Essays : first series

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PS 1608.A2 1854

Essays :first series.By .fi- ,W„,,S!JlSri?,9P,-|

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ESSAYS.

E S SAYS

m

R. W. EMERSON

FIRST SERIES.

NEW EDITION.

BOSTON:
PHILLIPS, SAMPSON & CO.,

110 -WASHINGTON STBEET.
1854.

Entered accordlag to Act of Congiess, in tlie year 1847, b;

Jamib Muhbok and Cohpaht,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

CAMBRIDGEi

STIREOTTPED BY METCALF AMD COMPAHT.
PRINTED Br WRIGHT ARD HASTT.

CONTENTS.

ESSAY I,

FAOB

EI8T0ST . . 1

ESSAY II.
SSLT-RKUANCK 37

ESSAY III.
COMPENSATION 81

ESSAY IV.
SFXRITirAL LAWS 115

ESSAY T.
LOTE ISl

ESSAY VI.
nUENDSHIP ITS

Vi CONTENTS.

ESSAY Til.
PRUDENCB 13^

ESSAY VIII.
HEROISM >...•••• ^1

ESSAY IZ.
THB OTER-SOUl' S41

ESSAY Z.
CIRCUS S71

ESSAY ZI.
INTEIXSCT S93

ESSAY ZII.
ART 315

HISTORY.

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

1 am owner of the sphere,

Of tne seven stars and the solar year,

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

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

ESSAY I.
HISTORY.

There is one mind common to all individual men.
Every man is an inlet to the same and to all ol the
same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason
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 ma»,
he can understand. Who hath access to this univer-
sal 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
appropriate events. But the thought is always prior
to the fact ; all the facts of history preexist in the
mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circum-

4 ESSAY I.

Stances predombant, and the limits of nature give
power to but one at a time. A man is the whole
encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand
forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome,
Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the
first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, em-
pire, republic, democracy, are merely the applica-
tion 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
relation between the hours of our life and the cen-
turies of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from
the great repositories of nature, as the light on mv
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 explained by the hours. Of the universal mind
each individual man is one more incarnation. AU
its properties consist in him. Each new fact in his
private experience flashes a light on what great
bodies of men have done, and the crises of his life
refer to national 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 reform was once a private opinion, and

HISTORY.

when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve
the problem of the age. The fact narrated must
correspond to something in me to be credible or in-
telligible. We as we read must become Greeks,
Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and execu-
tioner, must fasten these images to some reality in
our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing right-
ly. What befell Asdrubal or Csesar Borgia is as
much an illustration of the mind's powers and depra-
vations as what has befallen us. Each new law and
political movement has meaning for you. Stand be-
fore each of its tablets and say, ' Under this mask
did my Proteus nature hide itself.' This remedies
the defect of our too great nearness to ourselves.
This throws our actions into perspective : and as
crabs, goats, scorpions, the balance, and the waterpot
lose 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 par-
ticular men and things. Human life as containing
this is mysterious and inviolable, and we hedge it
round with penalties and laws. All laws derive hence
their ultimate reason ; all express more or less dis-
tinctly some command of this supreme, illimitable es-
sence. 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 combi-

ESSAY I.

nations. The obscure consciousness of this fact is
the light of all our day, the claim of clainns ; the
plea for education, for justice, for charity, the foun-
dation of friendsliip and love, and of the heroism and
grandeur which belong to acts of self-reliance. It
is remarkable that involuntarily we always read as su-
perior beings. Universal history, the poets, the ro-
mancers, do not in their stateHest 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 better
men ; 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 sympathize
in the great moments of history, in the great dis-
coveries, the great resistances, the great prosperities
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.

We have the same interest in condition and char-
acter. We honor the rich, because they have ex-
ternally the freedom, 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, describes to each reader his own idea, de-
scribes his unattained but attainable self. All liter-

HISTORY. 7

ature writes the character of the wise man. Books,
monuments, pictures, conversation, are portraits in
which he finds the lineaments he is forming. The
silent and the eloquent praise him and accost liim,
and he is stimulated wherever he moves as by per-
sonal allusions. A true aspirant, therefore, never
needs look for allusions personal and laudatory in dis-
course. He hears the commendation, not of him-
self, but more sweet, of that character he seeks, in
every word that is said concerning character, yea,
further, in every fact and circumstance, — in the run-
ning river and the rustling com. 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 esteemi
his own life the text, and books the commentary.
Thus compelled, the Muse of history will utter ora-
cles, as never to those who do not respect them-
selves. 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 ac-
tion in history, to which there is not somewhat cor-

ESSAY I.

responding in his life. Every thing tends in a won-
derful manner to abbreviate itself and yield its own
virtue to him. He should see that he can live all
history in his own person. He must sit solidly at
home, and not suffer himself to be bulhed 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 his-
tory 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,
let them for ever be silent He must attain and
maintain that lofty sight where facts yield their se-
cret 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, Troy,
Tyre, Palestine, and even early Rome, are pass-
ing already into fiction. The Garden of Eden,
the sun standing still in Gibeon, is poetry thence-
forward to all nations. Who cares what the fact
was, when we have 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 up-

HISTORY.

on ? " 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 Eternity. I
can find Greece, Asia, 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 emphatic
facts of history in our private experience, and
verifying them here. All history becomes subjec-
tive ; 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 wiU
not know. What the former age has epitomized in-
to a formula or rule for manipular convenience, it
will lose all the good of verifying for itself, by means
of the wall of that rule. Somewhere, sometime, it
will demand 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 na-
ture ; that is all. We must in ourselves see the
necessaiy reason of every fact, — see how it could
and must be. So stand before every public and

10 ESSAY I.

private work ; before an oration of Burke, before a
victory of Napoleon, before a martyrdom of Sir
Thomas More, of Sidney, of Marmaduke Robinson,
before a French Reign of Terror, and a Salem hang-
ing of witches, before a fanatic Revival, and the An-
imal 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 respect-
ing 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. Belzoni digs and measures in the mum-
my-pits and pyramids of Thebes, until he can see the
end of the difference between the monstrous work
and himself. When he has satisfied himself, in gen-
eral and in detail, that it was made by such a person
as he, so armed and so motived, and to ends to which
he himself 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 with satisfaction, and they live again
to the mind, or are now.

A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us,

HISTORY. 11

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 state of the builder. We re-
member the forest-dwellers, the first temples, the
adherence to the first type, and the decoration of it
as the wealth of tlie nation increased ; the value
which is given to wood by carving led to the carv-
ing over the whole mountain of stone of a cathedral.
When we have gone through this process, and add-
ed thereto the Catholic Church,' its cross, its music,
its processions, its Saints' days and image-worship,
we have, as it were, been the man that made the min-
ster ; we have seen how it could and must be. We
have the sufiicient 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 intrinsic likeness, or by the relation of cause and
effect. The progress of the intellect is to the
clearer vision of causes, which neglects surface dif-
ferences. To the poet, to the philosopher, to the
saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events
profitable, all days holy, all men divined For the
eye is fastened on the life, and slights the circum
stance. Every chemical substance, every plants
every animal in its growth, teaches the unity of
cause, the variety of appearance.

12 ESSAY I.

Upborne and surrounded as we are by this all-cre-
ating nature, soft and fluid as a cloud or the air, why-
should we be such hard pedants, and magnify a few
forms ? Why should we make account of time, or
of magnitude, or of figure ? The soul knows them
not, and genius, obeymg its law, knows how to play
with them as a young child plays with graybeards 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 di-
ameters. Genius watches the monad through all his
masks as he performs the metempsychosis of nature.
Genius detects through the fly, through the caterpil-
lar, through the grub, through the egg, the constant
individual ; through countless individuals, the fixed
species ; through many species, the genus ; through
all genera, the steadfast type ; through all the king-
doms 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. Through
the bruteness and toughness of matter, a subtle spirit
bends all things to its own will. The adamant
streams into soft but precise form before it, and,
whilst I look at it, its outline and texture are changed
again. Nothing is so _ fleeting as form ; yet never
does it quite deny itself. In man we still trace the
remains or hints of all that we esteem badges of ser-

•HISTORY. 13

fitude in the lower races ; yet in him they enhance
his nobleness and grace ; as lo, in jEschylus, trans'
formed to a cow, offends the imagmation ; but how
changed, when as Isis in Egypt she meets Osiris-
Jove, a beautiful woman, with nothing of the meta-
morphosis left but the lunar horns as the splendid
ornament of her brows !

The identity of history is equally intrmsic, the
diversity equally obvious. There is at the surface
mfinite variety of things ; at the centre there is sim-
plicity of cause. How many are the acts of one
man in which we recognize the same character !
Observe the sources of our information in respect to
the Greek genius. We have the civil history of that
Deople, as Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and
Plutarch have given it ; a very sufficient account of
what manner of persons they were, and what they
did. We have the same national mind expressed for
us again in their literature, in epic and lyric poems,
drama, and philosophy ; a very complete form.
Then we have it once more in their architecture, a
beauty as of temperance itself, limited to the straight
line and the square, — a builded geometry. Then
we have it once again in sculpture, the " tongue on
the balance of expression," a multitude of forms in
the utmost freedom of action, and never transgressing
the ideal serenity ; like votaries performing some
religious dance before the gods, and, though in con-

14 ESSAY I.

vulsive pain or mortal combat, never daring to break
the figure and decorum of their dance. Thus, of the
genius of one remarkable people, we have a fourfold
representation : and to the senses what more unlike
than an ode of Pindar, a marble centaur, the peri-
style of the Parthenon, and the last actions of Pho-
cion ?

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
endless combination and repetition of a very few
laws. She hums the old well-known air through
mnumerable variations.

Nature is full of a sublime family likeness through-
out her works ; and 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 sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and
the remains of the earliest Greek art. And there

HISTOB.Y. 15

are compositions of the same straiH to be found in
the books of all ages. What is Guide's Rospigliosi
Aurora but a moi'ning thought, as the horses in it are
only a morning cloud. If any one will but take
pains to observe the variety of actions to which he is
equally inclined 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 tte&\
without in some sort becoming a tree ; or draw ai
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 I
into -the inmost nature of a sheep." I knew a
draughtsman employed in a public survey, who found
that he could not sketch the rocks until their geologi-
cal structure was first explained to him. In a certain
state of thought is the common origin of very diverse
works. ItJsjhe^P^irit and not the fact that is iden-
tical. By a deeper apprehension, 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 profound nature
awakens in us by its actions and words, by its

16 ESSAY I.

very looks and manners, the same power and beau-
ty that a gallery of sculpture, or of pictures, ad-
dresses.

Civil and natural history, the history of art and of
literature, 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 shoe, the roots
of all things are in man. 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 JisL 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 the words and signs which we had heard and
seen without heed. 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 inhabit
them suspended their deeds until the wayfarer has
passed onward : a thought which poetry has cele-

HISTOEY. I',

brated in the dance of the fairies, which breaks off oi
the approach of human feet. The man who has seer
the rising moon break out of the clouds at midnigh
has been present like an archangel at the creation of
hght and of the world. I remember one summei
day, in the fields, my companion pointed out to me i
broad cloud, which might extend a quarter of a mile
parallel to the horizon, quite accurately in the forrr
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 famihar ornament.
I have seen in the sky a chain of summer lightning
which at once showed 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 surrounding ourselves with the original circum-
stances, we invent anew the orders and the ornaments
of architecture, as we see how each people merely
decorated its primitive abodes. The Doric temple
preserves 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
2

18 ESSAY I.

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 as-
sistance of nature, it could not move on a small scale
without degrading itself. What would statues of the
usual size, or neat porches and wings, have been, as-
sociated with those gigantic halls before which only
Colossi could sit as watchmen, or lean on the pillars
of the interior } "

The Gothic church plamly 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 ai'e
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

HISTOET. 19

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 repro-
duced its ferns, hs spikes of flowers, its locust, elm,
oak, pine, fir, and spruce.

The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone
subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man.
The mountain of granite blooms into an eternal flow-
er, 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 individ-
ualized, all private facts are to be generalized. Then
at once History becomes fluid and true, and Biogra-
phy deep and sublime. As the Persian imitated in
the slender shafts and capitals of his architecture the
stem and flower of the lotus and palm, so the Persian
court in its magnificent era never gave over the no-
madism 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 no-
i^adic hfe. 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

20 ESSAY I.

the state from nomadism. And in these late and
civil countries of England and America, these pro-
pensities still fight out the old battle in the nation
and m the individual. The nomads of Africa were
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 to
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. Sacred cities, to which a periodical
religious pilgrimage was enjoined, or stringent laws
and customs, tending to invigorate the national bond,
were the check on the old rovers ; and the cumula-
tive values of long residence are the restraints on the
itineracy of the present day. The antagonism of ihe-
two tendencies is not less active m individuals, as
the love of adventure or the love of repose happens
to predominate. A man of rude health and flowing
spirits has the faculty of rapid domestication, lives in
his wagon, and roams through all latitudes as easily as
a Calmuc. At sea, or in the forest, or in the snow,
he sleeps as warm, dines with as good appetitO)
nd associates as happily, as beside his own chim-
eys. Or perhaps his faqihty is deeper seated, in
the increased range of his faculties of observation,

HISTOKY. 21

which yield him points of interest wherever fresh
objects meet his eyes. The pastoral nations were
needy and hungry to desperation ; and this intellect-
ual nomadism, in its excess, bankrupts the mind,
through the dissipation of power on a miscellany of
objects. The home-keeping wit, on the other hand,
is that continence or content which finds all the ele-
ments of life in its own soil ; and which has its own
perils of monotony and deterioration, if not stimulated
by foreign infusions.

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
Germans say, — 1 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 ? What but this, that
every man passes personally through a Grecian pe-
riod. The Grecian state is the era of the bodily
nature, the perfection of the senses, — of the spirit-

22 ESSAY I.

tial nature unfolded in strict unity with the body. In
fit existed those human forms which supphed the
'sculptor with his models of Hercules, Phojbus, and
i Jove ; not like the forais 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
foi'med 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 man-
ners of that period are plain and fierce. The rever-
ence exhibited is for personal qualities, courage, ad-
dress, self-command, justice, strength, swiftness, a
loud voice, a broad chest. Luxury and elegance are
not known. 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 dif-
ferent is the picture Xenophon gives of himself and
his compatriots in the Retreat of the Ten Thousand.
" After the army had crossed the river Teleboas in
Armenia, there fell much snow, and the troops lay
miserably on the ground covered with it. But Xeno-
phon arose naked, and, taking an axe, began to split
wood ; whereupon others rose and did the like."
Throughout his army exists a boundless liberty of
speech. They quarrel for plunder, they wrangle

HISTORY. 23

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 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 reflective
habit has become the predominant habit of the mind.
Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of \
the old, but of the natural. The Greeks are not
reflective, but perfect in their senses and in their
health, with the finest physical organization in the
world. Adults acted with the simplicity and grace
of children. They made vases, tragedies, and stat-
ues', 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 ex- '
ists ; but, as a class, from their superior organization, ;
they have surpassed all. They combine the energy •
of manhood with the engaging unconsciousness of;
childhood.. The attraction of these manners is that
they belong to man, and.3re_Jcnown to every man in
virtue of his being once a^hild ;T)es]3es that there
are 'always individuals^ho retain these characteris-
tics. A person of childlike genius and inborn energy

24 ESSAY I.

is still a Greek, and revives our love of the Muse of
Hellas. I admire the love of nature in the Philoc-
tetes. In reading those fine 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, ^'rjciea the vaunted distinction between
Greek and English, between Classic and Romantrc
schools^ seems superficial and pedantic. 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 mini-
ature 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 pierce^ to the truth through all the
confusion of tradition and the caricature of institu
tions.

HISTORY. 25

Rare, extravagant spirits come by us at intervals,
who disclose to us new facts in nature. I see that
men of God have, 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 inspired by the
divine afflatus.

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 them-
selves in the mind. I cannot find any andquitj^in
them. They are mine as niucH~ar^ieirs._

I have seen the 'first monks and anchorets without
crossing seas or centuries. More than once some
individual has appeared to me with such negligence
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

26 ESSAY I.

that without producing indignation, but only fear and
obedience, and even much sympathy with the tyran-
ny, — is a familiar fact explained to the child when
he becomes a man, only by seeing that the oppres-
sor 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 discov-
ery by ChampolHon of the names of all the work-
men and the cost of every tile. He finds Assyria
and the Mounds 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
repeats 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 Lu-
ther of the day had to lament the decay of piety in
his own household ! " Doctor," said his wife to
Martin Luther, one day, " how is it that, whilst sub-
ject 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 proper-

HISTORY. 27

ty he has in literature, — in all fable as well as in all
histoiy. 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 biography
he finds in lines wonderfully intelligible to him, dot-
ted down before he was bom. One after another
he comes up in his private adventures with every
fable of ^sop, 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_of3 the imagina tion_and not of the fancy,
ai:e_universal_x£djifis. What a range ol meaniiigs^
and what perpetual pertinence has the story of Pro-
metheus ! Beside its primary value as the first chap-
ter 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 his-
tory of religion with some closeness to the faith of lat-
er ages. Prometheus is the Jesus of the old mythol-
ogy. He is the friend of man ; stands between the
unjust "justice " of the Eternal Father and the race
of mortals, and readily suffers all things on their ac-
count. But where it departs from the Calvinistic
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,

28 ESSAY* I.

objective form, and which seems the self-defence of
man against this untruth, namely, a discontent 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 Pro-
metheus Vinctus is the romance of skepticism. Not
less true to all time are the details of that stately ap-
ologue. Apollo kept the flocks of Admetus, said
the poets. When the gods come among men, they
are not known. Jesus was not ; Socrates and Shak-
speare were not. Antaeus was suffocated by the
gripe of Hercules, but every time he touched his
mother earth, his strength was renewed. Man is the
broken giant, and, in all his weakness, both his body
and liis mind are invigorated by habits of conversa-
tion with nature. The power of music, the power
of poetry to unfix, and, as it were, clap wings to sol-
id nature, interprets the riddle of Orpheus. TJie. phi-
losophical perception of identity through endless mu-
tations of form makes him know the Proteus. What
else am I who laughed or wept yesterday, who slept
last night hke a corpse, and this morning stood and ran ^
And what see I on any side but the transmigrations
of Proteus .' I can symbolize 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 impos-

HISTORY. 29

sibility of drinking the waters of thought which are
always gleaming and waving within sight of the soul.
The transmigration of souls 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 for-
est, of the earth and of the waters that are under
the earth, has contrived to get a footing and to leave
the print of its features and form in some one or oth-
er of these upright, heaven-facing speakers. Ah !
brother, 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, the Sphinx was slain.
What is our life but an endless 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 rou-
tine 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 sentiments, and refuses the do-
minion of facts, as one that comes of a higher race,
remains fast by the soul and sees the principle, then

30 ESSAY I.

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 ev-
ery word should be a thing. These figures, he
would say, these Chirons, Griffins, Phorkyas, Hel-
en, and Leda, are somewhat, and do exert a spe-
cific influence on the mind. So far then are they
eternal entities, as real to-day as in the first Olym-
piad. Much revolving them, he writes out freely
his humor, and gives them body to his own imagi-
nation. And although that poem be as vague and
fantastic as a dream, yet is it 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 un-
ceasing succession of brisk shocks of surprise.

The universal nature, too strong for the petty
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 them-
selves understand." All the fictions of the Middle
Age explain themselves as a masked or frolic ex-
pression of that which in grave earnest the mind of

HISTORY. 31

that period toiled to achieve. Magic, and all that is
ascribed to it, is a deep presentiment of the powers
of science. The shoes of swiftness, the sword of
sharpness, the power of subduing the elements, of
using the secret virtues of minerals, of understand-
ing the voices of birds, are the obscure efforts of the
mind in a right direction. The preternatural prow-
ess of the hero, the gift of perpetual youth, and the
like, are alike the endeavour 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 Cas-
tle a fine name for proud poverty, and the foreign
mission of state only a Bunyan disguise for honest
industry. We may aU shoot a wild bull that would

32 ESSAY I.

toss the good and beautiful, by fighting down the un-
just and sensual. Lucy Ashton is another name for
fidelity, which is always beautiful and always liable
to calamity 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 natm'e. His power
consists in the multitude of his affinities, in the
fact that his Jife is. intertwined with the whole chain_
of organic and inorganic being. In old Rome the
public roads beginning at the Forum proceeded 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
reduce it under the dominion of man. A man is a
bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower
and fruitage is the world. His faculties refer to na-
tures out of him, and jiredict the world he is to in-
habit, as the fins of the fish foreshow that water
exists, or the wings of an eagle in the egg presup-
pose air. He cannot live without a world. Put
Napoleon in an island prison, let his faculties find
no men to act on, no Alps to climb, no stake to

HISTOKY. 33

play for, and he would beat the air and appear stu-
pid. Transport him to large countries, dense pop-
ulation, 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 vir-
tual Napoleon. This is but Talbot'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 pitchy
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 ages and thick-
strewn celestial areas. One may say a gravitating
^olar_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
affinities and repulsions of particles, anticipate the
laws of organization. Does not the eye of the hu-
man embryo predict the light .'' the ear of, Handel
predict the witchcraft of harmonic sound } Do not
the constructive fingers of Watt, Fulton, Whitteraore,
Arkwright, predict the fusible, hard, and temperable
texture of metals, the properties of stone, water, and
wood .'' Do not the lovely attributes of the maiden
child predict the refinements and decorations of civil
society .'' Here also we are reminded of the action
3

34 ESSAY I.

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 before he has been thrilled with indignation
at an outrage, or has heard an eloquent tongue, or
has shared the throb of thousands in a national exul-
tation or alarm ? No man can antedate his experi-
ence, or guess what faculty or feeling a new object
shall unlock, 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-
tivejjiistory is to be read and written.

Thus in all ways does the soul concentrate and
reproduce its treasures for each pupil. He, too,
shaU pass through the whole cycle of experience.
He shall collect mto 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

HISTORY. 35

own form and features by their exalted intelligence
shall be that variegated vest. I shall find in him the
Foreworld ; m his childhood the Age of Gold ; the
Apples of Knowledge ; the Argonautic Expedition ;
the calling 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 into humble cottages the blessing 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 fungus
under foot, the lichen on the log. What do I know
sympathetically, morally, of either of these worlds
of life .'' As old as the Caucasian man, — perhaps
older, — these creatures have kept their counsel be-
side him, and there is no record of any word or sign
that has passed from one to the other. What con-
nection do the books show between the fifty or sixty
chemical elements, and the historical eras ? Nay,
what does history yet record of the metaphysical

36 ESSAY I.

annals of man ? What light does it shed on those
mysteries which we liide 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 Con-
sulates to these neighbouring systems of being ?
Nay, what food or experience or succour 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
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. The idiot, the Indian, the child, and
unschooled farmer's boy, stand nearer to the light by
which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the
antiquary.

SELF-RELIANCE.

"Ne te quaesiTeria extra."

" Man is his own star ; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man.
Commands edi light, all influence, all fete ;
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 Honttt Man'i FortuHt

Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolfs teat
Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be bands and fee

ESSAY II.
SELF-RELIANCE.

1 READ the other day some verses written by an
eminent painter which were original and not conven-
tional. The soul always hears an admonition in such
lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment
tliey instil is of more value than any thought they
may contain. To believe your own thought, to be-
lieve 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 the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, —
and our first thought is rendered back to us by the
trumpets 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

40 ESSAY II.

the firmament 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 certam alien-
ated majesty. Great works of art have no more
affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to
abide by our spontaneous impression with good-hu-
mored inflexibility 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 jthe
wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing
corn can come to him but through his toil bestow.ed
on that plot of ground which is given to himto till.
The power which resides in him is new in nature,
and none but he knows what that is which he caiTSo,
nor does he know until he has tried. Not for noth-
ing one face, one character, one fact, makes much
impression on him, and another none. This sculp-
ture in the memory is not without preestablished
harmony. The eye was placed where one ray
should fall, that it might testify of that particular rav

SELF-RELIANCE. 41

We b ut half express ourselves, and are ashamed
of that divine idea which each of us represents. It
miy~Fe safely trusted as proportionate and of good
issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not
ha ve bis wo rk made manifest by cowards. 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 de-
liverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his
genius deserts him ; no muse befriends ; no inven-
tion, no hope.

Tr ust thy self: every_heart vibrates to that iron
string Accept the place the divine providence has
found for you, the society of your contemporaries,
the connection of events. Great men have always
done so, and confided themselves childlike to the
genius of their age, betraying their perception that
the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart,
working through their hands, predominating in all
their being. And we are now men, and must ac-
cept in the highest mind the same transcendent
destiny ; and not minors and invalids in a protect-
ed comer, not cowards fleeing before a J^evolution,
but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying
the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and
the Dark.

What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text,
in the face and behaviour of children, babes, and even

42 ESSAY II.

brutes ! That divided and rebel mind, that distrust
of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed
the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these
have not. Their mind being v^hole, their eye is as
yet unconquered, and when we look in their faces,
Vfe are disconcerted. Infancy conforms 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 man-
hood 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 his voice is suffi-
ciently clear and emphatic. It seems he knows how to
speak to his contemporaries. Bashful or bold, then,
he will know how to make us seniors very unneces-
sary.

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. A boy is in the parlour what the pit
is in the playhouse ; independent, irresponsible, look-
ing out from his corner on such people and facts as
pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits,
in the swift, summaiy way of boys, as good, bad, in-
teresting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers
himself never about consequences, about interests :

SELF-EELIANCE. 43

he gives an independent, g^enuine verdict. You must
court him : he does not court you. But the man is,
as it were, clapped mto 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 neutrahty !
Who can thus avoid all pledges, and having observed,
observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, un-
bribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be for-
midable. He would utter opinions on all pass-
ing 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 cons_piracy against
the manhood of every one of its members. Socie-
ty is a joint-stock company, in which the members
agree, for the better securing of his bread to each
shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture 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

44 ESSAY 11.

if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but tlie
integrity of yOur own mind. Absolve you to your-
self, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. 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 transfera-
ble to that or this ; the only right is what is afterjny
constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A
man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposi-
tion, as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but
he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitu-
late to badges and names, to large societies and dead
institutions. Every decent and well-spoken Individ-'
ual 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

SELF-RELIANCE. 45

wood-chopper : be good-natured and modest : have
that grace ; and never varnish yom- hard, uncharita-
ble 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 greet-
ing, but truth is handsomer than the affectation of
love . Your joodness must have some edge to 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 .-'
Ijell 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 T. will go to
prisonjjf^need be j^ but your miscellaneous popular
charities ; the education at college of fools ; the
building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which
many now stand ; alms to sots ; and the thousand-
fold Relief Societies ; — though I confess with shame

46 ESSAY II.

I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a
wicked dollar wliich by and by I shall have the man-
hood to vi'ithold.

Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the ex-
ception 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
vifould pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appear-
ance on parade. Their works are done as an apol-
ogy or extenuation of their living in the world, — as
invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their
virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiate, but
to live. My life 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 glit-
tering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and
sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. I ask pri-
mary evidence that you are a man, and refuse this
appeal from the man to his actions. I know that foi
myself it makes no difference whether I do or for
heir those actions which are reckoned excellent. ]
cannot consent to pay for a privilege where I hav4
intrinsic right. Few and mean as my gifts may be,
I actually am, and do not need for my own assur-
ance 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 actual

SELF-RELIANCE. 47

and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole dis-
tinction between greatness and meanness. It is the
harderj_becausejrou 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 independ-
ence of solitude. ;^

The objec tion 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, con-
tribute 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 with-
drawn from joui proper life. But do your work,
and I shall know you. Doyour work, and you
shaU 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 announce for his text and topic the expe-
diency 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

48 ESSAY II.

of the institution, 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 attornej,
and these airs of the bench are the emptiest affecta-
tion. Well, most men have bound their eyes with
one or another handkerchief, and attached them-
selves to some one of these communities of opinion.
This conformity makes them not false in a few par-
ticulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all partic-
ulars. 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. Mean-
time 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 ac-
quire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression.
There is a mortifying experience in particular,
which does not fail to wreak itself also in the gener-
al history ; I mean " the foolish face of praise," 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
spontaneously moved, but moved by a low usurp-
ing wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the
face with the most disagreeable sensation.

For nonconformity the world whips you with its

SELF-RELIANCE. 49

displeasure. And therefore a man must know how
to^'^stunate a sour face. The by-standers look
askance on him in the public street or in the
friend's parlour. 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 caused but are put on and off as the wind
blows and a newspaper directs. Yet is the discon-
tent 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 pru-
dent, for they are timid as being very vulnerable
themselves. But when to their feminine rage the
indignation of the people is added, when the igno-
rant 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.

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 corpse of your
4

50 ESSAY II.

memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have
stated in this or that pubhc 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 m acts of pure memory, but to
bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed
present, and live ever in a new day. In your meta-
physics you have denied personality 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 harlot, 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 himself
with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think
now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-
morrow thinks in hard words again, though it con-
tradict every thing you said to-day. — ' Ah, so you
shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad,
then, to be misunderstood .'' Pythagoras was misun-
derstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and
Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, 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 bv the law of his be-

SELF-HELIANCE. 51

ing, 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 wUl 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 conimuni-
cate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and
do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every
moment.

There will be an agreement in whatever variety
of actions, so they be each honest and natural in
their hour. For of one will, the actions will be har-
monious, however unlike they seem. These varieties
are lost sight of 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. See the line from a sufficient distance, and
it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your
genuine action will explain itself, and will explain

52 ESSAY 11.

your other genuine actions. Your conformity ex-
plains nothing. Act singly, and what you have al-
ready done singly will justify you now. Greatness
appeals to the future. If I can be firm enough to-
day 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. They shed an
united light on the advancing actor. He is attended
as by a visible escort of angels. That is it which
throws thunder into Chatham's voice, and dignity mto
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
because it is not of to-day. We love it and payit
homage, because it is not a trap for our love__arid
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 Spar-

SELF-RELIANCE. 53

tan fife. Let us never bow and apologize 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
anTsquaUd 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 re-
sponsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man
works ; 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. OrdinaSyTevery body in society rembds us
of somewhat else, or of some other person. Char-
acter, reality, reminds you of nothing else ; it takes
place of tlie whole creation. The man must be so
much, that he must make all circumstances indifferent.
Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age ;
requu'es infinite spaces and numbers and time fully
to accomplish his design ; — and posterity seem to
follow his steps as a train of clients. A man CiEsar
is bom, and for ages after we have a Roman Em-
pire. 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
lengthened shadow of one man ; as, Monachism, of
the Hermit Antony ; the Reformation, of Luther ;

54 ESSAY II.

Quakerism, of Fox ; Methodism, of Wesley ; Abo-
lition, of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called " the
height of Rome " ; and all history resolves itself very
easily into the biography of a fevir stout and earnest
persons.

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things
under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skiilk
up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard,
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 ahen and forbidding air, much hke a
gay equipage, and seem to say like that, ' Who are
you, Sir ? ' Yet they all are his, suitors for his no-
tice, 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 claims to praise. That popular fable of the sot
who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried
to the duke's house, v?ashed and dressed and laid in
the duke's bed, and, on his waking, 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.

SELF-RELIANCE. 55

Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In
history, our imagination plays us false. Kingdom
and lordship, power and estate, are a gaudier vocabu-
lary tlian private John and Edward in a small house
and common day's work ; but the 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 pubhc and
renowned steps. Whenjrivate men shall act with
original views, the lustre will be transferred from the
actions of kings to those of gentlemen.

The world has been instructed by its kings, who
have so magnetized the eyes of nations. It has
been taught by this colossal symbol the mutual rever-
ence that is due from man to man. The joyful loy-
alty 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 ^ith 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,

56 ESSAY II.

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 im-
pure actions, if the least mark of independence ap-
pear?. The inquiry leads us to that source, at once
the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which
we call Spontaneity pr Instinct. We denote this pri-
mary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings
are tuitions. ,In that deep force, the last fact behind
which analysis' cannot go, all things find their "com-
mon 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, bat one with them, and proceeds obvious-
ly from the same source whence their life and being
also proceed. We first share the life by which tilings
exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in na-
ture, and forget that we have shared their cause.
Here is the fountain of action and of thought. Here
are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth man wis-
dom, and which cannot be denied without impiety and
atheism. We lie in the lap of immense intelligence,
which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its
activity. When we discern justice, when we discern
truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage
to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we
seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy

SELF-RELIANCE. 57

is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can
afBrm. Every man discriminates between the volun-
tary acts of liis mind, and his involuntary per-
ceptions, and knows that to his involuntary percep-
tions a perfect faith 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. My
wilful actions and acquisitions are but roving ; — the
idlest reverie, the faintest native emotion, command
my curiosity and respect. Thoughtless people con-
tradict as readily the statement of perceptions as of
opinions, or rather much more readily ; for, they do
not distinguish between perception and notion. They
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 manldnd, — although 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 commu-
nicate, not one thing, but all things ; should fill the
world with his voice ; should scatter forth light, na-
ture, 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, old things pass away, — means, teachers,

58 ESSAY II.

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 as much as another.
All things are dissolved to their centre by their cause,
and, in the universal miracle, petty and particular mir-
acles disappear. If, therefore, a man claims to know
and speak of God, and carries you backward to the
phraseology of some old mouldered nation in anoth-
er country, in another world, believe him not. Is
the acorn better than the oak which is its fulness and
completion .'' Is the parent 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 sanity and authority of the
soul. Time and space are but physiological colors
which the eye makes, 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 tlian 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 for-
mer roses or to better 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

SELF-RELIANCE. 59

every moment of its existence. Before a Jeaf-bud
has burst, its whole life acts ; in the full-blown flow-
er there is no more ; in the leafless root there is no
less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature,
in all moments alike. 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 titpoe 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 grandames and tutors, and, as they
grow older, of the men of talents and character they
chance to see, — 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. 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 perception, we shall gladly
disburden the memory of its hoarded treasures as

60 ESSAY II.

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 com.

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 intu-
ition. 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 accustomed 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 example and
experience. You take the way from man, not to
man. All persons that ever existed are its forgot-
ten ministers. Fear and hope are alike beneath it.
There is somewhat low even in hope. In the hour
of vision, there is nothing that can be called grat-
itude, nor properly joy. The soul raised over
passion beholds identity and eternal causation, per-
ceives the self-existence of Truth and Right, and
calms itself with knowing that all things go well.
Vast spaces of nature, the Atlantic Ocean, the South
Sea, — long intervals of time, years, centuries, — are
of no account. This which I think and feel underlay
every former state of life and circumstances, as it
does underlie my present, and what is called life,
and what is called death.

SELF-RELIANCE. 61

Life only avails, not the having lived. Power
ceases ia the instant of repose ; it resides in the
moment 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 be-
comes ; for that for ever degrades the past, turns
all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, con-
founds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and
Judas equally aside. Why, then, do' we prate of
self-reliance ? Inasmuch as the soul is present,
there will be power not confident but agent. To
talk of reliance is a poor external way of speak-
ing. Speak rather of that which relies, because it
works and is. Who has more obedience than I
masters me, though he should not raise his finger.
Round him I must revolve by the gravitation of
spirits. We fancy it rhetoric, when we speak of
eminent virtue. We do not yet see that virtue ia
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
"each on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all
mto the ever-blessed One. Self-existence is the at-
••ibute of the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the
measure of good by the degree in which it enters in-
to all lower forms. All things real are so by so touch

62 ESSAY II.

virtue as they contain. Commerce, husbandry,
hunting, whaling, war, eloquence, personal weight,
are somewhat, and engage my respect as examples
of its presence and impure action. I see the same
law working in nature for conservation and growth.
Power is in nature the essential measure of right.
Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms
which cannot help itself. The genesis and matura-
tion of a planet, its poise and orbit, the bended tree
recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital
resources of every animal and vegetable, are dem-
onstrations of the self-sufficing, and therefore self-
relying soul.

Thus all concentrates : let us not rove ; let us
sit at home with the cause. Let us stun and aston-
ish the intruding rabble of men and books and insti-
tutions, by a simple declaration of the divine fact.
Bid the invaders 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 pov-
erty of nature and fortune beside our native riches.

But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in
awe of man, nor is his genius admonished to stay at
home, to put itself in communication with the inter-
nal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water
of the urns of other men. We must go alone. I
like the silent church before the service begins, bet-
ter than any preaching. How far off, how cool, how

SELF-RELIANCE. 63

chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a pre-
cinct or sanctuary ! So let us always sit. Wliy should
we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or fa-
ther, or child, because they 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 isolation must
not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be
elevation. At times the whole world seems to be
m conspiracy to importune you with emphatic tri-
fles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want,
charity, all knock at once at thy closet door, and
say, — 'Come out unto us.' But keep thy state;
come not into their confiision. The power men
possess to annoy me, I give them by a weak curios-
ity. 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 temptations ;
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 hospitality and
lying affection. Live no longer to the expectation of
these deceived and deceiving people with whom we
converse. Say to them, O father, O mother, O

64 ESSAY II.

wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you
after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the
truth's. Be it known unto you that henceforward
[ obey no law less than the eternal law. I will have
no covenants but proximities. I shall endeavour to
nourish my parents, to support my family, to be the
chaste husband of one wife, — but these relations I
must fill after a new and unprecedented way. I ap-
peal 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 the happier. If
you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you
should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I
will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I wih do
strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly re-
joices 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 in-
terest, 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 you
may give these friends pain. Yes, but I cannot sell
my liberty and my power, to save their sensibility.

SELF-RELIANCE. 65

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 popular
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 confession-
als, in one or the other of which we must be shriven.
You may fulfil your round of duties by clearing your-
self in the direct, or in the reflex way. Consider
whether you have satisfied your relations to father,
mother, cousin, neighbour, 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 cir-
cle. 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 taskmaster.
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 !
5

66 ESSAY II.

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 insol-
vent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an am-
bition out of all proportion to their practical force,
and do lean and beg day and night continually. Our
housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupa-
tions, our marriages, our religion, we have not cho-
sen, but society has chosen for us. We are parlour
soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate, where
strength is born.

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises,
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 Bos-
ton or New York, it seems to his friends and to
himself that he is right in being disheartened, 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 newspaper, goes to Con-

SELF-KELIANCE. 67

gress, 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,' for he does not postpone his
life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a
hundred chances. Let a Stoic open the resources of
man, and tell men they are not leaning wiUows, but
can and must detach themselves ; that with the exer-
cise 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 com-
passion, and that the moment he acts from himself,
tossing the laws, the books, idolatries, and customs
out of the 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
must work a revolution in aU the ofEces and rela-
tions of men ; in their religion ; in their education ;
in their pursuits ; their modes of living ; their asso-
ciation ; in their property ; in their speculative
views .

1 . In what prayers do men allow themselves !
That which they call a holy ofSce is not so much as
brave and manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks for
some foreign addition to come through some foreign

68 ESSAY II.

virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes of natural
and supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous.
Prayer that craves a particular commodity, — any
thing less than all good, — is vicious. Prayer is the
contemplation 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 VForks good. But prayer as a means to effect a
private end is meanness and theft. It supposes du-
alism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As
soon as the man is at one with God, he wiU 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 admonished to inquire the mind of the god Au-
date, replies, —

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

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets.
Discontent is the want of self-reliance : it is infirm-
ity 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 sympa-
thy 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 elec-

SELF-RELIANCE. 69

ti-ic shocks, putting them once more in communication
with their own reason. The secret of fortune is joy-
in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men
is the self-helping 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
solicitously 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 Zo-
roaster, " 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 hindered
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. Eve-
ry 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 Fourier, it im-
poses its classification on other men, and lo ! a new
system. In proportion 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.

70 ESSAY II.

which are also classifications of some powerful mind
acting on the elemental thought of duty, and man's
relation to the Highest. Such is Calvinism, Qua-
kerism, Swedenborgism. The pupil takes the same
delight in subordinating every thing to the new ter-
minology, as a girl who has just learned botany in
seeing a new earth and new seasons thereby. It will
happen for a time, that the pupil will find his intel-
lectual power has grown by the study of his master's
mind. But in all unbalanced minds, the classifica-
tion 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, indomitable, will
break into any cabin, even into theirs. Let them
chirp awhile and call it their own. If they are hon-
est and 'do well, presently their neat new pinfold 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 ovei
the universe as on the first morning.

2. It is for want of self-cuhure that the supersti-
tion of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England,

SELF-RELIANCE. 71

Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Ameri-
cans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece
venerable in the imagination did so by sticking fast
where they were, like an axis of the earth. In man-
ly hours, we feel that duty is our place. The soul is
no traveller ; the wise man stays at home, and when
his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call
him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is
at home still, and shall make men sensible by the
expression of his countenance, that he goes the mis-
sionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and
men hke 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 wluch 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 fool's paradise. Our first jour-
neys discover to us the indifference of places. At
home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be
intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I
pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the

72 ESSAY II.

sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside
me is the stem fact, the sad self, unrelenting,
identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vadcan,
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 a symptom of a
deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual
action. The intellect is vagabond, and our 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 faculties, lean, and follow
the Past and the Distant.- 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 mod-
el .'' 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
climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants
of the people, the habit and form of the govern-
ment, he wiU create a house in which all these will

SELF-RELIANCE. 73

find themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment will
be satisfied also.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own
gift you can present every moment with the cumu-
lative force of a whole life's cultivation ; but of the
adopted talent of another, you have only an extem-
poraneous, 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 Shakspeare ? Where is the master who
could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or
Bacon, or Newton .'' Every great man is a unique.
The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he
could not borrow. Shakspeare will never be made
by the study of Shakspeare. Do that which is as-
signed you, and you cannot hope too much or dare
too much. There is at this moment for you an ut-
terance brave 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 you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely
you can reply to them in the same pitch of voice ;
for the ear and the tongue are two organs of one
nature. Abide in the simple and noble regions of
thy life, obey thy heart, and thou shalt reproduce
the Foreworld again.

74 ESSAY II.

4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look
abroad, so does our spirit of society. All men
plume 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. It imdergoes continu-
al changes ; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is chris-
tianized, 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 exchange in his
pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose prop-
erty is a club, a spear, a mat, and an undivided
twentieth of a shed to sleep under ! But compare
the health of the two men, and you shall see that
the white man has lost his aboriginal strength. 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 a
fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the
hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac
he has, and so being sure of the information when

SELF-RELIANCE. 75

he wants it, the man in the street does not know a
star in tlie sky. The solstice he does not observe ;
tlie equinox he knows as little ; and the whole bright
calendar of the yeas is without a dial in his mind.
His note-books impair his memory ; his libraries
overload his wit ; the insLjrance-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 Chris-
tian ?

There is no more deviation in the moral standard
than in the standard of height or hulk 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,
Anaxagoras, Diogenes, are great men, but they
leave no class. He who is really of their class
will not be called by their name, but will be his
own man, and, in his turn, the founder of a sect.
The arts and inventions of each period are only
its costume, and do not invigorate men. The

76 ESSAY II.

harm of the improved machinery may compensate
its good. Hudson and Beliring accomplished so
much in their fishing-boats, as to astonish Parry
and Franklin, whose equipment exhausted tlie re-
sources of science and art. Galileo, with an opera-
glass, discovered a more splendid series of celestial
phenomena 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
gi'eat genius returns to essential man. We reckoned
the improvements of the art of war among the tri-
umphs of science, and yet Napoleon conquered
Europe by the bivouac, which consisted of falling
back on naked valor, and disencumbering it of all
aids. The Emperor held it impossible to make a
perfect army, says Las Casas, " without abohshing
our arms, magazines, commissaries, and carriages,
until, in imitation of the Roman custom, the soldier
should receive his supply of com, grind it in his
hand-mill, and bake his bread liimself."

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, next year die,
and their experience with them.

SELF-RELIANCE. 77

And so the reliance on Property, including the
reliance on governments which protect it, is the want
of self-rehance. Men have looked away from them-
selves and at things so long, that they have come to
esteem the religious, learned, and civil institutions as
guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on
these, because they feel them to be assaults on prop-
erty. 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,
out of new respect for his nature. Especially he
bates what he has, if he see that it is accidental, —
came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime ; then
he feels that it is not having ; it does not belong to
him, has no root in him, and merely lies there, be-
cause 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 living property, which
does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolu-
tions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually
renews itself wherever the man breathes. " Thy lot
or portion of life," said the Caliph Ali, "is seekmg
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 concourse, and with each new uproar of an-
nouncement, The delegation from Essex ! The

78 ESSAY II.

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. Not so, O friends ! will
the God deign to enter and inhabit you, but by a
method precisely the reverse. It is only as a man
puts off all foreign 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 inborn, that he is weak
because he has looked for good out of him and else-
where, and so perceiving, throws himself unhesitat-
ingly on his thought, instantly rights himself, 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
sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations. A politi-
cal victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick,

SELF-RELIANCE. 79

or the return of your absent friend, or some other
favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think
good days are preparing for you. Do not believe
it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of
principles.

COMPENSATION.

The winga of Time are black and white,
Pied with morning and with night.
Mountain tall and ocean deep
Trembling balance duly keep.
In changing moon, in tidal wave,
Glows the feud of Want and Hare.
-Gauge of more and less through space
Electric star and pencil plays.
The lonely Earth amid the balls
That hurry through the eternal halls,
A makeweight flying to the void,
Supplemental asteroid,
Or compensatory spark,
Shoots across the neutral Dark.

Man 's.the elm, and Wealth the Tine;
Stanch and strong the tendrils twine ;
Though the frail ringlets thee deceive,
None from its stock that vine can reave.
Fear not, then, thou child infirm,
There 's no god dare wrong a worm.
Laurel crowns cleave to deserts,
And power to him who power exerts ;
Hast not thy share ? On winged feet,
Lo ! it rushes thee to meet ;
And all that Nature made thy own,
Floating in air or pent in stone.
Will rive the hills and swim the sea,
And, like thy shadow, follow thee.

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 fan-
cy 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, greetings,
relations, debts and credits, the influence of charac-
ter, the nature and endowment of all men. It seem-
ed to me, also, that in it might be shovm 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 al-
ways and always must be, because it really is now.

84 ESSAY III.

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 star in many dark hours and crook-
ed 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 miserable ;
and then urged from reason and from Scripture a
compensation to be made to both parties in the next
life. No offence appeared to be taken by the con-
gregation at this doctrine. As far as I could ob-
serve, 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, ofSces, 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 compen-
sation intended ; for what else ? Is it that they are

COMPENSATION. 85

to have leave to pray and praise ? to love and serve
men ? Why, that they can do nov?. The legitimate
inference the disciple would draw was, — ' We are
to have such a good time as the sinners have now ' ;
— 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 expect our re-
venge to-morrow.'

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 con-
victing 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.

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 better
than this theology. Their daily life gives it the lie.
Every JBgenuous and aspiring soul leaves the doc-
trine behind him m his own experience ; and all men
feel sometimes the falsehood which they cannot de-
monstrate. For men are wiser than they know.

66 • ESSAY III.

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 hear-
er, 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.

Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in ev-
ery 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 equation of quantity and quality
in the fluids of the animal body ; in the systole and
diastole of the heart ; in the undulations of fluids,
and of sound ; in the centrifugal and centripetal grav-
ity ; in electricity, galvanism, and chemical affinity.
Superinduce magnetism at one end of a needle ;
the opposite magnetism takes place at the other end.
If the south attracts, the north repels. To empty
here, you must condense there. An inevitable dual-
ism bisects nature, so that each thing is a half, and
suggests another thing to make it whole ; as, spirit,
matter ; man, woman ; odd, even ; subjective, ob-

COMPENSATION. 87

jective ; in, out ; upper, under ; motion, rest ; 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 com, in each individual of every animal
ti-ibe. The reaction, so grand in the elements, is re-
peated within these small boundaries. For example,
in the animal kingdom the physiologist has observed
that no creatures are favorites, but a certain compen-
sation balances every gift and every defect. A sur-
plusage given to one part is paid out of a reduction
from another part of the same creature. If the head
and neck are enlarged, the trunk and extremities are
cut short.

The theory of the mechanic forces is another ex-
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- i
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

88

ESSAY III.

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 eve-
ry thing you have missed, you have gained something
else ; and for every thing you gain, you lose some-
\thing. 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. Nature 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 equal-
ize themselves. There is always some levelling
circumstance that puts down the overbearing, 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
Dad citizen, — a morose rufEan, 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 courtesy.
Thus she contrives to intenerate the granite and fel-
spar, 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

COMPENSATION. 89

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 tne
throne. Or, do men desire the more substantial and
permanent grandeur of genius .'' Neither has this an
immunity. He who by force of will St of thought is
great, and overlooks thousands, has the charges of
that eminence. With every influx of light comes
new danger. Has he light ? he must bear witness
to the light, and always outrun that sympathy 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 become, a byword and a, ;
hissing. ,,,;;',;!,,/' j.. /_.-., -. ^ '

This law wiites the laws of cities and nations. It
is in vain to build or plot or combine against it.
Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Rts 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 hfe is not
safe. If you tax too high, the revenue will yield noth-
ing. If you make the criminal code sanguinary, ju-
ries will not convict. If the law is too mild, private
vengeance comes in. If the government is a terrific

90

ESSAY III.

democracy, the pressure is resisted by an overr
charge of energy in the citizen, and life glows with
a fiercer flame. The true hfe and satisfactions
of man seem to elude the utmost rigors or fehcities
of condition, and to establish themselves with great
indifFerency under all varieties of circumstances. Un-
der all governments the influence of character re-
mains the same, — in Turkey and in 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 na-
ture. Every thing is made of one hidden stuff"; as
the naturalist sees one type under every metamor-
phosis, 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, ener-
gies, and whole system of every other. Every occu-
pation, 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 accommodate the whole
man, and recite all his destiny.

COMPENSATION. 91

The world globes itself in a drop of dew. The
microscope cannot find the animalcule which is less
perfect for being litde. Eyes, ears, taste, smell,
motion, resistance, appetite, and organs of reproduc-
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 omnipresence
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 aiBnity, so the repid-
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 inspiration ; out there in his-
tory we can see its fatal strength. " It is in the world,
and the world was made by it." Justice is not post-
poned. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all
parts of life. Ol id^oi Aibs ae\ cimin-ova-i, — The dicf
of God are always loaded. The world looks lik(
a multiplication-table, or a mathematical equation
which, turn it how you will, balances itself. Tak
what figure you will, its exact value, nor more m
less, still returns to you. Every secret is told, ev
ry crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, eve
wrong redressed, in silence and certainty. What Wi,
call retribution is the universal necessity by which
the whole appears wherever a part appears. If you

92 ESSAY III.

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 circum-
stance, or in apparent nature. Men call the cir-
cumstance the retribution. The causal retribution
is in the thing, and is seen by the soul. The retri-
bution in the circumstance is seen by the under-
standing ; it is inseparable from the thing, but is
often spread over a long time, and so does not
become distinct until after many years. The spe-
cific stripes may follow late after the offence, but
they follow because they accompany 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 efl^ect 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 always
been dedicated to the solution of one problem,— how
to detach the sensual sweet, the sensual strong, the

COMPENSATION. 93

sensual bright, &c., 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.

The soul strives amain to hve 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 possess one side of nature, —
the sweet, without the other side, — the bitter.

This dividing and detaching is steadily counter-
acted. Up to this day, it must be owned, no
projector has had the smallest success. The part-
ed water reunites behind our hand. Pleasure is
taken out of pleasant things, profit out of profitable
things, power out of strong things, as soon as we

94 ESSAY III.

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 without 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 ; tliat they do not
touch him ; — but the brag is on his lips, the con-
ditions 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 ap-
pearance, it is because he has resisted his life, and
fled from himself, and the retribution is so much
death. So signal 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 ob-
ject, 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 si-
lence, O thou only great God, sprinkling with a»

COMPENSATION. 95

unwearied Providence certain penal blindnesses up-
on such as have unbridled desires ! " *

The human soul is true to these facts in the
painting of fable, of history, of law, of proverbs,
of conversation. It finds a tongue in literature
unawares. Thus the Greeks called Jupiter, Su-
preme 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 helpless as a king of Eng-
land. Prometheus knows one secret which Jove
must bargain for; Minerva, cinother. He cannot get
liis 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 the
same ethics ; and it would seem impossible for any
fable to be invented and get any currency which was
not moral. Aurora forgot to ask youth for her lover,
and though Tithonus is immortal, he is old. Achilles
is not quite invulnerable ; the sacred waters did not
wash the heel by which Thetis held him. 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.

* St. Augustine, Confessions, B. I.

96 ESSAY III.

And so it must be. There is a crack in every
thing God has made. It woidd seem, there is al-
ways this vindictive circumstance steahng in at una-
wares, 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, certifying 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 transgress
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 Hector
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 Theagenes, a victor in the games, one of
his rivals went to it by night, and endeavoured 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-

COMPENSATION. 97

ing private in it ; that which he does not Know ;
that which flowed out of his constitution, 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 abstract 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, embarrass 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, modified in doing, by the
interfering volitions of Phidias, of Dante, of Shak-
speare, 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 absolute
truth, without qualification. Proverbs, like the sa-
cred 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 with-
out contradiction. And this law of laws wliich the
pulpit, the senate, and the college deny, is hourly
preached in all markets and workshops by flights of
proverbs, whose teaching is as true and as omni-
present as that of birds and flies.
7

98 ESSAY III.

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 himsel£ With
his will, or against his will, he draws his portrait 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 harpoon hurled
at the whale, unwmding, as it flies, a coil of cord in
the boat, and if the harpoon is not good, or not well

COMPENSATION. 99

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 hfe 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 ninepins,
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 re-
lations 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 interpenetration
of nature. But as soon as there is any departure
from simplicity, and attempt at halfness, or good for
me that is not good for him, my neighbour 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.

100 ESSAY III.

«

• All the old abuses in society, universal and par-
ticular, all unjust accumulations of property and
power, are avenged in the same manner. Fear is an
instructer of great sagacity, and the herald of all
revolutions. One thing he 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 volunta-
ry activity. The terror of cloudless noon, the eme-
rald of Polycrates, 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 neighbour's wares.

COMPENSATION. 101

or horses, or money ? There arises on the deed the
instant aclaiowledgment 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 neighbour ; and every new trans'-
action alters, according to its nature, their relation to
each other. He may soon come to see that he had
better have broken his own bones than to have
ridden in his neighbour's coach, and that " tlie
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 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,

102 ESSAY III.

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, say 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 apphed to navigation ; in the house, good
sense applied to cooking, sewing, serving ; in your
agent, good sense applied to accounts and affairs.
So do you multiply your presence, or spread your-
self throughout your estate. But because of the du-
al 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 la-
bor is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth ar.'
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 can-
not be answered but by real exertions of the mind,
and in obedience to pure motives. The cheat, the
defaulter, the gambler, cannot extort the knowledga
of material and moral nature which his honest care
and pains yield to the operative. The law of

COMPtNSATION. 103

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. 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 something else is obtained, and that it is impossi-
ble to get any thing without its price, — is not less
sublime in the columns of a leger 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 implicated in those
processes with which he is conversant, the stern eth-
ics which sparkle on his chisel-edge, which are meas-
ured out by his plumb and foot-rule, which stand a
manifest in the footing of the shop-bill as in the his-
tory of a state, — do recommend to him his trade,
and though seldom named, exalt his business to hh^
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

104 ESSAY III.

earth is made of glass. 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 in-
let or clew. Some damning circumstance always
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 hke fire turns every
thing to its own nature, so that you cannot do him
any harm ; but as the royal armies sent against Na-
poleon, when he approached, cast down their colors
and from enemies became friends, so disasters of
all kinds, as sickness, offence, poverty, prove bene-
factors : —

" 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 de-
fect that was not somewhere made useful to him.
The stag in the fable admired his horns and blamed

COMPENSATION. 105

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 understands
a truth until 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 temper that unfits
him to live in society .'' Thereby he is driven to en-
tertain 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. The
indignation which arms itself with secret forces does
not awaken until we are pricked and stung and sorely
assailed. 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 throws himself on the side of his assail-
ants. 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 tri-
umph, lo ! he has passed on invulnerable. Blame

106 F.SSAY 171.

is safer than praise. I hate to be defended m a
newspaper. As long as all that is said is said
against me, I feel a certain assurance of success.
But as soon as honeyed 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 hfe long,
under the foolish superstition that they can be cheat-
ed. 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 par-
ty to all our bargains. The nature and soul of
things takes on itself the guaranty of the fulfilment
of every contract, so that honest service cannot
come to loss. If you serve an ungrateful master,
serve him the more. Put God in your debt. Ev-
ery stroke shall be repaid. The longer the payment
is withholden, the better for you ; for compound in-
terest on compound interest is the rate and usage of
this exchequer.

COMPENSATION. 107

The history of persecution is a history of en-
deavours to cheat nature, to make water run up
hill, to twist a rope of sand. It makes no differ-
ence whether the actors be many or one, a tyrant
or a mob. A mob is a society of bodies volun-
tarily bereaving themselves of reason, and traversing
its work. The mob is man voluntarily descending
to the nature of the beast. Its fit hour of activi-
ty is night. lis actions are insane like its whole
constitution. It persecutes ^ principle ; it would
whip a right ; it would tar and feather justice, by
inflicting fire and outrage upon the houses and per-
sons 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
mart)T 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 reverber-
ates through the earth from side to side. Hours of
sanity and consideration are always arriving to com-
munities, as to individuals, when the truth is seen,
and the martyrs are justified.

Thus do all things preach the indifierency of cir-
cumstances. The man is all. Every thing has two
sides, a good and an evil. Every advantage has its

108 SSSAY III.

tax. I learn to be content. But the doctrine of
compensation is not the doctrine of indifferency. The
thoughtless say, on hearing these representations, —
What boots it to do well ? there is one event to
good and evil ; if I gain any good, I must pay for
it ; if I lose any good, I gain some other ; all ac-
tions 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, hes the aboriginal abyss
of real Being. Essence, 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 whhin itself.
Nature, truth, virtue, are the influx from thence.
Vice is the absence or departure of the same.
Nothing, Falsehood, may indeed stand as the great
Night or shade, on which, as a background, the liv-
ing universe paints itself forth ; but no fact is begot-
ten by it ; it cannot work ; for it is not. It cannot
work any good ; it cannot work any harm. It is
harm inasmuch 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 judg-
ment anywhere in visible nature. There is no stun-

COMPENSATION, 109

ning confutation of his nonsense before men and an-
gels. Has he therefore outwitted the law ? Inas-
much as he carries the malignity and the lie with
him, he so far deceases from nature. In some
manner there will be a demonstration of the wrong
to the understanding 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.
There is no penalty to virtue ; no penalty to wis-
dom ; 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 darlaiess
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 limits, and ^al-
ways affirms an Optimism, never a Pessimism.

His life is a progress, and not a station. His in-
stinct is trust. Our instinct uses " more " and
" less " in application to man, 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 no tax on the good of virtue ;
for that is the incoming of God himself, or absolute

110 ESSAY III.

existence, without any comparative. Material 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 burdens. I do
not wish more external goods, — neither possessions,
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
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 in-
dignation or malevolence towards More .'' Look at
those who have less faculty, and one feels sad, and
knows not well what to make of it. He almost
shuns their eye ; he fears they will upbraid God.

COMPENSATION. Ill

What should they do ? It seems a great injustice.
But see the facts nearly, and these mountainous in-
equalities 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 J\Iine
ceases. His is mine. I am my brother, and my
brother is me. If I feel overshadowed and outdone
by great neighbours, I can yet love ; I can stiU re-
ceive ; and he that loveth maketh his own the gran-
deur 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 nature of the soul to
appropriate all things. 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.

Such, also, is the natural history of calamity.
The changes which break up at short intervals the
prosperity of men are advertisements of a nature
whose law is growth. Every soul is by this intrinsic
necessity quitting its whole system of things, its
friends, and home, and laws, and faith, as the shell-
fish crawls out of its beautiful but stony case, be-
cause 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

112 ESSAY III.

some happier mind they are incessant, and all world-
ly relations hang very loosely about him, becoming,
as it were, a transparent fluid membrane through
which the living form is 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 biog-
raphy of man in time, a putting off of dead circum-
stances day by day, as he renews his raiment day by
day. But to us, in our lapsed estate, resting, not
advancing, resisting, not cooperating with the divine
expansion, this growth comes by shocks.

^e 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 idolaters
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 recreate that beautiful yesterday. We linger in
the 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 Al-
mighty saith, ' Up and onward for evermore ! '
We cannot stay amid the ruins. Neither will we

COMPENSATION. 113

rely on the new ; and so we walk ever with revert-
ed 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 under-
lies 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 liv-
ing, 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 reception of new influences that prove of the
first importance to the next years ; and the man or
woman who would have remained a sunny garden-
flower, vnth no room for its roots and too much sun-
shme for its head, by the 'falling of the walls and the
neglect of the gardener, is made the banian of the
forest, yielding shade and fruit to wide neighbour-
hoods of men.

8

SPIRITUAL LAWS.

The living Heaven thy prayers respect.
House at once and architect,
Quarrying man's rejected hours,
Builds therewith eternal towers ;
Sole and self-commanded works.
Fears not undermining days,
Grows by decays.

And, by the famous might that lurks
In reaction and recoil,
Makes iiame to freeze, and ice to boil ;
Forging, through swart arms of Offence,
The silver seat of Innocence.

ESSAY IV.
SPIRITUAL LAWS.

When the act of reflection takes place in the
mind, when we look at ourselves in the light of
tliought, we discover that our life is embosomed
in beauty. Behind us, as we go, all tilings 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 fool
ish person, — however neglected in the passing,
— have a grace in the past. Even the corpse
that has Iain 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 noth-
ing can be taken from us that seems much. All

118 ESSAY IV.

loss, all pain, is particular ; the universe remams
to the heart unhurt. Neither vexations nor ca-
lamities abate our trust. No man ever stated his
griefs as lightly as he might. Allow for exagger-
ation in the most patient and sorely ridden hack
that ever was driven. For it is only 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 im-
port 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 theologi-
cal problems of original sin, origin of evil, pre-
destination, 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 b's
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, with-

SPIKITITAL LAWS. 119

out this self-knowledge, there may be a sylvan
strength and integrity in that which he is. "A
few strong instincts and a few plain iiiles " suf-
fice us.

My will never gave the images in my mind the
rank they now take. The regular course of stud-
ies, the years of academical and professional ed-
ucation, 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 compara-
tive value. And education often wastes its effort
in attempts to thwart and balk this natural magnet-
ism, which is sure to select what belongs to it.

In like manner, our moral nature is vitiated by
any interference of our will. People represent virtue
as a struggle, and take to themselves great airs up-
on their attainments, and the question is everywhere
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 Ho-
mer's verses, Plutarch said. When we see a soul

120 ESSAY IV.

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
intention in history than we ascribe to it. We im-
pute deep-laid, far-sighted plans to Caesar and Na-
poleon ; 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 un-
to us, not unto us.' According to the faith of their
times, they have built altars to Fortune, or to Des-
tiny, or to St. Julian. Their success lay in their
parallelism to the course of thought, which found
in them an 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 externally seemed will and immovable-
ness was willingness and self-annihilation. Could
Shakspeare give a theory of Shakspeare ? Could
ever a man of prodigious mathematical genius con-
vey to others any insight into his methods .'' If he
could communicate that secret, it would instantly

SPIRITUAL LAWS. 121

lose its exaggerated value, blending with the day-
light 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,
convulsions, and despairs, of the wringing of the
hands and the gnashing of the teeth ; that we mis-
create our own evils. We interfere with the opti-
mism of nature ; for, whenever we get this vantage-
ground of the past, or of a wiser mind in the pres-
ent, we are able to discern that we are begirt with
laws which execute themselves.

The face of external nature teaches the same les-
son. Nature wiU 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 Temperance-meeting,
or the Transcendental club, into the 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 un-
happy. Our Sunday-schools, and churches, and
pauper-societies are yokes to the neck. We pain

122 ESSAY IV.

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 wiU come of it. We
have not dollars ; merchants have ; let them give
them. Farmers will give corn ; poets wiU sing ;
women will sew ; laborers will lend a hand ; the
children will briag flowers. And why drag this
dead weight of a Sunday-school over the whole
Christendom .'' It is natural and beautiful that child-
hood should inquire, and maturity should teacn ;
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, things are aU alike ; laws, and
letters, and creeds, and modes of living, seem a
travestie of truth. Our society is encumbered by
ponderous machinery, wliich 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 standing army, not so good as
a peace. It is a graduated, titled, richly appointed
empire, quite superfluous when town-meetmgs are
found to answer just as well.

SPIEITUAL LAWS. 123

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 aU animals is a falling forward.
All our manual labor and works of strength, as
prying, sphtting, diggmg, rowing, and so forth, are
done by dint of continual falling, and the globe,
earth, moon, comet, sun, star, fall for ever 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 knowledge 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 wisdom by his hope, knowing that the
perception of the inexhaustibleness of nature'^ an
immortal youth. The wild fertility of nature is
felt in comparing our rigid names and reputations
with our fluid consciousness. 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 afSrmed and denied with equal reason.
He is old, he is young, he is very wise, he is alto-
gether ignorant. He hears and feels what you say

124 ESSAY IV.

of the seraphim, and of the tin-pedler. There is
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 unnecessary, and fruitless ; that
only in our easy, simple, spontaneous action are
we strong, and by contenting ourselves with obe-
dience we become divine. Belief and love, — a
beheving 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 \vrong 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 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

SPIRITUAL LAWS. 125

of action, and of entertainment ? Certainly there
is a possible right for you that precludes the need
Df 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 animates all whom it floats, and you
are without effort impelled to truth, to right, and
a perfect contentment. Then you put all gainsay-
ers 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, reli-
gion 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 com-
monly 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 constitution ; and that which I call
heaven, and inwardly aspire after, is the state or
circumstance 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 ame-

126 ESSAY IV.

nable 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 evU 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 tHther 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 a deepening channel
into an mfinite 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 wiU his work exhibit
from the work of any other. His ambition is ex-
actly 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 obtuse-

SPIEITTJAL LAWS. 127

ness to perceive that there is one mind in all the
individuals, and no respect of persons therein.

By doing his work, he makes the need felt which
he can supply, and creates the taste by which he
is enjoyed. By doing his own work, he unfolds
himself. 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 rems ; 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 de-
tails of that work or trade he falls into, and tends it
as a dog turns a spit. Then is he a part of the
machine he moves ; the man is lost. Until he can
manage to commxmicate himself to others in his full
stature and proportion, he does not yet find his voca-
tion. He must find in that an outlet for his charac-
ter, so that he may justify his work to their eyes.
If the labor is mean, 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 communicate, or men will never know
and honor him aright. Foolish, whenever you take
the meanness and formality of that thing you do, in-
stead of converting it into the obedient spiracle of
your character and aims.

We like only such actions as have already long

128 ESSAY IV.

liad 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 jevvs-harp, and a nimble-fingered
lad out of shreds of paper with his scissors, and
Landseer out of swine, and the hero out of the pit-
iful habitation and company in which he was hid-
den. What we call obscure condition or vulgar
society is that condition and society whose poe-
try is not yet written, but which you shall presently
make as enviable and renowned as any. 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.

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 scatter
them on every wind as the momentary signs of his
infinite productiveness.

He may have his own. A man's genius, the

SPIKITUAL LAWS. 129

quality that differences him from every other, the
susceptibihty to one class of influences, the se-
lection of what is fit for him, the rejection of v^hat
is unfit, determines for him the character of the
universe. A man is a method, a progressive ar-
rangement ; a selecting principle, gathering 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 symbols of
value to him, as they can interpret parts of his con-
sciousness 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 par-
ticulars speak to me. A few anecdotes, a few
traits of character, manners, face, a few incidents,
nave an emphasis in your memory out of all pro-
portion to their apparent significance, if you meas-
ure them by the ordinary standards. They relate
to your gift. Let them have their weight, and do
9

130 ESSAY IT.

not reject them, and cast about for illustration and
facts more usual in literature. What^ your heart
thinks great is great. The soul's_ernphasis is al-
ways right.

Over all things that are agreeable to his nature and
genius, the man has the highest right. Everywhere
he may take what belongs to his spiritual estate, nor
can he take any thing 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 se-
cret 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 se-
crets of that state of mind he can compel. This
is a law which statesmen use in practice. All the
terrors 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 connection, which, in fact, constitutes a
sort of free-masonry. M. de Narbonne, in less than
a fortnight, penetrated all the secrets of the imperial
cabinet.

Nothing seems so easy as to speak and to be un-
derstood. Yet a man may come to find that the

SPIRITUAI, LAWS. 131

Strongest of defences and of ties, — that he has been
understood ; 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 indoctrinated
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 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 reasonmg from tha
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 publish-
ed and not published."

No man can learn what he has not prepara-
tion for > learning, however near to his eyes is the
ODject. A chemist may tell his most precious se-
crets to a carpenter, and he shall be never the
wiser, — the secrets he would not utter to a chem-
ist for an estate. God screens us evermore from

132 ESSAY IV.

premature ideas. Our eyes are holden that we can-
not see things that stare us in the face, until the hour
arrives when 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 un-
affecting !

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 li-
brarians are wiser men than othei's. There are
graces in the demeanour of a polished and noble
person, 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 bear some proportion to the visions of
the day. Hideous dreams are exaggerations of
the sins of the day. We see our evil affections
embodied in bad physiognomies. On the Alps,

SPIRITUAL LAWS. 133

the traveller sometimes beholds 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 any thing worse
than yourselves." As in dreams, so in the scarcely
less fluid events of the world, every man sees him-
self in colossal, without knowing that it is himself.
The good, 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, medial, and
terminal acrostic. And why not .'' He cleaves to
one person, and avoids another, according to their
likeness or unlikeness to himself, truly seeking him-
self in his associates, and moreover in his trade, and
habits, and gestures, and meats, and drinks ; and
comes at last to be faithfully represented by every
view you take of his circumstances.

He may read what he writes. What can we see
or acquire, but what we are ? You have observed 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

134 ESSAY IV.

delight he gets, he is as secure now the book is
Englished, as if it were imprisoned m the Pele«s'
tongue. It is with a good book as it is with good
company. Introduce a base person among gen-
tlemen ; it is all to no purpose ; he is not their
fellow. Every society protects itself. The com-
pany is perfectly safe, and he is not one of tliem,
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 enamoured of
Guy ; how high, how aristocratic, how Roman his
mien and manners ! to live with him were hfe in-
deed, 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
nothing but nature. The most wonderful talents,
the most meritorious exertions, really avail very
little with us ; but nearness or likeness of nature, —
how beautiful is the ease of its victory ! Persons
approach us famous for their beauty, for their ac-
complishments, worthy of all wonder for their

SPIEITtrAL LAWS. 135

charms and gifts ; they dedicate their whole skill
to the hour and the company, with very imperfect
result. To be sure, it would be ungrateful in us
not to praise them 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 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 to me, but, native of the same
celestial latitude, repeats in its ovra all my experi-
ence. The scholar forgets himself, and apes the
customs and costumes of the man of the world,
to deserve the smile of beauty, and follows some
giddy girl, not yet taught by religious passion to
know the noble woman with all that is serene, orac-
/:-, and beautiful in her soul. Let him be great,
aiiv- jve shall follow 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 associates by others' eyes.

136 ESSAY IV.

He may set his own rate. It is a maxim worthy
of all acceptation, that a man may have that al-
lowance he takes. Take the place and attitude
which belong to you, and all men acquiesce. The
world must be just. It leaves every man, wilh
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 produced
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. K
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 transfusion takes place ; he is you, ana
you are he ; then is a teaching ; and by no unfriend-
ly chance or bad company 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 adver-
tised that Mr. Grand will deliver an oration on the
Fourth of July, and Mr. Hand before the Mechan-
ics' Association, and we do not go thither, because
we know that these gentlemen will not communi-
cate their own character and experience to the com-

SPIRITTJAL LAWS. 137

pany. If we had reason to expect such a con-
fidence, we should go through all mconvenience
and opposition. The sick would be carried in lit-
ters. But a public oration is an escapade, a non-
committal, an apology, a gag, and not a communica-
tion, 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 logic or of oath can give it
evidence. 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 .'' K 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, permanent, over the minds of men ; if th
pages instruct j^ou not, they will die like flies ii'
the hour. The way to speak and write what shaL
not go out of fashion is, to speak and write sin-
cerely. The argument which has not power to
reach my own practice, I may well doubt, will
fail to reach yours. But take Sidney's maxim : —
" Look in thy heart, and write." He that writes
to himself writes to an eternal public. That state-
ment only is fit to be made public, which you have
come at in attempting to satisfy your own curiosity.

138 ESSAY IV.

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 val-
ued as we make ourselves valuable. There is no
luck in literary reputation. They who make up
the final verdict upon every book are not the par-
tial 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, de-
cides upon every man's title to fame. Only those
books come down which deserve to last. Gilt
edges, vellum, and morocco, and presentation-copies
to all the libraries, will not preserve a book in cir-
culation 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 for ever. 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 Beat-

SPIRITUAL LAWS. 139

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 grav-
ity, or the intrinsic importance of their contents to
the constant mind of man. " Do not trouble your-
self too much about the hght on your statue," said
Michel Angelo to the young sculptor ; " the light
of the public square will test its value."

In hke 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 ;
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
aUve. Truth has not single victories ; all thmgs 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 neg-
ative facts, as every shadow points to the sun. By
a divine necessity, every fact in nature is constrained
to offer its testimony.

140 ESSAY IV.

Human character evermore publishes itself. 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, if
you sleep, you show it. You thinjc, because you
have spoken nothing when others spoke, and have
given no opinion on the times, on the church, on
slavery, on marriage, on sociahsm, on secret socie-
ties, on the college, on parties and persons, that your
verdict is still expected with curiosity as a reserved
wisdom. Far otherwise ; 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 imder-
standing 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 he, it is said.
No man need be deceived, who will study the
hanges 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 false-
ly, 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
\.ho does not believe in his heart that his client ought
to have a verdict. If he does not believe it, his un-
L.'lief will appear to the jury, despite all his protesta-

c

SPIRITCTAL LAWS. 141

tions, 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 beheve,
we cannot adequately say, though we may repeat the
words never so often. It was this conviction which
Swedenborg expressed, when he described a group
of persons in the sphitual world endeavouring in vaia
to articulate a proposition which they did not believe;
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 people's estimate of us,
and all fear of remaining unknown is not less so. If
a man know that he can do any thing, — 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
assembly that a man enters, in every action he at-
tempts, 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
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
fi-om a distant school, with better dress, with trinkets
in his pockets, with airs and pretensions : an older
boy says to himself, ' It 's of no use ; we shall find

142 ESSAY IV.

him out to-morrow.' ' What has he done ? ' is the
divine question which searches men, and transpierces
every false reputation. A fop may sit in any ch'iir
of the world, nor be distinguished for his hour from
Homer and Washington ; but there need never be
any doubt concerning the respective ability of human
beings. 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.

As much virtue as there is, so much appears ; as
much goodness as there is, so much reverence it
commands. All the devils respect virtue. The
high, the generous, the self-devoted sect will always
instruct and command mankind. Never was a sin-
cere word utterly lost. Never a magnanimity fell to
the ground, but there is some heart to greet and ac-
cept it unexpectedly. A man passes for that he is
worth. What he is engraves itself on his face, on his
form, on his fortunes, in letters of light. Conceal-
ment avails him nothing ; boasting nothing. There is
confession in the glances of our eyes ; in our smiles ;
in salutations ; 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, cuts lines
of mean expression in his cheek, pinches the nose,

SPIRITUAL LAWS. 143

sets the mai-k of the beast on the back of the head,
and writes O fool ! fool ! on the forehead of a king.

If 3'-ou would not be known to do any tiling, 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 knowl-
edge, — all blab. Can a cook, a ChifEnch, 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, — him-
self, — and is pledged by it to sweetness of peace,
and to nobleness of aim, which will prove in the end
a better proclamation of it than the relating of the
incident. Vii'tue is the adherence in action to the
nature of things, and the nature of tilings 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
circuits. Let us unlearn our wisdom of the world.
Let us He low in the Lord's power, and learn that
truth alone makes rich and great.

144 ESSAY IV.

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, excuse themselves with
prolix reasons, and accumulate appearances, because
the substance is not.

We are full of these superstitions of sense, the
worship of magnitude. We call the poet inactive,
because he is not a president, a merchant, or a por-
ter. We adore an institution, and do not see that it
is founded on a thought which we 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 way-side 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, serve and wait on this, and, according to
their ability, execute its will. This revisal or cor-
rection is a constant force, which, as a tendency,

SPIRITUAL LAWS. 145

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 re-
port truly of his character, whether it be his diet, his
nouse, his rehgious forms, his society, his mirth, his
vote, his opposition. Now he is not homogeneour ,
but heterogeneous, and the ray does not traverse ,
there are no thorough lights : but the eye of th4
beholder is puzzled, detecting many unlike tenden-
cies, and a life not yet at one.

Why should we make it a point with our faS^e
modesty to disparage that man we are, and that form
of being assigned to us ? A good man is contented.
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 uneasi-
ness by saying, ' He acted, and thou sittest still.' I
see action to be good, when the need is, and sitting
still to be also good. Epaminondas, if 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 busybodies and superservice-
able ? Action and inaction are ahke to the true.
One piece of the tree is cut for a weathercock, and
10

146 ESSAY IV.

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
Epaminondas or Homer being there .'' and that
the soul did not know its own needs .'' Besides,
without any reasoning on the matter, I have no
discontent. The good soul nourishes me, and un-
locks new magazines of power and enjoyment to
me every day. I will not meanly decline the im-
mensity 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 Icnow that the ancestor of every action
is a thought. The poor mind does not seem to it-
self 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.

Let us, if we must have great actions, make our

SPIRITUAL LAWS. 147

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 heed my duties.
Why need I go gadding into the scenes and philos-
ophy of Greek and Italian history, before I have
justified myself to my benefactors .'' How dare I
read Washington's campaigns, when I have not an-
swered the letters of my own correspondent^ ? Is
not that a just objection to much of our reading ?
It is a pusillanimous desertion of our work to gaze
after our neighbours. 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 AD 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 facts, 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 ovra, comes from
a neglect of the fact of an identical nature. Bona-

148 ESSAY IV.

parte knew but one merit, and rewarded in one and
the same way the good soldier, the good astronomer,
the good poet, the good player. The poet uses the
names of Caesar, of Tamerlane, of Bonduca, of Bel-
isarius ; 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 Csesar, and not the player
of Caesar ; then the selfsame strain of thought,
emotion as pure, wit as subtle, motions as swifi,
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 incomparable
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. Let a man believe
in God, and not in names and places and persons.
Let the great soul incarnated in some woman's
form, poor and sad and single, in some Dolly or
Joan, go out to service, and sweep chambers and
scour floors, and its effulgent daybeams 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

SPIKITUAL LAWS. 149

enshrined itself in some other form, and done some
other deed, and that is now the flower and head of
all living nature.

We are the photometers, we the irritable goldleaf
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.

LOVE

" I was as a gem concealed j
Me my burning ray revealed."

Koran.

ESSAY V.

LOVE.

Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfil-
ments ; each of its joys ripens into a new want.
Nature, uncontainable, 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, hke 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.

The natural association of the sentiment of love
with the heyday of the blood seems to require, that

154 ESSAY V.

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 dehcious
fancies of youth reject the least savour of a mature
philosophy, as chilling with age and pedantry their
purple bloom. And, therefore, I laiow I incur the
imputation of unnecessary hardness and stoicism from
those who compose the Court and ParHament 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 different 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 multi-
tudes of men and women, upon the universal heart
of all, and so lights up the whole world and all na-
ture with its generous flames. It matters not, there-
fore, 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 pa-
tience and the Muses' aid, we may attain to that

LOYE. 155

inward view of the law, which shall describe a
truth ever young and beautiful, so central that it
shall commend itself to the eye, at whatever angle
beholden.

And the first condition is, that we must leave
a too close and lingering adherence 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 im-
agination. Each man sees over his own experience
a certain slain 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 nour-
ishment, he will shrink and moan. Alas ! I know
not vvhy, but infinite compunctions embitter in ma-
ture hfe the remembrances of budding joy, 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 melan-
choly ; the plan is seemly and noble. In the actual
world — the painful kingdom of time and place —
dwell care, and canker, and fear. With thought,
with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy.
Round it all the Muses sing. But grief cleaves to
names, and persons, and the partial interests of to-
day and yesterday.
'The strong bent of nature is seen In the proper-

156 ESSAY V.

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
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
earhest demonstrations of complacency and kindness
are nature's most winning pictures. It is the dawn
of civility and grace in the coarse and rustic. The
rude village boy teases the girls about the school-
house door ; — ■ but to-day he comes running into the
entry, and meets one fair child disposing her satchel ;
he holds her books to help her, and instandy it
seems to him as if she removed herself 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 neighbours, that
were so close just now, have learned to respect
each other's personality. Or who can avert his

LOVE. 157

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 with-
out any coquetry the happy, affectionate nature of
woman flows out in this pretty gossip. The girls
may have little beauty, yet plainly do they estab-
lish between them and the good boy the most agree-
able, confiding relations, what with their fun and
their earnest, about Edgar, and Jonas, and Almira,
and who was invited to the party, and who danced
at the dancmg-school, and when the singing-school
would begin, and other nothings concerning 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 in some public discourses
of mine my reverence for the intellect has made
me unjustly cold to the personal relations. But now
I almost shrink at the remembrance of such dispar-
aging 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 treason-

158 ESSAY V.

able to nature, aught derogatory to the social in-
stincts. 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 remembran-
ces, 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 life's book than the delicious
memory of some passages wherein affection con-
trived to give a witchcraft surpassing the deep at-
traction of its own truth to a parcel of accidental
and trivial circumstances. In looking backward,
they may find that several thmgs 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 visitations of that power to his heart
and brain, which created all things new ; •i\hich was
the dawn in him of music, poetry, and art ; whicli
made the face of nature radiant with purple light,
the morning and the night varied enchantments ;
when a single tone of one v^oice could make the
heart bound, and the most trivial circumstance asso-
ciated with one form is put in the amber of mem-
ory; when he became all eye when one was piesent,

LOVE. 159

and all memory when one was gone ; when tlie
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 be-
loved 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'er thou art,
Thou leav'st in him thy watchful eyes, in him thy loving
heart."

In the noon and the afternoon of hfe we still throb at
the recollection of days when happiness was not happy
enough, but must be drugged with the relish 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 gen-
erous deed it resolved on ; when the moonlight was
a pleasing fev^r, 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 pictm-es.

160 ESSAY V.

The passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It
makes all things ahve and significant. Nature grows
conscious. Every bird on the boughs of the tree
sings now to his heart and soul. The notes are
almost 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
he almost fears to trust them with the secret which
they seem to invite. Yet nature soothes and sympa-
thizes. In the green sohtude 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 ;
he is twice a man ; he walks with arms akimbo ; he
soliloquizes ; he accosts the grass and the 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 heats that have opened 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.

LOVE. 161

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 be-
loved 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 relig-
ious solemnity of character and aims. He does
not longer appertain to his family and society ; he
is somewhat ; Ae is a person ; Ae is a soul.

And here let us examine a little nearer the nature
of that influence which is thus potent over the human
youth. Beauty, whose revelation to man we now
celebrate, welcome as the sun wherever it pleases to
shine, which pleases everybody with it and with
themselves, seems sufficient to itself. The lover
cannot paint his maiden to his fancy poor and sol-
itary. Like a tree in flower, so much soft, budding,
informing loveliness is society for itself, and she
teaches his eye why Beauty was pictured with
Loves and Graces attending her steps. Her ex-
istence makes the world rich. Though she ex-
trudes all other persons from his attention as cheap
and unworthy, she indemnifies hiiji 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
11

162 ESSAY V.

that reason, the lover never sees personal resemblan-
ces 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.

The ancients called beauty 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, points. It is destroyed
for the imagination by any attempt to refer it to or-
ganization. Nor does it point to any relations of
friendship or love known and described in society,
but, as it seems to me, to a quite other and imattaia-
able sphere, to relations of transcendent delicacy and
sweetness, to what roses and violets hint and fore-
show. We cannot approach beauty. Its nature is
like opaline doves'-neck lustres, hovering and eva-
nescent. Herein it resembles the most excellent
iliings, which all have this rainbow character, defy-
ing all attempts at appropriation and use. What
else did Jean Paul Richter signify, when he said
to music, " Away ! away ! thou speakest to me of
things which in all my endless life I have not found,
uLid shall not find." The same fluency may be ob-

LOVE. 163

served m every work of the plastie arts. The stat-
ue is then beautiful when it begins to be incompre-
hensible, 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
luUs and satisfies, but when it astonishes and fires
us with new endeavours after the unattainable. Con-
cerning it, Landor inquires " whether it is not to be
referred to some purer state of sensation and ex-
istence."

In like manner, personal beauty is then first
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 makes the be-
holder 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 simset.

Hence arose the saying, " If I love you, what is
that to you ? " We say so, because we feel that
wliat we love is not in your will, but above it. It

164 ESSAY V.

is not you, but your radiance. 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
beautiful 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, move-
ment, and intelligence of this person, because it
suggests to him the presence of that which in-
deed is within the beauty, and the cause of the
beauty.

If, however, from too much conversing with ma-
terial objects, the soul was gross, and misplaced its
satisfaction in the body, it reaped nothing but sor-
row ; body being unable to ful61 the promise which
beauty holds out ; but if, accepting the hint of these
visions and suggestions which beauty makes to his
mmd, the soul passes through the body, and falls to
admire strokes of character, and the lovers contem-

LOVE, 165

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
love extinguishing thg base affection, as the sun puts
out the fire by shining on the hearth, ihey become
pure and hallowed. By conversation witli 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 con-
tracted 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 hke 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.

166 ESSAY V.

SO have Petrarch, Angelo, and Mikon. It awaits a
truer unfolding in opposition and rebuke to that sub-
terranean prudence which presides at marriages with
words that take hold of the upper world, whilst one
eye is prowling in the cellar, so that its gravest dis-
course has a savor of hams and powdering-tubs.
Worst, when this sensualism intrudes into the ed-
ucation 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, hke the pebble thrown into the pond, or the
light proceeding 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 his-
tory. But things are ever grouping themselves
according to higher or more interior laws. Neigh-
bourhood, 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 progressive, idealizing
instinct, predominate later, and the step backward
from the higher to the lower relations is impossible.

LOVE. 167

Thus even love, which is the deification of persons,
must become more impersonal every day. Of this
at first it gives no hint. Lilde think the youth and
maiden who are glancing at each other across crowd-
ed rooms, with eyes so full of mutual intelligence,
of the precious fruit long hereafter to proceed from
this new, quite external stimulus. The work of
vegetation begins first in the irritability of the bark
and leaf-buds. From exchanging glances, they ad-^
vance to acts of courtesy, of gallantry, 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 Httle stars to
make tlie heavens fine. Life, \vith 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 dehght in endear-
ments, 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 affec-

168 ESSAY V.

tion, and, adding up costly advantages, friends,
opportunities, properties, exult in discovering that
willingly, joyfully, they would give all as a ransom for
the beautiful, 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 cove-
nants 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 temporary state.
Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry, protestations,
nor even home in another heart, content 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
a perfect beatitude, detects incongruities, defects,
and disproportion in the behaviour 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 re-
appear, and continue to attract ; but the regard
changes, quits the sign, and attaches to the substance.
This repairs the wounded affection. Meantime, as

LOVE. 169

life wears on, it proves a game of permutation and
combination of all possible positions of the parties,
to employ all the resources of each, and acquaint
each with the strength and weakness of the oth-
er. 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 eveiy
hour. The angels that inhabit this temple of the
body appear at the windows, and the gnomes and
vices also. By all the virtues they are united. If
there be virtue, all the vices are known as such ;
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, disen-
gaged 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 features, that magical play of charms, — was

170 ESSAY V.

deciduous, had a prospective end, like the scaffold-
ing by which the house was built ; and the purifica-
tion of the intellect and the heart, from year to year,
is the real marriage, foreseen and prepared from the
first, and wholly above their consciousness. Look-
ing 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
wiih 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 trainuig for a love which
knows not sex, nor person, nor partiahty, but which
seeks 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
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 mind is presently
seen again, — its overarching vault, bright with gal-
axies of immutable lights, and the warm loves and

LOVE. 171

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 any thing 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 for ever.

FRIENDSHIP.

A ruddy drop of manly blood

The surging sea outweighs.

The world uncertain comes and goes,

The lover rooted stays.

I fancied he was fled,

And, after many a year.

Glowed unexhausted kindliness

Like daily sunrise there.

My careful heart was free again, —

O friend, my bosom said,

Through thee alone the sky is arched,

Through thee the rose is red,

All things through thee take nobler form,

And look beyond the earth.

And is the mill-round of our fate

A sun-path in thy worth.

Me too thy nobleness has taught

To master my despair ;

The fountains of my hidden life

Are through thy friendship fair.

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
wandering 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 lik-
ened to the material effects of fire ; so swift, or
much more swift, more active, more cheering, are
these fine inward irradiations. From the highest
degree of passionate love, to the lowest degree of
good-will, they make the sweetness of life.

176 ESSAY VI.

Our intellectual and active powers increase with
')ur affection. The scholar sits down to write, and
"U his years of meditation do not furnish him with
one good thought or happy expression ; but it is ne-
cessary to write a letter to a friend, — and, forthwith,
iroops of gentle thoughts invest themselves, on every
Land, with chosen words. See, in any house where
virtue and self-respect abide, the palpitation which
•he approach of a stranger causes. A commended
stranger is expected and announced, and an uneasi-
,iess betwixt pleasure and pain invades all the hearts
of a household. His arrival almost brings fear to
ihe 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
'jet up a dinner if they can. Of a commended
stranger, only the good report is told by others,
jiily the good and new is heard by us. He stands
10 us for humanity. He is what we wish. Plaving
inagined and invested him, we ask how we should
;!and related in conversation and action with such a
nan, and are uneasy with fear. The same idea ex-
,lts conversation with him. We talk better than we
.;e wont. We have the nimblest fancy, a richer
..emory, and our dumb devil has taken leave for
iijd time. For long hours we can continue a series
r.i sincere, graceful, rich communications, drawn
iiiim the oldest, secretest experience, so that they

FRIENDSHIP. 177

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 bis
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, misappre-
hension are old acquaintances. Now, when ba
comes, he may get the order, the dress, and the
dinner, — but the throbbing of the heart, and the
communications of the soul, no more.

What is so pleasant as these jets of afi^ecticn
which make a young world for me again .'' What
so delicious as a just and firm encounter of two, i:i
a thought, in a feeling .'' How beautiful, on their
approach to this beating heart, the steps and foriKs
of the gifted and the true ! The moment we indulg 3
our affections, the earth is metamorphosed ; there is
no winter, and no night ; all tragedies, all ennuis, van-
ish, — 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 uni-
verse it should rejoin its friend, and it would be con-
tent and cheerful alone for a thousand years.

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving fcr

my friends, the old and the new. Shall I not c;,;l

God the Beautiful, who daily showeth himself so to

me in his gifts ? I chide society, I embrace solitude,

12

178 ESSAY VI.

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 rae, who un-
derstands me, becomes mine, — a possession 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. I'he great God gave them to me. By
oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue with it-
self, I find them, or rather not I, but the Deity in
me and in them derides and cancels the thick walls
of individual character, relation, age, sex, circum-
stance, at which he usually connives, and now makes
many one. High thanks I owe you, excellent lov-
ers, who carry out the world for me to new and
noble depths, and enlarge the meaning of .all my
thoughts. These are new poetry of the first Bard,
— poetry without stop, — hymn, ode, and epic, poet-
ry still flovv'ing, 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 diem is so pure, that we hold by sim-
ple affinity, and the Genius of my life being thus
social, the same affinity will exert its energy on

FRIENDSHIP. 179

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 a great event, and hin-
ders me from sleep. I have often had fine fan-
cies about 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
httle modified. I must feel pride in my friend's ac-
complishments as if they were mine, — and a prop-
erty in his virtues. I feel as warmly when he is
praised, as the lover when he hears applause of his
engaged maiden. We over-estimate the conscience
of our friend. His goodness seems better than our
goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less.
Every thing that is his, — his name, his form, his
dress, books, and instruments, —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 suspicion and unbe-
lief. We doubt that we bestow on our hero the vir*

180 ESSAY VI.

tues in which he shines, and afterwards worship the
form to which we have ascribed this divine inhabita-
tion. In strictness, the soul does not respect men as
it respects itself. In strict science all persons iinder-
he the same condition of an infinite remoteness. Shall
we fear to cool our love by mining for the metaphys-
ical 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 stands
united with his thought conceives magnificently 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 tantamount 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 hke
him, unless he is at last a poor Greek like me. I

FEIENDSHIP. 181

cannot deny it, O friend, that the vast shadow of the
PhenomenaJ includes thee also in its pied and paint-
ed immensity, — thee, also, compaped 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 tlie 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 su-
perinduces the opposite. The soul environs itself
with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-
acquaintance or solitude ; and it goes alone for a
season, that it may exalt its conversation or society.
This method betrays itself along the whole history
of our personal relations. The instinct of affection
revives the hope of union with our mates, and tlie
returning sense of insulation recalls us from the
chase. Thus every 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 tliink
again of trifles in relation to thy comings and goings.

182

ESSAY VI.

I am not very wise ; my moods are quite attainable ;
and I respect thy genius ; it is to me as yet unfath-
omed ; yet dare I not presume in thee a perfect in-
telligence 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 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 summers 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 antago-
nisms, which, as soon as we meet, begin to play, and
translate all poetry into stale prose. Almost all peo-
ple descend to meet. All association must be a
compromise, and, what is worst, the very flower and
aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures
disappears as they approach each other. What a
perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of

FRIENDSHIP. 183

the virtuous and gifted ! After interviews have been
compassed with long foresight, we must be tormented
presently by bafBed blows, by sudden, unseasonable
apathies, by epilepsies of wit and of animal spirits,
in the heyday of friendship and thought. Our fac-
ulties do not play us true, and both parties are re-
heved 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 un-
equal from one contest, 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 aJl 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 Icnew itself before any of the
best souls were yet ripe enough to know and own it.
Respect the naturlangsamk»it which hardens the ru-
by 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

184 ESSAY VI.

God, is not for levity, but for the total worth of man.
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 common, 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 frostwork, but the solidest
thing we know. For now, after so many ages of
experience, what do we know of nature, or of our-
selves .' Not one step has man taken toward the so-
lution of the problem of his destiny. In one con-
demnation of folly stand the whole universe of men.
But the sweet sincerity of joy and peace, which 1
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 entertain him a single day. Happier, if
he know the solemnity of that relation, and honor its

FRIENDSHIP. 185

law ! 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 proposes himself for contests
where Time, Want, Danger, are in the lists, and
he alone is victor who has truth enough in his con-
stitution to preserve the delicacy of liis beauty from
tlie wear and tear of all these. The gifts of fortune
may be present or absent, but all the speed in that
contest depends on intrinsic nobleness, and the con-
tempt of trifles. There are two elements that go to
the composition of friendship, each so sovereign
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 arrived at last
in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I
may drop even those imdermost garments of dissim-
ulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men
never piat off, and may deal with him with the sim-
plicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom
meets another. Sincerity is the luxury allowed,
like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank,
that b^ing 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 gos-

186 ESSAY VI.

sip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our
thought from him under a hundred folds. I knew a
man, who, under a certain rehgious "frenzy, cast off
this drapery, and, omitting all compliment and com-
monplace, spoke to the conscience of every person
he encountered, and that with great insight and beau-
ty. 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 advantage of bringing every man of his ac-
quaintance into true relations with him. No man
would think of speaking falsely with him, or of put-
ting him off with any chat of markets or reading-
rooms. But every man was constrained by so much
sincerity to the like plaindealing, and what love of
nature, what poetry, what symbol of truth he had,
he did certainly show him. But to most of us so-
ciety 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 re-
quires 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 ques-
tioned, and which spoils all conversation with him.
But a friend is a sane man who exercises not my in-
genuity, but me. My friend gives me entertainment
without requiring any stipulation on my part. A

FRIENDSHIP. 187

friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I
who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose
existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my
own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all
its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a for-
eign 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 fie, 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 charac-
ter can subsist in another as to draw us by love.
Can anotlier be so blessed, and we so pure, that we
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 mat-
ter 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 friendship should have
feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant
itself on the ground, before it vaults 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 exchange of gifts, of useful
loans ; it is good neighbourhood ; it watches with the

188 ESSAY VI.

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 dis-
guise 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
prostitution of the name of friendship to signify mod-
ish and worldly alliances. I much prefer the compa-
ny of ploughboys and tin-peddlers, to the silken and
perfumed amity which celebrates its days of encoun-
ter by a frivolous display, by rides in a curricle, and
dinners at the best taverns. The end of friendship is
a commerce the most strict and homely that can be
joined ; more strict than any of which we have expe-
rience. It is for aid and comfort through all the rela-
tions and passages of life and death. It is fit for
serene days, and graceful gifts, and country rambles,
but also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck,
poverty, and persecution. It keeps company with the
sallies of the wit and the trances of religion. 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 some-
thing usual and settled, but should be alert and in-
ventive, and add rhyme and reason to what was
dnadgery.

Friendship may be said to require natures so

FRIENDSHIP. 189

rare and costly, each so well tempered and so hap-
pily adapted, and withal so circumstanced, (for even
in that particular, a poet says, love demands that
the parties be ahogether paired,) that its satisfactioa
can very seldom be assured. It cannot subsist in
its perfection, say some of those who are learned
m this warm lore of the heart, betwixt more than
two. I am not quite so strict in my terms, per-
haps because I have never known so high a fellow-
ship as others. I please my imagination more with
a circle of godlike men and women variously related
to each other, and between whom subsists 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 wa-
ters too much. The best mix as ill as good and
bad. You shall have very useful and cheering dis-
course 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-
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
merge their egotism into a social soul exactly co-
extensive with the several consciousnesses there pres-
ent. No partialities of friend to friend, no fondness-

ICO ESSAY VI.

es 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
determines 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 perma-
nent property in some individuals. Conversation is
an evanescent relation, — no more. A man is reput-
ed 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 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 balked by antago-
nism and by compliance. Let him not cease an in-

FRIENDSHIP. 191

Slant to be himself. The only joy I have in his
being mine, is that the not mine is mine. I hate,
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 de-
mands is ability to do without it. That high
office reqiures great and sublime parts. There
must be very two, before there can be very one.
Let it be an alliance of two large, formidable na-
tures, mutually beheld, mutually feared, before yet
they recognize the deep identity which beneath these
disparities unites them.

He only is fit for this society who is magnanimous;
who is sure that greatness and goodness are always
economy ; -who is not swift to intermeddle with his
fortunes. Let him not intermeddle with this. Leave
to the diamond its ages to grow, nor expect to accel-
erate the births of the eternal. Friendship demands
a religious treatment. We talk of choosing our
friends, but friends are self-elected. Reverence is
a gi-eat part of it. Treat your friend as a spectacle.
Of course he has merits that are not yours, and that
you cannot honor, if you must needs hold him close
to your person. Stand aside ; give those merits
room ; let them mount and expand. 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

192 ESSAY VI.

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-con-
founding pleasure, instead of the noblest benefit.

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 .'' Wliy 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 neighbourly 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 superiorities ; wish him not
less by a thought, but hoard and tell them all.
Guard him as thy counterpart. Let him be to thea
for ever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, de-

FRIENDSHIP. 193

voutly 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 let-
ter, and from him I receive a letter. That seems
to you a little. It suffices me. It is a spiritual gift
worthy of him to give, and of me to receive. It
profanes nobody. In these warm hnes the heart will
trust itself, as it will not to the tongue, and pour out
the prophecy of a godlier existence than all the an-
nals of heroism have yet made good.

Respect so far the holy laws of this fellowship as
not to prejudice its perfect flower by your impa-
tience for its opening. We must be our own before
we can be another's. There is at least this satisfac-
tion in crime, according to the Latin proverb ; — you
can speak to your accomplice on even terms. Cri-
men quos inquinat, cequat. To those whom we ad-
mire and love, at first we cannot. Yet the least de-
fect 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
shoidd say to the select souls, or how to say any
13

194 ESSAY VI.

thing to such ? No matter how ingenious, no matter
how graceful and bland. There are innumerable
degrees of folly and wisdom, and for you to say
aught is to be frivolous. Wait, and thy heart shall
speak. Wait until the necessary and everlasting
overpowers you, until day and night avail themselves
of your lips. 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 never catch 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 arrangements, no intro-
ductions, 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 tliey 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

FRIENDSHIP. 195

desire, are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope
cheers ever tlie faitliful 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 ourselves that
the period of nonage, of follies, of blunders, and of
shame, is passed in solitude, and when we are finish-
ed 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 in-
to rash and foolish alliances which no God attends.
By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the lit-
tle you gain the great. 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 fooUsh 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 abso-
lute 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

196

ESSAY VI.

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 .'' Unhand me : I will be dependent no more.'
Ah ! seest thou not, O brother, that thus we part
only to meet 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, and the harbinger of
a greater friend.

I do then with my friends as I do with my books.
I would have them where I can find them, but I sel-
dom 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 de-
scend to converse. In the great days, presentiments
hover 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

FRIENDSHIP. 197

own. It would bdeed give me a certain household
joy to quit this lofty seeking, tliis spiritual astrono-
my, or search of stars, and come down to warm
sympathies 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 moods, when
I can well afford to occupy myself with foreign ob-
jects ; 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 I shall not be able any more than now
to converse with you. So I will owe to my friends
this evanescent intercourse. I will receive from
them, not what they have, but what they are. They
shall give me that which properly they cannot give,
but which emanates from them. But they shall not
hold me by any relations less subtile 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 1
knew, to carry a friendship greatly, on one side,
without due correspondence on the other. Why
should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver
is not capacious .'' It never troubles the siui 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-

198 ESSAY VI.

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 the unworthy object, and dwells and
broods on the eternal, and when the poor interposed
mask crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much
earth, and feels hs 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.

PRUDENCE.

Theme no poet gladly sung,
Fair to old and foul to young,
Scorn not thou the love of parts,
And the articles of arts.
Grandeur of the perfect sphere
Thanks the atoms that cohere.

ESSAY VII,

PRUDENCE.

What right have I to write on Prudence, where-
of 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 perception. Then I
have the same title to write on prudence, that I have
to write on poetry or holiness. We write from
aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experi-
ence. 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 egotis-
tic, you shall find what he has not by his praise.
Moreover, it would be hardly honest in me not to

202 ESSAY VII.

balance these fine lyric words of Love and Friend-
ship 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
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
content to seek health of body by complying with
physical 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 char-
acter ; and a true prudence or law of shows rec-
ognizes the co-presence of other laws, and knows
that its own office is subaltern ; knows that it is sur-
face 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 un-
folds 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 pur-
pose, to indicate three. One class live 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

PRUDENCE. 203

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
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 devotion to
matter, as if we possessed no other faculties than the
palate, the nose, the touch, the eye and ear ; a pru-
dence which adores the Rule of Three, which never
subscribes, which never gives, which seldom lends,
and asks but one question of any project, — Will it
bake bread ? This is a disease like a thickening of
the skin until the vital organs are destroyed. 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 sev-
eral faculty, but a name for wisdom and virtue con-
versing 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

204 ESSAY VII.

personal influence, a graceful and commanding ad-
dress, had their value as proofs of the energy of the
spirit. If a man lose his balance, and immerse him-
self in any trades or pleasures for their own sake, he
may be a good wheel or pin, but he is not a cul-
tivated 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 htera-
ture'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
being studied with the co-perception of their subordi-
nate 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, where-
by man's 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

PRUDENCE. 205

to give bound and period to his being, on all sides,
the sun and moon, the great formalists in the sky :
here hes 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
properties 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 va-
cant, indivisible, and divine in its coming, is slit and
peddled into trifles and tatters. A door is to be
pamted, 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 trans-
acted with a man without heart or brains ; and the
stringing recollection of an injurious or veiy awkward
word, — these eat up the hours. Do what we can,
summer wilf have its flies : if we walk in the woods,
we must feed mosquitos : 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 regai'd the
clouds and the rain.

We are instructed by these petty experiences
which usurp the hours and years. The hard soil

206 ESSAY VII.

and four months of snow make the inhabitant of the
northern temperate zone wiser and abler than his fel-
low 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, and pile
wood and coal. But as it happens that not one
stroke can labor lay to, without some new acquaint-
ance 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 dis-
criminate ; 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 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 ap-
plication of means to ends insures victory and the

PET7DENCE. 207

in

songs of victory, not less in a farm or a shop than
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 ramy 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. Herem he tastes an old
joy of youth and childhood, the cat-like love of
garrets, presses, and corn-chambers, and of the con-
veniences of long housekeeping. His garden or his
poultry-yard 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 bo
strown with satisfactions. There is more difference
in the quality of our pleasures 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 sweeteess 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
says he looked out of this window,. when he looked
out of that, — whip him." Our American character

208 ESSAY VII.

is marked by a more than average delight in accurate
perception, which is shown by the currency of the
byword, "No mistalce." But the discomfort of
unpunctuahty, of confusion of thought about facts, of
inattention to the wants of to-morrow, is of no nation.
The beautiful laws of time and space, once dis-
located 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 efTect
which gives life to the figures, and to the life an ir-
resistible truth. This property is the hitting, in all
the figures we draw, the right centre of gravity. I
mean, the placing the figures firm upon their feet,

PRUDENCE. 209

making the hands grasp, and fastening the eyes on
the spot where they should look. Even lifeless
figures, as vessels and stools, — 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
greatly 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 impression than
the contortions of ten crucified martyrs. For, be-
side all the resisdess beauty of form, it possesses in
the highest degree the property of the perpendicu-
larity of all the figures." This perpendicularity 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 dis-
criminate between what they remember and what
they dreamed, call a spade a spade, give us facts,
and honor their own senses with trust.

But what man shall dare tax another with impru-
dence .'' Who is prudent ? The men we call great-
est are least in this kingdom. There is a certain
fatal dislocation in our relation to nature, distorting
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
14

210 ESSAY VII.

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 loiow the properties of
plants and animals and the laws of nature through
our sympathy with the same ; but this remains the
dream of poets. Poetry and prudence should be
coincident. Poets should be lawgivers ; that is, the
boldest lyric inspiration should not chide and insult,
but should announce and lead, the civil code, and the
day's work. But now the two things seem irrecon-
cilably parted. We have violated law upon law,
until we stand amidst ruins, and when by chance we
espy a coincidence between reason and the phe-
nomena, we are surprised. Beauty should be the
dowry of every man and woman, as invariably as
sensation ; but it is rare. Health or sound organiza-
iion should be universal. Genius should be the child
i)f genius, and every child should be inspired ; but
:iOW it is not to be predicted of any child, and no-
\vhere is it pure. We call partia] half-lights, by
courtesy, genius ; talent which converts itself to
iiioney ; talent which glitters to-day, that it may dine
nd sleep well to-morrow ; and society is officered
i'y 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 ;
L.iid piety and love. Appetite shows to the finer

PRUDENCE. 211

souls as a disease, and they find beauty in rites and
bounds that resist it.

We have found out fine names to cover our sensu-
ality 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
nothing considered with his devotion to his art. His
art 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 sense. On him
who scorned the world, as he said, the scorned world
wreaks its revenge. He that despiseth small things
will perish by little and little. Goethe's Tasso is
very likely to be a pretty fair historical portrait, and
tliat is true tragedy. It does not seem to me so gen-
uine grief when some tyrannous Richard the Third
oppresses and slays a score of innocent persons, as
when Antonio and Tasso, both apparently 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 grasping 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 tempera-
ment, reckless of physical laws, self-indUlgent, be-
comes presently unfortunate, querulous, a " discom-
fortable cousin," a thorn to himself and to others.

212 ESSAY VII.

The scholar shames us by his bifold life. Whilst
something higher than prudence is active, he is admi-
rable ; when common sense is wanted, he is an en-
cumbrance. Yesterday, Caesar was not so great;
to-day, the felon at the gallows' foot is not more
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. He resembles the pitiful
drivellers, whom travellers describe as frequenting the
bazaars of Constantinople, who skulk about all day,
yellow, emaciated, ragged, sneaking ; and at evening,
when the bazaars are open, slink to the opium-shop,
swallow their morsel, and become tranquil and glori-
fied seers. And who has not seen the tragedy of
imprudent genius, struggling for years with paltry
pecuniary difficulties, at last sinking, chilled, exhaust-
ed, 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

PRUDENCE. 213

him see that as much wisdom may be expended on
a private economy as on an empire, and as much
wisdom 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 wisd&m of
Poor Richard ; or the State-Street prudence of buy-
ing by the acre to sell by the foot ; or the thrift of
the agriculturist, to stick a tree between whiles, be-
cause it will grow whilst he sleeps ; or the prudence
which consists 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, 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 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

214 ESSAY Til.

few swift moments in which the Yankee suffers any
one of them to remain in his possession. 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-cominand,
let him put the bread he eats at his own disposal,
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 conversation ! 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 across all these
distracting forces, and keep a slender human word
among the storms, distances, and accidents that
drive us hither and thither, and, by persistency,
make the paltry force of one man reappear to re-
deem 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

PRUDENCE. 215

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 reconcila-
ble. Prudence concerns the present time, persons,
property, and existing forms. But as every fact
hath its roots m the soul, and, if the soul were
changed, would cease to be, or would become some
other thing, 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 hu-
man society. On the most profitable lie, the course
of events presently lays a destructive tax ; whilst
frankness invites frankness, puts the parties on a
convenient footing, and makes their business a friend-
ship. Tmst 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
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 stout-
ness will commonly make his fear groundless. The

216 ESSAY VII.

Latin proverb says, that "in battles the eye is first
overcome." 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 sol-
diers, 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 parlour and the cabin. The
drover, the sailor, bufllsts 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
neighbours, 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 ofTender of your peace and of the neigh-
bourhood, if you rip up his claims, is as thin and timid
as any ; and the peace of society is often kept, be-
cause, as children say, one is afraid, and the other
dares not. Far off, men swell, bully, and threaten ;
1)11. .?■ 'liem hand to hand, and they are a feeble folk.

it IS a proverb, that ' courtesy costs nothing ' ;
but calculation might come to value love for its profit.
Love is fabled to be blifid ; but kindness is necessary

PRUDENCE. 217

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 they set out to contend. Saint Paul will
lie, and Saint John will hate. What low, poor,
paltry, hypocritical people an argument on religion
will make of the pure and chosen souls ! They will
shuffle, 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 with your
contemporaries, by indulging a vein of hostility and
bitterness. Though your views are in straight antag-
onism to theirs, assume an identity of sentiment, as-
sume that you are saying precisely that which all
think, and in the flow of wit and love roll out your
paradoxes in solid column, with not the infirmity of
a doubt. So at least shall you get an adequate deliv-
erance. 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

218 ESSAY VII.

bears extorted, hoarse, and half witness. But as-
sume a consent, and it shall presently be granted,
since, really, and underneath their external diver-
sities, 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, approach-
ing us. We are too old to regard fashion, too old
to expect patronage of any greater or more power-
ful. Let us suck the sweetness of those affections
and consuetudes 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 imagination hath its friends ; and life
would be dearer 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 relations, 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
prudence, or the art of securing a present well-being.

PRUDENCE. 219

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 command-
ments.

HEROISM,

" Paradise is under the shadow of swords."

Mahonut.

Ruby wine is drunic by knaves,
Sugar spends to fatten slaves.
Rose and vine-leaf deck buffoons ;
Thunderclouds are Jove's festoons.
Drooping oft in wreaths of -dread
Lightning-knotted round his head ;
The hero is not fed on sweets.
Daily his own heart he eats ;
Chambers of the great are jetils.
And head-winds right for royal saila.

ESSAY VIII.
HEROISM

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 behaviour 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 de-
light in personal advantages, there is in their plays a
certain heroic cast of character and dialogue, — as
in Bonduca, Sophocles, the Mad Lover, the Double
Marriage, — wherein the speaker is so earnest and
cordial, and on such deep grounds of character, that
the dialogue, on the slightest additional incident in
the plot, rises naturally into poetry. Among many
texts, take the following. The Roman Martins has
conquered Athens, — all but the invincible spirits of

224 ESSAY VIII.

Sophocles, the duke of Athens, and Dorigen, his
wife. The beauty of the latter inflames Martius,
and he seeks to save her husband ; 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.

Sofh. No, I will take no leave. My Dorigen,
Yonder, above, 'bout Ariadne's crown,
My spirit sball 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 '11 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,

HEROISM. 225

And live with all the freedom you were wont.

love ! thou doubly hast afflicted me

With virtue and with beauty. Treacherous heart,
My hand sliall cast thee quick into my urn.
Ere thou transgress this knot of piety.

Vol. What ails my brother ?

Soph. Martius, O Martins,
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, Veilerius,
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."

1 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 Laoda-
mia, and the ode of "Dion," and some sonnets,
have a certain noble music ; and Scott will some-
times draw a stroke like the portrait of Lord Evan-
dale, 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 Bums has given us a song or two.

15

226 ESSAY vin.

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 re-
counts the prodigies of individual valor with admira-
tion, all the more 'evident on the 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 explore 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 Epaminondas, the Scipio
of old, and I must think we are more deeply indebt-
ed 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 inmiense fame.

We need books of this tart cathartic virtue, more
than books of political science, or of private econo-
my. Life is a festival only to the wise. Seen from
tlie 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-

HEROISM. 227

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. Unhappily,
no man exists who has not b his own person be-
come, to some amount, a stockholder in the sin,
and so made himself liable to a share in the ex-
piation.

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 commonwealth and
his own well-being require that he should not go dan-
cing in the weeds of peace, but warned, self-collect-
ed, and neither defying nor dreading the tliunder, 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 behaviour.

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 en-

228

ESSAY VIII.

ergy 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 texture
with it ; it has pride ; it is the extreme of individual
nature. Nevertheless, we must profoundly revere it.
There is somewhat in great actions, which does not
allow us to go behind them. Heroism feels and
never reasons, and therefore is always right ; and al-
though 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 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

HEROISM. 229

does to him, for every man must be supposed to see
a little farther on his own proper path dian any one
else. Therefore, just and wise men take umbrage at
his act, undl after some litde dme 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, generous, hospi-
table, 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 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 society.
What joys has kmd nature provided for us dear
creatures ! There seems to be no interval between
greatness and meanness. When the spirit is not
master of the world, then it is its dupe. Yet the little

230 ESSAY VIII.

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, lay-
ing 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 nonsense. " 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 un-
usual display : the soul of a better quality thrusts
back the unseasonable economy into the vaults of
life, and says, I will obey the God, and the sacrifice
and the fire he will provide. Ibn Hankal, the Ara-
bian geographer, describes a heroic extreme 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 whatever number ; the master has

HEROISM. 231

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 magnanimous
know very weU that they who give time, or money,
or shelter, to the stranger — so it he done for love,
and not for ostentation — do, as it were, put God un-
der obligation to them, so perfect are the compensa-
tions 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 tlie
flame of human love, and raise the standard of civil
virtue among mankind. But hospitality 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 draperies. 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 aus-
terity. It seems not worth his while to be solemn,
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 precis-
ion, his living is natural and poetic. John Eliot,

232

ESSAY VIII.

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 Eu-
ripides, — " 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 vir-
tue is enough. Poverty is its ornament. It does
not need plenty, 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 wiU 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 wait for justification, though he had the scroll of
bis accounts in his hands, but tears it to pieces be-

HEROISM. 233

fore the tribunes. Socrates's condemnation of him-
self 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 captain and his company, —

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

Master. Very likely,

'T is 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 game in innocent defiance of the Blue-
Laws of the world ; and such would appear, could we
see the human race assembled in vision, like liltle
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 delight
in the hero, is the main fact to our purpose. All
these great and transcendent properties are ours. If

234 ESSAY VIII.

we dilate in beholding the Greek energy, the Roman
pride, it is that we are already domesticating the
same sentiment. Let us find room for this great
guest in our small houses. The first step of wor-
thiness will be to disabuse us of our superstitious as-
sociations with places and times, with number and
size. "Why should the|§ words, Athenian, Roman,
Asia, and England, so tingle in the ear .'' Where the
heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and
not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Con-
necticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry
places, and the ear loves names of foreign and clas-
sic topography. But here we are ; 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 fate, friends, angels, and the Su-
preme Being, shall not be absent from the chamber
where thou sittest. Epaminondas, brave and affec-
tionate, 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 handsome ground
enough for Washington to tread, and London streets
for the feet of Milton. A great man makes his cli-
mate genial in the imagination of men, and its air the
beloved element of all delicate spirits. That coun-
try is the fairest, which is inhabited by the noblest
minds. The pictures which fill the imagination in
reading the actions of Pericles, Xenophon, Colura-

HEROISM. 235

bus, 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 re-
gal or national splendor, and act on principles
that should interest man and nature in the length
of our days.

We have seen or heard of many extraordinary
young men, who never ripened, or whose perform-
ance in actual life was not extraordinary. When we
see their air and mien, when w© hear them speak of
society, of books, of religion, we admire their supe-
riority, they seem to throw contempt on Our entire
polity and social state ; theirs is the tone of a youth-
ful giant, who is sent to work revolutions. Bult 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
make the Actual ridiculous ; but the tough world had
its revenge the moment they put their horses of the
sun to plough in its furrow. They found no exam-
ple 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 organize their belief. Or
why should a woman liken herself to any historical
woman, and think, because Sappho, or Sevigne, or
De Stael, or the cloistered souls who have had ge-
nius and cdtivation, do not satisfy the imagination

236 ESSAY VIII.

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 na-
ture that ever bloomed. Let the maiden, with erect
soul, walk serenely on her way, accept the hint of
each new experience, search in turn all the objects
that solicit her eye, that she inaj learn the power
and the charm of her new-born being, which is the
kindling of a new dawn in the recesses of space.
The fair girl, who repels interference by a decided
and proud choice of influences, so careless of pleas-
ing, 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 m vain you live, for every passing eye is cheered
and refined by the vision.

The characteristic of heroism is its persistency.
All men have wandering impulses, fits, and starts of
generosity. But when you have chosen your part,
abide by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile your-
self with the world. The heroic cannot be the com-
mon, nor the common the heroic. Yet we have the
weakness to expect the sympathy of people in those
actions whose excellence is that tRey outrun sympa-
thy, 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

HEKOISM. 237

prudent people do not commend you. Adhere to
yoiu- own act, and congratulate yourself if you have
done something strange and extravagant, 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 of-
fice to my fellow-creature. Has nature covenanted
with me that I should never appear to disadvantage,
never make a ridiculous figure .'' Let us be gener-
ous of our dignity, as well as of our money. Great-
ness 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 mer-
it, but for our justification. It is a capital blunder ;
as you discover, when another man recites his char-
ities.

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

238 ESSAY VIII.

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 behooves
the wise man to look with a bold eye 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 opinion.
But whoso is heroic will always find crises to try his
edge. Human virtue demands her champions and
martyrs, and the trial of persecution always proceeds.
It is but the other day that the brave Lovejoy 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 after the counsel of his own bosom.
Let him quit too much association, let him go home
much, and stablish himself in those courses he ap-

HEEOISM. 239

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
slander, 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 penal-
ties, whenever it may please the next newspaper and
a sufficient number of his neighbours to pronounce
his opinions incendiary.

It may calm the apprehension of calamity in the
most susceptible heart to see how quick a bound na-
tm-e 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
the hour when we are deaf to the higher voices, who
does not envy those who have seen safely to an end
their manful endeavour } Who that sees the mean-
ness of our politics, but inly congratulates Washing-
ton that he is long already wrapped in his shroud,
and for ever safe ; that he was laid sweet in his

240 ESSAY VIII.

grave, the hope of humanity not yet subjugated in
llim ? 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 compla-
cency the speedy term of his own conversation with
finite nature ? And yet the love that will be annihi-
lated sooner than treacherous has already made
death impossible, and affirms itself no mortal, but
a native of the deeps of absolute and mextmguish-
able being.

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 '11 never them forsake :
When they shall die, then God himself shall di« ■
They live, they live in blest eternity."

Henry More.

Space is ample, east and west,

But two cannot go abreast,

Cannot travel in it two :

Yonder masterful cnckoo

Crowds every egg out of the nest,

Quick or dead, except its own;

A spell is laid on sod and stone.

Night and Day 've been tampered with.

Every quality and pith

Surcharged and sultry with a power

That works its veill on age and hour.

16

ESSAY IX.
THE OVER-SOUL

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.
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 uni-
versal sense of want and ignorance, but the fine inu-
endo by which the soul makes its enormous claim .'
Why do men feel that the natural history of man has
never been written, but he is always leaving behind
what you have said of him, and it becomes old, and

244 ESSAY IX.

books of metaphysics worthless ? The philosophj
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. Our being is descending into us from we
know not whence. The most eiicact calculator has
no prescience that somewhat incalculable may not
balk 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 atti-
tude of reception, but from some alien energy the
visions come.

The Supreme Critic on 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 particular
being is contained and made one with all other ; that
common heart, of which all sincere conversation is
the worship, to which all right action is submission ;
that overpowering reahty which confutes our tricks

THE OVEK-SOUL. 245

and talents, and constrains every one to pass for what
he IS, and to speak from his character, and not from
his tongue, and which evermore tends to pass into
our thought and hand, and become wisdom, and vir-
tue, and power, and beauty. We hve in succession,
in division, in parts, in panicles. Meantime withinj
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-sufficing 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 Wisdom 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, we can know
what it saith. Every man's words, who speaks from
that hfe, 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 in-
spire whom it will, and behold ! their speech shall
be lyrical, and sweet, and universal as the rising of
the wind. Yet I deske, even by profane words, if

246 ESSAY IX.

I may not use sacred, 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,
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 mem-
ory, 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 in-
tellect and the will ; is the background of our be-
ing, in which they lie, — an immensity not possessed
and that cannot be possessed. From within or from
behind, a light sliines through us upon things, and
makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is
all. A man is the facade 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 misrepresents himself Him we do not respect,
but the soul, whose organ he is, would he let it ap-

THE OVER-SOUL. 247

pear 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 be-
gins, when the individual woiald be something of him-;
self. All reform aims, in some one particular, to let!
the soul have its way through us ; in other wordsj
to engage us to obey.

Of this pure nature every man is at some time sen-
sible. Language cannot paint it with his colors. It
is too subtile. 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 prov-
erb 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 na-
ture, to the attributes of God. Jifetice we see and
know. Love, Freedom, Power. These natures no
man ever got above, but they tower over us, and
most in the moment when our bterests tempt us to
wound them.

The sovereignty of this nature whereof we speak
is made known by its independency of those limita-

248 ESSAY IX.

tions which cuTumscribe us on every hand. The
soul circumscribes all things. As I have said, it con-
tradicts all experience. In like manner it abolishes
lime 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
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. The spirit sports with time, —

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

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
fmd 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 conditions 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 lon-
gevity. See how the deep, divine thought reduces
centuries, and millenniums, and makes itself present
through all ages. Is the teaching of Christ less ef-

THE OVER-SOUL. 249

fective now than it was when first his mouth was
opened ? The emphasis of facts and persons in
my thought has nothing to do with time. And so,
always, the soul's scale is one ; the scale of the
senses and the understanding is another. Before
the revelations of the soul, Time, Space, and
Nature shrink away. In common speech, we refer
all things to time, as we habitually refer the immense-
ly 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 political,
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, de-
tach 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 before her, leaving worlds behind
her. She has no dates, nor rites, nor persons, nor
specialties, nor men. The soul knows only the soul ;
the web of events is the flowing robe in which she
IS clothed.

After its own law and not by arithmetic is the rate
of its progress to be computed. The soul's advan-

250 ESSAY IX.

ces 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 met-
amorphosis, — from the egg to the worm, from the
worm to the fly. The growths of genius are of a
certain total character, that does not advance tlie
elect individual first over Jolm, then Adam, then
Richard, and give to each the pain of discovered in-
feriority, but by every throe of growth the man ex-
pands there where he works, passing, at each pulsa-
tion, 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 Arri-
an, 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
are in the spirit which contains them all. 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. To
the well-born child, all the virtues are natural, and
not painfully acquired. Speak to his heart, and the
man becomes suddenly virtuous.

THE OVER-SOUL. 251

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, stand aheady on a platform that com-
mands the sciences and arts, speech and poetry, ac-
tion and grace. For whoso dwells in this moral
beatitude already anticipates those special powers
which men prize so higlily. The lover has no talent,
no skill, which passes for quite nothing with his en-
amoured maiden, however little she may possess of
related faculty ; and the heart which abandons itself
to the Supreme Mind finds itself related to all its
works, and will travel a royal road to particular
knowledges and powers. In ascending to this prima-
ry and aboriginal sentiment, we have come from our
remote station on the circumference instantaneously
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.
I live in society ; with persons who answer to
thoughts in ray own mind, or express a certain obedi-
ence to the great instincts to which I live. I see its
presence to thera. I am certified of a common na-
ture ; and 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.

252 ESSAY IX.

admiration, pity ; thence comes conversation, com-
petition, persuasion, cities, and war. Persons are
supplementary to the primary teaching of the soul.
In youth we are mad for persons. Childliood and
youth see all the world in them. But the larger ex-
perience of man discovers the identical nature ap-
pearing through them all. Persons themselves ac-
quaint us with the impersonal. In all conversation
between two persons, tacit reference is made, as to a
thn'd 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 high questions, the company be-
come aware that the thought rises to an equal level
in all bosoms, that all have a spiritual property in
what was said, as well as the sayer. They all be-
come 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 solemnity. All
are conscious of attaining to a higher self-posses-
sion. It shines for all. There is a certain wis-
dom of humanity which is common to the greatest
men with the lowest, and which our ordinary ed-
ucation 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.
They accept it thankfully everywhere, and do not

THE OVER-SOUL. 253

label or stamp it with any man's name, for it is theirs
long beforehand, and from eternity. The learned and
the studious of thought have no monopoly of wisdom.
Their violence of direction in some degree disquali-
fies them to think truly. We owe many valuable
observations to people who are not very acute or pro-
found, 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 conver-
sation. It broods over every society, and they un-
consciously 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 neighbours, 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 Pa-
cha, and reserve all their display of wealth for their
interior and guarded retirements.

As it is present in all persons, so it is in every pe-
riod of life. It is adult already in the infant man.
In my dealing with my child, my Latin and Greek,

254 ESSAY IX.

my accomplishments and my money stead me noth-
ing ; but as much soul as I have avails. If I am wilful,
he sets his will against mine, one for one, and leaves
me, if I please, the degradation of beatmg him by
my superiority of strength. But if I renounce my
will, and act for the soul, setting 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 scof-
fer 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 er-
ror 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 greatness of that man's perception, — " It is no
proof of a man's understanding to be able to confirm
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 be-
comes 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,

THE OVEE-SOUL. 255

or see how the thing stands in God, we know the
particular 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 soul's
communication of truth is the highest event in nature,
since 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 Reve-
lation. 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 apprehension of this cen-
tral 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

256 ESSAY IX.

obedience, and the obedience proceeds from a joyful
perception. Every moment when the individual feels
himself invaded by it is memorable. By the neces-
sity of our constitution, a certain enthusiasm attends
the individual's consciousness of that divine pres-
ence. The character and duration of this enthusi-
asm varies with the state of the individual, from an
ecstasy and trance and prophetic inspiration, — which
is its rarer appearance, —to the faintest glow of virtu-
ous emotion, in which form it warms, like our house-
hold fires, all the families and associations of men,
and makes society possible. / A certain tendency to
insanity has always attended the opening of the re-
ligious sense in men, as if they had been "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 il-
lumination of Swedenborg, are of this kind. What
was in the case of these remarkable persons a ravish-
ment has, in innumerable instances in cpmmon life,
been exhibited in less striking manner./^ Everywhere
the history of religion betrays a tendency to enthusi-
asm. The rapture of the Moravian and Quletist ;
the opening of the internal sense of the Word, in the
language of the New Jerusalem Church ; the revival
of the Calvinistic churches ; the experiences of the
Methodists, are varying forms of that shudder of awe

THE OVEE-SOUL. 257

and delight with which the individual soul always
mingles with the universal soul. /

The nature of these revelations is the same ; they
are perceptions of the absolute law. They are solu-
tions of the soul's owa questions. They do not an-
swer the questions which the understanding asks.
The' sold answers never by words, but by the thing
itself that is inquired after.
/Revelation is the disclosure of the soul. The
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 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 concerning
the immortaUty of the soul, the employments of heav-
en, 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
17

258 ESSAY IX.

is essentially associated. Jesus, living in these mor-
al sentiments, heedless of sensual fortunes, heeding
only the manifestations of these, never made the sep-
aration of the idea of duration from the essence of
these attributes, nor 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
maintain it by evidences. The moment the doc-
trine of the immortality is separately taught, man is
already fallen. In the flowing of love, in the adora-
tion of humility, there is no question of continuance.
No inspired man ever asks this question, or conde-
scends 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
cot have us read any other cipher than that of cause
and effect. By this veil, which curtains events, it
instructs 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 aU low curiosity, and, accept-

THE OVEE-SOUL. 259

ing the tide of being which floats us into the secret
of nature, work and live, work and Uve, and all un-
awares the adyancmg soul has built and forged for it-
self a new condition, and the question and the answer
are one.

By the same fire, vital, consecrating, celestial,
which burns until it shall dissolve all thmgs 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 tJie*
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 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. The inter-
course of society, — its trade, its religion, its friend-
ships, 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 themselves to be judged. Against their

260 ESSAY IX.

will they exhibit those decisive trifles by which char-
acter is read. But who judges ? and what ? Not
our understanding. We do not read them by learn-
ing or craft. No ; the wisdom of the wise man con-
sists 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 by avenues which we never left open, and
thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which
we never voluntarily opened. Character teaches
over our head. The infallible index of true pro-
gress 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 spirit than his
own. If he have not found his home in God, his
manners, his forms of speech, the turn of his senten-
ces, the build, shall I say, of all his opinions, will in-
voluntarily 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 igno-
rance, of ungenial temperament, of unfavorable cir-
cumstance. The tone of seeking is one, and the
tone of having is another.

THE OVER-SOUL. 261

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 accomphshed 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. I believe before-
hand thatJt_oue;ht^oJoJ)e. All men stand continu-
ally 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,
and makes what we call genius. Much of the wis-
dom of the world is not wisdom, and the most illu-
minated class of men are no doubt superior to litera-
ry fame, and are not writers. Among the multitude
of scholars and authors, we feel no hallowing pres-
ence ; we are sensible of a knack and skill rather

262 ESSAY IX.

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 mem-
ber, so that their strength is a disease. In these in-
[stances the intellectual gifts do not make the impres-
sion of virtue, but almost of vice ; and we feel that
a man's talents stand in the way of his advancement
in truth. | But geniusjs religiousTI It is a larger im-
bibing 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 talents they exercise. The author,
the wit, the partisan, the fine gentleman, does not
take place of the man. Humanity shines in Homer,
in Chaucer, in Spenser, in Shakspeare, in Milton.
They are content 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 beholds again, and blesses the things which
it hath made.^The soul is superior to its knowl-
edge ; wiser" than any of its works. The great
poet makes us feel our own wealth, and then we
think less of his compositions. His best commu-
nication to our mind is to teach us to despise all
he has done. Shakspeare carries us to such a lofty

THE OVES-SOUL. 263

Strain of intelligent activity, 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 poet-
ry, take no stronger hold of real nature than the
shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The in-
spiration 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 ?

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 grandeur.
When we see those whom it inhabits, we are ap-
prized of new degrees of greatness. From that in-
spiration the man comes back with a changed tone.
He does not talk with men with an eye to their opin-
ion. 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 ambi-
tious 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 pleasing, poetic circura-

264

ESSAY IX.

Stance, — the visit to Rome, the man of genius they
saw, the brilliant friend they know ; still further on,
perhaps, the gorgeous landscape, the mountain lights,
the mountain thoughts, they enjoyed yesterday, — and
so seek to throw a romantic color over their life.
But the soul that ascends to worship the great God
is plain and true ; has no rose-color, no fine friends,
no chivalry, no adventures ; does not want admira-
tion ; 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 be-
come porous t^ 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. Nothing can pass there, or make you one of
the circle, but the casting aside your trappings, 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 ad-
miration your wit, your bounty, your virtue even, —
say rather your act of duty, for your virtue they own

THE OVER-SOUL. 265

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 flattery
with which authors solace each other and wound them-
selves ! These flatternot. I do not wonder that these
men go to see Cromwell, and Christina, and Charles
the Second, and James the First, 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, anffgive a high na-
ture 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
highest compliment you can pay. Their " highest
praising," said Milton, " is not flattery, and their
plainest advice is a kind of praising."

Inefl^able 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 arid universal self
is new and unsearchable. It inspires awe and aston-
ishment. How dear, how soothing to man, arises

266 ESSAY IX.

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 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 dis-
miss all particular uncertainties and fears, and adjourn
to the sure revelation of time, the solution of his pri-
vate 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 condition 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 therefore 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
'ove of men and the hope of fame. Has it not oc-

THE OVEE-SOTJL. 267

curred to you, that you have no right to go, unless
you are equally willing to be prevented from go-
ing ? 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 byword that belongs to
thee for aid or comfort, sha;ll surely come home
dirough 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 intersection is
there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls unin-
terruptedly 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
Highest 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'cowards. fUe must greatly listen to him-
self, withdrawing himself from all the accents of oth-
er mea's devotion. Even their prayers are hurtful
to him, until he have made his owg^ Our religion
vulgarly stands on numbers of believers. Whenever

268 ESSAY IX.

the appeal is made — no matter how indirectly —
to numbers, proclamation is then and there made,
that religion is not. He that finds God a sweet, en-
veloping thought to him never counts his company.
When I sit in that presence, 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 author-
ity 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 flat-
terer, it is no follower ; it never appeals from itself.
It believes in itself. Before the immense possibili-
ties of man, all mere experience, all past biography,
however spotless and sainted, shrinks away. Before
that 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, absohitely 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 allpwance.

THE OVER-SOUL. 269

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 invade. The soul gives itself, alone,
origbal, 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 fails 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 the fair accidents and
effects which change and pass. More and more the
surges of everlasting nature enter into me, and I be-
come pubhc and human in my regards and actions.
So come I to live in thoughts, and act with energies,
which are immortal. Thus revering the soul, and
learning, as the ancient said, that "its beauty is im-
mense," 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 mo-
ment of time. He will weave no longer a spotted

270 ESSAY IX.

life of shreds and patches, but he will live with a di-
vine unity. He will cease from what is base and
frivolous in his life, and be content with all places
and with 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.

CIRCLES.

Nature centres into balls.
And her proud ephemerals,
Fast to sur&ce and outside,
Scan tlie profile of the sphere;
Knew they what that signified,
A new genesis were here.

ESSAY X.
CIRCLES

The eye is the first circle ; the horizon which it
forms is the second ; and throughout nature this pri-
mary figure 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 compensatory character
of every human action. Another analogy we shall
now trace ; that every action admits of being out-
done. 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 begin-
ning ; 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
18

274 ESSAY X.

of the Unattainable, the flying Perfect, around which
the hands of man can never meet, at once the in-
spirer and the condemner of every success, may con-
veniently serve us to connect many illustrations of
human power in every department.

There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is
fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of de-
grees. 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 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
mountain 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 pass-
ing under the same sentence, and tumbling into the
inevitable 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 gunpowder ; roads and canals, by
railways ; sails, by steam ; steam by electricity.

CIRCLES. 275

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 bet-
ter than tliat 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 eiTect of a finer cause. Every thing
looks permanent until its secret is known. A rich
estate appears to women 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 citizen ; but to a large farmer, not much more
fixed than the state of the crop. Nature looks pro-
vokingly 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-
Dalls.

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

876 ESSAY X.

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
without 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 heart refuses to be imprisoned ;
in its first and narrowest pulses, it already tends out-
ward with a vast force, and to immense and innumer-
able expansions.

Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new se-
ries. Every general law only a particular fact of
some more general law presently to disclose itself.
There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no circum-
ference 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 cir-
cle we had just pronounced the outline of the sphere.
Then already is our first speaker not man, but only

CIRCLES. 277

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 cannot be escaped, will presently be
abridged into a word, and the principle that seemed
to explain nature will itself be included- as one ex-
ample 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 work-
man 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. Ev-
ery 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 statement is always hated by the old, and,
to those dwelling in the old, comes like an abyss of
skepticism. But the eye soon gets wonted to it, for
the eye and it are effects of one cause ; then its in-
nocency and benefit appear, and presently, all its en-
ergy spent, it pales and dwindles before the revela-
tion of the new hour.

Fear not the new generalization. Does the fact
look crass and material, threatening to degrade thy

278 ESSAY X.

theory of spirit ? Resist it not ; it goes to refine
and raise tliy 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 pos-
sibility.

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 nat-
ural 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, 1 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 it-
self in a man's relations. We thirst for approbation,
yet cannot forgive the approver. The sweet of na-
ture is love ; yet, if I have a friend, I am tormented

CIRCLES. 279

by my imperfections. The love of me accuses tha
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 succes-
sive 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 thou ! Every personal consideration that
we allow costs us heavenly state. "We sell the
thrones of angels for a short and turbulent pleas-
ure.

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 enterprise .-' has he
knowledge .' it boots not. Infinitely alluring and
attractive 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 netv step we take in thought reconciles

280 ESSAY X.

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
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 reputa-
tion, 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 re-
ligion of nations, the manners and morals of man-
kind, are all at the mercy of a new generalization.
Generalization is always a new influx of the di-
vinity into the mind. Hence the thrill that at-
tends 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

CIRCLES. 281

that his laws, his relations to society, his Christian-
ity, 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 poet-
ry that it may be true, that it is true in gleams and
fragments. Then, its countenance waxes stem and
grand, and we see that it must be true. It now
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 organ-
izing itself. Much more obviously is history and the
state of the world at any one time directly depend-
ent 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

282 ESSAY X.

to be judged by the spirit they partake and even ex-
press 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 recover our rights, to
become men. O, what truths profound and executa-
ble only in ages and orbs are supposed in the an-
nouncement of every truth ! In common hours, so-
ciety sits cold and statuesque. We all stand wait-
ing, 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 veO
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 strange-
ly changed their proportions. All that we reck-
oned settled shakes and rattles ; and literatures, cit-
ies, climatesj religions, leave their foundations, and
dance before our eyes. And yet here again see the

CIRCLES. 283

swift circumspection ! Good as is discoiirse, 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-
standbg in any part, no words would be necessary
thereon. If at one in all parts, no words would be
suffered.

Literature is a point outside of our hodiernal cir-
cle, through which a new one may be described.
The use of hterature 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 hous-
es, only that we may wiselier see French, English,
and American houses and modes of living. In like
manner, we see literature best from the midst of wild
nature, or from the din of affairs, or from a high re-
ligion. The field cannot be well seen from within
the field. The astronomer 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
m the sonnet or the play. In my daily work I incline
to repeat my old steps, and do not believe in reme-
dial force, in tlie power of change and reform. But

284 ESSAY X.

some Petrarch or Ariosto, filled with the new wine
of his imagination, writes me an ode or a brisk ro-
mance, 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 Christian-
ity 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 virtues of persons be never so great and
welcome, the instinct of man presses eagerly onward
to the impersonal and illimitable, and gladly arms it-
self against the dogmatism of bigots with this gener-
ous word out of the book itself.

CIRCLES. 285

The natural world may be conceived of as a sys-
tem of concentric circles, and we now and then de-
tect in nature slight dislocations, which apprize us that
this surface on which we now stand is not fixed, but
sliding. These manifold tenacious qualities, this
chemistry 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 grav-
ity 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 behooves each
to see, when he sacrifices prudence, to what god he

286 ESSAY X.

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 prov-
erbs 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. One man thinks justice consists in
paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence
of another who is very remiss in this duty, and makes

CIRCLES. 287

the creditor wait tediously. But that second man
has his own way of looldng at things ; asks himself
which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or
the debt to the poor ? the debt of money, or the
debt of thought to mankind, of genius to nature .''
For you, O broker ! there is no other principle but
arithmetic. For me, commerce is of trivial import ;
love, faith, truth of character, 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 injustice to higher claims. If a man
should dedicate himself to the payment of notes,
would not this be injustice ? Does he owe no debt
but money .'' And are all claims on him to be post-
poned to a landlord'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

288 ESSAY X.

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
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 mdifferency 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 saccha
rine principle throughout vegetable nature, and not
less by beholding in morals that unrestrained inun-
dation of the principle of good into every chink
and hole that selfishness has left open, yea, into
selfishness and sin itself j 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

CIRCLES. 289

discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to set-
tle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things.
No facts are to me sacred ; none are profane ; I
simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past
at my back.

Yet this incessant movement and progression which
all things partake could never become sensible to us
but by contrast to some principle of fixture or
stability in the soul. Whilst the eternal genera-
tion of circles proceeds, the eternal generator abides.
That central life is somewhat superior to 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 n§w 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 new-
ness, 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
19

290 ESSAY X.

eye looking upward, counts itself nothing, and aban-
dons itself to the instruction flowing from all sides.
But the man and woman of seventy assume to know
all, they have outlived their hope, they renounce aspi-
ration, 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 be-
hold truth ; and their eyes are uphfted, their wrinkles
smoothed, they are perfumed again with hope and
power. This old age ought not to creep on a hu-
man mind. In nature every moment is new ; the
past is always swallowed and forgotten ; the coming
only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition,
the energizing spirit. No love can be bound by oath
or covenant to secure it against a higher love. No
truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in
the light of new thoughts. People wish to be set-
tled ; 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 inlet of

CIRCLES. 291

SO to know. The new position of the advancing 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 knowl-
edge, as vacant and vain. Now, for the first time,
seem I to know any thing rightly. The simplest
words, — we do not know what they mean, except
when we love and aspire.

The difference between talents and character is
adroimess 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
exaggerated the difficulty. It was easy to him.
The great man is not convulsible or tormentable ;
events pass over him without much impression. Peo-
ple say sometimes, ' See what I have overcome ;
see how cheerful I am ; see how completely I have
triumphed over these black events.' Not if they
still remind me of the black event. True conquest
is the causing the calamity to fade and disappear, as
an early cloud of insignificant result in a history so
large and advancing.

292 ESSAY X.

The one thing which we seek with insatiable de-
sire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our
propriety, to lose our sempiternal menaory, 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 moments of histo-
ry are the facilities of performance through the
strength of ideas, as the works of genius and re-
ligion. " A man," said Oliver Cromwell, " never
rises so high as when he knows not whither he is go-
ing." Dreams and drunkenness, the use of opium
and alcohol are the semblance and counterfeit of
this oracular genius, and hence their dangerous at-
traction 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.

INTELLECT.

Go, speed the stars of Thought
On to their shining goals ; —
The sower scatters broad his seed,
The wheat thou strew'st be souls.

ESSAY XI.
INTELLECT.

Every substance is negatively electnc to that
which stands above it in the chemical tables, posi-
tively to that which stands below it. Water dis-
solves 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.* Intel-
lect lies behind genius, which is intellect constructive j)
Intellect is the simple power anterior to all action or
construction. 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 grav-
elled 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, knowl-

296

ESSAY XI.

edge 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
of time and place, of you and me, of profit and hurt,
tyrannize over most men's minds. Intellect sep-
arates the fact considered from you, from all local
and personal reference, and discerns it as if it exist-
ed for its own sake. Herachtus looked upon the
iffections 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 affec-
tion, 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 can-
not see the problem of existence. This the intel-
lect always ponders. Nature shows all things formed
and bound. The intellect pierces the form, over-
leaps the wall, detects intrinsic likeness between re-
mote things, and reduces all things into a few prin-
ciples.

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 ca-

INTELLECT. 297

cumstance of daily life ; they are subject to change,
to fear, and hope. Every man beholds his human
condition with a degree of melancholy. As a ship
aground is battered by the waves, so man, impris-
oned 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 reflec-
tions, disentangled from the web of our unconscious-
ness, becomes 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 be-
ings.

The growth of the intellect is spontaneous in every
expansion. 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 in-
fancy it accepted and disposed of all impressions from
the surrounding creation after its own way. What-
ever any mind doth or saith is after a law ; and
this native law remains over it after it has come to

298 ESSAY XI.

reflection or conscious thought. In the most worn,
pedantic, introverted self-tormenter's life, the great-
est part is incalculable by him, unforeseen, unimagina-
ble, 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 1 am ? Nothing. I have been floated
into this thought, this hour, this connection of events,
by secret currents of might and mind, and my in-
genuity and wilfulness have not thwarted, have not
aided to an appreciable 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 abroad in the morning after meditating the mat-
ter before sleep on the previous night. Our think-
ing 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 sufier 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, with-
out an effort to make them our own. By and by we
fall out of that rapture, bethink us where we have

INTELLECT. 299

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 ineffaceable
memory the result, and all men and all the ages con-
firm it. It is called Truth. But the moment we
cease to report, and attempt to correct and contrive,
it is not truth.

K 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 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
proportionate unfolding of the intuition ; but its vir-
tue is as silent method ; the moment it would appear
as- propositions, 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
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.

300

ESSAY XI.

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 other's
secret. And hence the differences between men in
natural endowment are insignificant in comparison
with their common wealth. Do you think the porter
and the cook have no anecdotes, no experiences, no
wonders for you .' Every body 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 inscriptions. Every
man, in the degree in which he has wit and culture,
finds his curiosity inflamed concerning 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,
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 eyp

INTELLECT. 301

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 Hve. 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 flitting 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
hbrary 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
forbear your activity, and see what the great Soul
showeth.

The immortality of man is as legitimately preached
from the intellections as from the moral volitions.
Every intellection is mainly prospective. Its pres-

302 ESSAY XI.

ent 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 turns full
on what facts and thoughts lay already in his mind,
and behold, all the mats and rubbish which had lit-
tered his garret become precious. Every trivial fact
in his private biography becomes an illustration of this
new principle, revisits the day, and delights 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 per-
sons is not in wisdom but in art. I knew, in an aca-
demical 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 ex-
amples. 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 inca-

INTELLECT. 303

pacity to produce any thing like Hamlet and Othello,
see the perfect reception this wit, and immense
knowledge of life, and liquid eloquence find in us all.

If you gather apples in the sunshine, or make hay,
or hoe corn, and then retire within doors, and shut
your eyes, and press thera 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 afterwards. There
lie the impressions on the retentive organ, though you
knew it not. So lies the whole series of natural im-
ages with which your life has made you acquainted
in your memory, though you know it not, and a thrill
of passion flashes liglit 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
nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser
years still run back to the despised recollections of
childhood, and always we are fishmg up some won-
derful 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 reahty, 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

304 ESSAY XI.

balance of two elements as in intellect receptive.
The constructive intellect produces thoughts, senten-
ces, poems, plans, designs, systems. It is the gener-
ation of the mind, the marriage of thought with na-
ture. To genius must always go two gifts, the thought
and the publication. The first is revelation, always
a miracle, which no frequency of occurrence or in-
cessant 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 universe, a
child of the old eternal soul, a piece of genuine 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 availa-
ble, it needs a vehicle or art by which it is conveyed
to men. To be communicable, it must become pic-
ture 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 it is 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

INTELLECT. 305

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 pow-
er of communication in their head, but only in the
artist does it descend into the hand. There is an in-
equality, 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 are not de-
tached, but lie in a web. The thought of genius is
spontaneous ; but the power of picture or expres-
sion, in the most enriched and flowing nature, implies
a mixture of will, a certain control over the spontane-
ous 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 strenu-
ous exercise of choice. And yet the imaginative
vocabulary seems to be spontaneous also. It does
not flow from experience only or mainly, but from a
richer source. Not by any conscious imitation of
particular forms are the grand strokes of the painter
executed, but by repairing to the fountain-head of all
'brms 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 attitude be natural or
20

306 ESSAY XI.

grand, or mean, though he has never received any in-
struction in drawing, or heard any conversation on
the subject, nor can himself draw with correctness a
single feature. A good form strikes all eyes pleas-
antly, long before they have any science on the sub-
ject, and a beautiful face sets tvfenty hearts in palpita-
tion, prior to all consideration of the mechanical pro-
portions 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 or inexperience, no mea-
greness or poverty ; it can design well, and group
well ; its composition is full of art, its colors are well
laid on, and the whole canvas 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 al-
ways 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 as-

INTELLECT. 307

sured that nothing is easier than to continue this com-
munication at pleasure. Up, down, around, the king-
dom of thought has no inclosures, 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
much 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 occur-
rence. The intellect is a whole, and demands in-
tegrity in every work. This is resisted equally by a
man's devotion to a single thought, and by his ambi-
tion to combine too many.

Truth is our element of life, yet if a man fasten
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 gram-
marian, the phrenologist, the political or rehgious fa-
natic, or indeed any possessed mortal whose balance

308 ESSAY XI.

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 liberaUze 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
completeness, 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.
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 de-
tails, yet does the world reappear in miniature in
every event, so that all the laws of nature may be

INTELLECT. 309

read in the smallest fact. The intellect must have
the like perfection in its apprehension and jn its
works. Kqt this reason, an index -'or mercury of
intellectual proficiency is the perception of identity.
"We talk with accompUshed 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 re-
ceiver 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,
and forego all things for that, and choose defeat and

310

ESSAY XI.

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 pre-
dominates will accept the first creed, the first philos-
ophy, the first pohtical party he meets, — most like-
ly his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and repu-
tation ; 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 dogmatism, and recognize all the opposite nega-
tions, between which, as walls, his being is swung.
He submits to the inconvenience of suspense and im-
perfect 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, 1 am bathed by a
beautiful element, and am not conscious of any limits
to my nature. The suggestions are thousandfold that
I hear arid see. The waters of the great deep have
Ingress and egress to the soul. But if I speak, I de-

INTELLECT. 311

fine, 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. He like-
wise defers to them, loves them, whilst he speaks.
Because a true and natural man contains and is the
same truth which an eloquent man articulates : but in
the eloquent man, because he can articulate it, it
seems something the less to reside, and he turns to
these silent beautiful with the more inclination 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 uni-
versal. Every man's progress is through a succes-
sion 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 livmg. Such has Swedenborg, such
has Kant, such has Coleridge, such has Hegel or his
interpreter 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

312 ESSAY XI.

season, the dismay will be overpast, the excess of in-
fluence withdrawn, and they will be no longer an
alarming meteor, but one more bright star shining se-
renely 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-
ever fame and authority may attend it, because it is
not his own. Entire self-reliance belongs to the in-
tellect. 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 jEschylus 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 -^schyluses to my intel-
lectual 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

INTELLECT. 313

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.
Anyhow, 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 seraphim love most."
The gods shall settle their own quarrels. But I can-
not recite, even thus rudely, laws of the intellect,
without remembering that lofty and sequestered class
of men who have been its prophets and oracles, the
high-priesthood 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 look parvenues and popular ; for " persua-
sion is in soul, but necessity is in intellect." This
band of grandees, Hermes, Heraclitus, Empedocles,
Plato, Plotinus, Olympiodorus, Proclus, Synesius,
and the rest, have somewhat so vast in their logic, so

314 ESSAY XI.

primary in their thinking, that it seems antecedent to
all the ordinary 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 geom-
etry 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 thinj,, for its
illustration. But what marks its elevation, "nd has
even a comic look to us, is the innocent sererity with
which these babe-like Jupiters sit in their clouds, and
from age to age prattle to each other, and to no con-
temporary. Well assured that their speech is intelli-
gible, and the most natural thing in the world, they
add thesis to thesis, without a moment's heed of the
universal astonishment of the human race below, who
do not comprehend their plainest argument ; nor do
they ever relent so much as to insert a popular or ex-
plaining sentence ; nor testify the least displeasure or
petulance at the dulness of their amazed auditory.
The angels are so enamoured of the language that is
spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips
vnth the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but
speak their own, whether there be any who under-
stand it or not.

ART.

Give to barrows, trays, and pans
Grace and glimmer of romance;
Bring the moonlight into noMi
Hid in gleaming piles of stone ;
On the city's paved street
Plant gardens lined with lilac sweet j
Let spouting fountains coo! the air.
Singing in the sun-baked square ;
Let statue, picture, park, and hall,
llallad, flag, and festival.
The past restore, the day adorn.
And. make each morrow a new morn.
So shall the drudge in dusty frock
Spy behind the city clock
Retinues of airy kings.
Skirts of angels, starry wings,
His fathers shining in bright fables.
His children fed at heavenly tables.
'T is the privilege of Art
Thus to play its cheerful part,
Man in Earth to acclimate,
And bend the exile to his fate.
And, moulded of one element
With the days and firmament,
Teach him on these as stairs to climb,
And live on even terms with Time;
Whilst upper life the slender rill
Of human sense doth overfill.

ESSAY XII.
ART.

Because the soul is progressive, it never quite
repeats itself, but in every act attempts the production
of a new and fairer whole. This appears in works
both of the useful and the fine arts, if we employ
the popular distinction of works according to their
aim either at use or beauty. Thus in our fine arts,
not imitation, but creation, is the aim. In landscapes,
the painter should give the suggestion of a fairer cre-
ation than we know. The details, the prose of na-
ture 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

318

ESSAY XII.

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 abridgment and selection we observe
in all spiritual activity, but itself the creative im-
pulse .'' for it is the inlet of that higher illumination
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, — na-
ture'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 form-
ed out of the old. The Genius of the Hour sets
his inefliaceable seal on the work, and gives it an in-
expressible charm for the imagination. As far as
the spiritual character of the period overpowers the
artist, and finds expression in his work, so far it will
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

ART. 319

from his labor. No man can quite emancipate him-
self 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 fantas-
tic, 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 sight, he is necessitated, by the air he
breathes, and the idea on which he and his contem-
poraries live and toil, to share the manner of his
times, without knowing what that manner is. Now
that which is inevitable 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 shape-
less. 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

320 ESSAY XII.

of art to educate ihe 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 de-
tachment, in sequestering one object from the embar-
rassing variety. Until one thing comes out from the
connection of things, there can be enjoyment, con-
templation, but no thought. Our happiness and un-
happiness are unproductive. The infant lies in a
pleasing trance, but his individual character and his
practical power depend on his daily progress in the
separation of things, and dealing 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-excluding 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 mo-
mentary eminency of an object, — so remarkable in
Burke, in Byron, in Carlyle, — the painter and sculp-
tor exhibit in color and in stone. The power de-
pends on the depth of the artist's insight of that ob-
jnrt lie rontomplates. For every object has its roots

ART. 321

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 con-
centrates attention on itself. For the time, it is the
only thing worth naming to do that, — be it a son-
net, an opera, a landscape, a statue, an oration, the
plan of a temple, of a campaign, or of a voyage of
discoT ery. Presently we pass to some other object,
which rounds itself into a whole, as did the first ;'
for example, a well-laid garden : 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 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 beautiful, 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 mas-
ter, or a litter of pigs, satisfies, and is a reality not
less than the frescoes of Angelo. From this succes-
sion of excellent objects, we learn at last the immen-
sity 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
21

322 ESSAY XII.

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
figures " 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-master
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
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,

ART. 323

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, its training to the niceties and curiosities
of its function. There is no statue like this living
man, with his infinite advantage over all ideal sculp-
ture, 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 improvismg, 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 masteries 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 intel-
ligible ; 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 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 overpower the accidents of a local add

324 ESSAY Xll.

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 outlines, or
rules of art can ever teach, namely, a radiation 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 Romans, and in the
pictures of the Tuscan and Venetian masters, the
highest charm is the universal language 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 illus-
trated in the memory. The traveller who visits the
Vatican, and passes from chamber to chamber through
galleries of statues, vases, sarcophagi, and candela-
bra, 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, and that
they had their origin from thoughts and laws in his
ovm breast. He studies the technical rules on these
wonderful remains, but forgets that these works were
not always thus constellated ; that they are the con-
tributions of many ages and many countries ; that
each came out of the solitary workshop of one artist,

AKT. 325

who toiled perhaps in ignorance of the existence of
other sculpture, created his work without other mod-
el, 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 propor-
tion 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
tiirough his necessity of imparting himself the ada-
mant will be wax in his hands, and will allow an ade-
quate communication of himself, in his full stature and
proportion. He need not cumber himself with a
conventional nature and culture, 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 Hampsliire 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 pover-
ty, will serve as well as any other condition as the
symbol of a thought- which pours itself indifferently
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

326 ESSAY XII.

combination of color and form ; a foreign wonder,
barbaric pearl and gold, like the spontoons and stand-
ards of the militia, which play such pranks in the eyes
and imaginations of school-boys. 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 os-
tentatious, 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 conversations. I had the same experience
already i'" a church at Naples. There I saw that
nothing v changed with me but the place, and said
to mysel — ' 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 ridicu-
lous as a treadmill. I now require this of all pictures,
that they domesticate me, not that they dazzle me.

ART. 327

Pictures must not be too picturesque. Nothing aston-
ishes men so much as common-sense and plain deal-
ing. All great actions have been simple, and all
great pictures are.

I'he Transfiguration, by Raphael, is an eminent
example of this peculiar merit. A calm, benignant
beauty shines over all this picture, and goes directly
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 stream of tendency ; to-
kens of the everlasting effort to produce, which even
in its worst estate the soul betrays. Art has not yet

328

ESSAY xn.

come to its maturity, if it do not put itself abreast
with the most potent influences of the world, if it is
not practical and moral, if it do not stand in con-
nection with the conscience, if it do not make the
poor and uncultivated 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 tied hands, and
of making cripples and monsters, such as all pictures
and statues 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 eflect 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 a useful art, a mode of writing, a
savage'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 eflFect. But it is the game of a rude and youth-

ART. 329

ful people, and not the manly labor of a wise and
spiritual nation. Under an oak-tree loaded witn
leaves and nuts, under a sky full of eternal eyes, I
stand in a thoroughfare ; but in the works of our plas-
tic arts, and especially of sculpture, creation is driv-
en 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."
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 wnich
needs to roll through all things, and is impatient of
counterfeits, and things not alive. Picture and sculp-
ture 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 ten-
derness, 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.

330

ESSAY XII.

All works of art should not be detached, but extem-
pore 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 ro-
mance.

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 in-
vention and beauty in modern society are all but dried
up. A popular novel, a theatre, or a ball-room
makes us feel that we are all paupers in the alms-
house 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 Cupius of tne antique, and furnishes
the sole apology for the intrusion of such anomalous
figures into nature, — namely, that they were inev-
itable ; that the artist was drunk with a passion for
form which he could not resist, and which vented it-
self in these fine extravagances, — no longer dignifies
the chisel or the pencil. But the artist and the con-
noisseur 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 bet-
ter sense in an oratorio, a statue, or a picture. Art

ART. 331

makes the same effort which a sensual prosperity-
makes ; namely, to detach the beautiful from the use-
ful, to do up the work as unavoidable, and, hating it,
pass on to enjoyment. These solaces and compen-
sations, this division 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 de-
grades the seeker. High beauty is no longer attaina-
ble by him in canvas or in stone, in sound, or in lyri-
cal construction ; an effeminate, prudent, sickly beau-
ty, 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
the ideal. Thus is art vihfied ; 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 be-

332

ESSAY XII.

fore they eat and drink ; to serve the ideal in eating
and drinking, in drawing the breath, and in the func-
tions of life ? Beauty must come back to the useful
arts, and the distinction between the fine and the use-
ful arts be forgotten. If history were truly told, if
life were nobly spent, it would be no longer easy or
possible 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 therefore useful, because it is symmetrical and
fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a legisla-
ture, nor will it repeat in England or America its
history in Greece. It will come, as always, unan-
nounced, 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 road-side, 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 as-
semblies, our commerce, the galvanic battery, the
electric jar, the prism, and the chemist's retort, in
which we seek now only an economical 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 im-
pulses which these works obey .'' When its errands

ART. 333

are noble and adequate, a steamboat bridging the At-
lantic 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. Petersburgh, which plies along the Lena by
magnetism, needs little to make it sublime. When
science is learned in love, and its powers are wield-
ed by love, they will appear the supplements and
continuations of the material creation.

THE END.