Essays

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E SSATS

FIRST SERIES

BY

R. W. EMERSON

NEW YORK
UNITED STATES BOOK COMPANY

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JOHN W. LOVELL COMPANY
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CONTENTS.

_ PAGE

ESSAY I.
History, 5

ESSAY II.
Selp-Reliance, 41

ESSAY III.
Compensation, 83

ESSAY IV.
Spiritual Laws, 115

ESSAY V.
Love, 149

ESSAY VI.
Friendship, 109

ESSAY VII.
Prudence, 195

iv CQNTENTS. ,A

PAOB

Heroism, 215

ESSAY IX.
The Over-Soul, 235

ESSAY X.
Circles, 265

ESSAY XI.
;, Intellect, 287

ESSAY XII.
Art, 309

HISTORY.

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

I fim owner of the sphere,

Of the seven stars and the solar year.

Of Ctesar'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
of the same. He that is once admitted to the light
of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate.
"What Plato has thought, he may think ; what a
saint has felt, Le may feel ; what at any time has
befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath
access to this universal mind is a party to all that
is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign
agent.

Of the works of this mind history is the record.
Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days.
Man is explicable by nothing less than all his his-
tory. 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 always
the thought is prior to the fact ; all the facts of his-
tory preexist in the mind as laws. Each law in
turn is made by circumstances predominant, and
the limits of nature give power to but one at a time.

8 HISTORY,

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, empire, republic, democracy, are
merely the application of his manifold spirit to the
manifold world.

This human mind wrote history, and this must
read it. The Sphinx must solve her own riddle.
If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be
explained from individual experience. There is a
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 my
book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of
miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on
the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces,
60 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.
All its properties consist in him. Every step in his
private experience flashes a light on what great
bodies of men have done, and the crises of his life
refer to 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
wdien 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-

BISTORT, 9

telligible. We, a8 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 see nothing, learn
nothing, keep nothing. What befell Asdrubal or
Caesar Borgia is as much an illustration of the
mind's powers and depravations as what has be-
fallen us. Each new law and political movement
has meaning for you. Stand before each of its tab-
lets and say, * Here is one of my coverings ; under
this fantastic, or odious, or graceful mask did my
Proteus nature hide itself.' This remedies the de-
fect of our too great nearness to ourselves. This
throws our own actions into perspective; and as
crabs, goats, scorpions, the balance and the water
pot lose all their meanness when hung as signs in
the zodiack, so I can see my own vices without heat
in the distant persons of Solomon, Alcibiades, and
Catiline.

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

10 mSTORY.

claims ; the plea for education, for justice, for char-
ity ; the foundation of friendship and love and of
the heroism and grandeur which belong to acts of
self-reliance. It is remarkable that involuntarily
we always read as superior beings. Universal his-
tory, the poets, the romancers, do not in their state-
liest pictures, — in the sacerdotal, the imperial
palaces, in the triumphs of will or of genius, —
anywhere lose our ear, anywhere make us feel thkt
we intrude, that this is for our betters ; 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 discoveries, 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, ybr tis^
as we ourselves in that place would have done or
applauded.

So is it in respect to condition and character.
We honor the rich because they have externally the
freedom, power, and grace which we feel to be pro-
per 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, describes his
unattained but attainable self. All literature writes
the character of the wise man. All books, monu-
ments, pictures, conversation, are portraits in which
he finds the lineaments he is forming. The silent

mSTORY. 11

and the loud praise liim and accost liim, and he is
stimulated wherever he moves, as by personal allu-
sions. A wise and good soul therefore never needs
look for allusions personal and laudatory in 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 that befalls, — in the running
river and the rustling corn. Praise is looked,
homage tendered, love flows, from mute nature,
from the mountains and the lights of the finna-
ment.

These hints, dropped as it were from sleep and
night, let us use in broad day. The student is to
read history actively and not passively ; to esteem
his own life the text, and books the commentary.
Thus compelled, the muse of history will utter 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 re-
sounded 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-
responding in his life. Every thing tends in a
wonderful manner to abbreviate itself and yield its
whole virtue to him. lie should see that he can
live all history in his own person. He nmst sit at

12 mSTOIiY.

home with iniglit and main and not suffer himself
to be bullied by kings or empires, but know that he
is greater than all the geography and all the govern-
ment of the world : he nnist transfer the point of
view from which history is commonly read, from
Rome and Athens and London, to himself, and not
deny his conviction that he is the Court, and if
England or Egypt have any thing to say to him he
will try the case ; if not, let them forever be silent.
He must attain and maintain that lofty sight where
facts yield their secret sense, and poetry and annals
are alike. The instinct of the mind, the purpose of
nature, betrays itself in the use we make of the sig-
nal narrations of history. Time dissipates to shin-
ing ether the solid angularity of facts. Xo anchor,
no cable, no fences avail to keep a fact a fact.
Babylon and Troy, and Tyre, and even early Rome
are passing already into fiction. The Garden of
Eden, the Sun standing still in Gibeon, is poetry
thenceforward to all nations. Who cares what the
fact was, when we have thus made a constellation
of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign ? London
and Paris and JS'ew York must go the same way.
" What is history," said Xapoleon, " but a fable
agreed upon ? " This life of ours is stuck round
with Egypt, Greece, Gaul, England, War, Coloniza-
tion, Church, Court and Commerce, as with so many
flowers and wild ornaments grave and gay. I will
not make more account of them. I believe in Eter-
nity. I can find Greece, Palestine, Italy, Spain and

HISTORY. 13

the Islands, — the genius and creative principle of
each and of all eras, in my own mind.

We are always coming up with the facts that
have moved us in history in our private experience
and verifying them here. All history becomes sub-
jective ; in other words there is properly no History,
only Biograph3^ Every mind must know the whole
lesson for itself, — must go over the whole ground.
What it does not see, what it does not live, it will
not know. What tke former age has epitomized
into 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 or
other, some time or other, 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
nature ; that is all. We must in our own nature
see the necessary reason lor every fact, — see how it
could and must be. So stand before every public
every 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 Eeign of Terror, and a
Salem hanging of witches ; before a fanatic Revival
and the Animal Magnetism in Paris, or in Provi-
dence. We assume that we under like influence
should be alike affected, and should achieve the

14 HISTORY.

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. It is to banish the 7iot vie and supply tlie
me. It is to abolish difference and restore unity.
J3elzoni digs and measui*es in the mummy-pits and
pyramids of Thebes until he can see the end of the
difference between the monstrous work and himself.
When he has satisfied himself, in general and in
detail, that it was made by such a person as himself,
60 armed and so motived, and to ends to which he
himself in given circumstances should also have
worked, the problem is solved ; his thought lives
along tlie whole line of temples and sphinxes and
catacombs, passes through them all like a creative
soul with satisfaction, and they live again to the
mind, or are noio.

A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by
us and not done by us. Surely it was by man, but
M^e find it not in our man. But we apply ourselves
to the history of its production. AVe put ourselves
into the place and historical state of the builder.
We remember the forest dwellers, the first tem-
ples, the adherence to the first type, and the decora-
tion of it as the wealth of the nation increased ; the

HISTORY. 15

value which is given to wood by carving led to the
carving over the whole mountain of stone of a cathe-
dral. When we have gone through this process,
and added 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 minster ; we have seen how it could and
must be. We have the sufficient reason.

The difference between men is in their principle
of association. Some men classify objects by color
and size and other accidents of appearance ; others
by intrinsic likeness, or by the relation of cause
and effect. The progress of the intellect consists
in the clearer vision of causes, which overlooks sur-
face differences. To the poet, to the philosopher,
to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all
events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.
For the eye is fastened on the life, and slights the
circumstance. Every chemical substance, every
plant, every animal in its growth, teaches the unity
of cause, the variety of appearance.

Why, being as we are, surrounded by this all-
creating nature, soft and fluid as a cloud or the air,
should we be such hard pedants, and magnify a few
forms ? Wliy should we make account of time, or
of magnitude, or of figure? The soul knows them
not, and genius, obeying its law, knows how to play
with them as a young child plays with greybeards
and in churches. Genius studies the causal tliought,
and far back in the womb of things sees the rays

16 HISTORY.

parting from one orb, lliat diverge, ere they fall,
by infinite diameters. Genius watches the monad
through all his masks as he performs the metemp-
sychosis of nature. Genius detects through the
fly, through the caterpillar, through the grub,
through the egg^ the constant type of the individ-
ual ; through countless individuals the fixed species ;
through many species the genus ; through all gen-
era the steadfast type ; through all the kingdoms of
organized life the eternal unity. Xature is a muta-
ble 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. Beau-
tifully shines a spirit through the bruteness and
toughness of matter. Alone omnipotent, it converts
all things to its own end. The adamant streams
into softest but precise form before it, but whilst I
look at it its outline and texture are changed alto-
gether. Nothing is so fleeting as form. Yet never
does it quite deny itself. In man we still trace the
rudiments or hints of all that we esteem badges of
servitude in the lower races ; yet in him they en-
hance his nobleness and grace ; as lo, in ^schylus,
transformed to a cow, ofi^ends the imagination, but
how changed when as Isis in Egypt she meets
Jove, a beautiful woman with nothing of the meta-
morphosis left but the lunar horns as the splendid
ornament of lier brows.

The identity of history is equally intrinsic, the
diversity equally obvious. There is, at the surface,

HISTORY. VI

infinite variety of things ; at the centre there is sim-
plicity and unity of cause. How many are the acta
of one man in whicli we recognize the same char-
acter. See the variety of the sources of our infor-
mation in respect to the Greek genius. Thus at
first we have the civil history of tliat people, as
Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Plutarch have
given it — a very sufficient account of what manner
of persons they were and what they did. Then we
have the same soul expressed for us again in tlieir
literature / in poems, drama, and philosopiiy : a
very complete form. Then we have it once more
in their architecture — the purest sensuous beauty —
the perfect medium never over-stepping the limit of
charming propriety and grace. Then we have it
once more in sculpture, — the " tongue on the bal-
ance of expression," those forms in every action at
every age of life, ranging through all the scale of
condition, from god to beast, and never transgress-
ing the ideal serenity, but in convulsive exertion,
the liege of order and of law. Thus, of the genius
of one remarkable people we have a fourfold repre-
sentation— the most various expression of one moral
thing: and to the senses wiiat more unlike than
an ode of Pindar, a marble Centaur, the peristyle
of the Parthenon, and the last actions of Phocion ?
Yet do these varied external expressions pioceed
from one national mind.

Every one must have observed faces and forma
which, without any resembling feature, make a like
2

18 11I3T0P.7.

impression on the beliolder. A particular picture
or copy of verses, if it do not awaken tlie same
train of images, will yet superinduce the same senti-
ment 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 innumerable variations.

Nature is full of a sublime family likeness
throughout her works. She delights in startling us
with resemblances in the most unexpected quarters.
I have seen the head of an old sachem of the for-
est which at once reminded the eye of a bald moun-
tain summit, and the furrows of the brow suggested
the strata of the rock. There are men whose man-
ners 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 are compositions of the same strain to be
found in the books of all ages. What is Guide's
Rospigliosi Aurora but a morning thought, as the
horses in it are only a 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 tree
without in some sort becoming a tree ; or draw a
child by studying the outlines of its form merely,

HIST OR r. 10

— but, by watching for a time his motions and pkys,
the painter enters into his nature and can then draw
him at will in every attitude. So Eoos "entered
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
geological structure was first explained to him.

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

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

Civil liistory, natural history, the history of art
and the liistory of literature, — all must be explained
from individual history, or must remain words.
There is nothing but is related to us, nothing that
does not interest us, — kingdom, college, tree, horse,
or iron shoe, the roots of all things are in man. It
is in the soul that architecture exists. Santa Croco
and the Dome of St. Peter's are lame copies after a

20 mSTORY.

divine model. Strasbnrg Catliedral is a material
counterpart of the soul of Ervvin of Steinbacli. 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 GWQvy spine and tint in the sea-
shell preexist in the secreting organs of the fish. The
whole of heraldry and of chivalry is in courtesy. A
man of fine manners shall pronounce your name with
all the ornament that titles of nobility could ever add.

The trivial experience of every day is always
verifying some old prediction to us and converting
into thinojs for us also the words and siojns which we
had heard and seen without heed. Let me add a
few examples, such as fall within the scope of every
man's observation, of trivial facts which go to il-
lustrate great and conspicuous facts.

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

HISTORY. 21

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

By simply throwing ourselves into new circum-
stances we do continually invent anew the orders
and the ornaments of architecture, as we see how
each people merely decorated its primitive abodes.
The Doric temple still presents the semblance of
the wooden cabin in v/hich the Dorian dwelt. The
Chinese pagoda is plainly a Tartar tent. The In-
dian and Egyptian temples still betray the mounds
and subterranean houses of their forefathers. " The
custom of making houses and tombs in the living
rock " (says Ileeren in his Researches on the Ethio-
pians), ''determined very naturally the principal
character of the Nubian Egyptian architecture to
the colossal form which it assumed. In these cav-
erns, already prepared by nature, the eye was accus^
tomed to dwell on Iiuge shapes and masses, so that
when art came to the assistance of nature it could

22 HISTORY.

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

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

HISTORY. 23

In like mariner all public facts are to be indi-
vidualized, all private facts are to be generalized.
Then at once History becomes fluid and true, and
Biography deep and sublime. As the Persian imi-
tated in the slender shafts and capitals of his archi'
tecture the stem and flower of the lotus and palm,
so the Persian court in its magnificent era novel
gave over the Komadirm 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, Komad-
ism and Agriculture are the two antagonist facts.
The geography of Asia and of Africa necessitated
a nomadic life. But the nomads were the terror
of all those whom the soil or the advantages of a
market had induced to build towns. Agriculture
therefore was a religious injunction, because of tho
perils of the state from nomadism. And in these
late and civil countries of England and America
these propensities still fights out the old battle in
each individual. We are all rovers and all fixtures
by turns, and pretty rapid turns. The nomads of
Africa are constrained to wander, by the attacks of
the gad-fly, which drives the cattle mad, and so
compels the tribe to emigrate in the rainy season
and drive off the cattle to tlie higher sandy re-
gions. The nomads of Asia follow the pasturage
from month to month. In America and Europe
the nomadism is of trade and curiosity. A prog-

24 HISTORY.

ress certainly, from the gad-fly of Astaboras to tlio
Anojlo and Italo-niania of Boston Bay. The differ-
ence between men in this respect is the faculty of
rapid domestication, the power to find his chair
and bed everywhere, which one man has and an-
other has not. Some men have so much of the
Indian left, have constitutionally such habits of ac-
commodation that at sea, or in the forest, or in the
snow, they sleep as warm, and dine witli as good
appetite, and associate as happily as in their own
liouse. And to push this old fact still one degree
nearer, we may find it a representative of a per-
manent fact in human nature. The intellectual
nomadism is the faculty of objectiveness or of eyes
which everywhere feed themselves. Who hath
such eyes, everywhere falls into easy relations with
his fellow-men. Every man, every thing is a prize,
a study, a property to him, and this love smooths
his brow, joins him to men, and makes him beauti-
ful and beloved in their sight. His house is a
wagon ; he roams through all latitudes as easily as
a Cahnuc.

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
belongs.

The primeval world, the Fore- World, as the
Germans say, I can dive to it in myself as well as
grope for it with researching fingers in catacombs,

HISTORY. 25

libraries, and tlie broken reliefs and torsos of ruined
villas.

What is the foundation of that interest all men
feel in Greek history, letters, art and poetrj^, in all
its periods from the Heroic or Homeric age down
to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans,
four or five centuries later? This period draws us
because we are Greeks. It is a state through which
every man in some sort passes. Tlie Grecian state
is the era of the bodily nature, the perfection of the
senses, — of the spiritual nature unfolded in strict
unity with the body. In it existed those human
forms which supplied the sculptor with his models
of Hercules, Phoebus, and Jove ; not like the forms
abounding in the streets of modern cities, wherein
the face is a confused blur of features, but com-
posed of incorrupt, sharply defined and symmetrical
features, whose eye-sockets are so formed that it
would be impossible for such eyes to squint and
take furtive glances on this side and on that, but
they must turn the whole head.

The manners of that period are plain and fierce.
The reverence exhibited is for perso!ial qualities;
courage, address, self-command, justice, strength,
swiftness, a loud voice, a broad chest. Luxury ia
not known, nor elegance. A sparse population and
want make every man his own valet, cook, butcher
and soldier, and the habit of supplying his own
needs educates the body to wonderful performances.
Such are the Aj^amennion and Diomcd of Homer,

26 EISTORT.

and not far different is the picture Xenophon gives
of himself and his compatriots in the Retreat of the
Ten Thousand. " After tlie army liad crossed the
river Teleboas in Armenia, there fell much snow,
and the troops lay miseral)ly on the ground covered
with it. But Xenophon arose naked, and taking an
axe, began to split wood ; whereupon others rose
and did the like." Throughout his army seemed to
be a boundless liberty of speech. They quarrel for
plunder, they wrangle with tlie 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 persona
speak simply, — speak as persons who have great
good sense without knowing it, before yet the re-
flective 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,
perfect in their health, with the finest physical or-
ganization in the world. Adults acted with the sim-
plicity and grace of boys. They made vases, trag-
edies and statues, such as healthy senses should,
— that is, in good taste. Such things have con.
tinned to be made in all ages, and are now, whep
ever a healthy physique exists ; but, as a class, from

niSTORT. 27

their superior organization, they have surpassed all.
They combine the energy of manhood with the en-
gaging unconsciousness of childhood. Our reverence
for them is our reverence for childhood. Xobody
can reflect upon an unconscious act with regret or
contempt. Bard or hero cannot look down on the
word or gesture of a child. It is as great as they.
The attraction of these manners is that they belong
to man, and are known to every man in virtue of
liis being once a child ; besides that there are al-
ways individuals who retain these cliaractei-istics.
A person of childlike genius and inborn energy is
still a Greek, and revives our love of the Muse of
Hellas. A great boy, a great gifl with good sense
is a Greek. Beautiful is the love of nature in the
Pliiloctetes. But 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. Then the vaunted
distinction between Greek and English, between
Classic and Romantic 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 tlie same hue, and do
as it were run into one, why should I measure

28 HISTORY.

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 min-
iature experiences of his own. To the sacred his-
tory of the world he has the same key. "When the
voice of a prophet out of the deeps of anticpity
merely echoes to liim a sentiment of his infancy, a
prayer of his youth, he then pierces to the truth
through all the confusion of tradition and the cari-
cature of institutions.

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

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 antiquity in
them. They are mine as much as theirs.

Then I have seen the first monks and anchorets,
without crossiuii seas or centuries. More than once

HISTORY. 29

some. individual has appeared to me witli sucli neg-
ligence of labor and such commanding contempla-
tion, a haughty beneficiary begging in the name of
God, as made good to the nineteenth century Sim
eon the Stylite, the Thebais, and the first Capu-
chins.

The priestcraft of the East and West, of the
Magian, Brahmin, Druid, and Inca, is expounded
in the individual's private life. The cramping in-
fluence of a hard formalist on a young child, in re-
pressing his spirits and courage, paralyzing the
understanding, and that without producing indigna-
tion, but only fear and obedience, and even much
sympathy with the ' tyranny, — is a familiar fact,
explained to the child when he becomes a man, only
by seeing that the oppressor of his youth is himself
a child tyrannized over by those names and word;^
and forms of whose influence he was merely the or-
gan to the youth. The fact teaches him how Belus
was worshipped and how the Pyramids were built,
better than the discovery by Champollion of the
names of all the workmen and the cost of every
tile. lie finds Assyria and the Mounds of Cholula
at his door, and himself has laid the courses.

Again, in that protest which each considerate
person 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

30 HISTORY.

great licentiousness treads on the heels of a re-
formation. Ilow many times in the history of the
world has the Luther of the day had to lament the
decay of piety in his own household. " Doctor,"
said his wife to Martin Luther, one day, " how is it
that whilst subject to papacy we prayed so often
and with such fervor, whilst now we pray with the
utmost coldness and very seldom ? "

The advancing man discovers how deep a prop-
erty he hath in literature, — in all fable as well as in
all history. He finds that the poet was no odd fel-
low who described strange and impossible situations,
but that universal man wrote b}^ his pen a confes-
sion true for one and true for all. His own secret
biography he finds in lines wonderfully intelligible
to him, dotted down before he was born. One
after another he comes up in his private adventures
with every fable of ^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 propei
creations of the Imagination and not of the Fancy,
are universal verities. What a range of meanings
and what perpetual pertinence has the story of Pro-
metheus ! Beside its primary value as the first
chapter of the history of Europe (the mythology
thinly veiling authentic facts, the invention of the
mechanic arts and the migration of colonies), it gives
the history of religion, with some closeness to the
faith of later ages. Prometheus is the Jesus of the

HISTORY, 31

old mythology. 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 account. 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, objective form, and which seems
the self-defence of man against this untruth, namely,
a discontent with the believed fact that a God ex-
ists, 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 Prometheus Yinctus is the romance
of skepticism. Xot less true to all time are the
details of that stately apologue. Apollo kept the
flocks of Admetus, said the poets. Every man is a
divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool. It
seems as if heaven had sent its insane angels
into our world as to an asylum, and here they will
break out in their native music and utter at inter-
vals the words they have heard in heaven ; then
the mad fit returns and they mope and wallow like
dogs. When the gods come among men, they are
not known. Jesus was not ; Socrates and Shaks-
peare were not. Antaeus was suffocated by the
gripe of Hercules, but every time he touched his
mother earth liis strength was renewed. Man is
the broken giant, and in all his weakness both liis
body and his mind are invigorated by hal)it6 of

32 HISTORY.

conversation with nature. The power of music, tho
power of poetry, to unfix and as it were clap wings
to all solid nature, interprets the riddle of Orpheus,
which was to his childhood an idle tale. The phil-
osophical perception of identity through endless
mutations of form makes him know the Proteus.
What else am I who laughed or wept yesterday,
who slept last night like a corpse, and this morning
stood and ran ? And what see I on any side but
the transmigrations of Proteus ? I can 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 impossibility of drinking the
waters of thought which are always gleaming and
waving within sight of the soul. The transmigra-
tion of souls : that too is no fable. I would it were ;
but men and women are only half human. Every
animal of the barn-yard, the field and the forest, of
the earth and of the w^aters 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 other of
these upright, heaven-facing speakers. Ah, brother,
hold fast to the man and awe the beast ; stop the
ebb of thy soul, — ebbing downward into the foi-ms
into whose habits thou hast now for many years
slid. As near and proper to us is also that old fable
of tho Sphinx, who was said to sit in the road-sido
and put riddles to every passenger. If the man
could not answer, she swallowed him alive. If he

HISTORY. 33

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 en-
cumber them, tyrannize over them, and make the
men of routine, the men of sense, in whom a literal
obedience to facts has extinguished every spark of
that light by which man is truly man. But if the
man is true to his better instincts or sentiments, and
refuses the dominion of facts, as one that comes of
a higher race ; remains fast by the soul and sees
the principle, then the facts fall aptly and supple
into their places ; they know their master, and the
meanest of them glorifies him.

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

34 niSTORT.

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 themselves
understand." All the fictions of the Middle Age
explain themselves as a masked or frolic expression
of that which in grave earnest the mind of that
period toiled to achieve. Magic and all that is as-
cribed to it is manifestly a deep presentiment of
the powers of science. The shoes of swiftness, the
sword of sharpness, the power of subduing the ele-
ments, of using the secret virtues of minerals, of
understanding the voices of birds, are the obscure
efforts of the mind hi a right direction. The pre-
ternatural prowess of the hero, the gift of perpetual
youth, and the like, are alike the endeavor of the
human spirit " to bend the shows of things to the
desires of the mind."

In Perceforest and Amadis de Gaul a garland
and a rose bloom on the head of her who is faith-
ful, 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

HISTORY. 35

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 Ash ton
is a mask for a vulgar temptation, Bavenswood
Castle a fine name for proud poverty, and the for-
eign mission of state only a Bunyan disguise for
honest industry. We may all shoot a wild bull that
would toss the good and beautiful, by fighting down
the unjust and sensual. Lucy Ashton is another
name for fidelity, which is always beautiful and
always liable to calamity in this world.

But along with the civil and metaphysical his-
tory of man, another history goes daily forward, —
that of the external world, — in which he is not less
strictly implicated, lie is the compend of time ;
he is also the correlative of nature. The power of
man consists in the multitude of his affinities, in the
fact that his life is intertwined with the whole
chain of organic and inorganic being. In the age of
the Caesars out from the Forum at Rome proceeded
the great highways north, south, east, west, to the
centre of every province of the empire, making
each market-town of Persia, Spain, and Britain per-
vious 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 do-
minion of man. A man is a bundle of relations, a

36 HISTORY.

knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the
world. All his faculties refer to natures out of
him and predict the world he is to inhabit, as the
fins of the fish foreshow that water exists, or the
wings of an eagle in the G^g presuppose air. In-
sulate and you destroy him. He cannot live with-
out a world. Put Napoleon in an island prison, let
his faculties find no men to act on, no Alps to climb,
no stake to play for, and he would beat the air, and
appear stupid. Transport him to large countries,
dense population, complex interests and antagonist
power, and you shall see that the man Napoleon,
bounded that is by such a profile and outline, is
not the virtual Napoleon. This is but 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 pitch,
Your roof were not sufficient to contain it."

Henry VL

Columbus needs a planet to shape his course
upon. Newton and Laplace need myriads of age
and thick-strown celestial areas. One may say a
gravitating solar system is already prophesied in the
nature of Newton's mind. Not less does the brain
of Davy or of Gay Lussac, from childhood exploring
the aflfinities and repulsions of particles, anticipate
the laws of organization. Does not the eye of the

HISTORY. 37

hnman embryo predict the light ? the ear of Handel
predict the witchcraft of harmonic sound ? Do not
the constructive fingers of Watt, Fulton, Whitte-
more, Arkvvright, predict the fusible, hard, and
temperable texture of metals, the properties of
stone, water, and wood? the lovely attributes of
the maiden child predict the refinements and deco-
rations of civil society ? Here also we are reminded
of the action of man on man. A mind might pon-
der 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 exultation or alarm?
No man can antedate his experience, 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-morj'ow 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 correl-
ative, history is to be read and written.

Thus in all ways does the soul concentrate and re-
produce its treasures for each pupil, for each new-born
man. He too shall pass through the whole cycle of ex*
perience. He shall collect into a focus the rays of na-
ture. History no longer shall be a dull book. It shall
walk incarnate in every just and wise man. You shall

88 HISTORY.

not tell me by languages and titles a catalogue of the
volumes 3^011 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 e\»ents and experiences ; — liis own
form and features by their exalted intelligence shall
be that variegated vest. I shall find in him the
Foreworld ; in 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 Ilevival of
Letters, the Reformation, the discovery of new
lands, the opening of new sciences and new regions
iu 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 caimot 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 long as the Caucasian man, —
perhaps longer, — these creatures have kept their
counsel beside him, and there is no record of any

HISTORY. 39

word or sign that has passed from one to the other.
Nay, what does history yet record of the metaphys-
ical annals of man ? What light does it shed on
those mysteries which we hide under the names
Death and Immortality ? Yet every history should
be written in a wisdom which divined the range of
our affinities and looked at facts as symbols. I am
ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-
called History is. IIow many times we must say
Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople ! What does
Rome know of rat and lizard ? What are Olympi-
ads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of
being? Nay, what food or experience or succor
have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, for the
Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the steve-
dore, 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, but from it, rather. The idiot, the
Indian, the child and unschooled farmer's boy come
much nearer to these — understand them better than
the dissector or the antiquary.

SELF-RELIANCE.

"Ne te qucBsiveris extra."

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

EpUogite to Beaumont and l^leicher^s llonest Man'i Fortune,

Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat ;
Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be hands and feet.

ESSAY 11.

SELF-RELIANCE.

I READ the other day some verses written by an
eminent painter which were original and not con-
ventional. Always the soul hears an admonition
in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The
sentiment they instil is of more value than any
thought they may contain. Tojbelieve your own
thought, to believe that what is true for you in
your private heart is true for all men, — that is
genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall
be the universal sense ; for always the inmost be-
comes the outmost — and our first thought is ren-
dered back to us by the tnimpets of the Last Judg-
ment. 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 tradi-
tions, and spoke not what men, but what they
thought. A man should learn to detect and watch
that gleam of light which flashes across his mind
from within, more than the lustre of the firmament
of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without no-
tice his thought, because it is his. In every work

44 SELF-RELIANCE.

of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts ;
they come back to us witli a certain alienated maj-
esty. Great works of art have no more affecting
lesson for us than this. They teacli us to abide by
our spontaneous impression witli good-humored in-
flexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is
on the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will
say with masterly good sense precisely what we have
thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced
to take with shame our own opinion from another.

There is a time in every man's education when
he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance;
that imitation is suicide ; that he must take him-
self for better for worse as his portion ; that though
the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nour-
ishing corn can come to him but through his toil
bestow^ed on that plot of ground which is given to
him to till. The power which resides in him is
new in nature, and none but he knows what that is
which he can do, nor does he know until he has
tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one
fact, makes much impression on him, and another
none. It is not without preestablished harmony, this
sculpture in the memory. The eye was placed
where one ray should fall, that it might testify
of that particular ray. Bravely let him speak the ut-
most syllable of his confession. We but half express
ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which
each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as
proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully

SELF-RELIANCE. 46

imparted, but God will not have his work made
manifest by cowards. It needs a divine man to ex-
hibit anything divine. A man is relieved and gay
when he has put his heart into his work and done
his best ; but what he has said or done otherwise
shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which
does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts
him ; no muse befriends ; no invention, no hope.

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

What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text
in the face and behavior of children, babes, and
even brutes. That divided and rebel mind, that
distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has
computed the strength and means opposed to our
purpose, these have not. Their mind being whole,
their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we look
in their faces, we are disconcerted. Infancy con-

4G SELF-RELIANCK

forms to nobody ; all conform to it ; so that one
babe commonly makes four or live out of the adults
who prattle and piay to it. So God has armed
youth and puberty and manhood no less with its
own piquancy and charm, and made it enviable and
gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it will
stand by itself. Do not think the youth has no force,
because he cannot speak to you and me. Hark ! in
the next room who spoke so clear and emphatic ? It
seems he knows how to speak to his contemporaries.
Good Heaven ! it is he ! it is that very himp of bash-
fulness and phlegm which for weeks has done noth-
ing but eat when you were by, that now rolls out these
words like bell- strokes. It seems he knows how to
speak to his contemporaries. Bashful or bold then, he
will know how to make us seniors very unnecessary.
The nonchalance of hoy& who are sure of a din-
ner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or
say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude
of human nature. How is a boy the master of so-
ciety ; independent, irresponsible, looking out from
liis corner on such people and facts as pass by, he
tries and sentences them on their merits, in the
swift, sunnnary way of boys, as good, bad, interest-
ing, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers him-
self never about consequences, about interests ; he
gives an independent, genuine verdict. You nnist
court him ; he does not court you. But the man is as
it were clapped into jail by his consciousness. As
soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat he iis
a committed j^erson, watched by the sympathy or the

SELF-RELIANCE. 47

hatred of liiuidreds, whose affections must now enter
into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah,
that he could pass again into his neutral, godlike
independence ! AVho can thus lose all pledge and,
having observed, observe again from the same unaf-
fected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence,
must always be formidable, must always engage the
poet's and the man's regards. Of such an immortal
youth the force would be felt. He would utter
opinions on all passing affairs, which being seen to
be not private but necessary, would sink like darts
into the ear of men and put them in fear.

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

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

48 SELF-RELIANCE.

of the clnu-cli. On mj saying, What have I to do
with tlie sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly
from within ? my friend suggested, — " But these
impulses may be from below, not from above."
I replied, ' They do not seem to me to be such ;
but if I am the devil's child, I will live then from
the devil.' No law can be sacred to me but that
of my nature. Good and bad are but names very
readily transferable to that or this ; the only right
is what is after my constitution ; the only wrong
what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the
presence of all opposition as if every thing were
titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to
think how easily we capitulate to badges and names,
to large societies and dead institutions. Every de-
cent and well-spoken individual affects and sways
me more than is right. I ought to go upright and
vital, and speak tlie 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 J3arbadoes, why should I not say
to him, ' Go love thy infant ; love thy wood-chop-
per ; be good-natured and modest ; have that grace ;
and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition
with this incredible tenderness for black folk a
thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home.'
Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but
truth is handsomer than the affectation of love.
Your goodness must have some edge to it, — else it

SELF-RELIANCE. 49

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 w^hy I exclude
company. Then, again, do not tell me, as a good
man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor
men in good situations. Are they my poor ? I tell
thee thou foolish philanthropist that I grudge the
dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do
not belon«: to me and to whom I do not belons;.
There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual
affinity I am bought and sold ; for them I w^ill go to
prison if need be ; but yowr miscellaneous popular
charities ; the education at college of fools; the build-
ing of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many
now stand ; alms to sots, and the thousandfold Relief
Societies ; — though I confess Vith shame I some
times succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked
dollar, which by-and-by I shall have the manhood to
withhold.

Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the
exception than the rule. There is the man and his
virtues. Men do what is called a good action, as
some piece of courage or charity, nnich as they
would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appear-
ance on parade. Their works are done as an apol*
4

50 SELF-RELIANCE.

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

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

SELF-RELIANCE. 51

The objection to conforming to usages that have
become dead to jou is that it scatters yom* force.
It loses your time and blurs the impression of your
character. If you maintain a dead church, contrib*
ute to a dead Bible Society, vote with a great party
either for the Government or against it, spread your
table like base housekeepers, — under all these
screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man
you are. And of course so much force is withdrawn
from your proper life. But do your thing, and I
shall know you. Do your work, and you shall re-
inforce yourself. A man must consider what a
blindman's-buff is this game of conformity. Jf 1
know your sect I anticipate your argument. I hear
a preacher announce for his text and topic the ex-
pediency of one of the institutions of his church.
Do I not know beforehand that not possibly can ho
say a new and spontaneous word ? Do I not know
that with all this ostentation of examining the
grounds 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
attorney, and these airs of the bench are the empti-
est affectation. Well, most men have bound their
eyes with one or another liandkerchief, and attached
themselves to some one of these communities of
opinion. This conformity makes them not false in
a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in
all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true.

52 SELF-RELIANCE.

Their two is not the real two, their four not tlie
real four : so that every word they say chagrins us
and we know not where to begin to set them right.
Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the
pi'ison-uniform of the party to which we adhere.
We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and
acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression.
There is a mortifying experience in particular,
which does not fail to wreak itself also in the gen-
eral 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 spon-
taneously moved but moved by a low usurping wil-
fulness, grow tight about the outline of the face, aad
make the most disagreeable sensation ; a sensation
of rebuke and warning which no brave young man
will suffer twice.

For non conformity the world whips yon with
its displeasure. And therefore a man must know
how to estimate a sour face. The bystanders look
askance on him in the public street or in the friend's
parlor. If this aversation had its origin in contempt
and resistance like his own he might well go home
with a sad countenance ; but the sour faces of the
multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep
cause — disguise no god, but are put on and off as
the wind blows and a newspaper directs. Yet is
the discontent of the multitude more formidable
than that of the senate and the college. It is easy

SELF-RELIANCE. 53

enongh for a firm man who knows the world to
brook the rage of tlie cultivated classes. Their
rage is decorous and prudent, for they are timid,
as being very vulnerable themselves. But when to
their feminine rage the indignation of the people is
added, when the ignorant and the poor are aroused,
when the unintellisrent 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 concernment.

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

But why should you keep your head over your
shoulder ? Why drag about this monstrous corpse
of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you
liave stated in this or that public place ? Suppose
you should contradict yourself ; what then ? It
seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your
memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure mem-
ory, but to bring the past for judgment into the
thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day.
Trust your emotion. In your metaphysics you have
denied personality to the Deity, yet when the de-
vout motions of the soul come, yield to them lieart
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.

54 SELF-RELIANCE.

A foolish consistency is the hobgobh'n of littie
minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers
and divines. With consistency a great soul has
simply nothing to do. He may as well concern
himself with his shadow on the wall. Out npon
your guarded lips ! Sew them up with pockthread,
do. Else if you would be a man speak what 3'ou
think to-day in words as hard as cannon balls, and
to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard
words again, though it contradict every thing you
said to-day. Ah, then, exclaim the aged ladies, you
shall be sure to be misunderstood ! . JNIisunderstood I
It is a right fool's word. Is it so bad then to be mis-
understood ? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and So-
crates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Ga-
lileo, 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 by the law of
his being, as the inequalities of Andes and Ilim-
maleh 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 forward, backward, or across, it still spells
the same thing. In this pleasing contrite wood-life
which God allows me, let me record day by day my
honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and,
I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical,
thought I mean it not and see it not. My book
ehould smell of pines and resound with the hum of

SELF-RELIANCE. 55

insects. The swallow over my window should in-
terweave that thread or straw he carries in his bill
into my web also. We pass for what w^e are.
Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine
that they communicate their virtue or vice only by
overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit
a breath every moment.

Fear never but you shall be consistent in whatever
variety of actions, so they be each honest and
natural in their hour. For of one will, the actions
will be harmonious, however unlike they seem.
These varieties are lost sight of when seen at a little
distance, at a little height of thought. One ten-
dency unites them all. The voyage of the best ship
is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. This is only
microscopic criticism. See the line from a suffi-
cient distance, and it straightens itself to the average
tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself
and will explain your other genuine actions. Your
conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what
you have already done singly will justify you now.
Greatness always appeals to the future. If I can be
great enough now to do right and scorn eyes, I
must have done so much right before as to defend
me now. Be it how it will, do right now. Always
scorn appearances and you always may. The force
of character is cunnilative. 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 coo'

56 SELF-RELIANCE.

sciousness of a train of great days and victones
behind. There they all stand and shed an united
light on the advancing actor. He is attended as by
a visible escort of angels to every man's eye. That
is it which throws thunder into Chatham's voice,
and dignity into Washington's port, and America
into Adams's eye. Honor is venerable to us because
it is no ephemeris. It is always ancient virtue. We
worship it to-day because it is not of to-day. We
love it and pay it homage because it is not a trap
for our love and homage, but is self-dependent,
self derived, and therefore 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
Spartan fife. Let us bow and apologize never
more. A great man is coming to eat at my house.
I do not wish to please him : I wish that he should
wish to please me. I will stand here for humanity,
and though I would make it kind, I would make it
true. Let us affront and reprimand the smooth
mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times,
and hnrl in the face of custom and trade and office,
the fact which is the upshot of all history, that
there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor
moving wherever moves a man ; that a true man
belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre
of things. Where he is, there is nature. He meas-

SELF-RELIANCE. 67

nres you and all men and all events. You are con-
strained to accept his standard. Ordinarily, every
body in society reminds us of somewhat else, or of
some other person. Character, reality, reminds you
of nothing else ; it takes place of the whole creation.
The man must be so much that he must make all
circumstances indifferent — put all means into the
shade. This all great men are and do. Every true
man is a cause, a country, and an age ; requires in-
finite spaces and numbers and time fully to accom-
plish his thought; — and posterity seem to follow
his steps as a procession. A man Csesar is born,
and for ages after w^e have a Homan Empire. Christ
is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave
to his genius that he is confounded with virtue and
tlie possible of man. An institution is the length-
ened shadow of one man ; as, the Reformation, of
Luther ; Quakerism, of Fox ; Methodism, of Wes-
ley ; Abolition, of Clarksou. Scipio, Milton called
" the height of Home ; " and all history resolves it-
self very easily into the biography of a few stout
and earnest persons.

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things
under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk
up and down with the air of a charity -boy, a bas-
tard, or an interloper in the world which exists for
him. But the man in the street, finding no worth
in himself whicli 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.

58 SELF-RELIANCE,

or a costly book have an alien and forbidding air,
much like a gay equipage, and seem to say like that,
' Who are you, sir ? ' Yet they all are his, suitors
for his notice, petitioners to his facilities that they
will come out and take possession. The picture
waits for my verdict ; it is not to command me,
but I am to settle its claim to praise. That popular
fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in
the street, carried to the duke's house, washed and
dressed and laid in the duke\j bed, and, on his wak-
ing, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the
duke, and assured that he had been insane — owes
its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well
the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot,
but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason
and finds himself a true prince.

Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In
history our imagination makes fools of us, plays us
false. Kingdom and lordship, power and estate, are
a gaudier vocabulary than private John and Edward
in a small house and comtnon 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 public and renowned steps. When
private men shall act with original views, the lustre
will be transferred from the actions of kings to
those of gentlemen.

SELF-RELIANCE. 59

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

The magnetism which all original action exerts
is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust.
Who is the Trustee ? What is the aboriginal Self,
on which a universal reliance may be grounded ?
What is the nature and power of that science-baf-
fling star, without parallax, without calculable ele-
ments, which shoots a ray of beauty even into triv-
ial and impure actions, if the least mark of inde-
pendence appear ? The inquiry leads us to that
source, at once the essence of genius, the essence of
virtue, and the essence of life, which we call Spon-
taneity or Instinct. We denote this primary wis-
dom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tui-
tions. 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 di

60 SELF-RELIANCE,

verse from things, from space, from light, from
time, from man, but one with them and proceedeth
obviously from the same source whence their life
and being also proceedeth. AVe jirst share the life
by which things exist and afterwards see them as
appearances in nature and forget that we have
shared their cause. Here is the fountain of action
and the fountain of thouojht. Here are the lunjjs of
that inspiration which giveth man wisdom, of that
inspiration of man which cannot be denied without
impiety and atheism. We lie in the lap of immense
intelligence, which makes us organs of its activity
and receivers of its truth. When we discern jus-
tice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of our-
selves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask
whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul
that causes — all metaphysics, all philosophy is at
fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can
affirm. Every man discerns between the voluntary
acts of his mind and his involuntary perceptions.
And to his involuntary perceptions he knows a per-
fect respect is due. He may err in the expression
of them, but he knows that these things are so, like
day and right, not to be disputed. All my wilful
actions and acquisitions are but roving ; — the most
trivial reverie, the faintest native emotion, are do*
mestic and divine. Thoughtless people contradict
as readily the statement of perceptions as of opin-
ions, or rather much more readily ; for they do not
distinguish between perception and notion. They

SELF-RELIANCE. 61

fancy that I choose to see this or that thing. But
perception is not whimsical, but fatal. If I see a
trait, my children will see it after me, and in course
of time all mankind, — 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 com-
municate, not one thing, but all things ; should fill
the world with his voice ; should scatter forth light,
nature, time, souls, from the centre of the present
thought ; and new date and new create the whole.
Whenever a mind is simple and receives a divine
wisdom, then old things pass away, — means, teach-
ers, texts, temples fall ; it lives now, and absorbs
past and future into the present hour. All things
are made sacred by relation to it, — one thing as much
as another. All things are dissolved to their centie
by their cause, and in the universal miracle petty
and particular miracles disappear. This is and must
be. If therefore a man claims to know and speak
of God and carries you backward to the phraseology
of some old mouldered nation in another country,
in another world, believe him not. Is the acorn
better than the oak which is its fulness and com-
pletion ? Is the parent better than the child into
whom he has cast his ripened being ? Whence tlien
this worship of the past ? The centuries are con-
<?pirator8 against the sanity and majesty of the souL

62 8ELF-RELTANCE.

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

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer up-
right ; he dares not say 'I think,' ' I am,' but quotes
some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the
blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses
under my window make no reference to former
roses or to 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
every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud
has burst, its whole life acts ; in the full-blown
flower there is no more ; in the leafless root there
is no less. Its nature is satisfied and it satisfies
nature in all moments alike. There is no time to it.
But man postpones or remembers ; he does not live
in the present, but with reverted eye laments the
past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him,
stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot
be^liappy 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 un-
less he speak the phraseology of I know not what
David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not al-
ways set so great a price on a few texts, on a few

SELF-RELIANCE. 63

lives. We are like children who repeat by rote the
sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as tliey
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. So was it
with us, so will it be, if we proceed. If we live
truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the
strong man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be
weak. When we have new perception, we shall
gladly disburthen the memory of its hoarded treas-
ures as old rubbish. When a man lives with God,
his voice shall be as sweet as tEe murmur of the
brook and the rustle of the corn. /

And now at last the highest truth on this subject
remains unsaid ; probably cannot be said ; for^all
that we sav is tlie far off roniemberino; of the intui-
tion. That thought, by wluit I can now nearest ap-
proach to say it, is this. When good is near you,
when you have life in yourself, — it is not by any
known or appointed way ; you shall not discern the
foot-pi-ints of any other ; you shall not see tlie face
of man ; 3'ou shall not hear any name ; — the way,
the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and
new. It shall exclude all other being. You take
the way from man, not to man. All persons that
ever existed are its fugitive ministers. There shall

64 SELF-RELIANCE.

be no fear in it. Fear and hope are alike beneath it.
It asks nothing. There is somewhat low even in
hope. We are then in vision. There is nothing that
can be called gratitude, nor properly joy. Tlie soul
is raised over passion. It seeth identity and eternal
causation. It is a perceiving that Truth and Right
are. Hence it becomes a Tranquillity out of the
knowing that all things go well. Vast spaces of
nature ; the Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea ; vast
intervals of time, years, centuries, ai-e of no account.
This which I think and feel underlay that former
state of life and circumstances, as it does underlie
my present and -will always all circumstance, and
what is called life and what is called death.

Life only avails, not the having lived.. Power
ceases in the instant of repose ; it resides in the mo-
ment of transition from a past to a new state, in
the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.
This one fact the world hates, that the soul be-
comes ; for that forever 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 speaking. Speak
rather of that which relies because it works and is.
Who has more soul than I masters me, though he
should not raise his finger. Hound him I must re-
volve by the gravitation of spirits. Who has less

SELF-RELIANCE. 65

I rule with like facility. We fancy it rhetoric when
we speak of eminent virtue. We do not yet see
that virtue is Height, and that a man or a company
of men, plastic and permeable to principles, by the
law of nature must overpower and ride all cities,
nations, kings, rich men, poets, who are not.

This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly
reach on this, as on every topic, the resolution of
all into the ever-blessed One. Virtue is the gov-
ernor, the creator, the reality. All things real are
so by so nmch virtue as they contain. Hardship,
husbandry, hunting, whaling, war, eloquence, per-
sonal weight, are somewhat, and engage my respect
as examples oi the sours^presence and impure
^ction,, I see the same law working in nature for
conservation and growth. The poise of a planet,
the bended tree recoverinoj itself from the strono:
wind, the vital resources of every animal and veg-
etable, are also demonstrations of the self-sufficing
and therefore self-relying soul. All history, from
its highest to its trivial passages is the various
record of this power.

Thus all concentrates ; let us not rove ; let us sit
at home with the cause. Let us stun and astonish
the intruding rabble of men and books and institu-
tions by a simple declaration of the divine fact.
Bid them take the shoes from off their feet, for
God is here within. Let our simplicity judge them,
and our docility to our own law demonstrate the pov-
erty of nature and fortune beside our native riches.
0

GO SELF-RELIANCE.

But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in
awe of man, nor is the soul admonished to stay at
home, to put itself in communication with the in-
ternal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water
of the urns of men. We must go alone. Isola-
tion must precede true society. I like the silent
church before the service begins, better than any
preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste the
persons look, begirt each one with a precinct or
sanctuary. So let us always sit. Why should we
assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father,
or child, because they 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
in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic
trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want,
charity, all knock at once at thy closet door and
say, ' Come out unto ns.' — Do not spill thy soul ;
do not all descend ; keep thy state ; stay at home
in thine own heaven ; come not for a moment
into their facts, into their hubbub of conflicting ap-
pearances, but let in the light of thy law on their
confusion. _The power men possess to annoy me I
give them by a weak curiosity. 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."

SELF-RELIANCE. 67

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

0 mother, O wife, O brothei*, O friend, I have
lived with you after appearances hitherto. Hence-
forward I am the truth's. Be it known unto you
that henceforward I obey no law less than the eter-
nal law. I will have no covenants but proximities.

1 shall endeavor 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 un-
precedented way. I appeal from your customs. I
must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer
for you, or you. If you can love me for what I
am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I
will still seek to deserve that you should. I nuist
be myself. I will not hide my tastes or aversions.
I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will
do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly
rejoices me and the heart appoints. If you are
noble, I will love you ; if you are not, I will not
hurt you and myself by liypocritical attentions. If
you are true, but not in the same truth with me,
cleave to your companions ; I will seek my own. 1

68 SELiP-RELIANCE.

do this not eelfislilj but liuinbly and truly. It is
alike your interest, and mine, and all men's, how-
ever long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth.
Does thi.'? sound harsh to-day ? You will soon love
what is dictated by your nature as well as mine, and
if we follow the truth it will bring us out safe at
last. — But so may you give these friends pain.
Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to
save their sensibility. Besides, all persons have
their moments of reason, when they look out into
the region of absolute truth ; then will they justify
me and do the same thing.
<|. The populace think that your rejection of popu-

lar standards is a rejection of all standard, and
mere antinomianism ; and the bold sensualist will
use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But
the law of consciousness abides. There are two
confessionals, in one or the other of which we must
be shriven. You may fulfil your round of duties
by clearing yourself in the direct^ or in the reflex
way. Consider whether you have satisfied your re-
lations to father, mother, cousin, neighbor, town,
cat and dog ; whether any of these can upbraid
you. But I may also neglect this reflex standard
and absolve me to myself. I have my own stern
claims and perfect circle. It denies the name of
duty to many ofiices that are called duties. But if
I can discharge its debts it enables me to disj^ense
with the popular code. If any one imagines that this
law is lax, let him keep its commandment one day.

SELF-RELIANCE. 69

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

If any man consider the present aspects of what
is called by distinction society, he will see the need
of these ethics. The sinew and heart of man seem
to be drawn out, and we are become timorous de-
sponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth,
afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each
other. Our age yields no great and perfect per-
sons. J^e want men and women who shall reno-
/vate life and our social state, but we see that most
natures are insolvent ; cannot satisfy their own
wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to
their practical force, and so do lean and beg day and
night continually. Our housekeeping is mendicant,
our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion
we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us.
We are parlor soldiers. The rugged battle of fate,
where strength is born, we shun.

If our young men miscarry in their first enter-
prizes 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 tlic cities or
suburbs of Boston or New York, it soems to his

70 SELF-RELIANCE.

friends and to himself that lie is right in being dis>
heartened and in complaining the rest of his life.
A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont,
who in turn tries all the professions, who temns it,
far ins it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a
newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and
60 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
arise who shall reveal the resources of man and tell
men they are not leaning willows, but can and must
detach themselves; that with the exercise of self-
trust, new powers shall appear ; that a man is the
word made flesh, born to shed healing to the na-
tions, that he should be ashamed of our compas-
sion, 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 re-
store the life of man to splendor and make his name
dear to all History.

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

SELF-RELIANCE. 71

1. In wliat prayers do men allow themselves !
That which they call a holy office is not so much as
brave and manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks
for some foreign addition to come through some
foreign virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes of
natural and supernatural, and mediatorial and mi-
raculous. Friiyer that craves a particular cqmmod- dx
jty — anything 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 be-
holding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God
pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a
means to effect a private end is theft and meanness.
It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and
consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with
God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in
all action. The prayer of the farmer kneeling in
Jiis field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneel-
ing 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 Audate, replies,

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

Another sort of false prayers are onr regrets.
Discontent is the want of self-reliance : it is infirm-
ity of will. liegret calamities if you can thereby
help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work
and already tlie evil begins to be repaired. Oui*

72 SELF-RELIANCE.

sympathy is jnst as base. We come to them who
weep foolishly and sit down and cry for company,
instead of imparting to them truth and health in
rough electric shocks, putting them once more in
communication with the soul. The secret of for-
tune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to
gods and men is the self -helping man. For him
all doors are flung wide. Ilim 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
eelebrate 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 Innnortals are swift."

As men's prayei'S are a disease of the will, so are
their creeds a disease of the intellect. They say
wdth those foolish Israelites, *Let not God speak to
us, lest we die. Speak thou, speak any man with
us, and w^e will obey.' Everywhere I am bereaved
of meeting God in my brother, because he has shut
his own temple doors and recites fables merely of
his brother's, or his brothers brother's God. Every
new mind is a new classification. If it prove a
mind of uncommon activity and power, a Locke, a
Lavoisier, a Ilutton, a Bentham, a Spurzheim, it
imposes its classification on other men, and lo ! a
new system. In proportion always to the depth of
the thought, and so to the mimber of the objects it
touches and brings within reach of the pupil, is his

SELF-RELIANCE. 73

complacency. But chiefly is this apparent in creeds
and churches, which are also classifications of some
powerful mind acting on the great elemental thought
of Duty and man's I'elation to tlie Highest. Such
is Calvinism, Quakerism, Swedenborgianism. The
pupil takes the same delight in subordinating every
thing to the new tei'minology that a girl does who
has just learned botany in seeing a new earth and
new seasons thereby. It will happen for a time
that the pupil will feel a real debt to the teacher —
will find his intellectual power has grown by the
study of his writings. This will continue until he
lias exhausted his master's mind. But in all unbal-
anced minds the classification is idolized, passes for
the end and not for a speedily exhaustible means,
60 that the walls of the system blend to their eye
in the remote horizon with the walls of the uni-
verse ; the luminaries of heaven seem to them hung
on the arch their master built. They cannot imag-
ine 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, w^ill break into any
cabin, even into theirs. Let them chirp awhile
and call it their own. If they are honest and do
well, presently their neat new pinfold will be too
strait and low, will crack, will lean, will rot and
vanish, and the immortal light, all young and joy-
ful, million-orbed, million-colored, will beam over
the universe as on the first morning.

74 SELF-RELIANCE.

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

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

Travelling is a fool's paradise. We owe to oui

SELF-RELIANCE. 75

first journeys the discovery that place is nothing.
At home I dream tliat at Naples, at Kome, I can bo
intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. 1
pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the
sea and at last wake up in IS'aples, and there beside
me is the stern Fact, the sad self, unrelenting, iden-
tical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the
palaces. I affect to be intoxicated wath sights and
suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My^;iant
^es withjne wherever I go.

3. But the rage of travelling is itself only a
eympton of a deeper unsoundness affecting the
whole intellectual action. The intellect is vaga-
bond, and the universal system of education fosters
restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies
are forced to stay at home. "We imitate ; and what
is imitation but the travelling of the mind ? Our
liouses are built with foreign taste ; our shelves are
garnished with foreign ornaments ; our opinions,
our tastes, our whole minds, lean, and follow the
Past and the Distant, as the eyes of a maid follow
her mistress. The soul created the arts wherever
they have flourished. It was in his own mind that
the artist sought his model. It was an application
of his own thought to the thing to be done and the
conditions to be observed. And why need we copy
the Doric or the Gothic model ? Beauty, con-
venience, grandeur of thought and quaint expres-
sion are as near to us as to any, and if the American
ailist will btudy with hope and love the precise

76 SELF-RELIANCE.

tiling to be done bj him, considering the climate,
the soil, the length of the day, the wants of the
people, the habit and form of the government, he
will create a house in which all these will find them-
selves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satis-
fied 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. Xo
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 Washinjr-
ton, or Bacon, or Xewton 'i Every great man is
an unique. The Scipionism of 8cipio is precisely
that part he could not borrow. If anybody will tell
me whom the great man imitates in the original
crisis when he performs a great act, I will tell him
who else than himself can teach him. Shakspeare
will never be made by the study of Shakspeare.
Do that which is assigned thee and thou canst not
hope too nuich or dare too much. There is at this
moment, there is for me an utterance bare and
grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or
trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses or
Dante, but different from all these. Xot possibly
will the soul, all rich, all eloquent, with thousand'

SELF-RELIANCE. 77

cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself ; but if I can
hear what these patriarchs say, surely I can reply to
them in the same pitch of voice ; for the ear and the
tongue are two organs of one nature. Dwell up there
in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy
heart and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld again.

4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look
abroad, so does our spirit of society. All men
plume themselves on the improvement of society,
and no man improves.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on
one side as it gains on the other. Its progress is
only apparent like the workers of a treadmill. It
undergoes continual changes ; it is barbarous, it is
civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific ;
but this change is not amelioration. For every
thing that is given something is taken. Society ac-
quires 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 property is a club, a spear, a mat
and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep un-
der. But compare the health of the two men and
you shall see that his aboriginal strength, the white
man has lost. If the traveller tell us truly, strike
the savage with a broad axe and in a day or two
the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the
blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send
the white to his grave.

J

78 SELF-RELIANCE,

The civilized man has hnilt a coaeli, but lias lost
the use of his feet. lie is supported on crutclies,
but lacks so much support of muscle. He has got
a fine Geneva watch, but he has lost the skill to tell
the hour bv the sun. A Greenwich nautical alma-
nac he has, and so being sure of the information
when he wants it, the man in the street does not
know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not
observe ; the equinox he knows as little ; and the
whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial
in his mind. His note-books impair his memory ;
his libraries overload his wit ; the insurance-office
increases the number of accidents ; and it may be a
question whether machinery does not encumber;
whether we have not lost by refinement some en-
ergy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments
and forms some vigor of wild virtue. For every
stoic was a stoic ; but in Christendom where is the
Christian ?

There is no more deviation in the moral standard
than in the standard of height or bulk. No greater
men are now than ever were. A singular equality
may be observed between the great men of the first
and of the last ages ; nor can all the science, art, re-
ligion, and philosophy of the nineteenth century
avail to educate greater men than Plutarch's he-
roes, 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

SELF-RELIANCE. 79

not be called by their name, but be wholly his own
man, and in his turn the founder of a sect. The
arts and inventions of each period are only its cos-
tume and do not invigorate men. The harm of the
improved machinery may compensate its good.
Hudson and Behring accomplished so much in their
fishing-boats as to astonish Parry and Franklin^
whose equipment exhausted the resources of science
and art. Galileo, with an opera-glass, discovered a
more splendid series of facts than any one since.
Columbus found the JSTew World in an undecked
boat. It is curious to see the periodical disuse and
perishing of means and machinery which were in-
troduced with loud laudation a few years or centu-
ries before. The great genius returns to essential
man. We reckoned the improvements of the art
of war among the triumphs of science, and yet Na-
poleon conquered Europe by the Bivouac, which
consisted of falling back on naked valor and disen-
cumbering it of all aids. The Emperor held it
impossible to make a perfect army, says Las Casas,
" without abolishing our arms, magazines, commis-
saries and carriages, until, in imitation of the Ko-
man custom, the soldier should receive his supply
of com, grind it in his hand-mill and bake his bread
himself."

-Society is a wave. The wave moves onward,
but the water of which it is composed does not.
The same particle does not rise from the valley to
the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The per*

80 SELF-RELIANCE.

eons who make up a nation to-day, die, and their
experience with them.

And so the reliance on Property, inchiding the
reliance on governments which protect it, is the
want of self-reliance. Men have looked away from
themselves and at things so long that they have
come to esteem what they call the soul's progress,
namely, the religious, learned and civil institutions
as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults
on these, because they feel them to be assaults on
property. They measure their esteem of each other
by what each has, and not by what each is. But a
cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property,
ashamed of what he has, out of new respect for his
being. Especially he iiates 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 because no revolution or no robber
takes it away. But that which a man is, does al-
ways by necessity acquire, and what the man ac-
quires, is permanent and living property, which
does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revo-
lutions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but per-
petually renews itself wherever the man is put.
" Thy lot or portion of life," said the Caliph Ali,
" is seeking after thee ; therefore be at rest from
seeking after it." Our. dependence on these foreign
goods leads us to our slavish respect for numbers.
The political parties meet in numerous conventions ;

SELF-RELIANCE. 81

the greater the concourse and with each new uproar
of announcement, The delegation from Essex ! The
Democrats from Kew Hampshire ! Tlie 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 m multitude. But 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 from himself all external
support and stands alone that I see him to be
strong and to prevail. lie is weaker by every re-
cruit to his banner. Is not a man better than a
town? Ask nothing of men, and, in the endless
mutation, thou only firm column must presently ap-
pear the upholder of all that surrounds thee. He
who knows that power is in the soul, that he is
weak only because he has looked for good out of
him and elsewhere, and, so perceiving, throws him-
self unhesitatingly 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 ail, 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

82 SELF-RELIANCE.

always drag her after thee. A political victory, a
rise of rents, the recovery of your sick or the return
of your absent friend, or some other quite external
event raises your spirits, and you think good days
are preparing for you. Do not believe it. It can
never be so. Nothing can bring you peace but
yourself. Nothing can bring you peace bufc the
triumph of principles.

COMPENSATION.

ESSAY IIL

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
aliead of theology and the people knew more than
the preachers taught. The documents too from
which the doctrine is to be drawn, charmed my
fancy by their endless variety, and lay always be-
fore me, even in sleep ; for they are the tools in our
hands, the bread in our basket, the transactions of
the street, the farm and the dwelling-house; the
greetings, the relations, the debts and credits, the
influence of character, the nature and endowment
of all men. It seemed to me also that in it might
be shown men a ray of divinity, the present action
of the Soul of this world, clean from all vestige of
tradition ; and so the heart of man might be bathed
by an inundation of eternal love, conversing with
that which he knows was always and always must
be, because it really is now. It appeared moreover
that if this doctrine could be stated in terms with

86 COMPENSATION.

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 crooked passages in our
jouraey, 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 miser-
able ; and then urged from reason and from Script-
ure a compensation to be made to both parties in
the next life, ^o offence appeared to be taken by
the congregation at this doctrine. As far as I could
observe when the meeting broke up they separated
without remark on the sermon.

Yet what was the import of this teaching ? What
did the preacher mean by saying that the good are
miserable in the present life ? Was it that houses
and lands, offices, wine, horses, dress, luxury, are
had by unprincipled men, whilst tlie saints are poor
and despised ; and that a compensation is to be made
to these last hereafter, by giving them tlie like giati-
fications another day, — bank-stock and doubloons,
venison and champagne ? This must be the com-
pensation intended ; for what else ? Is it that they
are to have leave to pray and praise ? to love and
serve men? Why, that they can do now. The
legitimate inference the disciple would di-aw was,
*We arc to have such o. good time as the sinners

COMPENSATION. 87

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 ex-
pect our revenge tomorrow.'

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 constitutes a manly success, instead of con-
fronting and convicting the world from the truth ;
announcing the Presence of the Soul ; the omnipo-
tence of the Will ; and so establishing the standard
of good and ill, of success and falsehood, and sum-
moning the dead to its present tribunal.

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

88 COMPENSATION.

veys well enough to an observer the dissatisfaction
of the hearer, but his incapacity to make his own
statement.

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

Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in
every part of nature ; in darkness and light ; in
heat and cold ; in the ebb and flow of waters ; in
male and female ; in the inspiration and expiration
of plants and animals ; in the systole and diastole
of the heart ; in the undulations of fluids and of
sound ; in the centrifugal and centripetal gravity ;
in 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 in-
evitable dualism bisects nature, so that each thing is
a half, and suggests another thing to make it whole ;
as, spirit, matter ; man, woman ; subjective, ob-
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

COMPENSATION. 89

night, man and woman, in a single needle of the
pine, in a kernel of corn, in each individual of every
animal tribe. The reaction, so grand in the ele-
ments, is repeated within these small boundaries.
For example, in the animal kingdom the physiolo-
gist has observed that no creatures are favorites,
but a certain compensation balances every gift and
every defect. A surplusage given to one part is
paid out of a 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-
dition of man. Every excess causes a defect ; every
defect an excess. Every sweet hath its sour ; every
evil its good. Every faculty which is a receiver of
pleasure has an equal penalty put on its abuse. It
is to answer for its moderation with its life. For
every grain of wit there is a grain of folly. For
every thing you have missed, you have gained some-
thing else ; and for every thing you gain, you lose
something. If riches increase, they are increased
that use them. If the gatherer gathers too much,
nature takes out of the man what she puts into his

90 COMPENSATION.

cliest ; swells the estate, but kills the owner. Na-
7 ture hates monopolies and exceptions. The waves
of the sea do not more speedily seek a level from
their loftiest tossing than the varieties of condition
tend to equalize themselves. There is always some
levelling circumstance that puts down the overbear-
ing, the strong, the rich, the fortunate, substantially
on the same ground with all others. Is a man too
strong and fierce for society and by temper and
position a bad citizen, — a morose ruffian, with a
dash of the pirate in him ? — nature sends him a
troop of pretty sons and daughters who are getting
along in the dame's classes at the village school, and
love and fear for them smooths his grim scowl to
courtesy. Thus she contrives to intenerate the
granite and felspar, takes the boar out and puts the
lamb in and keeps her balance true.

The farmer imagines power and place are fine
tilings. But the President has paid dear for his
White House. It has commonly cost him all his
peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To
preserve for a short time so conspicuous an appear-
ance before the world, he is content to eat dust be-
fore the real masters who stand erect behind the
throne. Or do men desire the more substantial and
permanent grandeur of genius? Neither has this
an immunity. He who by force of will or of
thought is great and overlooks thousands, has the
responsibility of overlooking. With every influx of
light comes new danger. Has he light? he must bear

COMPENSATION. 91

witness to the light, and always outrun that sym-
pathy which gives him such keen satisfaction, by
liis fidelity to new revelations of the incessant soul.
He must hate father and mother, wife and child.
Has he all that the world loves and admires and
covets ? — he must cast behind him their admiration
and afflict them by faithfulness to his truth and be-
come a byword and a hissing.

This Law writes the laws of cities and nations.
It will not be baulked of its end in the smallest
iota. It is in vain to build or plot or combine
against it. Things refuse to be mismanaged long.
JRes nolunt diu male administrari. Though no
checks to a new evil appear, the checks exist, and
will appear. If the government is cruel, the gov-
ernor's life is not safe. If you tax too high, the
revenue will yield nothing. If you make the crim-
inal code sanguinary, juries will not convict.
Nothing arbitrary, nothing artificial .can endure.
The true life and satisfactions of man seem to elude
the utmost rigors or felicities of condition and to
establish themselves with great indifferency under
all varieties of circumstance. Under all govern-
ments the influence of character remains the same,
— in Turkey and New England about alike. Under
the primeval despots of Egypt, history honestly
confesses that man must have been as free as cuh
ture could make him.

These appearances indicate the fact that the uni-
verse is represented in every one of its particles.

92 COMPENSATION.

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

The world globes itself in a drop of dew. The
microscope cannot find the animalcule which is less
perfect for being little. Eyes, ears, taste, smell,
motion, resistance, appetite, and organs of repro-
duction that take hold on eternity, — all find room
to consist in the small creature. So do we put our
life into every act. The true doctrine of omnipres-
ence is that God reappears with all his parts in
every moss and cobweb. The value of the universe
contrives to throw itself into every point. If the
good is there, so is the evil ; if the aflSuity, so the
repulsion ; if the force, so the limitation.

Thus is the universe alive. All things are moral.
That soul which within us is a sentiment, outside

COMPENSATION. 93

of US is a law. We feel its inspirations ; out there in
history we can see its fatal strength. It is almighty.
All nature feels its grasp. " It is in the world, and
the world was made by it." It is eternal but it
enacts itself in time and space. Justice is not post-
poned. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all
parts of life. 01 kvjSoi J 109 ael evirCirTova-t,. The
dice of God are always loaded. The world looks
like a multiplication-table, or a mathematical equa-
tion, which, turn it how you will, balances itself.
Take what figure you will, its exact value, nor more
nor less, still returns to you. Every secret is told,
every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded,
every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty.
What we call retribution is the universal necessity
by which the whole appears wherever a part ap-
pears. If you see smoke, there must be fire. If
you see a hand or a limb, you know that the trunk
to which it belongs is there behind.

Every act rewards itself, or in other words inte-
grates itself, in a twofold manner: first in the
thing, or in real nature ; and secondly in the cir-
cumstance, or in apparent nature. Men call the
circumstance the retribution. The causal retribu-
tion is in the thing and is seen by the soul. The
retribution in the circumstance is seen by the un-
derstanding ; 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 specific stripes
may follow late after the offence, but they follow

94 COMPENSATION.

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 effect already blooms in the cause, the end
preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.

Whilst thus the world will be whole and refuses
to be disparted, we seek to act partially, to sunder,
to appropriate ; for example, — to gratify the senses
we sever the pleasure of the senses from the needs
of the character. The ingenuity of man has been
dedicated to the solution of one problem, — how to
detach the sensual sweet, the sensual strong, the
sensual bright, &c., from the moral sweet, the
moral deep, the moral fair ; that is, again, to con-
trive 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 live and work through
all things. It would be the only fact. All things
shall be added unto it, — power, pleasure, knowl-
edge, beauty. The particular man aims to be some-
body ; to set up for himself ; to truck and higgle
for a private good ; and, in particulars, to ride that

COMPENSATION. 95

he may ride ; to dress that he may be dressed ; to
eat tliat he may eat ; and to govern, that he may be
seen. Men seek to be great ; they would have of-
fices, wealth, power, and fame. They think that to
be great is to get only one side of nature, — the
sweet, witliout the other side, — the bitter.

Steadily is this dividing and detaching counter-
acted. Up to this day it must be owned no pro-
jector has had the smallest success. The parted
water re-unites behind our hand. Pleasure is
taken out of pleasant things, profit out of profitable
things, power out of strong things, the moment we
seek to separate them from the whole. We can no
more halve things and get the sensual good, by it-
self, than w^e 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 an-
other brags that he does not know, brags that they
do not touch him ; — but the brag is on his lips, the
conditions 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 appear-
ance, it is because ho 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 exper-
iment would not be tried, — since to try it is to bo
mad, — but for the circumstance that when tlie dis-

96 COMPENSATION.

ease began in the will, of rebellion and separation,
the intellect is at once infected, so that the man
ceases to see God whole in each object, but is able
to see the sensual allurement of an object and not
see the sensual hurt ; he sees the mermaid's head
but not the dragon's tail, and thinks he can cut oif
that which he would have from that which he would
not have. ''How secret art thou who dwellest in
the highest heavens in silence, O thou only great
God, sprinkling with an unwearied providence cer-
tain penal blindnesses upon such as have unbridled
desires ! " *

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

*'0f all the gods, I only know the keys
That ope the solid doors within whose vaults
Ilis thunders sleep."

A plain confession of the in-working of the All and
of its moral aim. The Indian mythology ends in
♦ St Augustine, Confessions, B. I.

COMPENSATION, 97

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

This is that ancient doctrine of Kemesis, who
keeps watch in the Universe and lets no offence go
unchastised. The Furies they said are attendants
on Justice, and if the sun in heaven should trans-
gress his path they would punish him. The poets
related that stone walls and iron swords and leath-
ern thongs had an occult sympathy with the wrongs
of their owners; that the belt which Ajax gave Hec-
tor dragged the Trojan hero over the field at the
wheels of the car of Achilles, and the sword which
Hector gave Ajax was that on whoso point Ajax
7

98 COMrENSATION.

fell. They recorded that when tlie Thasians erected
a statue to Tlieogenes, a victor in the games, one of
his rivals went to it by night and endeavored to
throw it down by repeated blows, until at last he
moved it from its pedestal and was crushed to death
beneath its fall.

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

Still more striking is the expression of this fact in
the proverbs of all nations, which are always the
literature of Heason, or the statements of an abso-
lute truth without qualification. Proverbs, like the
sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of
the Intuitions. That which the droning world,

COMPENSATION, 99

chained to appearances, will not allow the realist to
say in his own words, it will suffer him to saj in
proverbs without contradiction. And this law of
laws, which the pulpit, the senate and the college
deny, is hourly preached in all markets and all Ian
gnages by flights of proverbs, whose teaching is as
true and as onmipresent as that of birds and flies.

All things are double, one against another. — Tit
for tat ; an eye for an eye ; a tooth for a tooth ;
blood for blood ; measure for measure ; love for
love. — Give, and it shall be given you. — He that
watereth shall be watered himself. — What will you
have 'i quoth God ; pay for it and take it. — Noth-
ing venture, nothing have. — Thoushalt be paid ex-
actly 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 it-
self 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 characterised above our
will by the law of nature. We aim at a petty end
quite aside from the public good, but our act ar-
ranges itself by irresistible magnetism in a line
with the poles of the world.

A man cannot speak but he judges himself.
With his will or against his will ho draws his por-
trait to the eye of his companions by every word.

100 COMPEN.^ATION.

Every opinion reacts on him who utters it. It is a
tliread-ball thrown at a mark, but the other end re-
mains in the thrower's bag. Or, rather, it is a har-
poon thrown at the whale, unwinding, as it flies, a
coil of cord in the boat, and, if the hai'poon is not
good, or not well thrown, it will go nigh to cut the
steersman in twain or to sink the boat.

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.
" Xo man had ever a point of pride that was not in-
jurious to him," said Burke. The exclusive in
fashionable life does not see that he excludes liim-
self from enjoyment, in the attempt to appropriate
it. The exclusionist in religion does not see that
he shuts the door of heaven on himself, in striving
to shut out others. Treat men as pawns and nine-
pins and you shall suffer as well as they. If you
leave out their heart, you shall lose your own. The
senses would make things of all persons ; of women,
of children, of the poor. The vulgar proverb, " I
will get it from his purse or get it from his skin," is
sound philosophy.

All infractions of love and equity in our social 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 interpenetra-
tion of nature. But as soon as there is any depar-
ture from simplicity and attempt at halfness, or
good for me that is not good for him, my neigh-

COMPENSATION. 101

bor feels tlie wrong ; he shrinks from me as far as
I have shrunk from him ; his ejes no longer seek
mine ; there is war between us ; there is hate in
him and fear in me.

All the old abuses in society, the great and uni-
versal and the petty and particular, all unjust ac-
cumulations of property and power, are avenged in
the same manner. Fear is an instructor of great
sagacity and the herald of all revolutions. One
thing he always teaches, that there is rotten-
ness 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. lie indicates great wrongs
which must be revised.

Of the like nature is that expectation of change
which instantly follows the suspension of our volun-
tary activity. The terror of cloudless noon, the
emerald of 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. lias a man

102 COMPENSATION.

gained any thing who has received a hundred favors
and rendered none ? Has he gained by borrowing,
through indolence or cunning, liis neighbor's wares,
or horses, or money ? There arises on the deed the
instant acknowledgment of benefit on the one part
and of debt on the other ; that is, of superiority and
inferiority. The transaction remains in the memory
of himself and his neighbor ; and every new trans-
action alters according to its nature their relation to
each other. He may soon come to see that he had
better have broken his own bones than to have rid-
den in his neighbor's coach, and that " the highest
price he can pay for a thing is to ask for it."

A wise man will extend this lesson to all parts of
life, and know that it is always the part of prudence
to face every claimant and pay every just demand
on your time, your talents, or your heart. Always
pay ; for first or last you must pay your entire debt.
Persons 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.
lie is great who confers the most benefits, lie is
])ase, — and that is the one base thing in the uni-
verse,— 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, lino

COMPENSATION. 103

for line, deed for deed, cent for cent, to somebody.
Beware of too much good staying in yom- 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 gar-
dener, or to buy good sense applied to gardening ;
in your sailor, good sense applied to navigation ; in
the house, good sense applied to cooking, sewing,
serving; in your agent, good sense applied to ac-
counts and affairs. So do you multiply your pres-
ence, or spread yourself throughout your estate.
But because of the dual constitution of things, in
labor as in life there can be no cheating. The thief
steals from himself. The swindler swindles him-
self. For the real price of labor is knowledge and
virtue, whereof wealth and credit are signs. These
signs, like paper money, may be counterfeited or
stolen, but that which they represent, namely, knowl-
edge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited or stolen.
These ends of labor cannot be answered but by real
exertions of the mind, and in obedience to pure mo«
tives. The cheat, the defaulter, the gambler, can-
not extort the benefit, cannot extort the knowledge
of material and moral nature which his honest care
and pains yield to the operative. The law of
nature is, Do the thing, and you shall have tho

104 COMPENSATION.

power ; bat tlicy who do not the thing have not tlie
power.

Human labor, through all its forms, from the
sharpening of a stake to the construction of a city
or an epic, is one immense illustration of the per-
fect compensation of the universe. Everywhere
and always this law is sublime. The absolute bal-
ance 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 impossible to get anything without its price, ia
not less sublime in the columns of a leger than in
the budgets of states, in the laws of light and dark-
ness, in all the action and reaction of nature. I
cannot doubt that the high laws w^hich each man
sees ever implicated in those processes with which he
is conversant, the stern ethics which sparkle on his
chisel-edge, which are measured out by his plumb
and foot-rule, which stand as manifest in the foot-
ing of the shop-bill as in the history of a state, —
do recommend to him his trade, and though seldom
named, exalt his business to his imagination.

The league between virtue and nature engages
all things to assume a hostile front to vice. The
beautiful laws and substances of the world perse-
cute and whip the traitor. He finds that things are
arranged for truth and benefit, but there is no den
in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime,
and the earth is made of glass. There is no such
thing as concealment. Commit a crime, and it seems

COMPENSATION. 105

as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as re-
veals in the woods the track of every partridge and
fox and squirrel and mole. You cannot recall the
spoken word, jou cannot wipe out the foot-track, you
cannot draw up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet or
clew. Always some damning circumstance trans-
pires. The laws and suhstances 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 bo
loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as
the two sides of an algebraic equation. The good
man has absolute good, which like fire turns every
thing to its own nature, so that you cannot do him
any harm ; but as the royal armies sent against ]^a-
poleon, when he approached cast down their colors
and from enemies became friends, so do 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 liim, 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
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

106 COMPENSATION.

needs to tliaiik liis faults. As no man thoroughly
understands a truth until first he has contended
against it, so no man has a thorough acquaintance
with the hindrances or talents of men until he has
suffered from the one and seen the triumph of the
other over his own want of the same. Has he a
defect of temper that unfits him to live in society ?
Thereby he is driven to entertain himself alone and
acquire habits of self-help ; and thus, like the
wounded oyster, he mends his shell with pearl.

Our strength grows out of our weakness. Not
until w^e are pricked and stung and sorely shot at,
awakens the indignation which arms itself with
secret forces. A great man is always willing to be
little. Whilst he sits on the cushion of advantages,
he goes to sleep. When he is pushed, tormented,
defeated, he has a chance to learn something ; he
has been put on his wits, on his manhood ; he has
gained facts ; learns his ignorance ; is cured of the
insanity of conceit ; has got moderation and real
skill. The wise man always throws himself on the
side of his assailants. It is more his interest than
it is theirs to find his weak point. The wound cica-
trizes and falls off from him like a dead skin and
when they would triumph, lo ! he has passed on in-
vulnerable. Blame is safer than praise. I hate to
be defended in a ne\vspaper. As long as all that
is said is said against me, I feel a certain assur-
ance of success. But as soon as honied words of
praise are spoken for me I feel as one that lies

COMPENSATION. 107

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,
60 w^e gain the strength of the temptation we re-
sist.

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 onr institutions, nor is shrewdness in trade
a mark of wisdom. Men suffer all their life long
under the foolish superstition that they can be
cheated. But it is as impossible for a man to be
cheated by any one but himself, as for a thing to bo
and not to be at the same time. There is a third
silent party to all our bargains. The nature and
soul of things takes on itself the guaranty of the
fulfilment of every contract, so that honest service
cannot come to loss. If you serve an ungrateful
master, serve him the more. Put God in your debt.
Every stroke shall be repaid. The longer the pay-
ment is withholden, the better for you ; for com-
pound interest on compound interest is the rate and
usage of this exchequer.

Tlie history of persecution is a history of en-
deavors to cheat. nature, to make water run up hill,
to twist a rope of sand. It makes no difference
whether tlie actors be many or one, a tyrant or a
mob. A mob is a society of bodies voluntarily be-
reaving themselves of reason and traversing its

108 COMPENSATION.

work. The mob is man voluntarily descending to
the nature of the beast. Its fit hour of activity is
niglit. Its actions are insane, like its whole consti-
tution. It persecutes a principle ; it would whip a
right; it would tar and featlier justice, by inflicting
fire and outrage npon the houses and persons of
those who have these. It resembles the prank of
boys^ who run with fire-engines to put out the ruddy
aurora streaming to the stars. The inviolate spirit
tunis their spite against the wrongdoers. The mar-
tyr 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 rever-
berates through the earth from side to side. The
minds of men are at last aroused ; reason looks out
and justifies her own and malice finds all her work
in vain. It is the whipper who is whipped and the
tyrant who is undone.

Thus do all things preach the indifFerency of cir-
cumstances. The man is all. Every thing has two
sides, a good and an evil. Every advantage has
its tax. I learn to be content. But the doctrine
of compensation is not the doctrine of indifferency.
The thoughtless say, on hearing these representa-
tions,— What boots it to do well ? there is one
event to good and evil ; if I gain any good 1 must

COMPENSATION. 109

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

There is a deeper fact in the soul than compensa-
tion, to wit, its own nature. The soul is not a com-
pensation, but a life. The soul is. Under all this
running sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and
flow with perfect balance, lies the aboriginal abyss
of real Being. Existence, or God, is not a relation
or a part, but the whole. Being is the vast aihrina-
tive, excluding negation, self-balanced, and swal-
lowing up all relations, parts and times within it-
self. 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 back-ground
the living universe paints itself forth ; but no fact
is begotten by it ; it cannot work, for it is not. It
cannot work any good ; it cannot work any harm.
It is harm 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
stunning confutation of his nonsense before men
and angels. Has he thei-efore outwitted the law ?
Inasmuch 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

110 COMPENSATION.

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 vir-
tuous action I properly am / in a virtuous act I add
to the world ; I plant into deserts conquered from
Chaos and Nothing and see the darkness receding
on the limits of the horizon. There can be no . ex-
cess to love, none to knowledge, none to beauty,
when these attributes are considered in the purest
sense. The soul refuses all limits. It affirms in
man always an Optimism, never a Pessimism.

His life is a progress, and not a station. His
instinct is trust. Our instinct uses "more" and
"less "in application to man, always of ihapi'es-
ence of the soul, and not of its absence ; the brave
man is greater than the coward ; the true, the be-
nevolent, the wise, is more a man and not less, than
the fool and knave. There is therefore no tax on
the good of virtue, for that is the incoming of God
himself, or absolute existence, without any compar-
ative. All external good has its tax, and if it came
without desert or sweat, has no root in me, and the
next wind will blow it away. But all the good of
nature is the soul's, and may be had if paid for in
nature's lawful coin, that is, by labor which the
heart and the head allow. 1 710 longer wish to
meet a good I do not earn, for example to find a

COMPENSATION. Ill

pot of buried gold, knowing that it brings with it
new responsibility. I do not wish more external
goods, — neither possessions, nor honors, nor pow-
ers, 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 possi-
ble mischief. I learn the wisdom of St. Bernard,
" Nothing can work me damage except myself ;
the harm that I sustain I carry about with me, and
never am a real sufferer but by my own fault."

In the nature of the soul is the compensation for
the inequalities of condition. The radical tragedy
of nature seems to be the distinction of More and
Less. How can Less not feel the pain; how not
feel indignation or malevolence towards More ?
Look at those who have less faculty, and one feels
sad and knows not well what to make of it. Al-
most he shuns their eye ; he fears they will upbraid
God. What should they do ? It seems a great in-
justice. But see the facts nearly and these moun-
tainous inequalities 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
Ilis and Mine ceases. His is mine. I am my
brother and my brother is me. If I feel overshad-
owed and outdone by great neighbors, I can yet
love; I can still receive; and he tliat loveth makcth
his own tlie grandeur he loves. Thereby I make

112 COMPENSATION.

the discovery that my brother is my guardian, act-
ing for me with the friendliest designs, and the
estate I so admired and envied is my own. It is
the eternal nature of the soul to appropriate and
make all things its own. Jesus and Shakespeare
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 can-
not be made mine, it is not wit.

Such also is the natural history of calamity.
The changes which break np at short intervals the
prosperity of men are advertisements of a nature
whose law is growth. Evermore it is the order of
nature to grow, and every soul is by this intrinsic
necessity quitting its whole system of things, its
friends and home and laws and faith, as the 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 some happier mind they are incessant and all
worldly relations hang very loosely about him, be-
coming as it were a transparent fluid membrane
through which the living form is alway 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 en-
largement, and the man of to-day scarcely recognizes
the man of yesterday. And such should be the
outward biography of man in time, a putting off of

COMPENSATION. 113

dead circumstances day by day, as he renews his
raiment day by day. But to us, in our lapsed es-
tate, resting, not advancing, resisting, not cooperat-
ing with the divine expansion, this growth comes
by shocks.

We cannot part with our friends. "We cannot
let our angels go. We do not see that they only
go out that archangels may come in. We are idol-
aters of the old. We do not believe in the riches
of the soul, in its proper eternity and omnipresence.
We do not believe there is any force in to-day to
rival or re-create that beautiful yesterday. We lin-
ger 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 grace-
ful. But we sit and weep in vain. The voice of ^
the Almighty saith, ' Up and onward f orevermore ! '
We cannot stay amid the ruins. Neither will we
rely on the New ; and so we walk ever with re-
verted eyes, like those monsters who look back-
wards.

And yet the compensations of calamity are made
apparent to the understanding also, after long inter-
vals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disap-
pointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems
at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But
the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that \
underlies all facts. The death of a dear friend,
wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but pri-
8

114 COMPENSATION.

vation, 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 allo%vs 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, with no room for its roots and too umch
sunshine 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 neigh-
borhoods of men.

SPIRITUAL LAWS.

ESSAY IV.

SPIRITUAL LAWS.

When the act of reflection takes place in the
mind, when we look at ourselves in the light of
thought, we discover that our life is embosomed in
beauty. Behind us, as we go, all things assume
pleasing forms, as clouds do far off. Not only
things familiar and stale, but even the tragic and
terrible ate comely as they take their place in the
pictures of memory. The river-bank, the weed at
the water-side, the old house, the foolish person, —
however neglected in the passing, — have a grace in
the past. Even the coi-pse that has lain in the
chambers has added a solemn ornament to the
liouse. The soul will not know either deformity or
pain. If in the hours of clear reason we should
speak the severest truth, we should say that we had
never made a sacrifice. In these hours the mind
seems so great that nothing can be taken from us
that seems much. All loss, all pain, is particular ;
the universe remains to the heart unhurt. Distress
never, trifles never abate our trust. No man ever

118 SPIRITUAL LAWS.

Stated his griefs as lightly as he might. Allow for
exaggeration 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 he kept clean and
healthful if man will live the life of nature and not
import into his mind difficulties which are none of
his. No man need be perplexed in his speculations.
Let him do and say what strictly belongs to him, and
though very ignorant of books, his nature shall not
yield liim any intellectual obstructions and doubts.
Our young people are diseased with the theological
problems of original sin, origin of evil, predestina-
tion and the like. These never presented a practi-
cal difficulty to any man, — never darkened across
any man's road who did not go out of liis way to
seek them. These are the soul's mumps and mea-
sles and w^hooping-coughs, and those who have not
caught them cannot describe their health or pre-
scribe 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 ex-
pound to another the theory of his self-union and
freedom. Tliis requires rare gifts. Yet without
this self-kiowledge there may be a sylvan strength
and integrity in that which he is. " A few strong
instincts and a few plain rules " suffice us.

My will never gave the images in my mind the
rank they now take. The regular course of studies,

SPIRITUAL LAWS. 119

tlie jeai*s of academical and pi-ofessional education
have not yielded me better facts than some idle
books under the bench at the Latin school. What
we do not call education is more precious than that
which we call so. We form no guess, at the time
of receiving a thought, of its comparative vahie.
And education often wastes its effort in attempts to
thwart and baulk this natural magnetism, whicli
with sure discrimination selects its own.

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

Not less conspicuous is the preponderance of na-
ture over will in all practical life. There is less in-
tention in history than we ascribe to it. We impute

120 SPIRITUAL LAWS.

j deep-laid far-siglited plans to Caesar and Napoleon;
but the best of their power was in nature, not in
them. Men of an extraordinary success, in their
lionest moments, Iiave always sung ' Not unto us,
not unto us.' According to the faith of their times
they have built altars to Fortune, or to Destiny, or
to St. Julian. Their success lay in their parallelism
to the course of thought, which found in them an
unobstructed channel ; and the wonders of which
they were the visible conductors seemed to the eye
their deed. Did the wires generate the galvanism ?
It is even true that there was less in them on which
they could reflect than in another ; as the virtue of
a pipe is to be smooth and hollow. That which ex-
ternally seemed will and immovableness was willing-
ness and self-aimihilation. Could Shakspeare give
a theory of Shakspeare? Could ever a man of
prodigious mathematical genius convey to others any
insight into his methods? If he could communi-
cate that secret instantly it would lose all its exagger-
ated value, blending with the daylight and the vital
energy the power to stand and to go.

The lesson is forcibly taught by these observa-
tions that our life might be nuich 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-

SPIRITUAL LAWS. 121

ground of the past, or of a wiser mind in the present,
we are able to discern that we are begirt with spirit-
ual laws which execute themselves.

The face of external nature teaches the same les-
son with calm superiority. Kature will not have
us fret and fume. She does not like our benevo-
lence or our learning mucli better than she likes our
f jauds and wars. When we come out of the caucus,
or tlie bank, or the Abolition convention, or the
Temperance meeting, or the Transcendental club
into tlie 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 om* benevolence is un-
happy. Our Sunday schools and churches and
pauper-societies are yokes to the neck. We pain
ourselves to please nobody. There are natural ways
of arriving at the same ends at which these aim,
but do not arrive. Why should all virtue work in
one and the same way ? Why should all give dol-
lars? It is very inconvenient to us country folk,
and we do not think any good will come of it. We
have not dollars. Merchants have. Let them give
them. Farmers will give corn. Poets will sing.
Women will sew. Laborers will lend a hand. The
children will bring flowers. And why drag this
dead weight of a Sunday school over the whole
Christendoui? It is natural and beautiful that

122 SriUlTUAL LAWS,

cliildhood should inquire and maturity should teach;
but it is time enough to answer questions when they
are asked. Do not shut up the young people against
their will in a pew and force the children to ask
them questions for an hour against their will.

If we look wider, things are all alike ; laws and
letters and creeds and modes of living seem a trav-
estie of truth. Our society is encumbered by pon-
derous machinery, which resembles the endless
aqueducts which the Romans built over hill and
dale and which are superseded by the discovery of
the law that water rises to the level of its source.
It is a Chinese wall which any nimble Tartar can
leap over. It is a standing army, not so good as a
peace. It is a graduated, titled, richly appointed
Empire, quite superfluous when Town-meetings are
found to answer just as well.

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

The simplicity of the universe is very different
from the simplicity of a machine. He wdio sees
moral nature out and out and thoroughly knows
how knowledge is acquired and character formed.

SPIRITUAL LAWS. 123

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 is 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 affirmed and denied with equal reason. He
is old, he is young, he is very wise, he is altogether
ignorant. He hears and feels what you say of the
seraphim, and of the tin-pedlar. There is no per-
manent wise man except in the figment of the
stoics. We side with the hero, as we read or
paint, against the coward and the robber ; but we
have been ourselves that coward and robber, and
shall be again, not in the low circumstance, but
in comparison with the grandeurs possible to the
soul.

A little consideration of what takes place around us
every day would show us that a higher law than that
of our will regulates events ; that our painful labors
are very unnecessary and altogether fruitless ; that
only in our easy, simple, spontaneous action are we
strong, and by contenting ourselves with obedience
we become divine. Belief and love, — a believing

124 SPIRITUAL LAWS.

we love will relieve us of a vast load of care. O my
! brothers, God exists. There is a soul at the centre
I of nature and over the will of every man, so that
I none of us can wrong the universe. It has so in-
' fused its strong enchantment into nature that we
prosper when we accept its advice, and when we
struggle to wound its creatures our hands are glued
to our sides, or they beat our own breasts. The
whole course of things goes to teach us faith. "We
need only obey. There is a guidance for each of
us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right
word. Why need you choose so painfully your
place and occupation and associates and modes of
action and of entertainment ? Certainly there is a
possible right for you that precludes the need of
balance and wilful election. For you there is a re-
ality, a fit place and congenial duties. Place your-
self in the middle of the stream of power and wis-
' dom which flows into you as life, place yourself in the
full centre of that flood, then you are without
effort impelled to truth, to right and a perfect content-
ment. Then you put all gain say ers in the wrong.
Then you are the world, tlie measure of right, of
truth, of beauty. If we Avill not be mar-plots wnth
our miserable interferences, the work, the society, let-
ters, arts, science, religion of men would go on far
better than now, and tlie 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.

SPIRITUAL LAWS. 125

I say, do not choose / but that is a figure of speech
by wliich I would distinguish what is commonly
called choice among men, and which is a partial act,
the choice of the hands, of the eyes, of the appe-
tites, 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 in-
wardly aspire after, is the state of circumstances de-
sirable to my constitution ; and the action which I
in all my years tend to do, is the work for my
faculties. We must hold a man amenable to reason
for the choice of his daily craft or profession. It is
not an excuse any longer for his deeds that they are
the custom of his trade. What business has he
with an evil trade ? Has he not a ealling 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. lie has faculties silently inviting
him thither to endless exertion. He is like a ship
in a river ; he runs against obstructions on every
side but one ; on that side all obstruction is taken
away and he sweeps serenely over God's depths into
an infinite sea. This talent and this call depend on
his organization, or the mode in which the general
soul incarnates itself in him. He inclines to do
something which is easy to him and good when it is
done, but which no other man can do. He has no
rival. For the more truly he consults his own
powers, the more difference will his work exhibit

126 SPIRITUAL LAWS.

from the work of any other. When he is true and
faithful his ambition is exactly proportioned to his
powers. Tlie lieight 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 elec-
tion and outward " signs that mark him extraor-
dinary and not in the roll of common men," is fa-
naticism, and betrays obtuseness 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. He creates the taste by which he is
enjoyed. lie provokes the wants to which he can
minister. By doing his own work he unfolds him-
self. It is the vice of our public speaking that it
has not abandonment. Somewhere, not only every
orator but every man should let out all the length
of all the reins ; should find or make a frank and
hearty expression of what force and meaning is in
him. The common experience is that the man fits
himself as well as he can to the customary details
of that work or trade he falls into, and tends it as
a dog turns a spit. Then is he a part of the ma-
chine he moves; the man is lost. Until he can
manage to communicate himself to others in his
full stature and proportion as a wise and good man,
he does not yet find his vocation, lie must find in
that an outlet for his character, so that he may jus-

SPntlTUAL LAWS, 127

tif J himself to tlieir eyes for doing what he does.
If the labor is trivial, let him by his thinking and
character make it liberal. Whatever he knows
and thinly, 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, instead of converting it into the obedient
spiracle of your character and aims.

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

What a man does, that he has. What has he to

128 SPIRITUAL LAWS.

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

He may have his own. A man's genius, the
quality that differences him from every other, the
susceptibility to one class of influences, the selection
of what is fit for him, the rejection of what is unfit,
determines for him the character of the universe.
As a man thinketh so is he, and as a man choosetli
so is he and so is nature. A man is a method,
a progressive arrangement ; a selecting principle^j
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, per-
sons, which dwell in his memory without his being
able to say why, remain because they have a rela-
tion to him not less real for being as yet unappre-
hended. They are symbols of value to him as they
can interpret parts of his consciousness which he
would vainly seek words for in the conventional
images of books and otlier minds. What attracts
my attention shall have it, as I will go to the man
who knocks at my door, whilst a thousand persons

SPIRITUAL LAWS. 129

as worthy go by it, to whom I give no regard. It
is enough that these particulars speak to me. A
few anecdotes, a few traits of character, manners^
face, a few incidents, have an emphasis in your
memory out of all proportion to their apparent
significance if you measure them by the ordinary
standards. They relate to your gift. Let them
have their weight, and do not reject them and cast
about for illustration and facts more usual in litera-
ture. Respect them, for they have their origin in
deepest nature. ' What your heart thinks great, isH
great. The soul's emphasis is always right. — I

Overall things that are agreeable to his nature
and genius the man has the highest right. Every-
where he may take what belongs to his spiritual es-
tate, nor can he take anything else though all doors
were open, nor can all the force of men hinder him
from taking so much. It is vain to attempt to keep
a secret from one who has a right to know it. It
will tell itself. That mood into which a friend can
bring lis 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 ter-
rors of the French Republic, which held Austria in
awe, were unable to connnand 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
9

c

130 BPmiTUAL LAWB.

the same connexion, which in fact, constitntes a
sort of free-masonry. M. Narbonne in less than a
fortnight penetrated all the secrets of the Imperial
Cabinet.

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

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

No man can learn what he has not preparation

SPIRITUAL LAWS. 131

for learning, however near to his eyes is the object 1
A chemist may tell his most precious secrets to a
carpenter, and he shall be never the wiser, — the
secrets he would not utter to a chemist for an estate.
God screens us evermore from premature ideas.
Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that
stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when
the mind is ripened,— then we behold them, and
the time when we saw them not is like a dream.

Kot 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 tills her lap with splendors" not
lier own. The vale of Tempo, Tivoli and Kome 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 others. There are
graces in the demeanor of a polished and noble per-
son which are lost upon the eye of a churl. These
are like the stars whose light has not yet reached
us.

lie may see what ho maketh. Our dreams are \
the sequel of our waking knowledge. The visions
of the night always bear some proportion to the
visions of the day. Hideous dreams are only ex-

132 SPIRITUAL LAWS.

aggerations of the sins of the day. We see our own
evil affections embodied in bad physiognomies.
On the alps the traveller sometimes sees his own
shadow magnified to a giant, so that every gesture
of his hand is terrific. " My childi'en," said an old
man to his boys scared by a figure in the dark entry,
" my children, you will never see anything worse than
yourselves." As in dreams, so in the scarcely less
fluid events of the world every man sees himself in
colossal, without knowing that it is himself that he
sees. The good which he sees compared to the evil
which he sees, is as his own good to his own evil.
Every quality of his rnind is magnified in some one
acquaintance, and every emotion of his heart in some
one. He is like a quincunx of trees, which counts
five, east, west, north, or south ; or an initial, me-
dial, and terminal acrostic. And why not ? He
cleaves to one person and avoids another, according
to their likeness or unlikeness to himself, truly seek-
ing himself in his associates and moreover in his
trade, and habits, and gestures, and meats, and
drinks; and comes at last to be faithfully represent-
ed by every view you take of his circumstances.

He may read what he writeth. What can we
Bee or acquire but what we are ? You have seen a
skilful man reading Virgil. Well, that author is a
thousand books to a thousand persons. Take the
book into your two hands and read your eyes out ;
you will never find what I find. If any ingenious
reader would have a monopoly of the wisdom or

SPIRITUAL LAWS. 133

delight he gets, he is as secure now the book is
Englished, as if it were imprisoned in the Pelews
tongue. It is with a good book as it is with good
company. Introduce a base person among gentle-
men : it is all to no purpose : he is not their fellow.
Every society protects itself. The company is per-
fectly safe, and he is not one of them, though his
body is in the room.

What avails it to fight with the eternal laws of
mind, which adjust the relation of all persons to
each other by the mathematical measure of their
havings and beings ? Gerti'ude is enamored of Guy ;
how high, how aristocratic, how Roman his mien
and manners ! to live with him wxre life indeed :
and no purchase is too great ; and heaven and earth
are moved to that end. Well, Gertrude has Guy :
but what now avails how high, how aristocratic,
how Roman his mien and manners, if his heart and
aims are in the senate, in the theatre and in the
billiard room, and she has no aims, no conversation
that can enchant her graceful lord ?

He shall have his own society. We can love
nothing but nature. The most wonderful talents,
the most meritorious exertions really avail very lit-
tle 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
charms and gifts : they dedicate their whole skill to
the hour and the company ; with very imperfect re-

134 SPIRITUAL LAWS.

Bult. To be sure it would be very ungrateful in us
not to praise them very loudly. Then, when all is
done, a person of related mind, a brother or sister
by nature, comes to us so softly and easily, so nearly
and intimately, as if it were the blood in our proper
veins, that we feel as if some one was gone, instead
of another having come: we are utterly relieved
and refreshed : it is a sort of joyful solitude. We
foolislily think in our days of sin that we must
court friends by compliance to the customs of soci-
ety, to its dress, its breeding, and its estimates.
But later if we are so happy we learn that only
that soul can be my friend which I encounter
on the line of my own march, that soul to which
I do not decline and which does not decline to me,
but, native of the same celestial latitude, repeats
in its own all my experience. The scholar and the
prophet forget themselves and ape the customs
and costumes of the man of the world to deserve
the smile of beauty. He is a fool and follows
some giddy girl, and not with religious, ennobling
passion a woman with all that is serene, oracular
and beautiful in her soul. Let him be great, and
love shall follow him. Nothing is more deeply
punished than the neglect of the affinities by which
alone society should be formed, and the insane lev-
ity of choosing associates by others' eyes.

He may set his own rate. It is an universal
maxim worthy of all acceptation that a man may
have tliat allowance he takes. Take the place and

SPIRITUAL LAWS. 135

attitude to which yon see your unquestionable right
and all men acquiesce. The world must be just
It always leaves every man, with profound un-
concern, 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 con-
cave sphere of the heavens, one with the revolution
of the stars.

The same reality pervades all teaching. Tlie
man may teach by doing, and not otherwise. If he
can communicate himself he can teach, but not by
words. He teaches who gives, and he learns who
receives. There is no teaching until the pupil is
brought into the same state or principle in which
you are ; a transfusion takes place ; he is you and
you are he ; then is a teaching, and by no unfriendly
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 advertised
that Mr. Grand will deliver an oration on the Fourth
of July, and Mr. Hand before the Mechanics' As-
sociation, and we do not go thither, because we
know that these gentlemen will not communicate
their own character and being to tlie company. If
we had reason to expect such a comnumication we
should go through all inconvenience and opposition.
The sick would be carried in litters. But a publio
oration is an escapade, a non-connuittal, an apology,

136 SPIRITUAL LAWS.

a gag, and not a communication, not a Bpeech, not
a man.

A like Nemesis presides over all intellectual
works. We have yet to learn that the thing ut-
tered in words is not therefore affirmed. It must
affirm itself, or no forms of grammar and no plausi-
bility can give it evidence and no array of argu-
ments. 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 nuich water does it draw ? If it awaken you
to think ; if it lift you from your feet with the great
voice of eloquence ; then the eifect is to be wide,
slow, permanent, over the minds of men ; if the
pages instruct you not, they will die like flies in the
hour. The way to speak and write what shall not
go out of fashion is to speak and write sincerely.
The argument which has not power to reach my
own practice, I may well doubt will fail to reach
yours. But take Sidney's maxim : " Look in thy
heart, and write." He that writes to himself writes
to an eternal public. That statement only is fit to
be made public which you have come at in attempt-
ing to satisfy your own curiosity. The writer who
takes his subject from his ear and not from his
heart, should know that he has lost as much as he
seems to have gained, and when the empty book
has gathered all its praise, and half the people say, —
* what poetry ! what genius 1 ^ it still needs fuel to

SPIRITUAL LAWS. 137

make fire. That only profits wliich is profitable.
Life alone can impart life ; and though we should
burst we can only be valued as we make ourselves
valuable. There is no luck in literary reputation.
They who make up the final verdict upon every
book are not the partial and noisy readers of the
hour when it appears, but a court as of angels, a
public not to be bribed, not to be entreated and not
to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to
fame. Only those books come down which deserve
to last. All the gilt edges, vellum and morocco, all
the presentation-copies to all the libraries will not
preserve a book in circulation beyond its intrinsic
date. It must go with all Wal pole's Noble and Eoyal
Authors to its fate. Blackmore, Kotzebue, or Pollok
may endure for a night, but Moses and Homer stand
forever. There are not in the world at any one
time more than a dozen persons who read and un-
derstand 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 Bentley, " was ever written down by any but
itself." The permanence of all books is fixed by ^
EG effort, friendly or hostile, but by their own spe-
cific gravity, or the intrinsic importance of their /*
contents to the constant mind of man. " Do not
trouble yourself too much about the light on youi
Btatue," said Michael Angelo to the young sculptor^
** the light of the public square will test its value."

138 SPIRITUAL LAWS.

In like manner the effect of every action is meas-
ured by tlie depth of the sentiment from whicli it
proceeds. TJie great man knew not that he was
great. It took a century or two for that fact to
appear, i What lie did, he did because he must :
he used no election : it was the njost 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 in-
stitution.

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

Human character does evermore publish itself.
It will not be concealed. It hates darkness — it
rushes into light. The most fugitive deed and
word, the mere air of doing a thing, the intimated
purpose, expresses character. If you act you show
character ; if you sit still you show it ; if you sleep,
you show it. You think because yon have spoken
nothing when others spoke, and have given no

SPIRITUAL LAWS. 139

opinion on the times, on the church, on slavery, on
the college, on parties and persons, that your verdict
is still expected with curiosity as a reserved wisdom.
Far 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 understanding put
forth her voice ?

Dreadful limits are set in nature to the powers of
dissimulation. Truth tyrannizes over the unwilling
members of the body. Faces never lie, it is said.
Kg man need be deceived who will study the
changes of expression. When a man speaks the
truth in the spirit of truth, his eye is as clear as the
heavens. When he has base ends and speaks
falsely, the eye is muddy and sometimes asquint.

I have heard an experienced counsellor say that /
he never feared the effect upon a jury of a lawyer I
who does not believe in his heart that his client
ought to have a verdict. If he does not believe it
liis unbelief will appear to the jui-y, despite all his
protestations, and will become their unbelief. This 1
is that law whereby a work of art, of whatever
kind, sets us in the same state of mind wherein the
artist was when he made it. That which we do
not believe we cannot adequately say, though we
may repeat the words never so often. It was this
conviction which Swedenborg expressed when he
described a group of pei-sons in the spiritual world
endeavoring in vain to articulate a proposition

140 SPIRITUAL LAWS.

which they did not believe ; but tliey could not,
though they twisted and folded their lips even to
indignation.

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

SPIRITUAL LAWS. 141

nor drove back Xerxes, nor christianized the world^
nor abolished slavery.

Always as much virtue as there is, so much ap-
pears ; as much goodness as there is, so much rever-
ence it commands. All the devils respect virtue.
The high, the generous, the self-devoted sect will
always instruct and command mankind. Kever a
sincere word was utterly lost. Never a magnanim-
ity fell to the ground. Always the heart of man
greets and accepts 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 which all men may read but himself. Con-
cealment 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, j
Men know not why they do not trust him ; but !
they do not trust him. His vice glasses his eye,
demeans his cheek, pinches the nose, sets the mark
of the beast on the back of the head, and writes O
fool ! fool ! on the forehead of a king. J

If you would not be known to do any thing, 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 1
look, ungenerous acts and tlie want of due knowl-
edge,— all blab. Can a cook, a ChitRnch, an la- j
chimo be mistaken for Zeno or Paul? Confucius

r

142 SPiniTUAh LAW&

exclaimed, " How can a man be concealed I How
can a man be concealed I "

On tlie other hand, the hero fears not that if
he withhold the avowal of a just and brave act it
will go unwitnessed and unloved. One knows it,
himself, — and is pledged by it to sweetness of peace
and to nobleness of aim which will prove in the
end a better proclamation of it than the relating
of the incident. Virtue is the adherence in action
to the nature of things, and the nature of things
makes it prevalent. It consists in a perpetual sub-
stitution 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 lie low in the Lord's power and learn that
truth alone makes rich and great.

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

SPIRITUAL LAWS, 143

excuse themselves with prolix reasons, they accumu-
late appearances because tlie substance is not.

"We are full of these superstitions of sense, the
worship of magnitude. God loveth not size : whale 1
and minnow are of like dimension. But we call the
poet inactive, because he is not a president, a mer-
chant, or a porter. We adore an institution, and
do not see that it is founded on a thought which we
have. But real action Js in silent moments. The
epochs of our life are not in the visible facts of our
choice of a calling, our marriage, our acquisition of
an office, and the like, but in a silent thought by the
wayside as we walk ; in a thought which revises our
entire manner of life and says, ' Thus hast thou done,
but it were better thus.' And all our after years,
like menials, do serve and wait on this, and ac-
cording to their ability do execute its will. This
revisal or correction is a constant force, which, as a
tendency, reaches through our lifetime. The object
of the man, the aim of these moments, is to make
daylight shine through him, to suffer the law to
traverse his whole being without obstruction, so that
on what point soever of his doing your eye falls it
shall repmjt truly of his character, whether it be his
diet, his house, his religious forms, his society, his
mirth, his vote, his opposition. Kow he is not
homogeneous, but heterogeneous, and the ray does
not traverse ; there are no thorough lights, but tlie
eye of the beholder is puzzled, detecting many unliko
tendencies and a life not yet at one.

144 SPIRITUAL LAWS.

Why should we make it a point with onr false
modesty to disparage that man we are and that
form of being assigned to us ? A good man is con-
tented. I love and honor Epaminondas, but I do
not wish to be Epaminondas. I hold it more just
to love the world of this hour than the world of his
hour. Nor can you, if I am true, excite me to the
least uneasiness by saying, * he acted and thou sit-
test 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 busy-bodies
and superserviceable ? Action and inaction are
alike to the true. One piece of the tree is cut for a
weathercock and one for the sleeper of a bridge;
the virtue of the wood is apparent in both.

I desire not to disgrace the soul. The fact that
I am here certainly shows me that the soul had need
of an organ here. Shall I not assume the post ?
Shall I skulk and dodge and duck with my unsea-
sonable apologies and vain modesty and imagine
my being here impertinent ? less pertinent than
Epaminondas or Homer being there ? and ihat
the soul did not know its own needs ? Besides,
without any reasoning on the matter, I have no
discontent. The good soul nourishes me alway,
unlocks new magazines of power and enjoyment to
me every day. 1 will not meanly decline the im-

SPian-UAL LAWS. 145

mensity of good, because I have heard that it has
come to others in another shape.

Besides;^ why^ould we be cowed bY_thfi-iiaine,of
Action? 'Tis a trick of the senses, — no more.
We know that the ancestor of every action is a
thought. The poor mind does not seem to itself
to be any thing unless it have an outside badge, —
some Gentoo diet, or Quaker coat, or Calvinistic
prayer-meeting, or philanthropic society, or a great
donation, or a high office, or, any how, some wild
contrasting action to testify that it is somewhat.
The ricli_ 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
own so. All action is of an infinite elasticity, and
the least admits of being inflated with the celestial
air until it eclipses the sun and moon. Let us
seek one peace by fidelity. Let me do my duties.
Why need I go gadding into the scenes and philos-
ophy of Greek and Italian history before I have
washed my own face or justified myself to my ben-
efactors ? How dare I read Washington's campaigns
when I have not answered the letters of my own
correspondents ? Is not that a just objection to
much of our reading? It is a pusillanimous deser-
tion of our work to gaze after our neighbors. It is
peeping. Byron says of Jack Bunting,

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

I may say it of our preposterous use of books. He
10

)

146 SPIIilTUAL LAWS.

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

This over-estimate of the possibilities of Paul and
Pericles, this under-estimate of our own, comes
from a neglect of the fact of an identical nature.
Bonaparte knew but one Merit, and rewarded in one
and the same way the good soldier, the good as-
tronomer, the good poet, the good player. Thus
he signified his sense of a great fact. The poet
uses the names of Caesar, of Tamerlane, of Bon-
duca, of Belisarius ; the painter uses the conven-
tional 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 Cgesar, and not the
player of Csesar ; then the selfsame strain of
thought, emotion as pure, wit as subtle, motions as
swift, mounting, extravagant, and a heart as great,
self-sufficing, dauntless, which on the waves of its
love and hope can uplift all that is reckoned solid
and precious in the world, palaces, gardens, money,
navies, kingdoms, — marking its own incomparable

SPIRITUAL LAWS. 147

worth by the sh'ght it casts on these gauds of men ;
— these all are his, and by the power of these he
rouses the nations. But the great names cannot
stead him, if he have not life himself. Let a man
believe in God, and not in names and places and
persons. , Let the great soul incarnated in some
woman's form, poor and sad and single, in some
Dolly or Joan, go out to service and sweep cham-
bers and scour floors, and its effulgent day-beams
cannot be muffled or hid, but to sweep and scour
will instantly appear supreme and beautiful actions,
the top and radiance of human life, and all people
will get mops and brooms ; until, lo, suddenly the
great soul has enshrined itself in some other form
and done some other deed, and that is now the
flower and head of all living nature.

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

LOVE.

ESSAY V.

LOVE.

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

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

152 LOVK

sacred attributes, establishes marriage and gives
permanence to human society.

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

LOVB. 153

at the last, some of its earlier traits. Only it is to
be hoped that bj patience and the muses' aid we
may attain to that inward view of the law which
shall describe a truth ever young, ever beautiful,
80 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 the actual, to
facts, and study the sentiment as it appeared in
hope, and not in history. For each man sees his
own life defaced and disfigured, as the life of man
is not to his imagination. Each man sees over his
own experience a certain slime of error, Avhilst 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 liim sincerest
instruction and nourishment, he will shrink and
shrink. Alas ! I know not why, but infinite com-
punctions embitter in mature life all the remem-
brances of budding sentiment, and cover every be-
loved name. Every thing is beautiful seen from the
point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour if
seen as experience. Details are always melancholy ;
the plan is seemly and noble. It is strange how
painful is the actual world — the painful kingdom of
time and ])lace. There dwells care and canker and
fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal
hilarity, the rose of joy. Hound it all the muses
sing. But with names and persons and the partial
interests of to-day and yesterday is grief.

154 LOVE,

The strong bent of nature is seen in the propor*
tion which this topic of personal relations usurps
in the conversation of society. What do we wish
to know of any worthy person so much as how he
has sped in the history of this sentiment ? What
books in the circulating libraries circulate? How
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 theui
and take the warmest interest in the development
of the romance. All mankind love a lover. The
earliest demonstrations of complacency and kind-
ness are nature's most winning pictures. It is the
dawn of civility and grace in the coarse and rustic.
The rude village boy teazes the girls about the
school-house door; — but to-day he comes running
into the entry and meets one fair child arranging
her satchel : he holds her books to help her, and
instantly it seems to him as if she removed her-
self from him infinitely, and was a sacred precinct.
Among the throng of girls he runs rudely enough,
but one alone distances him: and these two little
neighbors, that were so close just now, have learned
to respect each other's personality. Or who cau
avert his eyes from the engaging, half -artful, half*

LOVE. 15o

artless ways of scliool-girls wlio go into the country
shops to buy a skein of silk or a sheet of paper, and
talk half an hour about nothing with the broad-
faced, good-natured shop-boy. In the village they
are on a perfect equality, which love delights in,
and without any coquetry the happy, affectionate
nature of woman flows out in this pretty gossip.
The girls may have little beauty, yet plainly do
they establish between them and the good boy the
most agreeable, 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 dancing-school, and when the sing
ing-school would begin, and other nothings con-
cerning which the parties cooed. By-and-by that
boy wants a wife, and very truly and heartily will
he know where to find a sincere and sweet mate,
without any risk such as Milton deplores as incident
to scholars and great men.

I have been told that my pliilosophy is unsocial
and that in public discourses my reverence for the
intellect makes me unjustly cold to the personal
relations. But now I almost shrink at the remem-
brance of such disparaging words. For persons are
love's world, and the coldest philosopher cannot re-
count the debt of the young soul wandering liere in
nature to the power of love, without being tempted
to unsay, as treasonable to nature, aught derogatory
to the social instincts. For, though the celestial
rapture falling out of heaven seizes only upon those

156 LOVE.

of tender age, and although a beauty overpowering
all analysis or comparison and putting ns quite beside
ourselves we can seldom see after thirty years, yet
the remembrance of these visions outlasts all other
remembrances, 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 contrived to give a witchcraft, surpassing
the deep attraction of its own truth, to a parcel of
accidental and trivial circumstances. In looking
backward they may find that several things which
were not the charm have more reality to this
groping memory than the charm itself which em-
balmed them. But be our experience in particulars
wliat it may, no man ever forgot the visitations of
that power to his heart and brain, which created all
things new ; which was the dawn in him of music,
poetry and art; which made the face of nature
radiant with purple light, the moi-ning and the
night varied enchantments; when a single tone of
one voice could make the heart beat, and the most
trivial circumstance associated with one form is put
in the amber of memory ; when he became all eye
when one was present, and all memory when one
was gone ; when the youth becomes a watcher of
windows and studious of a glove, a veil, a ribbon,
or the wheels of a carriage ; when no place is too
solitary and none too silent for him who has richer

LOVE. 157

company and sweeter conversation in his new
thoughts than any old friends, though best and
purest, can give him ; for, the figures, the mo-
tions, tlie words of the beloved object are not, like
other images, written in water, but, as Plutarch
said, " enamelled in fire," and make the study of
midnight.

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

In the noon and the afternoon of life we still throb at
the recollection of days when happiness was not
happy enough, but must be drugged with the relish
of pain and fear ; for he touched the secret of the
matter who said of love,

** All other pleasures are not worth its pains : "

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

The passion re-makes the world for the youth. It
makes all things alive and significant. Kature
grows conscious. Every bird on the boughs of the

158 LOVE,

tree sings now to his heart and soul. Ahnost the
notes are articulate. The clouds have faces as ho
looks on them. The trees of the forest, the waving
grass and the peeping flowers have grown intelli-
gent ; and almost he fears to trust them with the
secret which they seem to invite. Yet nature soothes
and sympathizes. In the green solitude he finds a
dearer home than with men.

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

Behold there in the wood the fine madman ! lie
is a palace of sweet sounds and sights ; he dilates ;
he is twice a man ; he walks with arm'te 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 causes that have sliarpened his perceptions of
natural beauty have made him love music and verse.
It is a fact often observed, that men have written
good verses under the/ inspiration of passion, who
cannot write well under any other circumstances.

The like force has the passion over all his nature.
It expands the sentiment; it makes the clown gen-
tle and gives the coward heart. Into the most pit-
iful and abject it will infuse a heart and courage to

LOVB. 159

defy the world, so only it have the countenance of
the beloved object. In giving him to another it
Btill more gives him to lumself. He is a new man,
with new perceptions, new and keener purposes,
and a religious solemnity of character and aims.
He does not longer appertain to his family and so-
ciety. He is somewhat. He is a person. He is a
soul.

And here let us examine a little nearer the nature
of that influence which is thus potent over the hu-
man youth. Let us approach and admire Beauty,
whose revelation to man we now celebrate, — beauty,
welcome as the sun wherever it pleases to shine,
which pleases everybody with it and with themselves.
Wondei-ful is its charm. It seems sufficient to it-
self. The lover cannot paint his maiden to his fancy
poor and solitary. Like a tree in flower, so much
soft, budding, informing loveliness is society for it-
self ; and she teaches his eye why Beauty was ever
painted with Loves and Graces attending her steps.
Her existence makes the world rich. Though she
extrudes all other persons from his attention as
cheap and unworthy, she indemnifies him by carry-
ing out lier own being into somewhat impersonal,
large, mundane, so that the maiden stands to him
for a representative of all select things and virtues.
For that reason the lover sees never personal resem-
blances in his mistress to her kindred or to others.
His friends find in her a likeness to her mother, or
her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. Tho

160 LOVB,

lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings
and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of
birds.

Beauty is ever that divine thing the ancients es-
teemed it. It is, they said, the flowering of virtue.
Who can analyze the nameless charm which glances
from one and another face and form ? We are
touched with emotions of tenderness and compla-
cency, but we cannot find whereat this dainty emo-
tion, this wandering gleam, point. It is destroyed
for the imagination by any attempt to refer it to or-
ganization. Kor does it point to any relations of
friendship or love that society knows and has, but,
as it seems to me, to a quite other and unattainable
sphere, to relations of transcendant delicacy and
sweetness, a true faerie land ; to what roses and vio-
lets hint and foreshow. We cannot get at beauty.
Its nature is like opaline doves'-neck lustres, hover-
ing and evanescent. Herein it resembles the most
excellent things, which all have this rainbow char-
acter, defying all attempts at appropriation and use.
What else did Jean Paul Hichter signify, when he
said to music, " Away ! away ! thou speakest to me
of things which in all my endless life I have not
found and shall not find." The same fact may be
observed in every work of the plastic arts. The
statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incom-
prehensible, when it is passing out of criticism and
can no longer be defined by compass and measur-
ing wand, but demands an active imagination to go

LOVE. 161

with it and to say what it is in the act of doing.
The god or liero of the sculptor is always repre-
sented in a transition from that which is represent-
able to the senses, to that which is not. Then first
it ceases to be a stone. The same remark holds of ,
painting. And of poetry the success is not attained
when it lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes ,
and fires us with new endeavors after the unattain- 1
able. Concerning it Landor inquires " whether it
is not to be referred to some purer state of sensation
and existence."

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

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

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

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

This agrees well with that high philosophy of
Beauty which the ancient writers delighted in ; for
11

/

162 LOVE.

they said that the soul of man, embodied here on
earth, went roaming up and down in qnest 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 ce-
lestial good and fair ; and the man beholding such
a person in the female sex runs to her and finds the
highest joy in contemplating the form, movement
and intelligence of this person, because it suggests
to him the presence of that which indeed is within
the beauty, and the cause of the beauty.

If however, from too much conversing with ma-
terial objects, the soul was gross, and misplaced its
satisfaction in the body, it reaped nothing but sor-
row ; body being unable to fulfil the promise which
beauty holds out ; but if, accepting the hint of these
visions and suggestions which beauty makes to his
mind, the soul passes through the body and falls to
admire strokes of character, and the lovers contem-
plate one another in their discourses and their ac-
tions, then they pass to the true palace of beauty,
more and more inflame their love of it, and by this
love extinguishing the base affection, as the sun puts
out the fire by shining on the hearth, they become
pure and hallowed. By conversation with that
which is in itself excellent, magnanimous, lowly,

LOVE, 1C3

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 anj^ 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 di-
vine from the taint which it has contracted in the
world, the lover ascends to the highest beauty, to
the love and knowledge of the Divinity, by steps on
this ladder of created souls.

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

164 LOVE,

tion of human nature by teaching that marriage
signifies nothing but a housewife's thrift, and that
woman's life has no other aim.

But tliis dream of love, though beantiful, is only
one scene in our play. In the procession of the
soul from within outward, it enlarges its circles
ever, like the pebble thrown into the pond, or the
b'glit 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 liousehold acquaint-
ance, on politics and geography and history. But
by the necessity of our constitution things are ever
grouping themselves according to higher or more
interior laws. Neighborhood, size, numbers, habits,
persons, lose by degrees their power over us. Cause
and effect, real affinities, the longing for liarmony
between the soul and the circumstance, the high
progressive, idealizing instinct, these predominate
later, and ever the step backward from the higher
to the lower relations is impossible. Thus even
loj^, which is the deification of persons, must be-
come more impersonal every day. Of this at first
it gives no hint. Little think the youth and
maiden who are glancing at each other across
crowded rooms with eyes so full of mutual intelli-
gence, — of the precious fruit long hereafter to pro-
ceed from this new, quite external stinnilus. The
work of vegetation begins first in the irritability of
the bark and leaf -buds. From exchanging glances,

LOVE. 165

they advance to acts of courtesy, of gallantry, then
to fiery passion, to plighting troth and marriage.
Passion beholds its object as a perfect nnit. The
soul is wholly embodied, and the body is wholly en-
souled.

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

Romeo, if dead, should be cut up into little stars
to make the heavens fine. Life, with this pair, has
no other aim, asks no more, than Juliet, — than Bo-
rneo. Xight, day, studies, talents, kingdoms, relig-
ion, are all contained in this form full of soul, in
this soul which is all form. The lovers delight in
endearments, in avowals of love, in comparisons of
their regards. When alone, they solace themselves
with the remembered image of the other. Does
that other see the same star; the same melting
cloud, read the same book, feel the same emotion,
that now delight me ? They try and weigh their
affection, and adding up all costly advantages,
friends, opportunities, properties, exult in discover-
ing that willingly, joyfully, they would gire all as a
ransom for the beautiful, the beloved head, not one
liair of which shall be harmed. But the lot of hu-
manity is on these children. Danger, sorrow and
pain arrive to* them as to all. Love prays. It
makes covenants with Eternal Power in behalf of
this dear mate. The union which is thus effected

1C6 LOVE.

and which adds a new vaUie to eveiy atom in nature,
for it transmutes every thread throughout the
whole web of relation into a golden raj, and bathes
the soul in a new and sweeter element, is yet a tem-
porary state. Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry,
protestations, nor even home in another heart, con-
tent the awful soul that dwells in clay. It arouses
itself at last from these endearments, as toys, and
puts on the harness and aspires to vast and univer-
sal aims. The soul which is in the soul of each,
craving for a perfect beatitude, detects incongruities,
defects and disproportion in the behavior of the
other. Hence arise surprise, expostuUition and
pain. Yet that wdiich drew them to each other
was signs of loveliness, signs of virtue : and these
virtues are there, however eclipsed. They appear
and reappear and continue to attract ; but the re-
gard changes, quits the sign and attaches to the
substance. This repairs the wounded affection.
Meantime, as life wears on, it proves a game of
permutation and combination of all possible posi-
tions of the parties, to extort all the resources of
each and acquaint each with the whole strength and
weakness of the other. For, it is the nature and
end of this relation, that they should represent the
human race to each other. All that is in the
world, which is or ought to be known, is cunningly
wrought into the texture of man, of woman.

** The person love does to us fit,

Like mauna, has the taste of all in it."

LOVE. 1C7

The world rolls: the circumstances vary every
hour. All the angels that inhabit this temple of
the body appear at the windows, and all the gnomes
and vices also. By all the virtues they are ignited.
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 ofiices which man
and woman are severally appointed to discharge in
time, and exchange the passion which once could
not lose sight of its object, for a cheerful, disengaged
furtherance, whether present or absent, of each
other's designs. At last they discover that all which
at first drew them together, — those once sacred feat-
ures, that magical play of charms, — was deciduous,
had a prospective end, like the scaffolding by which
the house was built ; and the purification of the in-
tellect and the heart from year to year is the real
marriage, foreseen and prepared from the first,
and wholly above their consciousness. Looking at
these aims with which two persons, a man and a
woman, so variously and correlatively gifted, are
shut up in one house to spend in the nuptial so-
ciety forty or fifty years, I do not wonder at the
emphasis with which the heart prophesies this
crisis from early infancy, at the profuse beauty
with which the instincts deck the nuptial bower,
and nature and intellect and art emulate each other

168 LOVE.

in the gifts and the melody they bring to the epi-
thalamium.

Thus are we pnt in training for a love which
knows not sex, nor person, nor partiality, but which
seeketh virtue and wisdom everywhere, to the end
of increasing virtue and wisdom. We are by nature
observers, and thereby learners. That is our per-
manent state. But we are often made to feel that
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 per-
son or persons. But in health the mind is present-
ly seen again, — its overarching vault, bright with
galaxies of ininmtable lights, and the warm loves
and fears that swept over us as clouds must lose
their finite character and blend with God, to attain
their own perfection. But we need not fear that
we can lose anything by the progress of the soul.
The soul may be trusted to the end. That which is
so beautiful and attractive as these relations, must
be succeeded and supplanted only by what is more
beautiful, and so on forever.

FRIENDSHIP.

ESSAY VI.

FRIENDSHIP.

We have a great deal more kindness than is ever
spoken. Mangre 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! Head 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
likened 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.

Onr intellectual and active powers increase with
our affection. The scholar sits down to write, and

172 FRIENDSniP.

all his years of meditation do not furnish him with
one good thought or happy expression ; but it is
necessary to write a letter to a friend, — and forth-
with troops of gentle thoughts invest themselves, on
every hand, with chosen words. See, in any house
where virtue and self-respect abide, the palpitation
which the approach of a stranger causes. A com-
mended stranger is expected and announced, and
an uneasiness betwixt pleasure and pain invades all
the hearts of a household. His arrival almost brings
fear to the good hearts that would welcome him.
The house is dusted, all things fly into their places,
the old coat is exchanged for the new, and they
must get up a dinner if they can. Of a commended
stranger, only the good report is told by others,
only the good and new is heard by us. He stands
to us for humanity. He is what we wish. Having
imagined and invested him, we ask how we should
stand related in conversation and action with such a
man, and are uneasy with fear. The same idea ex-
alts conversation with him. We talk better than
we are wont. We have the nimblest fanc}", a richer
memory, and our dumb devil has taken leave for
the time. For long hours we can continue a series
of sincere, graceful, rich communications, drawn
from the oldest, secretest experience, so that they
who sit by, of our own kinsfolk and acquaintance,
shall feel a lively surprise at our unusual powers.
But as soon as the stranger begins to intrude his
partialities, his definitions, his defects into the con-

FRIENDSHIP. 173

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. Yulgaritj, ignorance, misapprehen-
sion are old acquaintances. Now, when he comes,
he may get tlie order, the dress and the dinner, —
but the throbbing of the heart and the communica-
tions of the soul, no more.

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

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving
for my friends, the old and the new. Sliall I not
call God the Beautiful, who daily showeth himself
80 to me in his gifts ? I chide society, I embrace
solitude, and yet I am not so ungrateful as not to
see the wise, the lovely and the noble-minded, as
from time to time they pass my gate. Who hears
me, who understands me, becomes mine, — a pos-
session for all time. Nor is nature so poor but she
gives me this joy several times, and thus we weave

174 FRIEND snip.

social threads of onr own, a new web of relations ;
and, as many thoughts in succession substantiate
tliemselves, we shall by-and-by stand in a new world
of our own creation, and no longer strangers and
pilgrims in a traditionary globe. My friends have
come to me unsought. The great God gave them
to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of
virtue with itself, I find them, or rather not I but
the Deity in me and in them both deride and can-
cel the thick walls of individual character, relation,
age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives,
and now makes many one. High thanks I owe
you, excellent lovers, who carry out the world for
me to new and noble depths, and enlarge the mean-
ing of all my thoughts. These are not stark and
stiffened persons, but the new-born poetry of God, —
poetry without stop, — hymn, ode and epic, poetry
still flowing and not yet caked in dead books with
annotation and grammar, but Apollo and the Muses
chanting still. Will these too separate tliemselves
from me again, or some of them ? I know not, but
I fear it not ; for my relation to them is so pure
that we hold by simple affinity, and the Genius of
my life being thus social, the same affinity will
exert its energy on whomsoever is as noble as these
men and women, wherever 1 may be.

I confess to an extreme tenderness of nature on
this point. It is almost dangerous to me to " crush
the sweet poison of misused wine " of the affections.
A new person is to me always a great event and

FRIENDSHIP. 175

hinders me from sleep. I have had sucli fine fancies
lately about two or three persons which have given
me delicious hours ; but the joy ends in the day ; it
yields no fruit. Thought is not born of it ; my action
is very little modified. I must feel pride in my friend's
accomplishments as if they were mine, — wild, del-
icate, throbbing property 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 good-
ness seems better than' our goodness, his nature
finer, his temptations less. Every thing that is his,
his name, his form, his dress, books and instru-
ments, fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds
new and larger from his mouth.

Yet the systole and diastole of the heart are not
without their analogy in the ebb and flow of love.
Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too
good to be believed. The lover, beholding his
maiden, half knows that she is not verily that
which he worships ; and in the golden hour of
friendship we are surprised with shades of suspi-
cion and unbelief. We doubt that we bestow on
our hero the virtues in which he shines, and after-
wards worship the form to which we have ascribed
this divine inhabitation. In strictness, the soul does
not respect men as it respects itself. In strict sci-
ence al! persons underlie the same condition of an
infinite remoteness. Shall we fear to cool our love
by facing the fact, by mining for the metaphysical

176 FRIEND snip.

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 es-
sence 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
yonr 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 like him, unless he is at
last a poor Greek like me. I cannot deny it, O
friend, that the vast shadow of the Phenomenal in-
cludes thee also in its pied and painted immensity,
— thee also, compared with whom all else is shadow.
Thou art not Being, as Truth is, as Justice is, — thou
art not my soul, but a ])icture and effigy of that.
Thou hast come to me lately, and already thou art
seizing thy Lat and cloak. Is it not that the soul

FRIEND snip. 177

puts forth friends as the tree puts forth leaves, and
presently, by the germination of new buds, extrudes
the old leaf ? The law of nature is alternation for-
evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the
opposite. The soul environs itself with friends that
it may enter into a grander self -acquaintance or sol-
itude ; and it goes alone for a season that it may
exalt its conversation or society. This method be-
trays itself along the whole history of our personal
relations, the instinct of affection revives the hope
of union with our mates, and the returning sense of
insulation recalls us from the chase. Thus every
man passes his life in the search after friendship,
and if he should record his true sentiment, he might
write a letter like this to each new candidate for his
love.

Dear Friend,

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

Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for
curiosity and not for life. They are not to be in-
dulged. This is to weave cobweb, and not cloth.
Id

I'TS FRIENDSniP.

Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclu-
' sions, because we have made them a texture of wine
! and dreams, instead of the tough fibre of the hu-
( man heart. The laws of friendship are great, aus-
tere 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, wdiich 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 antagonisms, which, as soon as we meet, be^
gin to play, and translate all poetry into stale prose.
Almost all people descend to meet. All association
must be a compromise, and, what is worst, the very
flower and aroma of the flower of each of the beau-
tiful natures disappears as they approach each other.
What a perpetual disappointment is actual society,
even of the virtuous and gifted ! After interviews
have been compassed with long foresight we must
be tormented presently by bafiled blows, by sudden,
unseasonable apathies, by epilepsies of wit and of
animal spirits, in the hey-dey of friendship and
thought. Our faculties do not play us true, and
both parties are relieved by solitude.

I ought to be equal to every relation. It makes
no difference how many friends I have and what
content I can find in conversing with each, if there
be one to whom I am not equal. If I have shrunk

FRIENDSHIP, 179

nnequal from one contest, instantly the joy I find in
all the rest becomes mean and cowardly. I should
hate myself, if then I made my other friends my
asylum.

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

Our impatience is thus sharply rebuked. Bash-
fulness and apathy are a tough husk in which a
delicate organization is protected from premature
ripening. It would be lost if it knew itself be-
fore any of the best souls were yet ripe enough to
know and own it. Respect the naturlangsamkeit
which hardens the ruby in a million years, and
works in duration in which Alps and Andes come
and go as rainbows. The good spirit of our life has
no heaven which is the price of rashness. jiOve,
which is the essence of God, is not for levity, buj;
for the^total worth ofjnan. Let us not liave this
childish luxury in our regards ; but the austerest
worth ; let us approach our friend with an auda-
cious trust in the truth of his heart, in the breadth,
impossible to be overturned, of his foundations.

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
Bacred relation which is a kind of absolute, and
which even leaves the language of love suspicious

180 FRIENDSHIP.

and common, so much is this purer, and nothing ia
BO much divine.

I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but
with roughest courage. When they are real, they
are not glass threads or frost-work, but the solidest
thing we know. For now, after so many ages of
experience, what do we know of nature or of our-
selves ? Not one step has man taken toward the
solution 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 I
draw from this alliance with my brother's soul is
the nut itself whereof all nature and all thought is
but the husk and shell. Happy is the house that
shelters a friend ! It might well be built, like a fes-
tal bower or arch, to entertain him a single day.
Happier, if he know the solemnity of that relation
and honor its law ! It is no idle bond, no holiday
engagement. He who offers himself a candidate
for that covenant comes up, like an Olympian, to
the great games where the first-born of the world
are the competitors. He proposes himself for con-
tests where Time, Want, Danger, are in the lists,
and he alone is victor who has truth enough in his
constitution to preserve the delicacy of his beauty
from the wear and tear of all these. The gifts
of fortune may be present or absent, but all the
hap in that contest depends on intrinsic nobleness
and the contempt of trifles. There are two elements
that go to the composition of friendship, each so

FItlENDSniP. 181

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 most undermost
garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second
thought, which men never put off, and may deal
with him with the simplicity and wholeness with
which one chemical atom meets another. Sincerity
is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority,
only to the highest rank, that being permitted to
speak truth, as having none above it to court or
conform unto. Every man alone is sincere. At
the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.
We parry and fend the approach of our fellow man
by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by af-
fairs. We cover up our thought from him under
a hundred folds. I knew a man who under a cer-
tain religious frenzy cast off this drapery, and omit-
ting all compliment and commonplace, spoke to tho
conscience of every person he encountered, and that
with great insight and beauty. At first he was re-
sisted, and all men agreed he was mad. But per-
sisting as indeed he could not help doing for some
time in this course, he attained to the advantage of
bringing every man of his acquaintance into true
relations with him. No man would think of speak-
ing falsely with him, or of putting him off with any
chat of markets or reading-rooms. But every man

182 FRIENDSHIP.

was constrained bj so much sincerity to face liiin,
and what love of nature, what poetry, what symbol
of truth he had, lie did certainly show him. But
to most of us society shows not its face and eye, but
its side and its back. To stand in true relations
with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is
it not ? We can seldom go erect. Almost every
man we meet requires some civility, requires to be
humored ; — he has some fame, some talent, some
whim of religion or philanthropy in his head that
is not to be questioned, and which spoils all conver-
sation with him. But a friend is a sane man who
exercises not my ingenuity, but me. My friend
gives me entertainment without requiring me to
stoop, or to lisp, or to mask myself. A friend there-
fore 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 foreign form ;
so that a friend may well be reckoned the master-
piece of nature.

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

FRIENDSniP. 183

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

184 FRIENDSniP.

all the relations 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, ship-
wreck, poverty and persecution. It keeps company
with the sallies of the wit and the trances of relig-
ion. We are to dignify to each other the daily
needs and offices of man's life, and embellish it by
courage, wisdom and nnity. It should never fall
into something usual and settled, but should be alert
and inventive and add rhyme and reason to what
was drudgery.

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

FRIENDSHIP, 185

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 tlie table, as takes place when you
leave them alone. In good company the individuals
at once merge their egotism into a social soul exact-
ly coextensive with the several consciousnesses there
present. !No partialities of friend to friend, no
fondnesses of brother to sister, of wife to husband,
are there pertinent, but quite otherwise. Only he
may then speak who can sail on the common thought
of the party, and not poorly limited to his own.
Now this convention, which good sense demands,
destroys the high freedom of great conversation,
which requires an absolute running of two souls
into one.

Ko 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 per-
manent property in some individuals. Conversa-
tion is an evanescent relation, — no more. A man
is reputed to have thought and eloquence ; he can-
not, for all that, say a word to his cousin or his
uncle. The^' accuse his silence with as much rea-
son as they would blame the insignificance of a diiil

186 FlilENDSniP.

in the shade. In the snn it will mark the honr.
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 baulked by
antagonism and by compliance. Let him not cease
an instant to be himself. Tlie only joy I have in
his being mine, is that the not Qiiine is 7nine. It
turns the stomach, it blots the daylight ; where I
looked for at manly furtherance or a least a manly
resistance, to find a mush of concession. Better be
a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.
The condition which high friendship demands is
ability to do without it. To be capable that high
office requires great and sublime parts. There must
be very two, before there can be very one. Let it
be an alliance of two large, formidable natures,
mutually beheld, mutually feared, before 3'et they
recognise the deep identity which, beneath these
disparities, unites them.

lie only is fit for this society who is magnani-
mous. He must be so to know its law. He must
be one who is sure that greatness and goodness are
always economy. He must be one who is not swift
to intermeddle with his fortunes. Let him not
dare to intermeddle with this. Leave to the dia-

FRIENDSHIP. 187

mond its ages to grow, nor expect to accelerate
the births of the eternal. Friendship demands a
religious treatment. We must not be wilful, wo
must not provide. "We talk of choosing our friends,
but friends are self-elected, lleverence is a great part
of it. Treat your friend as a spectacle. Of course
if he be a man he has merits that are not yours, and
that you cannot honor if you must needs hold him
close to your person. Stand aside. Give those merits
room. Let them mount and expand. Be not so
much his friend that you can never know his pecu-
liar energies, like fond mammas who shut up their
boy in the house until he is almost grown a girl.
Are you the friend of your friend's buttons, or of
his thought ? To a great heart he will still be a
stranger in a thousand particulars, that he may come
near in the holiest ground. Leave it to girls and
boys to regard a friend as property, and to suck a
short and all-confounding pleasure, instead of the
pure nectar of God.

Let us buy our entrance to this guild by a long
probation. Why should we desecrate noble and
beautiful souls by intruding on them ? Why insist
on rash personal relations with your friend I Why
go to his house, or know his mother and brother
and sisters? Why be visited by him at your own ?
Are these things material to our covenant ? Leave
this touching and clawing. Let him be to me a
Bpirit. A message, a thought, a sincerity, a glance
from him, I want, but not news, nor pottage. I cau

188 FRIENDSHIP,

get politics and cliat and neighborly conveniencea
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 for-
tify and enhance. Worship his superiorities. Wish
him not less by a thought, but hoard and tell them
all. Guard him as thy great counterpart ; have a
princedom to thy friend. Let him be to thee for
ever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly
revered, and not a trivial conveniency to be soon
outgrown and cast aside. The hues of the opal,
the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the
eye is too near. To my friend I write a letter and
from him I receive a letter. That seems to you a
little. Me it suffices. It is a spiritual gift, worthy
of him to give and of me to receive. It profanes
nobody. In these warm lines the heart will trust
itself, as it will not to the tongue, and pour out the
prophecy of a godlier existence than all the annals
of heroism have yet made good.

Respect so far the holy laws of this fellowship as
not to prejudice its perfect flower by j^our impa-
tience for its opening. We nnist be our own be-
fore we can be another's. There ia at least this

FRIENDSHIP. 189

satisfaction in crime, according to the Latin prov-
erb; you can speak to your accomplice on even
terms. Crimen quos inquinat, cequat. To those
whom we admire and love, at first we cannot. Yet
the least defect of self-possession vitiates, in my
judgment, the entire relation. There can never be
deep peace between two spirits, never mutual re-
spect, 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 intei-fere. Who set you to cast about what you
should say to the select souls, or to say any 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 soul shall
speak. Wait until the necessary and everlasting
overpowers you, until day and night avail them-
selves of your lips. The only money of God is God.
He pays never with any thing less, or any thing
else. The only reward of virtue is virtue : the
only way to have a friend is to be one. You shall
not come nearer a man by getting into his house.
If unlike, his soul only flees the faster from you,
and you shall catch never a true glance of his eye.
We see the noble afar off and they repel us ; why
should we intrude ? Late, — very late, — we perceive
that no arrangements, no introductions, no con-

190 FRIENDSHIP.

snetndes or habits of society would be of any avail
to establish iis in such relations with them as wo
desire, — but solely the uprise of nature in us to the
same degree it is in them : then shall we meet as
water with water : and if we should not meet them
then, we shall not want them, for we are already
they. In the last analysis, love is only the reflection
of a man's own worthiness from other men. Men
have sometimes exchanged names with their friends,
as if they would signify that in their friend each
loved his own soul.

The higher the style we demand of friendship, of
course the less easy to establish it with flesh and
blood. We walk alone in the world. Friends such
as we desire are dreams and fables. But a sublime
hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere,
in other regions of the universal power, souls are
now acting, enduring and daring, wliich can love us
and which we can love. We may congratulate our-
selves that the period of nonage, of follies, of bhm-
ders and of shame, is passed in solitude, and when
we are finished men we shall grasp heroic hands in
heroic hands. Only be admonished by what you
already see, not to strike leagues of friendship with
cheap persons, where no friendship can be. Our
impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances
which no God attends. By persisting in your path,
though you forfeit the little you gain tlie great.
You become pronounced. You demonstrate your-
self, so as to put yourself out of the reach of false

FRIENDSHIP, 191

relations, and you draw to you the first-born of tlie
world, — tJiose rare pilgrims whereof only one or
two wander in nature at once, and before whom
the vulgar great show as spectres and shadows
merely.

It is foolish to be afraid of making our ties too
spiritual, as if so we could lose any genuine love.
AVhatever 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 re-
pay us with a greater. Let us feel if we will the
absolute insulation of man. We are sure that we
have all in us. We go to Europe, or we pursue
persons, or we read books, in the instinctive faith
that these will call it out and reveal us to ourselves.
Beggars all. The persons are such as we ; the Eu-
rope, 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 I 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. He
is the harbinger of a greater friend. It is the prop-
erty of the divine to be reproductive.

I do then with my friends as I do with my books.

192 FRIENDSniP.

I would have them where I can find them, but 1
eeldoni use them. We must have society on our
own terms, and admit or exchide it on the siiirhtest
cause. I cannot afford to speak nuicli witli my
friend. If he is great he makes me so great tliat
I cannot descend to converse. In the great days,
presentiments hover before me, far before me, in
the firmament. I ought then to dedicate myself to
them. 1 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' 1
prize my friends, I cannot afi'ord to talk with them
and study their visions, lest I lose my own. It
would indeed give me a certain household joy to
quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual astronomy or
search of stars, and come down to warm sympathies
with you ; but then I know well I shall mourn al-
ways the vanishing of my mighty gods. It is true,
next week I shall have languid times, when I can
well afford to occupy myself with foreign objects ;
then I shall regret the lost literature of your mind,
and wish you were by my side again. But if you
come, perhaps you will fill my mind only with new
visions; not with yourself but with your lustres,
and I shall not be able any more than now to converse
with you. So I will owe to my fiiends this evanes-
cent intercourse. I will receive from them not
what they liave but what they are. They shall give
me that which properly they cannot give me, but

FRIENDSHIP, 193

wliicli emanates from them. But they shall not
hold me by any relations less subtle and pure. We
will meet as though we met not, and part as though
we parted not.

It has seemed to me lately more possible than I
knew, to carry a fi'iendship greatly, on one side,
without due correspondence on the other. Why
should I cumber myself with the poor fact that the
receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the
sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into
ungrateful space, and only a small part on the re-
flecting planet. Let your greatness educate the
ci-ude and cold companion. 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 unre-
quited. But the great will see that true love cannot
be unrequited. True love transcends instantly the
unworthy object and dwells and broods on the eter-
nal, and when the poor interposed mask crumbles, it
is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth and feels
its independency the surer. Yet these things may
liardly 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.
13

PRUDENCE.

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 percep-
tion. Then I have the same title to write on pru-
dence that I have to write on poetry or holiness.
We write from aspiration and antagonism, as well
as from experience. We paint those qualities which
we do not possess. The poet admires the man of
energy and tactics ; the merchant breeds his son for
the church or the bar ; and where a man is not vain
and egotistic you shall find what he has not by his
praise. Moreover it would be hardly honest in me
not to balance these fine lyric words of Love and
Friendship with words of coarser sound, and whilst

198 PRUDENCE.

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 tlie laws of matter. It is con-
tent to seek health of body by complying with phys-
ical conditions, and health of mind by the laws of
the intellect.

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

There are all degrees of proficiency in knowledge
of the world. It is sufficient to our present purpose
to indicate three. One class lives to the utility of
the symbol, esteeming healtli and wealth a final
good. Another class live above this mark to the
beauty of the symbol, as the poet and artist and the
naturalist and man of science. A third class live
above the beauty of the symbol to the beauty of the
thing signified ; these are wise men. The first class
have common sense ; the second, taste ; and the
third, spiritual perception. Once in a long time, a

PHUDENCB, 199

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

200 PRUDENCE.

The spurions pnidencc, making the senses final,
is the god of sots and cowards, and is the subject of
all comedy. It is nature's joke, and therefore liter-
ature's. The true prudence limits this sensualism
by admitting the knowledge of an internal and real
M'orld. This recognition once made, — the order of
the world and the distribution of affairs and times,
being studied with the co-perception of their sub-
ordinate place, will reward any degree of attention.
For, our existence, thus apparently attached in na-
ture to the sun and the returning moon and the pe-
riods w^liicli 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 primaiy lessons out of these
books.

Prudence does not go behind nature and ask
whence it is ? It takes the laws of the world
w^hereby 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, to give bound and period to his being on
all sides, the sun and moon, the great formalists in
the sky : here lies stubborn matter, and will not
swerve from its chemical routine. Here is a
planted globe, pierced and belted with natural laws
and fenced and distributed externally with civil
partitions and properties which impose new re-
Btraints on the young inhabitant.

PRUDENCE. 201

We eat of the bread whicli grows in the field.
We live by the air which blows around us and we
are poisoned by tlie air that is too cold or too hot,
too dry or too wet. Time, which shows so vacant,
indivisible and divine in its coming, is slit and
peddled into trifles and tatters. A door is to be
panited, a lock to be repaired. I want wood or oil,
or meal or salt ; the house smokes, ov I have a
headache ; then the tax ; and an affair to be trans-
acted with a man without heart or brains, and the
stinging recollection of an injurious or very awk-
ward word, — these eat up the hours. Do what we
can, summer will 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 re-
gard the clouds and the rain.

We are instructed by these petty experiences
which usurp the hours and years. The hard soil
and four months of snow make the inhabitant of
the northern temperate zone wiser and abler than
his fellow who enjoys the fixed smile of the tropics.
The islander may ramble all day at will. At night
he may sleep on a mat under the moon, and wher-
ever a wild date-tree grows, nature has, without a
prayer even, spread a table for his morning meal.
The northerner is perforce a householder. lie must
brew, bake, salt and preserve his food. lie muet
pile wood and coal. But as it happens that not

202 PRUDENCE.

one stroke can labor lay to without some new ac-
quaintance witli nature ; and as nature is inexhaust-
ibly 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 discrimi-
nate ; let him accept and hive every fact of chemis-
try, 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 nmsic so well as his kitchen clock and the airs
which the logs sing to him as they burn on the
hearth, has solaces which others never dream of.
The application of means to ends ensures victory
and the songs of victory not less in a farm or a
shop than in the tactics of party or of war. The
good husband finds method as efiicient in the pack-
ing of fire-wood in a shed or in the harvesting of
fruits in the cellar, as in Peninsular campaigns or
the files of the Department of State. In the rainy
day he builds a work-bench, or gets his tool-box
set in the comer of the barn -chamber, and stored
with nails, gindet, pincers, screwdriver and chisel.
Herein he tastes an old joy of youth and childhood,
the cat-like love of garrets, presses and corn-cham-
bers, and of the conveniences of long housekeeping.

PRUDENCE. 203

His garden or his poultrj-jard — very paltry places
it may be — tells him many pleasant anecdotes. One
might find argument for optimism in the abundant
flow of this saccharine element of pleasure in every
suburb and extremity of the good world. Let a
man keep the law, — any law, — and his way will be
strown with satisfactions. There is more difference
in the quality of our 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 sweetness before it is ripe on the slow
tree of cause and effect. It is vinegar to the eyes
to deal with men of loose and imperfect perception.
Dr. Johnson is reported to have said, — " If the child
says lie looked out of this window, when he looked
out of that, — whip him." Our American character
is marked by a more than average delight in accu-
rate perception, which is shown by tlie currency of
the by-word, " No mistake." But the discomfort of
unpunctuality, of confusion of thought about facts,
inattention to the wants of to-morrow, is of no na-
tion. The beautiful laws of time and space, once
dislocated by our inaptitude, are holes and dens.
If the hive be disturbed by rash and stupid hands,
instead of honey it will yield us bees. Our words
and actions to be fair must be timely. A gay and
pleasant sound is the whetting of the scythe in tho
moniings of June ; yet wliat is more lonesome and
ead than the sound of a whetstone or mower's riile

204 PRUDENCE,

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 gi'eat works
of art, and just now especially in Dresden, liow
much a certain property contributes to the effect
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,
making the hands grasp, and fastening the eyes on
the spot ^vllere they should look. Even lifeless
figures, as vessels and stools — let them be drawn
ever so correctly — lose all eiTect so soon as they
lack the resting upon their centre of gravity, and
have a certain swimming and oscillating appearance.
The Raphael in the Dresden gallery (the only great
affecting picture which I have seen) is the quietest
and most passionless piece you can imagine ; a
couple of saints who worship the Virgin and child.
Nevertheless it awakens a deeper impression than
the contortions of ten crucified martyrs. For, beside
all the resistless beauty of form, it possesses in the
highest degree the property of the perpendicular-
ity of all the figures." This perpendicularity we

PRUDENCE. 205

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 disci'iminate between what they remember
and what they dreamed. Let them call a spade a
spade. Let them give us facts, and honor their own
senses with trust.

But what man shall dare task another with im-
prudence ? Who is prudent ? The men we call
greatest are least in this kingdom. There is a cer-
tain fatal dislocation in our relation to nature, dis-
torting all our modes of living and making every law
our enemy, which seems at last to have aroused all
the wit and virtue in the world to ponder the ques-
tion of Reform. "VVe must call the highest prudence
to counsel, and ask why health and beauty and ge-
nius should now be the exception rather than the
rule of human nature ? We do not know the prop-
erties of plants and animals and the laws of nature,
through our sympathy with the same ; but this re-
mains 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 irreconcilably parted. We have violated law
upon law until we stand amidst ruins, and when by
chance we espy a coincidence between reason and
the phenomena, we are surprised. Beauty should
be the dowry of every man and woman, as invariar

206 PRUDENCE.

bly as sensation ; but it is rare. Health or sound
organization should be universal. Genius should bo
the child of genius, and every child should be in-
spired ; but now it is not to be predicted of any
child, and nowhere is it pure. We call partial half
lights, by courtesy, genius; talent which converts
itself to money ; talent which glitters to-day that it
may dine and sleep well to-morrow ; and society is
officered by men of parts^ as they are properly
called, and not by divine men. These use their
gifts to refine luxury, not to abolish it. Genius is
always ascetic ; and piety, and love. Appetite shows
to the finer souls as a disease, and they find beauty
in rites and bounds that resist it.

We have found out fine names to cover our sen-
suality withal, but no gifts can raise intemperance.
The man of talent affects to call his transgressions
of the laws of the senses trivial and to count them
nothing considered with his devotion to his art. His
art rebukes him. That never taught him lewdness,
nor the love of wine, nor the wish to reap where he
had not sowed. His art is less for every deduction
from his holiness, and less for every defect of com-
mon 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 likelj^ to be a pretty fair his-
torical portrait, and that is true tragedy. It does
not seem to me so genuine grief when some tyran-
nous Eichard III. oppresses and slays a score of

PRUDENCE. 207

innocent persons, as when Antonio and Tasso, both
apparently right, wrong each other. One living
after the maxims of this world and consistent and
trne to them, the other fired with all divine senti-
ments, 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 modem biography. A man of
genius, of an ardent temperament, reckless of phys-
ical laws, self-indulgent, becomes presently unfortu-
nate, querulous, a " discomfortable cousin," a thorn
to himself and to others.

The scholar shames us by his bifold life. Whilst
something higher than prudence is active, he is ad-
mirable ; when common sense is wanted, he is an
encumbrance. Yesterday, Caesar was not so great ;
to-day. Job not so miserable. Yesterday, radiant
with the light of an ideal world in which he lives,
the first of men, and now oppressed by wants and
by sickness, for which he must thank himself, none
is so poor to do him reverence. He resembles the
opium eaters whom travellers describe as frequent-
ing the bazaars of Constantinople, who skulk about
all day, the most pitiful drivellers, yellow, emaciated,
ragged, sneaking ; then at evening, when the ba-
zaars are open, they slink to the opium-shop, swal-
low their morsel and become tranquil, glorious and
great. And who has not seen the tragedy of im-
prudent genius struggling for years with paltry
pecuniary difficulties, at last sinking, chilled, ex-

208 PRUDENCE.

haiisted and fruitless, like a giant slaughtered by
pins ?

Is it not better that a man should accept tlie 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, so-
cial 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 deviations. Let him make the
night night, and the day day. Let him control the
habit of expense. Let him see that as much wisdom
may be expended on a private economy as on an
empire, and as much 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 wisdom of Poor Richard, or the State-
street prudence of buying by the acre to sell by the
foot ; or the thrift of the agriculturist, to stick a
tree between whiles, because it will grow whilst he
sleeps ; or the prudence which consists in husband-
ing 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

PRUDENCE. 209

US, yields no rent and is liable to loss ; if invested,
is liable to depreciation of the particular kind of
stock. Strike, says the smith, the iron is white.
Keep the rake, says the haymaker, as nigh the
scythe as you can, and the cart as nigh the rake.
Our Yankee trade is reputed to be very much on
the extreme of this prudence. It saves itself by
its activity. It takes bank notes, — good, bad, clean,
ragged, and saves itself by the speed with which it
passes them off. Iron cannot rust, nor beer sour,
nor timber rot, nor calicoes go out of fashion, nor
money stocks depreciate, in the few swift moments
in which the Yankee suffers any one of them to
remain in his 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-
command let him put the bread he eats at his own
disposal, and not at that of others, that he may not
stand in bitter and false relations to other men ; for
the best good of wealth is freedom. Let him practise
the minor virtues, llow much of human life is lost in
waiting ! Let him not make his fellow creatures wait.
How many words and promises arc promises of con-
versation ! Let his be words of fate. When he sees a
folded and sealed scrap of piiper 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
14

210 PRUDENCE.

likewise feel the admonition to integrate his being
across all these distracting forces, and keep a slen-
der human word among the storms, distances and
accidents that drive us hither and thither, and, by
persistency, make the paltry force of one man re-
appear to redeem its pledge after months and years
in the most distant climates.

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

PRUDENCE. 2il

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 fears groundless. The
Latin proverb says, '' in battles the eye is first over-
come." The eye is daunted and greatly exagger-
ates the perils of the hour. Entire self-possession
may make a battle very little more dangerous to life
than a match at foils or at football. Examples are
cited by soldiers, of men who have seen the cannon
pointed and the fire given to it, and who have
stepped aside from the path of the ball. The terrors
of the storm are chiefly confined to the parlor and
the cabin. The drover, the sailor, buffets it all
day, and his health renews itself at as vigorous a
pulse under the sleet as under the sun of June.

In the occurrence of unpleasant things among
neighbors, fear comes readily to heart and magni-
fies the consequence of the other party ; but it is a
bad counsellor. Every man is actually weak and
apparently strong. To himself he seems weak ; to
others formidable. You are afraid of Grim ; but
Grim also is afraid of you. You are solicitous of
the good will of the meanest person, uneasy at his
ill will. But the sturdiest offender of your peace

213 PRUDENOS.

and of the neigliborliood, if you rip up his claims^
is as thin and timid as any; and the peace of society
is often kept, because, as chihiren say, one is afraid
and the other dares not. Far oif, men swell, bully
and threaten : bring them hand to hand, and they
are a feeble folk.

It is a proverb that * courtesy costs nothing ' ; but
calculation might come to value love for its profit.
Love is fabled to be blind, but kindness is neces-
sary to perception ; love is not a hood, but an eye-
water. If you meet a sectary or a liostile partisan,
never recognise the dividing lines, but meet on what
common 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
mountains on which the eye had fastened have
melted into air. If he set out to contend, almost
St. Paul will lie, almost St. John will hate. AVhat
low, poor, paltry, hypocritical people an argument
on religion will make of the pure and chosen souls.
Shuffle they will and crow, crook and hide, feign
to confess here, only that they may brag and con-
quer there, and not a thought has enriched either
party, and not an emotion of bravery, modesty, or
hope. So neither should you put yourself in a false
position to your contemporaries by indulging a vein
of hostility and bitterness. Though your views ai-o
in straight antagonism to theirs, assume an identity
of sentiment, assume that you are saying precisely
that which all think, and in the liow of wit and lovo

PRUDENCE. 213

roll out your paradoxes in solid column, with not
the infirmity of a doubt. So at least shall you get
an adequate deliverance. The natural motions of
the soul are so much better than the voluntary ones
that you will never do yourself justice in dispute.
The thought is not then taken hold of by the right
handle, does not show itself proportioned and in its
true bearings, but bears extorted, hoarse, and half
witness. But assume a consent and it shall pres-
ently be granted, since really and underneath their
all external diversities, all men are of one heart and
mind.

Wisdom will never let us stand with any man or
men on an unfriendly footing. We refuse sympa-
thy 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,
approacliing us. We are too old to regard fashion,
too old to expect patronage of any greater or more
powerful. Let us suck the sweetness of those affec-
tions 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 pleasant would life be with such companions.
But if you cannot have them on goocl nmtual terms,

214 PRUDENCE.

you cannot have tliem. If not the Deity hut 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-be-
ing. 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 wo
are pretty sure in a short space to be mumbling our
ten commandments.

HEROISM.

"Paradise is under the shadow of swords."

MaJwmet,

ESSAY VIIL

HEROISM.

In the elder English dramatists, and mainly in
the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, there is a con-
stant recognition of gentility, as if a noble behavior
were as easily marked in the society of their age as
color is in om* American population. When any
Rodrigo, Pedi'o or Valerio enters, though he be a
stranger, the duke or governor exclaims, ' This is
a gentleman,' and proffers civilities without ^nd ;
but all the rest are slag and refuse. In harmony
with this delight in personal advantages there is
in their plays a certain heroic cast of character
and dialogue, — as in Bondiica, 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 ad-
ditional incident in the plot, rises naturally into
poetry. Among many texts take the following.
The Roman Martius has conquered Athens, — all
but the invincible spirits of Sophocles, the duke of
Athens, and Dorigen, his wife. The beauty of the

218 HEROISM.

latter inflames Martins, and he seeks to save her
hnsband ; bnt Sophocles will not ask his life, al-
thougli assnred that a word will save him, and the
execution of both proceeds : —

Valerius. Bid thy wife farewell.

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

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

Mar. Dost know what 't is to die ?

Soph. Thou dost not, Martins,
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.

Vol, But art not grieved nor vexed to leave thy life thus ?

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

Mar. Strike, strike, Valerius,
Or Martins' heart will leap out at his mouth.
This is a man, a woman. Kiss thy lord,
And live with all the freedom you were wont.
0 love ! thou doubly hast afflicted me

HEROISM. 219

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

Vol. What ails my brother ?

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

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

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

I do not readily remember any poem, play, ser-
mon, novel or oration that onr press vents in the
last few years, which goes to the same tnne. We
have a great many flutes and flageolets, but not
often the sound of any fife. Yet Wordsworth's
" Laodamia," and the ode of " Dion," and some
sonnets, have a certain noble music ; and Scott will
sometimes draw a stroke like the portrait of Lord
Evandale given by Balfour of Burley. Thomas
Carlyle, with his natural taste for what is manly
and daring in character, has suffered no heroic ti'iiit
in his favorites to drop from his biographical and
liistorical pictures. Earlier, Robert Burns has given
us a song or two. In the Ilarleian Miscellanies
there is an account of the battle of Lutzcn which

220 HEROISM.

deserves to be read. And Simon Ockley's History
of the Saracens recounts the prodigies of individual
valor, with admiration all the more evident on the
part of the narrator that he seems to think that his
place in Christian Oxford requiree of him some
proper protestations of abhorrence. But if we ex-
plore the literature of Heroism we shall quickly
come to Plutarch, who is its Doctor and historian.
To him we owe the Brasidas, the Dion, the Epam-
inondas, the Scipio of old, and I must think we
are more deeply indebted to him than to all the an-
cient writers. Each of his "Lives" is a refutation
to the despondency and cowardice of our religious
and political theorists. A wild courage, a stoicism
not of the schools but of the blood, shines in every
anecdote, and has given that book its immense
fame.

We need books of this tart cathartic virtue more
than books of political science or of private econ-
omy. Life is a festival only to the wise. Seen from
the nook and chimney-side of prudence, it wears a
ragged and dangerous front. The violations of the
laws of nature by our predecessors and our contem-
poraries are punished in us also. The disease and
deformity around us certify the infraction of natural,
intellectual and moral laws, and often violation on
violation to breed such compound misery. A lock-
jaw that ])onds a man's head back to his heels; hy-
drophobia that makes him bark at his wife and
babes ; insanity that makes him cat grass ; war^

HEROISM. 221

plague, cholera, famine, indicate a certain ferocity
in nature, which, as it had its inlet by human crime,
must have its outlet by human suffering. Unhap-
pily almost no man exists who has not in his OM^n
person become 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 common-
wealth and his own well being require that he
should not go dancing in the weeds of peace, but
warned, self-collected and neither defying nor
dreading the thunder, let him take both reputation
and life in his hand, and with perfect urbanity dare
the gibbet and the mob by the absolute truth of his
speech and the rectitude of his behavior.

Towards all this external evil the man within the
breast assumes a warlike attitude, and affirms his
ability to cope single-handed with the infinite army
of enemies. To this military attitude of the soul
we give the name of Heroism. Its rudest form is
tlie contempt for safety and ease, which makes the
attractiveness of war. It is a self trust which slights
the restraints of prudence, in the plenitude of its
energy and power to repair the harms it may suffer.
The hero is a mind of such balance that no disturb-
ances can Hhuke his will, but plcjusantly and as it
were merrily he advances to his own music, alike in
frightful alarms and in the tipsy mirth of universal

222 HEROISM.

dissoluteness. There is somewhat not philosophical
in lieroism ; there is somewhat not holy in it ; it
seems not to know that other souls are of one tex-
ture with it ; it hath pride ; it is the extreme of in-
dividual nature. Nevertheless we must profoundly
revere it. There is somewhat in great actions
which does not allow us to go behind them. Hero-
ism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always
right ; and although a different breeding, different
religion and greater intellectual activity would have
modified or even reversed the particular action, yet
for the hero that thing he does is the highest deed,
and is not open to the censure of philosophers or
divines. It is the avowal of the unschooled man
that he finds a quality in him that is negligent of
expense, of health, of life, of danger, of hatred, of
reproach, and that he knows that his will is higher
and more excellent than all actual and all possible
antagonists.

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

HEROISM. 223

contraiy to a sensual prosperity ; for every heroic
act measures itself by its contempt of some external
good. But it finds its own success at last, and then
the prudent also extol.

Self -trust is the essence of heroism. It is the
state of the soul at war, and its ultimate objects are
the last defiance of falsehood and wrong, and the
power to bear all that can be inflicted by evil agents.
It speaks the truth and it is just. It is generous, hos-
pitable, temperate, scornful of petty calculations and
scornful of being scorned. It persists ; it is of an
undaunted boldness and of a fortitude not to be
wearied out. Its jest is the littleness of common
life. That false prudence which dotes on health
and wealth is the foil, the butt and merriment of
heroism. Heroism, like Plotinus, is almost ashamed
of its body. What shall it say then to the sugar-
plums and cats'-cradles, to the toilet, compliments,
quarrels, cards and custard, which rack the wit of
all human society ? What joys has kind nature pro-
vided for us dear creatures ! There seems to be no
interval between greatness and meaimess. When
the spirit is not master of the world, then it is
its dupe. Yet the little man takes the great hoax
so innocently, works in it so headlong and believing,
is born red, and dies gray, arranging his toilet, at-
tending on his own health, laying traps for sweet
food and strong wine, setting his heart on a horse
or a rifle, made happy with a little gossip or a little
praise, that the great soul cannot choose but laugh

224 HEROISM.

at such earnest nonsense. " Indeed, these humble
considerations make me out- of love with greatness.
AVhat 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,
consider the inconvenience of receiving strangers at
their fireside, reckon narrowly the loss of time and
the unusual display : the soul of a better quality
thrusts back the unseasonable economy into the
vaults of life, and says, I will obey the God, and the
sacrifice and the fire he will provide. Ibn Ilankal,
the Arabian geographer, describes a heroic extrenje
in the hospitality of Sogd, in Biikharia. " 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 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 YQvy well that they who give
time, or money, or shelter, to the stranger, — so it
be done for love and not for ostentation, — do, as it
were, put God under obligation to them, so perfect

HEROISM. 226

are the compensations of the universe. In some
way the time they seem to lose is redeemed and
the pains they seem to take remunerate themselves.
These men fan the flame of human love and raise the
standard of civil virtue among mankind. But hos-
pitality 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 tlio
same wisli to do no dishonor to the worthiness he
has. But he loves it for its elegancy, not for its
austerity. It seems not worth his while to be sol-
emn and denounce with bitterness flesh-eating or
wine drinking, the use of tobacco, or opium, or tea,
or silk, or gold. A great man scarcely knows how
lie dines, how he dresses, but without railing or
precision his living is natural and poetic. John
Eliot, the Indian Apostle, drank water, and said of
wine, " It is a noble, generous liquor and we should
be humbly thankful for it, but, as I remember, water
was made before it." Better still is the temperance
of King David, who poured out on the ground
unto the Lord the water which three of his warriors
had brought him to drink, at the peril of their lives.

It is told of Ihutus, that when he fell on his
sword after the battle of Philippi, he quoted a line
of Euripides, "O Virtue! I have followed thee
15

226 HEHOISM.

through life, and I find thee at last but a Bhade."
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 per-
ception that virtue is enough. Poverty is its orna-
ment. Plenty does not need it, and can very well
abide its loss.

But that which takes my fancy most in the heroic
class, is the good-humor and hilarity they exhibit.
It is a height to which common duty can very well
attain, to suffer and to dare with solemnity. Put
these rare souls set opinion, success, and life at so
cheap a rate that they will not soothe their enemies
by petitions, or the show of sorrow, but wear their
own habitual greatness. Scipio, charged with pecu-
lation, refuses to do himself so great a disgrace as
to wait for justification, though he had the scroll of
his accounts in his hands, but tears it to pieces be-
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 Beau-
mont and Fletcher's " Sea Voyage," Juletta tells
the stout captain and his company, —

Jul. 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

HEROISM. 227

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 cum-
bered the earth long thousands of years. Simple
hearts put all the history and customs of this world
behind them, and play their own play in innocent
defiance of the Blue-Laws of the world ; and such
would appear, could we see the human race assem-
bled in vision, like little children frolicking to-
gether, though to the eyes of mankind at large
they wear a stately and solemn garb of works and
influences.

The interest these fine stories have for us, the
power of a romance over the boy who grasps the
forbidden book under his bench at school, our de-
light in the hero, is the main fact to our purpose.
All these great and transcendent properties are
ours. If we dilate in beholding the Greek energy,
the Roman pride, it is that we are already domesti-
cating the same sentiment. Let us find room for
this great guest in our small houses. The first step
of worthiness will be to disabuse us of our super-
stitious associations with places and times, with
number and size. Why should these words, Atlie-
nian, Roman, Asia and England, so tingle in the ear?
Let us feel that where the heart is, there the nmses,
there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of
fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River and Boston
Bay you think paltry places, and the ear loves names

228 nEROISM.

of foreign and classic topography. Bnt here wo are ;
— that is a great fact, and, if we will tarry a little,
We may come to learn that here is best. See to it
only that thyself is here, — and art and nature, hope
and dread, friends, angels and the Supreme Being
shall not be absent fi'oni the chamber where thou
sittest. Epaminondas, brave and affectionate, does
not seem to us to need Olympus to die upon, nor
the Syrian sunshine, lie lies very well wheie ho
is. The Jerseys were handsome ground enough for
AVashington to tread, and London streets for the
feet of Milton. A great man illustrates his place,
makes his climate genial in the imagination of men,
and its air the beloved element of all delicate spirits.
That country is the fairest which is inhabited by
the noblest minds. The pictures which fill the
imagination in reading the actions of Pericles,
Xenophon, Columbus, Bayard, Sidney, Hampden,
teach us how needlessly mean our life is ; that we,
by the depth of our living, should deck it with
more than regal or national splendor, and act on
pi'inciples 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 perfor-
mance in actual life was not extraordinary. When
we see their air and mien, when we hear them
speak of society, of books, of religion, we admire
their superiority ; they seem to throw contempt on
the whole state of the world ; theirs is the tone of

HEROISM. 229

a yontlifnl giant who is sent to work revolntions.
But they enter an active profession and the forming
Colossus shrinks to the common size of man. The
magic they used was the ideal tendencies, which al-
ways make the Actual ridiculous ; but the tough
world has its revenge the moment they put their
horses of the sun to plough in its furrow. They
found no example and no companion, and their
heart fainted. What then ? The lesson they gave
in their first aspirations is yet true ; and a better
valor and a purer truth shall one day execute their
will and put the world to shame. Or why should a
w^oman liken herself to any historical woman, and
think, because Sappho, or Sevigne, or De Stael, or the
cloistered souls who have had genius and cultivation
do not satisfy the imagination and the serene Themis,
none can, — certainly not she. Why not ? She has a
new and unattempted problem to solve, perchance
that of the happiest nature that ever bloomed. Let
the maiden, with erect soul, walk serenely on her way,
accept the hint of each new experience, try in turn all
the gifts God offers her that she may learn the power
and the charm that like a new dawn radiating: of
the deep of space, her new-born being is. The fair
girl who repels interference by a decided and proud
choice of influences, so careless of pleasing, so wilful
and lofty, inspires every beholder with somewhat
of her own nobleness. The silent heart encourages
lier ; O friend, never strike sail to a fear. Como
into port greatly, or sail with God the seas. Not

230 HEROISM.

in vain you live, for every passing eye is cheered
and refined by the vision.

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

HEROISM, 231

ons of our dignity as Avell as of onr money. Great-
ness once and for ever has done witli opinion. We
tell our charities, not because we wish to be praised
for their., not because we think they have great
merit, but for our justification. It is a capital blun-
der ; as you discover when another man recites his
charities.

To speak the truth, even with some austerity, to
live w^ith some rigor of temperance, or some ex-
tremes of generosity, seems to be an asceticism
which common good nature would appoint to those
who are at ease and in plenty, in sign that they feel
a brotherhood with the great multitude of suffering
men. And not only need we breathe and exercise
the soul by assuming the penalties of abstinence, of
debt, of solitude, of unpopularity, but it behoves
the wise man to look with a bold 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
liistorically somewhat better in this country and at
this hour than perhaps ever before. More freedom
exists for culture. It will not now run against an
axe at the first step out of the beaten track of opin-
ion. But whoso is heroic will always find crises to
try his edge. Human virtue demands her cham-

232 HEROISM.

pions and martyrs, and the trial of persecution al-
waj^s proceeds. It is but the other day tliat tlie
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 to take counsel of his own bosom.
Let him quit too much association, let him go home
much, and stablish himself in those courses he ap-
proves. The unremitting retention of simple and
high sentiments in obscure duties is hardening the
character to that temper which will work with
honor, if need be in the tumult, or on the scaffold.
Whatever outrages have happened to men may be-
fall 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
penalties, whenever it may please the next news-
paper and a sufficient number of his. neighbors to
pronounce his opinions incendiary.

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

"Let them rave :
Thou art quiet in thy grave."

HEROISM, 233

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 thcni who have seen safely to au
end their manful endeavor ? AVho that sees the
meanness of our politics but inly congratulates
Washington that he is long already wrapped in liis
shroud, and for ever safe ; that he was laid sweet in
liis grave, the hope of humanity not yet subjugated
in him ? Who does not sometimes envy the good
and brave who are no more to suffer from the tu-
mults of the natural world, and await with curious
complacency the speedy term of his own conversa-
tion with finite nature ? And yet the Jove that will
be annihilated sooner than treacherous has already
made death impossible, and affirms itself no mortal
but a native of the deeps of absolute and inextin-
guishable 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 die :
They live, they live in blest eternity."

Henry More,

ESSAY IX

THE OVER-SOUL.

TiTERE 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 ai-gu-
ment which is always forthcoming to silence tliose
who conceive extraordinary hopes of man, namely
the appeal to experience, is forever invalid and
vain. A mightier liope abolishes despair. We give
up the past to the objector, and yet we hope. He
must explain this hope. We grant that human life
is mean, but how did we find out that it was mean ?
What is the ground of this uneasiness of ours ;
of this old discontent ? What is the universal sense
of want and ignorance, bi)t the fine inuendo by
which the great soul makes its enormous claim ?
Why do men feel that the natural history of man
has never been written, but always he is leaving be-
hind what you have said of him, and it becomes
old, and books of metaphysics worthless? Tho

238 THE OVER- SOUL.

philosophy of six thousand years has not searched
the chambers and magazines of the soiih In its
experiments tliere lias always remained, in the last
analysis, a residuum it could not resolve. Man is a
stream whose source is hidden. Always our being
is descending into us from we know not whence.
The most exact calculator has no prescience that
somewhat incalculable may not baulk the very next
moment. I am constrained every moment to ac-
knowledge a higher origin for events than the will
1 call mine.

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

The Supreme Critic on all the errors of the past
and the present, and the only prophet of that which
must be, is that great nature in which we rest as
the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere ;
that Unity, that Over soul, within which every
man's 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 reality
which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains
every one to pass for what he is, and to speak from
Lis character and not from his tongue, and which

THE OVER-SOUL, 239

evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand
and become wisdom and virtue and power and
beauty. We live in succession, in division, in parts,
in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of
the whole ; the wise silence ; the universal beauty,
to which every part and particle is equally related ;
the eternal One. And this deep power in which
we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us,
is not only self-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 that we can know
what it saith. Every man's words who speaks from
that life must sound vain to those who do not dwell
in the same thought on their own part. I dare not
speak for it. My words do not carry its august
sense ; they fall short and cold. Only itself can in-
spire whom it will, and behold ! their speech shall
be lyrical, and sweet, and universal as the rising of
the wind. Yet I desire, even by profane words, if
sacred I may not use, to indicate the heaven of this
deity and to report what hints I have collected of
the transcendent simplicity and energy of the High-
est Law.

240 THE OVER- SOUL.

If wc 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 forc-
ing it on our distinct notice, — we shall catch many
liints that will broaden and lighten into knowledge
of the secret of nature. All goes to show that the
Boul in man is not an organ, but animates and exer-
cises all the organs ; is not a function, like the
power of memory, of calculation, of comparison, —
but uses these as hands and feet ; is not a faculty,
but a light ; is not the intellect or the will, but the
master of the intellect and the will ; — is the vast
background of our being, in which they lie, — an
immensity not possessed and that cannot be pos-
sessed. From within or from behind, a light shines
through us upon things and makes us aware that
we are nothing, but the light is all. A man is the
fa9ade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good
abide. What we commonly call man, the eating,
drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we
know him, represent himself, but misrepresents
himself. Ilim we do not respect, but the soul,
whose organ he is, would he let it appear through
his action, would make our knees bead. 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

THE OVER- SOUL. 241

something of itself. The weakness of the will be-
gins when the individual would be something of
himself. All reform aims in some one particular
to let the great soul have its way through us ; in
other words, to engage us to obey.

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

The sovereignty of this nature whereof we speak
is made known by its independency of those limita-
tions which circumscribe us on every hand. The
soul circumscribeth all things. As I have said, it
contradicts all experience. In like n)anner it abol-
ishes time and space. The influence of the senses
has in most men overpowered the mind to that de-
gree that the walls of time and space have come to
look solid, real and insurmountable ; and to speak
16

242 TUE OVER-SOUL

with levity of these limits is, in the world, the sign
of insanity. Yet time and space are but inverse
measures of the force of the soul. A man is capa-
ble of abolishing them both. The spirit sports with
time —

** Can crowd eternity into an hour,
Or stretch au 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 al-
ways find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought
is the love of the universal and eternal beauty.
Every man parts from that contemplation with the
feeling that it rather belongs to ages than to mortal
life. The least activity of the intellectual powers
redeems us in a degree from the influences of time.
In sickness, in languor, give us a strain of poetry or
a profound sentence, and we are refreshed ; or pro-
duce a volume of Plato or Shakspeare, or remind
us of their names, and instantly we come into a
feeling of longevity. See how the deep divine
thought demolishes centuries and millenniums, and
makes itself present through all ages. Is the teach-
ing of Ciirist less effective now than it was when
first his mouth was opened ? The emphasis of facts
and persons to my soul has nothing to do with time.
And so always the soul's scale is one ; the scale of
the senses and the understanding is another. Before
the great revelations of the soul, Time, Space and

THE OVER-SOUL. ^43

Kature shrink away. In common speech we refer
all things to time, as we habitually refer the im-
mensely sundered stars to one concave sphere. And
so we say tliat the Judgment is distant or near, that
tlie Millennium approaches, tho.t a day of certain
political, moral, social reforms is at hand, and the
like, when we mean that in the nature <jf tlungs one
of the facts we contemplate is external and fugitive,
and the other is permanent and connate with the
80ul. The things we now esteem fixed shall, one
by one, detach themselves like ripe fruit from our
experience, and fall. The wind shall blow them
none knows whither. The landscape, the figures,
Boston, London, are facts as fugitive as any institu-
tion past, or any whiff of mist or smoke, and so is
society, and so is the world. The soul looketh
steadily fowai-ds, creating a world alway before her,
leaving worlds alway behind her. She has no dates,
nor rites, nor persons, nor specialties, nor men. The
soul knows only the soul ; all else is idle weeds for
her wearing.

After its own law and not by arithmetic is the
rate of its progress to be computed. The sours
advances are not made by gradation, such as can
be represented by motion in a straight line, but
rather by ascension of state, such as can be repre-
sented by metamorphosis, — from the egg to the
wonn, from the worm to tlie fly. The growths of
genius are of a certain total character, that does not
advance the elect individual first over John, then

244 THE 0VER-80UL.

Adam, then Kicliard, and give to each the pain of
discovered inferiority, but by every throe of growth
the man expands there where he works, passing, at
eacli pulsation, classes, populations, of men. With
each divine impulse the mind rends the thin rinds
of the visible and finite, and comes out into
eternity, and inspires and expires its air. It con-
verses with truths that have always been spoken in
the world, and becomes conscious of a closer sym-
pathy with Zeno and Arrian than with persons in
the house.

This is the law of moral and of mental gain.
The simple rise as by specific levity not into a par-
ticular virtue, but into the region of all the virtues.
They are in the spirit which contains them all. The
soul is superior to all the particulars of merit. The
soul requires purity, but purity is not it ; requires
justice, but justice is not that ; requires beneficence,
but is somewhat better : so that there is a kind of
descent and accommodation felt when we leave
speaking of moral nature to urge a virtue which it
enjoins. For, to the soul in her pure action all tho
virtues are natural, and not painfully acquired.
Speak to his heart, and the man becomes suddenly
virtuous.

Within the same sentiment is the germ of intel-
lectual growth, which obeys the same law. Those
who are capable of humility, of justice, of love, of
aspiration, are already on a platform that commands
tho sciences and arts, speech and poetry, action and

THE 0VER-80UL. 245

grace. For whoso dwells in this moral beatitude
does already anticipate those special powers which
men prize so highly ; just as lov^e does justice to all
the gifts of the object beloved. The lover has no
talent, no skill, which passes for quite nothing witK
his enamored maiden, however little she may pos-
sess of related faculty ; and the heart which aban-
dons itself to the Supreme Mind finds itself related
to all its works, and will travel a royal road to par-
ticular knowledges and powers. For in ascending
to this primary 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 antici-
pate 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 foi-ms, like my
own. I live in society ; with persons who answer
to thoughts in my own mind, or outwardly express
a certain obedience to the great instincts to which I
live. I see its presence to them. I am certified
of a common nature ; and so these other souls, these
separated selves, draw me as nothing else can.
They stir in me the new emotions we call passion ;
of love, hatred, fear, admiration, pity ; thence come
conversation, competition, persuasion, cities and war.
Persons are supplementary to the primary teaching
of the Boul. In youth we are mad for persons.
Childhood and youth see all the world in them.
But the larger experience of man discovers tho

24:G THE OVER-SOUL.

identical nature appearing through them all. Per-
sons themselves acquaint us with the impersonal.
In all conversation between two persons tacit ref-
erence is made, as to a third party, to a common
nature. That third party or common nature is not
social ; it is impersonal ; is God. And so in groups
where debate is earnest, and especially on great
questions of thought, the company become aware of
their unity ; aware that the thought rises to an equal
lieight in all bosoms, that all have a spiritual prop-
erty in what was said, as well as the sayer. They all
wax wiser than they were. It arches over them like
a temple, this unity of thought in which every heart
beats with nobler sense of power and duty, and thinks
and acts with unusual solemnity. All are conscious
of attaining to a higher self-possession. It shines
for all. There is a certain wisdom of humanity
which is common to the greatest men with the
lowest, and which our ordinary education often la-
bors to silence and obstruct. The mind is one,
and the best minds, who love truth for its own sake,
think much less of property in truth. Thankfully
they accept it everywhere, and do not label or stamp
it wdth any man's name, for it is theirs long before-
hand. It is theirs from eternit3\ The learned and
the studious of thought have no monopoly of wis-
dom. Their violence of direction in some degree
disqualifies them to think truly. We owe many
valuable observations to people who are not very
acute or profound, and who say the thing without

THE OVER-SOUL. 247

effort which we want and have long been hunting
in vain. Tlie action of the soul is oftener in
that which is felt and left unsaid than in that
which is said in any conversation. It broods over
every society, and they unconsciously seek for it in
each other. We know better than we do. We do
not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same
time that we are much more. I feel the same
truth how often in my trivial conversation with my
neighbors, 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 ex-
ternal poverty, to escape the rapacity of the Pacha,
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
period of life. It is adult already in the infant
man. In my dealing with my child, my Latin and
Greek, my accomplishments and my money stead
me nothing. They are all lost on him: but as much
8onl as I have, avails. If I am merely wilful, he
gives me a Rowland for an Oliver, sets his will
against mine, one for one, and leaves me, if 1 please,
the degradation of beating 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^

248 THE OVER-SOUL.

out of his young eyes looks the same soul ; he re-
veres and loves with uie.

The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth.
We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and
scoffer say what they choose. Foolish people ask
you, when you have spoken what they do not
wish to hear, * How do you know it is truth, and
not an error of your own ? ' "VVe know truth
when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we
are awake that we are awake. It was a grand sen-
tence 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 affirm whatever he pleases ; but to be able to dis-
cern that what is true is true, and that what is
false is false, this is the mark and character of
intelligence." In the book I read, the good thought
returns to me, as every truth will, the image of the
whole soul. To the bad thought which I find in it,
the same soul becomes a discerning, separating
sword, and lops it away. We are wiser than we
know. If we will not interfere with our thought,
but will act entirely, or see how the tiling 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 om-
niscience throuo:h us over thiners.

But beyond this recognition of its own in partic-
ular passages of the individual's experience, it also
reveals truth. And here we should seek to rein-

TUE OVER- SOUL. 249

force ourselves by its very presence, and to speak
witli a wortliier, loftier strain of that advent. For
the soul's communication of truth is the highest
event in nature, for it then does not give somewhat
from itself, but it gives itself, or passes into and be-
comes that man whom it enlightens ; or, in propor-
tion 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 terra
Revelation. These are always attended by the
emotion of the sublime. For this communication
is an influx of the Divine mind into our mind. It
is an ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing
surges of the sea of life. Every distinct apprehen-
sion of this central commandment agitates men wuth
awe and delight. A thrill passes through all men
at the reception of new truth, or at the performance
of a great action, which comes out of the heart of
nature. In these communications the power to see
is not separated from the will to do, but the insight
proceeds from obedience, and the obedience pro-
ceeds from a joyful perception. Every moment
when the individual feels himself invaded by it, is
memorable. Always, I believe, by the necessity of
our constitution a certain enthusiasm attends the
individual's consciousness of that divine presence.
The character and duration of this enthusiasm varies
with the state of the individual, from an exstasy
and trance and prophetic inspiration, — which is its
rarer appearance, to the faintest glow of virtuous

250 THE OVER-SOUL.

emotion, in which form it warms, like our honseliold
fires, all the families and associations of men, and
makes society possible. A certain tendency to insan-
ity has always attended the opening of the religions
sense in men, as if " blasted with excess of light."
The trances of Socrates ; the " union " of Plotimis ;
the vision of Porphyry ; the conversion of Paul ; the
aurora of Behmen ; the convulsions of George Fox
and his Quakers ; the illumination of Swedenborg,
are of this kind. What was in the case of these re-
markable persons a ravishment, has, in innumerable
instances in common life, been exhibited in less
striking manner. Everywhere the history of relig-
ion betrays a tendency to enthusiasm. The rapture
of the Moravian and Quietist ; the opening of the
internal sense of the Word, in the language of the
New Jerusalem Church ; the revival of the Calvin-
istic churches ; the experiences of the Methodists,
are varying forms of that shudder of awe and de-
light with which the individual soul always mingles
with the universal soul.

The nature of these revelations is always the
same; they are perceptions of the absolute law.
They are solutions of the soul's own questions.
They do not answer the questions which the under-,
standing asks. The soul 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*

THE OVER-SOUL. 251

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

252 777^ OVER SOUL.

man ever asks this question or condescends 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. ]^o answer in words can reply to a ques-
tion of things. It is not in an arbitrary " decree of
God," but in the nature of man, that a veil shuts
down on the facts of to-morrow : for the soul will
not have us read any other cipher but that of cause
and effect. By this veil which curtains events it in-
structs the cliildren of men to live in to-day. The
only mode of obtaining an answer to these questions
of the senses is to forego all low curiosity, and, ac-
cepting the tide of being which floats us into the
secret of nature, work and live, work and live, and
all unawares the advancing soul has built and forged
for itself a new condition, and the question and the
answer are one.

Thus is the soul the perceiver and revealer of
truth. By the same fire, serene, impersonal, per-
fect, which burns until it shall dissolve all things
into the waves and surges of an ocean of light, — we
see and know each othei*, and what spirit each is of.
"Who can tell the grounds of liis knowledge of the
character of tiie several individuals in his circle of
friends? No man. Yet their acts and words do
not disappoint him. In that man, though he knew

THE OVER-SOUL. 263

no ill of him, he put no trust. In that other,
though they liad seldom met, authentic signs had
yet passed, to signify that he might be tmsted as
one wlio 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 efPort
also.

We are all discerners of spirits. That diagnosis
lies aloft in our life or unconscious power, not in
the understanding. The whole intercourse of so-
ciety, its trade, its religion, its friendships, its quar-
rels,— is one w^de judicial investigation of charac-
ter. In full court, or in small committee, or con-
fronted face to face, accuser and accused, men offer
themselves to be judged. Against their will they
exhibit those decisive trifles by which character is
read. But who judges ? and what ? Not our un-
derstanding. We do not read them by learning or
craft. No; the wisdom of the wise man consists
lierein, that he docs 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 im-
perfections, your genius will speak from you, and
mine from me. That which we are, we shall teach,
not voluntarily but involuntarily. Thoughts come
into our minds through avenues which we never left
open, and thoughts go out of our minds through

254: THE OVER-SOUL,

avenues which we never vohintarily opened. Cliar^
acter teaches over our liead. The infallible index
of true progress is found in the tone the man takes.
Neither his age, nor his breeding, nor company,
nor books, nor actions, nor talents, nor all together
can liinder him from being deferential to a higher
spirit than his own. If he have not found his homo
in God, his manners, his forms of speech, the turn
of his sentences, the build, shall I say, of all his
opinions will involuntarily confess it, let him brave
it out how he will. If he have found his centre,
the Deity will shine through him, through all the
disguises of ignorance, of ungenial temperament,
of unfavorable circumstance. The tone of seeking
is one, and the tone of having is another.

The great distinction between teachers sacred or
literary ; between poets like Herbert, and poets
like Pope ; between philosophers like Spinoza, Kant
and Coleridge, — and philosphers like Locke, Paley,
Mackintosh and Stewart ; between men of the
world who are reckoned accomplished talkers, and
here and there a fervent mystic, prophesying half-
insane under the infinitude of his thought, is that
one class speak from within, or from experience, as
parties and possessors of the fact ; and the other
class froin without^ as spectatoi's 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

THE OVEnSOUL. 255

all others. In that is the miracle. That inclndeg
the miracle. My soul believes beforehand that it
ought so to be. All men stand continually in the
expectation of the appearance of such a teacher.
But if a man do not speak from within the veil,
where the word is one with that it tells of, let hiro
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 il-
luminated class of men are no doubt superior to
literary fame, and are not writers. Among the
multitude of scholars and authors we feel no hal-
lowing presence; we are sensible of a knack and
skill rather than of inspiration ; they have a light
and know not whence it comes and call it their
own : their talent is some exaggerated faculty, some
overgrown member, so that their sti'ength is a dis-
ease. In these instances the intellectual gifts do
not make the impression of virtue, but almost of
vice ; and we feel that a man's talents stand in the
way of his advancement in truth. But genius is re-
ligious. It is a larger imbibing of the common
heart. It is not anomalous, but more like and not
less like other men. There is in all great poets a
wisdom of humanity which is superior to any tal-
ents they exercise. The author, the wit, the par-
tisan, the tine gentleman, does not take place of the
man. Humanity shines in Homer, in Chaucer, in
Spenser, in Shakspeare, in Milton. They ara con

256 THE OVER-SOUL.

tent with truth. They use the positive degree.
They seem frigid and phlegmatic to those who have
been spiced with the frantic passion and violent
coloring of inferior but popular writers. For, they
are poets by the free course which they allow to the
informing soul, which through their eyes beholdeth
again and blesses the things which it hath made.
The soul is superior to its knowledge, wiser than
any of its works. The great poet makes ns feel our
own wealth, and then we think less of his com-
positions. His greatest communication to our mind
is to teach us to despise all he has done. Shakspeare
carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activ-
ity as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own ;
and we then feel that the splendid works which he
has created, and which in other hours we extol as a
sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold
of real nature than the shadow of a passing travel-
ler on the rock. The inspiration which uttered
itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good
from day to day for ever. Why then should I make
account of Hamlet and Lear, as if we had not the
soul from which they fell as syllables from the
tongue ?

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
conies as insight ; it comes as serenity and grand-
eur. When we see those whom it inhabits, we are

THE OVER-SOUL. 267

apprised of new degrees of greatness. From that
inspiration tlie man comes back with a changed
tone. He does not talk with men with an eye to
their opinion. He tries them. It requires of us to
be plain and true. The vain traveller attempts
to embellish his life by quoting my Lord and the
Prince and the Countess, who thus said or did to
him. The ambitious vulgar show you their spoons
and brooches and rings, and preserve their cards
and compliments. The more cultivated, in their
account of their own experience, cull out the pleas-
ing, poetic circumstance ; the visit to Rome, the
man of genius they saw ; the brilliant friend they
know ; still further on perhaps the gorgeous land-
scape, the mountain lights, the mountain thoughts
they enjoyed yesterday, — and so seek to throw a ro-
mantic color over their life. But the soul that as-
cendeth to worship the great God is plain and true ;
has no rose color ; no fine friends ; no chivalry ; no ad-
ventures ; does not want admiration ; dwells in the
hour that now is, in the earnest experience of the
common day, — by reason of the present monient
and the mere trifle having become porous to thought
and bibulous of the sea of light.

Converse wiih 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,
17

258 THE OVER'SOXTL,

when the whole earth and tlie whole atmosphere
are ours. The mere author in such society is like
a pickpocket among gentlemen, who has come in
to steal a gold button or a pin. Nothing can pass
there, or make you one of the circle, but the casting
aside your trappings and dealing man to man in
naked truth, plain confession and omniscient affir-
mation.

Souls such as these treat you as gods would, walk
as gods in the earth, accepting without any admira-
tion your wit, your bounty, your virtue even, say
rather your act of duty, for your virtue they own as
their proper blood, royal as themselves, and over-
royal, and the father of the gods. But what rebuke
their plain fraternal bearing casts on the nuitual
flattery with which authors sohice each other and
wound themselves ! These flatter not. I do not
wonder that these men go to see Cromwell and
Christina and Charles the II. and James I. and tlie
Grand Turk. For they are, in their own elevation,
the fellows of kings, and must feel the servile tone
of conversation in the world. They must always be
a godsend to princes, for they confront them, a king
to a king, without ducking or concession, and give a
higli nature the refreshment and satisfaction of re-
sistance, of plain humanity, of even companionship
and of new ideas. They leave them wiser and su-
perior men. Souls like these make us feel that sin-
cerity is more excellent than flattery. Deal so
plainly with man and woman as to constrain the ut-

THE OVER-SOUL. 259

most sincerity and destroy all hope of trifling with
you. It is the higliest compliment you can pay.
Their " highest praising," said Milton, " is not flat-
tery, and their plainest advice is a kind of praising."
Ineff^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 and universal self ia
new and unsearchable. Ever it inspires awe and aston-
ishment. IIow dear, how soothing to man, arises the
idea of God, peopling the lonely place, effacing the
scars of our mistakes and disappointments ! When
we have broken our god of tradition and ceased
from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the
heart with his presence. It is the doubling of the
heart itself, nay, the infinite enlargement of the heart
with a power of growth to a new infinity on every
side. It inspires in uiaii an infallible trust, lie
has not the conviction, but the sight, that the best
is the true, and may in that thought easily dismiss
all particular uncertainties and fears, and adjourn
to the sure revelation of time the solution of his
private riddles. He is sure that his welfare is dear
to the heart of being. In the presence of law to
liis mind he is overflowed with a reliance so univer-
sal that it sweeps away all cherished hopes and the
most st.'ii)le projects of mortal condition in it-s flood.
lie 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

260 THE OVEIi-SOUL.

run, bnt your mind need not. If you do not find
liim, 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 xery well
bring you together, if it were for the best. You
are preparing with eagerness to go and render a
service to which your talent and your taste invite
you, the love of men and the hope of fame. Has
it not occurred to you that you have no right to go,
unless you are equally willing to be prevented from
going ? O, believe, as thou livest, that every sound
that is spoken over the round world, which thou
oughtest to hear, will vibrate on thine ear. Every
proverb, every book, every by-word that belongs to
thee for aid or comfort, shall surely come home
through open or winding passages. Every friend
whom not thy fantastic will but the great and ten-
der heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his em-
brace. And this because the heart in thee is the
heart of all ; not a valve, not a wall, not an inter-
section is there anywhere in nature, but one blood
rolls uninterruptedly an endless circulation througli
all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea,
and, truly seen, its tide is one.

Let man then loarn the revelation of all nature
and all thought to his heart ; this, namely ; that the
Highest dwells with him ; that the sources of na-
ture are in his own mind, if the sentiment of duty
is there. But if he would know what the great
God spcaketli, he must ' go into hi.s closet and shut

THE 0 VERSO UL, 261

the door,' as Jesus said. God will not make him-
self manifest to cowards, lie must greatly listen
to himself, withdrawing himself from all the accents
of other men's devotion. Their prayers even are
hurtful to him, until he have made his own. Our
religion vulgarly stands on numbers of believers.
Whenever the appeal is made, — no matter how in-
directly,— to numbers, proclamation is then and
there made that religion is not. lie that finds God
a sweet enveloping thought to him never counts his
company. When 1 sit in that presence, who shall
dare to come in ? When I rest in perfect humility,
when 1 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 au-
thority is not faith. The reliance on authority
measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of
the soul. The position men have given to Jesus,
now for many centuries of history, is a position of
authority. It characterizes themselves. It cannot
alter the eternal facts. Great is the soul, and plain.
It is no flatterer, it is no follower ; it never appeals
from itself. It always believes in itself. Before
the immense possibilities of man all mere experience,
all past biography, however spotless and sainted,
shrinks away. Before that holy heaven which
our presentiments foreshow us, we cannot easily
praise any form of life we have seen or read of.
We not only atliriu that wo have few groat men.

262 THE OVER- SOUL.

but, absolutely speaking, that we have none ; that
we have no history, no record of any character or
mode of living that entirely contents us. The
saints and demigods whom history worships we are
constrained to accept with a grain of allowance.
Though in our lonely hours we draw a new strength
out of their memory, yet, pressed on our attention,
as they are by the thoughtless and customary, they
fatigue and invade. The soul gives itself, alone,
original and pure, to the Lonely, Original and Pure,
who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads and
speaks through it. Then is it glad, young and
nimble. It is not wise, but it sees through all
things. It is not called religious, but it is innocent.
It calls the light its own, and feels that the grass
grows and the stone falls by a law inferior to, and
dependent on, its nature. Behold, it saith, I am
born into the great, the universal mind. I, the im-
perfect, adore my own Perfect. I am somehow
receptive of the great soul, and thereby I do over-
look the sun and the stars and feel them to be but
the fair accidents and efFects which change and pass.
More and more the surges of everlasting nature en-
ter into me, and I become public and human in my
reorards and actions. So come I to live in thouojhts
and act with energies which are immortal. Tiius
revering tlio soul, and learning, as the ancient said,
tluU " its beautj^ is immense," man will come to see
that the world is the perennial miracle which the
soul worketh, and bo less astonished at particular

THE OVER SOUL. 263

wonders ; he will learn that there is no profane his-
tory ; that all history is sacred ; that the universe is
represented in an atom, in a moment of time. He
will weave no longer a spotted life of shreds and
patches, but he will live with a divine unity. He
will cease from what is base and frivolous in his
own life and be content with all places and any
service he can render. He will calmly front the
morrow in the negligency of that trust which car-
ries God with it and so hath already the whole fu-
ture iu the bottom of the heart.

CIKCLES.

ESSAY X.

CIRCLES.

The eye is the first circle ; the horizon which it
forms is tlie second ; and tlironghont nature this
primary picture is repeated without end. It is the
highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St.
Augustine described the nature of God as a circle
whose centre was everywhere and its circumference
nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the co-
pious 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 ac-
tion admits of being outdone. Our life is an ap-
prenticeship to the truth that around every circle
another can be drawn ; that there is no end in na-
ture, but every end is a beginning ; that there is
always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under
every deep a lower deep opens.

This fact, as far as it symbolizes the moral fact
of the Unattainable, the flying Perfect, around
which the hands of man can never meet, at once the
inspirer and the condemner of every success, may

2G8 CIRCLES.

conveniently 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
degrees. Our globe seen by God is a transparent
law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the
fact and holds it fluid. Our culture is the predom-
inance of an idea which draws after it all this train
of cities and institutions. Let us rise into another
idea ; they will disappear. The Greek sculpture is
all melted away, as if it had been statues of ice:
here and there a solitary figure or fragment re-
maining, 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 passing under the same sentence and tum-
bling 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. Kew 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.

You admire this tower of granite, weathering the
hurts of so many ages. Yet a little waving hand
bnilt this huge wall, and that which builds is better
than that which is built. The hand that built caa

CIRCLES. 269

topple it down miicli faster. Better than the hand
and nimbler was the invisible thought which
wrought through it; and thus ever, behind the
coarse effect, is a fine cause, which, being narrowly
seen, is itself the effect of a finer cause. Every
thing looks permanent until its secret is known. A
rich estate appears to women and children a firm
and lasting fact ; to a merchant, one easily created
out of any materials, and easily lost. An orchard,
good tillage, good grounds, seem a fixture, like a
gold mine, or a rivei-, to a citizen ; but to a large
farmer, not much more fixed than the state of the
crop. Nature looks provokingly stable and secular,
but it has a cause like all the rest ; and when onco
I comprehend that, will these fields stretch so im-
movably wide, these leaves hang so individually
considerable? Permanence is a word of degrees.
Every thing is medial. Moons are no more bounds
to spiritual power than bat-balls.

The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy
and defying though he look, he has a helm w^hich
he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facta
are classified. lie can only be reformed by show-
ing him a new idea which commands his own. The
life of man is a self -evolving circle, which, from
a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides out-
wards to new and larger circles, and that withou ;
end. The extent to which this generation of cir
cles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the
force or tnith of the individual soul. For it is the

270 CIRCLES.

inert effort of eacli tlionglit, 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 al-
ready tends outward with a vast force and to im-
mense and innumerable 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, — liow
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 a first speaker. His only redress is forth-
with to draw a circle outside of his antacronist.
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 example of a bolder generaliza-
tion. In the thought of to-morrow there is a power

CIRCLES. 271

to upheave all tlij creed, all thy creed, all the creeds,
all the literatures of the nations, and marshal thee
to a heaven which no epic dream has vet depicted.
Every man is not so much a workman in the world
as he is a suojcrestion of that he should be. Men
walk as prophecies of the next age.

Step by step we scale this mysterious ladder ; the
steps are actions, the new prospect is power.
Every several result is threatened and judged by
that which follows. Every one seems to be contra-
dicted 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
scepticism. But the eye soon gets wonted to it,
for the eye and it are effects of one cause ; then its
innocency and benefit appear, and presently, all its
energy spent, it pales and dwindles before the rev-
elation of the new hour.

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

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

272 CIRCLES.

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 &anie
thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow
^\liat I write, whilst 1 write it, seems the most nat-
ural thing in the world ; but yesterday I saw a
dreary vacuity in this direction in which now 1 see
so much ; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall
wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous
pages. Alas for this infirm faith, tliis 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-
eelf, to work a pitch above his last height, betrays
itself in a man's relations. We thirst for approba-
tion, yet cannot forgive the approver. The sweet
of nature is love ; yet if I have a friend I am tor-
mented by my imperfections. The love of me ac-
cuses the other party. If he were high enough to
slight me, then could I love him, and rise by my
affection to new heights. A man's growth is seen
in the successive choirs of his friends. For every
friend whom he loses for truth, he gains a better.
I thought as I walked in the woods and nmsed 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. Eich, noble and great they are
by the liberality of our speech, but truth is sad. O
blessed Spirit, whom I forsake for these, they aix)

CIRCLES. 273

not thee ! Every personal consideration that we
allow costs us heavenly state. We sell the thronea
of angels for a short and turbulent pleasure.

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

Each new step we take in thought reconciles
twenty seemingly discordant facts, as expressions
of one law. Aristotle and Plato are reckoned the
respective 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 reputation, not the so-called eternal names
of fame, that may not be revised and condemned.
18

274 CIRCLES.

The very hopes of man, the thoiiglits of his heart,
the religion of nations, the manners and morals of
mankind are all at the mercy of a new general iza-
Lion. Generalization is always a new influx of the
divinity 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 ho
out-generalled, but put him where you will, he
stands. This can only he by liis preferring truth
to liis past apprehension of truth, and his alert ac-
ceptance of it fi'om whatever quarter ; the intrepid
conviction that his laws, his relations to society, his
Christianity, his world, may at any time be super-
seded and decease.

There are degrees in idealism. We learn first
to play with it academically, as the magnet was
once a toy. Then we see in the heyday of youth
and poetry that it may be true, that it is true in
gleams and fragments. Then, its countenance waxes
stern and grand, and we see that it must be true.
It now shows itself ethical and practical. "VVe learn
that God IS ; that he is in me ; and that all things
are shadows of him. The idealism of Berkeley is
only a crude statement of the idealism of Jesus, and
that again is a crude statement of the fact that all
nature is the rapid efflux of goodness executing and
organizing itself. Much more obviously is history
and the state of tlie world at any one time directly
dependent on the intellectual classification then ex-

CIRCLES, 275

isting 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 everj*^ side. The parties are not
to be judged by the spirit they partake and even
express under this Pentecost. To-morrow they will
have receded from this high-water mark. To-mor-
row you shall find them stooping under the old
pack-saddles. Yet let us enjoy the cloven flame
whilst it glows on our walls. When each new
speaker strikes a new light, emancipates ns 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, wo
seem to recover our rights, to become men. O,
what truths profound and executable only in ages
and orbs, are supposed in the announcement of
every truth! In common hours, society sits cold
and statuesque. We all stand waiting, empty, —
knowing, possibly, that we can be full, surrounded
by mighty symbols which are not symbols to us,
but prose and trivial toys. Then cometh the god
and converts the statues into fiery men, and by a
flash of his eye burns up the veil which shrouded

276 CIRCLES.

all things, and the meaning of the very furnitnrc^
of Clip and saucer, of chair and clock and tester, is
manifest. The facts which loomed so large in the
fogs of yesterday, — property, climate, breeding, per-
sonal beauty and the like, have strangely changed
their proportions. All that we reckoned settled
shakes and rattles ; and literatures, cities, climates,
religions, leave their foundations and dance before
our eyes. And yet here again see the swift circum-
scription! Good as is discourse, silence is better,
and shames it. The length of the discourse indi-
cates the distance of thought betwixt the speaker and
the hearer. If they were at a perfect understanding
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 literature is to afford us a platform
whence we may command a view of our present
life, a purchase by which we may move it. We fill
ourselves with ancient learning, install ourselves
the best w^e can in Greek, in Punic, in Homan
houses, only that Ave may wiselier see French, Eng-
lish 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 religion. Tlie 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.

CIRCLES, 277

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

We have the same need to command a view of
the religion of the world. We can never see
Christianity from the catechism : — from the pas-
tures, 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 biog-
raphy. 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 liim, that God may
be all in all." Let the claims and virtues of per-

278 CIRCLES.

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

The natural world may be conceived of as a 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 qual-
ities, 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 ex-
plored the gravity of atoms and the elective affini-
ties, who has not yet discerned the deeper law
whereof this is only a partial or approximate state-
ment, 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. Kot through subtle
subterranean channels need friend and fact bo
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

CIRCLES. 279

the light of a better. The great man will not be
prudent in the popular sense ; all his prudence will
be so much deduction from his grandeur. But it
behoves each to see, when he sacrifices prudence,
to what god he devotes it ; if to ease and pleasure,
he had better be prudent still ; if to a great trust,
he can well spare his mule and panniers who has a
winged chariot instead. 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
tliat the highest prudence 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 centre. Besides, your
bravest sentiment is familiar to the humblest men.
The poor and the low have their way of express-
ing the last facts of philosophy as well as you.
'' Blessed be nothing " and " The worse things are,
the better they are " are proverbs which express the
transcendentalism of common life.

One man's justice is another's injustice; one
man's beauty another's ugliness ; one man's wisdom
another's folly ; as one beholds the same objects
from a higher point of view. One man thinks jus-

280 CinCLES.

tice consists in paying debts, and has no measure in
Iiis abhorrence of another who is very remiss in thia
duty and makes the creditor wait tediously. But
tliat second man lias his own way of looking at
things ; asks himself which debt must I pay first,
the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor ? the
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, com-
merce is of trivial import ; love, faith, truth of
character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred ;
nor can I detach one dutj^, like you, from all other
duties, and concentrate my forces mechanically on
the payment of moneys. Let me live onward ; you
shall find that, though slower, the progress of my
character will liquidate all these debts without in-
justice to higher claims. If a man should dedicate
himself to the payment of notes, would not this be
injustice f Owes he no debt but money? And
are all claims on him to be postponed to a land-
lord's or a banker's ?

There is no virtue which is final ; all are initial.
The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The
terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast
away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed
Buch, 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"

CIRCLES, 281

It is the highest power of divine moments that
they abolish our contritions also. I accuse myself
of sloth and unprofitableness day by day ; but when
these waves of God flow into me I no longer reckon
lost time. I no longer poorly compute my possible
achievement by what remains to me of the month
or the year; for these moments confer a sort of
omnipresence and omnipotence which asks nothing
of duration, but sees that the energy of the mind
is commensurate with the work to be done, without
time.

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

I am not careful to justify myself. I own I am
gladdened by seeing the predominance of the sac-
charine principle throughout vegetable nature, and
not less by beholding in morals that unrestrained
inundation of the principle of good into every chink
and hole that selfishness has left open, yea into self-
ishness and sin itself ; so that no evil is pure, nor
hell itself without its extreme satisfactions. But
lest I should mislead any when I have my own head
and obey my whims, let me remind the reader that
I am only an experimenter. Do not set tlie least
value on what I do, or the least discredit on what

282 CIRCLES,

I do not, as if I pretended to settle anj tiling as
true or false. I unsettle all tilings. Ko facts are
to me sacred ; none are profane ; I simply experi-
ment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.

Yet this incessant movement and progression
which all things partake could never become sensi-
ble to ns but by contrast to some principle of fix*
ture or stability in the soul. Whilst the eternal
generation of circles proceeds, the eternal generator
abides. That central life is somewhat superior to
creation, superior to knowledge and thought, and
contains all its circles. Forever it labors to create
a life and thought as large and excellent as itself ;
but in vain ; for that which is made instructs how to
make a better.

Thus there is no sleep, no pause, no preservation,
but all things renew, germinate and spring. Why
should we import rags and relics into the new hour?
Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only
disease : all others ruu into this one. We call it by
many names, — fever, intemperance, insanity, stupid-
ity and crime : they are all forms of old age : they
are rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia ; not
newness, not the way onward. We grizzle every
day. I see no need of it. Whilst we converse
with what is above us, we do not grow old, but grow
young. Infancy, youth, receptive, aspiring, with
religious eye looking upward, counts itself nothing
and abandons itself to the instruction flowing from
all sides. But the man and woman of seventy

CIRCLES, 283

assume to know all ; throw np tlieir hope ; re-
nounce aspiration ; accept the actual for the neces-
sary and talk down to the young. Let them then
become organs of the Holy Ghost ; let them be
lovers ; let them behold truth ; and their eyes are
uplifted, their wi-inkles smoothed, they are per-
fumed again with hope and power. This old age
ought not to creep on a human mind. In nature
every moment is new ; th© past is always swallowed
and forgotten ; the coming o\\\y 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 tomorrow in the light of new
thoughts. People wish to be settled : only as far
as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.

Life is a series of surprises. We do not guess to-
day the mood, the pleasure, the power of to-morrow,
when we are building up our being. Of lower
states, — of acts of routine and sense, wo can tell
somewhat, but the masterpieces of God, the total
growths and universal movements of the soul, ho
hideth ; they are incalculable. I can know that
truth is divine and helpful ; but how it shall help
Kie I can have no guess, for so to he is the sole in-
let of 80 to know. The new position of the advanc-
ing man has all the powers of the old, yet has them
all new. It carries in its bosom all the enei-gies of
the past, yet is itself an exhalation of the morning.
I cast away in thia new moment all my onco

284 CIRCLES.

hoarded knowledge, 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 diiference between talents and character is
adroitness to keep the old and trodden round, and
power and courage to make a new road to new and
better goals. Character makes an overpowering
present, a cheerful, determined hour, which forti-
fies 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 tlie 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.
He is so much that events pass over him without
much impression. People say sometimes, ' See what
I have overcome ; see how cheerful I am ; see how
completely I have triumphed over these black events.'
Not if they still remind me of the black event, — ■
they have not yet conquered. Is it conquest to be a
gay and decorated sepulchre, or a half crazed widow,
hysterically laughing ? True conquest is the causing
the black event to fade and disappear as an early
cloud of insignificant result in a history so large and
advancing.

The one thins: which we seek with insatiable de-
sire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our
propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory and to

CIRCLES. 285

do something without knowing how or why ; in
short to draw a new circle. Kotliing great was
ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of
life is wonderful. It is by abandonment. The great
moments of history are the facilities of performance
through the strength of ideas, as the works of gen-
ius and religion. " A man," said Oliver Cromwell,
" never rises so high as when he knows not whither
he is going." Dreams and drunkenness, the use of
opium and alcohol are the semblance and counter-
feit of this oracular genius, and hence their danger-
ous attraction for men. For the like reason they
ask the aid of wild passions, as in gaming and war,
to ape in some manner these flames and generosi-
ties of the heart.

INTELLECT.

ESSAY XI.

INTELLECT.

Every substance is negatively electric 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 un-
named relations of nature in its resistless men-
struum. Intellect lies behind genius, which is intel-
lect constructive. Intellect is the simple power an-
terior 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 es-
sence ? The first questions are always to be asked,
and the wisest doctor is gravelled by the inquisi-
tiveness of a child. How can we speak of the ac-
tion of the mind under any divisions, as of its
knowledge, of its ethics, of its works, and so forth,
since it melts will into perception, knowledge into
act? Each becomes the other. Itself alone is.
10

290 INTELLECT.

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 consider-
ations of time and place, or yon and me, of profit
and hurt tyrannize over most men's minds. Intel-
lect separates the fact considered, from you, from
all local and personal reference, and discerns it as
if it existed for its own sake. Heraclitus looked
upon the affections as dense and colored mists. In
the fog of good and evil affections it is hard fur
man to walk forward in a straight line. Intellect
is void of affection and sees an object as it stands
in the light of science, cool and disengaged. The
intellect goes out of the individual, floats over its
own personality, and regards it as a fact, and not
/and mine. He who is immersed in what con-
cerns person or place cannot see the problem of
existence. This the intellect always ponders. Ma-
ture shows all things formed and bound. The in-
tellect pierces the form, overleaps the wall, detects
intrinsic likeness between remote things and re-
duces all things into a few principles.
1/ The making^a fact the subject of thqii^it raises
it. All fhat mass of mental and moral phenomena
which we do not make objects of voluntary thought,
come within tlie power of fortune; they constitute
the circumstance of daily life ; they are subject to
change, to fear and hope. Every man beholds his
human condition with a degree of melancholy. As

INTELLECT. 291

a ship aground is battered by the waves, so man,
imprisoned in mortal life, lies open to the mercy of
corning events. But a truth, separated by^die Jii^
tellect, is no longer a subject of destiny. We be-
holdlt as a god upraised above care and fear. And
60 any fact in our life, or any record of our fancies
or reflections, disentangled from the web of our un-
consciousness, 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 beings.

The grovi^th of the intellect is spontaneous in
every step. The mind that grows could not predict
the times, the means, the mode of that spontaneity.
God enters by a private door into every individual.
Long prior to the age of reflection is the thinking of
the mind. Out of darkness it came insensibly into
the marvellous light of to-day. In the period of
infancy it accepted and disposed of all impressions
from the surrounding creation after its own way.
Whatever any mind doth or saith is after a law.
It has no random act or word. And this native law_
remains over it after it has come to reflection or
conscious thought. Over it always reigned a firm
law. In the most wofn^ pedantic, introverted self-
tormentor's life, the greatest part is incalculable by
him, unforeseen, unimaginable, and must be, until

292 INTELLECT.

hecan take himself up bj his own ears. What am
I ? What has my will done to make me that I am ?
Nothing. I have been floated into this thought,
this hour, this connection of events, by might and
mind sublime, and my ingenuity and wilfulness
liave 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
matter before sleep on the previous night. Always
i our thinking is a pious reception. Our truth of
thought is therefore vitiated as much by too violent
direction given by our will, as by too great negli-
gence. We do not determine what w^e will think.
We only open our senses, clear away as we can all
obstruction from the fact, and suffer the intellect
to see. We have little control over our thoughts.
We are the prisoners of ideas. They catch us up
for moments into their heaven and so fully engage
lis that we take no thought for the morrow, gaze
like children, without an effort to make them our
own. By-and-by we fall out of that rapture, be-
think us where we have been, what we have seen,
and repeat as truly as we can what we have beheld.
As far as we can recall these exstasies we carry away
in the effaceable memory the result, and all men and
all the ages confirm it. It is called Truth. But the

INTELLECT. 293

moment we cease to report and attempt to correct
and contrive, it is not truth.

If we consider what persons have stimulated and
profited ns, we shall perceive the superiority of the
spontaneous or intuitive principle over the arith-
metical or logical. The first always contains the
second, but virtual and latent. We want in every
man a long logic ; we cannot pardon the absence of
it, but it must not be spoken. Logic is the proces-
sion or proportionate unfolding of the intuition ;
but its virtue 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 il-
lustrate 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 in-
stinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
It is vain to hurry it. By trusting it to the end, it
shall ripen into truth and you shall know why you
believe.

Each mind has its own method. A true man
never acquires after college rules. What you have
aggregated in a natural manner surprizes and de-
lights when it is produced. For we cannot oversee
each other's secret. And hence the differences be-
tween men in natural endowment are insignificant ia

294 INTELLECT.

comparison with their common wealth. Do yon
tliink 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 in-
scriptions. Eveiy 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
})urpose 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
intlie eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench
and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to
know what he meant who said, No man can see God
face to face and live. For example, a man explores
the basis of civil government. Let him intend his
mind without respite, without rest, in one direction.
His best heed long time avails him nothing. Yet

INTELLECT. 295

tlionglits are flitting before hiin. We all but appre-
hend, M^e 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 com-
posed attitude of the library to seize the thought.
But we come in, and are as far from it as at first.
Then, in a moment, and unannounced, the truth
appears. A certain wandering light appears, and
is the distinction, the principle, we wanted. But
the oracle comes because we had previously laid
siege to the shrine. It seems as if the law of the
intellect resembled that law of nature by which we
now inspire, now expire the breath ; by which the
heart now draws in, then hurls out the blood, — the
law of undulation. So now you must labor with
your brains, and now you must forbear your activity
and see what the great Soul showeth.

Our intellections are mainly prospective. The
immortality of man is as legitimately preached from
the intellections as from the moral volitions. Every
intellection is mainly prospective. Its present value
is its least. Inspect what delights you in Plutarch,
in Shakspeare, in Cervantes. Each truth that a
writer acquires is a lantern which lie instantly turns
full on what facts and thoughts lay already in his
mind, and behold, all the mats and rubbish which
had littered his garret become precious. Every
trivial fact in his private biography becomes an il-
lustration of this new principle, revisits the day, and

296 INTELLECT,

delights all men by its piquancy and new chann.
Men say, where did he get this? and think there
was something divine in his life. But no ; they
have myriads of facts just as good, would they only
get a lamp to ransack their attics withal.

We are all wise. The difference between persons
is not in wisdom but in art. I knew, in an academ-
ical club, a person who always deferred to me, who,
seeing my whim for writing, fancied that my ex-
periences had somewhat superior ; whilst I saw that
his experiences were as good as mine. Give them
to me and I would make the same use of them. Ho
held the old ; he holds the new ; I had the habit of
tacking together the old and the new which he did
not use to exercise. This may hold in the great
examples. Perhaps, if we should meet Shakspeare
we should not be conscious of any steep inferiority ;
no, but of a great equality, — only that lie possessed
a strange skill of using, of classifying his facts,
which we lacked. For notwithstanding our utter
incapacity to produce anything like Ilamlet and
Othello, see the perfect reception this wit and im-
mense 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 them with your hand, you
shall still see apples hanging in the bright light
with boughs and leaves thereto, or the tassel led
grass, or the corn-flags, and this for five or six

INTELLECT. 297

hours afterwards. There lie the impressions on
the retentive organ, though you knew it not. So
lies the wliole series of natural images with which
your life has made you acquainted, in your mem-
ory, though you know it not, and a thrill of passion
flashes light on tlieir dark chamber, and the active
power seizes instantly the fit image, as the word of
its momentary thought.

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

In the intellect constriictiv-e, which we popularly
designate by the word Genius, we observe the same
balance of two elements as in intellect receptive.
The constructive intellect produces thoughts, sen-
tences, poems, plans, designs, systems. It is the
generation of the mind, the marriage of thought
with nature. To genius must always go two gifts,
the thought and the publication. The first is rev-
elation, always a miracle, which no frequency of
occurrence or incessant study can ever familiarize,
but which must always leave the inquirer stupid
with wonder. It is the advent of truth into the

208 INTELLECT.

world, a form of thought now for the first time
bursting into the universe, a child of the old eter-
nal sonl, 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 fash-
ion every institution. But to make it available it
needs a vehicle or art by which it is conveyed to
men. To be communicable it must become picture
or sensible object. We must learn the language of
facts. The most wonderful inspirations die with
their subject if he has no hand to paint them to the
senses. The ray of light passes invisible through
space and only when it falls on an object is it seen.
When the spiritual energy is directed on something
outward, then is it a thought. The relation be»
tween it and you first makes yon, the value of you,
apparent to me. The rich inventive genius of the
painter must be smothered and lost for want of the
power of drawing, and in our happy hours we
should be inexhaustible poets if once we could
break through the silence into adequate rhyme.
As all men have some access to primary truth, so
all have some art or power of communication in
their head, but only in the artist does it descend
into the hand. There is an inequality, whose laws
we do not yet know, between two men and between
two moments of the same man, in respect to this
faculty. In common hours we have the same facts
as in the uncommon or inspired, but they do not

INTELLECT. 299

Bit for their portraits ; they are not detached, but
lie in a web. The thought of genius is spontane-
ous ; but the power of picture or expression, in the
most enriched and flowing nature, implies a mixture
of will, a certain control over the spontaneous states,
without which no production is possible. It is a
conversion of all nature into the rhetoric of thought,
under the eye of judgment, with a strenuous exer-
cise 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 particu-
lar forms are the grand strokes of the painter ex-
ecuted, but by repairing to the fountain-head of all
forms in his rnind. Who is the first drawing-mas-
ter ? 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 grand or mean ; though he has never re-
ceived any instruction in drawing or heard any con-
versation on the subject, nor can himself draw with
correctness a single feature. A good form strikes
all eyes pleasantly, long before they have any science
on the subject, and a beautiful face sets twenty
hearts in palpitation, prior to all consideration of
the mechanical proportions of the features and head.
We may owe to dreams some light on the fountain
of this skill ; for as soon as we let our will go and
let the unconscious states ensue, see what cunning
draughtsmen wo arc ! Wo entertain ourselves with

300 LNTELLECT.

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 awkward-
ness or inexperience, no meagreness or poverty ; it
can design well and group well ; its composition is
full of art, its colors are well laid on and the whole
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 ex-
perience ever mere copies, but always touched and
softened by tints from this ideal domain.

The conditions essential to a constructive mind do
not appear to be so often combined but that a good
sentence or verse remains fresh and memorable for
a long time. Yet when we write with ease and
come out into the free air of thought, we seem
to be assured that nothing is easier than to continue
this communication at pleasure. Up, down, around,
the kingdom of thought has no enclosures, but the
Muse makes us free of her city. Well, the world
has a million writers. One would think then that
good thought would be as familiar as air and water,
and the gifts of each new hour would exclude the
last. Yet we can count all our good books ; nay,
I remember au}^ beautiful verse for twenty years.
It is true that the discerning intellect of the world
is always greatly in advance of the creative, so that
there are many competent judges of the best book,
and few writers of the best books. But some of
the conditions of intellectual construction ai-e of

INTELLECT. 301

rare occurrence. The intellect is a whole and de-
mands integrity in every work. This is resisted
equally by a man's devotion to a single thought and
by his ambition to combine too many.

Truth is our element of life, yet if a man fasten
his attention on a single aspect of truth and apply
himself to that alone for a long time, the truth bo-
comes distorted and not itself but falsehood ; herein
resembling the air, which is our natural element
and the breath of our nostrils, but if a stream of
the same be directed on the body for a time, it
causes cold, fever, and even death. How wearisome
the grammarian, the phrenologist, the political or
religious fanatic, or indeed any possessed mortal
whose balance is lost by the exaggeration of a sin-
gle topic. It is incipient insanity. Every thought
is a prison also. I cannot see what you see, be-
cause I am caught up by a strong wind and blown
80 far in one direction that 1 am out of the hoop of
your horizon.

Is it any better if the student, to avoid this of-
fence and to liberalize himself, aims to make a me-
chanical 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 ana-
lyzed by addition 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 en-

302 INTELLBCT.

cyclopaedia 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 mo-
ment. It must have the same wholeness which na-
ture has. Although no diligence can rebuild the
universe in a model by the best accumulation or
disposition of details, yet does the world reappear
in miniature in every event, so that all the laws of
nature may be read in the smallest fact. The in-
tellect must have the like perfection in its appre-
hension and in its works. For this reason, an in-
dex or mercury of intellectual proficiency is the per-
ception of identity. We talk with accomplished
persons who appear to be strangers in nature. Tlie
cloud, the tree, the turf, the bird, are not theirs,
have nothing of them ; the world is only their lodg-
ing 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 de-
tects 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

INTELLECT. 303

really enriched. For the truth was in us before it
was reflected to us from natural objects ; and the
profound genius will cast the likeness of all creatures
into every product of his wit.

But if the constructive powers are rare and it is
given to few men to be poets, yet every man is a
receiver of this descending holy ghost, and may
well study the laws of its influx. Exactly parallel
is the whole rule of intellectual duty to the rule of
moral duty. A self-denial no less austere than the
saint's is demanded of the scholar. He must wor-
ship truth, and forego all things for that, and choose
defeat and pain, so tJiat his treasure in thought is
thereby augmented.

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. lie in whom the love of repose pre-
dominates will accept the first creed, the first phi-
losophy, the first political party he meets, — most
likely his father's, lie gets rest, commodity and
reputation ; but he shuts the door of truth. He ia
whom the love of truth ])redominate8 will keep him-
self aloof from all moorings, and afloat. IJe will
abstain from dogmatism, and recognize all the op-
posite negations between which, as walls, his being
is swung. lie submits to the inconvenience of sus-
pense and impci-fect opinion, but he is a candidate
for truth, as the other is not, and respects the high-
est law of his being.

304 INTELLECT.

The circle of the green earth lie mnst measure
with his shoos to find the man wlio can yield him
trutli. 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 1 hear truth I am bathed by a
beautiful element and am not conscious of any lim-
its to my nature. The suggestions are thousand-
fold that I hear and see. The waters of the great
deep have ingress and egress to the soul. But if I
speak, I define, I confine and am less. When Soc-
rates speaks, Lysis and Menexenus are afflicted by
no shame that they do not speak. They also are
good. He likewise defers to them, loves them,
whilst he speaks. Because a true and natural man
contains and is the same truth which an eloquent
man 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 sen-
tence said, Let us be silent, for so are the gods.
Silence is a solvent that destroys personality, and
gives us leave to be great and universal. Every
man's progress is through a succession of teachers,
each of whom seems at the time to have a superla-
tive 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 follow me.
Who leaves all, receives more. This is as true in-
tellectually as morally. Each new mind we ap-

INTELLECT. 305

proacli seems to require an abdication of all our
past and present possessions. A new doctrine
eeems at first a subversion of all our opinions,
tastes, and manner of living. Such has Sweden-
borg, such has Kant, such has Coleridge, such has
Cousin seemed to many young men in this country.
Take thankfully and heartily all they can give.
Exhaust them, wrestle with them, let them not go
until their blessing be won, and after a short season
the dismay will be overpast, the excess of influence
withdrawn, and they will be no longer an alarming
meteor, but one more bright star shining serenely
in your heaven and blending its light with all your
day.

But whilst he gives himself up unreservedly to
that which draws him, because that is his own, he
is to refuse himself to that which draws him not,
whatsoever fame and authority may attend it, be-
cause it is not his own. Entire self-reliance be-
longs to the intellect. One soul is a counterpoise
of all souls, as a capillary column of water is a bal-
ance for the sea. It must treat things and books
and sovereign genius as itself also a sovereign. If
yEschylus be that man he is taken for, he lias not
yet done his office when he has educated the learned
of Europe for a thousand years. lie is now to ap-
prove himself a master of delight to me also. If
he cannot do that, all his fame shall avail him noth-
ing with me. I were a fool not to sacrifice a thou-
6and -^schyluses to my intellectual integrity. Es*
20

306 INTELLECT.

pecially 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 see-
ing, perhaps of denominating. Say then, instead
of too timidly poring into his obscure sense, that he
has not succeeded in rendering back to you your
consciousness. He has not succeeded ; now let an-
other try. If Plato cannot, perhaps Spinoza will.
If Spinoza cannot, then perhaps Kant. Any how,
when at last it is done, you will find it is no recon-
dite, but a simple, natural, common state which the
writer restores to you.

I3ut let us end these didactics. I will not, though
the subject might provoke it, speak to the open
question between Truth and Love. I shall not pre-
sume 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 cannot recite, even thus rudely, laws of the
intellect, without remembering that lofty and se-
questered class who have been its prophets and ora-
cles, the highpriesthood of the pure reason, the
Triameglsti, 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

INTELLECT, 307

spiritual lords who have walked in the world, —
these of the old religion, — dwelling in a worship
which makes the sanctities of Christianity look jt^ar-
venues and popular ; for " persuasion is in soul,
but necessity is in intellect." This band of gran-
dees, Hermes, Ileraclitus, Empedocles, Plato, Plo-
tinus, Olympiodorus, Proclus, Synesius and the
rest, have somewhat so vast in their logic, so pri-
mary in their thinking, that it seems antecedent to
all the ordinary distinctions of rhetoric and litera-
ture, and to be at once poetry and music and danc-
ing and astronomy and mathematics. I am present
at the sowing of the seed of the world. With a
geometry of sunbeams the soul lays the foundations
of nature. The truth and grandeur of their thought
is proved by its scope and applicability, for it com-
mands the entire schedule and inventoiy of things
for its illustration. But what marks its elevation
and has even a comic look to us, is the innocent se-
renity with which these babe-like Jupiters sit in
their clouds, and from age to age prattle to each
other and to no contemporary. Well assured that
their speech is intelligible and the most natural
thing in the world, they add thesis to thesis, with-
out 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 explaining sentence,
nor testify the least displeasure or petulance at the

308 INTELLECT.

diilness of their amazed auditory. The angels are
60 enamored of the language that is spoken in
heaven that they will not distort their lips with the
hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak
their own, whether there be any who understand it
or not.

ART.

ESSAY XII.

ART.

Because the soul is progressive, it never quite
repeats itself, but in every act attempts the produc-
tion of a new and fairer whole. This appears in
works both of the useful and fine arts, if we employ
the popular distinction of works according to their
aim either at use or beauty. Thus in our fine arts,
not imitation but creation^ is_J;he aim. In land-
scapes the painter should give the suggestion of a
fairer creation than we know. The details, the
prose of nature he should omit and give us only
tlie spirit and splendor, lie should know that the
landscape has beauty for his eye because it ex--
presses 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 como to
value the expression of nature and not nature itself,
and so exalt in his copy the features that please
him. lie will give the gloom of gloom and the
sunshine of sunshine. In a portrait he must in-
scribe the cliaracter and not the features, and must
esteem the man who sits to him as himself only au

312 ART.

imperfect picture or likeness of the aspiring origi-
nal within.

What is that abridgement and selection we ob-
serve in all spiritual activity, but itself the crea-
tive impulse ? for it is the inlet of that higher illu-
mination 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 compactor landscape than the hori-
zon figures ; nature's eclecticism ? and what is his
speech, his love of painting, love of nature, but a
still finer success ? all the weai:y miles and tons of
space and bulk left out, and the spirit or moral of
it contracted into a musical word, or the most cun-
ning stroke of the pencil ?

But the artist must employ the symbols in use in
his day and nation to convey his enlarged sense to his
fellow-men. Thus the new in art is always formed
out of the old. The Genius of the Hour always
sets his ineffaceable seal on the work and gives it
an inexpressible charm for the imagination. As
far as the spiritual character of the period over-
powers the artist and finds expression in his work,
so far it will always retain a certain grandeur, and
will represent to future beholders the Unknown, the
Inevitable, the Divine. No man can quite ex-
clude this element of Necessity from his labor.
No man can quite emancipate himself from his age
and country, or produce a model in which the
education, the religion, the politics, usages and arts

ART. 313

of his times shall have no share. Though he were
never so original, never so wilful and fantastic, he
cannot wipe out of his work every trace of the
thoughts amidst which it grew. The very avoid-
ance 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, inas-
much as the artist's pen_or chisel seems to have
been held and guided by a gigantic hand to inscribe
a line in the liistory of the human race. This cir-
cumstance gives a value to the Egyptian hiero-
glyphics, to the Indian, Chinese and Mexican idols,
however gross and shapeless. They denote the
Ijcight 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 pro-
duct of the plastic arts lias herein its highest value,
as history ; as a stroke drawn in the portrait of that
fate, perfect and beautiful, according to whose or-
dinations all beings advance to their beatitude ?

Thus, historically viewed, it has been the office
of art to educate the perC/Cption of beauty. We are
immersed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vis-
ion. 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, aa

314 ART.

students of the mystery of Form. Tlie virtue of
art lies in detachment, in sequestering one object
from the embarrassing variety. Until one thing
comes out from the connection of things, there can
be enjoyment, contemplation, but no thought. Our
happiness and unhappiness are unproductive. The
infant lies in a pleasing trance, but his individual
character and his practical power depend on his
daily progress in the separation of things, and deal-
ing with one at a time. Love and all the passions
concentrate all existence around a single form. It
is the habit of certain minds to give an all-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 ora-
tors, the leaders of society. The power to detach
and to magnify by detaching is the essence of rhet-
oric in tlie hands of the orator and the poet. This
rhetoric, or power to fix the momentary eminency
of an object, so remarkable in Burke, in Byron, in
Carlyle, — the painter and sculptor exhibit in color
and in stone. The power depends on the depth of
the artist's insight of that object he contemplates.
For eveiy object has its roots in central nature, and
may of course be so exhibited to us as to represent
the world. Therefore each work of genius is the
tyrant of the hour and concentrates attention on it-
self. For the time, it is the only thing worth
naming, to do that, — be it a sonnet, an opera, a land-
scape, a statue, an oration, the plan of a temple, of

ART. 315

a campaign, or of a voyage of discovery. Presently
we pass to some other object, which rounds itself
into a whole as did the first ; for example a well
laid garden : and nothing seems worth doing but the
laying out of gardens. I should think fire the best
thing in the world, if 1 were not acquainted with
air, and water, and earth. For it is the right and
property of all natural objects, of all geimine tal-
ents, 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-sufiicing, and stands
then and there for nature. A good ballad draws
my ear and heart whilst I listen, as much as an epic
has done before. A dog, drawn by a master, or a
litter of pigs, satisfies and is a reality not less than
the frescoes of Angelo. From this succession of
excellent objects learn we at last the immensity of
the world, the opulence of human nature, which can
run out to infinitude in any direction. But I also
learn that what astonished and fascinated me in
the first work, astonished mo 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 " land-
scape with figures" amidst which wo dwell. Paint*

316 ART,

ing seems to be to the eye wliat 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 indifferency 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 as-
sembly, I understand well what he meant who said,
" When 1 have been reading Homer, all men look
like giants." I too see that painting and sculpture
are gymnastics of the eye, training to the niceties
and curiosities of its function. There is no statue
like this living man, with his infinite advantage
over all ideal sculpture, of perpetual variety. What
a gallery of art have I here ! No mannerist made
these varied groups and diverse original single fig-

Anr. 317

nres. Here is the artist himself improvising, grim
and glad, at his block. Now one thought strikes
him, now another, and with each moment he alters
the whole air, attitude and expression of his clay.
Away with your nonsense of oil and easels, of mar-
ble and chisels : except to open your eyes to the
witchcraft of eternal art, they are hypocritical rub-
bish.

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
intelligible ; 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
liappy hours, nature appears to us one with art ; art
perfected, — the work of genius. And the individ-
ual in whom simple tastes and susceptibility to all
the great human influences overpowers the acci-
dents of a local and special culture, is the best critic
of art. Though we travel the world over to find
the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find
it not. The best of beauty is a finer charm than
skill in surfaces, in 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

318 AliT.

tlicse attributes. In tlie Bciilptures of the Greeks,
ill the masonry of the Roman b, 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 whicli we
carry to them, the same we bring back more fairly
illustrated in the memory. The traveller who visits
the Vatican and passes from chamber to chamber
through galleries of statues, vases, sarcophagi and
candelabra, through all forms of beauty cut in the
richest materials, is in danger of forgetting the sim-
plicity of the principles out of which they all
sprung, and that they had their origin from
thoughts and laws in his own breast. He studies
the technical rules on these wonderful remains, but
forgets that these works were not always thus con-
stellated ; that they are the contributions of many
ages and many countries ; that each came out of the
solitary workshop of one artist, who toiled perhaps
in ignoranoe of the existence of other 6cul2)ture,
created his work without other model save life,
household life, and the sweet and smart of personal
relations, of beating hearts, and meeting eyes ; of
poverty and necessity and hope and fear. These
were his inspirations, and these are the effects he
carries home to your heart and mind. In propor-
tion to his force, the artist will find in his work an
outlet for his proper character. lie must not be in
any manner pinched or hindered by his material^

AUT, 319

but through his necessity of imparting himself the
adamant will be wax in his hands, and wdll allow an
adequate communication of himself, in his full
stature and proportion. Not a conventional nature
and culture need he cumber himself with, nor ask
what is the mode in Rome or in Paris, but that
house and weather and manner of living which
poverty and the fate of birth have made at once so
odious and so dear, in the gray unpainted wood
cabin, on the corner of a IS'ew Hampshire farm, or
in the log hut of the backwoods, or in the narrow
lodging where he has endured the constraints and
seeming of a city poverty, — will serve as well as any
other condition as the symbol of a thought w^hieh
pours itself indifferently through all.

I remember w4ien in my younger days I had
heard of the wonders of Italian painting, I fancied
the great pictures would be great strangers ; some
surprising combination of color and form ; a foreign
wonder, barbaric pearl and gold, like the spontoons
and standards of the militia, which plays such
pranks in the eyes and imaginations of school-boys.
I was to see and acquire I knew not what. "Wlien
I came at last to Rome and saw with eyes the pic-
tures, I found that genius left to novices the gay
and fantastic and ostentatious, and itself pierced
directly to the simple and true ; that it was famil- /
iar 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

320 ART.

well, — had left at home in so many conversations.
I had the same experience already in a church at
Naples. There I saw that nothing was changed
with me but the place, and said to myself, — ' 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 1
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 Yinci. " What,
old mole ! workest thou in the earth so fast ? " It
had travelled by my side: that which I fancied I
had left in Boston was here in the Vatican, and
again at Milan and at Paris, and made all travelling
ridiculous as a treadmill. I now require this of all
pictures, that they domesticate me, not that they
dazzle me. Pictures must not be too picturesque.
Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense
and plain dealing. All great actions have been.
/_ simple, and all great pictures are.

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

ART. 321

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 prom-
ised, not to the actual result. He has conceived
meanly of the resources of man, who believes that
the best age of production is past. The real value
of the Iliad or the Transfiguration is as signs of
power; billows or ripples they are of the great
stream of tendency ; tokens of the everlasting effort
to produce, which even in its worst estate the soul
betrays. Art has not come to its maturity if it do
not put itself abreast with the most potent influences
o{ the world, if it is not practical and moral, if it do
not stand in connection 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 abor-
tive births of an impei-fect or vitiated instinct. Art
is the need to create ; but in its essence, immense
and jmiversal, it is impatient of working with lame
or tired hands, and of making cripples and mon-
sters, 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 en-
ergy. He may paint and carve only as long as he
21

322 ART.

can do that. Art should exhilarate, and throw
down the walls of circumstance on every side,
awakening in the beholder the same sense of uni-
versal relation and power which the work evinced
in the artist, and its highest effect is to make new
artists.

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

ART. 323

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

A true announcement of the law of cixjation, if a
man were found worthy to declare it, would carry
art up into the kingdom of nature, and destroy its
separate and contrasted existence. The fountains
of invention 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
almshouse of this world, without dignity, without
skill or industry. Art is as poor and low. The old
tragic Necessity, which lowers on the brows even
of the Venuses and the Cupids of the antique, and

324 ART.

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

The art that thus separates is itself first separated.
Art must not be a superficial talent, but must begin
farther back in man. Now men do not see nature
to be beautiful, and they go to make a statue which
shall be. They abhor men as tasteless, dull, and

ART. 325

inconvertible, and console themselves with color-
bags and blocks of marble. Thej^ reject life as
prosaic, and create a death which they call poetic.
Thej despatch the day's weary chores, and fly to
voluptuous reveries. They eat and drink, that
they may afterwards execute the ideal. Tims is
art vilified ; the name conveys to the mind its
secondary and bad senses ; it stands in the imagi-
nation as somewhat contrary to nature, and struck
with death from the first. Would it not be better
to begin higher up, — to serve the ideal before thej
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 use-
ful arts, and the distinction between the fine and
the useful arts be forgotten. If history were truly
told, if life were nobly spent, it would be no longer
easy or 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 legislature, nor will it repeat in England
or America its history in Greece. It will come, as
always, unannounced, and spring up between the
feet of brave and earnest men. It is in vain that
we look for genius to reiterate its miracles in the
old arts ; it is its instinct to find beauty and holiness
in new and necessary facts, in the field and road-
side, in the shop and mill. Proceeding from a

326 ART.

religious heart it will raise to a divine use the
railroad, the insurance office, the joint-stock com-
pany ; our law, our primary assemblies, our com-
merce, the galvanic battery, the electric jar, the
prism, and the chemist's retort ; in wliich we seek
now only an economical use. Is not the selfisli and
even cruel aspect which belongs to our great me*
chanical works, to mills, railways, and machinery,
the effect of the mercenary impulses which these
works obey? When its errands are noble and
adequate, a steamboat bridging the Atlantic be-
tween Old and Kew England and arriving at its
ports with the punctuality of a planet, — is a step
of man into harmony with nature. The boat at
St. Petersburg, which plies along the Lena by
magnetism, needs little to make it sublime. AVhen
science is learned in love, and its powers are
wielded by love, they will appear the supplements
and continuations of the material creation.

THE END.

•W^ ^L,^M/;^%

P3

1608

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Wallace
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Smerson, Ralph Waldo
Essays

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