Essays

m

ESSAYS

BY

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

FIRST SERIES

NEW YORK

T. Y. CROWELL & COMPANY
46 EAST FOURTEENTH STREET

CONTENTS.

ESSAY I.

PAGE

HISTORY i

ESSAY II.
SELF-RELIANCE 32

ESSAY III.
COMPENSATION 69

ESSAY IV.
SPIRITUAL LAWS 96

ESSAY V.
LOVE . . 125

ESSAY VI.
FRIENDSHIP 142

ESSAY VII.
PRUDENCE 163

• iii

IV CONTENTS.

ESSAY VIII.

PAGE

HEROISM 179

ESSAY IX.
THE OVER-SOUL 195

ESSAY X.
CIRCLES ......... 220

ESSAY XI.
INTELLECT 237

ESSAY XII.
ART 255

ESSAY I.

HISTORY.

There is no great and no small
To the Soul that maketh all :
And where it cometh, all things are ;
And it cometh everywhere.

I am owner of the sphere,

Of the seven stars and the solar year,

Of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain,

Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakspeare's strain.

THERE is one mind common to all individual men.
Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the
same. He that is once admitted to the right of rea
son is made a freeman of the whole estate. What
Plato has thought, he may think ; what a saint has
felt, he may feel ; what at any time has befallen any
man, he can understand. Who hath access to this
universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done,
for this is the only and sovereign agent.

Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its
genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man
is explicable by nothing less than all his history.
Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes
forth from the beginning to embody every faculty,
every thought, every emotion which belongs to it, in

2 HISTORY.

appropriate events. But always the thought is prior
to the fact ; all the facts of history preexist in the
mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circum
stances predominant, and the limits of nature give
power to but one at a time. A man is the whole en
cyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand for
ests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul,
Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man.
Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic,
democracy, are merely the application of his manifold
spirit to the manifold world.

This human mind wrote history, and this must
read it. The Sphinx must solve her own riddle.
If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be
explained from individual experience. There is a re
lation between the hours of our life and the centuries
of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great
repositories of nature, as the light on my book is
yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant,
as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium
of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours
should be instructed by the ages and the ages ex
plained by the hours. Of the universal mind each
individual man is one more incarnation. All its
properties consist in him. Every step in his private
experience flashes a light on what great bodies of
men have done, and the crises of his life refer to na
tional crises. Every revolution was first a thought in
one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs
to another man, it is the key to that era. Every re
form was once a private opinion, and when it shall be
a private opinion again it will solve the problem of

HISTORY. 3

the age. The fact narrated must correspond to
something in me to be credible or intelligible. We,
as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks,
priest and king, martyr and executioner ; must fasten
these images to some reality in our secret experience,
or we shall see nothing, learn nothing, keep nothing.
What befell Asdrubal or Caesar Borgia is as much an
illustration of the mind's powers and depravations as
what has befallen us. Each new law and political
movement has meaning for you. Stand before each
of its tablets and say, * ' Here is one of my coverings ;
under this fantastic, or odious, or graceful mask did
my Proteus nature hide itself." This remedies the
defect of our too great nearness to ourselves. This
throws our own actions into perspective ; and as
crabs, goats, scorpions, the balance and the water-
pot lose all their meanness when hung as signs in
the zodiac, so I can see my own vices without heat
in the distant persons of Solomon, Alcibiades, and
Catiline.

It is the universal nature which gives worth to
particular men and things. Human life, as contain
ing this, is mysterious and inviolable, and we hedge
it round with penalties and laws. All laws derive
hence their ultimate reason ; all express at last rev
erence for some command of this supreme, illimitable
essence. Property also holds of the soul, covers
great spiritual facts, and instinctively we at first hold
to it with swords and laws and wide and complex
combinations. The obscure consciousness of this
fact is the light of all our day, the claim of claims ;
the plea for education, for justice, for charity ; the

4 HISTORY.

foundation of friendship and love and of the heroism
and grandeur which belong to acts of self-reliance. It
is remarkable that involuntarily we always read as
superior beings. Universal history, the poets, the
romancers, do not in their stateliest pictures, — in the
sacerdotal, the imperial palaces, in the triumphs of
will or of genius, — anywhere lose our ear, anywhere
make us feel that we intrude, that this is for our bet
ters ; but rather is it true that in their grandest
strokes we feel most at home. All that Shakspeare
says of the king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in
the corner feels to be true of himself. We sympa
thize in the great moments of history, in the great
discoveries, the great resistances, the great prosperi
ties of men ; — because there law was enacted,
the sea was searched, the land was found, or the blow
was struck, for us, as we ourselves in that place would
have done or applauded.

So is it in respect to condition and character. We
honor the rich because they have externally the free
dom, power, and grace which we feel to be proper to
man, proper to us. So all that is said of the wise
man by stoic or oriental or modern essayist, de
scribes to each reader his own idea, describes his
unattained but attainable self. All literature writes
the character of the wise man. All books, monu
ments, pictures, conversation, are portraits in which
he finds the lineaments he is forming. The silent
and the loud praise him and accost him, and he is
stimulated wherever he moves, as by personal allu
sions. A wise and good soul therefore never needs
look for allusions personal and laudatory in discourse.

HISTORY. 5

He hears the commendation, not of himself, but,
more sweet, of that character he seeks, in every word
that is said concerning character, yea further in every
fact that befalls, — in the running river and the rus
tling corn. Praise is looked, homage tendered, love
flows, from mute nature, from the mountains and the
lights of the firmament.

These hints, dropped as it were from sleep and
night, let us use in broad day. The student is to
read history actively and not passively ; to esteem his
own life the text, and books the commentary. Thus
compelled, the muse of history will utter oracles, as
never to those who do not respect themselves. I
have no expectation that any man will read history
aright who thinks that what was done in a remote age,
by men whose names have resounded far, has any
deeper sense than what he is doing to-day.

The world exists for the education of each man.
There is no age or state of society or mode of action
in history to which there is not somewhat correspond
ing in his life. Every thing tends in a wonderful
manner to abbreviate itself and yield its whole virtue
to him. He should see that he can live all history in
his own person. He must sit at home with might
and main and not suffer himself to be bullied by
kings or empires, but know that he is greater than
all the geography and all the government of the
world ; he must transfer the point of view from which
history is commonly read, from Rome and Athens
and London, to himself, and not deny his conviction
that he is the Court, and if England or Egypt have
any thing to say to him he will try the case ; if not,

6 HISTORY.

let them forever be silent. He must attain and main
tain that lofty sight where facts yield their secret
sense, and poetry and annals are alike. The instinct
of the mind, the purpose of nature, betrays itself in
the use we make of the signal narrations of history.
Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity
of facts. No anchor, no cable, no fences avail to keep
a fact a fact. Babylon and Troy, and Tyre, and even
early Rome are passing already into fiction. The
Garden of Eden, the Sun standing still in Gibeon, is
poetry thenceforward to all nations. Who cares what
the fact was, when we have thus made a constellation
of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign ? London
and Paris and New York must go the same way.
"What is history," said Napoleon, " but a fable
agreed upon ? " This life of ours is stuck round with
Egypt, Greece, Gaul, England, War, Colonization,
Church, Court and Commerce, as with so many
flowers and wild ornaments grave and gay. I will
not make more account of them. I believe in Eter
nity. I can find Greece, Palestine, Italy, Spain and
the Islands, — the genius and creative principle of
each and of all eras, in my own mind.

We are always coming up with the facts that have
moved us in history in our private experience and
verifying them here. All history becomes subjective ;
in other words there is properly no History, only
Biography. Every mind must know the whole lesson
for itself, — must go over the whole ground. What
it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know.
What the former age has epitomized into a formula or
rule for manipular convenience, it will lose all the good

HISTORY. 7

of verifying for itself, by means of the wall of that rule.
Somewhere or other, some time or other, it will de
mand and find compensation for that loss, by doing
the work itself. Ferguson discovered many things in
astronomy which had long been known. The better
for him.

History must be this or it is nothing. Every law
which the state enacts indicates a fact in human
nature ; that is all. We must in our own nature see
the necessary reason for every fact, — see how it
could and must be. So stand before every public
every private work ; before an oration of Burke, be
fore a victory of Napoleon, before a martyrdom of
Sir Thomas More, of Sidney, of Marmaduke Robin
son ; before a French Reign of Terror, and a Salem
hanging of witches ; before a fanatic Revival and the
Animal Magnetism in Paris, or in Providence. We
assume that we under like influence should be alike
affected, and should achieve the like ; and we aim to
master intellectually the steps and reach the same
height or the same degradation that our fellow, our
proxy has done.

All inquiry into antiquity, — all curiosity respecting
the pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, the
Ohio Circles, Mexico, Memphis, is the desire to do
away this wild, savage, and preposterous There or
Then, and introduce in its place the Here and the Now.
It is to banish the not me and supply the me. It is to
abolish difference and restore unity. Belzoni digs
and measures in the mummy-pits and pyramids of
Thebes until he can see the end of the difference
between the monstrous work and himself. When he

8 HISTORY.

has satisfied himself, in general and in detail, that it
was made by such a person as himself, so armed and
so motived, and to ends to which he himself in given
circumstances should also have worked, the problem
is solved ; his thought lives along the whole line of
temples and sphinxes and catacombs, passes through
them all like a creative soul with satisfaction, and they
live again to the mind, or are now.

A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us
and not done by us. Surely it was by man, but we
find it not in our man. But we apply ourselves to
the history of its production. We put ourselves into
the place and historical state of the builder. We
remember the forest dwellers, the first temples, the
adherence to the first type, and the decoration of it as
the wealth of the nation increased ; the value which
is given to wood by carving led to the carving over
the whole mountain of stone of a cathedral. When
we have gone through this process, and added thereto
the Catholic Church, its cross, its music, its proces
sions, its Saints' days and image-worship, we have as
it were been the man that made the minster; we
have seen how it could and must be. We have the
sufficient reason.

The difference between men is in their principle of
association. Some men classify objects by color and
size and other accidents of appearance ; others by in
trinsic likeness, or by the relation of cause and effect.
The progress of the intellect consists in the clearer
vision of causes, which overlooks surface differences.
To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all
things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable,

HISTORY. 9

all days holy, all men divine. For the eye is fastened
on the life, and slights the circumstance. Every
chemical substance, every plant, every animal in its
growth, teaches the unity of cause, the variety of ap
pearance.

Why, being as we are, surrounded by this all-creat
ing nature, soft and fluid as a cloud or the air, should
we be such hard pedants, and magnify a few forms ?
Why should we make account of time, or of magni
tude, or of figure? The soul knows them not, and
genius, obeying its law, knows how to play with them
as a young child plays with greybeards and in
churches. Genius studies the causal thought, and
far back in the womb of things sees the rays parting
from one orb, that diverge, ere they fall, by infinite
diameters. Genius watches the monad through all
his masks as he performs the metempsychosis of
nature. Genius detects through the fly, through the
caterpillar, through the grub, through the egg, the
constant type of the individual ; through countless
individuals the fixed species ; through many species
the genus ; through all genera the steadfast type ;
through all the kingdoms of organized life the eternal
unity. Nature is a mutable cloud which is always
and never the same. She casts the same thought
into troops of forms, as a poet makes twenty fables
with one moral. Beautifully shines a spirit through
the bruteness and toughness of matter. Alone om
nipotent, it converts all things to its own end. The
adamant streams into softest but precise form before
it, but whilst I look at it its outline and texture are
changed altogether. Nothing is so fleeting as form.

10 HISTORY.

Yet never does it quite deny itself. In man we still
trace the rudiments or hints of all that we esteem
badges of servitude in the lower races ; yet in him
they enhance his nobleness and grace ; as lo, in
^schylus, transformed to a cow, offends the imagina
tion, but how changed when as Isis in Egypt she
meets Jove, a beautiful woman with nothing of the
metamorphosis left but the lunar horns as the splendid
ornament of her brows.

The identity of history is equally intrinsic, the
diversity equally obvious. There is, at the surface,
infinite variety of things ; at the centre there is sim
plicity and unity of cause. How many are the acts
of one man in which we recognize the same character.
See the variety of the sources of our information in
respect to the Greek genius. Thus at first we have
the civil history of that people, as Herodotus, Thu-
cydides, Xenophon, Plutarch have given it — a very
sufficient account of what manner of persons they
were and what they did. Then we have the same
soul expressed for us again in their literature; in
poems, drama, and philosophy: a very complete
form. Then we have it once more in their archi
tecture — the purest sensuous beauty — the perfect
medium never over-stepping the limit of charming
propriety and grace. Then we have it once more in
sculpture, — the "tongue on the balance of expres
sion," those forms in every action at every age of life,
ranging through all the scale of condition, from god
to beast, and never transgressing the ideal serenity,
but in convulsive exertion, the liege of order and of
law. Thus, of the genius of one remarkable people

HISTORY. ii

we have a fourfold representation — the most various
expression of one moral thing : and to the senses
what more unlike than an ode of Pindar, a marble
Centaur, the peristyle of the Parthenon, and the last
actions of Phocion? Yet do these varied external
expressions proceed from one national mind.

Every one must have observed faces and forms
which, without any resembling feature, make a like
impression on the beholder. A particular picture or
copy of verses, if it do not awaken the same train of
images, will yet superinduce the same sentiment as
some wild mountain walk, although the resemblance
is nowise obvious to the senses, but is occult and out
of the reach of the understanding. Nature is an end
less combination and repetition of a very few laws.
She hums the old well known air through innumer
able variations.

Nature is full of a sublime family likeness through
out her works. She delights in startling us with re
semblances in the most unexpected quarters. I have
seen the head of an old sachem of the forest which at
once reminded the eye of a bald mountain summit,
and the furrows of the brow suggested the strata of
the rock. There are men whose manners have the
same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculp
ture on the friezes of the Parthenon and the remains
of the earliest Greek art. And there are composi
tions of the same strain to be found in the books of
all ages. What is Guide's Rospigliosi Aurora but a
morning thought, as the horses in it are only a morn
ing cloud. If any one will but take pains to observe
the variety of actions to which he is equally inclined

12 HISTORY.

in certain moods of mind, and those to which he is
averse, he will see how deep is the chain of affinity.

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree
without in some sort becoming a tree ; or draw a
child by studying the outlines of its form merely,
— but, by watching for a time his motions and plays,
the painter enters into his nature and can then draw
him at will in every attitude. So Roos " entered into
the inmost nature of a sheep." I knew a draughts
man employed in a public survey who found that he
could not sketch the rocks until their geological struc
ture was first explained to him.

What is to be inferred from these facts but this :
that in a certain state of thought is the common ori
gin of very diverse works? It is the spirit and not
the fact that is identical. By descending far down
into the depths of the soul, and not primarily by a
painful acquisition of many manual skills, the artist
attains the power of awakening other souls to a given
activity.

It has been said that "common souls pay with
what they do, nobler souls with that which they are."
And why? Because a soul living from a great depth
of being, awakens in us by its actions and words, by
its very looks and manners, the same power and
beauty that a gallery of sculpture or of pictures are
wont to animate.

Civil history, natural history, the history of art and
the history of literature, — all must be explained from
individual history, or must remain words. There is
nothing but is related to us, nothing that does not
interest us, — kingdom, college, tree, horse, or iron

HISTORY. 13

shoe, the roots of all things are in man. It is in the
soul that architecture exists. Santa Croce and the
Dome of St. Peter's are lame copies after a divine
model. Strasburg Cathedral is a material counter
part of the soul of Erwin of Steinbach. The true
poem is the poet's mind ; the true ship is the ship
builder. In the man, could we lay him open, we
should see the reason for the last flourish and tendril
of his work, as every spine and tint in the sea-shell
preexist in the secreting organs of the fish. The
whole of heraldry and of chivalry is in courtesy. A
man of fine manners shall pronounce your name with
all the ornament that titles of nobility could ever
add.

The trivial experience of every day is always veri
fying some old prediction to us and converting into
things for us also the words and signs which we had
heard and seen without heed. Let me add a few ex
amples, such as fall within the scope of every man's
observation, of trivial facts which go to illustrate
grea't and conspicuous facts.

A lady with whom I was riding in the forest said to
me that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as
if the genii who inhabited them suspended their
deeds until the wayfarer had passed onward. This is
precisely the thought which poetry has celebrated in
the dance of the fairies, which breaks off on the ap
proach of human feet. The man who has seen the
rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight, has
been present like an archangel at the creation of
light and of the world. I remember that being
abroad one summer day in the fields, my companion

14 HISTORY.

pointed out to me a broad cloud, which might extend
a quarter of a mile parallel to the horizon, quite ac
curately in the form of a cherub as painted over
churches, — a round block in the centre, which it was
easy to animate with eyes and mouth, supported on
either side by wide stretched symmetrical wings.
What appears once in the atmosphere may appear
often, and it was undoubtedly the archetype of that
familiar ornament. I have seen in the sky a chain of
summer lightning which at once revealed to me that
the Greeks drew from nature when they painted the
thunderbolt in the hand of Jove. I have seen a snow
drift along the sides of the stone wall which obviously
gave the idea of the common architectural scroll to
abut a tower.

By simply throwing ourselves into new circumstan
ces we do continually invent anew the orders and the
ornaments of architecture, as we see how each people
merely decorated its primitive abodes. The Doric
temple still presents the semblance of the wooden
cabin in which the Dorian dwelt. The Chinese pagoda
is plainly a Tartar tent. The Indian and Egyptian
temples still betray the mounds and subterranean
houses of their forefathers. " The custom of making
houses and tombs in the living rock " (says Heeren
in his Researches on the Ethiopians), "determined
very naturally the principal character of the Nubian
Egyptian architecture to the colossal form which it
assumed. In these caverns already prepared by nature,
the eye was accustomed to dwell on huge shapes and
masses, so that when art came to the assistance of
nature it could not move on a small scale without de-

HISTORY. 15

grading itself. What would statues of the usual size,
or neat porches and wings have been, associated with
those gigantic halls before which only Colossi could sit
as watchmen or lean on the pillars of the interior?"

The Gothic church plainly originated in a rude
adaptation of the forest trees, with all their boughs,
to a festal or solemn arcade ; as the bands about the
cleft pillars still indicate the green withes that tied
them. No one can walk in a road cut through pine
woods, without being struck with the architectural
appearance of the grove, especially in winter, when
the barrenness of all other trees shows the low arch
of the Saxons. In the woods in a winter afternoon
one will see as readily the origin of the stained
glass window, with which the Gothic cathedrals are
adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen through
the bare and crossing branches of the forest. Nor
can any lover of nature enter the old piles of Oxford
and the English cathedrals, without feeling that the
forest overpowered the mind of the builder, and that
his -chisel, his saw and plane still reproduced its
ferns, its spikes of flowers, its locust, its pine, its
oak, its fir, its spruce.

The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone sub
dued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man.
The mountain of granite blooms into an eternal
flower, with the lightness and delicate finish as well
as the aerial proportions and perspective of vegetable
beauty.

In like manner all public facts are to be indi
vidualized, all private facts are to be generalized.
Then at once History becomes fluid and true, and

1 6 HISTORY.

Biography deep and sublime. As the Persian imi
tated in the slender shafts and capitals of his archi
tecture the stem and flower of the lotus and palm, so
the Persian court in its magnificent era never gave
over the Nomadism of its barbarous tribes, but
travelled from Ecbatana, where the spring was spent,
to Susa in summer and to 'Babylon for the winter.

In the early history of Asia and Africa, Nomadism
and Agriculture are the two antagonist facts. The
geography of Asia and of Africa necessitated a
nomadic life. But the nomads were the terror of all
those whom the soil or the advantages of a market
had induced to build towns. Agriculture therefore
was a religious injunction, because of the perils of the
state from nomadism. And in these late and civil coun
tries of England and America the contest of these pro
pensities still fights oat the old battle in each individual.
We are all rovers and all fixtures by turns, and pretty
rapid turns. The nomads of Africa are constrained
to wander, by the attacks of the gad-fly, which drives
the cattle mad, and so compels the tribe to emigrate
in the rainy season and drive off the cattle to the
higher sandy regions. The nomads of Asia follow
the pasturage from month to month. In America
and Europe the nomadism is of trade and curiosity.
A progress certainly, from the gad-fly of Astaboras to
the Anglo and Italo-mania of Boston Bay. The dif
ference between men in this respect is the faculty of
rapid domestication, the power to find his chair and
bed everywhere, which one man has and another has
not. Some men have so much of the Indian left,
have constitutionally such habits of accommodation

HISTORY. 17

that at sea, or in the forest, or in the snow, they
sleep as warm, and dine with as good appetite, and
associate as happily as in their own house. And to
push this old fact still one degree nearer, we may
find it a representative of a permanent fact in human
nature. The intellectual nomadism is the faculty of
objectiveness or of eyes which everywhere feed them
selves. Who hath such eyes, everywhere falls into
easy relations with his fellow-men. Every man,
every thing is a prize, a study, a property to him, and
this love smooths his brow, joins him to men, and
makes him beautiful and beloved in their sight. His
house is a wagon ; he roams through all latitudes as
easily as a Calmuc.

Every thing the individual sees without him cor
responds to his states of mind, and every thing is in
turn intelligible to him, as his onward thinking leads
him into the truth to which that fact or series be
longs.

The primeval world, the Fore-World, as the Ger
mans say, I can dive to it in myself as well as grope for
it with researching fingers in catacombs, libraries,
and the broken reliefs and torsos of ruined villas.

What is the foundation of that interest all men
feel in Greek history, letters, art and poetry, in all its
periods from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the
domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or
five centuries later? This period draws us because
we are Greeks. It is a state through which every
man in some sort passes. The Grecian state is the
era of the bodily nature, the perfection of the senses,
— of the spiritual nature unfolded in strict unity with

1 8 HISTORY.

the body. In it existed those human forms which
supplied the sculptor with his models of Hercules,
Phoebus, and Jove ; not like the forms abounding in
the streets of modern cities, wherein the face is a
confused blur of features, but composed of incorrupt,
sharply defined and symmetrical features, whose eye-
sockets are so formed that it would be impossible
for such eyes to squint and take furtive glances on
this side and on that, but they must turn the whole
head.

The manners of that period are plain and fierce.
The reverence exhibited is for personal qualities ;
courage, address, self-command, justice, strength,
swiftness, a loud voice, a broad chest. Luxury is not
known, nor elegance. A sparse population and want
make every man his own valet, cook, butcher and
soldier, and the habit of supplying his own needs
educates the body to wonderful performances. Such
are the Agamemnon and Diomed of Homer, and not
far different is the picture Xenophon gives of himself
and his compatriots in the Retreat of the Ten Thou
sand. " After the army had crossed the river Tele-
boas in Armenia, there fell much snow, and the
troops lay miserably on the ground covered with it.
But Xenophon arose naked, and taking an axe, began
to split wood ; whereupon others rose and did the
like." Throughout his army seemed to be a bound
less liberty of speech. They quarrel for plunder,
they wrangle with the generals on each new order,
and Xenophon is as sharp-tongued as any and
sharper-tongued than most, and so gives as good as
he gets. Who does not see that this is a gang of

HISTORY. 19

great boys, with such a code of honor and such lax
discipline as great boys have ?

The costly charm of the ancient tragedy, and in
deed of all the old literature, is that the persons
speak simply, — speak as persons who have great
good sense without knowing it, before yet the reflec
tive habit has become the predominant habit of the
mind. Our admiration of the antique is not admira
tion of the old, but of the natural. The Greeks are
not reflective, but perfect in their senses, perfect in
their health, with the finest physical organization in
the world. Adults acted with the simplicity and
grace of boys. They made vases, tragedies and
statues, such as healthy senses should — that is, in
good taste. Such things have continued to be made
in all ages, and are now, wherever a healthy physique
exists ; but, as a class, from their superior organiza
tion, they have surpassed all. They combine the
energy of manhood with the engaging unconscious
ness of childhood. Our reverence for them is our
reverence for childhood. Nobody can reflect upon
an unconscious act with regret or contempt. Bard or
hero cannot look down on the word or gesture of a
child. It is as great as they. The attraction of these
manners is that they belong to man, and are known to
every man in virtue of his being once a child ; besides
that there are always individuals who retain these
characteristics. A person of childlike genius and in
born energy is still a Greek, and revives our love of
the Muse of Hellas. A great boy, a great girl with
good sense is a Greek. Beautiful is the love of
nature in the Philoctetes. But in reading those fine

20 HISTORY.

apostrophes to sleep, to the stars, rocks, mountains,
and waves, I feel time passing away as an ebbing sea.
I feel the eternity of man, the identity of his thought.
The Greek had it seems the same fellow-beings as I.
The sun and moon, water and fire, met his heart
precisely as they meet mine. Then the vaunted dis
tinction between Greek and English, between Classic
and Romantic schools, seems superficial and pedan
tic. When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to
me, — when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires
mine, time is no more. When I feel that we two
meet in a perception, that our two souls are tinged
with the same hue, and do as it were run into one,
why should I measure degrees of latitude, why should
I count Egyptian years?

The student interprets the age of chivalry by his
own age of chivalry, and the days of maritime ad
venture and circumnavigation by quite parallel minia
ture experiences of his own. To the sacred history of
the world he has the same key. When the voice of a
prophet out of the deeps of antiquity merely echoes
to him a sentiment of his infancy, a prayer of his
youth, he then pierces to the truth through all the
confusion of tradition and the caricature of institu
tions.

Rare, extravagant spirits come by us at intervals,
who disclose to us new facts in nature. I see that
men of God have always from time to time walked
among men and made their commission felt in the
heart and soul of the commonest hearer. Hence
evidently the tripod, the priest, the priestess in
spired by the divine afflatus.

HISTORY. 21

Jesus astonishes and overpowers sensual people.
They cannot unite him to history, or reconcile him
with themselves. As they come to revere their in
tuitions and aspire to live holily, their own piety ex
plains every fact, every word.

How easily these old worships of Moses, of Zo
roaster, of Menu, of Socrates, domesticate themselves
in the mind. I cannot find any antiquity in them.
They are mine as much as theirs.

Then I have seen the first monks and anchorets,
without crossing seas or centuries. More than once
some individual has appeared to me with such negli
gence of labor and such commanding contemplation,
a haughty beneficiary begging in the name of God, as
made good to the nineteenth century Simeon the
Stylite, the Thebais, and the first Capuchins.

The priestcraft of the East and West, of the
Magian, Brahmin, Druid, and Inca, is expounded in
the individual's private life. The cramping influence
of a hard formalist on a young child, in repressing his
spirits and courage, paralyzing the understanding,
and that without producing indignation, but only fear
and obedience, and even much sympathy with the
tyranny, — is a familiar fact, explained to the child
when he becomes a man, only by seeing that the op
pressor of his youth is himself a child tyrannized over
by those names and words and forms of whose in
fluence he was merely the organ to the youth. The
fact teaches him how Belus was worshipped and how
the Pyramids were built, better than the discovery by
Champollion of the names of all the workmen and the
cost of every tile. He finds Assyria and the Mounds

22 HISTORY.

of Cholula at his door, and himself has laid the
courses.

Again, in that protest which each considerate per
son makes against the superstition of his times, he re
peats step for step the part of old reformers, and in the
search after truth finds, like them, new perils to
virtue. He learns again what moral vigor is needed
to supply the girdle of a superstition. A great licen
tiousness treads on the heels of a reformation. How
many times in the history of the world has the Luther
of the day had to lament the decay of piety in his
own household. " Doctor,1' said his wife to Martin
Luther, one day, " how is it that whilst subject to
papacy we prayed so often and with such fervor,
whilst now we pray with the utmost coldness and
very seldom ? "

The advancing man discovers how deep a property
he hath in literature, — in all fable as well as in all
history. He finds that the poet was no odd fellow
who described strange and impossible situations, but
that universal man wrote by his pen a confession
true for one and true for all. His own secret biog
raphy he finds in lines wonderfully intelligible to
him, dotted down before he was born. One after
another he comes up in his private adventures with
every fable of yEsop, of Homer, of Hafiz, of Ariosto,
of Chaucer, of Scott, and verifies them with his own
head and hands.

The beautiful fables of the Greeks, being proper
creations of the Imagination and not of the Fancy,
are universal verities. What a range of meanings
and what perpetual pertinence has the story of Pro-

HISTORY. 23

metheus ! Beside its primary value as the first
chapter of the history of Europe (the mythology
thinly veiling authentic facts, the invention of the
mechanic arts and the migration of colonies), it gives
the history of religion, with some closeness to the
faith of later ages. Prometheus is the Jesus of the
old mythology. He is the friend of man ; stands be
tween the unjust * justice ' of the Eternal Father and
the race of mortals, and readily suffers all things on
their account. But where it departs from the Calvin-
istic Christianity and exhibits him as the defier of
Jove, it represents a state of mind which readily
appears wherever the doctrine of Theism is taught in
a crude, objective form, and which seems the self-de
fence of man against this untruth, namely, a discon
tent with the believed fact that a God exists, and a
feeling that the obligation of reverence is onerous. It
would steal if it could the fire of the Creator, and live
apart from him and independent of him. The Prome
theus Vinctus is the romance of skepticism. Not less
true to all time are the details of that stately apologue.
Apollo kept the flocks of Admetus, said the poets.
Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the
fool. It seems as if heaven had sent its insane angels
into our world as to an asylum, and here they will
break out in their native music and utter at intervals
the words they have heard in heaven ; then the mad
fit returns and they mope and wallow like dogs.
When the gods come among men, they are not
known. Jesus was not ; Socrates and Shakspeare
were not. Antaeus was suffocated by the gripe of
Hercules, but every time he touched his mother earth

24 HISTORY.

his strength was renewed. Man is the broken giant,
and in all his weakness both his body and his mind
are invigorated by habits of conversation with nature.
The power of music, the power of poetry, to unfix and
as it were clap wings to all solid nature, interprets
the riddle of Orpheus, which was to his childhood an
idle tale. The philosophical perception of identity
through endless mutations of form makes him know
the Proteus. What else am I who laughed or wept
yesterday, who slept last night like a corpse, and this
morning stood and ran ? And what see I on any
side but the transmigrations of Proteus? I can sym
bolize my thought by using the name of any creature,
of any fact, because every creature is man agent or
patient. Tantalus is but a name for you and me.
Tantalus means the impossibility of drinking the
waters of thought which are always gleaming and
waving within sight of the soul. The transmigration
of souls : that too is no fable. I would it were ; but
men and women are only half human. Every animal
of the barn-yard, the field and the forest, of the earth
and of the waters that are under the earth, has con
trived to get a footing and to leave the print of its
features and form in some one or other of these up
right, heaven-facing speakers. Ah, brother, hold fast
to the man and awe the beast ; stop the ebb of thy
soul, — ebbing downward into the forms into whose
habits thou hast now for many years slid. As near
and proper to us is also that old fable of the Sphinx,
who was said to sit in the road-side and put riddles
to every passenger. If the man could not answer,
she swallowed him alive. If he could solve the riddle,

HISTORY. 25

the Sphinx was slain. What is our life but an end
less flight of winged facts or events! In splendid
variety these changes come, all putting questions to
the human spirit. Those men who cannot answer by
a superior wisdom these facts or questions of time,
serve them. Facts encumber them, tyrannize over
them, and make the men of routine, the men of sense,
in whom a literal obedience to facts has extinguished
every spark of that light by which man is truly man.
But if the man is true to his better instincts or senti
ments, and refuses the dominion of facts, as one that
comes of a higher race ; remains fast by the soul
and sees the principle, then the facts fall aptly and
supple into their places ; they know their master, and
' the meanest of them glorifies him.

See in Goethe's Helena the same desire that every
word should be a thing. These figures, he would
say, these Chirons, Griffins, Phorkyas, Helen and
Leda, are somewhat, and do exert a specific in
fluence on the mind. So far then are they eternal
entities, as real to-day as in the first Olympiad. Much
revolving them he writes out freely his humor, and
gives them body to his own imagination. And
although that poem be as vague and fantastic as a
dream, yet it is much more attractive than the more
regular dramatic pieces of the same author, for the
reason that it operates a wonderful relief to the mind
from the routine of customary images, — awakens the
reader's invention and fancy by the wild freedom of
the design, and by the unceasing succession of brisk
shocks of surprise.

The universal nature, too strong for the petty

26 HISTORY.

nature of the bard, sits on his neck and writes
through his hand ; so that when he seems to vent a
mere caprice and wild romance, the issue is an exact
allegory. Hence Plato said that "poets utter great
and wise things which they do not themselves under
stand." All the fictions of the Middle Age explain
themselves as a masked or frolic expression of that
which in grave earnest the mind of that period toiled
to achieve. Magic and all that is ascribed to it is
manifestly a deep presentiment of the powers of
science. The shoes of swiftness, the sword of sharp
ness, the power of subduing the elements, of using
the secret virtues of minerals, of understanding the
voices of birds, are the obscure efforts of the mind in
a right direction. The preternatural prowess of the
hero, the gift of perpetual youth, and the like, are
alike the endeavor of the human spirit " to bend the
shows of things to the desires of the mind."

In Perceforest and Amadis de Gaul a garland and
a rose bloom on the head of her who is faithful, and
fade on the brow of the inconstant. In the story of
the Boy and the Mantle even a mature reader may be
surprised with a glow of virtuous pleasure at the
triumph of the gentle Genelas ; and indeed all the
postulates of elfin annals, that the fairies do not like
to be named ; that their gifts are capricious and not
to be trusted ; that who seeks a treasure must not
speak ; and the like I find true in Concord, however
they might be in Cornwall or Bretagne.

Is it otherwise in the newest romance? I read the
Bride of Lammermoor. Sir William Ashton is a
mask for a vulgar temptation, Ravenswood Castle a

HISTORY. 27

fine name for proud poverty, and the foreign mission
of state only a Bunyan disguise for honest industry.
We may all shoot a wild bull that would toss the
good and beautiful, by fighting down the unjust and
sensual. Lucy Ashton is another name for fidelity,
which is always beautiful and always liable to calam
ity in this world.

But along with the civil and metaphysical history
of man, another history goes daily forward, — that of
the external world, — in which he is not less strictly
implicated. He is the compend of time ; he is also
the correlative of nature. The power of man con
sists in the multitude of his affinities, in the fact that
his life is intertwined with the whole chain of organic
and inorganic being. In the age of the Caesars out
from the Forum at Rome proceeded the great high
ways north, south, east, west, to the centre of every
province of the empire, making each market-town of
Persia, Spain, and Britain pervious to the soldiers of
the capital : so out of the human heart go as it were
highways to the heart of every object in nature, to re
duce it under the dominion of man. A man is a
bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and
fruitage is the world. All his faculties refer to natures
out of him and predict the world he is to inhabit, as
the fins of the fish foreshow that water exists, or the
wings of an eagle in the egg presuppose air. Insulate
and you destroy him. He cannot live without a
a world. Put Napoleon in an island prison, let his
faculties find no men to act on, no Alps to climb, no
stake to play for, and he would beat the air, and
appear stupid. Transport him to large countries,

28 HISTORY.

dense population, complex interests and antagonist
power, and you shall see that the man Napoleon,
bounded that is by such a profile and outline, is not
the virtual Napoleon. This is but Talbof s shadow ;

His substance is not here.
For what you see is but the smallest part
And least proportion of humanity ;
But were the whole frame here,
It is of such a spacious, lofty pitch,
Your roof were not sufficient to contain it.

Henry VI.

Columbus needs a planet to shape his course upon.
Newton and Laplace need myriads of age and thick-
strown celestial areas. One may say a gravitating
solar system is already prophesied in the nature of
Newton's mind. Not less does the brain of Davy or
of Gay Lussac, from childhood exploring the affini
ties and repulsions of particles, anticipate the laws of
organization. Does not the eye of the human em
bryo predict the light? the ear of Handel predict the
witchcraft of harmonic sound? Do' not the con
structive fingers of Watt, Fulton, Whittemore, Ark-
wright, predict the fusible, hard, and temperable
texture of metals, the properties of stone, water, and
wood? the lovely attributes of the n>aiden child pre
dict the refinements and decorations of civil society?
Here also we are reminded of the action of man on
man. A mind might ponder its thought for ages and
not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion (of
love shall teach it in a day. Who knows himself be
fore he has been thrilled with indignation at an out
rage, or has heard an eloquent tongue, or has shared

HISTORY. 29

the throb of thousands in a national exultation or
alarm? No man can antedate his experience, or
guess what faculty or feeling a new object shall un
lock, any more than he can draw to-day the face of a
person whom he shall see to-morrow for the first
time.

I will not now go behind the general statement to
explore the reason of this correspondency. Let it
suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely,-
that the mind is One, and that nature is its correla
tive, history is to be read and written.

Thus in all ways does the soul concentrate and re
produce its treasures for each pupil, for each new-born
man. He too shall pass through the whole cycle of
experience. He shall collect into a focus the rays of
nature. History no longer shall be a dull book. It
shall walk incarnate in every just and wise man. You
shall not tell me by languages and titles a catalogue
of the volumes you have read. You shall make me
feel what periods you have lived. A man shall be the
Temple of Fame. He shall walk, as the poets have
described that goddess, in a robe painted all over
with wonderful events and experiences; — his own
form and features by their exalted intelligence shall
be that variegated vest. I shall find in him the Fore-
world ; in his childhood the Age of Gold, the Apples
of Knowledge, the Argonautic Expedition, the call
ing of Abraham, the building of the Temple, the
Advent of Christ, Dark Ages, the Revival of Letters,
the Reformation, the discovery of new lands, the
opening of new sciences and new regions in man.
He shall be the priest of Pan, and bring with him

3° HISTORY.

into humble cottages the blessings of the morning
stars, and all the recorded benefits of heaven and
earth.

Is there somewhat overweening in this claim?
Then I reject all I have written, for what is the use
of pretending to know what we know not? But it is
the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state
one fact without seeming to belie some other. I
hold our actual knowledge very cheap. Hear the
rats in the wall, see the lizard on the fence, the fun
gus under foot, the lichen on the log. What do I
know sympathetically, morally, of either of these
worlds of life? As long as the Caucasian man, —
perhaps longer, — these creatures have kept their
counsel beside him, and there is no record of any
word or sign that has passed from one to the other.
Nay, what does history yet record of the metaphys
ical annals of man? What light does it shed on
those mysteries which we hide under the names
Death and Immortality? Yet every history should
be written in a wisdom which divined the range of
our affinities and looked at facts as symbols. I am
ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-
called History is. How many times we must say
Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople ! What does
Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads
and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being?
Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for
the Esquimaux seal-hunter, for the Kanaka in his
canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?

Broader and deeper we must write our annals, —
from an ethical reformation, from an influx of the

HISTORY. 31

ever new, ever sanative conscience, — if we would
trulier express our central and wide-related nature,
instead of this old chronology of selfishness and pride
to which we have too long lent our eyes. Already
that day exists for us, shines in on us at unawares,
but the path of science and of letters is not the way
into nature, but from it, rather. The idiot, the In
dian, the child and unschooled farmer's boy come
much nearer to these — understand them better than
the dissector or the antiquary.

ESSAY II.

SELF-RELIANCE.

Ne te qusesiveris extra.

Man is his own star ; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.
Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher s Honest Man's Fortune,

Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him wim the she-wolfs teat,
Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be hands and feet.

I READ the other day some verses written by an
eminent painter which were original and not con
ventional. Always the soul hears an admonition in
such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sen
timent they instil is of more value than any thought
they may contain. To believe your own thought, to
believe that what is true for you in your private heart
is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your
latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense ;
for always the inmost becomes the outmost — and our
first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets
32

SELF-RELIANCE. 33

of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the
mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to
Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at naught
books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but
what they thought. A man should learn to detect
and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his
mind from within, more than the lustre of the firma
ment of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without
notice his thought, because it is his. In every work
of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts ;
they come back to us with a certain alienated maj
esty. Great works of art have no more affecting
lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by
our spontaneous impression with good-humored in
flexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is
on the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will
say with masterly good sense precisely what we have
thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced
to take with shame our own opinion from another.

There is a time in every man's education when
he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance ;
that imitation is suicide ; that he must take himself
for better for worse as his portion ; that though the
wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourish
ing corn can come to him but through his toil be
stowed on that plot of ground which is given to him
to till. The power which resides in him is new in
nature, and none but he knows what that is which he
can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not
for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes
much impression on him, and another none. It is
not without preestablished harmony, this sculpture in

34 SELF-RELIANCE.

the memory. The eye was placed where one ray
should fall, that it might testify of that particular
ray. Bravely let him speak the utmost syllable of his
confession. We but half express ourselves, and are
ashamed of that divine idea which each mof us repre
sents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and
of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God
will not have his work made manifest by cowards.
It needs a divine man to exhibit anything divine. A
man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart
into his work and done his best ; but what he has
said or done otherwise shall give him no peace. It
is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the
attempt his genius deserts him ; no muse befriends ;
no invention, no hope.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron
string. Accept the place the divine providence has
found for you, the society of your contemporaries,
the connexion of events. Great men have always
done so, and confided themselves childlike to the
genius of their age, betraying their perception that
the Eternal was stirring at their heart, working
through their hands, predominating in all their being.
And we are now men, and must accept in the highest
mind the same transcendent destiny ; and not pinched
in a corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution,
but redeemers and benefactors, pious aspirants to be
noble clay under the Almighty effort let us advance
on Chaos and the Dark.

What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text
in the face and behavior of children, babes, and
even brutes. That divided and rebel mind, that

SELF-RELIANCE. 35

distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has
computed the strength and means opposed to our
purpose, these have not. Their mind being whole,
their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we look
in their faces, we are disconcerted. Infancy con
forms to nobody ; all conform to it ; so that one
babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults
who prattle and play to it. So God has armed
youth and puberty and manhood no less with its
own piquancy and charm, and made it enviable and
gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it will
stand by itself. Do not think the youth has no force,
because he cannot speak to you and me. Hark ! in
the next room who spoke so clear and emphatic? It
seems he knows how to speak to his contemporaries.
Good Heaven ! it is he ! it is that very lump of bash-
fulness and phlegm which for weeks has done nothing
but eat when you were by, and now rolls out these
words like bell-strokes. It seems he knows how to
speak to his contemporaries. Bashful or bold then, he
will know how to make us seniors very unnecessary.
The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a din
ner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or
say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude
of human nature. How is a boy the master of soci
ety ; independent, irresponsible, looking out from
his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he
tries and sentences them on their merits, in the
swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interest
ing, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers him
self never about consequences, about interests ; he
gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must

36 SELF-RELIANCE.

court him ; he does not court you. But the man is as
it were clapped into jail by his consciousness. As
soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat he is
a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the
hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter
into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah,
that he could pass again into his neutral, godlike
independence ! Who can thus lose all pledge and,
having observed, observe again from the same unaf
fected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence,
must always be formidable, must always engage the
poet's and the man's regards. Of such an immortal
youth the force would be felt. He would utter
opinions on all passing affairs, which being seen to
be not private but necessary, would sink like darts
into the ear of men and put them in fear.

These are the voices which we hear in solitude,
but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into
the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy
against the manhood of every one of its members.
Society is a joint-stock company, in which the mem
bers agree, for the better securing of his bread to
each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and cul
ture of the eater. The virtue, in most request is
conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves
not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.
He who would gather immortal palms must not be
hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore
if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the
integrity of our own mind. Absolve you to your
self, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

SELF-RELIANCE. 37

I remember an answer which when quite young I
was prompted to make to a valued adviser who was
wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines
of the church. On my saying, What have I to do
with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly
from within? my friend suggested, — " But these
impulses may be from below, not from above."
I replied, " They do not seem to me to be such ;
but if I am the devil's child, I will live then from
the devil." No law can be sacred to me but that
of my nature. Good and bad are but names very
readily transferable to that or this ; the only right
is what is after my constitution ; the only wrong
what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the
presence of all opposition as if every thing were
titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to
think how easily we capitulate to badges and names,
to large societies and dead institutions. Every
decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways
me more than is right. I ought to go upright and
vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. If
malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy,
shall that pass? If an angry bigot assumes this
bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with
his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say
to him, "Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chop
per ; be good-natured and modest ; have that grace ;
and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition
with this incredible tenderness for black folk a
thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home."
Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but
truth is handsomer than the affectation of love.

38 SELF-RELIANCE.

Your goodness must have some edge t6 it, — else it
is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached,
as the counteraction of the doctrine of love, when
that pules and whines. I shun father and mother
and wife and brother when my genius calls me. I
would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim.
I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but
we cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect
me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude
company. Then, again, do not tell me, as a good
man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor
men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell
thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the
dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do
not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.
There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual
affinity I am bought and sold ; for them I will go to
prison if need be ; but your miscellaneous popular
charities ; the education at college of fools ; the build
ing of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many
now stand ; alms to sots, and the thousandfold Relief
Societies ; — though I confess with shame I sometimes
succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar,
which by-and-by I shall have the manhood to with
hold.

Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the
exception than the rule. There is the man and his
virtues. Men do what is called a good action, as
some piece of courage or charity, much as they
would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance
on parade. Their works are done as an apology or
extenuation of their living in the world, — as invalids

SELF-RELIANCE. 39

and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are
penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My
life is not an apology, but a life. It is for itself and
not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be
of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that
it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be
sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding.
My life should be unique ; it should be an alms, a
battle, a conquest, a medicine. I ask primary evi
dence that you are a man, and refuse this appeal from
the man to his actions. I know that for myself it
makes no difference whether I do or forbear those
actions which are reckoned excellent. I cannot con
sent to pay for a privilege where I have intrinsic
right. Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually
am, and do not need for my own assurance or the
assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what
the people think. This rule, equally arduous in ac
tual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole
distinction between greatness and meanness. It is
the harder because you will always find those who
think they know what is your duty better than you
know it. It is easy in the world to live after the
world's opinion ; it is easy in solitude to live after
our own ; but the great man is he who in the midst
of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the inde
pendence of solitude.

The objection to conforming to usages that have
become dead to you is that it scatters your force.
It loses your time and blurs the impression of your
character. If you maintain a dead church, contrib-

40 SELF-RELIANCE.

ute to a dead Bible Society, vote with a great party
either for the Government or against it, spread your
table like base housekeepers, — under all these
screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man
you are. And of course so much force is withdrawn
from your proper life. But do your thing, and I shall
know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce
yourself. A man must consider what a blindman's-
buff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect
I anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher an
nounce for his text and topic the expediency of one
of the institutions of his church. Do I not know
beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and
spontaneous word ? Do I not know that with all this
ostentation of examining the grounds of the institu
tion he will do no such thing? Do I not know that
he is pledged to himself not to look but at one side,
the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish
minister? He is a retained attorney, and these airs
of the bench are the emptiest affectation. Well,
most men have bound their eyes with one or another
handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one
of these communities of opinion. This conformity
makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of
a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every
truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real
two, their four not the real four : so that every word
they say chagrins us and we know not where to begin
to set them right. Meantime nature is not slow to
equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which
we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and
figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine

SELF-RELIANCE. 41

expression. There is a mortifying experience in par
ticular, which does not fail to wreak itself also in the
general history; I mean "the foolish face of praise,1'
the forced smile which we put on in company where
we do not feel at ease, in answer to conversation
which does not interest us. The muscles, not spon
taneously moved but moved by a low usurping wil-
fulness, grow tight about the outline of the face, and
make the most disagreeable sensation ; a sensation
of rebuke and warning which no brave young man
will suffer twice.

For non-conformity the world whips you with its
displeasure. And therefore a man must know how to
estimate a sour face. The bystanders look askance
on him in the public street or in the friend's par
lor. If this aversation had its origin in contempt
and resistance like his own he might well go home
with a sad countenance ; but the sour faces of the
multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause
— disguise no god, but are put on and off as the
wind blows and a newspaper directs. Yet is the dis
content of the multitude more formidable than that
of the senate and the college. It is easy enough for
a firm man who knows the world to brook the rage
of the cultivated classes. Their rage is decorous and
prudent, for they are timid, as being very vulnerable
themselves. But when to their feminine rage the
indignation of the people is added, when the ignorant
and the poor are aroused, when the unintelligent
brute force that lies at the bottom of society is made
to growl and mow, it needs the habit of magnanimity
and religion to treat it godlike as a trifle of no con
cernment.

42 SELF-RELIANCE.

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is
our consistency ; a reverence for our past act or word
because the eyes of others have no other data for
computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are
loath to disappoint them.

But why should you keep your head over your
shoulder? Why drag about this monstrous corpse
of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you
have stated in this or that public place? Suppose
you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems
to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory
alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but
to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-
eyed present, and live ever in a new day. Trust your
emotion. In your metaphysics you have denied per
sonality to the Deity, yet when the devout motions
of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though
they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave
your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the har
lot, and flee.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little
minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers
and divines. With consistency a great soul has sim
ply nothing to do. He may as well concern him
self with his shadow on the wall. Out upon your
guarded lips.! Sew them up with packthread, do.
Else if you would be a man speak what you think
to-day in words as hard as cannon balls, and to-mor
row speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again,
though it contradict every thing you said to-day. Ah,
then, exclaim the aged ladies, you shall be sure to be
misunderstood ! Misunderstood ! It is a right fooPs

SELF-RELIANCE. 43

word. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Py
thagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus,
and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and New
ton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took
flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the
sallies of his will are rounded in by the law of his
being, as the inequalities of Andes and Himmaleh are
insignificant in the curve of the sphere. Nor does it
matter how you gauge and try him. A character is
like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza ; — read it for
ward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.
In this pleasing contrite wood-life which God allows
me, let me record day by day my honest thought
without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt,
it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not
and see it not. My book should smell of pines and
resound with the hum of insects. The swallow over
my window should interweave that thread or straw he
carries in his bill into my web also. We pass for
what we are. Character teaches above our wills.
Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or
vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue
or vice emit a breath every moment.

Fear never but you shall be consistent in whatever
variety of actions, so they be each honest and
natural in their hour. For of one will, the actions
will be harmonious, however unlike they seem.
These varieties are lost sight of when seen at a little
distance, at a little height of thought. One tendency
unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is
a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. This is only mi-

44 SELF-RELIANCE.

croscopic criticism. See the line from a sufficient
distance, and it straightens itself to the average ten
dency. Your genuine action will explain itself and
will explain your other genuine actions. Your con
formity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you
have already done singly will justify you now. Great
ness always appeals to the future. If I can be great
enough now to do right and scorn eyes, I must have
done so much right before as to defend me now. Be
it how it will, do right now. Always scorn appear
ances and you always may. The force of character
is cumulative. All the foregone days of virtue work
their health into this. What makes the majesty of
the heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills
the imagination? The consciousness of a train of
great days and victories behind. There they all
stand and shed an united light on the advancing
actor. He is attended as by a visible escort of angels
to every man's eye. That is it which throws thunder
into Chatham's voice, and dignity into Washington's
port, and America into Adams's eye. Honor is
venerable to us because it is no ephemeris. It is
always ancient virtue. We worship it to-day be
cause it is not of to-day. We love it and pay it
homage because it is not a trap for our love and
homage, but is self-dependent, self-derived, and there
fore of an old immaculate pedigree, even if shown
in a young person.

I hope in these days we have heard the last of
conformity and consistency. Let the words be ga
zetted and ridiculous henceforward. Instead of the
gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the

SELF-RELIANCE. 45

Spartan fife. Let us bow and apologize never more.
A great man is coming to eat at my house. I do
not wish to please him : I wish that he should wish
to please me. I will stand here for humanity, and
though I would make it kind, I would make it true.
Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity
and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in
the face of custom and trade and office, the fact
which is the upshot of all history, that there is a
great responsible Thinker and Actor moving wher
ever moves a man ; that a true man belongs to no
other time or place, but is the centre of things.
Where he is, there is nature. He measures you
and all men and all events. You are constrained
to accept his standard. Ordinarily, every body in
society reminds us of somewhat else, or of some
other person. Character, reality, reminds you of
nothing else ; it takes place of the whole creation.
The man must be so much that he must make all
circumstances indifferent — put all means into the
shade. This all great men are and do. Every true
man is a cause, a country, and an age ; requires in
finite spaces and numbers and time fully to accom
plish his thought ; — and posterity seem to follow
his steps as a procession. A man Caesar is born,
and for ages after we have a Roman Empire. Christ
is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave
to his genius that he is confounded with virtue and
the possible of man. An institution is the length
ened shadow of one man ; as, the Reformation, of
Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wes
ley ; Abolition, of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called

46 SELF-RELIANCE.

" the height of Rome;" and all history resolves
itself very easily into the biography of a few stout
and earnest persons.

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things
under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk
up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bas
tard, or an interloper in the world which exists for
him. But the man in the street, finding no worth
in himself which corresponds to the force which
built a tower or sculptured a marble god, feels poor
when he looks on these. To him a palace, a statue,
or a costly book have an alien and forbidding air,
much like a gay equipage, and seem to say like that,
'Who are you, sir?' Yet they all are his, suitors
for his notice, petitioners to his faculties that they
will come out and take possession. The picture
waits for my verdict ; it is not to command me,
but I am to settle its claim to praise. That popular
fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in
the street, carried to the duke's house, washed and
dressed and laid in the duke's bed, and, on his wak
ing, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the
duke, and assured that he had been insane — owes
its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well
the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot,
but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason
and finds himself a true prince.

Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In
history our imagination makes fools of us, plays us
false. Kingdom and lordship, power and estate, are
a gaudier vocabulary than private John and Edward
in a small house and common day's work : but the

SELF-RELIANCE. 47

things of life are the same to both : the sum total
of both is the same. Why all this deference to
Alfred and Scanderbeg and Gustavus? Suppose
they were virtuous; did they wear out virtue? As
great a stake depends on your private act to-day as
followed their public and renowned steps. When
private men shall act with original views, the lustre
will be transferred from the actions of kings to those
of gentlemen.

The world has indeed been instructed by its kings,
who have so magnetized the eyes of nations. It has
been taught by this colossal symbol the mutual rev
erence that is due from man to man. The joyful
loyalty with which men have everywhere suffered the
king, the noble, or the great proprietor to walk among
them by a law of his own, make his own scale of men
and things and reverse theirs, pay for benefits not
with money but with honor, and represent the Law
in his person, was the hieroglyphic by which they
obscurely signified their consciousness of their own
right and comeliness, the right of every man.

The magnetism which all original action exerts is
explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust.
Who is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self,
on which a universal reliance may be grounded?
What is the nature and power of that science-baffling
star, without parallax, without calculable elements,
which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and
impure actions, if the least mark of independence
appear? The inquiry leads us to that source, at
once the essence of genius, the essence of virtue, and
the essence of life, which we call Spontaneity or

48 SELF-RELIANCE.

Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intui
tion, whilst all later teachings are tuitions. In that
deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot
go, all things find their common origin. For the
sense of being which in calm hours rises, we know
not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from
space, from light, from time, from man, but one with
them and proceedeth obviously from the same source
whence their life and being also proceedeth. We
first share the life by which things exist and after
wards see them as appearances in nature and forget
that we have shared their cause. Here is the foun
tain of action and the fountain of thought. Here are
the lungs of that inspiration which giveth man wis
dom, of that inspiration of man which cannot be de
nied without impiety and atheism. We lie in the lap
of immense intelligence, which makes us organs of its
activity and receivers of its truth. When we discern
justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of our
selves, but allow a passage to its beams. . If we ask
whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that
causes — all metaphysics, all philosophy is at fault.
Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm. Every
man discerns between the voluntary acts of his mind
and his involuntary perceptions. And to his involun
tary perceptions he knows a perfect respect is due.
He may err in the expression of them, but he knows
that these things are so, like day and night, not to be
disputed. All my wilful actions and acquisitions are
but roving ; — the most trivial reverie, the faintest
native emotion, are domestic and divine. Thought
less people contradict as readily the statement of

SELF-RELIANCE. 49

perceptions as of opinions, or rather much more
readily ; for they do not distinguish between percep
tion and notion. Xhey fancy that I choose to see
this or that thing. But perception is not whimsical,
but fatal. If I see a trait, my children will see it
after me, and in course of time all mankind, — al
though it may chance that no one has seen it before
me. For my perception of it is as much a fact as the
sun.

The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so
pure that it is profane to seek to interpose helps. It
must be that when God speaketh he should communi
cate, not one thing, but all things ; should fill the
world with his voice ; should scatter forth light,
nature, time, souls, from the centre of the present
thought ; and new date and new create the whole.
Whenever a mind is simple and receives a divine
wisdom, then old things pass away, — means, teach
ers, texts, temples fall ; it lives now, and absorbs
past and future into the present hour. All things are
made sacred by relation to it, — one thing as much
as another. All things are dissolved to their centre
by their cause, and in the universal miracle petty and
particular miracles disappear. This is and must be.
If therefore a man claims to know and speak of God
and carries you backward to the phraseology of some
old mouldered nation in another country, in another
world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the
oak which is its fulness and completion ? Is the par
ent better than the child into whom he has cast his
ripened being? Whence then this worship of the
past? The centuries are conspirators against the

50 SELF-RELIANCE.

sanity and majesty of the soul. Time and space are
but physiological colors which the eye maketh, but
the soul is light ; where it is, is day ; where it was, is
night ; and history is an impertinence and an injury
if it be any thing more than a cheerful apologue or
parable of my being and becoming.

Man is timid and apologetic ; he is no longer up
right ; he dares not say * I think,' ' I am,' but quotes
some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade
of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my
window make no reference to former roses or to bet
ter ones ; they are for what they are ; they exist with
God to-day. There is no time to them. There is
simply the rose ; it is perfect in every moment of its
existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life
acts ; in the full-blown flower there is rio more ; in
the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is sat
isfied and it satisfies nature in all moments alike.
There is no time to it. But man postpones or re
members ; he does not live in the present, but with
reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the
riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee
the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he
too lives with nature in the present, above time.

This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong
intellects dare not yet hear God himself unless he
speak the phraseology of I know not what David, or
Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great
a price on a few texts, on a few lives. We are like
children who repeat by rote the sentences of gran-
dames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the
men of talents and character they chance to see, —

SELF-RELIANCE. 5 1

painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke ;
afterwards, when they come into the point of view
which those had who uttered these sayings, they
understand them and are willing to let the words go ;
for at any time they can use words as good when
occasion comes. So was it with us, so will it be, if
we proceed. If we live truly, we shall see truly. It
is as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is for
the weak to be weak. When we have new percep
tion, we shall gladly disburthen the memory of its
hoarded treasures as old rubbish. When a man lives
with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur
of the brook and the rustle of the corn.

And now at last the highest truth on this subject
remains unsaid ; probably cannot be said ; for all
that we say is the far off remembering of the intui
tion. That thought, by what I can now nearest
approach to say it, is this. When good is near you,
when you have life in yourself, — it is not by any
known or appointed way ; you shall not discern the
foot-prints of any other ; you shall not see the face
of man ; you shall not hear any name ; — the way,
the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and
new. It shall exclude all other being. You take
the way from man, not to man. All persons that
ever existed are its fugitive ministers. There shall
be no fear in it. Fear and hope are alike beneath it.
It asks nothing. There is somewhat low even in
hope. We are then in vision. There is nothing
that can be called gratitude, nor properly joy. The
soul is raised over passion. It seeth identity and
eternal causation. It is a perceiving that Truth and

52 SELF-RELIANCE.

Right are. Hence it becomes a Tranquillity out of
the knowing that all things go well. Vast spaces
of nature ; the Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea ; vast
intervals of time, years, centuries, are of no account.
This which I think and feel underlay that former
state of life and circumstances, as it does underlie
my present and will always all circumstances, and
what is called life and what is called death.

Life only avails, not the having lived. Power
ceases in the instant of repose ; it resides in the mo
ment of transition from a past to a new state, in the
shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This
one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes ; for
that forever degrades the past ; turns all riches to
poverty, all reputation to a shame ; confounds the
saint with the rogue ; shoves Jesus and Judas equally
aside. Why then do we prate of self-reliance? In
asmuch as the soul is present there will be power not
confident but agent. To talk of reliance is a poor
external way of speaking. Speak rather of that
which relies because it works and is. Who has more
soul than I masters me, though he should not raise
his finger. Round him I must revolve by the gravi
tation of spirits. Who has less I rule with like
facility. We fancy it rhetoric when we speak of
eminent virtue. We do not yet see that virtue is
Height, and that a man or a company of men, plastic
and permeable to principles, by the law of nature
must overpower and ride all cities, nations, kings,
rich men, poets, who are not.

This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach
on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all into

SELF-RELIANCE. 53

the ever-blessed ONE. Virtue is the governor, the
creator, the reality. All things real are so by so
much virtue as they contain. Hardship, husbandry,
hunting, whaling, war, eloquence, personal weight,
are somewhat, and engage my respect as examples
of the souPs presence and impure action. I see the
same law working in nature for conservation and
growth. The poise of a planet, the bended tree
recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital
resources of every animal and vegetable, are also
demonstrations of the self-sufficing and therefore
self-relying soul. All history, from its highest to
its trivial passages is the various record of this power.

Thus all concentrates ; let us not rove ; let us sit at
home with the cause. Let us stun and astonish the
intruding rabble of men and books and institutions
by a simple declaration of the divine fact. Bid them
take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here
within. Let our simplicity judge them, and our
docility to our own law demonstrate the poverty of
nature and fortune beside our native riches.

But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in
awe of man, nor is the soul admonished to stay at
home, to put itself in communication with the internal
ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of
the urns of men. We must go alone. Isolation
must precede true society. I like the silent church
before the service begins, better than any preaching.
How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons look,
begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary. So let
us always sit. Why should we assume the faults of
our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they

54 SELF-RELIANCE.

sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same
blood? All men have my blood and I have all men's.
Not for that will I adopt their petulance or folly, even
to the extent of being ashamed of it. But your iso
lation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is,
must be elevation. At times the whole world seems
to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic
trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want,
charity, all knock at once at thy closet door and say,
* Come out unto us.' — Do not spill thy soul ; do not
all descend ; keep thy state ; stay at home in thine
own heaven ; come not for a moment into their facts,
into their hubbub of conflicting appearances, but let
in the light of thy law on their confusion. The power
men possess to annoy me I give them by a weak curi
osity. No man can come near me but through my
act. " What we love that we have, but by desire we
bereave ourselves of the love."

If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obe
dience and faith, let us at least resist our tempta
tions, let us enter into the state of war and wake
Thor and Woden, courage and constancy, in our
Saxon breasts. This is to be done in our smooth
times by speaking the truth. Check this lying hos
pitality and lying affection. Live no longer to the
expectation of these deceived and deceiving people
with whom we converse. Say to them, O father,

0 mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived
with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward

1 am the truth's. Be it known unto you that hence
forward I obey no law less than the eternal law.
I will have no covenants but proximities. I shall

SELF-RELIANCE. 55

endeavor to nourish my parents, to support my fam
ily, to be the chaste husband of one wife, — but
these relations I must fill after a new and unprece
dented way. I appeal from your customs. I must
be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for
you, or you. If you can love me for what I am,
we shall be happier. If you cannot, I will still seek
to deserve that you should. I must be myself. I
will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust
that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly
before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me
and the heart appoints. If you are noble, I will
love you ; if you are not, I will not hurt you
and myself by hypocritical attentions. If you are
true, but not in, the same truth with me, cleave
to your companions ; I will seek my own. I do this
not selfishly but humbly and truly. It is alike your
interest, and mine, and all men's, however long we
have dwelt in lies, to live in truth. Does this sound
harsh to-day? You will soon love what is dictated
by your nature as well as mine, and if we follow the
truth it will bring us out safe at last. — But so may
you give these friends pain. Yes, but I cannot sell
my liberty and my power, to save their sensibility.
Besides, all persons have their moments of reason,
when they look out into the region of absolute truth;
then will they justify me and do the same thing.

The populace think that your rejection of popu
lar standards is a rejection of all standard, and mere
antinomianism ; and the bold sensualist will use
the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But
the law of consciousness abides. There are two

56 SELF-RELIANCE.

confessionals, in one or the other of which we must
be shriven. You may fulfil your round of duties
by clearing yourself in the direct, or in the reflex
way. Consider whether you have satisfied your re
lations to father, mother, cousin, neighbor, town,
cat and dog ; whether any of these can upbraid
you. But I may also neglect this reflex standard
and absolve me to myself. I have my own stern
claims and perfect circle. It denies the name of
duty to many offices that are called duties. But if
I can discharge its debts it enables me to dispense
with the popular code. If any one imagines that
this law is lax, let him keep its commandment one
day.

And truly it demands something godlike in him
who has cast off the common motives of humanity
and has ventured to trust himself for a task-master.
High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight,
that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society,
law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to
him as strong as iron necessity is to others.

If any man consider the present aspects of what
is called by distinction society, he will see the need
of these ethics. The sinew and heart of man seem
to be drawn out, and we are become timorous de
sponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid
of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other.
Our age yields no great and perfect persons. We
want men and women who shall renovate life and
our social state, but we see that most natures are
insolvent; cannot satisfy their own wants, have an
ambition out of all proportion to their practical force,

SELF-RELIANCE. 5 7

and so do lean and beg day and night continually.
Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occu
pations, our marriages, our religion we have not
chosen, but society has chosen for us. We are par
lor soldiers. The rugged battle of fate, where
strength is born, we shun.

If our young men miscarry in their first enter
prises they lose all heart. If the young merchant
fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius
studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in
an office within one year afterwards, in the cities or
suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his
friends and to himself that he is right in being dis
heartened and in complaining the rest of his life.
A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who
in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms
it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a news
paper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so
forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls
on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls.
He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame
in not * studying a profession,1 for he does not post
pone his life, but lives already. He has not one
chance, but a hundred chances. Let a stoic arise
who shall reveal the resources of man and tell men
they are not leaning willows, but can and must de
tach themselves ; that with the exercise of self-trust,
new powers shall appear ; that a man is the word
made flesh, born to shed healing to the nations,
that he should be ashamed of our compassion, and
that the moment he acts from himself, tossing the
laws, the books, idolatries and customs out of the

58 SELF-RELIANCE.

window, — we pity him no more but thank and revere
him ; — and that teacher shall restore the life of man
to splendor and make his name dear to all History.

It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance — a new
respect for the divinity in man — must work a revolu
tion in all the offices and relations of men ; in their
religion ; in their education ; in their pursuits ; their
modes of living ; their association ; in their property ;
in their speculative views.

i. In what prayers do men allow themselves!
That which they call a holy office is not so much as
brave and manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks for
some foreign addition to come through some foreign
virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes of natural
and supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous.
Prayer that craves a particular commodity — anything
less than all good, is vicious. Prayer is the contem
plation of the facts of life from the highest point of
view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant
soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works
good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end
is theft and meanness. It supposes dualism and not
unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the
man is at one with God, he will not beg. He will
then see prayer in all action. The prayer of the
farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of
the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true
prayers heard throughout nature, though for cheap
ends. Caratach, in Fletcher's Bonduca, when admon
ished to inquire the mind of the god Audate, replies,

His hidden. meaning lies in our endeavors;
Our valors are our best gods.

SELF-RELIANCE. 59

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Dis
content is the want of self-reliance : it is infirmity of
will. Regret calamities if you can thereby help the
sufferer; if not, attend your own work and already
the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just
as base. We come to them who weep foolishly and
sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting
to them truth and health in rough electric shocks,
putting them once more in communication with the
soul. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands.
Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-help
ing man. For him all doors are flung wide. Him
all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow
with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces
him because he did not need it. We solicitiously
and apologetically caress and celebrate him because
he held on his way and scorned our disapprobation.
The gods love him because men hated him. "To
the persevering mortal," said Zoroaster, "the blessed
Immortals are swift."

As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are
their creeds a disease of the intellect. They say
with those foolish Israelites, ' Let not God speak to
us, lest we die. Speak thou, speak any man with us,
and we will obey.' Everywhere I am bereaved of
meeting God in my brother, because he has shut his
own temple doors and recites fables merely of his
brother's, or his brother's brother's God. Every new
mind is a new classification. If it prove a mind of
uncommon activity and power, a Locke, a Lavoisier,
a Hutton, a Bentham, a Spurzheim, it imposes its
classification on other men, and lo! a new system.

60 SELF-RELIANCE.

In proportion always to the depth of the thought,
and so to the number of the objects it touches and
brings within reach of the pupil, is his complacency.
But chiefly is this apparent in creeds and churches,
which are also classifications of some powerful mind
acting on the great elemental thought of Duty and
man's relation to the Highest. Such is Calvinism,
Quakerism, Swedenborgianism. The pupil takes
the same delight in subordinating every thing to the
new terminology that a girl does who has just learned
botany in seeing a new earth and new seasons
thereby. It will happen for a time that the pupil
will feel a real debt to the teacher — will find his
intellectual power has grown by the study of his
writings. This will continue until he has exhausted
his master's mind. But in all unbalanced minds the
classification is idolized, passes for the end and not
for a speedily exhaustible means, so that the walls of
the system blend to their eye in the remote horizon
with the walls of the universe ; the luminaries of
heaven seem to them hung on the arch their master
built. They cannot imagine how you aliens have
any right to see — how you can see; 'It must be
somehow that you stole the light from us.' They
do not yet perceive that light, unsystematic, indom
itable, will break into any cabin, even into theirs.
Let them chirp awhile and call it their own. If they
are honest and do well, presently their neat new pin
fold will be too strait and low, will crack, will lean,
will rot and vanish, and the immortal light, all young
and joyful, million-orbed, million-colored, will beam
over the universe as on the first morning.

SELF-RELIANCE. 6 1

2. It is for want of self-culture that the idol of
Travelling, the idol of Italy, of England, of Egypt,
remains for all educated Americans. They who
made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the
imagination, did so not by rambling round creation
as a moth round a lamp, but by sticking fast where
they were, like an axis of the earth. In manly hours
we feel that duty is our place and that the merry
men of circumstance should follow as they may.
The soul is no traveller : the wise man stays at home
with the soul, and when his necessities, his duties,
on any occasion call him from his house, or into
foreign lands, he is at home still and is not gadding
abroad from himself, and shall make men sensible
by the expression of his countenance that he goes,
the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities
and men like a sovereign and not like an interloper
or a valet.

I have no churlish objection to the circumnaviga
tion of the globe for the purposes of art, of study,
and benevolence, so that the man is first domesti
cated, or does not go abroad with the hope of find
ing somewhat greater than he knows. He who
travels to be amused or to get somewhat which he
does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows
old even in youth among old things. In Thebes,
in Palmyra, his will and mind have become old and
dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins.

Travelling is a fooPs paradise. We owe to our
first journeys the discovery that place is nothing.
At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be
intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness.. I

62 SELF-RELIANCE.

pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the
sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside
me is the stern Fact, the sad self, unrelenting, iden
tical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the
palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and
suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant
goes with me wherever I go.

3. But the rage of travelling is itself only a symp
tom of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole
intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond, and
the universal system of education fosters restlessness.
Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay
at home. We imitate ; and what is imitation but the
travelling of the mind? Our houses are built with
foreign taste ; our shelves are garnished with foreign
ornaments ; our opinions, our tastes, our whole
minds, lean, and follow the Past and the Distant,
as the eyes of a maid follow her mistress. The soul
created the arts wherever they have flourished. It
was in his own mind that the artist sought his model.
It was an application of his own thought to the thing
to be done and the conditions to be observed. And
why need we copy the Doric or the Gothic model?
Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought and quaint
expression are as near to us as to any, and if the
American artist will study with hope and love the
precise thing to be done by him, considering the cli
mate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants of
the people, the habit and form of the government, he
will create a house in which all these will find them
selves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied
also.

SELF-RELIANCE. 63

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift
you can present every moment with the cumulative
force of a whole life's cultivation ; but of the adopted
talent of another you have only an extemporaneous
half possession. That which each can do best, none
but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows
what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it.
Where is the master who could have taught Shaks-
peare? Where is the master who could have in
structed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or
Newton? Every great man is an unique. The
Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could
not borrow. If anybody will tell me whom the great
man imitates in the original crisis when he performs
a great act, I will tell him who else than himself can
teach him. Shakspeare will never be made by the
study of Shakspeare. Do that which is assigned
thee and thou canst not hope too much or dare too
much. There is at this moment, there is for me an
utterance bare and grand as that of the colossal chisel
of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of
Moses or Dante, but different from all these. Not
possibly will the soul, all rich, all eloquent, with
thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but
if I can hear what these patriarchs say, surely I can
reply to them in the same pitch of voice ; for the ear
and the tongue are two organs of one nature. Dwell
up there in the simple and noble regions of thy life,
obey thy heart and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld
again.

4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look
abroad, so does our spirit of society. All men plume

64 SELF-RELIANCE.

themselves on the improvement of society, and no
man improves.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one
side as it gains on the other. Its progress is only
apparent like the workers of a treadmill. It under
goes continual changes ; it is barbarous, it is civil
ized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific ; but
this change is not amelioration. For every thing
that is given something is taken. Society acquires
new arts and loses old instincts. What a contrast
between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking
American, with a watch, a pencil and a bill of ex
change in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander,
whose property is a club, a spear, a mat and an undi
vided twentieth of a shed to sleep under. But com
pare the health of the two men and you shall see that
his aboriginal strength, the white man ^as lost. If
the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a
broad axe and in a day or two the flesh shall unite
and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and
the same blow shall send the white to his grave.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost
the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but
lacks so much support of muscle. He has got a fine
Geneva watch, but he has lost the skill to tell the
hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he
has, and so being sure of the information when he
wants it, the man in the street does not know a star
in the sky. The solstice he does not observe ; the
equinox he knows as little ; and the whole bright
calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind.
His note-books impair his memory ; his libraries

SELF-RELIANCE. 65

overload his wit; the insurance-office increases the
number of accidents ; and it may be a question
whether machinery does not encumber ; whether we
have not lost by refinement some energy, by a
Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms
some vigor of wild virtue. For every stoic was a
stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?

There is no more deviation in the moral standard
than in the standard of height or bulk. No greater
men are now than ever were. A singular equality
may be observed between the great men of the first
and of the last ages; nor can all the science, art,
religion, and philosophy of the nineteenth century
avail to educate greater men than Plutarch's heroes,
three or four and twenty centuries ago. Not in time
is the race progressive. Phocion, Socrates, Anax-
agoras, Diogenes, are great men, but they leave no
class. He who is really of their class will not be
called by their name, but be wholly his own man, and
in his turn the founder of a sect. The arts and in
ventions of each period are only its costume and do
not invigorate men. The harm of the improved
machinery may compensate its good. Hudson and
Behring accomplished so much in their fishing-boats
as to astonish Parry and Franklin, whose equipment
exhausted the resources of science and art. Galileo,
with an opera-glass, discovered a more splendid series
of facts than any one since. Columbus found the
New World in an undecked boat. It is curious to
see the periodical disuse and perishing of means and
machinery which were introduced with loud laudation
a few years or centuries before. The great genius

66 SELF-RELIANCE.

returns to essential man. We reckoned the improve
ments of the art of war among the triumphs of sci
ence, and yet Napoleon conquered Europe by the
Bivouac, which consisted of falling back on naked
valor and disencumbering it of all aids. The Em
peror held it impossible to make a perfect army, says
Las Cases, " without abolishing our arms, magazines,
commissaries and carriages, until, in imitation of the
Roman custom, the soldier should receive his supply
of corn, grind it in his hand-mill and bake his bread
himself."

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but
the water of which it is composed does not. The
same particle does not rise from the valley to the
ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons
who make up a nation to-day, die, and their experi
ence with them.

And so the reliance on Property, including the
reliance on governments which protect it, is the
want of self-reliance. Men have looked away from
themselves and at things so long that they have come
to esteem what they call the soul's progress, namely,
the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards
of property, and they deprecate assaults on these,
because they feel them to be assaults on property.
They measure their esteem of each other by what
each has, and not by what each is. But a cultivated
man becomes ashamed of his property, ashamed of
what he has, out of new respect for his being. Espe
cially he hates what he has if he see that it is acci
dental, — came to him by inheritance, or gift, or
crime; then he feels that it is not having; it does

SELF-RELIANCE. 67

not belong to him, has no root in him, and merely
lies there because no revolution or no robber takes
it away. But that which a man is, does always by
necessity acquire, and what the man acquires, is per
manent and living property, which does not wait the
beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or
storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself
wherever the man is put. " Thy lot or portion of
life," said the Caliph Ali, "is seeking after thee ;
therefore be at rest from seeking after it." Our
dependence on these foreign goods leads us to our
slavish respect for numbers. The political parties
meet in numerous conventions ; the greater the con
course and with each new uproar of announcement,
The delegation from Essex ! The Democrats from
New Hampshire ! The Whigs of Maine ! the young
patriot feels himself stronger than before by a new
thousand of eyes and arms. In like manner the
reformers summon conventions and vote and resolve
in multitude. But not so O friends ! will the God
deign to enter and inhabit you, but by a method pre
cisely the reverse. It is only as a man puts off from
himself all external support and stands alone that I
see him to be strong and to prevail. He is weaker
by every recruit to his banner. Is not a man better
than a town? Ask nothing of men, and, in the end
less mutation, thou only firm column must presently
appear the upholder of all that surrounds thee. He
who knows that power is in the soul, that he is weak
only because he has looked for good out of him and
elsewhere, and, so perceiving, throws himself unhesi
tatingly on his thought, instantly rights himself,

68 SELF-RELIANCE.

stands in the erect position, commands his limbs,
works miracles ; just as a man who stands on his feet
is stronger than a man who stands on his head.

So use all that is called Fortune. Most men
gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her
wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these
winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the chan
cellors of God. In the Will work and acquire, and
thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt
always drag her after thee. A political victory, a rise
of rents, the recovery of your sick or the return of
your absent friend, or some other quite external
event raises your spirits, and you think good days
are preparing for you. Do not believe it. It can
never be so. Nothing can bring you peace but
yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the
triumph of principles.

ESSAY III.

COMPENSATION.

EVER since I was a boy I have wished to write a
discourse on Compensation ; for it seemed to me
when very young that on this subject Life was
ahead of theology and the people knew more than
the preachers taught. The documents too from
which the doctrine is to be drawn, charmed my
fancy by their endless variety, and lay always before
me, even in sleep ; for they are the tools in our
hands, the bread in our basket, the transactions of
the street, the farm and the dwelling-house ; the
greetings, the relations, the debts and credits, the
influence of character, the nature and endowment
of all men. It seemed to me also that in it might
be shown men a ray of divinity, the present action
of the Soul of this world, clean from all vestige of
tradition ; and so the heart of man might be bathed
by an inundation of eternal love, conversing with
that which he knows was always and always must
be, because it really is now. It appeared moreover
that if this doctrine could be stated in terms with
any resemblance to those bright intuitions in which
this truth is sometimes revealed to us, it would be a

69

70 COMPENSATION.

star in many dark hours and crooked passages in our
journey, that would not suffer us to lose our way.

I was lately confirmed in these desires by hearing
a sermon at church. The preacher, a man esteemed
for his orthodoxy, unfolded in the ordinary manner
the doctrine of the Last Judgment. He assumed
that judgment is not executed in this world ; that the
wicked are successful ; that the good are misera
ble ; and then urged from reason and from Script
ure a compensation to be made to both parties in
the next life. No offence appeared to be taken by
the congregation at this doctrine. As far as I could
observe when the meeting broke up they separated
without remark on the sermon.

Yet what was the import of this teaching ? What
did the preacher mean by saying that the good are
miserable in the present life ? Was it that houses
and lands, offices, wine, horses, dress, luxury, are
had by unprincipled men, whilst the saints are poor
and despised ; and that a compensation is to be made
to these last hereafter, by giving them the like grati
fications another day, — bank-stock and doubloons,
venison and champagne ? This must be the com
pensation intended; for what else ? Is it that they
are to have leave to pray and praise ? to love and
serve men ? Why, that they can do now. The
legitimate inference the disciple would draw was,
* We are to have such a good time as the sinners
have now1 ; — or, to push it to its extreme import,
— * You sin now, we shall sin by-and-by ; we would
sin now, if we could ; not being successful we ex
pect our revenge tomorrow.'

COM PENS A TION. 7 1

The fallacy lay in the immense concession that the
bad are successful ; that justice is not done now.
The blindness of the preacher consisted in deferring
to the base estimate of the market of what consti
tutes a manly success, instead of confronting and
convicting the world from the truth ; announcing the
Presence of the Soul ; the omnipotence of the Will ;
and so establishing the standard of good and ill, of
success and falsehood, and summoning the dead to
its present tribunal.

I find a similar base tone in the popular religious
works of the day and the same doctrines assumed by
the literary men when occasionally they treat the
related topics. I think that our popular theology
has gained in decorum, and not in principle, over
the superstitions it -has displaced. But men are bet
ter than this theology. Their daily life gives it the
lie. Every ingenuous and aspiring soul leaves the
doctrine behind him in his own experience, and all
men feel sometimes the falsehood which they cannot
demonstrate. For men are wiser than they know.
That which they hear in schools and pulpits without
afterthought, if said in conversation would probably
be questioned in silence. If a man dogmatize in a
mixed company on Providence and the divine laws, he
is answered by a silence which conveys well enough
to an observer the dissatisfaction of the hearer, but
his incapacity to make his own statement.

I shall attempt in this and the following chapter to
record some facts that indicate the path of the law of
Compensation; happy beyond my expectation if I
shall truly draw the smallest arc of this circle.

7 2 COMPENSA TION.

POLARITY, or action and reaction, we meet in
every part of nature ; in darkness and light, in heat
and cold ; in the ebb and flow of waters ; in male
and female ; in the inspiration and expiration of
plants and animals ; in the systole and diastole of
the heart ; in the undulations of fluids and of sound ;
in the centrifugal and centripetal gravity ; in electric
ity, galvanism, and chemical affinity. Superinduce
magnetism at one end of a needle, the opposite mag
netism takes place at the other end. If the south
attracts, the north repels. To empty here, you must
condense there. An inevitable dualism bisects na
ture, so that each thing is a half, and suggests
another thing to make it whole; as, spirit, matter;
man, woman; subjective, objective; in, out; upper,
under ; motion, re°:t ; yea, nay.

Whilst the world is thus dual, so is* every one of
its parts. The entire system of things gets repre
sented in every particle. There is somewhat that
resembles the ebb and flow of the sea, day and night,
man and woman, in a single needle of the pine, in
a kernel of corn, in each, individual of every animal
tribe. The reaction, so grand in the elements, is
repeated within these small boundaries. For exam
ple, in the animal kingdom the physiologist has ob
served that no creatures are favorites, but a certain
compensation balances every gift and every defect.
A surplusage given to one part is paid out of a reduc
tion from another part of the same creature. If the
head and neck are enlarged, the trunk and extremi
ties are cut short.

The theory of the mechanic forces is another ex-

COMPENSA TION. 7 3

ample. What we gain in power is lost in time, and
the converse. The periodic or compensating errors
of the planets is another instance. The influences
of climate and soil in political history are another.
The cold climate invigorates. The barren soil does
not breed fevers, crocodiles, tigers, or scorpions.

The same dualism underlies the nature and con
dition of man. Every excess causes a defect ; every
defect an excess. Every sweet hath its sour; every
evil its good. Every faculty which is a receiver of
pleasure has an equal penalty put on its abuse. It
is to answer for its moderation with its life. For
every grain of wit there is a grain of folly. For
every thing you have missed, you have gained some
thing else ; and for every thing you gain, you lose
something. If riches increase, they are increased
that use them. If the gatherer gathers too much,
nature takes out of the man what she puts into his
chest ; swells the estate, but kills the owner. Na
ture hates monopolies and exceptions. The waves
of the sea do not more speedily seek a level from
their loftiest tossing than the varieties of condition
tend to equalize themselves. There is always some
levelling circumstance that puts down the overbear
ing, the strong, the rich, the fortunate, substantially
on the same ground with all others. Is a man too
strong and fierce for society and by temper and
position a bad citizen, — a morose ruffian, with a
dash of the pirate in him ? — nature sends him a
troop of pretty sons and daughters who are getting
along in the dame's classes at the village school, and
love and fear for them smooths his grim scowl to

74 COMPENSA TION.

courtesy. Thus she contrives to intenerate the gran
ite and felspar, takes the boar out and puts the lamb
in and keeps her balance true.

The farmer imagines power and place are fine
things. But the President has paid dear for his
White House. It has commonly cost him all his
peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To
preserve for a short time so conspicuous an appear
ance before the world, he is content to eat dust be
fore the real masters who stand erect behind the
throne. Or do men desire the more substantial and
permanent grandeur of genius? Neither has this
an immunity. He who by force of will or of thought
is great and overlooks thousands, has the responsi
bility of overlooking. With every influx of light
comes new danger. Has he light? he must bear
witness to the light, and always outrun that sym
pathy which gives him such keen satisfaction, by
his fidelity to new revelations of the incessant soul.
He must hate father and mother, wife and child.
Has he all that the world loves and admires and
covets? — he must cast behind him their admiration
and afflict them by faithfulness to his truth and be
come a byword and a hissing.

This Law writes the laws of the cities and nations.
It will not be baulked of its end in the smallest iota.
It is in vain to build or plot or combine against it.
Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Res nolunt
diu male administrari. Though no checks to a new
evil appear, the checks exist, and will appear. If
the government is cruel, the governor's life is not
safe. If you tax too high, the revenue will yield

COM PENS A TION. 7 5

nothing. If you make the criminal code sanguinary,
juries will not convict. Nothing arbitrary, nothing
artificial can endure. The true life and satisfactions
of man seem to elude the utmost rigors or felicities
of condition and to establish themselves with great
indifferency under all varieties of circumstance. Un
der all governments the influence of character remains
the same, — in Turkey and New England about
alike. Under the primeval despots of Egypt, history
honestly confesses that man must have been as free
as culture could make him.

These appearances indicate the fact that the uni
verse is represented in every one of its particles.
Every thing in nature contains all the powers of
nature. Every thing is made of one hidden stuff;
as the naturalist sees one type under every meta
morphosis, and regards a horse as a running man,
a fish as a swimming man, a bird as a flying man,
a tree as a rooted man. Each new form repeats
not only the main character of the type, but part
for part all the details, all the aims, furtherances,
hindrances, energies and whole system of every
other. Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is
a compend of the world and a correlative of every
other. Each one is an entire emblem of human life ;
of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course
and its end. And each one must somehow accom
modate the whole man and recite all his destiny.

The world globes itself in a drop of dew. The
microscope cannot find the animalcule which is less
perfect for being little. Eyes, ears, taste, smell,
motion, resistance, appetite, and organs of reproduc-

76 COMPENSATION.

tion that take hold on eternity, — all find room to
consist in the small creature. So do we put our
life into every act. The true doctrine of omnipres
ence is that God reappears with all his parts in every
moss and cobweb. The value of the universe con
trives to throw itself into every point. If the good
is there, so is the evil ; if the affinity, so the repul
sion ; if the force, so the limitation.

Thus is the universe alive. All things are moral.
That soul which within us is a sentiment, outside
of us is a law. We feel its inspirations ; out there in
history we can see its fatal strength. It is almighty.
All nature feels its grasp. ** It is in the world, and
the world was made by it." It is eternal but it
enacts itself in time and space. Justice is not post
poned. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all
parts of life. Ot Kv/3ot, Ai6s det evTUTrrovo-i. The
dice of God are always loaded. The world looks
like a multiplication-table, or a mathematical equa
tion, which, turn it how you will, balances itself.
Take what figure you will, its exact value, nor more
nor less, still returns to you. Every secret is told,
every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every
wrong redressed, in silence and certainty. What
we call retribution is the universal necessity by which
the whole appears wherever a part appears. If you
see smoke, there must be fire. If you see a hand or
a limb, you know that the trunk to which it belongs
is there behind.

Every act rewards itself, or in other words inte
grates itself, in a twofold manner: first in the thing,
or in real nature ; and secondly in the circumstance,

COM PENS A TION. 7 7

or in apparent nature. Men call the circumstance the
retribution. The casual retribution is in the thing
and is seen by the soul. The retribution in the cir
cumstance is seen by the understanding ; it is insep
arable from the thing, but is often spread over a long
time and so does not become distinct until after
many years. The specific stripes may follow late
after the offence, but they follow because they accom
pany it. Crime and punishment grow out of one
stem. Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens
within the flower of the pleasure which concealed it.
Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit,
cannot be severed ; for the effect already blooms in
the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit
in the seed.

Whilst thus the world will be whole and refuses
to be disparted, we seek to act partially, to sunder,
to appropriate ; for example, — to gratify the senses
we sever the pleasure of the senses from the needs
of the character. The ingenuity of man has been
dedicated to the solution of one problem, — how to
detach the sensual sweet, the sensual strong, the
sensual bright, etc., from the moral sweet, the moral
deep, the moral fair ; that is, again, to contrive to
cut clean off this upper surface so thin as to leave it
bottomless ; to get a one end, without an other end.
The soul says, Eat ; the body would feast. The soul
says, The man and woman shall be one flesh and
one soul ; the body would join the flesh only. The
soul says, Have dominion over all things to the ends
of virtue ; the body would have the power over things
to its own ends.

78 COMPENSA TION.

The soul strives amain to live and work through
all things. It would be the only fact. All things
shall be added unto it, — power, pleasure, knowl
edge, beauty. The particular man aims to be some
body ; to set up for himself; to truck and higgle for
a private good ; and, in particulars, to ride that he
may ride ; to dress that he may be dressed ; to eat
that he may eat ; and to govern, that he may be seen.
Men seek to be great ; they would have offices, wealth,
power, and fame. They think that to be great is to
get only one side of nature, — the sweet, without the
other side, — the bitter.

Steadily is this dividing and detaching counter
acted. Up to this day it must be owned no projector
has had the smallest success. The parted water re
unites behind our hand. Pleasure is taken out of
pleasant things, profit out of profitable things, power
out of strong things, the moment we seek to separate
them from the whole. We can no more halve things
and get the sensual good, by itself, than we can get
an inside that shall have no outside, or a light with
out a shadow. " Drive out nature with a fork, she
comes running back."

Life invests itself with inevitable conditions, which
the unwise seek to dodge, which one and another
brags that he does not know, brags that they do not
touch him ; — but the brag is on his lips, the condi
tions are in his soul. If he escapes them in one part
they attack him in another more vital part. If he
has escaped them in form and in the appearance, it
is because he has resisted his life and fled from him
self, and the retribution is so much death. So signal

COMPENSATION. 79

is the failure of all attempts to make this separation
of the good from the tax, that the experiment would
not be tried, — since to try it is to be mad, — but for
the circumstance that when the disease began in the
will, of rebellion and separation, the intellect is at
once infected, so that the man ceases to see God
whole in each object, but is able to see the sensual
allurement of an object and not see the sensual hurt ;
he sees the mermaid's head but not the dragon's tail,
and thinks he can cut off that which he would have
from that which he would not have. " How secret
art thou who dwellest in the highest heavens in
silence, O thou only great God, sprinkling with an
unwearied providence certain penal blindnesses upon
such as have unbridled desires ! " 1

The human soul is true to these facts in the paint
ing of fable, of history, of law, of proverbs, of con
versation. It finds a tongue in literature unawares.
Thus the Greeks called Jupiter, Supreme Mind ; but
having traditionally ascribed to him many base actions,
they involuntarily made amends to Reason by tying
up the hands of so bad a god. He is made as help
less as a king of England. Prometheus knows one
secret which Jove must bargain for ; Minerva, another.
He cannot get his own thunders ; Minerva keeps the
key of them :

Of all the gods, I only know the keys

That ope the solid doors within whose vaults

His thunders sleep.

A plain confession of the in-working of the All and

of its moral aim. The Indian mythology ends in

1 St. Augustine, Confessions, B. I.

8o COMPENSA TION.

the same ethics ; and indeed it would seem impos
sible for any fable to be invented and get any cur
rency which was not moral. Aurora forgot to ask
youth for her lover, and though so Tithonus is im
mortal, he is old. Achilles is not quite invulner
able ; for Thetis held him by the heel when she
dipped him in the Styx and the sacred waters did
not wash that part. Siegfried, in the Nibelungen,
is not quite immortal, for a leaf fell on his back
whilst he was bathing in the Dragon's blood, and
that spot which it covered is mortal. And so it
always is. There is a crack in every thing God has
made. Always it would seem there is this vindictive
circumstance stealing in at unawares even into the
wild poesy in which the human fancy attempted to
make bold holiday and to shake itself free of the old
laws, — this back-stroke, this kick of the gun, certify
ing that the law is fatal ; that in nature nothing can
be given, all things are sold.

This is that ancient doctrine of Nemesis, who
keeps watch in the Universe and lets no offence go
unchastised. The Furies they said are attendants
on Justice, and if the sun in heaven should trans
gress his path they would punish him. The poets
related that stone walls and iron swords and leathern
thongs had an occult sympathy with the wrongs
of their owners ; that the belt which Ajax gave Hec
tor dragged the Trojan hero over the field at the
wheels of the car of Achilles, and the sword which
Hector gave Ajax was that on whose point Ajax
fell. They recorded that when the Thasians erected
a statue to Theogenes, a victor in the games, one of

COMPENSA T1ON. 8 1

his rivals went to it by night and endeavored to
throw it down by repeated blows, until at last he
moved it from its pedestal and was crushed to death
beneath its fall.

This voice of fable has in it somewhat divine. It
came from thought above the will of the writer.
That is the best part of each writer which has noth
ing private in it ; that is the best part of each which
he does not know ; that which flowed out of his con
stitution and not from his too active invention ; that
which in the study of a single artist you might not
easily find, but in the study of many you would ab
stract as the spirit of them all. Phidias it is not,
but the work of man in that early Hellenic world
that I would know. The name and circumstance
of Phidias, however convenient for history, embar
rasses when we come to the highest criticism. We
are to see that which man was tending to do in a
given period, and was hindered, or, if you will, mod
ified in doing, by the interfering volitions of Phidias,
of Dante, of Shakspeare, the organ whereby man at
the moment wrought.

Still more striking is the expression of this fact in
the proverbs of all nations, which are always the
literature of Reason, or the statements of an abso
lute truth without qualification. Proverbs, like the
sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of
the Intuitions. That which the droning world,
chained to appearances, will not allow the realist to
say in his own words, it will suffer him to say in
proverbs without contradiction. And this law of
laws, which the pulpit, the senate and the college

82 COMPENSATION.

deny, is hourly preached in all markets and all lan
guages by flights of proverbs, whose teaching is
as true and as omnipresent as that of birds and
flies.

All things are double, one against another. — Tit
for tat ; an eye for an eye ; a tooth for a tooth ;
blood for blood ; measure for measure ; love for
love. — Give, and it shall be given you. — He that
watereth shall be watered himself. — What will you
have ? quoth God ; pay for it and take it. — Noth
ing venture, nothing have. — Thou shalt be paid
exactly for what thou hast done, no more, no less. —
Who doth not work shall not eat. — Harm watch,
harm catch. — Curses always recoil on the head of
him who imprecates them. — If you put a chain
around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens
itself around your own. — Bad counsel confounds the
adviser. — The devil is an ass.

It is thus written, because it is thus in life. Our
action is overmastered and characterized above our
will by the law of nature. We aim at a petty end
quite aside from the public good, but our act arranges
itself by irresistible magnetism in a line with the
poles of the world.

A man cannot speak but he judges himself.
With his will or against his will he draws his por
trait to the eye of his companions by every word.
Every opinion reacts on him who utters it. It is a
thread-ball thrown at a mark, but the other end
remains in the thrower's bag. Or, rather, it is a har
poon thrown at the whale, unwinding, as it flies, a
coil of cord in the boat, and, if the harpoon is not

COMPENSATION. 83

good, or not well thrown, it will go nigh to cut the
steersman in twain or to sink the boat.

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.
"No man had ever a point of pride that was not
injurious to him," said Burke. The exclusive in
fashionable life does not see that he excludes him
self from enjoyment, in the attempt to appropriate
it. The exclusionist in religion does not see that
he shuts the door of heaven on himself, in striving
to shut out others. Treat men as pawns and nine
pins and you shall suffer as well as they. If you
leave out their heart, you shall lose your own. The
senses would make things of all persons ; of women,
of children, of the poor. The vulgar proverb, " I
will get it from his purse or get it from his skin," is
sound philosophy.

All infractions of love and equity in our social
relations are speedily punished. They are punished
by Fear. Whilst I stand in simple relations to my
fellow-man, I have no displeasure in meeting him.
We meet as water meets water, or as two currents
of air mix, with perfect diffusion and interpenetra-
tion of nature. But as soon as there is any depar
ture from simplicity and attempt at halfness, or
good for me that is not good for him, my neigh
bor feels the wrong ; he shrinks from me as far as
I have shrunk from him ; his eyes no longer seek
mine ; there is war between us ; there is hate in
him and fear in me.

All the old abuses in society, the great and univer
sal and the petty and particular, all unjust accumula
tions of property and power, are avenged in the same

84 COMPENSA TION.

manner. Fear is an instructor of great sagacity and
the herald of all revolutions. One thing he always
teaches, that there is rottenness where he appears.
He is a carrion crow, and though you see not well
what he hovers for, there is death somewhere. Our
property is timid, our laws are timid, our cultivated
classes are timid. Fear for ages has boded and
mowed and gibbered over government and property.
That obscene bird is not there for nothing. He
indicates great wrongs which must be revised.

Of the like nature is that expectation of change
which instantly follows the suspension of our volun
tary activity. The terror of cloudless noon, the
emerald of Poly crates, the awe of prosperity, the
instinct which leads every generous soul to impose
on itself tasks of a noble asceticism and vicarious
virtue, are the tremblings of the balance of justice
through the heart and mind of man.

Experienced men of the world know very well that
it is best to pay scot and lot as they go along, and
that a man often pays dear for a small frugality. The
borrower runs in his own debt. Has a man gained
any thing who has received a hundred favors and
rendered none ? Has he gained by borrowing,
through indolence or cunning, his neighbor's wares,
or horses, or money? There arises on the deed the
instant acknowledgment of benefit on the one part
and of debt on the other ; that is, of superiority and
inferiority. The transaction remains in the memory
of himself and his neighbor ; and every new trans
action alters according to its nature their relation to
each other. He may soon come to see that he had

COM PENS A TION. 85

better have broken his own bones than to have ridden
in his neighbor's coach, and that " the highest price
he can pay for a thing is to ask for it."

A wise man will extend this lesson to all parts of
life, and know that it is always the part of prudence
to face every claimant and pay every just demand on
your time, your talents, or your heart. Always pay;
for first or last you must pay your entire debt. Per
sons and events may stand for a time between you
and justice, but it is only a postponement. You
must pay at last your own debt. If you are wise you
will dread a prosperity which only loads you with
more. Benefit is the end of nature. But for every
benefit which you receive, a tax is levied. He is
great who confers the most benefits. He is base, —
and that is the one base thing in the universe, — to
receive favors and render none. In the order of
nature we cannot render benefits to those from whom
we receive them, or only seldom. But the benefit we
receive must be rendered again, line for line, deed
for deed, cent for cent, to somebody. Beware of too
much good staying in your hand. It will fast corrupt
and worm worms. Pay it away quickly in some sort.

Labor is watched over by the same pitiless laws.
Cheapest, says the prudent, is the dearest labor.
What we buy in a broom, a mat, a wagon, a knife,
is some application of good sense to a common want.
It is best to pay in your land a skilful gardener, or to
buy good sense applied to gardening ; in your sailor,
good sense applied to navigation ; in the house, good
sense applied to cooking, sewing, serving; in your
agent, good sense applied to accounts and affairs.

86 COMPENSATION.

So do you multiply your presence, or spread yourself
throughout your estate. But because of the dual
constitution of things, in labor as in life there can be
no cheating. The thief steals from himself. The
swindler swindles himself. For the real price of
labor is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and
credit are signs. These signs, like paper money,
may be counterfeited or stolen, but that which they
represent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be
counterfeited or stolen. These ends of labor cannot
be answered but by real exertions of the mind, and
in obedience to pure motives. The cheat, the de
faulter, the gambler, cannot extort the benefit, cannot
extort the knowledge of material and moral nature
which his honest care and pains yield to the opera
tive. The law of nature is, Do the thing, and you
shall have the power ; but they who do not the thing
have not the power.

Human labor, through all its forms, from the sharp
ening of a stake to the construction of a city or an
epic, is one immense illustration of the perfect com
pensation of the universe. Everywhere and always
this law is sublime. The absolute balance of Give
and Take, the doctrine that every thing has its price,
and if that price is not paid, not that thing but some
thing else is obtained, and that it is impossible to get
anything without its price, is not less sublime in the
columns of a ledger than in the budgets of states, in
the laws of light and darkness, in all the action and
reaction of nature. I cannot doubt that the high laws
which each man sees ever implicated in those pro
cesses with which he is conversant, the stern ethics

COMPENSA TION. 8 7

which sparkle on his chisel-edge, which are measured
out by his plumb and foot-rule, which stand as mani
fest in the footing of the shop-bill as in the history of
a state, — do recommend to him his trade, and though
seldom named, exalt his business to his imagination.

The league between virtue and nature engages all
things to assume a hostile front to vice. The beau
tiful laws and substances of the world persecute and
whip the traitor. He finds that things are arranged
for truth and benefit, but there is no den in the wide
world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime, and the
earth is made of glass. There is no such thing as
concealment. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a
coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in
the woods the track of every partridge and fox and
squirrel and mole. You cannot recall the spoken
word, you cannot wipe out the foot-track, you cannot
draw up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet or clew.
Always some damning circumstance transpires. The
laws and substances of nature, water, snow, wind,
gravitation, become penalties to the thief.

On the other hand the law holds with equal sure-
ness for all right action. Love, and you shall be
loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as
the two sides of an algebraic equation. The good
man has absolute good, which like fire turns every
thing to its own nature, so that you cannot do him
any harm ; but as the royal armies sent against
Napoleon, when he approached cast down their colors
and from enemies became friends, so do disasters
of all kinds, as sickness, offence, poverty, prove
benefactors.

88 COMPENSATION.

Winds blow and waters roll
Strength to the brave and power and deity,
Yet in themselves are nothing.

The good are befriended even by weakness and
defect. As no man had ever a point of pride that
was not injurious to him, so no man had ever a
defect that was not somewhere made useful to him.
The stag in the fable admired his horns^and blamed
his feet, but when the hunter came, his feet saved
him, and afterwards, caught in the thicket, his horns
destroyed him. Every man in his lifetime needs to
thank his faults. As no man thoroughly under
stands a truth until first he has contended against it,
so no man has a thorough acquaintance with the
hindrances or talents of men until he has suffered
from the one and seen the triumph of the other over
his own want of the same. Has he a defect of tem
per that unfits him to live in society? Thereby he is
driven to entertain himself alone and acquire habits
of self-help ; and thus, like the wounded oyster, he
mends his shell with pearl.

Our strength grows out of our weakness. Not
until we are pricked and stung and sorely shot at,
awakens the indignation which arms itself with secret
forces. A great man is always willing to be little.
Whilst he sits on the cushion of advantages, he goes
to sleep. When he is pushed, tormented, defeated,
he has a chance to learn something ; he has been put
on his wits, on his manhood ; he has gained facts ;
learns his ignorance ; is cured of the insanity of
conceit ; has got moderation and real skill. The
wise man always throws himself on the side of his

COMPENSATION. 89

assailants. It is more his interest than it is theirs to
find his weak point. The wound cicatrizes and falls
off from him like a dead skin and when they would
triumph, lo ! he has passed on invulnerable. Blame
is safer than praise. I hate to be defended in a
newspaper. As long as all that is said is said against
me, I feel a certain assurance of success. But as
soon as honied words of praise are spoken for me I
feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies.
In general, every evil to which we do not succumb
is a benefactor. As the Sandwich Islander believes
that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills
passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the
temptation we resist.

The same guards which protect us from disaster,
defect and enmity, defend us, if we will, from self
ishness and fraud. Bolts and bars are not the best
of our institutions, nor is shrewdness in trade a mark
of wisdom. Men suffer all their life long under the
foolish superstition that they can be cheated. But
it is as impossible for a man to be cheated by any
one but himself, as for a thing to be and not to be
at the same time. There is a third silent party to all
our bargains. The nature and soul of things takes
on itself the guaranty of the fulfilment of every con
tract, so that honest service cannot come to loss.
If you serve an ungrateful master, serve him the
more. Put God in your debt. Every stroke shall
be repaid. The longer the payment is withholden,
the better for you; for compound interest on com
pound interest is the rate and usage of this exchequer.

The history of persecution is a history of endeavors

90 COMPENSATION.

to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist
a rope of sand. It makes no difference whether the
actors be many or one, a tyrant or a mob. A mob
is a society of bodies voluntarily bereaving them
selves of reason and traversing its work. The mob
is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the
beast. Its fit hour of activity is night. Its actions
are insane, like its whole constitution. It persecutes
a principle ; it would whip a right ; it would tar and
feather justice, by inflicting fire and outrage upon
the houses and persons of those who have these.
It resembles the prank of boys, who run with fire-
engines to put out the ruddy aurora streaming to the
stars. The inviolate spirit turns their spite against
the wrongdoers. The martyr cannot be dishonored.
Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame ; every prison
a more illustrious abode ; every burned book or house
enlightens the world ; every suppressed or expunged
word reverberates through the earth from side to
side. The minds of men are at last aroused ; reason
looks out and justifies her own and malice finds all
her work in vain. It is the whipper who is whipped
and the tyrant who is undone.

Thus do all things preach the indifferency of cir
cumstances. The man is all. Every thing has two
sides, a good and an evil. Every advantage has its
tax. I learn to be content. But the doctrine of
compensation is not the doctrine of indifferency.
The thoughtless say, on hearing these representa
tions, — What boots it to do well? there is one
event to good and evil ; if I gain any good I must

COMPENSA TION. 9 1

pay for it ; if I lose any good I gain some other ;
all actions are indifferent.

There is a deeper fact in the soul than compensa
tion, to wit, its own nature. The soul is not a com
pensation, but a life. The soul is. Under all this
running sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and
flow with perfect balance, lies the aboriginal abyss
of real Being. Existence, or God, is not a relation
or a part, but the whole. Being is the vast affirma
tive, excluding negation, self-balanced, and swallow
ing up all relations, parts and times within itself.
Nature, truth, virtue, are the influx from thence.
Vice is the absence or departure of the same. Noth
ing, Falsehood, may indeed stand as the great Night
or shade on which as a back-ground the living uni
verse paints itself forth ; but no fact is begotten by
it ; it cannot work, for it is not. It cannot work any
good ; it cannot work any harm. It is harm inas
much as it is worse not to be than to be.

We feel defrauded of the retribution due to evil
acts, because the criminal adheres to his vice and
contumacy and does not come to a crisis or judgment
anywhere in visible nature. There is no stunning
confutation of his nonsense before men and angels.
Has he therefore outwitted the law? Inasmuch as
he carries the malignity and the lie with him he so
far decreases from nature. In some manner there
will be a demonstration of the wrong to the under
standing also ; but, should we not see it, this deadly
deduction makes square the eternal account.

Neither can it be said, on the other hand, that
the gain of rectitude must be bought by any loss.

9 2 COMPENSA TION.

There is no penalty to virtue ; no penalty to wisdom ;
they are proper additions of being. In a virtuous
action I properly am ; in a virtuous act I add to the
world ; I plant into deserts conquered from Chaos
and Nothing and see the darkness receding on the
limits of the horizon. There can be no excess to
love, none to knowledge, none to beauty, when these
attributes are considered in the purest sense. The
soul refuses all limits. It affirms in man always an
Optimism, never a Pessimism.

His life is a progress, and not a station. His
instinct is trust. Our instinct uses "more" and
'* less" in application to man, always of the presence
of the soul, and not of its absence ; the brave man
is greater than the coward ; the true, the benevolent,
the wise, is more a man and not less, than the fool
and knave. There is therefore no tax on the good
of virtue, for that is the incoming of God himself,
or absolute existence, without any comparative. All
external good has its tax, and if it came without
desert or sweat, has no root in me, and the next
wind will blow it away. But all the good of nature
is the soul's, and may be had if paid for in nature's
lawful coin, that is, by labor which the heart and the
head allow. I no longer wish to meet a good I do
not earn, for example to find a pot of buried gold,
knowing that it brings with it new responsibility.
I do not wish more external goods, — neither posses
sions, nor honors, nor powers, nor persons. The
gain is apparent ; the tax is certain. But there is no
tax on the knowledge that the compensation exists
and that it is not desirable to dig up treasure. Herein

COMPENSA TION. 9 3

I rejoice with a serene eternal peace. I contract the
boundaries of possible mischief. I learn the wisdom
of St. Bernard, " Nothing can work me damage
except myself; the harm that I sustain I carry about
with me, and never am a real sufferer but by my
own fault."

In the nature of the soul is the compensation for
the inequalities of condition. The radical tragedy
of nature seems to be the distinction of More and
Less. How can Less not feel the pain ; how not
feel indignation or malevolence towards More?
Look at those who have less faculty, and one feels
sad and knows not well what to make of it. Almost
he shuns their eye ; he fears they will upbraid God.
What should they do? It seems a great injustice.
But see the facts nearly and these mountainous ine
qualities vanish. Love reduces them as the sun
melts the iceberg in the sea. The heart and soul
of all men being one, this bitterness of His and Mine
ceases. His is mine. I am my brother and my
brother is me. If I feel overshadowed and outdone
by great neighbors, I can get love ; I can still receive ;
and he that, loveth maketh his own the grandeur he
loves. Thereby I make the discovery that my
brother is my guardian, acting for me with the
friendliest designs, and the estate I so admired and
envied is my own. It is the eternal nature of the
soul to appropriate and make all things its own.
Jesus and Shakspeare are fragments of the soul, and
by love I conquer and incorporate them in my own
conscious domain. His virtue, — is not that mine?
His wit, — if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit.

94 COMPENSA TION.

Such also is the natural history of calamity. The
changes which break up at short intervals the pros
perity of men are advertisements of a nature whose
law is growth. Evermore it is the order of nature to
grow, and every soul is by this intrinsic necessity
quitting its whole system of things, its friends and
home and laws and faith, as the shellfish crawls out
of its beautiful but stony case, because it no longer
admits of its growth, and slowly forms a new house.
In proportion to the vigor of the individual these
revolutions are frequent, until in some happier mind
they are incessant and all worldly relations hang very
loosely about him, becoming as it were a transparent
fluid membrane through which the living form is
always seen, and not, as in most men, an indurated
heterogeneous fabric of many dates and of no settled
character, in which the man is imprisoned. Then there
can be enlargement, and the man of to-day scarcely
recognizes the man of yesterday. And such should
be the -outward biography of man in time, a putting
off of dead circumstances day by day, as he renews
his raiment day by day. But to us, in our lapsed
estate, resting, not advancing, resisting, not cooper
ating with the divine expansion, this growth comes
by shocks.

We cannot part with our friends. We cannot let
our angels go. We do not see that they only go out
that archangels may come in. We are idolators of
the old. We do not believe in the riches of the
soul, in its proper eternity and omnipresence. We
do not believe there is any force in to-day to rival or
re-create that beautiful yesterday. We linger in the

COMPENSA TION. 95

ruins of the old tent where once we had bread and
shelter and organs, nor believe that the spirit can
feed, cover, and nerve us again. We cannot again
find aught so dear, so sweet, so graceful. But we
sit and weep in vain. The voice of the Almighty
saith, 'Up and onward forevermore ! ' We cannot
stay amid the ruins. Neither will we rely on the
New ; and so we walk ever with reverted eyes, like
those monsters who look backwards.

And yet the compensations of calamity are made
apparent to the understanding also, after long inter
vals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disap
pointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems
at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But
the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that
underlies all facts. The death of a dear friend, wife,
brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation,
somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or
genius ; for it commonly operates revolutions in our
way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of
youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a
wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living,
and allows the formation of new ones more friendly
to the growth of character. It permits or constrains
the formation of new acquaintances and the recep
tion of new influences that prove of the first impor
tance to the next years ; and the man or woman who
would have remained a sunny garden-flower, with no
room for its roots and too much sunshine for its head,
by the falling of the walls and the neglect of the gar
dener is made the banian of the forest, yielding shade
and fruit to wide neighborhoods of men.

ESSAY IV.

SPIRITUAL LAWS.

WHEN the act of reflection takes place in the mind,
when we look at ourselves in the light of thought, we
discover that our life is embosomed in beauty. Be
hind us, as we go, all things assume pleasing forms,
as clouds do far off. Not only things familiar and
stale, but even the tragic and terrible are comely as
they take their place in the pictures of memory. The
river-bank, the weed at the water-side, the old house,
the foolish person, — however neglected in the pass
ing, — have a grace in the past. Even the corpse
that has lain in the chambers has added a solemn
ornament to the house. The soul will not know
either deformity or pain. If in the hours of clear
reason we should speak the severest truth, we should
say that we had never made a sacrifice. In these hours
the mind seems so great that nothing can be taken
from us that seems much. All loss, all pain, is par
ticular ; the universe remains to the heart unhurt.
Distress never, trifles never abate our trust. No
man ever stated his griefs as lightly as he might.
Allow for exaggeration in the most patient and sorely
ridden hack that was ever driven. For it is only
96

SPIRITUAL LAWS. 97

the finite that has wrought and suffered ; the infinite
lies stretched in smiling repose.

The intellectual life may be kept clean and health
ful if man will live the life of nature and not import
into his mind difficulties which are none of his. No
man need be perplexed in his speculations. Let him
do and say what strictly belongs to him, and though
very ignorant of books, his nature shall not yield him
any intellectual obstructions and doubts. Our young
people are diseased with the theological problems of
original sin, origin of evil, predestination and the like.
These never presented a practical difficulty to any man,
— never darkened across any man's road who did not
go out of his way to seek them. These are the soul's
•mumps and measles and whooping-coughs, and those
who have not caught them cannot describe their
health or prescribe the cure. A simple mind will
not know these enemies. It is quite another thing
that he should be able to give account of his faith
and expound to another the theory of his self-union
and freedom. This requires rare gifts. Yet without
this self-knowledge there may be a sylvan strength
and integrity in that which he is. "A few strong
instincts and a few plain rules " suffice us.

My will never gave the images in my mind the
rank they now take. The regular course of studies,
the years of academical and professional education
have not yielded me better facts than some idle books
under the bench at the Latin school. What we do
not call education is more precious than that which we
call so. We form no guess, at the time of receiving
a thought, of its comparative value. And education

98 SPIRITUAL LAWS.

often wastes its effort in attempts to thwart and baulk
this natural magnetism, which with sure discrimina
tion selects its own.

In like manner our moral nature is vitiated by
any interference of our will. People represent vir
tue as a struggle, and take to themselves great airs
upon their attainments, and the question is every
where vexed when a noble nature is commended,
Whether the man is not better who strives with
temptation. But there is no merit in the matter.
Either God is there or he is not there. We love
characters in proportion as they are impulsive and
spontaneous. The less a man thinks or knows
about his virtues the better we like him. Timoleon's
victories are the best victories, which ran and
flowed like Homer's verses, Plutarch said. When
we see a soul whose acts are all regal, graceful and
pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such
things can be and are, and not turn sourly on the
angel and say ' Crump is a better man with his
grunting resistance to all his native devils.'

Not less conspicuous is the preponderance of na
ture over will in all practical life. There is less in
tention in history than we ascribe to it. We impute
deep-laid far-sighted plans to Caesar and Napoleon;
but the best of their power was in nature, not in
them. Men of an extraordinary success, in their
honest moments, have always sung * Not unto us,
not unto us.' According to the faith of their times
they have built altars to Fortune, or to Destiny, or
to St. Julian. Their success lay in their parallelism
to the course of thought, which found in them an

SPIRITUAL LAWS. 99

unobstructed channel ; and the wonders of which
they were the visible conductors seemed to the eye
their deed. Did the wires generate the galvanism ?
It is even true that there was less in them on which
they could reflect than in another ; as the virtue of
a pipe is to be smooth and hollow. That which ex
ternally seemed will and immovableness was willing
ness and self-annihilation. Could Shakspeare give
a theory of Shakspeare? Could ever a man of pro
digious mathematical genius convey to others any
insight into his methods? If he could communi
cate that secret instantly it would lose all its exagger
ated value, blending with the daylight and the vital
energy the power to stand and to go.

The lesson is forcibly taught by these observa
tions that our life might be much easier and simpler
than we make it, that the world might be a happier
place than it is, that there is no need of struggles, con
vulsions, and despairs, of the wringing of the hands
and the gnashing of the teeth ; that we miscreate
our own evils. We interfere with the optimism of
nature, for whenever we get this vantage-ground of
the past, or of a wiser mind in the present, we are
able to discern that we are begirt with spiritual laws
which execute themselves.

The face of external nature teaches the same lesson
with calm superiority. Nature will not have us fret
and fume. She does not like our benevolence or
our learning much better than she likes our frauds
and wars. When we come out of the caucus, or the
bank, or the Abolition Convention, or the Temper
ance meeting, or the Transcendental club into the

100 SPIRITUAL LAWS.

fields and woods, she says to us, * So hot? my little
sir.'

We are full of mechanical actions. We must needs
intermeddle and have things in our own way, until
the sacrifices and virtues of society are odious. Love
should make joy; but our benevolence is unhappy.
Our Sunday schools and churches and pauper-societies
are yokes to the neck. We pain ourselves to please
nobody. There are natural ways of arriving at the
same ends at which these aim, but do not arrive.
Why should all virtue work in one and the same way?
Why should all give dollars? It is very inconvenient
to us country folk, and we do not think any good will
come of it. We have not dollars. Merchants have.
Let them give them. Farmers will give corn. Poets
will sing. Women will sew. Laborers will lend a
hand. The children will bring flowers. And why
drag this dead weight of a Sunday school over the
whole Christendom? It is natural and beautiful that
childhood should inquire and maturity should teach ;
but it is time enough to answer questions when they
are asked. Do not shut up the young people against
their will in a pew and force the children to ask them
questions for an hour against their will.

If we look wider, all things are alike ; laws and
letters and creeds and modes of living seem a trav-
estie of truth. Our society is encumbered by ponder
ous machinery, which resembles the endless aqueducts
which the Romans built over hill and dale and which
are superseded by the discovery of the law that water
rises to the level of its source. It is a Chinese wall
which any nimble Tartar can leap over. It is a

SPIRITUAL LAWS. IOI

standing army, not so good as a peace. It is a grad
uated, titled, richly appointed Empire, quite super
fluous when Town-meetings are found to answer just
as well.

Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always
works by short ways. When the fruit is ripe, it falls.
When the fruit is despatched, the leaf falls. The
circuit of the waters is mere falling. The walking
of man and all animals is a falling forward. All our
manual labor and works of strength, as prying, split
ting, digging, rowing and so forth, are done by dint
of continual falling, and the globe, earth, moon,
comet, sun, star, fall forever and ever.

The simplicity of the universe is very different from
the simplicity of a machine. He who sees moral
nature out and out and thoroughly knows how knowl
edge is acquired and character formed, is a pedant.
The simplicity of nature is not that which may easily
be read, but is inexhaustible. The last analysis
can no wise be made. We judge of a man's wis
dom by his hope, knowing that the perception of the
inexhaustibleness of nature is an immortal youth.
The wild fertility of nature is felt in comparing our
rigid names and reputations with our fluid conscious
ness. We pass in the world for sects and schools,
for erudition and piety, and we are all the time jejune
babes. One sees very well how Pyrrhonism grew up.
Every man sees that he is that middle point whereof
every thing may be affirmed and denied with equal
reason. He is old, he is young, he is very wise, he
is altogether ignorant. He hears and feels what you
say of the seraphim, and of the tin-pedlar. There is

102 SPIRITUAL LAWS.

no permanent wise man except in the figment of the
stoics. We side with the hero, as we read or paint,
against the coward and the robber ; but we have been
ourselves that coward and robber, and shall be again,
not in the low circumstance, but in comparison with
the grandeurs possible to the soul.

A little consideration of what takes place around
us every day would show us that a higher law than
that of our will regulates events ; that our painful
labors are very unnecessary and altogether fruitless ;
that only in our easy, simple, spontaneous action are
we strong, and by contenting ourselves with obedi
ence we become divine. Belief and love, — a believ
ing we love will relieve us of a vast load of care. O
my brothers, God exists. There is a soul at the
centre of nature and over the will of every man, so
that none of us can wrong the universe. It has so
infused its strong enchantment into nature that we
prosper when we accept its advice, and when we
struggle to wound its creatures our hands are glued
to our sides, or they beat our own breasts. The
whole course of things goes to teach us faith. • We
need only obey. There is a guidance for each of us,
and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word.
Why need you choose so painfully your place and
occupation and associates and modes of action and
entertainment? Certainly there is a possible right
for you that precludes the need of balance and wilful
election. For you there is a reality, a fit place and
congenial duties. Place yourself in the middle of the
stream of power and wisdom which flows into you as
life, place yourself in the full centre of that flood, then

SPIRITUAL LAWS. 103

you are without effort impelled to truth, to right and
a perfect contentment. Then you put all gainsayers
in the wrong. Then you are the world, the measure
of right, of truth, of beauty. If we will not be mar
plots with our miserable interferences, the work, the
society, letters, arts, science, religion of men would
go on far better than now, and the Heaven predicted
from the beginning of the world, and still predicted
from the bottom of the heart, would organize itself,
as do now the rose and the air and the sun.

I say, do not choose ; but that is a figure of speech
by which I would distinguish what is commonly
called choice among men, and which is a partial act,
the choice of the hands, of the eyes, of the appetites,
and not a whole act of the man. But that which I
call right or goodness, is the choice of my constitu
tion ; and that which I call heaven, and inwardly
aspire after, is the state of circumstances desirable to
my constitution ; and the action which I in all my years
tend to do, is the work for my faculties. We must
hold a man amenable to reason for the choice of his
daily craft or profession. It is not an excuse any
longer for his deeds that they are the custom of his
trade. What business has he with an evil trade?
Has he not a calling 'in his character?

Each man has his own vocation. The talent is
the call. There is one direction in which all space
is open to him. He has faculties silently inviting
him thither to endless exertion. He is like a ship
in a river ; he runs against obstructions on every
side but one; on that side all obstruction is taken
away and he sweeps serenely over God's depths into

104 SPIRITUAL LAWS.

an infinite sea. This talent and this call depend on
his organization, or the mode in which the general
soul incarnates itself in him. He inclines to do
something which is easy to him and good when it is
done, but which no other man can do. He has no
rival. For the more truly he consults his own powers,
the more difference will his work exhibit from the
work of any other. When he is true and faithful his
ambition is exactly proportioned to his powers. The
height of the pinnacle is determined by the breadth
of the base. Every man has this call of the power to
do somewhat unique, and no man has any other call.
The pretence that he has another call, a summons
by name and personal election and outward "signs
that mark him extraordinary and not in the roll of
common men," is fanaticism, and betrays obtuseness
to perceive that there is one mind in all the individ
uals, and no respect of persons therein.

By doing his work he makes the need felt which
he can supply. He creates the taste by which he is
enjoyed. He provokes the wants to which he can
minister. By doing his own work he unfolds him
self. It is the vice of our public speaking that it
has not abandonment. Somewhere, not only every
orator but every man should let out all the length
of all the reins ; should find or make a frank and
hearty expression of what force and meaning is in
him. The common experience is that the man fits
himself as well as he can to the customary details
of that work or trade he falls into, and tends it as
a dog turns a spit. Then he is a part of the machine
he moves ; the man is lost. Until he can manage to

SPIRITUAL LAWS. 105

communicate himself to others in his full stature and
proportion as a wise and good man, he does not yet
find his vocation. He must find in that an outlet
for his character, so that he may justify himself to
their eyes for doing what he does. If the labor is
trivial, let him by his thinking and character make it
liberal. Whatever he knows and thinks, whatever in
his apprehension is worth doing, that let him commu
nicate, or men will never know and honor him aright.
Foolish, whenever you take the meanness and formal
ity of that thing you do, instead of converting it into
the obedient spiracle of your character and aims.

We like only such actions as have already long
had the praise of men, and do not perceive that any
thing man can do may be 'divinely done. We think
greatness entailed or organized in some places or
duties, in certain offices or occasions, and do not see
that Paganini can extract rapture from a catgut, and
Eulenstein from a jews-harp, and a nimble-fingered
lad out of shreds of paper with his scissors, and
Landseer out of swine, and a hero out of the pitiful
habitation and company in which he was hidden.
What we call obscure condition or vulgar society
is that condition and society whose poetry is not
yet written, but which you shall presently make as
enviable and renowned as any. Accept your genius
and say what you think. In our estimates let us
take a lesson from kings. The parts of hospitality,
the connection of families, the impressiveness of
death, and a thousand other things, royalty makes
its own estimate of, and a royal mind will. To make
habitually a new estimate, — that is elevation.

io6 SPIRITUAL LAWS.

What a man does, that he has. What has he to
do with hope or fear? In himself is his might. Let
him regard no good as solid but that which is in his
nature and which must grow out of him as long as he
exists. The goods of fortune may come and go like
summer leaves ; let him play with them and scatter
them on every wind as the momentary signs of his
infinite productiveness.

He may have his own. A man's genius, the
quality that differences him from every other, the
susceptibility to one class of influences, the selection
of what is fit for him, the rejection of what is unfit,
determines for him the character of the universe.
As a man thinketh so is he, and as a man chooseth
so is he and so is nature. A man is a method, a
progressive arrangement ; a selecting principle, gath
ering his like to him wherever he goes. He takes
only his own out of the multiplicity that sweeps and
circles round him. He is like one of those booms
which are set out from the shore on rivers to catch
drift-wood, or like the loadstone amongst splinters
of steel. Those facts, words, persons, which dwell
in his memory without his being able to say why,
remain because they have a relation to him not less
real for being as yet unapprehended. They are sym
bols of value to him as they can interpret parts of his
consciousness which he would vainly seek words for
in the conventional images of books and other minds.
What attracts my attention shall have it, as I will go
to the man who knocks at my door, whilst a thousand
persons as worthy go by it, to whom I give no regard.
It is enough that these particulars speak to me. A

SPIRITUAL LAWS. 107

few anecdotes, a few traits of character, manners,
face, a few incidents, have an emphasis in your mem
ory out of all proportion to their apparent significance
if you measure them by the ordinary standards. They
relate to your gift. Let them have their weight, and
do not reject them and cast about for illustration and
facts more usual in literature. Respect them, for
they have their origin in deepest nature. What your
heart thinks great, is great. The soul's emphasis is
always right.

Over all things that are agreeable to his nature
and genius the man has the highest right. Every
where he may take what belongs to his spiritual es
tate, nor can he take anything else though all doors
were open, nor can all the force of men hinder him
from taking so much. It is vain to attempt to keep
a secret from one who has a right to know it. It
will tell itself. That mood into which a friend can
bring us is his dominion over us. To the thoughts
of that state of mind he has a right. All the secrets
of that state of mind he can compel. This is a
law which statesmen use in practice. All the ter
rors of the French Republic, which held Austria in
awe, were unable to command her diplomacy. But
Napoleon sent to Vienna M. de Narbonne, one of
the old noblesse, with the morals, manners and
name of that interest, saying, that it was indispensa
ble to send to the old aristocracy of Europe, men of
the same connexion, which in fact, constitutes a
sort of free-masonry. M. Narbonne in less than a
fortnight penetrated all the secrets of the Imperial
Cabinet.

io8 SPIRITUAL LAWS.

A mutual understanding is ever the firmest chain.
Nothing seems so easy as to speak and to be under
stood. Yet a man may come to find that the strongest
of defences and of ties, — that he has been under
stood; and he who has received an opinion may
come to find it the most inconvenient of bonds.

If a teacher have any opinion which he wishes
to conceal, his pupils will become as fully indoctri
nated into that as into any which he publishes. If
you pour water into a vessel twisted into coils and
angles, it is vain to say, I will pour it only into this
or that ; — it will find its own level in all. Men feel
and act the consequences of your doctrine without
being able to show how they follow. Show us an
arc of the curve, and a good mathematician will find
out the whole figure. We are always reasoning from
the seen to the unseen. Hence the perfect intelli
gence that subsists between wise men of remote
ages. A man cannot bury his meanings so deep in
his book but time and like-minded men will find
them. Plato had a secret doctrine, had he? What
secret can he conceal from the eyes of Bacon? of
Montaigne? of Kant? Therefore Aristotle said of his
works, " They are published and not published."

No man can learn what he has not preparation
for learning, however near to his eyes is the object.
A chemist may tell his most precious secrets to a
carpenter, and he shall be never the wiser, — the
secrets he would not utter to a chemist for an estate.
God screens us evermore from premature ideas.
Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that
stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when

SPIRITUAL LAWS. 109

the mind is ripened, — then we behold them, and
the time when we saw them not is like a dream.

Not in nature but in man is all the beauty and
worth he sees. The world is very empty, and is
indebted to this gilding, exalting soul for all its
pride. " Earth fills her lap with splendors " not her
own. The vale of Tempe, Tivoli and Rome are
earth and water, rocks and sky. There are as good
earth and water in a thousand places, yet how
unaifecting !

People are not the better for the sun and moon,
the horizon and the trees ; as it is not observed that
the keepers of Roman galleries or the valets of
painters have any elevation of thought, or that
librarians are wiser men than others. There are
graces in the demeanor of a polished and noble per
son which are lost upon the eye of a churl. These
are like the stars whose light has not yet reached us.

He may see what he maketh. Our dreams are
the sequel of our waking knowledge. The visions
of the night always bear some proportion to the
visions of the day. Hideous dreams are only exag
gerations of the sins of the day. We see our own
evil affections embodied in bad physiognomies. On
the alps the traveller sometimes sees his own shadow
magnified to a giant, so that every gesture of his
hand is terrific. " My children," said an old man
to his boys scared by a figure in the dark entry,
" my children, you will never see anything worse than
yourselves." As in dreams, so in the scarcely less
fluid events of the world every man sees himself in
colossal, without knowing that it is himself that he

HO SPIRITUAL LAWS.

sees. The good which he sees compared to the evil
which he sees, is as his own good to his own evil.
Every quality of his mind is magnified in some one
acquaintance, and every emotion of his heart in some
one. He is like a quincunx of trees, which counts
five, east, west, north, or south ; or an initial, me
dial, and terminal acrostic. And why not? He
cleaves to one person and avoids another, according
to their likeness or unlikeness to himself, truly seek
ing himself in his associates and moreover in his
trade, and habits, and gestures, and meats, and
drinks ; and comes at last to be faithfully repre
sented by every view you take of his circumstances.

He may read what he writeth. What can we
see or acquire but what we are? You have seen a
skilful man reading Virgil. Well, that author is a
thousand books to a thousand persons. Take the
book into your two hands and read your eyes out ;
you will never find what I find. If any ingenious
reader would have a monopoly of the wisdom or
delight he gets, he is as secure now the book is
Englished, as if it were imprisoned in the Pelews
tongue. It is with a good book as it is with good
company. Introduce a base person among gentle
men : it is all to no purpose : he is not their fellow.
Every society protects itself. The company is per
fectly safe, and he is not one of them, though his
body is in the room.

What avails it to fight with the eternal laws of
mind, which adjust the relation of all persons to each
other by the mathematical measure of their havings
and beings ? Gertrude is enamored of Guy ; how

SPIRITUAL LAWS. Ill

high, how aristocratic, how Roman his mien and
manners ! to live with him were life indeed : and no
purchase is too great ; and heaven and earth are
moved to that end. Well, Gertrude has Guy: but
what now avails how high, how aristocratic, how
Roman his mien and manners, if his heart and aims
are in the senate, in the theatre and in the billiard
room, and she has no aims, no conversation that can
enchant her graceful lord ?

He shall have his own society. We can love noth
ing but nature. The most wonderful talents, the
most meritorious exertions really avail very little with
us ; but nearness or likeness of nature, — how beauti
ful is the ease of its victory ! Persons approach us,
famous for their beauty, for their accomplishments,
worthy of all wonder for their charms and gifts : they
dedicate their whole skill to the hour and the com
pany ; with very imperfect result. To be sure it
would be very ungrateful in us not to praise them
very loudly. Then, when all is done, a person of
related mind, a brother or sister by nature, comes to
us so softly and easily, so nearly and intimately, as if
it were the blood in our proper veins, that we feel as
if some one was gone, instead of another having
come : we are utterly relieved and refreshed : it is a
sort of joyful solitude. We foolishly think in our
days of sin that we must court friends by compliance
to the customs of society, to its dress, its breeding,
and its estimates. But later if we are so happy we
learn that only that soul can be my friend which I
encounter on the line of my own march, that soul to
which I do not decline and which does not decline

112 SPIRITUAL LAWS.

to me, but, native of the same celestial latitude,
repeats in its own all my experience. The scholar
and the prophet forget themselves and ape the cus
toms and costumes of the man of the world to deserve
the smile of beauty. He is a fool and follows some
giddy girl, and not with religious, ennobling passion
a woman with all that is serene, oracular and beauti
ful in her soul. Let him be great, and love shall fol
low him. Nothing is more deeply punished than the
neglect of the affinities by which alone society should
be formed, and the insane levity of choosing associ
ates by others' eyes.

He may set his own rate. It is an universal maxim
worthy of all acceptation that a man may have that
allowance he takes. Take the place and attitude to
which you see your unquestionable right and all men
acquiesce. The world must be just. It always leaves
every man, with profound unconcern, to set his own
rate. Hero or driveller, it meddles not in the matter.
It will certainly accept your own measure of your
doing and being, whether you sneak about and deny
your own name, or whether you see your work pro
duced to the concave sphere of the heavens, one with
the revolution of the stars.

The same reality pervades all teaching. The man
may teach by doing, and not otherwise. If he can
communicate himself he can teach, but not by words.
He teaches who gives, and he learns who receives.
There is no teaching until the pupil is brought into
the same state or principle in which you are ; a trans
fusion takes place ; he is you and you are he ; then is
a teaching, and by no unfriendly chance or bad com-

SPIRITUAL LAWS. 113

pany can he ever quite lose the benefit. But your
propositions run out of one ear as they ran in at the
other. We see it advertised that Mr. Grand will
deliver an oration on the Fourth of July, and Mr.
Hand before the Mechanics1 Association, and we do
not go thither, because we know that these gentle
men will not communicate their own character and
being to the company. If we had reason to expect
such a communication we should go through all
inconvenience and opposition. The sick would be
carried in litters. But a public oration is an esca
pade, a non-committal, an apology, a gag, and not a
communication, not a speech, not a man.

A like Nemesis presides over all intellectual works.
We have yet to learn that the thing uttered in words
is not therefore affirmed. It must affirm itself, or no
forms of grammar and no plausibility can give it evi
dence and no array of arguments. The sentence
must also contain its own apology for being spoken.

The effect of any writing on the public mind is
mathematically measurable by its depth of thought.
How much water does it draw? If it awaken you to
think ; if it lift you from your feet with the great voice
of eloquence ; then the effect is to be wide, slow, per
manent, over the minds of men ; if the pages instruct
you not, they will die like flies in the hour. The
way to speak and write what shall not go out of fash
ion is to speak and write sincerely. The argument
which has not power to reach my own practice, I may
well doubt will fail to reach yours. But take Sid
ney's maxim : *' Look in thy heart, and write." He
that writes to himself writes to an eternal public.

114 SPIRITUAL LAWS.

That statement only is fit to be made public which
you have come at in attempting to satisfy your own
curiosity. The writer who takes his subject from his
ear and not from his heart should know that he has
lost as much as he seems to have gained, and when
the empty book has gathered all its praise, and half
the people say, — ' what poetry ! what genius ! ' it still
needs fuel to make fire. That only profits which is
profitable. Life alone can impart life; and though
we should burst we can only be valued as we make
ourselves valuable. There is no luck in literary repu
tation. They who make up the final verdict upon
every book are not -the partial and noisy readers of
the hour when it appears, but a court as of angels, a
public not to be bribed, not to be entreated and not
to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to
fame. Only those books come down which deserve
to last. All the gilt edges, vellum and morocco, all
the presentation-copies to all the libraries will not
preserve a book in circulation beyond its intrinsic
date. It must go with all Walpole's Noble and Royal
Authors to its fate. Blackmore, Kotzebue, or Pollok
may endure for a night, but Moses and Homer stand
forever. There are not in the world at any one time
more than a dozen persons who read and understand
Plato : — never enough to pay for an edition of his
works ; yet to every generation these come duly
down, for the sake of those few persons, as if God
brought them in his hand. " No book," said Bent-
ley, " was ever written down by any but itself." The
permanence of all books is fixed by no effort, friendly
or hostile, but by their own specific gravity, or the

SPIRITUAL LAWS. 115

intrinsic importance of their contents to the constant
mind of man. "Do not trouble yourself too much
about the light on your statue," said Michael Angelo
to the young sculptor ; " the light of the public square
will test its value."

In like manner the effect of every action is meas
ured by the depth of the sentiment from which it
proceeds. The great man knew not that he was
great. It took a century or two for that fact to
appear. What he did, he did because he must:
he used no election : it was the most natural thing
in the world, and grew out of the circumstances
of the moment. But now, every thing he did, even
to the lifting of his finger or the eating of bread,
looks large, all-related, and is called an institution.

These are the demonstrations in a few particulars
of the genius of nature : they show the direction of
the stream. But the stream is blood : every drop
is alive. Truth has not single victories : all things
are its organs, not only dust and stones, but errors
and lies. The laws of disease, physicians say, are
as beautiful as the laws of health. Our philosophy
is affirmative and readily accepts the testimony of
negative facts, as every shadow points to the sun.
By a divine necessity every fact in nature is con
strained to offer its testimony.

Human character does evermore publish itself.
It will not be concealed. It hates darkness — it
rushes into light. The most fugitive deed and word,
the mere air of doing a thing, the intimated purpose,
expresses character. If you act you show character ;
if you sit still you show it ; if you sleep you show it.

n6 SPIRITUAL LAWS.

You think because you have spoken nothing when
others spoke, and have given no opinion on the
times, on the church, on slavery, on the college, on
parties and persons, that your verdict is still expected
with curiosity as a reserved wisdom. Far other
wise ; your silence answers very loud. You have no
oracle to utter, and your fellow-men have learned
that you cannot help them ; for oracles speak. Doth
not wisdom cry and understanding put forth her
voice?

Dreadful limits are set in nature to the powers of
dissimulation. Truth tyrannizes over the unwilling
members of the body. Faces never lie, it is said.
No man need be deceived who will study the changes
of expression. When a man speaks the truth in the
spirit of truth, his eye is as clear as the heavens.
When he has base ends and speaks falsely, the eye
is muddy and sometimes asquint.

I have heard an experienced counsellor say that he
never feared the effect upon a jury of a lawyer who
does not believe in his heart that his client ought to
have a verdict. If he does not believe it his unbelief
will appear to the jury, despite all his protestations,
and will become their unbelief. This is that law
whereby a work of art, of whatever kind, sets us in
the same state of mind wherein the artist was when
he made it. That which we do not believe we cannot
adequately say, though we may repeat the words
never so often. It was this conviction which Swe-
denborg expressed when he described a group of per
sons in the spiritual world endeavoring in vain to
articulate a proposition which they did not believe ;

SPIRITUAL LAWS. 117

but they could not, though they twisted and folded
their lips even to indignation.

A man passes for that he is worth. Very idle is
all curiosity concerning other peoples' estimate of us,
and idle is all fear of remaining unknown. If a man
know that he can do anything, — that he can do it
better than any one else, — he has a pledge of the
acknowledgment of that fact by all persons. The
world is full of judgment-days, and into every assem
bly that a man enters, in every action he attempts,
he is gauged and stamped. In every troop of boys
that whoop and run in each yard and square, a new
comer is as well and accurately weighed in the bal
ance in the course of a few days and stamped with
his right number, as if he had undergone a formal
trial of his strength, speed and temper. A stranger
comes from a distant school, with better dress, with
trinkets in his pockets, with airs and pretensions ; an
old boy sniffs thereat and says to himself, ' It's of no
use ; we shall find him out to-morrow.' * What hath
he done?' is the divine question which searches men
and transpierces every false reputation. A fop may
sit in any chair of the world nor be distinguished for
his hour from Homer and Washington ; but there
can never be any doubt concerning the respective
ability of human beings when we seek the truth.
Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension
never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension
never wrote an Iliad, nor drove back Xerxes, nor
christianized the world, nor abolished slavery.

Always as much virtue as there is, so much ap
pears ; as much goodness as there is, so much rever-

Il8 SPIRITUAL LAWS.

ence it commands. All the devils respect virtue.
The high, the generous, the self-devoted sect will
always instruct and command mankind. Never a
sincere word was utterly lost. Never a magnanimity
fell to the ground. Always the heart of man greets
and accepts it unexpectedly. A man passes for tnat
he is worth. What he is engraves itself on his face,
on his form, on his fortunes, in letters of light which
all men may read but himself. Concealment avails
him nothing ; boasting nothing. There is confession
in the glances of our eyes ; in our smiles ; in saluta
tions ; and the grasp of hands. His sin bedaubs
him, mars all his good impression. Men know not
why they do not trust him ; but they do not trust
him. His vice glasses his eye, demeans his cheek,
pinches the nose, sets the mark of the beast on the
back of the head, and writes O fool ! fool ! on the
forehead of a king.

If you would not be known to do anything, never
do it. A man may play the fool in the drifts of a
desert, but every grain of sand shall seem to see.
He may be a solitary eater, but he cannot keep his
foolish counsel. A broken complexion, a swinish
look, ungenerous acts and the want of due knowledge,
— all blab. Can a cook, a Chiffinch, an lachimo be
mistaken for Zeno or Paul? Confucius exclaimed,
" How can a man be concealed ! How can a man be
concealed ! "

On the other hand, the hero fears not that if he
withhold the avowal of a just and brave act it will go
unwitnessed and unloved. One knows it, himself, —
and is pledged by it to sweetness of peace and to

SPIRITUAL LAWS. 119

nobleness of aim which will prove in the end a better
proclamation of it than the relating of the incident.
Virtue is the adherence in action to the nature of
things, and the nature of things makes it prevalent.
It consists in a perpetual substitution of being for
seeming, and with sublime propriety God is described
as saying, I AM.

The lesson which these observations convey is, Be,
and not seem. Let us acquiesce. Let us take our
bloated nothingness out of the path of the divine cir
cuits. Let us unlearn our wisdom of the world. Let
us lie low in the Lord's power and learn that truth
alone makes rich and great.

If you visit your friend, why need you apologize
for not having visited him, and waste his time and
deface your own act? Visit him now. Let him feel
that the highest love has come to see him, in thee its
lowest organ. Or why need you torment yourself
and friend by secret self-reproaches that you have not
assisted him or complimented him with gifts and
salutations heretofore? Be a gift and a benediction.
Shine with real light and not with the borrowed re
flection of gifts. Common men are apologies for
men ; they bow the head, they excuse themselves
with prolix reasons, they accumulate appearances be
cause the substance is not.

We are full of these superstitions of sense, the
worship of magnitude. God loveth not size : whale
and minnow are of like dimension. But we call the
poet inactive, because he is not a president, a mer
chant, or a porter. We adore an institution, and
do not see that it is founded on a thought which we

120 SPIRITUAL LAWS.

have. But real action is in silent moments. The
epochs of our life are not in the visible facts of our
choice of a calling, our marriage, our acquisition of
an office, and the like, but in a silent thought by the
wayside as we walk ; in a thought which revises our
entire manner of life and says, ' Thus hast thou done,
but it were better thus.' And all our after years, like
menials, do serve and wait on this, and according to
their ability do execute its will. This revisal or cor
rection is a constant force, which, as a tendency,
reaches through our lifetime. The object of the
man, the aim of these moments, is to make daylight
shine through him, to suffer the law to traverse his
whole being without obstruction, so that on what
point soever of his doing your eye falls it shall report
truly of his character, whether it be his diet, his house,
his religious forms, his society, his mirth, his vote,
his opposition. Now he is not homogeneous, but
heterogeneous, and the ray does not traverse ; there
are no thorough lights, but the eye of the beholder
is puzzled, detecting many unlike tendencies and a
life not yet at one.

Why should we make it a point with our false
modesty to disparage that man we are and that
form of being assigned to us ? A good man is con
tented. I love and honor Epaminondas, but I do
not wish to be Epaminondas. I hold it more just
to love the world of this hour than the world of his
hour. Nor can you, if I am true, excite me to the
least uneasiness by saying, * he acted and thou sittest
still.1 I see action to be good, when the need is,
and sitting still to be also good. Epaminondas, if

SPIRITUAL LAWS. 1 21

he was the man I take him for, would have sat still
with joy and peace, if his lot had been mine. Heaven
is large, and affords space for all modes of love and
fortitude. Why should we be busy-bodies and super-
serviceable? Action and inaction are alike to the
true. One piece of the tree is cut for a weathercock
and one for the sleeper of a bridge ; the virtue of the
wood is apparent in both.

I desire not to disgrace the soul. The fact that
I am here certainly shows me that the soul had need
of an organ here. Shall I not assume the post?
Shall I skulk and dodge and duck with my unsea
sonable apologies and vain modesty and imagine my
being here impertinent? less pertinent than Epaminon-
das or Homer being there? and that the soul did not
know its own needs? Besides, without any reason
ing on the matter, I have no discontent. The good
soul nourishes me alway, unlocks new magazines of
power and enjoyment to me every day. I will not
meanly decline the immensity of good, because I have
heard that it has come to others in another shape.

Besides, why should we be cowed by the name of
Action? 'T is a trick of the senses, — no more.
We know that the ancestor of every action is a
thought. The poor mind does not seem to itself
to be any thing unless it have an outside badge, —
some Gentoo diet, or Quaker coat, or Calvinistic
prayer-meeting, or philanthropic society, or a great
donation, or a high office, or, any how, some wild
contrasting action to testify that it is somewhat.
The rich mind lies in the sun and sleeps, and is
Nature. To think is to act.

122 SPIRITUAL LAWS.

Let us, if we must have great actions, make our
own so. All action is of an infinite elasticity, and
the least admits of being inflated with the celestial
air until it eclipses the sun and moon. Let us
seek one peace by fidelity. Let me do my duties.
Why need I go gadding into the scenes and philos
ophy of Greek and Italian history before I have
washed my own face or justified myself to my bene
factors? How dare I read Washington's campaigns
when I have not answered the letters of my own
correspondents? Is not that a just objection to
much of our reading? It is a pusillanimous deser
tion of our work to gaze after our neighbors. It is
peeping. Byron says of Jack Bunting,

He knew not what to say, and so he swore.

I may say it of our preposterous use of books. He
knew not what to do, and so he read. I can think
of nothing to fill my time with, and I find the Life of
Brant. It is a very extravagant compliment to pay
to Brant, or to General Schuyler, or to General
Washington. My time should be as good as their
time : my world, my facts, all my net of relations, as
good as theirs, or either of theirs. Rather let me do
my work so well that other idlers if they choose may
compare my texture with the texture of these and find
it identical with the best.

This over-estimate of the possibilities of Paul and
Pericles, this under-estimate of our own, comes from
a neglect of the fact of an identical nature. Bona
parte knew but one Merit, and rewarded in one and

SPIRITUAL LAWS. 123

the same way the good soldier, the good astronomer,
the good poet, the good player. Thus he signified
his sense of a great fact. The poet uses the names
of Caesar, of Tamerlane, of Bonduca, of Belisarius ;
the painter uses the conventional story of the Virgin
Mary, of Paul, of Peter. He does not therefore defer
to the nature of these accidental men, of these stock
heroes. If the poet write a true drama, then he is
Caesar, and not the player of Caesar ; then the self
same strain of thought, emotion as pure, wit as subtle,
motions as swift, mounting, extravagant, and a heart
as great, self-sufficing, dauntless, which on the waves
of its love and hope can uplift all that is reckoned
solid and precious in the world, palaces, gardens,
money, navies, kingdoms, — marking its own incom
parable worth by the slight it casts on these gauds of
men ; — these all are his, and by the power of these
he rouses the nations. But the great names cannot
stead him, if he have not life himself. Let a man
believe in God, and not in names and places and
persons. Let the great soul incarnated in some
woma^s form, poor and sad and single, in some
Dolly or Joan, go out to service and sweep cham
bers and scour floors, and its effulgent day-beams
cannot be muffled or hid, but to sweep and scour
will instantly appear supreme and beautiful actions,
the top and radiance of human life, and all people
will get mops and brooms ; until, lo, suddenly the
great soul has enshrined itself in some other form
and done some other deed, and that is now the
flower and head of all living nature.

124 SPIRITUAL LAWS.

We are the photometers, we the irritable gold-
leaf and tinfoil that measure the accumulations of
the subtle element. We know the authentic effects
of the true fire through every one of its million dis
guises.

ESSAY V.

LOVE.

EVERY soul is a celestial Venus to every other
soul. The heart has its sabbaths and jubilees in
which the world appears as a hymeneal feast, and
all natural sounds and the circle of the seasons
are erotic odes and dances. Love is omnipresent
in nature as motive and reward. Love is our highest
word and the synonym of God.

Every promise of the soul has innumerable ful
filments ; each of its joys ripens into a new want.
Nature, unobtainable, flowing, forelooking, in the
first sentiment of kindness anticipates already a be
nevolence which shall lose all particular regards in
its general light. The introduction to this felicity is
in a private and tender relation of one to one, which
is the enchantment of human life ; which, like a cer
tain divine rage and enthusiasm, seizes on man at one
period and works a revolution in his mind and body ;
unites him to his race, pledges him to the domestic
and civic relations, carries him with new sympathy
into nature, enhances the power of the senses, opens
the imagination, adds to his character heroic and
sacred attributes, establishes marriage and gives per
manence to human society.

125

126 LOVE.

The natural association of the sentiment of love
with the heyday of the blood seems to require that
in order to portray it in vivid tints, which every
youth and maid should confess to be true to their
throbbing experience, one must not be too old. The
delicious fancies of youth reject the least savor of
a mature philosophy, as chilling with age and ped
antry their purple bloom. And therefore I know I
incur the imputation of unnecessary hardness and
stoicism from those who compose the Court and
Parliament of Love. But from these formidable
censors I shall appeal to my seniors. For, it is to be
considered that this passion of which we speak,
though it begin with the young, yet forsakes not the
old, or rather suffers no one who is truly its servant
to grow old, but makes the aged participators of it
not less than the tender maiden, though in a differ
ent and nobler sort. For it is a fire that kindling
its first embers in the narrow nook of a private
bosom, caught from a wandering spark out of another
private heart, glows and enlarges until it warms
and beams upon multitudes of men and women,
upon the universal heart of all, and so lights up
the whole world and all nature with its generous
flames. It matters not therefore whether we attempt
to describe the passion at twenty, at thirty, or at
eighty years. He who paints it at the first period
will lose some of its later, he who paints it at the
last, some of its earlier traits. Only it is to be
hoped that by patience and the muses' aid we may
attain to that inward view of the law which shall
describe a truth ever young, ever beautiful, so cen-

LOVE. 127

tral that it shall commend itself to the eye at what
ever angle beholden.

And the first condition is that we must leave a
too close and lingering adherence to the actual, to
facts, and study the sentiment as it appeared in
hope, and not in history. For each man sees his
own life defaced and disfigured, as the life of man
is not to his imagination. Each man sees over his
own experience a certain slime of error, whilst that
of other men looks fair and ideal. Let any man go
back to those delicious relations which make the
beauty of his life, which have given him sincerest
instruction and nourishment, he will shrink and
shrink. Alas ! I know not why, but infinite com
punctions embitter in mature life all the remem
brances of budding sentiment, and cover every
beloved name. Every thing is beautiful seen from
the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour
if seen as experience. Details are always melancholy ;
the plan is seemly and noble. It is strange how
painful is the actual world — the painful kingdom of
time and place. There dwells care and canker and
fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal
hilarity, the rose of joy. Round it all the muses
sing. But with names and persons and the partial
interests of to-day and yesterday is grief.

The strong bent of nature is seen in the propor
tion which this topic of personal relations usurps
in the conversation of society. What do we wish
to know of any worthy person so much as how he
has sped in the history of this sentiment? What
books in the circulating libraries circulate? How

128 LOVE.

we glow over these novels of passion, when the
story is told with any spark of truth and nature !
And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of
life, like any passage betraying affection between
two parties? Perhaps we never saw them before
and never shall meet them again. But we see them
exchange a glance or betray a deep emotion, and
we are no longer strangers. We understand them
and take the warmest interest in the development
of the romance. All mankind love a lover. The
earliest demonstrations of complacency and kind
ness are nature's most winning pictures. It is the
dawn of civility and grace in the coarse and rustic.
The rude village boy teazes the girls about the
school-house door ; — but to-day he comes running
into the entry and meets one fair child arranging
her satchel : he holds her books to help her, and
instantly it seems to him as if she removed her
self from him infinitely, and was a sacred precinct.
Among the throng of girls he runs rudely enough,
but one alone distances him : and these two little
neighbors, that were so close just now, have learned
to respect each other's personality. Or who can
avert his eyes from the engaging, half- artful, half-
artless ways of school-girls who go into the country
shops to buy a skein of silk or a sheet of paper, and
talk half an hour about nothing with the broad-
faced, good-natured shop-boy. In the village they
are on a perfect equality, which love delights in,
and without any coquetry the happy, affectionate
nature of woman flows out in this pretty gossip.
The girls may have little beauty, yet plainly do they

LOVE. 129

establish between them and the good boy the most
agreeable, confiding relations ; what with their fun
and their earnestness, about Edgar and Jonas and
Almira, and who was invited to the party, and who
danced at the dancing-school, and when the sing
ing-school would begin, and other nothings con
cerning which the parties cooed. By-and-by that
boy wants a wife, and very truly and heartily will
he know where to find a sincere and sweet mate,
without any risk such as Milton deplores as incident
to scholars and great men.

I have been told that my philosophy is unsocial
and that in public discourses my reverence for the
intellect makes me unjustly cold to the personal rela
tions. But now I almost shrink at the remembrance
of such disparaging words. For persons are love's
world, and the coldest philosopher cannot recount
the debt of the young soul wandering here in nature
to the power of love, without being tempted to unsay,
as treasonable to nature, aught derogatory to the
social instincts. For, though the celestial rapture
falling out of heaven seizes only upon those of tender
age, and although a beauty overpowering all analysis
or comparison and putting us quite beside ourselves
we can seldom see after thirty years, yet the remem
brance of these visions outlasts all other remem
brances, and is a wreath of flowers on the oldest
brows. But here is a strange fact ; it may seem to
many men, in revising their experience, that they have
no fairer page in their lifers book than the delicious
memory of some passages wherein affection contrived
to give a witchcraft, surpassing the deep attraction of

13° LOVE.

its own truth, to a parcel of accidental and trivial cir
cumstances. In looking backward they may find that
several things which were not the charm have more
reality to this groping memory than the charm itself
which embalmed them. But be our experience in
particulars what it may, no man ever forgot the visi
tations of that power to his heart and brain, which
created all things new ; which was the dawn in him
of music, poetry and art ; which made the face of
nature radiant with purple light, the morning and the
night varied enchantments ; when a single tone of
one voice could make the heart beat, and the most
trivial circumstance associated with one form is put
in the amber of memory ; when he became all eye
when one was present, and all memory when one was
gone ; when the youth becomes a watcher of windows
and studious of a glove, a veil, a ribbon, or the
wheels of a carriage ; when no place is too solitary
and none too silent for him who has richer company
and sweeter conversation in his new thoughts than
any old friends, though best and purest, can give
him ; for, the figures, the motions, the words of the
beloved object are not, like other images, written in
water, but, as Plutarch said, " enamelled in fire," and
make the study of midnight.

Thou art not gone being gone, where e'er thou art,
Thou leav'st in him thy watchful eyes, in him thy loving
heart.

In the noon and the afternoon of life we still throb at
the recollection of days when happiness was not
happy enough, but must be drugged with the relish

LOVE. 131

of pain and fear ; for he touched the secret of the
matter who said of love,

All other pleasures are not worth its pains :

and when the day was not long enough, but the night
too must be consumed in keen recollections ; when
the head boiled all night on the pillow with the
generous deed it resolved on ; when the moonlight
was a pleasing fever and the stars were letters and
the flowers ciphers and the air was coined into song ;
when all business seemed an impertinence, and all
the men and women running to and fro in the streets,
mere pictures.

The passion re-makes the world for the youth. It
makes all things alive and significant. Nature grows
conscious. Every bird on the boughs of the tree
sings now to his heart and soul. Almost the notes
are articulate. The clouds have faces as he looks on
them. The trees of the forest, the waving grass and
the peeping flowers have grown intelligent; and
almost he fears to trust them with the secret which
they seem to invite. Yet nature soothes and sympa
thizes. In the green solitude he finds a dearer home
than with men.

Fountain-heads and pathless groves,
Places which pale passion loves,
Moonlight walks, when all the fowls
Are safely housed, save bats and owls,
A midnight bell, a passing groan,
These are the sounds we feed upon.

Behold there in the wood the fine madman ! He
is a palace of sweet sounds and sights ; he dilates ;

132 LOVE.

he is twice a man ; he walks with arms akimbo ; he
soliloquizes ; he accosts the grass and trees ; he feels
the blood of the violet, the clover and the lily in his
veins ; and he talks with the brook that wets his foot.

The causes that have sharpened his perceptions of
natural beauty have made him love music and verse.
It is a fact often observed, that men have written
good verses under the inspiration of passion, who
cannot write well under any other circumstances.

The like force has the passion over all his nature.
It expands the sentiment ; it makes the clown gentle
and gives the coward heart. Into the most pitiful
and abject it will infuse a heart and courage to defy
.the world, so only it have the countenance of the
beloved object. In giving him to another it still
more gives him to himself. He is a new man, with
new perceptions, new and keener purposes, and a
religious solemnity of character and aims. He does
not longer appertain to his family and society. He
is somewhat. He is a person. He is a soul.

And here let us examine a little nearer the nature
of that influence which is thus potent over the human
youth. Let us approach and admire Beauty, whose
revelation to man we now celebrate, — beauty, wel
come as the sun wherever it pleases to shine, which
pleases everybody with it and with themselves.
Wonderful is its charm. It seems sufficient to itself.
The lover cannot paint his maiden to his fancy poor
and solitary. Like a tree in flower, so much soft,
budding, informing loveliness is society for itself;
and she teaches his eye why Beauty was ever painted
with Loves and Graces attending her steps. Her

LOVE. 133

existence makes the world rich. Though she ex
trudes all other persons from his attention as cheap
and unworthy, she indemnifies him by carrying out
her own being into somewhat impersonal, large,
mundane, so that the maiden stands to him for a
representative of all select things and virtues. For
that reason the lover sees never personal resem
blances in his mistress to her kindred or to others.
His friends find in her a likeness to her mother, or
her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover
sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and
diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of
birds.

Beauty is ever that divine thing the ancients
esteemed it. It is, they said, the flowering of virtue.
Who can analyze the nameless charm which glances
from one and another face and form? We are
touched with emotions of tenderness and compla
cency, but we cannot find whereat this dainty emo
tion, this wandering gleam, point. It is destroyed
for the imagination by any attempt to refer it to
organization. Nor does it point to any relations of
friendship or love that society knows and has, but,
as it seems to me, to a quite other and unattainable
sphere, to relations of transcendent delicacy and
sweetness, a true faerie land ; to what roses and vio
lets hint and foreshow. We cannot get at beauty.
Its nature is like opaline doves'-neck lustres, hover
ing and evanescent. Herein it resembles the most
excellent things, which all have this rainbow charac
ter, defying all attempts at appropriation and use.
What else did Jean Paul Richter signify, when he

134 LOVE.

said to music, "Away! away! them speakest to me
of things which in all my endless life I have not
found and shall not find." The same fact may be
observed in every work of the plastic arts. The
statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incom
prehensible, when it is passing out of criticism and
can no longer be defined by compass and measuring
wand, but demands an active imagination to go with
it and to say what it is in the act of doing. The god
or hero of the sculptor is always represented in a
transition from that which is representable to the
senses, to that which is not. Then first it ceases to
be a stone. The same remark holds of painting.
And of poetry the success is not attained when it
lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and fires us
with new endeavors after the unattainable. Con
cerning it Landor inquires ** whether it is not to be
referred to some purer state of sensation and exist
ence."

So must it be with personal beauty which love
worships. Then first is it charming and itself when
it dissatisfies us with any end ; when it becomes a
story without an end ; when it suggests gleams and
visions and not earthly satisfactions ; when it seems

too bright and good,
For human nature's daily food ;

when it makes the beholder feel his unworthiness ;
when he cannot feel his right to it, though he were
Caesar ; he cannot feel more right to it than to the
firmament and the splendors of a sunset.

Hence arose the saying, " If I love you, what is

LOVE. 135

that to you? " We say so, because we feel that what
we love is not in your will, but above it. It is the
radiance of you and not you. It is that which you
know not in yourself and can never know.

This agrees well with that high philosophy of
Beauty which the ancient writers delighted in ; for
they said that the soul of man, embodied here on
earth, went roaming up and down in quest of that
other world of its own, out of which it came into
this, but was soon stupefied by the light of the nat
ural sun, and unable to see any other objects than
those of this world, which are but shadows of real
things. Therefore the Deity sends the glory of
youth before the soul, that it may avail itself of beau
tiful bodies as aids to its recollection of the celestial
good and fair ; and the man beholding such a person
in the female sex runs to her and finds the highest
joy in contemplating the form, movement and intelli
gence of this person, because it suggests to him the
presence of that which indeed is within the beauty,
and the cause of the beauty.

If however, from too much conversing with mate
rial objects, the soul was gross, and misplaced its
satisfaction in the body, it reaped nothing but sor
row ; body being unable to fulfil the promise which
beauty holds out ; but if, accepting the hint of these
visions and suggestions which beauty makes to his
mind, the soul passes through the body and falls to
admire strokes of character, and the lovers contem
plate one another in their discourses and their ac
tions, then they pass to the true palace of beauty,
more and more inflame their love of it, and by this

136 LOVE.

love extinguishing the base affection, as the sun puts
out the fire by shining on the hearth, they become
pure and hallowed. By conversation with that which
is in itself excellent, magnanimous, lowly, and just,
the lover comes to a warmer love of these nobilities,
and a quicker apprehension of them. Then he
passes from loving them in one to loving them in all,
and so is the one beautiful soul only the door
through which he enters to the society of all true
and pure souls. In the particular society of his
mate he attains a clearer sight of any spot, any taint
which her beauty has contracted from this world,
and is able to point it out, and this with mutual joy
that they are now able, without offence, to indicate
blemishes and hindrances in each other, and give to
each all help and comfort in curing the same. And,
beholding in many souls the traits of the divine
beauty, and separating in each soul that which is
divine from the taint which it has contracted in the
world, the lover ascends to the highest beauty, to
the love and knowledge of the Divinity, by steps on
this ladder of created souls.

Somewhat like this have the truly wise told us of
love in all ages. The doctrine is not old, nor is it
new. If Plato, Plutarch and Apuleius taught it, so
have Petrarch, Angelo and Milton. It awaits a truer
unfolding in opposition and rebuke to that subter
ranean prudence which presides at marriages with
words that take hold of the upper world, whilst one
eye is eternally boring down into the cellar ; so that
its gravest discourse has ever a slight savor of hams
and powdering- tubs. Worst, when the snout of this

LOVE. 137

sensualism intrudes into the education of young
women, and withers the hope and affection of human
nature by teaching that marriage signifies nothing but
a housewife's thrift, and that woman's life has no
other aim.

But this dream of love, though beautiful, is only
one scene in our play. In the procession of the soul
from within outward, it enlarges its circles ever, like
the pebble thrown into the pond, or the light pro
ceeding from an orb. The rays of the soul alight
first on things nearest, on every utensil and toy, on
nurses and domestics, on the house and yard and
passengers, on the circle of household acquaintance,
on politics and geography and history. But by the
necessity of our constitution things are ever grouping
themselves according to higher or more interior laws.
Neighborhood, size, numbers, habits, persons, lose
by degrees their power over us. Cause and effect,
real affinities, the longing for harmony between the
soul and the circumstance, the high progressive,
idealizing instinct, these predominate later, and ever
the step backward from the higher to the lower rela
tions is impossible. Thus even love, which is the
deification of persons, must become more impersonal
every day. Of this at first it gives no hint. Little
think the youth and maiden who are glancing at each
other across crowded rooms with eyes so full of
mutual intelligence, — of the precious fruit long here
after to proceed from this new, quite external stimu
lus. The work of vegetation begins first in the
irritability of the bark and leaf-buds. From exchang
ing glances, they advance to acts of courtesy, of gal-

138 LOVE.

lantry, then to fiery passion, to plighting troth and
marriage. Passion beholds its object as a perfect
unit. The soul is wholly embodied, and the body is
wholly ensouled.

•Her pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,
That one might almost say her body thought.

Romeo, if dead, should be cut up into little stars
to make the heavens fine. Life, with this pair, has
no other aim, asks no more, than Juliet, — than
Romeo. Night, day, studies, talents, kingdoms,
religion, are all contained in this form full of soul, in
this soul which is all form. The lovers delight in
endearments, in avowals of love, in comparisons of
their regards. When alone, they solace themselves
with the remembered image of the other. Does that
other see the same star ; the same melting cloud,
read the same book, feel the same emotion, that now
delight me? They try and weigh their affection, and
adding up all costly advantages, friends, opportuni
ties, properties, exult in discovering that willingly,
joyfully, they would give all as a ransom for the beau
tiful, the beloved head, not one hair of which shall be
harmed. But the lot of humanity is on these children.
Danger, sorrow and pain arrive to them as to all.
Love prays. It makes covenants with Eternal Power
in behalf of this dear mate. The union which is thus
effected and which adds a new value to every atom in
nature, for it transmutes every thread throughout the
whole web of relation into a golden ray, and bathes
the soul in a new and sweeter element, is yet a tem-

LOVE. 139

porary state. Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry,
protestations, nor even home in another heart, con
tent the awful soul that dwells in clay. It arouses
itself at last from these endearments, as toys, and
puts on the harness and aspires to vast and universal
aims. The soul which is in the soul of each, craving
for a perfect beatitude, detects incongruities, defects
and disproportion in the behavior of the other.
Hence arise surprise, expostulation and pain. Yet
that which drew them to each other was signs of
loveliness, signs of virtue : and these virtues are
there, however eclipsed. They appear and reappear
and continue to attract; but the regard changes,
quits the sign and attaches to the substance. This
repairs the wounded affection. Meantime, as life
wears on, it proves a game of permutation and com
bination of all possible positions of <he parties, to
extort all the resources of each and acquaint each
with the whole strength and weakness of the other.
For, it is the nature and end of this relation, that
they should represent the human race to each other.
All that is in the world, which is or ought to be
known, is cunningly wrought into the texture of man,
of woman.

The person love does to us fit,
Like manna, has the taste of all in it.

The world rolls : the circumstances vary every
hour. All the angels that inhabit this temple of
the body appear at the windows, and all the gnomes
and vices also. By all the virtues they are united.
If there be virtue, all the vices are known as such ;

140 LOVE.

they confess and flee. Their once flaming regard
is sobered by time in either breast, and losing in
violence what it gains in extent, it becomes a thor
ough good understanding. They resign each other
without complaint to the good offices which man
and woman are severally appointed to discharge in
time, and exchange the passion which once could
not lose sight of its object, for a cheerful, disengaged
furtherance, whether present or absent, of each
other's designs. At last they discover that all which
at first drew them together, — those once sacred feat
ures, that magical play of charms, — was deciduous,
had a prospective end, like the scaffolding by which
the house was built ; and the purification of the in
tellect and the heart from year to year is the real
marriage, foreseen and prepared from the first,
and wholly above their consciousness. Looking at
these aims with ' which two persons, a man and a
woman, so variously and correlatively gifted, are
shut up in one house to spend in the nuptial society
forty or fifty years, I do not wonder at the emphasis
with which the heart prophesies this crisis from early
infancy, at the profuse beauty with which the instincts
deck the nuptial bower, and nature and intellect and
art emulate each other in the gifts and the melody
they bring to the epithalamium.

Thus are we put in training for a love which
knows not sex, nor person, nor partiality, but which
seeketh virtue and wisdom everywhere, to the end
of increasing virtue and wisdom. We are by nature
observers, and thereby learners. That is our per
manent state. But we are often made to feel that

LOVE. 141

our affections are but tents of a night. Though
slowly and with pain, the objects of the affections
change, as the objects of thought do. There are
moments when the affections rule and absorb the
man and make his happiness dependent on a person
or persons. But in health the .nind is presently
seen again, — its overarching vault, bright with
galaxies of immutable lights, and the warm loves
and fears that swept over us as clouds must lose
their finite character and blend with God, to attain
their own perfection. But we need not fear that
we can lose anything by the progress of the soul.
The soul may be trusted to the end. That which is
so beautiful and attractive as these relations, must
be succeeded and supplanted only by what is more
beautiful, and so on forever.

ESSAY VI.

FRIENDSHIP.

WE have a great deal more kindness than is ever
spoken. Maugre all the selfishness that chills like
east winds the world, the whole human family is
bathed with an element of love like a fine ether.
How many persons we meet in houses, whom we
scarcely speak to, whom yet we honor, and who
honor us! How many we see in the street, or sit
with in church, whom, though silently, we warmly
rejoice to be with ! Read the language of these wan
dering, eye-beams. The heart knoweth.

The effect of the indulgence of this human affec
tion is a certain cordial exhilaration. In poetry and
in common speech the emotions of benevolence and
complacency which are felt towards others are likened
to the material effects of fire ; so swift, or much more
swift, more active, more cheering, are these fine in
ward irradiations. From the highest degree of pas
sionate love to the lowest degree of good will, they
make the sweetness of life.

Our intellectual and active powers increase with

our affection. The scholar sits down to write, and

all his years of meditation do not furnish him with

one good thought or happy expression ; but it is

142

FRIENDSHIP. 143

*

necessary to write a letter to a friend, — and forth
with troops of gentle thoughts invest themselves, on
every hand, with chosen words. See, in any house
where virtue and self-respect abide, the palpitation
which the approach of a stranger causes. A com
mended stranger is expected and announced, and
an uneasiness betwixt pleasure and pain invades all
the hearts of a household. His arrival almost brings
fear to the good hearts that would welcome him.
The house is dusted, all things fly into their places,
the old coat is exchanged for the new, and they
must get up a dinner if they can. Of a commended
stranger, only the good report is told by others,
only the good and new is heard by us. He stands
to us for humanity. He is what we wish. Having
imagined and invested him, we ask how we should
stand related in conversation and action with such a
man, and are uneasy with fear. The same idea
exalts conversation with him. We talk better than
we are wont. We have the nimblest fancy, a richer
memory, and our dumb devil has taken leave for
the time. For long hours we can continue a series
of sincere, graceful, rich communications, drawn
from the oldest, secretest experience, so that they
who sit by, of our own kinsfolk and acquaintance,
shall feel a lively surprise at our unusual powers.
But as soon as the stranger begins to intrude his
partialities, his definitions, his defects into the con
versation, it is all over. He has heard the first, the
last and best he will ever hear from us. He is no
stranger now. Vulgarity, ignorance, misapprehen
sion are old acquaintances. Now, when he comes,

144 FRIENDSHIP.

he may get the order, the dress and the dinner, —
but the throbbing of the heart and the communica
tions of the soul, no more.

Pleasant are these jets of affection which make
a young world for me again. Delicious is a just
and firm encounter of two, in a thought, in a feel
ing-. How beautiful, on their approach to this beat
ing heart, the steps and forms of the gifted and
the true ! The moment we indulge our affections,
the earth is metamorphosed : there is no winter
and no night: all tragedies, all ennuis vanish, — all
duties even; nothing fills the proceeding eternity
but the forms all radiant of beloved persons. Let
the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe
it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content
and cheerful alone for a thousand years.

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving
for my friends, the old and the new. Shall I not
call God the Beautiful, who daily showeth himself
so to me in his gifts? I chide society, I embrace
solitude, and yet I am not so ungrateful as not to
see the wise, the lovely and the noble-minded, as
from time to time they pass my gate. Who hears
me, who understands me, becomes mine, — a pos
session for all time. ' Nor is nature so poor but she
gives me this joy several times, and thus we weave
social threads of our own, a new web of relations ;
and, as many thoughts in succession substantiate
themselves, we shall by-and-by stand in a new world
of our own creation, and no longer strangers and
pilgrims in a traditionary globe. My friends have
come to me unsought. The great God gave them

FRIENDSHIP. 145

to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of
virtue with itself, I find them, or rather not I, but
the Deity in me and in them, both deride and can
cel the thick walls of individual character, relation,
age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives,
and now makes many one. High thanks I owe
you, excellent lovers, who carry out the world for
me to new and noble depths, and enlarge the mean
ing of ali my thoughts. These are not stark and
stiffened persons, but the new-born poetry of God, —
poetry without stop, — hymn, ode and epic, poetry
still flowing and not yet caked in dead books with
annotation and grammar, but Apollo and the Muses
chanting still. Will these too separate themselves
from me again, or some of them? I know not, but
I fear it not; for my relation to them is so pure
that we hold by simple affinity, and the Genius of
my life being thus social, the same affinity will
exert its energy on whomsoever is as noble as these
men and women, wherever I may be.

I confess to an extreme tenderness of nature on
this point. It is almost dangerous to me to " crush
the sweet poison of misused wine " of the affections.
A new person is to me always a great event and
hinders me from sleep. I have had such fine fancies
lately about two or three persons which have given
me delicious hours ; but the joy ends in the day ; it
yields no fruit. Thought is not born of it ; my action
is very little modified. I must feel pride in my friend's
accomplishments as if they were mine, — wild, deli
cate, throbbing property in his virtues. I feel as
warmly when he is praised, as the lover when he

146 FRIENDSHIP.

hears applause of his engaged maiden. We oven
estimate the conscience of our friend. His good
ness seems better than our goodness, his nature
finer, his temptations less. Every thing that is his,
his name, his form, his dress, books and instru
ments, fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds
new and larger from his mouth.

Yet the systole and diastole of the heart are not
without their analogy in the ebb and flow of love.
Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too
good to be believed. The lover, beholding his
maiden, half knows that she is not verily that
which he worships ; and in the golden hour of
friendship we are surprised with shades of sus
picion and unbelief. We doubt that we bestow on
our hero the virtues in which he shines, and after
wards worship the form to which we have ascribed
this divine inhabitation. In strictness, the soul does
not respect men as it respects itself. In strict sci
ence all persons underlie the same condition of an
infinite remoteness. Shall we fear to cool our love
by facing the fact, by mining for the metaphysical
foundation of this Elysian temple? Shall I not be
as real as the things I see? If I am, I shall not
fear to know them for what they are. Their essence
is not less beautiful than their appearance, though
it needs finer organs for its apprehension. The
root of the plant is not unsightly to science, though
for chaplets and festoons we cut the stem short.
And I must hazard the production of the bald
fact amidst these pleasing reveries, though it should
prove an Egyptian skull at our banquet. A man who

FRIENDSHIP. 147

stands united with his thought conceives magnifi
cently of himself. He is conscious of a universal
success, even though bought by uniform particular
failures. No advantages, no powers, no gold or
force, can be any match for him. I cannot choose
but rely on my own poverty more than on your
wealth. I cannot make your consciousness tanta
mount to mine. Only the star dazzles ; the planet
has a faint, moon-like ray. I hear what you say
of the admirable parts and tried temper of the party
you praise, but I see well that, for all his purple
cloaks, I shall not like him, unless he is at last
a poor Greek like me. I cannot deny it, O friend,
that the vast shadow of the Phenomenal includes
thee also in its pied and painted immensity, — thee
also, compared with whom all else is shadow. Thou
art not Being, as Truth is, as Justice is, — thou art
not my soul, but a picture and effigy of that. Thou
hast come to me lately, and already thou art seizing
thy hat and cloak. Is it not that the soul puts
forth friends as the tree puts forth leaves, and
presently, by the germination of new buds, extrudes
the old leaf? The law of nature is alternation for-
evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the
opposite. The soul environs itself with friends that
it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or soli
tude ; and it goes alone for a season that it may
exalt its conversation or society. This method be
trays itself along the whole history of our personal
relations, the instinct of affection revives the hope
of union with our mates, and the returning sense of
insulation recalls us from the chase. Thus every

14^ FRIENDSHIP.

man passes his life in the search after friendship,
and if he should record his true sentiment, he might
write a letter like this to each new candidate for his
love.

DEAR FRIEND : If I was sure of thee, sure of thy
capacity, sure to match my mood with thine, I should
never think again of trifles in relation to thy com
ings and goings. I am not very wise : my moods are
quite attainable : and I respect thy genius : it is to me
as yet unfathomed ; yet dare I not presume in thee a
perfect intelligence of me, and so thou art to me a
delicious torment. Thine ever, or never.

Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for
curiosity and not for life. They are not to be in
dulged. This is to weave cobweb, and not cloth.
Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions,
because we have made them a texture of wine and
dreams, instead of the tough fibre of the human heart.
The laws of friendship are great, austere and eternal,
of one web with the laws of nature and of morals.
But we have aimed at a swift and petty benefit, to
suck a sudden sweetness. We snatch at the slowest
fruit in the whole garden of God, which many sum
mers and many winters must ripen. We seek our friend
not sacredly, but with an adulterate passion which
would appropriate him to ourselves. In vain. We
are armed all over with subtle antagonisms, which,
as soon as we meet, begin to play, and translate all
poetry into stale prose. Almost all people descend
to meet. All association must be a compromise, and,
what is worst, the very flower and aroma of the

FRIENDSHIP. 149

flower of each of the beautiful natures disappears as
they approach each other. What a perpetual disap
pointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and
gifted ! After interviews have been compassed with
long foresight we must be tormented presently by
baffled blows, by sudden, unseasonable apathies, by
epilepsies of wit and of animal spirits, in the hey-dey
of friendship and thought. Our faculties do not play
us true, and both parties are relieved by solitude.

I ought to be equal to every relation. It makes no
difference how many friends I have and what content
I can find in conversing with each, if there be one to
whom I am not equal. If I have shrunk unequal
from one contest, instantly the joy I find in all the
rest becomes mean and cowardly. I should hate
myself, if then I made my other friends my asylum.

The valiant warrior famoused for fight,
After a hundred victories, once foiled,
Is from the book of honor razed quite
And all the rest forgot for which he toiled.

Our impatience is thus sharply rebuked. Bashful-
ness and apathy are a tough husk in which a delicate
organization is protected from premature ripening.
It would be lost if it knew itself before any of the
best souls were yet ripe enough to know and own it.
Respect the naturlangsamkeit which hardens the
ruby in a million years, and works in duration in
which Alps and Andes come and go as rainbows.
The good spirit of our life has no heaven which is
the price of rashness. Love, which is the essence of
God, is not for levity, but for the total worth of man.

150 FRIENDSHIP.

Let us not have this childish luxury in our regards ;
but the austerest worth ; let us approach our friend
with an audacious trust in the truth of his heart, in
the breadth, impossible to be overturned, of his foun
dations.

The attractions of this subject are not to be re
sisted, and I leave, for the time, all account of sub
ordinate social benefit, to speak of that select and
sacred relation which is a kind of absolute, and which
even leaves the language of love suspicious and com
mon, so much is this purer, and nothing is so much
divine.

I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with
roughest courage. When they are real, they are not
glass threads or frost-work, but the solidest thing we
know. For now, after so many ages of experience,
what do we know of nature or of ourselves ? Not
one step has man taken toward the solution of the
problem of his destiny. In one condemnation of
folly stand the whole universe of men. But the sweet
sincerity of joy and peace which I draw from this
alliance with my brother's soul is the nut itself
whereof all nature and all thought is but the husk and
shell. Happy is the house that shelters a friend ! It
might well be built, like a festal bower or arch, to en
tertain him a single day. Happier, if he know the
solemnity of that relation and honor its law! It is
no idle bond, no holiday engagement. He who
offers himself a candidate for that covenant comes
up, like an Olympian, to the great games where the
first-born of the world are the competitors. He pro
poses himself for contest where Time, Want, Danger,

FRIENDSHIP. s 151

are in the lists, and he alone is victor who has truth
enough in his constitution to perserve the delicacy of
his beauty from the wear and tear of all these. The
gifts of fortune may be present or absent, but all the
hap in that contest depends on intrinsic nobleness
and the contempt of trifles. There are two elements
that go to the composition of friendship, each so sov
ereign that I can detect no superiority in either, no
reason why either should be first named. One is
Truth. A friend is a person with whom I may be
sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am ar
rived at last in the presence of a man so real and
equal that I may drop even those most undermost
garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second
thought, which men never put off, and may deal with
him with the simplicity and wholeness with which
one chemical atom meets another. Sincerity is the
luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to
the highest rank, that being permitted to speak truth,
as having none above it to court or conform unto.
Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a
second person, hypocrisy begins. We parry and fend
the approach of our fellow man by compliments, by
gossip, by amusements, by aifairs. We cover up
our thought from him under a hundred folds. I knew a
man who under a certain religious frenzy cast off this
drapery, and omitting all compliment and common
place, spoke to the conscience of every person he en
countered, and that with great insight and beauty.
At first he was resisted, and all men agreed he was
mad. But persisting as indeed he could not help
doing for some time in this course, he attained to the

152 FRIENDSHIP.

advantage of bringing every man of his acquaintance
into true relations with him. No man would think
of speaking falsely with him, or of putting him off
with any chat of markets or reading-rooms. But
every man was constrained by so much sincerity to
face him, and what love of nature, what poetry, what
symbol of truth he had, he did certainly show him.
But to most of us society shows not its face and eye,
but its side and its back. To stand in true relations
with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it
not? We can seldom go erect. Almost every man
we meet requires some civility, requires to be
humored ; — he has some fame, some talent, some
whim of religion or philanthropy in his head that is
not to be questioned, and which spoils all conversa
tion with him. But a friend is a sane man who exer
cises not my ingenuity, but me. My friend gives me
entertainment without requiring me to stoop, or to lisp,
or to mask myself. A friend therefore is a sort of para
dox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in
nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evi
dence to my own, behold now the semblance of my
being, in all its height, variety and curiosity, reit
erated in a foreign form ; so that a friend may well be
reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

The other element of friendship is Tenderness.
We are holden to men by every sort of tie, by blood,
by pride, by fear, by hope, by lucre, by lust, by hate,
by admiration, by every circumstance and badge and
trifle, but we can scarce believe that so much char
acter can subsist in another as to draw us by love.
Can another be so blessed and we so pure that we

FRIENDSHIP. 153

can offer him tenderness? When a man becomes
dear to me I have touched the goal of fortune. I
find very little written directly to the heart of this
matter in books. And yet I have one text which I
cannot choose but remember. My author says,
" I offer myself faintly and bluntly to those whose I
effectually am, and tender myself least to him to
whom I am the most devoted." I wish that friend
ship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence.
It must plant itself on the ground, before it walks
over the moon. I wish it to be a little of a citizen,
before it is quite a cherub. We chide the citizen
because he makes love a commodity. It is an ex
change of gifts, of useful loans ; it is good neighbor
hood ; it watches with the sick ; it holds the pall at
the funeral ; and quite loses sight of the delicacies
and nobility of the relation. But though we cannot
find the god under this disguise of a sutler, yet on
the other hand we cannot forgive the poet if he
spins his thread too fine and does not substantiate
his romance by the municipal virtues of justice,
punctuality, fidelity and pity. I hate the prostitu
tion of the name of friendship to signify modish and
worldly alliances. I much prefer the company of
ploughboys and tin-pedlars to the silken and per
fumed amity which only celebrates its days of en
counter by a frivolous display, by rides in a curricle
and dinners at the best taverns. The end of friend
ship is a commerce the most strict and homely that
can be joined ; more strict than any of which we
have experience. It is for aid and comfort through
all the relations and passages of life and death. It

154 FRIENDSHIP.

is fit for serene days and graceful gifts and country
rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, ship
wreck, poverty and persecution. It keeps company
with the sallies of the wit and the trances of relig
ion. We are to dignify to each other the daily
needs and offices of man's life, and embellish it by
courage, wisdom and unity. It should never fall
into something usual and settled, but should be alert
and inventive and add rhyme and reason to what
was drudgery.

For perfect friendship may be said to require
natures so rare and costly, so well tempered each and
so happily adapted, and withal so circumstanced
(for even in that particular, a poet says, love de
mands that the parties be altogether paired), that
very seldom can its satisfaction be realized. It can
not subsist in its perfection, say some of those who
are learned in this warm lore of the heart, betwixt
more than two. I am not quite so strict in my
terms, perhaps because I have never known so high
a fellowship as others. I please my imagination
more with a circle of godlike men and women vari
ously related to each other and between whom sub
sists a lofty intelligence. But I find this law of
one to one peremptory for conversation, which is the
practice and consummation of friendship. Do not
mix waters too much. The best mix as ill as good
and bad. You shall have very useful and cheering
discourse at several times with two several men, but
let all three of you come together and you shall not
have one new and hearty word. Two may talk and
one may hear, but three cannot take part in a con-

FRIENDSHIP. 155

versation of the most sincere and searching sort.
In good company there is never such discourse be
tween two, across the table, as takes place when you
leave them alone. In good company the individuals
at once merge their egotism into a social soul exactly
coextensive with the several consciousnesses there
present. No partialities of friend to friend, no
fondnesses of brother to sister, of wife to husband,
are there pertinent, but quite otherwise. Only he
may then speak who can sail on the common thought
of the party, and not poorly limited to his own.
Now this convention, which good sense demands,
destroys the high freedom of great conversation,
which requires an absolute running of two souls
into one.

No two men but being left alone with each other
enter into simpler relations. Yet it is affinity that de
termines which two shall converse. Unrelated men
give little joy to each other ; will never suspect the
latent powers of each. We talk sometimes of a
great talent for conversation, as if it were a per
manent property in some individuals. Conversation
is an evanescent relation, — no more. A man is re
puted to have thought and eloquence ; he cannot,
for all that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle.
They accuse his silence with as much reason as they
would blame the insignificance of a dial in the shade.
In the sun it will mark the hour. Among those who
enjoy his thought he will regain his tongue.

Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt like
ness and unlikeness that piques each with the pres
ence of power and of consent in the other party. Let

156 FRIENDSHIP.

me be alone to the end of the world, rather than that
my friend should overstep, by a word or a look, his
real sympathy. I am equally baulked by antagonism
and by compliance. Let him not cease an instant to
be himself. The only joy I have in his being mine,
is that the not mine is mine. It turns the stomach,
it blots the daylight; where I looked for a manly
furtherance or at least a manly resistance, to find a
mush of concession. Better be a nettle in the side
of your friend than his echo. The condition which
high friendship demands is ability to do without it.
To be capable that high office requires great and
sublime parts. There must be very two, before there
can be very one. Let it be an alliance of two large,
formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared,
before yet they recognise the deep identity which,
beneath these disparities, unites them.

He only is fit for this society who is magnanimous.
He must be so to know its law. He must be one
who is sure that greatness and goodness are always
economy. He must be one who is not swift to inter
meddle with his fortunes. Let him not dare to in
termeddle with this. Leave to the diamond its ages
to grow, nor expect to accelerate the births of the
eternal. Friendship demands a religious treatment.
We must not be wilful, we must not provide. We
talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-
elected. Reverence is a great part of it. Treat your
friend as a spectacle. Of course if he be a man he
has merits that are not yours, and that you cannot
honor if you must needs hold him close to your per
son. Stand aside. Give those merits room. Let

FRIENDSHIP. 157

them mount and expand. Be not so much his friend
that you can never know his peculiar energies, like
fond mammas who shut up their boy in the house
until he is almost grown a girl. Are you the friend
of your friend's buttons, or of his thought? To a
great heart he will still be a stranger in a thousand
particulars, that he may come near in the holiest
ground. Leave it to girls and boys to regard a friend
as property, and to suck a short and all-confounding
pleasure, instead of the pure nectar of God.

Let us buy our entrance to this guild by a long
probation. Why should we desecrate noble and
beautiful souls by intruding on them? Why insist on
rash personal relations with your friend? Why go
to his house, or know his mother and brother and
sisters? Why be visited by him at your own? Are
these things material to our covenant? Leave this
touching and clawing. Let him be to me a spirit.
A message, a thought, a sincerity, a glance from him,
I want, but not news, nor pottage. I can get politics
and chat and neighborly conveniences from cheaper
companions. Should not the society of my friend be
to me poetic, pure, universal and great as nature itself ?
Ought I to feel that our tie is profane in comparison
with yonder bar of cloud that sleeps on the horizon,
or that clump of waving grass that divides the brook?
Let us not vilify, but raise it to that standard. That
great defying eye, that scornful beauty of his mien
and action, do not pique yourself on reducing, but
rather fortify and enhance. Worship his superiori
ties. Wish him not less by a thought, but hoard
and tell them all. Guard him as thy great counter-

158 FRIENDSHIP.

part ; have a princedom to thy friend. Let him be
to thee forever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable,
devoutly revered, and not a trivial conveniency to be
soon outgrown and cast aside. The hues of the
opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if
the eye is too near. To my friend I write a letter
and from him I receive a letter. That seems to you
a little. Me it suffices. It is a spiritual gift, worthy
of him to give and of me to receive. It profanes
nobody. In these warm lines the heart will trust it
self, as it will not to the tongue, and pour out the
prophecy of a godlier existence than all the annals of
heroism have yet made good.

Respect so far the holy laws of this fellowship as
not to prejudice its perfect flower by your impatience
for its opening. We must be our own before we can
be another's. There is at least this satisfaction in .
crime, according to the Latin proverb ; you can
speak to your accomplice on even terms. Crimen
quos inquinat, (squat. To those whom we admire
and love, at first we cannot. Yet the least defect of
self-possession vitiates, in my judgment, the entire
relation. There can never be deep peace between two
spirits, never mutual respect, until in their dialogue
each stands for the whole world.

What is so great as friendship, let us carry with
what grandeur of spirit we can. Let us be silent, —
so we may hear the whisper of the gods. Let us not
interfere. Who set you to cast about what you
should say to the select souls, or to say anything to
such ? No matter how ingenious, no matter how
graceful and bland. There are innumerable degrees

FRIENDSHIP. 159

of folly and wisdom, and for you to say aught is to
be frivolous. Wait, and thy soul shall speak. Wait
until the necessary and everlasting overpowers you,
until day and night avail themselves of your lips.
The only money of God is God. He pays never
with any thing less, or any thing else. The only
reward of virtue is virtue : the only way to have a
friend is to be one. You shall not come nearer a
man by getting into his house. If unlike, his soul
only flees the faster from you, and you shall catch
never a true glance of his eye. We see the noble
afar off and they repel us ; why should we intrude ?
Late, — very late, — we perceive that no arrange
ments, no introductions, no consuetudes or habits of
society would be of any avail to establish us in such
relations with them as we desire, — but solely the
uprise of nature in us to the same degree it is in
them : then shall we meet as water with water : and
if we should not meet them then, we shall not want
them, for we are already they. In the last analysis,
love is only the reflection of a man's own worthiness
from other men. Men have sometimes exchanged
names with their friends, as if they would signify that
in their friend each loved his own soul.

The higher the style we demand of friendship, of
course the less easy to establish it with flesh and
blood. We walk alone in the world. Friends such
as we desire are dreams and fables. But a sublime
hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere,
in other regions of the universal power, souls are
now acting, enduring and daring, which can love us
and which we can love. We may congratulate our-

160 FRIENDSHIP.

selves that the period of nonage, of follies, of blun
ders and of shame, is passed in solitude, and when
we are finished men we shall grasp heroic hands in
heroic hands. Only be admonished by what you
already see, not to strike leagues of friendship with
cheap persons, where no friendship can be. Our
impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances
which no God attends. By persisting in your path,
though you forfeit the little you gain the great. You
become pronounced. You demonstrate yourself, so
as to put yourself out of the reach of false relations,
and you draw to you the first-born of the world, —
those rare pilgrims whereof only one or two wander
in nature at once, and before whom the vulgar great
show as spectres and shadows merely.

It is foolish to be afraid of making our ties too
spiritual, as if so we could lose any genuine love.
Whatever correction of our popular views we make
from insight, nature will be sure to bear us out in,
and though it seem to rob us of some joy, will repay
us with a greater. Let us feel if we will the absolute
insulation of man. We are sure that we have all in
us. We go to Europe, or we pursue persons, or we
read books, in the instinctive faith that these will
call it out and reveal us to ourselves. Beggars all.
The persons are such as we ; the Europe, an old
faded garment of dead persons ; the books, their
ghosts. Let us drop this idolatry. Let us give over
this mendicancy. Let us even bid our dearest friends
farewell, and defy them, saying ' Who are you? Un
hand me : I will be dependent no more.'' Ah! seest
thou not, O brother, that thus we part only to meet

FRIENDSHIP. 161

again on a higher platform, and only be more each
other's because we are more our own? A friend is
Janus-faced : he looks to the past and the future. He
is the child of all my foregoing hours, the prophet of
those to come. He is the harbinger of a greater
friend. It is the property of the divine to be repro
ductive.

I do then with my friends as I do with my books.
I would have them where I can find them, but I
seldom use them. We must have society on our own
terms, and admit or exclude it on the slightest cause.
I cannot afford to speak much with my friend. If he
is great he makes me so great that I cannot descend
to converse. In the great days, presentiments hover
before me, far before me, in the firmament. I ought
then to dedicate myself to them. I go in that I may
seize them, I go out that I may seize them. I fear
only that I may lose them receding into the sky in
which now they are only a patch of brighter light.
Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to
talk with them and study their visions, lest I lose my
own. It would indeed give me a certain household
joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual astronomy
or search of stars, and come down to warm sym
pathies with you; but then I know well I shall
mourn always the vanishing of my mighty gods. It is
true, next week I shall have languid times, when I
can well afford to occupy myself with foreign objects ;
then I shall regret the lost literature of your mind,
and wish you were by my side again. But if you
come, perhaps you will fill my mind only with new
visions ; not with yourself but with your lustres, and

1 62 FRIENDSHIP.

I shall not be able any more than now to converse
with you.; So I will owe to my friends this evanes
cent intercourse. I will receive from them not what
they have but what they are. They shall give me
that which properly they cannot give me, but which
emanates from them. But they shall not hold me by
any relations less subtle and pure. We will meet as
though we met not, and part as though we parted
not.

It has seemed to me lately more possible than I
knew, to carry a friendship greatly on one side, with
out due correspondence on the other. Why should
I cumber myself with the poor fact that the receiver
is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that
some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful
space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet.
Let your greatness educate the crude and cold com
panion. If he is unequal he will presently pass
away ; but thou art enlarged by thy own shining, and
no longer a mate for frogs and worms, dost soar and
burn with the gods of the empyrean. It is thought a
disgrace to love unrequited. But the great will see
that true love cannot be unrequited. True love
transcends instantly the unworthy object and dwells
and broods on the eternal, and when the poor inter
posed mask crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of
so much earth and feels its independency the surer.
Yet these things may hardly be said without a sort of
treachery to the relation. The essence of friendship
is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. It
must not surmise or provide for infirmity. It treats
its object as a god, that it may deify both.

ESSAY VII.

PRUDENCE.

WHAT right have I to write on Prudence, whereof
I have little, and that of the negative sort ? My
prudence consists in avoiding and going without,
not in the inventing of means and methods, not in
adroit steering, not in gentle repairing. I have no
skill to make money spend well, no genius in my
economy, and whoever sees my garden discovers
that I must have some other garden. Yet I love
facts, and hate lubricity and people without percep
tion. Then I have the same title to write on pru
dence that I have to write on poetry or holiness.
We write from aspiration and antagonism, as well
as from experience. We paint those qualities which
we do not possess. The poet admires the man of
energy and tactics ; the merchant breeds his son for
the church or the bar ; and where a man is not vain
and egotistic you shall find what he has not by his
praise. Moreover it would be hardly honest in me
not to balance these fine lyric words of Love and
Friendship with words of coarser sound, and whilst
my debt to my senses is real and constant, not to
own it in passing.

Prudence is the virtue of the senses. It is the

163

1 64 PRUDENCE.

science of appearances. It is the outmost action of
the inward life. It is God taking thought for oxen.
It moves matter after the laws of matter. It is con
tent to seek health of body by complying with physi
cal conditions, and health of mind by the laws of
the intellect.

The world of the senses is a world of shows ; it
does not exist for itself, but has a symbolic charac
ter ; and a true prudence or law of shows recognizes
the co-presence of other laws and knows that its
own office is subaltern ; knows that it is surface and
not centre where it works. Prudence is false when
detached. It is legitimate when it is the Natural
History of the soul incarnate, when it unfolds the
beauty of laws within the narrow scope of the
senses.

There are all degrees of proficiency in knowledge
of the world. It is sufficient to our present purpose
to indicate three. One class lives to the utility of
the symbol, esteeming health and wealth a final
good. Another class live above this mark to the
beauty of the symbol, as the poet and artist and the
naturalist and man of science. A third class live
above the beauty of the symbol to the beauty of the
thing signified ; these are wise men. The first class
have common sense ; the second, taste ; and the
third, spiritual perception. Once in a long time, a
man traverses the whole scale, and sees and enjoys
the symbol solidly, then also has a clear eye for its
beauty, and lastly, whilst he pitches his tent on this
sacred volcanic isle of nature, does not offer to build
houses and barns thereon, reverencing the splendor

PRUDENCE. 165

of the God which he sees bursting through each
chink and cranny.

The world is filled with the proverbs and acts
and winkings of a base prudence, which is a devo
tion to matter, as if we possessed no other faculties
than the palate, the nose, the touch, the eye and
ear; a prudence which adores the Rule of Three,
which never subscribes, which gives never, which
seldom lends, and asks but one question of any proj
ect, — Will it bake bread ? This is a disease like a
thickening of the skin until the vital organs are de
stroyed. But culture, revealing the high origin of
the apparent world and aiming at the perfection of
the man as the end, degrades every thing else, as
health and bodily life, into means. It sees prudence
not to be a several faculty, but a name for wisdom
and virtue conversing with the body and its wants.
Cultivated men always feel and speak so as if a
great fortune, the achievement of a civil or social
measure, great personal influence, a graceful and
commanding address, had their value as proofs of
the energy of the spirit. If a man lose his balance
and immerse himself in any trades or pleasures for
their own sake, he may be a good wheel or pin, but
he is not a cultivated man.

The spurious prudence, making the senses final,
is the god of sots and cowards, and is the subject of
all comedy. It is nature's joke, and therefore liter
ature's. The true prudence limits this sensualism
by admitting the knowledge of an internal and real
world. This recognition once made, — the order of
the world and the distribution of affairs and times,

1 66 PRUDENCE.

being studied with the co-perception of their sub
ordinate place, will reward any degree of attention.
For, our existence, thus apparently attached in nature
to the sun and the returning moon and the periods
which they mark; so susceptible to climate and to
country, so alive to social good and evil, so fond
of splendor and so tender to hunger and cold and
debt, — reads all its primary lessons out of these
books.

Prudence does not go behind nature and ask
whence it is? It takes the laws of the world whereby
man^ being is conditioned, as they are, and keeps
these laws that it may enjoy their proper good. It
respects space and time, climate, want, sleep, the
law of polarity, growth and death. There revolve,
to give bound and period to his being on all sides,
the sun and moon, the great formalists in the sky:
here lies stubborn matter, and will not swerve from
its chemical routine. Here is a planted globe,
pierced and belted with natural laws and fenced and
distributed externally with civil partitions and prop
erties which impose new restraints on the young
inhabitant.

We eat of the bread which grows in the field. We
live by the air which blows around us and we are
poisoned by the air that is too cold or too hot, too
dry or too wet. Time, which shows so vacant, in
divisible and divine in its coming, is slit and peddled
into trifles and tatters. A door is to be painted, a
lock to be repaired. I want wood or oil, or meal or
salt ; the house smokes, or I have a headache ; then
the tax ; and an affair to be transacted with a man

PRUDENCE. 167

without heart or brains, and the stinging recollection
of an injurious or very awkward word, — these eat up
the hours. Do what we can, summer will have its
flies. If we walk in the woods we must feed mos-
quitos. If we go a-fishing we must expect a wet coat.
. Then climate is a great impediment to idle persons.
We often resolve to give up the care of the weather,
but still we regard the clouds and the rain.

We are instructed by these petty experiences which
usurp the hours and years. The hard soil and four
months of snow make the inhabitant of the northern
temperate zone wiser and abler than his fellow who
enjoys the fixed smile of the tropics. The islander
may ramble all day at will. At night he may sleep
on a mat under the moon, and wherever a wild date-
tree grows, nature has, without a prayer even, spread
a table for his morning meal. The northerner is
perforce a householder. He must brew, bake, salt
and preserve his food. He must pile wood and coal.
But as it happens that not one stroke can labor lay
to without some new acquaintance with nature ; and
as nature is inexhaustibly significant, the inhabitants
of these climates have always excelled the southerner
in force. Such is the value of these matters that a
man who knows other things can never know too
much of these. Let him have accurate perceptions.
Let him, if he have hands, handle ; if eyes, measure
and discriminate ; let him accept and hive every fact
of chemistry, natural history and economics ; the
more he has, the less is he willing to spare any one.
Time is always bringing the occasions that disclose
their value. Some wisdom comes out of every

1 68 PRUDENCE.

natural and innocent action. The domestic man,
who loves no music so well as his kitchen clock and
the airs which the logs sing to him as they burn on
the hearth, has solaces which others never dream of.
The application of means to ends ensures victory and
the songs of victory not less in a farm or a shop than
in the tactics of party or of war. The good husband
finds method as efficient in the packing of fire-wood
in a shed or in the harvesting of fruits in the cellar,
as in Peninsular campaigns or the files of the Depart
ment of State. In the rainy day he builds a work
bench, or gets his tool-box set in the corner of the
barn-chamber, and stored with nails, gimlet, pincers,
screwdriver and chisel. Herein he tastes an old joy
of youth and childhood, the cat-like love of garrets,
presses and corn-chambers, and of the conveniences
of long housekeeping. His garden or his poultry-
yard — very paltry places it may be — tells him many
pleasant anecdotes. One might find argument for
optimism in the abundant flow of this saccharine
element of pleasure in every suburb and extremity of
the good world. Let a man keep the law, — any
law, — and his way will be strown with satisfactions.
There is more difference in the quality of our pleas
ures than in the amount.

On the other hand, nature punishes any neglect of
prudence. If you think the senses final, obey their
law. If you believe in the soul, do not clutch at
sensual sweetness before it is ripe on the slow tree of
cause and effect. It is vinegar to the eyes to deal
with men of loose and imperfect perception. Dr.
Johnson is reported to have said, — "If the child

PRUDENCE. 169

says he looked out of this window, when he looked
out of that, — whip him." Our American character
is marked by a more than average delight in accu
rate perception, which is shown by the currency of
the by-word, "No mistake." But the discomfort of
unpunctuality, of confusion of thought about facts,
inattention to the wants of to-morrow, is of no
nation. The beautiful laws of time and space, once
dislocated by our inaptitude, are holes and dens. If
the hive be disturbed by rash and stupid hands, in
stead of honey it will yield us bees. Our words and
actions to be fair must be timely. A gay and pleas
ant sound is the whetting of the scythe in the morn
ings of June ; yet what is more lonesome and sad
than the sound of a whetstone or mower's rifle when
it is too late in the season to make hay? Scatter
brained and "afternoon men" spoil much more than
their own affair in spoiling the temper of those who
deal with them. I have seen a criticism on some
paintings, of which I am reminded when I see the
shiftless and unhappy men who are not true to their
senses. The last Grand Duke of .Weimar, a man of
superior understanding, said: "I have sometimes
remarked in the presence of great works of art, and
just now especially in Dresden, how much a certain
property contributes to the effect which gives life to
the figures, and to the life an irresistible truth. This
property is the hitting, in all the figures we draw, the
right centre of gravity. I mean the placing the fig
ures firm upon their feet, making the hands grasp,
and fastening the eyes on the spot where they should
look. Even lifeless figures, as vessels and stools —

17° PRUDENCE.

let them be drawn ever so correctly — lose all effect
so soon as they lack the resting upon their centre of
gravity, and have a certain swimming and oscillating
appearance. The Raphael in the Dresden gallery
(the only great affecting picture which I have seen)
is the quietest and most passionless piece you can
imagine ; a couple of saints who worship the Virgin
and child. Nevertheless it awakens a deeper im
pression than the contortions of ten crucified mar
tyrs. For, beside all the resistless beauty of form, it
possesses in the highest degree the property of the
perpendicularity of all the figures." This perpen
dicularity we demand of all the figures in this picture
of life. Let them stand on their feet, and not float
and swing. Let us know where to find them. Let
them discriminate between what they remember and
what they dreamed. Let them call a spade a spade.
Let them give us facts, and honor their own senses
with trust.

But what man shall dare task another with impru
dence? Who is prudent? The men we call greatest
are least in this kingdom. There is a certain fatal
dislocation in our relation to nature, distorting all
our modes of living and making every law our enemy,
which seems at last to have aroused all the wit and
virtue in the world to ponder the question of Reform.
We must call the highest prudence to counsel, and
ask why health and beauty and genius should now be
the exception rather than the rule of human nature?
We do not know the properties of plants and animals
and the laws of nature, through our sympathy with
the same ; but this remains the dream of poets.

PRUDENCE. 171

Poetry and prudence should be coincident. Poets
should be lawgivers ; that is, the boldest lyric inspi
ration should not chide and insult, but should an
nounce and lead the civil code and the day's work.
But now the two things seem irreconcilably parted.
We have violated law upon law until we stand amidst
ruins, and when by chance we espy a coincidence
between reason and the phenomena, we are surprised.
Beauty should be the dowry of every man and woman,
as invariably as sensation ; but it is rare. Health or
sound organization should' be universal. Genius
should be the child of genius, and every child should
be inspired ; but now it is not to be predicted of any
child, and nowhere is it pure. We call partial half
lights, by courtesy, genius ; talent which converts
itself to money; talent which glitters to-day that it
may dine and sleep well to-morrow ; and society is
officered by men of parts, as they are properly called,
and not by divine men. These use their gifts to
refine luxury, not to abolish it. Genius is always
ascetic ; and piety, and love. Appetite shows to the
finer souls as a disease, and they find beauty in rites
and bounds that resist it.

We have found out fine names to cover our sen
suality withal, but no gifts can raise intemperance.
The man of talent affects to call his transgressions of
the laws of the senses trivial and to count them noth
ing considered with his devotion to his art. His art
.rebukes him. That never taught him lewdness, nor
the love of wine, nor the wish to reap where he had
not sowed. His art is less for every deduction from
his holiness, and less for every defect of common

172 PRUDENCE.

sense. On him who scorned the world, as he said,
the scorned world wreaks its revenge. He that de-
spiseth small things will perish by little and little.
Goethe's Tasso is very likely to be a pretty fair his
torical portrait, and that is true tragedy. It does not
seem to me so genuine grief when some tyrannous
Richard III. oppresses and slays a score of innocent
persons, as when Antonio and Tasso, both appar
ently right, wrong each other. One living after the
maxims of this world and consistent and true to them,
the other fired with all divine sentiments, yet grasp
ing also at the pleasures of sense, without submitting
to their law. That is a grief we all feel, a knot we
cannot untie. Tasso's is no infrequent case in
modern biography. A man of genius, of an ardent
temperament, reckless of physical laws, self-indul
gent, becomes presently unfortunate, querulous, a
" discomfortable cousin," a thorn to himself and to
others.

The scholar shames us by his bifold life. Whilst
something higher than prudence is active, he is ad
mirable ; when common sense is wanted, he is an
encumbrance. Yesterday, Caesar was not so great;
to-day, Job not so miserable. Yesterday, radiant
with the light of an ideal world in which he lives, the
first of men, and now oppressed by wants and by
sickness, for which he must thank himself, none is so
poor to do him reverence. He resembles the opium
eaters whom travellers describe as frequenting the
bazaars of Constantinople, who skulk about all day,
the most pitiful drivellers, yellow, emaciated, ragged,
sneaking; then at evening, when the bazaars are

PRUDENCE. 173

open, they slink to the opium-shop, swallow their
morsel and become tranquil, glorious and great.
And who has not seen the tragedy of imprudent
genius struggling for years with paltry pecuniary
difficulties, at last sinking, chilled, exhausted and
fruitless, like a giant slaughtered by pins?

Is it not better that a man should accept the first
pains and mortifications of this sort, which nature is
not slack in sending him, as hints that he must expect
no other good than the just fruit of his own labor and
self-denial? Health, bread, climate, social position,
have their importance, and he will give them their
due. Let him esteem Nature a perpetual counsellor,
and her perfections the exact measure of our devia
tions. Let him make the night night, and the day
day. Let him control the habit of expense. Let
him see that as much wisdom may be expended on a
private economy as on an empire, and as much wis
dom may be drawn from it. The laws of the world
are written out for him on every piece of money in
his hand. There is nothing he will not be the better
for knowing, were it only the wisdom of Poor Rich
ard, or the State-street prudence of buying by the
acre to sell by the foot ; or the thrift of the agricul
turist, to stick a tree between whiles, because it will
grow whilst he sleeps ; or the prudence which con
sists in husbanding little strokes of the tool, little
portions of time, particles of stock and small gains.
The eye of prudence may never shut. Iron, if kept
at the ironmonger's, will rust ; beer, if not brewed in
the right state of the atmosphere, will sour ; timber
of ships will rot at sea, or if laid up high and dry,

174 PRUDENCE.

will strain, warp and dry-rot. Money, if kept by us,
yields no rent and is liable to loss ; if invested, is
liable to depreciation of the particular kind of stock.
Strike, says the smith, the iron is white. Keep the
rake, says the haymaker, as nigh the scythe as you
can, and the cart as nigh the rake. Our Yankee
trade is reputed to be very much on the extreme of
this prudence. It saves itself by its activity. It
takes bank notes, — good, bad, clean, ragged, and
saves itself *by the speed with which it passes them
off. Iron cannot rust, nor beer sour, nor timber rot,
nor calicoes go out of fashion, nor money stocks
depreciate, in the few swift moments in which the
Yankee suffers any one of them to remain in his pos
session. In skating over thin ice our safety is in our
speed.

Let him learn a prudence of a higher strain. Let
him learn that every thing in nature, even motes and
feathers, go by law and not by luck, and that what he
sows he reaps. By diligence and self-command let
him put the bread he eats at his own disposal, and
not at that of others, that he may not stand in bitter
and false relations to other men ; for the best good
of wealth is freedom. Let him practise the minor
virtues. How much of human life is lost in waiting!
Let him not make his fellow creatures wait. How
many words and promises are promises of conversa
tion ! Let his be words of fate. When he sees a
folded and sealed scrap of paper float round the globe
in a pine ship and come safe to the eye for which it
was written, amidst a swarming population ; let him
likewise feel the admonition to integrate his being

PRUDENCE. 175

across all these distracting forces, and keep a slender
human word among the storms, distances and acci
dents that drive us hither and thither, and, by persist
ency, make the paltry force of one man reappear to
redeem its pledge after months and years in the most
distant climates.

We must not try to write the laws of any one vir
tue, looking at that only. Human nature loves no
contradictions, but is symmetrical. The prudence
which secures an outward well-being is not to be
studied by one set of men, whilst heroism and holi
ness are studied by another, but they are reconcil
able. Prudence concerns the present time, persons,
property and existing forms. But as every fact hath
its roots in the soul, and, if the soul were changed,
would cease to be, or would become some other
thing, therefore the proper administration of outward
things will always rest on a just apprehension of
their cause and origin ; that is, the good man will
be the wise man, and the single-hearted the politic
man. Every violation of truth is not only a sort of
suicide in the liar, but is a stab- at the health of
human society. On the most profitable lie the course
of events presently lays a destructive tax ; whilst
frankness proves to be the best tactics, for it invites
frankness, puts the parties on a convenient footing
and makes their business a friendship. Trust men
and they will be true to you ; treat them greatly and
they will show themselves great, though they make
an exception in your favor to all their rules of trade.

So, in regard to disagreeable and formidable
things, prudence does not consist in evasion or in

176 PRUDENCE.

flight, but in courage. He who wishes to walk in
the most peaceful parts of life with any serenity must
screw himself up to resolution. Let him front the
object of his worst apprehension, and his stoutness
will commonly make his- fears groundless. The Latin
proverb says, "in battles the eye is first overcome.1"
The eye is daunted and greatly exaggerates the
perils of the hour. Entire self-possession may make
a battle very little more dangerous to life than a
match at foils or at football. Examples are cited by
soldiers, of men who have seen the cannon pointed
and the fire given to it, and who have stepped aside
from the path of the ball. The terrors of the storm
are chiefly confined to the parlor and the cabin. The
drover, the sailor, buffets it all day, and his health
renews itself at as vigorous a pulse under the sleet as
under the sun of June.

In the occurrence of unpleasant things among
neighbors, fear comes readily to heart and magnifies
the consequence of the other party; but it is a bad
counsellor. Every man is actually weak and appar
ently strong. To himself he seems weak ; to others
formidable. You are afraid of Grim ; but Grim also
is afraid of you. You are solicitous of the good
will of the meanest person, uneasy at his ill will.
But the sturdiest offender of your peace and of the
neighborhood, if you rip up his claims, is as thin and
timid as any ; and the peace of society is often kept,
because, as children say, one is afraid and the other
dares not. Far off, men swell, bully and threaten:
bring them hand to hand, and they are a feeble folk.

It is a proverb that * courtesy costs nothing'; but

PRUDENCE. 177

calculation might come to value love for its profit.
Love is fabled to be blind, but kindness is necessary
to perception ; love is not a hood, but an eye-water.
If you meet a sectary or a hostile partisan, never
recognize the dividing lines, but meet on what com
mon ground remains, — if only that the sun shines
and the rain rains for both, — the area will widen
very fast, and ere you know it, the boundary moun
tains on which the eye had fastened have melted into
air. If he set out to contend, almost St. Paul will
lie, almost St. John will hate. What low, poor, pal
try, hypocritical people an argument on religion will
make of the pure and chosen souls. Shuffle they will
and crow, crook and hide, feign to confess here, only
that they may brag and conquer there, and not a
thought has enriched either party, and not an emotion
of bravery, modesty, or hope. So neither should
you put yourself in a false position to your contem
poraries by indulging a vein of hostility and bitter
ness. Though your views are in straight antagonism
to theirs, assume an identity of sentiment, assume
that you are saying precisely that which all think,
and in the flow of wit and love roll out your para
doxes in solid column, with not the infirmity of a
doubt. So at least shall you get an adequate deliver
ance. The natural motions of the soul are so much
better than the voluntary ones that you will never do
yourself justice in dispute. The thought is not then
taken hold of by the right handle, does not show
itself proportioned and in its true bearings, but bears
extorted, hoarse, and half witness. But assume a
consent and it shall presently be granted, since really

178 PRUDENCE.

and underneath their all external diversities, all men
are of one heart and mind.

Wisdom will never let us stand with any man or
men on an unfriendly footing. We refuse sympathy
and intimacy with people, as if we waited for some
better sympathy and intimacy to come. But whence
and when? To-morrow will be like to-day. Life
wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live. Our
friends and fellow-workers die off from us. Scarcely
can we say we see new men, new women, approaching
us. We are too old to regard fashion, too old to expect
patronage of any greater or more powerful. Let us
suck the sweetness of those affections and consue
tudes that grow near us. These old shoes are easy
to the feet. Undoubtedly we can easily pick faults
in our company, can easily whisper names prouder,
and that tickle the fancy more. Every man's imagin
ation hath its friends ; and pleasant would life be with
such companions. But if you cannot have them on
good mutual terms, you cannot have them. If not the
Deity but our ambition hews and shapes the new rela
tions, their virtue escapes, as strawberries lose their
flavor in garden beds.

Thus truth, frankness, courage, love, humility and
all the virtues range themselves on the side of pru
dence, or the art of securing a present well-being.
I do not know if all matter will be found to be made
of one element, as oxygen or hydrogen, at last, but
the world of manners and actions is wrought of one
stuff, and begin where we will we are pretty sure in a
short space to be mumbling our ten commandments.

ESSAY VIII.

HEROISM.

Paradise is under the shadow of swords.

— Mahomet*

IN the elder English dramatists, and mainly in the
plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, there is a constant
recognition of gentility, as if a noble behavior were
as easily marked in the society of their age as color
is in our American population. When any Rodrigo,
Pedro or Valerio enters, though he be a stranger, the
duke or governor exclaims, * This is a gentleman,'
and proffers civilities without end ; but all the rest are
slag and refuse. In harmony with this delight in
personal advantages there is in their plays a certain
heroic cast of character and dialogue, — as in Bon-
duca, Sophocles, the Mad Lover, the Double Mar
riage, — wherein the speaker is so earnest and cordial
and on such deep grounds of character, that the dia
logue, on the slightest additional incident in the plot,
rises naturally into poetry. Among many texts take the
following. The Roman Martius has conquered Athens,
— all but the invincible spirits of Sophocles, the duke
of Athens, and Dorigen, his wife. The beauty of the
latter inflames Martius, and he seeks to save her hus-

179

i8o HEROISM.

band ; but Sophocles will not ask his life, although
assured that a word will save him, and the execution
of both proceeds : —

Valerius. Bid thy wife farewell.

Soph. No, I will take no leave. My Dorigen,
Yonder, above, 'bout Ariadne's crown,
My spirit shall hover for thee. Prithee, haste.

Dor. Stay, Sophocles, — with this tie up my sight;
Let not soft nature so transformed be,
And lose her gentler sexed humanity,
To make me see my lord bleed. So, 't is well ;
Never one object underneath the sun
Will I behold before my Sophocles :
Farewell ; now teach the Romans how to die.

Mar. Dost know what 't is to die?

Soph. Thou dost not, Martius,
And, therefore, not what 't is to live ; to die
Is to begin to live. It is to end
An old, stale, weary work and to commence
A newer and a better. 'T is to leave
Deceitful knaves for the society
Of gods and goodness. Thou thyself must part
At last from all thy garlands, pleasures, triumphs,
And prove thy fortitude what then 't will do.

Val. But art not grieved nor vexed to leave thy life thus?

Soph. Why should I grieve or vex for being sent
To them I ever loved best? Now I'll kneel,
But with my back toward thee : 't is the last duty
This trunk can do the gods.

Mar. Strike, strike, Valerius,
Or Martius' heart will leap out at his mouth.
This is a man, a woman. Kiss thy lord,
And live with all the freedom you were wont.
O love ! thou doubly hast afflicted me
With virtue and with beauty. Treacherous heart,
My hand shall cast thee quick into my urn,

HEROISM. 181

Ere thou transgress this knot of piety.

VaL What ails my brother ?

Soph. Martius, O Martius,
Thou now hast found a way to conquer me.

Dor. O star of Rome ! what gratitude can speak
Fit words to follow such a deed as this ?

Mar. This admirable duke, Valerius,
With his disdain of fortune and of death,
Captived himself, has captivated me,
And though my arm hath ta'en his body here,
His soul hath subjugated Martius' soul.
By Romulus, he is all soul, I think;
He hath no flesh, and spirit cannot be gyved,
Then we have vanquished nothing ; he is free,
And Martius walks now in captivity.

I do not readily remember any poem, play, ser
mon, novel or oration that our press vents in the
last few years, which goes to the same tune. We
have a great many flutes and flageolets, but not
often the sound of any fife. Yet Wordsworth's
*' Laodamia," and the ode of " Dion," and some
sonnets, have a certain noble music ; and Scott will
sometimes draw a stroke like the portrait of Lord
Evandale given by Balfour of Burley. Thomas
Carlyle, with his natural taste for what is manly
and daring in character, has suffered no heroic trait
in his favorites to drop from his biographical and
historical pictures. Earlier, Robert Burns has given
us a song or two. In the Harleian Miscellanies
there is an account of the battle of Lutzen which
deserves to be read. And Simon Ockley's History
of the Saracens recounts the prodigies of individual
valor, with admiration all the more evident on the

1 82 HEROISM.

part of the narrator that he seems to think that his
place in Christian Oxford requires of him some
proper protestations of abhorrence. But if we ex
plore the literature of Heroism we shall quickly
come to Plutarch, who is its Doctor and historian.
To him we owe the Brasidas, the Dion, the Epam-
inondas, the Scipio of old, and I must think we
are more deeply indebted to him than to all the
ancient writers. Each of his " Lives " is a refutation
to the despondency and cowardice of our religious
and political theorists. A wild courage, a stoicism
not of the schools but of the blood, shines in every
anecdote, and has given that book its immense
fame.

We need books of this tart cathartic virtue more
than books of political science or of private econ
omy. Life is a festival only to the wise. Seen from
the nook and chimney-side of prudence, it wears a
ragged and dangerous front. The violations of the
laws of nature by our predecessors and our contem
poraries are punished in us also. The disease and
deformity around us certify the infraction of natural,
intellectual and moral laws, and often violation on
violation to breed such compound misery. A lock
jaw that bends a man's head back to his heels ; hy
drophobia that makes him bark at his wife and
babes ; insanity that makes him eat grass ; war,
plague, cholera, famine, indicate a certain ferocity
in nature, which, as it had its inlet by human crime,
must have its outlet by human suffering. Unhap
pily almost no man exists who has not in his own
person become to some amount a stockholder in the

HEROISM. 183

sin, and so made himself liable to a share in the
expiation.

Our culture therefore must not omit the arming
of the man. Let him hear in season that he is
born into the state of war, and that the common
wealth and his own well-being require that he
should not go dancing in the weeds of peace, but
warned, self-collected and neither defying nor dread
ing the thunder, let him take both reputation and
life in his hand, and with perfect urbanity dare the
gibbet and the mob by the absolute truth of his
speech and the rectitude of his behavior.

Towards all this external evil the man within the
breast assumes a warlike attitude, and affirms his
ability to cope single-handed with the infinite army
of enemies. To this military attitude of the soul
we give the name of Heroism. Its rudest form is
the contempt for safety and ease, which makes the
attractiveness of war. It is a self-trust which slights
the restraints of prudence, in the plenitude of its
energy and power to repair the harms it may suffer.
The hero is a mind of such balance that no disturb
ances can shake his will, but pleasantly and as it
were merrily he advances to his own music, alike in
frightful alarms and in the tipsy mirth of universal
dissoluteness. There is somewhat not philosophical
in heroism ; there is somewhat not holy in it ; it
seems not to know that other souls are of one tex
ture with it ; it hath pride ; it is the extreme of in
dividual nature. Nevertheless we must profoundly
revere it. There is somewhat in great actions
which does not allow us to go behind them. Hero-

1 84 HEROISM.

ism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always
right; and although a different breeding, different
religion and greater intellectual activity would have
modified or even reversed the particular action, yet
for the hero that thing he does is the highest deed,
and is not open to the censure of philosophers or
divines. It is the avowal of the unschooled man
that he finds a quality in him that is negligent of
expense, of health, of life, of danger, of hatred, of
reproach, and that he knows that his will is higher
and more excellent than all actual and all possible
antagonists.

Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of
mankind and in contradiction, for a time, to the
voice of the great and good. Heroism is an obedi
ence to a secret impulse of an individual's character.
Now to no other man can its wisdom appear as it
does to him, for every man must be supposed to
see a little farther on his own proper path than any
one else. Therefore just and wise men take um
brage at his act, until after some little time be past :
then they see it to be in unison with their acts. All
prudent men see that the action is clean contrary to
a sensual prosperity ; for every heroic act measures
itself by its contempt of some external good. But
it finds its own success at last, and then the prudent
also extol.

Self-trust is the essence of heroism. It is the
state of the soul at war, and its ultimate objects are
the last defiance of falsehood and wrong, and the
power to bear all that can be inflicted by evil agents.
It speaks the truth and it is just. It is generous, hos-

HEROISM. 185

pitable, temperate, scornful of petty calculations and
scornful of being scorned. It persists; it is of an
undaunted boldness and of a fortitude not to be
wearied out. Its jest is the littleness of common life.
That false prudence which dotes on health and
wealth is the foil, the butt and merriment of heroism.
Heroism, like Plotinus, is almost ashamed of its
body. What shall it say then to the sugar-plums and
cats'-cradles, to the toilet, compliments, quarrels,
cards and custard, which rack the wit of all human
society? What joys has kind nature provided for us
dear creatures ! There seems to be no interval be
tween greatness and meanness. When the spirit is
not master of the world, then it is its dupe. Yet the
little man takes the great hoax so innocently, works
in it so headlong and believing, is born red, and dies
gray, arranging his toilet, attending on his own
health, laying traps for sweet food and strong wine,
setting his heart on a horse or a rifle, made happy
with a little gossip or a little praise, that the great
soul cannot choose but laugh at such earnest non
sense. " Indeed, these humble considerations make
me out of love with greatness. What a disgrace is it
to me to take note how many pairs of silk stockings
thou hast, namely, these and those that were the
peach-colored ones ; or to bear the inventory of thy
shirts, as one for superfluity, and one other for use."
Citizens, thinking after the laws of arithmetic, con
sider the inconvenience of receiving strangers at
their fireside, reckon narrowly the loss of time
and the unusual display : the soul of a better
quality thrusts back the unseasonable economy into

1 86 HEROISM.

the vaults of life, and says, I will obey the God, and
the sacrifice and the fire he will provide. Ibn Han-
kal, the Arabian geographer, describes a heroic ex
treme in the hospitality of Sogd, in Bukharia.
" When I was in Sogd I saw a great building, like a
palace, the gates of which were open and fixed back
to the wall with large nails. I asked the reason, and
was told that the house had not been shut, night or
day, for a hundred years. Strangers may present
themselves at any hour and in wl^tever number ; the
master has amply provided for the reception of the
men and their animals and is never happier than
when they tarry for some time. Nothing of the kind
have I seen in any other country." The magnani
mous know very well that they who give time, or
money, or shelter, to the stranger, — so it be done
for love and not for ostentation, — do, as it were, put
God under obligation to them, so perfect are the
compensations of the universe. In some way the
time they seem to lose is redeemed and the pains
they seem to take remunerate themselves. These
men fan the flame of human love and raise the
standard of civil virtue among mankind. But hospi
tality must be for service and not for show, or it pulls
down the host. The brave soul rates itself too high
to value itself by the splendor of its table and dra
peries. It gives what it hath, and all it hath, but its
own majesty can lend a better grace to bannocks and
fair water than belong to city feasts.

The temperance of the hero proceeds from the
same wish to do no dishonor to the worthiness he
has. But he loves it for its elegancy, not for its

HEROISM. 187

austerity. It seems not worth his while to be sol
emn and denounce with bitterness flesh-eating or
wine-drinking, the use of tobacco, or opium, or tea,
or silk, or gold. A great man scarcely knows how he
dines, how he dresses, but without railing or pre
cision his living is natural and poetic. John Eliot,
the Indian Apostle, drank water, and said of wine,
"It is a noble, generous liquor and we should be
humbly thankful for it, but, as I remember, water was
made before it." Better still is the temperance of
King David, who poured out on the ground unto the
Lord the water which three of his warriors had
brought him to drink, at the peril of their lives.

It is told of Brutus, that when he fell on his sword
after the battle of Philippi, he quoted a line of
Euripides, "O Virtue! I have followed thee through
life, and I find thee at last but a shade." I doubt not
the hero is slandered by this report. The heroic
soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness. It
does not ask to dine nicely and to sleep warm. The
essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is
enough. Poverty is its ornament. Plenty does not
need it, and can very well abide its loss.

But that which takes my fancy most in the heroic
class, is the good-humor and hilarity they exhibit. It
is a height to which common duty can very well
attain, to suffer and to dare with solemnity. But
these rare souls set opinion, success, and life at so
cheap a rate that they will not soothe their enemies
by, petitions, or the show of sorrow, but wear their
own habitual greatness. Scipio, charged with pecu
lation, refuses to do himself so great a disgrace as to

i88 HEROISM.

wait for justification, though he had the scroll of his
accounts in his hands, but tears it to pieces before
the tribunes. Socrates's condemnation of himself to
be maintained in all honor in the Prytaneum, during
his life, and Sir Thomas More's playfulness at the
scaffold, are of the same strain. In Beaumont and
Fletcher's " Sea Voyage," Juletta tells the stout cap
tain and his company, —

Jul. Why, slaves, 't is in our power to hang ye.

Master. Very likely,

Tis in our powers, then, to be hanged, and scorn ye.

These replies are sound and whole. Sport is the
bloom and glow of a perfect health. The great will
not condescend to take any thing seriously ; all must
be as gay as the song of a canary, though it were the
building of cities or the eradication of old and foolish
churches and nations which have cumbered the earth
long thousands of years. Simple hearts put all the
history and customs of this world behind them, and
play their own play in innocent defiance of the Blue-
Laws of the world ; and such would appear, could we
see the human race assembled in vision, like little
children frolicking together, though to the eyes of
mankind at large they wear a stately and solemn
garb of works and influences.

The interest these fine stories have for us, the
power of a. romance over the boy who grasps the
forbidden book under his bench at school, our de
light in the hero, is the main fact to our purpose.
All these great and transcendent properties are ours.
If we dilate in beholding the Greek energy, the
Roman pride, it is that we are already domesticating

HEROISM. 189

the same sentiment. Let us find room for this great
guest in our small houses. The first step of worthi
ness will be to disabuse us of our superstitious asso
ciations with places and times, with number and size.
Why should these words, Athenian, Roman, Asia
and England, so tingle in the ear? Let us feel that
where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods
sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massa
chusetts, Connecticut River and Boston Bay you
think paltry places, and the ear loves names of foreign
and classic topography. But here we are : — that is a
great fact, and, if we will tarry a little, we may come to
learn that here is best. See to it only that thyself is
here, — and art and nature, hope and dread, friends,
angels and the Supreme Being shall not be absent
from the chamber where thou sittest. Epaminondas,
brave and affectionate, does not seem to us to need
Olympus to die upon, nor the Syrian sunshine. He
lies very well where he is. The Jerseys were hand
some ground enough for Washington to tread, and
London streets for the feet of Milton. A great man
illustrates his place, makes his climate genial in the
imagination of men, and its air the beloved element
of all delicate spirits. That country is the fairest
which is inhabited by the noblest minds. The pic
tures which fill the imagination in reading the actions
of Pericles, Xenophon, Columbus, Bayard, Sidney,
Hampden, teach us how needlessly mean our life is ;
that we, by the depth of our living, should deck it
with more than regal or national splendor, and act on
principles that should interest man and nature in the
length of our days.

190 HEROISM.

We have seen or heard of many extraordinary
young men who never ripened, or whose performance
in actual life was not extraordinary. When we see
their air and mien, when we hear them speak of
society, of books, of religion, we admire their supe
riority ; they seem to throw contempt on the whole
state of the world ; theirs is the tone of a youthful
giant who is sent to work revolutions. But they
enter an active profession and the forming Colossus
shrinks to the common size of man. The magic
they used was the ideal tendencies, which always
makes the Actual ridiculous ; but the tough world
has its revenge the moment they put their horses of
the sun to plough in its furrow. They found no ex
ample and no companion, and their heart fainted.
What then? The lesson they gave in their first
aspirations is yet true ; and a better valor and a purer
truth shall one day execute their will and put the
world to shame. Or why should a woman liken her
self to any historical woman, and think, because
Sappho, or Sevigne', or De Stael, or the cloistered
souls who have had genius and cultivation do not
satisfy the imagination and the serene Themis, none
can, — certainly not she. Why not? She has a new
and unattempted problem to solve, perchance that of
the happiest nature that ever bloomed. Let the
maiden, with erect soul, walk serenely on her way,
accept the hint of each new experience, try in turn all
the gifts God offers her that she may learn the power
and the charm that like a new dawn radiating of the
deep of space, her new-born being is. The fair girl
who repels interference by a decided and proud

HEROISM. 191

choice of influences, so careless of pleasing, so wilful
and lofty, inspires every beholder with somewhat of
her own nobleness. The silent heart encourages
her ; O friend, never strike sail to a fear. Come into
port greatly, or sail with God the seas. Not in vain
you live, for every passing eye is cheered and refined
by the vision.

The characteristic of genuine heroism is its persist
ency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and
starts of generosity. But when you have resolved
to be great, abide by yourself, and do not weakly
try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic
cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic.
Yet we have the weakness to expect the sympathy
of people in those actions whose excellence is that
they outrun sympathy and appeal to a tardy justice.
If you would serve your brother, because it is fit for
you to serve him, do not take back your words when
you find that prudent people do not commend you.
Be true to your own act, and congratulate yourself
if you have done something strange and extrava
gant and broken the monotony of a decorous age.
It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a
young person, "Always do what you are afraid to
do." A simple manly character need never make
an apology, but should regard its past action with
the calmness of Phocion, when he admitted that the
event of the battle was happy, yet did not regret his
dissuasion from the battle.

There is no weakness or exposure for which we
cannot find consolation in the thought, — this is a
part of my constitution, part of my relation and office

192 HEROISM.

to my fellow-creature. Has nature covenanted with
me that I should never appear to disadvantage, never
make a ridiculous figure ? Let us be generous of our
dignity as well as of our money. Greatness once
and for ever has done with opinion. We tell our
charities, not because we wish to be praised for them,
not because we think they have great merit, but for
our justification. It is a capital blunder; as you dis
cover when another man recites his charities.

To speak the truth, even with some austerity, to
live with some rigor of temperance, or some ex
tremes of generosity, seems to be an asceticism
which common good nature would appoint to those
who are at ease and in plenty, in sign that they feel
a brotherhood with the great multitude of suffering
men. And not only need we breathe and exercise
the soul by assuming the penalties of abstinence, of
debt, of solitude, of unpopularity, but it behoves
the wise man to look with a bold teye into those
rarer dangers which sometimes invade men, and to
familiarize himself with disgusting forms of disease,
with sounds of execration, and the vision of violent
death.

Times of heroism are generally times of terror,
but the day never shines in which this element may
not work. The circumstances of man, we say, are
historically somewhat better in this country and at
this hour than perhaps ever before. More freedom
exists for culture. It will not now run against an
axe at the first step out of the beaten track of opin
ion. But whoso is heroic will always find crises to
try his edge. Human virtue demands her champions

HEROISM. 193

and martyrs, and the trial of persecution always pro
ceeds. It is but the other day that the brave Love-
joy gave his breast to the bullets of a mob, for the
rights of free speech and opinion, and died when it
was better not to live.

I see not any road of perfect peace which a man
can walk, but to take counsel of his own bosom.
Let him quit too much association, let him go home
much, and stablish himself in those courses he ap
proves. The unremitting retention of simple and
high sentiments in obscure duties is hardening the
character to that temper which will work with honor,
if need be in the tumult, or on the scaffold. What
ever outrages have happened to men may befall a
man again : and very easily in a republic, if there
appear any signs of a decay of religion. Coarse slan
der, fire, tar and feathers and the gibbet, the youth
may freely bring home to his mind and with what
sweetness of temper he can, and inquire how fast he
can fix his sense of duty, braving such penalties,
whenever it may please the next newspaper and a
sufficient number of his neighbors to pronounce his
opinions incendiary.

It may calm the apprehension *of calamity in the
most susceptible heart to see how quick a bound
Nature has set to the utmost infliction of malice.
We rapidly approach a brink over which no enemy
can follow us.

Let them rave :
Thou art quiet in thy grave.

In the gloom of our ignorance of what shall be, in

194 HEROISM.

the hour when we are deaf to the higher voices,
who does not envy them who have seen safely to an
end their manful endeavor? Who that sees the
meanness of our politics but inly congratulates Wash
ington that he is long already wrapped in his shroud,
and for ever safe ; that he was laid sweet in his
grave, the hope of humanity not yet subjugated in
him? Who does not sometimes envy the good and
brave who are no more to suffer from the tumults
of the natural world, and await with curious com
placency the speedy term of his own conversation
with finite nature? And yet the love that will be
annihilated sooner than treacherous has already made
death impossible, and affirms itself no mortal but a
native of the deeps of absolute and inextinguishable
being.

ESSAY IX.

THE OVER-SOUL.

But souls that of his own good life partake,
He loves as his own self; dear as his eye
They are to Him: He'll never them forsake :
When they shall die, then God himself shall die:
They live, they live in blest eternity.

— Henry More.

THERE is a difference between one and another
hour of life in their authority and subsequent effect.
Our faith comes in moments ; our vice is habitual.
Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which
constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to
all other experiences. For this reason the argument
which is always forthcoming to silence those who
conceive extraordinary hopes of man, namely the
appeal to experience, is for ever invalid and vain. A
mightier hope abolishes despair. We give up the
past to the objector, and yet we hope. He must
explain this hope. We grant that human life is
mean, but how did we find out that it was mean?
What is the ground of this uneasiness of ours ; of
this old discontent? What is the universal sense of
want and ignorance, but the fine innuendo by which
the great soul makes its enormous claim? Why do

195

196 THE OVER-SOUL.

men feel that the natural history of man has never
been written, but always he is leaving behind what
you have said of him, and it becomes old, and books
of metaphysics worthless? The philosophy of six
thousand years has not searched the chambers and
magazines of the soul. In its experiments there has
always remained, in the last analysis, a residuum it
could not resolve. Man is a stream whose source is
hidden. Always our being is descending into us
from we know not whence. The most exact calcula
tor has no prescience that somewhat incalculable may
not baulk the very next moment. I am constrained
every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for
events than the will I call mine.

As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I
watch that flowing river, which, out of regions I see
not, pours for a season its streams into me, — I see
that I am a pensioner, — not a cause but a surprised
spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and
look up and put myself in the attitude of reception,
but from some alien energy the visions come.

The Supreme Critic on all the errors of the past
and the present, and the only prophet of that which
must be, is that great nature in which we rest as the
earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere ; that
Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man's par
ticular being is contained and made one with all
other ; that common heart of which all sincere con
versation is the worship, to which all right action is
submission ; that overpowering reality which confutes
our tricks and talents, and constrains every one to
pass for what he is, and to speak from his character

THE OVER-SOUL. 197

and not from his tongue, and which evermore tends
to pass into our thought and hand and become wis
dom and virtue and power and beauty. We live in
succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Mean
time within man is the soul of the whole ; the wise
silence ; the universal beauty, to which every part
and particle is equally related ; the eternal ONE.
And this deep power in which we exist and whose
beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-suffic
ing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing
and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the
subject and the object, are one. We see the world
piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the
tree ; but the whole, of which these are the shining
parts, is the soul. Only by the vision of that Wis
dom can the horoscope of the ages be read, and by
falling back on our better thoughts, by yielding to the
spirit of prophecy which is innate in every man that
we can know what it saith. Every man's words who
speaks from that life must sound vain to those who
do not dwell in the same thought on their own part.
I dare not speak for it. My words do not carry its
august sense ; they fall short and cold. Only itself
can inspire whom it will, and behold ! their speech
shall be lyrical, and sweet, and universal as the rising
of the wind. Yet I desire, even by profane words, if
sacred I may not use, to indicate the heaven of this
deity and to report what hints I have collected of the
transcendent simplicity and energy of the Highest
Law.

If we consider what happens in conversation, in
reveries, in remorse, in times of passion, in surprises,

198 THE OVER-SOUL.

in the instructions of dreams, wherein often we see
ourselves in masquerade, — the droll disguises only
magnifying and enhancing a real element and forcing
it on our distinct notice, — we shall catch many hints
that will broaden and lighten into knowledge of the
secret of nature. All goes to show that the soul in
man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all
the organs ; is not a function, like the power of
memory, of calculation, of comparison, — but uses
these as hands and feet ; is not a faculty, but a light ;
is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the
intellect and the will ; — is the vast background of
our being, in which they lie, — an immensity not pos
sessed and that cannot be possessed. From within
or from behind, a light shines through us upon things
and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the
light is all. A man is the fa9ade of a temple wherein
all wisdom and all good abide. What we commonly
call man, the eating, drinking, planting, counting man,
does not, as we know him, represent himself, but mis
represents himself. Him we do not respect, but the
soul, whose organ he is, would he let it appear
through his action, would make our knees bend.
When it breathes through his intellect, it is genius ;
when it breathes through his will, it is virtue ; when
it flows through his affection, it is love. And the
blindness of the intellect begins when it would be
something of itself. The weakness of the will begins
when the individual would be something of himself.
All reform aims in some one particular to let the
great soul have its way through us ; in other words,
to engage us to obey.

THE OVER-SOUL. 199

Of this pure nature every man is at some time sen
sible. Language cannot paint it with his colors. It
is too subtle. It is undefinable, unmeasurable ; but
we know that it pervades and contains us. We
know that all spiritual being is in man. A wise old
proverb says, " God comes to see us without bell : "
that is, as there is no screen or ceiling between our
heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or
wall in the soul, where man, the effect, ceases, and
God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken away.
We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual
nature, to all the attributes of God. Justice we see
and know, Love, Freedom, Power. These natures
no man ever got above, but always they tower over
us, and most in the moment when our interests
tempt us to wound them.

The sovereignty of this nature whereof we speak is
made known by its independency of those limitations
which circumscribe us on every hand. The soul cir-
cumscribeth all things. As I have said, it contradicts
all experience. In like manner it abolishes time and
space. The influence of the senses has in most men
overpowered the mind to that degree that the walls
of time and space have come to look solid, real and
insurmountable ; and to speak with levity of these
limits is, in the world, the sign of insanity. Yet
time and space are but inverse measures of the force
of the soul. A man is capable of abolishing them
both. The spirit sports with time —

Can crowd eternity into an hour,
Or stretch an hour to eternity.

200 THE OVER-SOUL.

We are often made to feel that there is another
youth and age than that which is measured from the
year of our natural birth. Some thoughts always
find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is
the love of the universal and eternal beauty. Every
man parts from that contemplation with the feeling
that it rather belongs to ages than to mortal life.
The least activity of the intellectual powers redeems
us in a degree from the influences of time. In sick
ness, in languor, give us a strain of poetry or a pro
found sentence, and we are refreshed ; or produce a
volume of Plato or Shakspeare, or remind us of their
names, and instantly we come into a feeling of
longevity. See how the deep divine thought de
molishes centuries and millenniums, and makes it
self present through all ages. Is the teaching of
Christ less effective now than it was when first
his mouth was opened? The emphasis of facts and
persons to my soul has nothing to do with time.
And so always the souPs scale is one ; the scale of
the senses and the understanding is another. Before
the great revelations of the soul, Time, Space and
Nature shrink away. In common speech we refer all
things to time, as we habitually refer the immensely
sundered stars to one concave sphere. And so we
say that the Judgment is distant or near, that the
Millennium approaches, that a day of certain politi
cal, moral, social reforms is at hand, and the like,
when we mean that in the nature of things one of
the facts we contemplate is external and fugitive, and
the other is permanent and connate with the soul.
The things we now esteem fixed shall, one by one,

THE OVER-SOUL. 2O*

detach themselves like ripe fruit from our experience,
and fall. The wind shall blow them none knows
whither. The landscape, the figures, Boston, Lon
don, are facts as fugitive as any institution past, or
any whiff of mist or smoke, and so is society, and so
is the world. The soul looketh steadily forwards,
creating a world alway before her, leaving worlds
alway behind her. She has no dates, nor rites, nor
persons, nor specialties, nor men. The soul knows
only the soul ; all else is idle weeds for her wearing.

After its own law and not by arithmetic is the rate
of its progress to be computed. The soul's advances
are not made by gradation, such as can be repre
sented by motion in a straight line, but rather by as
cension of state, such as can be represented by meta
morphosis, — from the egg to the worm, from the
worm to the fly. The growths of genius are of a cer
tain total character, that does not advance the elect
individual first over John, then Adam, then Richard,
and give to each the pain of discovered inferiority,
but by every throe of growth the man expands there
where he works, passing, at each pulsation, classes,
populations, of men. With each divine impulse the
mind rends the thin rinds of the visible and finite,
and comes out into eternity, and inspires and expires
its air. It converses with truths that have always
been spoken in the world, and becomes conscious of
a closer sympathy with Zeno and Arrian than with
persons in the house.

This is the law of moral and of mental gain. The
simple rise as by specific levity not into a particular
virtue, but into the region of all the virtues. They

202 THE OVER-SOUL.

are in the spirit which contains them all. The soul
is superior to all the particulars of merit. The soul
requires purity, but purity is not it ; requires justice,
but justice is not that; requires beneficence, but is
somewhat better : so that there is a kind of descent
and accommodation felt when we leave speaking of
moral nature to urge a virtue which it enjoins. For,
to the soul in her pure action all the virtues are
natural, and not painfully acquired. Speak to his
heart, and the man becomes suddenly virtuous.

Within the same sentiment is the germ of intel
lectual growth, which obeys the same law. Those
who are capable of humility, of justice, of love, of
aspiration, are already on a platform that commands
the sciences and arts, speech and poetry, action and
grace. For whoso dwells in this moral beatitude
does already anticipate those special powers which
men prize so highly ; just as love does justice to all
the gifts of the object beloved. The lover has no
talent, no skill, which passes for quite nothing with
his enamored maiden, however little she may possess
of related faculty ; and the heart which abandons it
self to the Supreme Mind finds itself related to all its
works, and will travel a royal road to particular
knowledges and powers. For in ascending to this
primary and aboriginal sentiment we have come
from our remote station on the circumference in
stantaneously to the centre of the world, where, as in
the closet of God, we see causes, and anticipate the
universe, which is but a slow effect.

One mode of the divine teaching is the incarna
tion of the spirit in a form, — in forms, like my own.

THE OVER-SOUL. 203

I live in society; with persons who answer to
thoughts in my own mind, or outwardly express a
certain obedience to the great instincts to which I
live. I see its presence to them. I am certified of a
common nature ; and so these other souls, these
separated selves, draw me as nothing else can. They
stir in me the new emotions we call passion ; of
love, hatred, fear, admiration, pity; thence come
conversation, competition, persuasion, cities and
war. Persons are supplementary to the primary
teaching of the soul. In youth we 'are mad for per
sons. Childhood and youth see all the world in
them. But the larger experience of man discovers
the identical nature appearing through them all. Per
sons themselves acquaint us with the impersonal.
In all conversation between two persons tacit ref
erence is made, as to a third party, to a common
nature. That third party or common nature is not
social ; it is impersonal ; is God. And so in groups
where debate is earnest, and especially on great
questions of thought, the company become aware
of their unity ; aware that the thought rises to an
equal height in all bosoms, that all have a spiritual
property in what was said, as well as the sayer.
They all wax wiser than they were. It arches over
them like a temple, this unity of thought in which
every heart beats with nobler sense of power
and duty, and thinks and acts with unusual solem
nity. All are conscious of attaining to a higher self-
possession. It shines for all. There is a certain
wisdom of humanity which is common to the great
est men with the lowest, and which our ordinary edu-

204 THE OVER-SOUL.

cation often labors to silence and obstruct. The
mind is one, and the best minds, who love truth for
its own sake, think much less of property in truth.
Thankfully they accept it everywhere, and do not
label or stamp it with any man's name, for it is
theirs long beforehand. It is theirs from eternity.
The learned and the studious of thought have no
monopoly of wisdom. Their violence of direction in
some degree disqualifies them to think truly. We
owe many valuable observations to people who are
not very acute or profound, and who say the thing
without effort which we want and have long been
hunting in vain. The action of the soul is oftener in
that which is felt and left unsaid than in that which
is said in any conversation. It broods over every
society, and they unconsciously seek for it in each
other. We know better than we do. We do not
yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same
time that we are much more. I feel the same truth
how often in my trivial conversation with my neigh
bors, that somewhat higher in each of us overlooks
this by-play, and Jove nods to Jove from behind
each of us.

Men descend to meet. In their habitual and mean
service to the world, for which they forsake their
native nobleness, they resemble those Arabian sheiks
who dwell in mean houses and affect an external
poverty, to escape the rapacity of the Pacha, and re
serve all their display of wealth for their interior and
guarded retirements.

As it is present in all persons, so it is in every
period of life. It is adult already in the infant man.

THE OVER-SOUL. 205

In my dealing with my child, my Latin and Greek,
my accomplishments and my money stead me noth
ing. They are all lost on him : but as much soul as
I have, avails. If I am merely wilful, he gives me a
Rowland for an Oliver, sets his will against mine,
one for one, and leaves me, if I please, the degrada
tion of beating him by my superiority of strength.
But if I renounce my will and act for the soul, set
ting that up as umpire between us two, out of his
young eyes looks the same soul ; he reveres and
loves with me.

The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth.
We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and
scoffer say what they choose. Foolish people ask
you, when you have spoken what they do not wish
to hear, ' How do you know it is truth, and not an
error of your own? ' We know truth when we see it,
from opinion, as we know when we are awake that
we are awake. It was a grand sentence of Emanuel
Swedenborg, which would alone indicate the great
ness of that man's perception, — " It is no proof of a
man's understanding to be able to affirm whatever he
pleases ; but to be able to discern that what is true
is true, and that what is false is false, this is the
mark and character of intelligence." In the book I
read, the good thought returns to me, as every truth
will, the image of the whole soul. To the bad
thought which I find in it, the same soul becomes a
discerning, separating sword, and lops it away. We
are wiser than we know. If we will not interfere
with our thought, but will act entirely, or see how
the thing stands in God, we know the particular

206 THE OVER-SOUL.

thing, and every thing, and every man. For the
Maker of all things and all persons stands behind us
and casts his dread omniscience through us over
things.

But beyond this recognition of its own in particu
lar passages of the individual's experience, it also re
veals truth. And here we should seek to reinforce
ourselves by its very presence, and to speak with a
worthier, loftier strain of that advent. For the souPs
communication of truth is the highest event in nature,
for it then does not give somewhat from itself, but it
gives itself, or passes into and becomes that man
whom it enlightens; or, in proportion to that truth
he receives, it takes him to itself.

We distinguish the announcements of the soul,
its manifestations of its own nature, by the term
Revelation. These are always attended by the
emotion of the sublime. For this communication
is an influx of the Divine mind into our mind. It
is an ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing
surges of the sea of life. Every distinct apprehen
sion of this central commandment agitates men with
awe and delight. A thrill passes through all men
at the reception of new truth, or at the performance
of a great action, which comes out of the heart of
nature. In these communications the power to see
is not separated from the will to do, but the insight
proceeds from obedience, and the obedience pro
ceeds from a joyful perception. Every moment
when the individual feels himself invaded by it, is
memorable. Always, I believe, by the necessity of
our constitution a certain enthusiasm attends the

THE OVER-SOUL. 207

individual's consciousness of that divine presence.
The character and duration of this enthusiasm varies
with the state of the individual, from an exstasy and
trance and prophetic inspiration, — which is its rarer
appearance, to the faintest glow of virtuous emotion,
in which form it warms, like our household fires,
all the families and associations of men, and makes
society possible. A certain tendency to insanity has
always attended the opening of the religious sense
in men, as if "blasted with excess of light." The
trances of Socrates; the "union" of Plotinus ; the
vision of Porphyry ; the conversion of Paul ; the aurora
of Behmen ; the convulsions of George Fox and his
Quakers ; the illumination of Swedenborg, are of this
kind. What was in the case of these remarkable per
sons a ravishment, has, in innumerable instances in
common life, been exhibited in less striking manner.
Everywhere the history of religion betrays a tendency
to enthusiasm. The rapture of the Moravian and
Quietist; the opening of the internal sense of the
Word, in the language of the New Jerusalem Church ;
the revival of the Calvinistic churches ; the experi
ences of the Methodists, are varying forms of that
shudder of awe and delight with which the individual
soul always mingles with the universal soul.

The nature of these revelations is always the same ;
they are perceptions of the absolute law. They are
solutions of the souPs own questions. They do not
answer the questions which the understanding asks.
The soul answers never by words, but by the thing
itself that is inquired after.

Revelation is the disclosure of the soul. The

208 THE OVER-SOUL;

popular notion of a revelation, is, that it is a telling
of fortunes. In past oracles of the soul the under
standing seeks to find answers to sensual questions,
and undertakes to tell from God how long men shall
exist, what their hands shall do and who shall be
their company, adding even names and dates and
places. But we must pick no locks. We must check
this low curiosity. An answer in words is delusive ;
it is really no answer to the questions you ask. Do
not require a description of the countries towards
which you sail. The description does not describe
them to you, and to-morrow you arrive there and
know them by inhabiting them. Men ask of the im
mortality of the soul, and the employments of heaven,
and the state of the sinner, and so forth. They even
dream that Jesus has left replies to precisely these
interrogatories. Never a moment did that sublime
spirit speak in their patois. To truth, justice, love,
the attributes of the soul, the idea of immutableness
is essentially associated. Jesus, living in these moral
sentiments, heedless of sensual fortunes, heeding only
the manifestations of these, never made the separa
tion of the idea of duration from the essence of these
attributes, never uttered a syllable concerning the
duration of the soul. It was left to his disciples to
sever duration from the moral elements, and to teach
the immortality of the soul as a doctrine, and main
tain it by evidences. The moment the doctrine of
the immortality is separately taught, man is already
fallen. In the flowing of love, in the adoration of
humility, there is no question of continuance. No
inspired man ever asks this question or condescends

THE OVER-SOUL. 209

to these evidences. For the soul is true to itself, and
the man in whom it is shed abroad cannot wander
from the present, which is infinite, to a future which
would be finite.

These questions which we lust to ask about the
future are a confession of sin. God has no answer
for them. No answer in words can reply to a ques
tion of things. It is not in an arbitrary " decree of
God," but in the nature of man, that a veil shuts
down on the facts of to-morrow : for the soul will
not have us read any other cipher but that of cause
and effect. By this veil which curtains events it in
structs the children of men to live in to-day. The
only mode of obtaining an answer to these questions
of the senses is to forego all low curiosity, and, ac
cepting the tide of being which floats us into the
secret of nature, work and live, work and live, and
all unawares the advancing soul has built and forged
for itself a new condition, and the question and the
answer are one.

Thus is the soul the perceiver and revealer of
truth. By the same fire, serene, impersonal, per
fect, which burns until it shall dissolve all things into
the waves and surges of an ocean of light, — we see
and know each other, and what spirit each is of.
Who can tell the grounds of his knowledge of the
character of the several individuals in his circle of
friends? No man. Yet their acts and words do not
disappoint him. In that man, though he knew no ill
of him, he put no trust. In that other, though they
had seldom met, authentic signs had yet passed, to
signify that he might be trusted as one who had an

210 THE OVER-SOUL.

interest in his own character. We know each other
very well, — which of us has been just to himself and
whether that which we teach or behold is only an
aspiration or is our honest effort also.

We are all discerners of spirits. That diagnosis
lies aloft in our life or unconscious power, not in the
understanding. The whole intercourse of society,
its trade, its religion, its friendships, its quarrels,
— is one wide judicial investigation of character.
In full court, or in small committee, or confronted
face to face, accuser and accused, men offer them
selves to be judged. Against their will they exhibit
those decisive trifles by which character is read.
But who judges? and what? Not our understand
ing. We do not read them by learning or craft.
No; the wisdom of the wise man consists herein,
that he does not judge them ; he lets them judge
themselves and merely reads and records their own
verdict.

By virtue of this inevitable nature, private will is
overpowered, and, maugre our efforts- or our imper
fections, your genius will speak from you, and mine
from me. That which we are, we shall teach, not
voluntarily but involuntarily. Thoughts come into
our minds through avenues which we never left open,
and thoughts go out of our minds through ave
nues which we never voluntarily opened. Char
acter teaches over our head. The infallible index of
true progress is found in the tone the man takes.
Neither his age, nor his breeding, nor company,
nor books, nor actions, nor talents, nor all together
can hinder him from being deferential to a higher

THE OVER-SOUL. 21 1

spirit than his own. If he have not found his home
in God, his manners, his forms of speech, the turn
of his sentences, the build, shall I say, of all his
opinions will involuntarily confess it, let him brave
it out how he will. If he have found his centre,
the Deity will shine through him, through all the
disguises of ignorance, of ungenial temperament,
of unfavorable circumstance. The tone of seeking
is one, and the tone of having is another.

The great distinction between teachers sacred or
literary ; between poets like Herbert, and poets like
Pope ; between philosophers like Spinoza, Kant and
Coleridge, — and philosophers like Locke, Paley,
Mackintosh and Stewart; between men of the
world who are reckoned accomplished talkers, and
here and there a fervent mystic, prophesying half-
insane under the infinitude of his thought, is that
one class speak from within, or from experience, as
parties and possessors of the fact; and the other
class from without, as spectators merely, or perhaps
as acquainted with the fact on the evidence of third
persons. It is of no use to preach to me from with
out. I can do that too easily. myself. Jesus speaks
always from within, and in a degree that transcends
all others. In that is the miracle. That includes
the miracle. My soul believes beforehand that it
ought so to be. All men stand continually in the
expectation of the appearance of such a teacher.
But if a man do not speak from within the veil,
where the word is one with that it tells of, let him
lowly confess it.

The same Omniscience flows into the intellect

212 THE OVER-SOUL.

and makes what we call genius. Much of the wis
dom of the world is not wisdom, and the most
illuminated class of men are no doubt superior to
literary fame, and are not writers. Among the
multitude of scholars and authors we feel no hal
lowing presence ; we are sensible of a knack and
skill rather than of inspiration ; they have a light
and know not whence it comes and call it their
own : their talent is some exaggerated faculty, some
overgrown member, so that their strength is a dis
ease. In these instances the intellectual gifts do
not make the impression of virtue, but almost of
vice ; and we feel that a man's talents stand in the
way of his advancement in truth. But genius is
religious. It is a larger imbibing of the common
heart. It is not anomalous, but more like and not
less like other men. There is in all great poets a
wisdom of humanity which is superior to any tal
ents they exercise. The author, the wit, the par
tisan, the fine gentleman, does not take place of the
man. Humanity shines in Homer, in Chaucer, in
Spenser, in Shakspeare, in Milton. They are con
tent with truth. They use the positive degree.
They seem frigid and phlegmatic to those who have
been spiced with the frantic passion and violent
coloring of inferior but popular writers. For, they
are poets by the free course which they allow to the
informing soul, which through their eyes beholdeth
again and blesses the things which it hath made.
The soul is superior to its knowledge, wiser than
any of its works. The great poet makes us feel our
own wealth, and then we think less of his com-

THE OVER-SOUL. 213

positions. His greatest communication to our mind
is to teach us to despise all he has done. Shakspeare
carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activ
ity as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own ;
and we then feel that the splendid works which he
has created, and which in other hours we extol as a
sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold
of real nature than the shadow of a passing trav
eller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered
itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good
from day to day for ever. Why then should I make
account of Hamlet and Lear, as if we had not the
soul from which they fell as syllables from the
tongue r

This energy does not descend into individual life
on any other condition than entire possession. It
comes to the lowly and simple ; it comes to whom
soever will put off what is foreign and proud ; it
comes as insight ; it comes as serenity and gran
deur. When we see those whom it inhabits, we are
apprised of new degrees of greatness. From that
inspiration the man comes back with a changed
tone. He does not talk with men with an eye to
their opinion. He tries them. It requires of us to
be plain and true. The vain traveller attempts
to embellish his life by quoting my Lord and the
Prince and the Countess, who thus said or did to
him. The ambitious vulgar show you their spoons
and brooches and rings, and preserve their cards
and compliments. The more cultivated, in their
account of their own experience, cull out the pleas
ing, poetic circumstance ; the visit to Rome, the

214 THE OVER-SOUL.

man of genius they saw ; the brilliant friend they
know ; still further on perhaps the gorgeous land
scape, the mountain lights, the mountain thoughts
they enjoyed yesterday, — and so seek to throw a
romantic color over their life. But the soul that
ascendeth to worship the great God is plain and true ;
has no rose color ; no fine friends ; no chivalry ; no
adventures ; does not want admiration ; dwells in the
hour that now is, in the earnest experience of the
common day, — by reason of the present moment
and the mere trifle having become porous to thought
and bibulous of the sea of light.

Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and
literature looks like word-catching. The simplest
utterances are worthiest to be written, yet are they
so cheap and so things of course, that in the infinite
riches of the soul it is like gathering a few pebbles off
the ground, or bottling a little air in a phial, when
the whole earth and the whole atmosphere are ours.
The mere author in such society is like a pickpocket
among gentlemen, who has come in to steal <a gold
button or a pin. Nothing can pass there, or make
you one of the circle, but the casting aside your trap
pings and dealing man to man in naked truth, plain
confession and omniscient affirmation.

Souls such as these treat you as gods would, walk
as gods in the earth, accepting without any admira
tion your wit, your bounty, your virtue even, say
rather your act of duty, for your virtue they own as
their proper blood, royal as themselves, and over-
royal, and the father of the gods. But what rebuke
their plain fraternal bearing casts on the mutual flat-

THE OVER-SOUL. 215

tery with which authors solace each other and wound
themselves ! These flatter not. I do not wonder
that these men go to see Cromwell and Christina and
Charles the II. and James I. and the Grand Turk.
For they are, in their own elevation, the fellows of
kings, and must feel the servile tone of conversation
in the world. They must always be a godsend to
princes, for they confront them, a king to a king,
without ducking or concession, and give a high
nature the refreshment and satisfaction of resistance,
of plain humanity, of even companionship and of new
ideas. They leave them wiser and superior men.
Souls like these make us feel that sincerity is more
excellent than flattery. Deal so plainly with man
and woman as to constrain the utmost sincerity and
destroy all hope of trifling with you. It is the high
est compliment you can pay. Their " highest prais
ing," said Milton, "is not flattery, and their plainest
advice is a kind of praising.1'

Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act
of the soul. The simplest person who in his integrity
worships God, becomes God ; yet for ever and ever
the influx of this better and universal self is new and
unsearchable. Ever it inspires awe and astonish
ment. How dear, how soothing to man, arises the
idea of God, peopling the lonely place, effacing the
scars of our mistakes and disappointments ! When
we have broken our god of tradition and ceased from
our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with
his presence. It is the doubling of the heart itself,
nay, the infinite enlargement of the heart with a power
of growth to a new infinity on every side. It inspires

216 THE OVER-SOUL.

in man an infallible trust. He has not the conviction,
but the sight, that the best is the true, and may in
that thought easily dismiss all particular uncertainties
and fears, and adjourn to the sure revelation of time
the solution of his private riddles. He is sure that
his welfare is dear to the heart of being. In the
presence of law to his mind he is overflowed with a
reliance so universal that it sweeps away all cherished
hopes and the most stable projects of mortal condi
tion in its flood. He believes that he cannot escape
from his good. The things that are really for thee
gravitate to thee. You are running to seek your
friend. Let your feet run, but your mind need not.
If you do not find him, will you not acquiesce that it
is best you should not find him ? for there is a power,
which as it is in you, is in him also, and could there
fore very well bring you together, if it were for the
best. You are preparing with eagerness to go and
render a service to which your talent and your taste
invite you, the love of men and the hope of fame.
Has it not occurred to you that you have no right to
go, unless you are equally willing to be prevented
from going? O, believe* as thou livest, that every
sound that is spoken over the round world, which
thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate on thine ear.
Every proverb, every book, every by-word that be
longs to thee for aid or comfort, shall surely come
home through open or winding passages. Every
friend whom not thy fantastic will but the great and
tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his
embrace. And this because the heart in thee is the
heart of all ; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersec-

THE OVER-SOUL. 217

tion is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls
uninterruptedly an endless circulation through all
men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and,
truly seen, its tide is one.

Let man then learn the revelation of all nature and
all thought to his heart; this, namely; that the High
est dwells with him ; that the sources of nature are in
his own mind, if the sentiment of duty is there. But
if he would know what the great God speaketh, he
must 'go into his closet and shut the door/.as Jesus
said. God will not make himself manifest to cow
ards. He must greatly listen to himself, withdraw
ing himself from all the accents of other men's devo
tion. Their prayers even are hurtful to him, until he
have made his own. Our religion vulgarly stands on
numbers of believers. Whenever the appeal is made,
— no matter how indirectly, — to numbers, proclama
tion is then and there made that religion is not. He
that finds God a sweet enveloping thought to him
never counts his company. When I sit in that pres
ence, who shall dare to come in? When I rest in
perfect humility, when I burn with pure love, what can
Calvin or Swedenborg say?

It makes no difference whether the appeal is to
numbers or to one. The faith that stands on
authority is not faith. The reliance on authority
measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of
the soul. The position men have given to Jesus,
now for many centuries of history, is 'a position of
authority. It characterizes themselves. It cannot
alter the eternal facts. Great is the soul, and plain.
It is no flatterer, it is no follower ; it never appeals

2i8 THE OVER-SOUL.

from itself. It always believes in itself. Before the
immense possibilities of man all mere experience,
all past biography, however spotless and sainted,
shrinks away. Before that holy heaven which our
presentiments foreshow us, we cannot easily praise
any form of life we have seen or read of. We
not only affirm that we have few great men, but,
absolutely speaking, that we have none; that we
have no history, no record of any character or mode
of living that entirely contents us. The saints and
demigods whom history worships we are constrained
to accept with a grain of allowance. Though in our
lonely hours we draw a new strength out of their
memory, yet, pressed on our attention, as they are by
the thoughtless and customary, they fatigue and in
vade. The soul gives itself, alone, original and
pure, to the Lonely, Original and Pure, who, on that
condition, gladly inhabits, leads and speaks through
it. Then is it glad, young and nimble. It is not
wise, but it sees through all things. It is not called
religious, but it is innocent. It calls, the light its
own, and feels that the grass grows and the stone
falls by a law inferior to, and dependent on, its
nature. Behold, it saith, I am born into the great,
the universal mind. I, the imperfect, adore my own
Perfect. I am somehow receptive of the great soul,
and thereby I do overlook the sun and the stars and
feel them to be but the fair accidents and effects
which change" and pass. More and more the surges
of everlasting nature enter into me, and I become
public and human in my regards and actions. So
come I to live in thoughts and act with energies

THE OVER-SOUL. 219

which are immortal. Thus revering the soul, and
learning, as the ancients said, that "its beauty is
immense," man will come to see that the world is the
perennial miracle which the soul worketh, and be
less astonished at particular wonders ; he will learn
that there is no profane history ; that all history is
sacred ; that the universe is represented in an atom,
in a moment of time. He will weave no longer a
spotted life of shreds and patches, but he will live
with a divine unity. He will cease from what is base
and frivolous in his own life and be content with all
places and any service he can render. He will calmly
front the morrow in the negligency of that trust which
carries God with it and so hath already the whole
future in the bottom of the heart.

ESSAY X.

CIRCLES.

THE eye is the first circle ; the horizon which it
forms is the second ; and throughout nature this
primary picture is repeated without end. It is the
highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St.
Augustine described the nature of God as a circle
whose centre was everywhere and its circumference
nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious
sense of this first of forms. One moral we have
already deduced in considering the circular or com
pensatory character of every human action. Another
analogy we shall now trace, that every action admits
of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to
the truth that around every circle another can be
drawn ; that there is no end in nature, but every end
is a beginning; that there is always another dawn
risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower
deep opens.

This fact, as far as it symbolizes the moral fact of
the Unattainable, the flying Perfect, around which
the hands of man can never meet, at once the inspirer
and the condemner of every success, may conveniently
serve us to connect many illustrations of human power
in every department.

CIRCLES. 221

There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is
fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of
degrees. Our globe seen by God is a transparent
law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the fact
and holds it fluid. Our culture is the predominance
of an idea which draws after it all this train of cities
and institutions. Let us rise into another idea; they
will disappear. The Greek sculpture is all melted
away, as if it had been statues of ice : here and there
a solitary figure or fragment remaining, as we see
flecks and scraps of snow left in cold dells and moun
tain clefts in June and July. For the genius that
created it creates now somewhat else. The Greek
letters last a little longer, but are already passing
under the same sentence and tumbling into the inevi
table pit which the creation of new thought opens for
all that is old. The new continents are built out of
the ruins of an old planet ; the new races fed out of the
decomposition of the foregoing. New arts destroy
the old. See the investment of capital in aqueducts,
made useless by hydraulics ; fortifications, by gun
powder; roads and canals, by railways; sails, by
steam ; steam, by electricity.

You admire this tower of granite, weathering the
hurts of so many ages. Yet a little waving hand
built this huge wall, and that which builds is better
than that which is built. The hand that built can
topple it down much faster. Better than the hand
and nimbler was the invisible thought which wrought
through it ; and thus ever, behind the coarse effect,
is a fine cause, which, being narrowly seen, is itself
the effect of a finer cause. Every thing looks perma-

222 CIRCLES.

nent until its secret is known. A rich estate appears
to women and children a firm and lasting fact ; to a
merchant, one easily created out of any materials, and
easily lost. An orchard, good tillage, good grounds,
seem a fixture, like a gold mine, or a river, to a citi
zen ; but to a large farmer, not much more fixed than
the state of the crop. Nature looks provokingly
stable and secular, but it has a cause like all the rest ;
and when once I comprehend that, will these fields
stretch so immovably wide, these leaves hang so
individually considerable? Permanence is a word of
degrees. Every thing is medial. Moons are no
more bounds to spiritual power than bat-balls.

The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and
defying though he look, he has a helm which he
obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are
classified. He can only be reformed by showing him
a new idea which commands his own. The life of
man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring
imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to
new and larger circles, and that without end. The
extent to which this generation of circles, wheel with
out wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of
the individual soul. For it is the inert effort of each
thought, having formed itself into a circular wave of
circumstance, as for instance an empire, rules of an
art, a local usage, a religious rite, to heap itself on
that ridge and to solidify and hem in the life. But
if the soul is quick and strong it bursts over that
boundary on all sides and expands another orbit on
the great deep, which also runs up into a high wave,
with attempt again to stop and to bind. But the

CIRCLES. 223

heart refuses to be imprisoned ; in its first and nar
rowest pulses it already tends outward with a vast
force and to immense and innumerable expansions.

Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series.
Every general law only a particular fact of some more
general law presently to disclose itself. There is no
outside, no inclosing wall, no circumference to us.
The man finishes his story, — how good ! how final !
how it puts a new face on all things ! He fills the
sky. Lo, on the other side rises also a man and
draws a circle around the circle we had just pro
nounced the outline of the sphere. Then already is
our first speaker not man, but only a first speaker.
His only redress is forthwith to draw a circle outside
of his antagonist. And so men do by themselves.
The result of to-day, which haunts the mind and can
not be escaped, will presently be abridged into a
word, and the principle that seemed to explain nature
will itself be included as one example of a bolder
generalization. In the thought of to-morrow there is
a power to upheave all thy creed, all the creeds, all
the literatures of the nations, and marshal thee to a
heaven which no epic dream has yet depicted. Every
man is not so much a workman in the world as he is
a suggestion of that he should be. Men walk as
prophecies of the next age.

Step by step we scale this mysterious ladder ; the
steps are actions, the new prospect is power. Every
several result is threatened and judged by that which
follows. Every one seems to be contradicted by the
new ; it is only limited by the new. The new state
ment is always hated by the old, and, to those dwell-

224 CIRCLES.

ing in the old, comes like an abyss of scepticism.
But the eye soon gets wonted to it, for the eye and it
are effects of one cause ; then its innocency and
benefit appear, and presently, all its energy spent, it
pales and dwindles before the revelation of the new
hour.

Fear not the new generalization. Does the fact
look crass and material, threatening to degrade thy
theory of spirit? Resist it not; it goes to refine
and raise thy theory of matter just as much.

There are no fixtures to men, if we appeal to con
sciousness. Every man supposes himself not to be
fully understood ; and if there is any truth in him, if
he rests at last on the divine soul, I see not how it
can be otherwise. The last chamber, the last closet,
he must feel was never opened ; there is always a
residuum unknown, unanalyzable. That is, every
man believes that he has a greater possibility.

Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day
I am full of thoughts and can write what I please.
I see no reason why I should not have the same
thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow.
What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most
natural thing in the world : but yesterday I saw a
dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see
so much ; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall
wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous
pages. Alas for this infirm faith, this will not
strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am God
in nature ; I am a weed by the wall.

The continual effort to raise himself above him
self, to work a pitch above his last height, betrays

CIRCLES. 225

itself in a man's relations. We thirst for approba
tion, yet cannot forgive the approver. The sweet
of nature is love ; yet if I have a friend I am tor
mented by my imperfections. The love of me ac
cuses the other party. If he were high enough to
slight me, then could I love him, and rise by my
affection to new heights. A man's growth is seen
in the successive choirs of his friends. For every
friend whom he loses for truth, he gains a better.
I thought as I walked in the woods and mused on
my friends, why should I play with them this game
of idolatry? I know and see too well, when not
voluntarily blind, the speedy limits of persons called
high and worthy. Rich, noble and great they are
by the liberality of our speech, but truth is sad. O
blessed Spirit, whom I forsake for these, they are
not thee ! Every personal consideration that we
allow costs us heavenly state. We sell the thrones
of angels for a short and turbulent pleasure.

How often must we learn this lesson ? Men cease
to interest us when we find their limitations. The
only sin is limitation. As soon as you once come up
with a man's limitations, it is all over with him.
Has he talents? has he enterprises? has he knowl
edge? It boots not. Infinitely alluring and attrac
tive was he to you yesterday, a great hope, a sea to
swim in ; now, you have found his shores, found it a
pond, and you care not if you never see it again.

Each new step we take in thought reconciles
twenty seemingly discordant facts, as expressions of
one law. Aristotle and Plato are reckoned the re
spective heads of two schools. A wise man will see

226 CIRCLES.

that Aristotle Platonizes. By going one step farther
back in thought, discordant opinions are reconciled
by being seen to be* two extremes of one principle,
and we can never go so far back as to preclude a still
higher vision.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker
on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is
as when a conflagration has broken out in a great
city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will
end. There is not a piece of science but its flank
may be turned to-morrow; there is not any literary
reputation, not the so-called eternal names of fame,
that may not be revised and condemned. The very
hopes of man, the thoughts of his heart, the religion
of nations, the manners and morals of mankind are
all at the mercy of a new generalization. Generaliza
tion is always a new influx of the divinity into the
mind. Hence the thrill that attends it.

Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so
that a man cannot have his flank turned, cannot be
out-generalled, but put him where you will, he stands.
This can only be by his preferring truth to his past
apprehension of truth, and his alert acceptance of it
from whatever quarter; the intrepid conviction that
his laws, his relations to society, his Christianity, his
world, may at any time be superseded and decease.

There are degrees in idealism. We learn first to
play with it academically, as the magnet was once a
toy. Then we see in the heyday of youth and poetry
that it may be true, that it is true in gleams and
fragments. Then, its countenance waxes stern and
grand, and we see that it must be true. It now

CIRCLES. 227

shows itself ethical and practical. We learn that
God is ; that he is in me ; and that all things are
shadows of him. The idealism of Berkeley is only a
crude statement of the idealism of Jesus, and that
again is a crude statement of the fact that all nature is
the rapid efflux of goodness executing and organizing
itself. Much more obviously is history and the state of
the world at any one time directly dependent on the
intellectual classification then existing in the minds of
men. The things which are dear to men at this
hour are so on account of the ideas which have
emerged on their mental horizon, and which cause
the present order of things, as a tree bears its apples.
A new degree of culture would instantly revolutionize
the entire system of human pursuits.

Conversation is a game of circles. In conversa
tion we pluck up the termini which bound the com
mon of silence on every side. The parties are not
to be judged by the spirit they partake and even
express under this Pentecost. To-morrow they will
have receded from this high-water mark. To-mor
row you shall find them stooping under the old
pack-saddles. Yet let us enjoy the cloven flame
whilst it glows on our walls. When each new
speaker strikes a new light, emancipates us from
the oppression of the last speaker to oppress us with
the greatness and exclusiveness of his own thought,
then yields us to another redeemer, we seem to re
cover our rights, to become men. O, what truths
profound and executable only in ages and orbs, are
supposed in the announcement of every truth ! In
common hours, society sits cold and statuesque.

228 CIRCLES.

We all stand waiting, empty, — knowing, possibly,
that we can be full, surrounded by mighty symbols
which are not symbols to us, but prose and trivial
toys. Then cometh the god and converts the statues
into fiery men, and by a flash of his eye burns up the
veil which shrouded all things, and the meaning of
the very furniture, of cup and saucer, of chair and
clock and tester, is manifest. The facts which loomed
so large in the fogs of yesterday, — property, climate,
breeding, personal beauty and the like, have strangely
changed their proportions. All that we reckoned
settled shakes and rattles ; and literatures, cities,
climates, religions, leave their foundations and dance
before our eyes. And yet here again see the swift
circumscription ! Good as is discourse, silence is
better, and shames it. The length of the discourse
indicates the distance of thought betwixt the speaker
and the hearer. If they were at a perfect under
standing in any part, no wordswould.be necessary
thereon. If at one in all parts, no words would be
suffered .

Literature is a point outside of our hodiernal circle
through which a new one may be described. The
use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we
may command a view of our present life, a purchase
by which we may move it. We fill ourselves with
ancient learning, install ourselves the best we can in
Greek, in Punic, in Roman houses, only that we may
wiselier see French, English and American houses
and modes of living. In like manner we see litera
ture best from the midst of wild nature, or from the
din of affairs, or from a high religion. The field can-

CIRCLES. 229

not be well seen from within the field. The astrono
mer must have his diameter of the earth's orbit as a
base to find the parallax of any star.

Therefore we value the poet. All the argument
and all the wisdom is not in the encyclopaedia, or
the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body of Divinity,
but in the sonnet or the play. In my daily work I
incline to repeat my old steps, and do not believe in
remedial force, in the power of change and reform.
But some Petrarch or Ariosto, filled with the new
wine of his imagination, writes me an ode or a brisk
romance, full of daring thought and action. He
smites and arouses me with his shrill tones, breaks
up my -whole chain of habits, and I open my eye on
my own possibilities. He claps wings to the sides
of all the solid old lumber of the world, and I am
capable once more of choosing a straight path in
theory and practice.

We have the same need to command a view of the
religion of the world. We can never see Christianity
from the catechism : — from the pastures, from a boat
in the pond, from amidst the songs of wood-birds we
possibly may. Cleansed by the elemental light and
wind, steeped in the sea of beautiful forms which the
field offers us, we may chance to cast a right glance
back upon biography. Christianity is rightly dear to
the best of mankind ; yet was there never a young
philosopher whose breeding had fallen into the
Christian church by whom that brave text of Paul's
was not specially prized, *' Then shall also the Son
be subject unto Him who put all things under him,
that God may be all in all." Let the claims and

230 CIRCLES.

virtues of persons be never so great and welcome,
the instinct of man presses eagerly onward to the
impersonal and illimitable, and gladly arms itself
against the dogmatism of bigots with this generous
word out of the book itself.

The natural world may be conceived of as a system
of concentric circles, and we now and then detect in
nature slight dislocations which apprize us that this
surface on which we now stand is not fixed, but slid
ing. These manifold tenacious qualities, this chem
istry and vegetation, these metals and animals,
which seem to stand there for their own sake, are
means and methods only, are words of God, and as
fugitive as other words. Has the naturalist or
chemist learned his craft, who has explored the
gravity of atoms and the elective affinities, who has
not yet discerned the deeper law whereof this is only
a partial or approximate statement, namely that like
draws to like, and that the goods which belong to
you gravitate to you and need not be pursued with
pains and cost? Yet is that statement approximate
also, and not final. Omnipresence is a higher fact.
Not through subtle subterranean channels need friend
and fact be drawn to their counterpart, but, rightly
considered, these things proceed from the eternal
generation of the soul. Cause- and effect are two
sides of one fact.

The same law of eternal procession ranges all
that we call the virtues, and extinguishes each in the
light of a better. The great man will not be prudent
in the popular sense ; all his prudence will be so
much deduction from his grandeur. But it behoves

CIRCLES. 231

each to see, when he sacrifices prudence, to what god
he devotes it ; if to ease and pleasure, he had better
be prudent still ; if to a great trust, he can well spare
his mule and panniers who has a winged chariot in
stead. Geoffrey draws on his boots to go through
the woods, that his feet may be safer from the bite of
snakes ; Aaron never thinks of such a peril. In
many years neither is harmed by such an accident.
Yet it seems to me that with every precaution you
take against such an evil you put yourself into the
power of the evil. I suppose that the highest pru
dence is the lowest prudence. Is this too sudden a
rushing from the centre to the verge of our orbit ?
Think how many times we shall fall back into pitiful
calculations before we take up our rest in the great
sentiment, or make the verge of to-day the new cen
tre. Besides, your bravest sentiment is familiar to
the humblest men. The poor and the low have
their way of expressing the last facts of philosophy
as well as you. "Blessed be nothing" and "The
worse things are, the better they are" are proverbs
which express the transcendentalism of common life.
One man's justice is another's injustice ; one
man's beauty another's ugliness ; one man's wisdom
another's folly ; as one beholds the same objects
from a higher point of view. One man thinks jus
tice consists in paying debts, and has no measure in
his abhorrence of another who is very remiss in this
duty and makes the creditor wait tediously. But
that second man has his own way of looking at
things ; asks himself which debt must I pay first,
the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor? the

232 CIRCLES.

debt of money, or the debt of thought to mankind,
of genius to nature? For you, O broker, there is no
no other principle but arithmetic. For me, commerce
is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of char
acter, the aspiration of man, these are sacred ; nor
can I detach one duty, like you, from all other
duties, and concentrate my forces mechanically on
the payment of moneys. Let me live onward ; you
shall find that, though slower, the progress of my
character will liquidate all these debts without in
justice to higher claims. If a man should dedicate
himself to the payment of notes, would not this be
injustice? Owes he no debt but money? And
are all claims on him to be postponed to a land
lord's or a banker's?

There is no virtue which is final ; all are initial.
The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The
terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast
away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed
such, into the same pit that has consumed our
grosser vices.

Forgive his crimes, forgive his virtues too,
Those smaller faults, half converts to the right.

It is the highest power of divine moments that
they abolish our contritions also. I accuse myself
of sloth and unprofitableness day by day ; but when
these waves of God flow into me I no longer reckon
lost time. I no longer poorly compute my possible
achievement by what remains to me of the month
or the year ; for these moments confer a sort of
omnipresence and omnipotence which asks nothing

CIRCLES. 233

of duration, but sees that the energy of the mind
is commensurate with the work to be done, without
time.

And thus, O circular philosopher, I hear some
reader exclaim, you have arrived at a fine pyr-
rhonism, at an equivalence and indifferency of all
actions, and would fain teach us that if we are true,
forsooth, our crimes may be lively stones out of
which we shall construct the temple of the true
God.

I am not careful to justify myself. I own I am
gladdened by seeing the predominance of the sac
charine principle throughout vegetable nature, and
not less by beholding in morals that unrestrained
inundation of the principle of good into every chink
and hole that selfishness has left open, yea into self
ishness and sin itself; so that no evil is pure, nor
hell itself without its extreme satisfactions. But
lest I should mislead any when I have my own head
and obey my whims, let me remind the reader that
I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least
value on what I do, or the least discredit on what
I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as
true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are
to me sacred ; none are profane ; I simply experi
ment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.

Yet this incessant movement and progression
which all things partake could never become sensi
ble to us but by contrast to some principle of fix
ture or stability in the soul. Whilst the eternal
generation of circles proceeds, the eternal generator
abides. That central life is somewhat superior to

234 CIRCLES.

creation, superior to knowledge and thought, and
contains all its circles. For ever it labors to create
a life and thought as large and excellent as itself;
but in vain ; for that which is made instructs how to
make a better.

Thus there is no sleep, no pause, no preservation,
but all things renew, germinate and spring. Why
should we import rags and relics into the new hour?
Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only
disease : all others run into this one. We call it by
many names, — fever, intemperance, insanity, stupid
ity and crime : they are all forms of old age : they
are rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia; not
newness, not the way onward. We grizzle every
day. I see no need of it. Whilst we converse
with what is above us, we do not grow old, but grow
young. Infancy, youth, receptive, aspiring, with
religious eye looking upward, counts itself nothing
and abandons itself to the instruction flowing from
all sides. But the man and woman of seventy as
sume to know all ; throw up their hope ; renounce
aspiration; accept the actual for the necessary and
talk down to the young. Let them then become
organs of the Holy Ghost ; let them be lovers ; let
them behold truth ; and their eyes are uplifted, their
wrinkles smoothed, they are perfumed again with hope
and power. This old age ought not to creep on a
human mind. In nature every moment is new; the
past is always swallowed and forgotten ; the coming
only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transi
tion, the energizing spirit. No love can be bound
by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher

CIRCLES. 235

love. No truth so sublime but it may be trivial
to-morrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish
to be settled : only as far as they are unsettled is
there any hope for them.

Life is a series of surprises. We do not guess to
day the mood, the pleasure, the power of to-morrow,
when we are building up our being. Of lower
states, — of acts of routine and sense, we can tell
somewhat, but the masterpieces of God, the total
growths and universal movements of the soul, he
hideth ; they are incalculable. I can know that
truth is divine and helpful ; but how it shall help
me I can have no guess, for so to be is the sole in
let of so to know. The new position of the advanc
ing man has all the powers of the old, yet has them
all new. It carries in its bosom all the energies of
the past, yet is itself an exhalation of the morning.
I cast away in this new moment all my once hoarded
knowledge, as vacant and vain. Now for the first
time seem I to know any thing rightly. The sim
plest words, — we do not know what they mean
except when we love and aspire.

The difference between talents and character is
adroitness to keep the old and trodden round, and
power and courage to make a new road to new and
better goals. Character makes an overpowering
present, a cheerful, determined hour, which fortifies
all the company by making them see that much is
possible and excellent that was not thought of.
Character dulls the impression of particular events.
When we see the conqueror we do not think much
of any one battle or success. We see that we had

236 CIRCLES.

exaggerated the difficulty. It was easy to him.
The great man is not convulsible or tormentable.
He is so much that events pass over him without
much impression. People say sometimes, ' See what
I have overcome ; see how cheerful I am ; see how
completely I have triumphed over these black events.1
Not if they still remind me of the black event, —
they have not yet conquered. Is it conquest to be a
gay and decorated sepulchre, or a half-crazed widow,
hysterically laughing? True conquest is the causing
the black event to fade and disappear as an early
cloud of insignificant result in a history so large and
advancing.

The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire
is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our pro
priety, to lose our sempiternal memory and to do
something without knowing how or why ; in short
to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever
achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is
wonderful. It is by abandonment. The great mo
ments of history are the facilities of performance
through the strength of ideas, as the works of genius
and religion. "A man," said Oliver Cromwell,
" never rises so high as when he knows not whither
he is going." Dreams and drunkenness, the use of
opium and alcohol are the semblance and counter
feit of this oracular genius, and hence their danger
ous attraction for men. For the like reason they
ask the aid of wild passions, as in gaming and war,
to ape in some manner these flames and generosities
of the heart.

ESSAY XI.

INTELLECT.

EVERY substance is negatively electric to that which
stands above it in the chemical tables, positively to
that which stands below it. Water dissolves wood
and iron and salt; air dissolves water; electric fire
dissolves air, but the intellect dissolves fire, gravity,
laws, method, and the subtlest unnamed relations of
nature in its resistless menstruum. Intellect lies
behind genius, which is intellect constructive. Intel
lect is the simple power anterior to all action or con
struction. Gladly would I unfold in calm degrees a
natural history of the intellect, but what man has yet
been able to mark the steps and boundaries of that
transparent essence ? The first questions are always
to be asked, and the wisest doctor is gravelled by the
inquisitiveness of a child. How can we speak of the
action of the mind under any divisions, as of its
knowledge, of its ethics, of its works, and so forth,
since it melts will into perception, knowledge into
act? Each becomes the other. Itself alone is. Its
vision is not like the vision of the eye, but is union
with the things known.

Intellect and intellection signify to the common ear
consideration of abstract truth. The considerations

237

238 INTELLECT.

of time and place, of you and me, of profit and hurt
tyrannize over most men's minds. Intellect separates
the fact considered, from you, from all local and per
sonal reference, and discerns it as if it existed for its
own sake. Heraclitus looked upon the affections as
dense and colored mists. In the fog of good and
evil affections it is hard for man to walk forward in a
straight line. Intellect is void of affection and sees
an object as it stands in the light of science, cool and
disengaged. The intellect goes out of the individual,
floats over its own personality, and regards it as a
fact, and not as /and mine. He who is immersed in
what concerns person or place cannot see the prob
lem of existence. This the intellect always ponders.
Nature shows all things formed and bound. The
intellect pierces the form, overleaps the wall, detects
intrinsic likeness between remote things and reduces
all things into a few principles.

The making a fact the subject of thought raises it.
All that mass of mental and moral phenomena which
we do not make objects of voluntary thought, come
within the power of fortune ; they constitute the cir
cumstance of daily life ; they are subject to change, to
fear and hope. Every man beholds his human con
dition with a degree of melancholy. As a ship
aground is battered by the waves, so man, imprisoned
in mortal life, lies open to the mercy of coming
events. But a truth, separated by the intellect, is no
longer a subject of destiny. We behold it as a god
upraised above care and fear. And so any fact in our
life, or any record of our fancies or reflections, disen
tangled from the web of our unconsciousness, becomes

INTELLECT. 239

an object impersonal and immortal. It is the past
restored, but embalmed. A better art than that of
Egypt has taken fear and corruption out of it. It is
eviscerated of care. It is offered for science. What
is addressed to us for contemplation does not threaten
us but makes us intellectual beings.

The growth of the intellect is spontaneous in every
step. The mind that grows could not predict the
times, the means, the mode of that spontaneity. God
enters by a private door into every individual. Long
prior to the age of reflection is the thinking of the
mind. Out of darkness it came insensibly into the
marvellous light of to-day. In the period of infancy
it accepted and disposed of all impressions from the
surrounding creation after its own way. Whatever
any mind doth or saith is after a law. It has no ran
dom act or word. And this native law remains over
it after it has come to reflection or conscious thought.
Over it always reigned a firm law. In the most worn,
pedantic, introverted self-tormentor's life, the greatest
part is incalculable by him, unforeseen, unimaginable,
and must be, until he can take himself up by his own
ears. What am I? What has my will done to make
me that I am? Nothing. I have been floated into.
this thought, this hour, this connection of events, by
might and mind sublime, and my ingenuity and wil-
fulness have not thwarted, have not aided to an ap
preciable degree.

Our spontaneous action is always the best. You
cannot with your best deliberation and heed come so
close to any question as your spontaneous glance shall
bring you, whilst you rise from your bed, or walk

240 INTELLECT.

abroad in the morning after meditating the matter
before sleep on the previous night. Always our
thinking is a pious reception. Our truth of thought
is therefore vitiated as much by too violent direction
given by our will, as by too great negligence. We
do not determine what we will think. We only open
our senses, clear away as we can all obstruction from
the fact, and suffer the intellect to see. We have
little control over our thoughts. We are the prisoners
of ideas. They catch us up for moments into their
heaven and so fully engage us that we take no thought
for the morrow, gaze like children, without an effort
to make them our own. By-and-by we fall out of
that rapture, bethink us where we have been, what
we have seen, and repeat as truly as we can what we
have beheld. As far as we can recall these ecstasies
we carry away in the effaceable memory the result,
and all men and all the ages confirm it. It is called
Truth. But the moment we cease to report and
attempt to correct and contrive, it is not truth.

If we consider what persons have stimulated and
profited us, we shall perceive the superiority of the
spontaneous or intuitive principle over the arithmeti
cal or logical. The first always contains the second,
but virtual and latent. We want in every man a long
logic ; we cannot pardon the absence of it, but it must
not be spoken. Logic is the procession or propor
tionate unfolding of the intuition ; but its virtue is as
silent method ; the moment it would appear as propo
sitions and have a separate value, it is worthless.

In every man's mind, some images, words and
facts remain, without effort on his part to imprint

INTELLECT. 241

them, which others forget, and afterwards these illus
trate to him important laws. All our progress is an
unfolding, like the vegetable bud. You have first an
instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the
plant has root, bud and fruit. Trust the instinct to
the end, though you can render no reason. It is
vain to hurry it. By trusting it to the end, it shall
ripen into truth and you shall know why you believe.

Each mind has its own method. A true man never
acquires after college rules. What you have aggre
gated in a natural manner surprises and delights
when it is produced. For we cannot oversee each
others secret. And hence the differences between
men in natural endowment are insignificant in com
parison with their common wealth. Do you think
the porter and the cook have no anecdotes, no ex
periences, no wonders for you? Everybody knows
as much as the savant. The walls of rude minds are
scrawled all over with facts, with thoughts. They
shall one day bring a lantern and read the inscrip
tions. Every man, in the degree in which he has
wit and culture, finds his curiosity inflamed concern
ing the modes of living and thinking of other men,
and especially of those classes whose minds have not
been subdued by the drill of school education.

This instinctive action never ceases in a healthy
mind, but becomes richer and more frequent in its
informations through all states of culture. At last
comes the era of reflection, when we not only ob
serve, but take pains to observe ; when we of set
purpose sit down to consider an abstract truth ; when
we keep the mind's eye open whilst we converse,

242 INTELLECT.

whilst we read, whilst we act, intent to learn the
secret law of some class of facts.

What is the hardest task in the world? To think.
I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye
an abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench and with
draw on this side and on that. I seem to know what
he meant who said, No man can see God face to face
and live. For example, a man explores the basis of
civil government. Let him intend his mind without
respite, without rest, in one direction. His best heed
long time avails him nothing. Yet thoughts are flit
ting before him. We all but apprehend, we dimly
forebode the truth. We say, I will walk abroad, and
the truth will take form and clearness to me. We go
forth, but cannot find it. It seems as if we needed
only the stillness and composed attitude of the
library to seize the thought. But we come in, and
are as far from it as at first. Then, in a moment,
and unannounced, the truth appears. A certain
wandering light appears, and is the distinction, the
principle, we wanted. But the oracle comes because
we had previously laid siege to the shrine. It seems
as if the law of the intellect resembled that law of
nature by which we now inspire, now expire the
breath ; by which the heart now draws in, then hurls
out the blood, — the law of undulation. So now you
must labor with your brains, and now you must for
bear your activity and see what the great Soul
showeth.

Our intellections are mainly prospective. The
immortality of man is as legitimately preached from
the intellections as from the moral volitions. Every

INTELLECT. 243

intellection is mainly prospective. Its present value
is its least. Inspect what delights you in Plutarch,
in Shakspeare, in Cervantes. Each truth that a
writer acquires is a lantern which he instantly turns
full on what facts and thoughts lay already in his
mind, and behold, all the mats and rubbish which
had littered his garret become precious. Every
trivial fact in his private biography becomes an illus
tration of this new principle, revisits the day, and de
lights all men by its piquancy and new charm. Men
say, where did he get this ? and think there was
something divine in his life. But no ; they have
myriads of facts just as good, would they only get a
lamp to ransack their attics withal.

We are all wise. The difference between persons
is not in wisdom but in art. I knew, in an academ
ical club, a person who always deferred to me, who,
seeing my whim for writing, fancied that my ex
periences had somewhat superior ; whilst I saw that
his experiences were as good as mine. Give them to
me and I would make the same use of them. He
held the old ; he holds the new ; I had the habit of
tacking together the old and*the new which he did
not use to exercise. This may hold in the great
examples. Perhaps, if we should meet Shakspeare
we should not be conscious of any steep inferiority ;
no, but of a great equality, — only that he possessed a
strange skill of using, of classifying his facts, which
we lacked. For notwithstanding our utter incapacity
to produce anything like Hamlet and Othello, see the
perfect reception this wit and immense knowledge of
life and liquid eloquence find in us all.

244 INTELLECT.

If you gather apples in the sunshine, or make hay,
or hoe corn, and then retire within doors and shut
your eyes and press them with your hand, you shall
still see apples hanging in the bright light with
boughs and leaves thereto, or the tasselled grass, or
the corn-flags, and this for five or six hours after
wards. There lie the impressions on the retentive
organ, though you knew it not. So lies the whole
series of natural images with which your life has made
you acquainted, in your memory, though you know it
not, and a thrill of passion flashes light on their dark
chamber, and the active power seizes instantly the fit
image, as the word of its momentary thought.

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our
history, we are sure, is quite tame. We have noth
ing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years
still run back to the despised recollections of child
hood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful
article out of that pond ; until by-and-by we begin to
suspect that the biography of the one foolish person
we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature
paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal
History. •

In the intellect constructive, which we popularly
designate by the word Genius, we observe the same
balance of two elements as in intellect receptive.
The constructive intellect produces thoughts, sen
tences, poems, plans, designs, systems. It is the
generation of the mind, the marriage of thought with
nature. To genius must always go two gifts, the
thought and the publication. The first is revelation,
always a miracle, which no frequency of occurrence

INTELLECT. 245

or incessant study can ever familiarize, but which
must always leave the inquirer stupid with wonder.
It is the advent of truth into the world, a form of
thought now for the first time bursting into the uni
verse, a child of the old eternal soul, a piece of gen
uine and immeasurable greatness. It seems, for the
time, to inherit all that has yet existed and to dictate
to the unborn. It affects every thought of man and goes
to fashion every institution. But to make it available
it needs a vehicle or art by which it is conveyed to
men. To be communicable it must become picture
or sensible object. We must learn the language of
facts. The most wonderful inspirations die with
their subject if he has no hand to paint them to the
senses. The ray of light passes invisible through
space and only when it falls on an object is it seen.
When the spiritual energy is directed on something
outward, then is it a thought. The relation between
it and you first makes you, the value of you, appar
ent to me. The rich inventive genius of the painter
must be smothered and lost for want of the power of
drawing, and in our happy hours we should be inex
haustible poets if once we could break through the
silence into adequate rhyme. As all men have some
access to primary truth, so all have some art or
power of communication in their head, but only
in the artist does it descend into the hand. There
is an inequality, whose laws we do not yet know,
between two men and between two moments of
the same man, in respect to this faculty. In common
hours we have the same facts as in the uncommon or
inspired, but they do not sit for their portraits ; they

246 INTELLECT.

are not detached, but lie in a web. The thought
of genius is spontaneous ; but the power of picture or
expression, in the most enriched and flowing nature,
implies a mixture of will, a certain control over the
spontaneous states, without which no production is
possible. It is a conversion of all nature into the
rhetoric of thought, under the eye of judgment, with
a strenuous exercise of choice. And yet the imagina
tive vocabulary seems to be spontaneous also. It
does not flow from experience only or mainly, but
from a richer source. Not by any conscious imita
tion of particular forms are the grand strokes of the
painter executed, but by repairing to the fountain-
head of all forms in his mind. Who is the first
drawing-master? Without instruction we know very
well the ideal of the human form. A child knows if
an arm or a leg be distorted in a picture ; if the atti
tude be natural or grand or mean ; though he has
never received any instruction in drawing or heard
any conversation on the subject, nor can himself draw
with correctness a single feature. A good form strikes
all eyes pleasantly, long before they have any science
on the subject, and a beautiful face sets twenty hearts
in palpitation, prior to all consideration of the
mechanical proportions of the features and head.
We may owe to dreams some light on the fountain
of this skill ; for as soon as we let our will go and let
the unconscious states ensue, see what cunning
draughtsmen we are! We entertain ourselves with
wonderful forms of men, of women, of animals, of
gardens, of woods and of monsters, and the mystic
pencil wherewith we then draw has no awkwardness

INTELLECT. 247

or inexperience, no meagreness or poverty ; it can
design well and group well; its composition is full
of art, its colors are well laid on and the whole can
vas which it paints is life-like and apt to touch us
with terror, with tenderness, with desire and with
grief. Neither are the artist's copies from experience
ever mere copies, but always touched and softened
by tints from this ideal domain.

The conditions essential to a constructive mind do
not appear to be so often combined but that a good
sentence or verse remains fresh and memorable for
a long time. Yet when we write with ease and
come out into the free air of thought, we seem to be
assured that nothing is easier than to continue this
communication at pleasure. Up, down, around, the
kingdom of thought has no enclosures, but the Muse
makes us free of her city. Well, the world has a
million writers. One would think then that good
thought would be as familiar as air and water, and
the gifts of each new hour would exclude the last.
Yet we can count all our good books ; nay, I remem
ber any beautiful verse for twenty years. It is true
that the discerning intellect of the world is always
greatly in advance of the creative, so that there are
many competent judges of the best book, and few
writers of the best books. But some of the condi
tions of intellectual construction are of rare oc
currence. The intellect is a whole and demands
integrity in every work. This is resisted equally by
a man's devotion to a single thought and by his
ambition to combine too many.

Truth is our element of life, yet if a man fasten

248 INTELLECT.

his attention on a single aspect of truth and apply
himself to that alone for a long time, the truth be
comes distorted and not itself but falsehood ; herein
resembling the air, which is our natural element and
the breath of our nostrils, but if a stream of the
same be directed on the body for a time, it causes
cold, fever, and even death. How wearisome the
grammarian, the phrenologist, the political or re
ligious fanatic, or indeed any possessed mortal whost
balance is lost by the exaggeration of a single topic.
It is incipient insanity. Every thought is a prison
also. I cannot see what you see, because I am
caught up by a strong wind and blown so far in one
direction that I am out of the hoop of your horizon.

Is it any better if the student, to avoid this offence
and to liberalize himself, aims to make a mechanical
whole of history, or science, or philosophy, by a
numerical addition of all the facts that fall within his
vision? The world refuses to be analyzed by addi
tion and subtraction. When we are young we spend
much time and pains in filling our note-books with
all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics,
Art, in the hope that in the course of a few years we
shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net
value of all the theories at which the world has yet
arrived. But year after year our tables get no com
pleteness, and at last we discover that our curve is a
parabola, whose arcs will never meet.

Neither by detachment, neither by aggregation is
the integrity of the intellect transmitted to its works,
but by a vigilance which brings the intellect in its
greatness and best state to operate every moment.

INTELLECT. 249

It must have the same wholeness which nature has.
Although no diligence can rebuild the universe in a
model by the best accumulation or disposition of
details, yet does the world reappear in miniature in
every event, so that all the laws of nature may be
read in the smallest fact. The intellect must have
the like perfection in its apprehension and in its
works. For this reason, an index or mercury of
intellectual proficiency is the perception of identity.
We talk with accomplished persons who appear to
be strangers in nature. The cloud, the tree, the
turf, the bird, are not theirs, have nothing of them ;
the world is only their lodging and table. But the
poet, whose verses are to be spheral and complete,
is one whom nature cannot deceive, whatsoever face
of strangeness she may put on. He feels a strict
consanguinity, and detects more likeness than variety
in all her changes. We are stung by the desire for
new thought, but when we receive a new thought it
is only the old thought with a new face, and though
we make it our own we instantly crave another ; we
are not really enriched. For the truth was in us
before it was reflected to us from natural objects ;
and the profound genius will cast the likeness of all
creatures into every product of his wit.

But if the constructive powers are rare and it is
given to few men to be poets, yet every man is a
receiver of this descending holy ghost, and may well
study the laws of its influx. Exactly parallel is the
whole rule of intellectual duty to the rule of moral
duty. A self-denial no less austere than the saint's
is demanded of the scholar. He must worship truth,

250 INTELLECT.

and forego all things for that, and choose defeat and
pain, so that his treasure in thought is thereby aug
mented.

God offers to every mind its choice between truth
and repose. Take which you please, — you can never
have both. Between these, as a pendulum, man
oscillates. He in whom the. love of repose predomi
nates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy,
the first political party he meets, — most likely his
father's. He gets rest, commodity and reputation;
but he shuts the door of truth. He in whom the love
of truth predominates will keep himself aloof from all
moorings, and afloat. He will abstain from dog
matism, and recognize all the opposite negations
between which, as walls, his being is swung. He
submits to the inconvenience of suspense and imper
fect opinion, but he is a candidate for truth, as the
other is not, and respects the highest law of his
being.

The circle of the green earth he must measure with
his shoes to find the man who can yield him truth.
He shall then know that there is somewhat more
blessed and great in hearing than in speaking.
Happy is the hearing man : unhappy the speaking
man. As long as I hear truth I am bathed by a
beautiful element and am not conscious of any limits
to my nature. The suggestions are thousandfold
that I hear and see. The waters of the great deep
have ingress and egress to the soul. But if I speak,
I define, I confine and am less. When Socrates
speaks, Lysis and Menexenus are afflicted by no
shame that they do not speak. They also are good.

INTELLECT. 251

He likewise defers to them, loves them, whilst he
speaks. Because a true and natural man contains
and is the same truth which an eloquent man articu
lates : but in the eloquent man, because he can artic
ulate it, it seems something the less to reside, and he
turns to these silent beautiful with the more inclina
tion and respect. The ancient sentence said, Let us
be silent, for so are the gods. Silence is a solvent
that destroys personality, and gives us leave to be
great and universal. Every man's progress is through
a succession of teachers, each of whom seems at the
time to have a superlative influence, but it at last gives
place to a new. Frankly let him accept it all. Jesus
says, Leave father, mother, house and lands, and fol
low me. Who leaves all, receives more. This is as
true intellectually as morally. Each new mind we
approach seems to require an abdication of all our
past and present possessions. A new doctrine seems
at first a subversion of all our opinions, tastes, and
manner of living. Such has Swedenborg, such has
Kant, such has Coleridge, such has Cousin seemed
to many young men in this country. Take thankfully
and heartily all they can give. Exhaust them, wrestle
with them, let them not go until their blessing be
won, and after a short season the dismay will be over
past, the excess of influence withdrawn, and they will
be no longer an alarming meteor, but one more bright
star shining serenely in your heaven and blending its
light with all your day.

But whilst he gives himself up unreservedly to that
which draws him, because that is his own, he is, to
refuse himself to that which draws him not, whatso-

252 INTELLECT.

ever fame and authority may attend it, because it is
not his own. Entire self-reliance belongs to the intel
lect. One soul is a counterpoise of all souls, as a
capillary column of water is a balance for the sea. It
must treat things and books and sovereign genius as
itself also a sovereign. If yEschylus be that man he
is taken for, he has not yet done his office when he
has educated the learned of Europe for a thousand
years. He is now to approve himself a master of
delight to me also. If he cannot do that, all his fame
shall avail him nothing with me. I were a fool not
to sacrifice a thousand ^Eschyluses to my intellectual
integrity. Especially take the same ground in regard
to abstract truth, the science of the mind. The
Bacon, the Spinoza, the Hume, Schelling, Kant,
or whosoever propounds to you a philosophy of the
mind, is only a more or less awkward translator of
things in your consciousness which you have also
your way of seeing, perhaps of denominating. Say
then, instead of too timidly poring into his obscure
sense, that he has not succeeded in rendering back to
you your consciousness. He has not succeeded ;
now let another try. If Plato cannot, perhaps Spi
noza will. If Spinoza cannot, then perhaps Kant.
Any how, when at last it is done, you will find it is
no recondite, but a simple, natural, common state
which the writer restores to you.

But let us end these didactics. I will not, though
the subject might provoke it, speak to the open ques
tion between Truth and Love. I shall not presume
to interfere in the old politics of the skies; "The
cherubim know most ; the serauhim love most." The

INTELLECT. 253

gods shall settle their own quarrels. But I cannot
recite, even thus rudely, laws of the intellect, without
remembering that lofty and sequestered class who
have been its prophets and oracles, the highpriesthood
of the pure reason, the Trismegisti, the expounders
of the principles of thought from age to age. When
at long intervals we turn over their abstruse pages,
wonderful seems the calm and grand air of these few,
these great spiritual lords who have walked in the
world, — these of the old religion, — dwelling in a
worship which makes the sanctities of Christianity
\QQ\Lparvenues and popular; for "persuasion is in
soul, but necessity is in intellect.1" This band of
grandees, Hermes, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Plato, Plo-
tinus, Olympiodorus, Proclus, Synesius and the rest,
have somewhat so vast in their logic, so primary in
their thinking, that it seems antecedent to all the ordi
nary distinctions of rhetoric and literature, and to be
at once poetry and music and dancing and astronomy
and mathematics. I am present at the sowing of
the seed of the world. With a geometry of sunbeams
the soul lays the foundations of nature. The truth
and grandeur of their thought is proved by its scope
and applicability, for it commands the entire schedule
and inventory of things for its illustration. But what
marks its elevation and has even a comic look to us,
is the innocent serenity with which these babe-like
Jupiters sit in their clouds, and from age to age
prattle to each other and to no contemporary. Well
assured that their speech is intelligible and the most
natural thing in the world, they add thesis to thesis,
without a moment's heed of the universal astonish-

254 INTELLECT.

ment of the human race below, who do not compre
hend their plainest argument ; nor do they ever relent
so much as to insert a popular or explaining sentence,
nor testify the least displeasure or petulance at the
dulness of their amazed auditory. The angels are so
enamored of the language that is spoken in heaven
that they will not distort their lips with the hissing
and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own,
whether there be any who understand it or not.

ESSAY XII,

ART.

BECAUSE the soul is progressive, it never quite
repeats itself, but in every act attempts the produc
tion of a new and fairer whole. This appears in
works both of the useful and fine arts, if we employ
the popular distinction of works according to their
aim either at use or beauty. Thus in our fine arts,
n/)t imitation but creation is the aim. In landscapes
the painter should give the suggestion of a fairer
creation than we know. The details, the prose of
nature he should omit and give us only the spirit
and splendor. He should know that the landscape
has beauty for his eye because it expresses a thought
which is to him good : and this because the same
power which sees through his eyes is seen in that
spectacle ; and he will come to value the expression
of nature and not nature itself, and so exalt in his
copy the features that please him. He will give the
gloom of gloom and the sunshine of sunshine. In
a portrait he must inscribe the character and not the
features, and must esteem the man who sits to him
as himself only an imperfect picture or likeness of the
aspiring original within.

What is that abridgement and selection we ob-

255

256 ART.

serve in all spiritual activity, but itself the creative
impulse? for it is the inlet of that higher illumina
tion which teaches to convey a larger sense by
simpler symbols. What is a man but nature's finer
success in self-explication? What is a man but
a finer and compacter landscape than the horizon
figures ; nature's eclecticism? and what is his speech,
his love of painting, love of nature, but a still finer
success? all the weary miles and tons of space and
bulk left out, and the spirit or moral of it contracted
into a musical word, or the most cunning stroke of
the pencil?

But the artist must employ the symbols in use in
his day and nation to convey his enlarged sense to
his fellow-men. Thus the new in art is always
formed out of the old. The Genius of the Hour
always sets his ineffaceable seal on the work and
gives it an inexpressible charm for the imagination.
As far as the spiritual character of the period over
powers the artist and finds expression in his work,
so far it will always retain a certain grandeur, and
will represent to future beholders the Unknown, the
Inevitable, the Divine. No man can quite exclude
this element of Necessity from his labor. No man
can quite emancipate himself from his age and
country, or produce a model in which the education,
the religion, the politics, usages and arts of his
times shall have no share. Though he were never
so original, never so wilful and fantastic, he cannot
wipe out of his work every trace of the thoughts
amidst which it grew. The very avoidance betrays
the usage he avoids. Above his will and out of his

ART. 257

sight he is necessitated by the air he breathes and
the idea on which he and his contemporaries live and
toil, to share the manner of his times, without know
ing what that manner is. Now that which is inevit
able in the work has a higher charm than individual
talent can ever give, inasmuch as the artist's pen or
chisel seems to have been held and guided by a
gigantic hand to inscribe a line in the history of the
human race. This circumstance gives a value to the
Egyptian hieroglyphics, to the Indian, Chinese and
Mexican idols, however gross and shapeless. They
denote the height of the human soul in that hour,
and were not fantastic, but sprung from a necessity
as deep as the world. Shall I now add that the
whole extant product of the plastic arts has herein
its highest value, as history ; as a stroke drawn in
the portrait of that fate, perfect and beautiful, ac
cording to whose ordinations all beings advance to
their beatitude?

Thus, historically viewed, it has been the office
of art to educate the perception of beauty. We are
immersed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear
vision. It needs, by the exhibition of single traits,
to assist and lead the dormant taste. We carve and
paint, or we behold what is carved and painted, as
students of the mystery of Form. The virtue of
art lies in detachment, in sequestering one object
from the embarrassing variety. Until one thing
comes out from the connection of things, there can
be enjoyment, contemplation, but no thought. Our
happiness and unhappiness are unproductive. The
infant lies in a pleasing trance, but his individual

258 ART.

character and his practical power depend on his
daily progress in the separation of things, and deal
ing with one at a time. Love and all the passions
concentrate all existence around a single form. It
is the habit of certain minds to give an all-exclud
ing fulness to the object, the thought, the word they
alight upon, and to make that for the time the deputy
of the world. These are the artists, the orators, the
leaders of society. The power to detach and to
magnify by detaching is the essence of rhetoric in
the hands of the orator and the poet. This rhetoric,
or power to fix the momentary eminency of an
object, so remarkable in Burke, in Byron, in Carlyle,
— the painter and sculptor exhibit in color and in
stone. The power depends on the depth of the
artist's insight of that object he contemplates. For
every object has its root's in central nature, and may
of course be so exhibited to us as to represent the
world. Therefore each work of genius is the tyrant
of the hour and concentrates attention on itself.
For the time, it is the only thing worth naming, to
do that, — be it a sonnet, an opera, a landscape, a
statue, an oration, the plan of a temple, of a cam
paign, or of a voyage of discovery. Presently we
pass to some other object, which rounds itself into a
whole as did the first ; for example a well laid gar
den : and nothing seems worth doing but the laying
out of gardens. I should think fire the best thing in
the world, if I were not acquainted with air, and
water, and earth. For it is the right and property of
all natural objects, of all genuine talents, of all native
properties whatsoever, to be for their moment the

ART. 259

top of the world. A squirrel leaping from bough to
bough and making the wood but one wide tree for
his pleasure, fills the eye not less than a lion, is beau
tiful, self-sufficing, and stands then and there for
nature. A good ballad draws my ear and heart
whilst I listen, as much as an epic has done before.
A dog, drawn by a master, or a litter of pigs, satisfies
and is a reality not less than the frescoes of Angelo.
From this succession of excellent objects learn we at
last the immensity of the world, the opulence of
human nature, which can run out to infinitude in any
direction. But I also learn that what astonished and
fascinated me in the first work, astonished me in the
second work also ; that excellence of all things is
one.

The office of painting and sculpture seems to be
merely initial. The best pictures can easily tell us
their last secret. The best pictures are rude draughts
of a few of the miraculous dots and lines and dyes
which make up the ever-changing " landscape with
figures1' amidst which we dwell. Painting seems to
be to the eye what dancing is to the limbs. When
that has educated the frame to self-possession, to
nimbleness, to grace, the steps of the dancing-mas
ter are better forgotten ; so painting teaches me the
splendor of color and the expression of form, and as
I see many pictures and higher genius in the art, I
see the boundless opulence of the pencil, the indiffer-
ency in which the artist stands free to choose out of
the possible forms. If he can draw every thing, why
draw any thing? and then is my eye opened to the
eternal picture which nature paints in the street, with

260 ART.

moving men and children, beggars and fine ladies,
draped in red and green and blue and gray ; long
haired, grizzled, white-faced, black-faced, wrinkled,
giant, dwarf, expanded, elfish, — capped and based
by heaven, earth and sea.

A gallery of sculpture teaches more austerely the
same lesson. As picture teaches the coloring, so
sculpture the anatomy of form. When I have seen
fine statues and afterwards enter a public assembly, I
understand well what he meant who said, " When I
have been reading Homer, all men look like giants."
I too see that painting and sculpture are gymnastics
of the eye, training to the niceties and curiosities of
its function. There is no statue like this living man,
with his infinite advantage over all ideal sculpture,
of perpetual variety. What a gallery of art have I
here ! No mannerist made these varied groups and
diverse original single figures. Here is the artist
himself improvising, grim and glad, at his block.
Now one thought strikes him, now another, and with
each moment he alters the whole air, attitude and
expression of his clay. Away with your nonsense of
oil and easels, of marble and chisels : except to open
your eyes to the witchcraft of eternal art, they are
hypocritical rubbish.

The reference of all production at last to an abo
riginal Power explains the traits common to all works
of the highest art, that they are universally intelligi
ble ; that they restore to us the simplest states of
mind ; and are religious. Since what skill is therein
shown is the reappearance of the original soul, a jet of
pure light, it should produce a similar impression to

ART. 261

that made by natural objects. In happy hours,
nature appears to us one with art ; art perfected, —
the work of genius. And the individual in whom
simple tastes and susceptibility to all the great human
influences overpowers the accidents of a local and
special culture, is the best critic of art. Though we
travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must
carry it with us, or we find it not. The best of
beauty is a finer charm than skill in surfaces, in out
lines, or rules of art can ever teach, namely a radia
tion from the work of art, of human character, — a
wonderful expression through stone, or canvas, or
musical sound, of the deepest and simplest attributes
of our nature, and therefore most intelligible at last
to those souls which have these attributes. In the
sculptures of the Greeks, in the masonry of the Ro
mans, and in the pictures of the Tuscan and Vene
tian masters, the highest charm is the universal lan
guage they speak. A confession of moral nature, of
purity, love, and hope, breathes from them all. That
which we carry to them, the same we bring back
more fairly illustrated in the memory. The traveller
who visits the Vatican and passes from chamber to
chamber through galleries of statues, vases, sarcoph
agi and candelabra, through all forms of beauty cut
in the richest materials, is in danger of forgetting
the simplicity of the principles out of which they
all sprung, arid that they had their origin from
thoughts and laws in his own breast. He studies
the technical rules on these wonderful remains, but
forgets that these works were not always thus con
stellated ; that they are the contributions of many

262 ART.

ages and many countries ; that each came out of the
solitary workshop of one artist, who toiled perhaps
in ignorance of the existence of other sculpture,
created his work without other model save life,
household life, and the sweet and smart of personal
relations, of beating hearts, and meeting eyes ; of
poverty and necessity and hope and fear. These
were his inspirations, and these are the effects he
carries home to your heart and mind. In proportion
to his force, the artist will find in his work an outlet
for his proper character. He must not be in any
manner pinched or hindered by his material, but
through his necessity of imparting himself the ada
mant will be wax in his hands, and will allow an
adequate communication of himself, in his full stature
and proportion. Not a conventional nature and cul
ture need he cumber himself with, nor ask what is the
mode in Rome or in Paris, but that house and
weather and manner of living which poverty and the
fate of birth have made at once so odious and so
dear, in the gray unpainted wood cabin, on the cor
ner of a New Hampshire farm, or in the log hut of
the backwoods, or in the narrow lodging where he
has endured the constraints and seeming of a city
poverty, — will serve as well as any other condition
as the symbol of a thought which pours itself indiffer
ently through all.

I remember when in my younger days I had heard
of the wonders of Italian painting, I fancied the great
pictures would be great strangers ; some surprising
combination of color and form ; a foreign wonder,
barbaric pearl and gold, like the spontoons and stand-

ART. 263

ards of the militia, which plays such pranks in the
eyes and imaginations of schoolboys. I was to see
and acquire I knew not what. When I came at last
to Rome and saw with eyes the pictures, I found that
genius left to novices the gay and fantastic and osten
tatious, and itself pierced directly to the simple and
true ; that it was familiar and sincere ; that it was the
old, eternal fact I had met already in so many forms ;
unto which I lived ; that it was the plain you and me
I knew so well, — had left at home in so many con
versations. I had the same experience already in a
church at Naples. There I saw that nothing was
changed with me but the place, and said to myself, —
44 Thou foolish child, hast thou come out hither, over
four thousand miles of salt water, to find that which
was perfect to thee there at home ? " — that fact I saw
again in the Academmia at Naples, in the chambers
of sculpture, and yet again when I came to Rome and
to the paintings of Raphael, Angelo, Sacchi, Titian,
and Leonardo da Vinci. *• What, old mole ! workest
thou in the earth so fast?" It had travelled by my
side : that which I fancied I had left in Boston was
here in the Vatican, and again at Milan and at Paris,
and made all travelling ridiculous as a treadmill. I
now require this of all pictures, that they domesticate
me, not that they dazzle me. Pictures must not be
too picturesque. Nothing astonishes men so much as
common sense and plain dealing. All great actions
have been simple, and all great pictures are.

The Transfiguration, by Raphael, is an eminent
example of this peculiar merit. A calm benignant
beauty shines over all this picture, and goes directly

264 ART.

to the heart. It seems almost to call you by name.
The sweet and sublime face of Jesus is beyond praise,
yet how it disappoints all florid expectations ! This
familiar, simple, home-speaking countenance is as if
one should meet a friend. The knowledge of picture-
dealers has its value, but listen not to their criticism
when your heart is touched by genius. It was not
painted for them, it was painted for you; for such as
had eyes capable of being touched by simplicity and
lofty emotions.

Yet when we have said all our fine things about the
arts, we must end with a frank confession that the
arts, as we know them, are but initial. Our best
praise is given to what they aimed and promised, not
to the actual result. He has conceived meanly of the
resources of man, who believes that the best age of
production is past. The real value of the Iliad or the
Transfiguration is as signs of power ; billows or ripples
they are of the great stream of tendency ; tokens of
the everlasting effort to produce, which even in its
worst estate the soul betrays. Art has not come to
its maturity if it do not put itself abreast with the
most potent influences of the world, if it is not prac
tical and moral, if it do not stand in connection with
the conscience, if it do not make the poor and uncul
tivated feel that it addresses them with a voice of
lofty cheer. There is higher work for Art than the
arts. They are abortive births of an imperfect or
vitiated instinct. Art is the need to create ; but in
its essence, immense and universal, it is impatient of
working with lame or tired hands, and of making
cripples and monsters, such as all pictures and statues

ART. 265

are. Nothing less than the creation of man and
nature is its end. A man should find in it an outlet
for his whole energy. He may paint and carve only
as long as he can do that. Art should exhilarate,
and throw down the walls of circumstance on every
side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of
universal relation and power which the work evinced
in the artist, and its highest effect is to make new
artists.

Already History is old enough to witness the old
age and disappearance of particular arts. The art of
sculpture is long ago perished to any real effect. It
was originally an useful art, a mode of writing, a sav
age's record of gratitude or devotion, and among a
people possessed of a wonderful perception of form
this childish carving was refined to the utmost splen
dor of effect. But it is the game of a rude and youth
ful people, and not the manly labor of a wise and
spiritual nation. Under an oak-tree loaded with
leaves and nuts, under a sky full of eternal eyes, I
stand in a thoroughfare. Cut in the works of our
plastic arts and especially of sculpture, creation is
driven into a corner. I cannot hide from myself that
there is a certain appearance of paltriness, as of toys
and the trumpery of a theatre, in sculpture. Nature
transcends all our moods of thought, and its secret
we do not yet find. But the gallery stands at the
mercy of our moods, and there is a moment when it
becomes frivolous. I do not wonder that Newton,
with an attention habitually engaged on the paths of
planets and suns, should have wondered what the
Earl of Pembroke found to admire in " stone dolls."

266 ART.

Sculpture may serve to teach the pupil how deep is
the secret of form, how purely the spirit can translate
its meanings into that eloquent dialect. But the
statue will look cold and false before that new activity
which needs to roll through all things, and is impa
tient of counterfeits and things not alive. Picture
and sculpture are the celebrations and festivities of
form. But true art is never fixed, but always flowing.
The sweetest music is not in the oratorio, but in the
human voice when it speaks from its instant life tones
of tenderness, truth, or courage. The oratorio has
already lost its relation^ to the morning, to the sun,
and the earth, but that persuading voice is in tune
with these. All works of art should not be detached,
but extempore performances. A great man is a new
statue in every attitude and action. A beautiful
woman is a picture which drives all beholders nobly
mad. Life may be lyric or epic, as well as a poem or
a romance.

A true announcement of the law of creation, if a
man were found worthy to declare it, would carry art
up into the kingdom of nature, and destroy its sepa
rate and contrasted existence. The fountains of
invention and beauty in modern society are all but
dried up. A popular novel, a theatre, or a ballroom
makes us feel that we are all paupers in the almshouse
of this world, without dignity, without skill or industry.
Art is as poor and low. The old tragic Necessity,
which lowers on the brows even of the Venuses and
the Cupids of the antique, and furnishes the sole
apology for the intrusion of such anomalous figures
into nature, — namely that they were inevitable ; that

ART. 267

the artist was drunk with a passion for form which he
could not resist, and which vented itself in these fine
extravagancies, — no longer dignifies the chisel or the
pencil. But the artist and the connoisseur now seek
in art the exhibition of their talent, or an asylum from
the evils of life. Men are not well pleased with the
figure they make in their own imaginations, and they
flee to art, and convey their better sense in an ora
torio, a statue, or a picture. Art makes the same
effort which a sensual prosperity makes ; namely to
detach the beautiful from the useful, to do up the
work as unavoidable, and, hating it, pass on to enjoy
ment. These solaces and compensations, this divis
ion of beauty from use, the laws of nature do not
permit. As soon as beauty is sought, not from
religion and love but for pleasure, it degrades the
seeker. High beauty is no longer attainable by him
in canvas or in stone, in sound, or in lyrical construc
tion ; an effeminate, prudent, sickly beauty, which is
not beauty, is all that can be formed ; for the hand
can never execute any thing higher than the character
can inspire.

The art that thus separates is itself first separated.
Art must not be a superficial talent, but must begin
farther back in man. Now men do not see nature to
be beautiful, and they go to make a statue which shall
be. They abhor men as tasteless, dull, and incon
vertible, and console themselves with color-bags and
blocks of marble. They reject life as prosaic, and
create a death which they call poetic. They despatch
the day's weary chores, and fly to voluptuous reveries.
They eat and drink, that they may afterwards execute

268 ART.

the ideal. Thus is art vilified ; the name conveys to
the mind its secondary and bad senses ; it stands
in the imagination as somewhat contrary to nature,
and struck with death from the first. Would it not be
better to begin higher up, — to serve the ideal before
they eat and drink ; to serve the ideal in eating and
drinking, in drawing the breath, and in the functions
of life? Beauty must come back to the useful arts,
and the distinction between the fine and the useful
arts be forgotten. If history were truly told, if life
were nobly spent, it would be no longer easy or pos
sible to distinguish the one from the other. In nature,
all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful
because it is alive, moving, reproductive ; it is there
fore useful because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty
will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it
repeat in England or America its history in Greece.
It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up
between the feet of brave and earnest men. It is in
vain that we look for genius to reiterate its miracles
in the old arts ; it is its instinct to find beauty and
holiness in new and necessary facts, in the field and
roadside, in the shop and mill. Proceeding from a
religious heart it will raise to a divine use the railroad,
the insurance office, the joint-stock company; our
law, our primary assemblies, our commerce, the gal
vanic battery, the electric jar, the prism, and the
chemist's retort ; in which we seek now only an eco
nomical use. Is not the selfish and even cruel aspect
which belongs to our great mechanical works, to mills,
railways, and machinery, the effect of the mercenary
impulses which these works obey? When its errands

ART. 269

are noble and adequate, a steamboat bridging the
Atlantic between Old and New England and arriving
at its ports with the punctuality of a planet, — is a
step of man into harmony with nature. The boat at
St. Petersburg, which plies along the Lena by mag
netism, needs little to make it sublime. When
science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded
by love, they will appear the supplements and con
tinuations of the material creation.

THE END.

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