Essays: second series

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CONTENTS

PA»E

ESSAY I.
The Poet 7

ESSAY II.
Experience 48

ESSAY in.
Chaeactee 79

ESSAY IV.
Mannees 105

(8)

ESSAY V.
&D*rs 139

ESSAY VI.
Natube , 147

ESSAY vn.
Politics ,..,.... 173

ESSAY VIIL
Nominalist and Realist 195

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS.
Lbctube at Aemoey Hall «H7

THE POET.

A moody child and wildly wise

Pursued the game with joyful eyes,

Which chose, like meteors, their way,

And rived the dark with private ray :

They overleapt the horizon's edge,

Searched with Apollo's privilege ;

Through man, and woman, and sea, and star,

Saw the dance of nature forward far ;

Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times.

Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes.

Olympian bards who sun*

Divine ideas below,
Which always find us youn£

And always keep us §o.

THE POET.

Those who are esteemed umpires of taste are
often persons who have acquired some knowledge
of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an in-
clination for whatever is elegant ; but if you
inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and
whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you
learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their
cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of
dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest
remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts
is some study of rules and particulars, or some
limited judgment of color or form, which is exer-
cised for amusement or for show. It is a proof of
the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty, as it
lies in the minds of our amateurs, that men seem
to have lost the perception of the instant depend-
ence of form upon soul. There is no doctrine of
forms in our philosophy. We were put into our
bodies, as fire is put into a pan, to be carried
about ; but there is no accurate adjustment be-
tween the spirit and the organ, much less is the
latter the germination of the former. So in re-
gard to other forms, the intellectual men do not
believe in any essential dependence of the material

(7)

8 ESSAY L

world on thought and volition. Theologians think
it a pretty air- castle to talk of the spiritual mean-
ing of a ship or a cloud, of a city or a contract,
but they prefer to come again to the solid ground
of historical evidence ; and even the poets are
contented with a civil and conformed manner of
living, and to write poems from the fancy, at a
safe distance from their own experience. But the
highest minds of the world have never ceased to
explore the double meaning, or, shall I say, the
quadruple, or the centuple, or much more mani-
fold meaning, of every sensuous fact : Orpheus,
Empedocles, Heraclitus, Plato, Plutarch, Dante,
Swedenborg, and the masters of sculpture, pic-
ture, and poetry. For we are not pans and
barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch-
bearers, but children of the fire, made of it, and
only the same divinity transmuted, and at two or
three removes, when we know least about it. And
this hidden truth, that the fountains whence all
this river of Time and its creatures, floweth, are
intrinsically ideal and beautiful, draws us to the
consideration of the nature and functions of the
Poet, or the man of Beauty, to the means and
materials he uses, and to the general aspect of the
art in the present time.

The breadth of the problem is great, for the
poet is representative. He stands among partial
men for the complete man, and apprises us not of
his wealth, but of the commonwealth. The young
man reveres men of genius, because, to speak
truly, they are more himself than he is. They re~

THE POET. 9

ceive of the soul as he also receives, but they
more. Nature enhances her beauty, to the eye of
loving men, from their belief that the poet is be-
holding her shows at the same time. He is
isolated among his contemporaries, by truth and
by his art, but with this consolation in his pur-
suits, that they will draw all men sooner or later.
For all men live by truth, and stand in need of
expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics,
in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful
secret. The man is only half himself, the other
half is his expression.

Notwithstanding this necessity to be published,
adequate expression is rare. I know not how it
is that we need an interpreter ; but the great ma-
jority of men seem to be minors, who have not
yet come into possession of their own, or mutes,
who cannot report the conversation they have had
with nature. There is no man who does not an-
ticipate a supersensual utility in the sun, and stars,
earth, and water. These stand and wait to render
him a peculiar service. But there is some obstruc-
tion, or some excess of phlegm in our constitu-
tion, which does not suffer them to yield the due
effect. Too feeble fall the impressions of nature
on us to make us artists. Every touch should
thrill. Every man should be so much an artist,
that he could report in conversation what had be-
fallen him. Yet, in our experience, the rays or
appulses have sufficient force to arrive at the
senses, but not enough to reach the quick, and
compel the reproduction of themselves in speech.

IO ESSAY /.

The poet is the person in whom these powers are
in balance, the man without impediment, who
sees and handles that which others dream of,
traverses the whole scale of experience, and
is representative of man, in virtue of being the
largest power to receive and to impart.

For the Universe has three children, born at
one time, which reappear, under different names,
in every system of thought, whether they be
called cause, operation, and effect ; or, more
poetically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune ; or, theologi-
cally, the Father, the Spirit, and the Son; but
which we will call here, the Knower, the Doer,
ami the Sayer. These stand respectively for
the love of truth, for the love of good, and for
the love of beauty. These three are equal. Each
is that which he is essentially, so that he cannot
be surmounted or analyzed, and each of these three
has the power of the others latent in him, and
his own patent.

The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents
beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the
centre. For the world is not painted, or adorned,
but is from the beginning beautiful ; and God
has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty
is the creator of the universe. Therefore the poet
is not any permissive potentate, but is emperor
in his own right. Criticism is infested with a cant
of materialism, which assumes that manual skill
and activity is the first merit of all men, and dis-
parages such as say and do not, overlooking the
fact that some men, namely, poets, are natural

THE POET. II

Bayers, sent into the world to the end of expres-
sion, and confounds them with those whose prov-
ince is action, but who quit it, to imitate the
sayers. But Homer's words are as costly and ad-
mirable to Homer, as Agamemnon's victories are
to Agamemnon. The poet does not wait for the
hero or the sage, but, as they act and think
primarily, so he writes primarily what will and
must be spoken, reckoning the others, though
primaries also, yet, in respect to him, secondaries
and servants ; as sitters or models in the studio
of a painter, or as assistants who bring building
materials to an architect.

For poetry was all written before time was,
and whenever we are so finely organized that we
can penetrate into that region where the air is
music, we hear those primal warblings, and at-
tempt to write them down, but we lose ever and
anon a word, or a verse, and substitute something
of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The
men of more delicate ear write down these
cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts,
though imperfect, become the songs of the nations.
For nature is as truly beautiful as it is good, or as it
is reasonable, and must as much appear, as it must
be done, or be known. Words and deeds are quite
indifferent modes of the divine energy, Words
are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.

The sign and credentials of the poet are, that he
announces that which no man foretold. He is the
true and only doctor ; he knows and tells ; he is-
the only teller of news, for he was present and

12 ESSAY I.

privy to the appearance which he describes. He is a
beholder of ideas, and an utterer of the necessary
and causal. For we do not speak now of men of
poetical talents, or of industry and skill in metre,
but of the true poet. I took part in a conversation
the other day, ^concerning a recent writer of lyrics,
a man of subtle mind, whose head appeared to be
a music-box of delicate tunes and rhythms, and
whose skill, and command of language we could
not sufficiently praise. But when the question
arose, whether he was not only a lyrist, but a
poet, we were obliged -to confess that he is
plainly a contemporary, not an eternal man. He
does not stand out of our low limitations, like a
Chimborazo under the line, running up from the
torrid base through all the climates of the globe,
with belts of the herbage of every latitude on
its high and mottled sides ; but this genius is the
landscape-garden of a modern house, adorned with
fountains and statues, with well-bred men and
women standing and sitting in the walks and
terraces. We hear, through all the varied music,
the ground- tone of conventional life. Our poets
are men of talents who sing, and not the children
of music. The argument is secondary, the finish
of the verses is primary.

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argu-
ment, that makes a poem, — a thought so pas-
sionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or
an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and
adorns nature with a new thing. The thought
and the form are equal in the order of time, but

THE POET. 13

in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the
form. The poet has a new thought : he has a
whole new experience to unfold ; he will tell us
how it was with him, and all men will be the
richer in his fortune. For, the experience of
each new age requires a new confession, and the
world seems always waiting for its poet. I re-
member, when I was young, how much I was
moved one morning by tidings that genius had
appeared in a youth who sat near me at table.
He had left his work, and gone rambling none
knew whither, and had written hundreds of lines,
but could not tell whether that which was in him
was therein told : he could tell nothing but that
all was changed, — man, beast, heaven, earth, and
sea. How gladly we listened! how credulous!
Society seemed to be compromised. We sat in
the aurora of a sunrise which was to put out all
the stars. Boston seemed to be at twice the
distance it had the night before, or was much
farther than that. Rome, — what was Rome?
Plutarch and Shakespeare were in the yellow leaf,,
and Homer no more should be heard of. It is
much to know that poetry has been written this
very day, under this very roof, by your side.
What ! that wonderful spirit has not expired I
these stony moments are still sparkling and ani-
mated! I had fancied that the oracles were all
silent, and nature had spent her fires, and be-
hold ! all night, from every pore, these fine auroras
have been streaming. Every one has some in-
terest in the advent of the poet, and no one

14 ESSAY I.

knows how much it may concern him. We know
that the secret of the world is profound, but who
or what shall be our interpreter, we know not.
A mountain ramble, a new style of face, a new
person, may put the key into our hands. Of
course, the value of genius to us is in the veracity
of its report. Talent may frolic and juggle ;
genius realizes and adds. Mankind, in good
earnest, have availed so far in understanding
themselves and their work, that the foremost
watchman on the peak announces his news. It is
the truest word ever spoken, and the phrase will
be the fittest, most musical, and the unerring
voice of the world for that time.

All that we call sacred history attests that the
birth of a poet is the principal event in chronol-
ogy. Man, never so often deceived, still watches
for the arrival of a brother who can hold him
steady to a truth, until he has made it his own.
With what joy I begin to read a poem, which I
confide in as an inspiration ! And now my chains
are to be broken ; I shall mount above these
clouds and opaque airs in which I live, — opaque,
though they seem transparent, — and from the
heaven of truth I shall see and comprehend my
relations. That will reconcile me to life, and
renovate nature, to see trifles animated by a ten-
dency, and to know what I am doing. Life will
no more be a noise ; now I shall see men and
women, and know the signs by which they may be
discerned from fools and satans. This day shall
be better than my birthday: then I became an

THE POET. 15

animal : now I am invited into the science of the
real. Such is the hope, but the fruition is post-
poned. Oftener it falls, that this winged man,
who will carry me into the heaven, whirls me into
the clouds, then leaps and frisks about with me
from cloud to cloud, still affirming that he is
bound heavenward; and I, being myself a novice,
am slow in perceiving that he does not know the
way into the heavens, and is merely bent that I
should admire his skill to rise, like a fowl or a
flying fish, a little way from the ground or the
water; but the all-piercing, all-feeding, and ocular
air of heaven, that man shall never inhabit. I
tumble down again soon into my old nooks, and
lead the life of exaggerations as before, and have
lost my faith in the possibility of any guide who
can lead me thither where I would be.

But leaving these victims of vanity, let us, with
new hope, observe how nature, by worthier im-
pulses, has ensured the poet's fidelity to his office
of announcement and affirming, namely, by the
beauty of things, which becomes a new, and
higher beauty, when expressed. Nature offers all
her creatures to him as a picture-language. Be-
ing used as a type, a second wonderful value ap-
pears in the object, far better than its old value,
as the carpenter's stretched cord, if you hold your
ear close enough, is musical in the breeze.
" Things more excellent than every image," says
Jamblichus, " are expressed through images."
Things admit of being used as symbols, because
nature is a symbol, in the whole, and in every

16 ESSAY I.

part. Every line we can draw in the sand has
expression ; and there is no body without its spirit
or genius. All form is an effect of character ; all
condition, of the quality of the life ; all harmony,
of health ; (and, for this reason, a perception of
beauty should be sympathetic, or proper only to
the good). The beautiful rests on the foundations
of the necessary. The soul makes the body, as
the wise Spenser teaches :

" So every spirit, as it is most pure,
And hath in it the more of heavenly light,
So it the fairer body doth procure
To habit in, and it more fairly dight,
With cheerful grace and amiable sight.
For, of the soul, the body form doth take,
For soul is form, and doth the body make."

Here we find ourselves, suddenly, not in a critical
speculation, but in a holy place, and should go
very warily and reverently. We stand before the
secret of the world, there where Being passes into
Appearance, and Unity into Variety.

The Universe is the extern isation of the soul.
Wherever the life is, that bursts into appearance
around it. Our science is sensual, and therefore
superficial. The earth, and the heavenly bodies,
physics, and chemistry, we sensually treat, as if
they were self-existent ; but these are the retinue
of that Being we have. " The mighty heaven,"
said Proclus, " exhibits, in its transfigurations,
clear images of the splendor of intellectual per-
ceptions ; being moved in conjunction with the
un apparent periods of intellectual natures."

THE POET. 17

Therefore, science always goes abreast with the
just elevation of the man, keeping step with relig-
ion and metaphysics ; or, the state of science is
an index of our self-knowledge. Since everything
in nature answers to a moral power, if any phe-
nomenon remains brute and dark, it is that the
corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet
active.

No wonder, then, if these waters be so deep,
that we hover over them with a religious regard.
The beauty of the fable proves the importance of
the sense ; to the poet, and to all others ; or, if
you please, every man is so far a poet as to be
susceptible of these enchantments of nature ; for
all men have the thoughts whereof the universe
is the celebration, I find that the fascination re-
sides in the symbol. Who loves nature ? Who
does not ? Is it only poets, and men of leisure
and cultivation, who live with her ? No ; but also
hunters, farmers, grooms, and butchers, though
they express their affection in their choice of life,
and not in their choice of words. The writer won-
ders what the coachman or the hunter values in
riding, in horses, and dogs. It is not superficial
qualities. When you talk with him, he holds
these at as slight a rate as you. His worship is
sympathetic ; he has no definitions, but he is com-
manded in nature, by the living power which he
feels to be there present. No imitation, or play-
ing of these things, would content him ; he loves
the earnest of the north wind, of rain, of stone,
and wood, and iron. A beauty not explicable, is

IS ESSAY I.

dearer than a beauty which we can see to the end
of. It is nature the symbol, nature certifying the
supernatural, body overflowed by life, which he
worships, with coarse, but sincere rites.

The inwardness, and mystery, of this attach-
ment drives men of every class to the use of em
blems. The schools of poets, and philosophers.
are not more intoxicated with their symbols than
the populace with theirs. In our political parties,
compute the power of badges and emblems. See
the great ball which they roll from Baltimore to
Bunker hill! In the political processions, Lowell
goes in a loom, and Lynn in a shoe, and Salem in
a ship. Witness the cider-barrel, the log-cabin,
the hickory-stick, the palmetto, and all the cogni-
zances of party. See the power of national em-
blems. Some stars, lilies, leopards, a crescent, a
lion, an eagle, or other figure, which came into
credit God knows how, on an old rag of bunting,
blowing in the wind, on a fort, at the ends of the
earth, shall make the blood tingle under the
rudest, or the most conventional exterior. The
people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all
poets and mystics !

Beyond this universality of the symbolic Ian
guage, we are apprised of the divineness of this
superior use of things, whereby the world is a
temple, whose walls are covered with emblems,
pictures, and commandments of the Deity, in this,
that there is no fact in nature which does not
carry the whole sense of nature; and the distinc-
tions which we make in events, and in affairs, of

THE POET. 19

low and high, honest and base, disappear when
nature is used as a symbol. Thought makes
everything fit for use. The vocabulary of an om-
niscient man would embrace words and images
excluded from polite conversation. What would
be base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes
illustrious, spoken in a new connection of thought.
The piety of the Hebrew prophets purges their
grossness. The circumcision is an example of the
power of poetry to raise the low and offensive.
Small and mean things serve as well as great sym-
bols. The meaner the type by which a law is
expressed, the more pungent it is, and the more
lasting in the memories of men : just as we choose
the smallest box, or case, in which any needful
utensil can be carried. Bare lists of words are
found suggestive, to an imaginative and excited
mind ; as it is related of Lord Chatham, that he
was accustomed to read in Bailey's Dictionary,
when he was preparing to speak in Parliament.
The poorest experience is rich enough for all the
purposes of expressing thought. Why covet a
knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house
and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us
as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We
are far from having exhausted the significance of
the few symbols we use. We can come to use
them yet with a terrible simplicity. It does not
need that a poem should be long. Every word
was once a poem. Every new relation is a new
word. Also, we use defects and deformities
to a sacred purpose, so expressing our sense that

20 ESSAY I.

the evils of the world are such onty to the evil
eye. In the old mythology, mythologists observe,
defects are ascribed to divine natures, as lameness
to Vulcan, blindness to Cupid, and the like, to
signify exuberances.

For, as it is dislocation and detachment from
the life of God, that makes things ugly, the poet,
who re-attaches things to nature and the Whole,
— re-attaching even artificial things, and viola-
tions of nature, to nature, by a deeper insight, — •
disposes very easily of the most disagreeable
facts. Readers of poetry see the factory -village
and the railway, and fancy that the poetry of the
landscape is broken up by these ; for these works
of art are not yet consecrated in their reading ;
but the poet sees them fall within the great Or-
der not less than the bee-hive, or the spider's
geometrical web. Nature adopts them very fast
into her vital circles, and the gliding train of cars
she loves like her own. Besides, in a centred mind,
it signifies nothing how many mechanical inven-
tions you exhibit. Though you add millions, and
never so surprising, the fact of mechanics has not
gained a grain's weight. The spiritual fact re*
mains unalterable, by many or by few particulars \
as no mountain is of any appreciable height to
break the curve of the sphere. A shrewd coun-
try-boy goes to the city for the first time, and the
complacent citizen is not satisfied with his little
wonder. It is not that he does not see all the fine
houses, and know that he never saw such before,
but he disposes of them as easily as the poet finds

THE POET. 21

place for the railway. The chief value of the
new fact, is to enhance the great and constant
fact of Life, which can dwarf any and every cir-
cumstance, and to which the belt of wampum,
and the commerce of America, are alike.

The world being thus put under the mind for
verb and noun, the poet is he who can articulate
it. For, though life is great, and fascinates, and
absorbs, — and though all men are intelligent of
the symbols through which it is named, — yet they
cannot originally use them. We are symbols, and
inhabit symbols ; workman, work, and tools,
words and things, birth and death, all are em-
blems; but we sympathize with the symbols, and,
being infatuated with the economical uses of
things, we do not know that they are thoughts.
The poet, by an ulterior intellectual perception,
gives them a power which makes their old use
forgotten, and puts eyes, and a tongue, into every
dumb and inanimate object. He perceives the in-
dependence of the thought on the symbol, the
stability of the thought, the accidency and fugac-
it}'- of the symbol. As the eyes of Lyncseus were
said to see through the earth, so the poet turns
the world to glass, and shows us all things in
their right series and procession. For, through
that better perception, he stands one step nearer
to things, and sees the flowing or metamorphosis ;
perceives that thought is multiform ; that within
the form of every creature is a force impelling it
to ascend into a higher form ; and, following with
his eyes the life, uses the forms which express

22 ESSAY I.

that life, and so his speech flows with the flowing of
nature. All the facts of the animal economy, sex^
nutriment, gestation, birth, growth, are symbols of
the passage of the world into the soul of man, to
suffer there a change, and reappear a new and higher
fact. He uses forms according to the life, and not
according to the form. This is true science. The
poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation,
and animation, for he does not stop at these facts,
but employs them as signs. He knows why the
plain, or meadow of space, was strewn with these
flowers we call suns, and moons, and stars ; why
the great deep is adorned with animals, with men,
and gods ; for, in every word he speaks he rides
on them as the horses of thought.

By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer,
or Language-maker, naming things sometimes af-
ter their appearance, sometimes after their essence,
and giving to every one its own name, and not
another's, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which de-
lights in detachment or boundary. The poet made
all the words, and therefore language is the archives
of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb
of the muses. For, though the origin of most of
our words is forgotten, each word was at first a
stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because
for the moment it symbolized the world to the
first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist
finds the deadest word to have been once a bril-
liant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the
limestone of the continent consists of infinite
masses of the shells of animalcules, so language

THE POET. 23

is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in
their secondary use, have long ceased to remind
us of their poetic origin. But the poet names
the thing because he sees it, or comes one step
nearer to it than any other. This expression, or
naming, is not art, but a second nature, grown
out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree. What we
call nature is a certain self-regulated motion, or
change ; and nature does all things by her own
hands, and does not leave another to baptize her,
but baptizes herself; and this through the meta-
morphosis again. I remember that a certain poet
described it to me thus :

Genius is the activity which repairs the decays
of things, whether wholly or partly of a material
and finite kind. Nature, through all her king-
doms, insures herself. Nobody cares for planting
the poor fungus: so she shakes down from the
gills of one agaric countless spores, any one of
which, being preserved, transmits new billions of
spores to-morrow or next day. The new agaric
of this hour has a chance which the old one had
not. This atom of seed is thrown into a new
place, not subject to the accidents which destro}red
its parent two rods off. She makes a man ; and
having brought him to ripe age, she will no longer
run the risk of losing this wonder at a blow, but
she detaches from him a new self, that the kind
may be safe from accidents to which the individ-
ual is exposed. So when the soul of the poet has
come to ripeness of thought, she detaches and

24 ESSAY I.

sends away from it its poems or songs, — a fearless,
sleepless, deathless progeny, which is not exposed
to the accidents of the weary kingdom of time :
a fearless, vivacious offspring, clad with wings,
(such was the virtue of the soul out of which
they came), which carry them fast and far, and
infix them irrecoverably into the hearts of men.
These wings are the beauty of the poet's soul.
The songs, thus flying immortal from their mor-
tal parent, are pursued by clamorous flights of
censures, which swarm in far greater numbers, and
threaten to devour them ; but these last are not
winged. At the end of a very short leap they fall
plump down, and rot, having received from the
souls out of which they came no beautiful wings.
But the melodies of the poet ascend, and leap,
and pierce into the deeps of infinite time.

So far the bard taught me, using his freer
speech. But nature has a higher end, in the pro-
duction of new individuals, than security, namely,
ascension, or, the passage of the soul into higher
forms. I knew, in my younger days, the sculptor
who made the statue of the youth which stands in
the public garden. He was, as I remember, un-
able to tell, directly, what made him happy, or
unhappy, but by wonderful indirections he could
tell. He rose one day, according to his habit, be-
fore the dawn, and saw the morning break, grand
as the eternity out of which it came, and, for
many days after, he strove to express this tran-
quillity, and, lo ! his chisel had fashioned out of

THE POET. 2$

marble the form of a beautiful youth, Phosphorus,
whose aspect is such, that, it is said, all persons
who look on it become silent. The poet also re-
signs himself to his mood, and that thought which
agitated him is expressed, but alter idem, in a
manner totally new. The expression is organic,
or, the new type which things themselves take
when liberated. As, in the sun, objects paint
their images on the retina of the eye, so they,
sharing the aspiration of the whole universe, tend
to paint a far more delicate copy of their essence
in his mind. Like the metamorphosis of things
into higher organic forms, is their change into
melodies. Over everything stands its daemon, 01
soul, and, as the form of the thing is reflected by
the eye, so the soul of the thing is reflected by a
melody. The sea, the mountain-ridge, Niagara,
and every flower-bed, pre-exist, or super-exist, in
pre-cantations, which sail like odors in the air, and
when any man goes by with an ear sufficiently
fine, he overhears them, and endeavors to write
down the notes, without diluting or depraving
them. And herein is the legitimation of criti-
cism, in the mind's faith, that the poems are a cor-
rupt version of some text in nature, with which
they ought to be made to tally. A rhyme in one
of our sonnets should not be less pleasing than
the iterated nodes of a sea-shell, or the resembling
difference of a group of flowers. The pairing of
the birds is an idyl, not tedious as our idyls are ;
a tempest is a rough ode without falsehood or
rant ; a summer, with its harvest sown, reaped,

26 ESSAY I.

and stored, is an epic song, subordinating how-
many admirably executed parts. Why should not
the symmetry and truth that modulate these,
glide into our spirits, and we participate the in-
vention of nature ?

This insight, which expresses itself by what is
called Imagination, is a very high sort of seeing,
which does not come by study, but by the intel-
lect being where and what it sees, by sharing the
path, or circuit of things through forms, and so
making them translucid to others. The path of
things is silent. Will they suffer a speaker to go
with them ? A spy they will not suffer ; a lover,
a poet, is the transcendency of their own nature,
— him they will suffer. The condition of true
naming, on the poet's part, is his resigning him-
self to the divine aura which breathes through
forms, and accompanying that.

It is a secret which every intellectual man
quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his
possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable
of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled
on itself), by abandonment to the nature of
things : that, besides his privacy of power as an
individual man, there is a great public power.
on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all
risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal
tides to roll and circulate through him : then he is
caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech
is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are
universally intelligible as the plants and animals.
The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then,

THE POET. 27

only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or, " with
the flower of the mind ; " not with the intellect,
used as an organ, but with the intellect released
from all service, and suffered to take its direction
from its celestial life ; or, as the ancients were
wont to express themselves, not with intellect
alone, but with the intellect inebriated by nectar.
As the traveller who has lost his way, throws his
reins on his horse's neck, and trusts to the instinct
of the animal to find his road, so must we do with
the divine animal who carries us through this
world. For if in any manner we can stimulate
this instinct, new passages are opened for us into
nature, the mind flows into and through things
hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is
possible.

This is the reason why bards love wine, mead,
narcotics, coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of sandal-
wood and tobacco, or whatever other species of
animal exhilaration. All men avail themselves of
such means as they can, to add this extraordinary
power to their normal powers ; and to this end
they prize conversation, music, pictures, sculp-
ture, dancing, theatres, travelling, war, mobs, fires,
gaming, politics, or love, or science, or animal in-
toxication, which are several coarser or finer
gw<m'-mechanical substitutes for the true nectar,
which is the ravishment of the intellect by coming
nearer to the fact. These are auxiliaries to the
centrifugal tendency of a man, to his passage out
into free space, and they help him to escape the
custody of that body in which he is pent up, and

28 ESSAY I.

of that jail-yard of individual relations in which
he is enclosed. Hence a great number of such as
were professionally expressors of Beauty, as paint-
ers, poets, musicians, and actors, have been more
than others wont to lead a life of pleasure and in-
dulgence ; all but the few who received the true
nectar; and, as it was a spurious mode of attain
ing freedom, as it was an emancipation not into
the heavens, but into the freedom of baser places,
they were punished for that advantage they won,
by a dissipation and deterioration. But never can
any advantage be taken of nature by a trick. The
spirit of the world, the great calm presence of the
creator, comes not forth to the sorceries of opium
or of wine. The sublime vision comes to the pure
and simple soul in a clean and chaste body. That
is not an inspiration which we owe to narcotics,
but some counterfeit excitement and fury. Milton
says, that the lyric poet may drink wine and live
generously, but the epic poet, he who shall sing
of the gods, and their descent unto men, must
drink water out of a wooden bowl. For poetry
is not c Devil's wine,' but God's wine. It is with
this as it is with toys. We fill the hands and nur-
series of our children with all manner of dolls,
drums, and horses, withdrawing their eyes from
the plain face and sufficing objects of nature, the
sun, and moon, the animals, the water, and stones,
which should be their toys. So the poet's habit
of living should be set on a key so low and plain,
that the common influences should delight him.
His cheerfulness should be the gift of the sun*

THE POET. 29

light ; the air should suffice for his inspiration,
arid he should be tipsy with water. That spirit
which suffices quiet hearts, which seems to come
forth to such from every dry knoll of sere grass,
from every pine-stump, and half-imbedded stone,
on which the dull March sun shines, comes forth
to the poor and hungry, and such as are of simple
taste. If thou fill thy brain with Boston and
4New York, with fashion and covetousness, and
wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with wine and
French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wis-
dom in the lonely waste of the pine woods.

If the imagination intoxicates the poet, it is not
inactive in other men. The metamorphosis excites
in the beholder an emotion of joy. The use of
symbols has a certain power of emancipation and
exhilaration for all men. We seem to be touched
by a wand, which makes us dance and run abouf
happily, like children. We are like persons who
come out of a cave or cellar into the open air.
This is the effect on us of tropes, fables, oracles,
and all poetic forms. Poets are thus liberating
gods. Men have really got a new sense, and
found within their world, another world, or nest
of worlds ; for, the metamorphosis once seen, we
divine that it does not stop. I will not now con-
sider how much this makes the charm of algebra
and the mathematics, which also have their tropes,
but it is felt in every definition ; as, when Aris-
totle defines space to be an immovable vessel, in
which things are contained ; — or, when Plato de-
fines a line to be a flowing point : or, figure to be

30 ESSAY I.

a bound of solid ; and many the like. What a
joyful sense of freedom we have, when Vitruvius
announces the old opinion of artists, that no
architect can build any house well, who does not
know something of anatomy. When Socrates, in
Charmides, tells us that the soul is cured of its
maladies by certain incantations, aud that these
incantations are beautiful reasons, from which
temperance is generated in souls ; when Plato calls
the world an animal ; and Timseus affirms that the
plants also are animals ; or affirms a man to be a
heavenly tree, growing with his root, which is his
head, upward ; and, as George Chapman, follow-
ing him, writes, —

"So in our tree of man, whose nervie root
Springs in his top ; "

when Orpheus speaks of hoariness as " that white
flower which marks extreme old age ; " when
Proclus calls the universe the statue of the intel-
lect ; when Chaucer, in his praise of 4 Gentilesse,?
compares good blood in mean condition to fire,
which, though carried to the darkest house be-
twixt this and the mount of Caucasus, will yet
hold its natural office, and burn as bright as if
twenty thousand men did it behold ; when John
saw, in the apocalypse, the ruin of the world
through evil, and the stars fall from heaven, as the
figtree casteth her untimely fruit ; when jEsop
reports the whole catalogue of common daily re-
lations through the masquerade of birds and
beasts ; — we take the cheerful hint of the immor-

THE POET. 31

tality of our essence, and its versatile habit and
escapes, as when the gypsies say, " it is in vain to
hang them, they cannot die."

The poets are thus liberating gods. The ancient
British bards had for the title of their order,
u Those who are free throughout the world."
They are free, and they make free. An imagina-
tive book renders us much more service at first, by
stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward,
when we arrive at the precise sense of the author.
I think nothing is of any value in books, except-
ing the transcendental and extraordinary. If a
man is inflamed and carried away by his thought,
to that degree that he forgets the authors and the
public, and heeds only this one dream, which holds
him like an insanity, let me read his paper, and
you may have all the arguments and histories and
criticism. All the value which attaches to Pytha-
goras, Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, Cardan,
Kepler, Swedenborg, Schelling, Oken, or any other
who introduces questionable facts into his cos-
mogony, as angels, devils, magic, astrology, palm-
istry, mesmerism, and so on, is the certificate we
have of departure from routine, and that here is
a new witness. That also is the best success in
conversation, the magic of liberty, which puts the
world, like a ball, in our hands. How cheap even
the liberty then seems ; how mean to study, when
an emotion communicates to the intellect the
power to sap and upheave nature ; how great the
perspective ! nations, times, systems, enter and
disappear, like threads in tapestry of large figure

32 ESSAY I.

and many colors ; dream delivers us to dream*
and, while the drunkenness lasts, we will sell our
bed, our philosophy, our religion, in our opulence.

There is good reason why we should prize this
liberation. The fate of the poor shepherd, who,
blinded and lost in the snow-storm, perishes in a
drift within a few feet of his cottage door, is an
emblem of the state of man. On the brink of the
waters of life and truth, we are miserably dying.
The inaccessibleness of every thought but that
we are in, is wonderful. What if you come near
to it, — you are as remote, when you are nearest,
as when you are farthest. Every thought is also
a prison ; every heaven is also a prison. There-
fore we love the poet, the inventor, who in any
form, whether in an ode, or in an action, or in
looks and behavior, has yielded us a new thought.
He unlocks our chains, and admits us to anew scene.

This emancipation is dear to all men, and the
power to impart it, as it must come from greater
depth and scope of thought, is a measure of intel-
lect. Therefore all books of the imagination
endure, all which ascend to that truth, that the
writer sees nature beneath him, and uses it as his
exponent. Every verse or sentence, possessing
this virtue, will take care of its own immortality.
The religions of the world are the ejaculations of
a few imaginative men.

But the quality of the imagination is to flow,
and not to freeze. The poet did not stop at the
color, or the form, but read their meaning ; neither
may he rest in this meaning, but he makes the

THE POET. 33

same objects exponents of his new thought. Here
is the difference betwixt the poet and the mystic,
that the last nails a symbol to one sense, which
was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes
old and false. For all symbols are fluxional ; all
language is vehicular and transitive, and is good,
as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as
farms and houses are, for homestead. Mysticism
consists in the mistake of an accidental and indi-
vidual symbol for an universal one. The morning-
redness happens to be the favorite meteor to the
eyes of Jacob Behmen, and comes to stand to him
for truth and faith ; and he believes should stand
for the same realities to every reader. But the
first reader prefers as naturally the symbol of a
mother and child, or a gardener and his bulb, or a
jeweller polishing a gem. Either of these, or of
a myriad more, are equally good to the person to
whom they are significant. Only they must be
held lightly, and be very willingly translated into
the equivalent terms which others use. And the
mystic must be steadily told, — All that you say is
just as true without the tedious use of that symbol
as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead
of this trite rhetoric, — universal signs, instead of
these village symbols, — and we shall both be gain-
ers. The history of hierarchies seems to show,
that all religious error consisted in making the
symbol too stark and solid, and, at last, nothing
but an excess of the organ of language.

Swedenborg, of all men in the recent ages,
stands eminently for the translator of nature into

B

34 ESSAY I.

thought. I do not know the man in history to
whom things stood so uniformly for words. Be-
fore him the metamorphosis continually plays.
Everything on which his eye rests, obeys the im-
pulses of moral nature. The figs become grapes
whilst he eats them. When some of his angels
affirmed a truth, the laurel twig which they held
blossomed in their hands. The noise which, at a
distance, appeared like gnashing and thumping,
on coming nearer was found to be the voice of
disputants. The men, in one of his visions, seen
in heavenly light, appeared like dragons, and
seemed in darkness ; but, to each other, they ap-
peared as men, and, when the light from heaven
shone into their cabin, they complained of the
darkness, and were compelled to shut the window
that they might see.

There was this perception in him, which makes
the poet or seer an object of awe and terror,
namely, that the same man, or society of men,
may wear one aspect to themselves and their com-
panions, and a different aspect to higher intelli-
gences. Certain priests, whom he describes as
conversing very learnedly together, appeared tc
the children, who were at some distance, like dead
horses: and many the like misappearances. And
instantly the mind inquires, whether these fishes
under the bridge, yonder oxen in the pasture,
those dogs in the yard, are immutably fishes,
oxen, and dogs, or only so appear to me, and per-
chance to themselves appear upright men ; and
whether I appear as a man to ail eyes. The

THE POET. 35

Branrins and Pythagoras propounded the same
question, and if any poet has witnessed the trans-
formation, he doubtless found it in harmony with
various experiences. We have all seen changes
as considerable in wheat and caterpillars. He is
the poet, and shall draw us with love and terror,
who sees, through the flowing vest, the firm na-
ture, and can declare it.

I look in vain for the poet whom I describe.
We do not, with sufficient plainness, or sufficient
profoundness, address ourselves to life, nor dare
we chaunt our own times and social circumstance.
If we filled the day with bravery, we should not
shrink from celebrating it. Time and nature
yield us many gifts, but not yet the timely man,
the new religion, the reconciler, whom all things
await. Dante's praise is, that he dared to write
his autobiography in colossal cipher, or into uni-
versality. We have yet had no genius in Amer-
ica, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of
our incomparable materials, and saw, in the bar-
barism and materialism of the times, another
carnival of the same gods whose picture he so
much admires in Homer; then in the middle age,
then in Calvinism. Banks and tariffs, the news-
paper and caucus, methodism and unitarianism,
are flat and dull to dull people, but rest on the
same foundations of wonder as the town of Troy,
and the temple of Delphos, and are as swiftly
passing away. Our log-rolling, our stumps and
their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and
Indians, our boats, and our repudiations, the

36 ESSAY I.

wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest
men, the northern trade, the southern planting,
the western clearing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet
unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes ; its
ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it
will not wait long for metres. If I have not
found that excellent combination of gifts in my
countrymen which I seek, neither could I aid my-
self to fix the idea of the poet by reading now
and then in Chalmers's collection of five centuries
of English poets. These are wits, more than
poets, though there have been poets among them.
But when we adhere to the ideal of the poet, we
have our difficulties even with Milton and Homer.
Milton is too literary, and Homer too literal and
historical.

But I am not wise enough for a national criti-
cism, and must use the old largeness a little
longer, to discharge my errand from the muse to
the poet concerning his art.

Art is the path of the creator to his work. The
paths, or methods, are ideal and eternal, though
few men ever see them, not the artist himself for
years, or for a lifetime, unless he come into the
conditions. The painter, the sculptor, the com-
poser, the epic rhapsodist, the orator, all partake
one desire, namely, to express themselves sym-
metrically and abundantly, not dwaifLshly and
fragmentary. They found or put themselves in
certain conditions, as, the painter and sculptor
before some impressive human figures ; the orator,
into the assembly of the people ; and the others.

THE POET. 37

in such scenes as each has found exciting to his
intellect ; and each presently feels the new desire.
He hears a voice, he sees a beckoning. Then he
is apprised, with wonder, what herds of demons
hem him in. He can no more rest ; he sa}7s, with
the old painter, " By God, it is in me, and must
go forth of me." He pursues a beauty, half seen.
which flies before him. The poet pours out verses
in every solitude. Most of the things he says are
conventional, no doubt ; but by and by he says
something which is original and beautiful. That
charms him. He would say nothing else but such
things. In our way of talking, we say, i That is
yours, this is mine ; ' but the poet knows well that
it is not his ; that it is as strange and beautiful to
him as to you ; he would fain hear the like elo-
quence at length. Once having tasted this im-
mortal ichor, he cannot have enough of it, and, as
an admirable creative power exists in these intel-
lections, it is of the last importance that these
things get spoken. What a little of all we know
is said ! What drops of all the sea of our science
are baled up ! and by what accident it is that these
are exposed, when so many secrets sleep in nature !
Hence the necessity of speech and song; hence
these throbs and heart-beatings in the orator, at the
door of the assembly, to the end, namely, that
thought may be ejaculated as Logos, or Word.

Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say, • It is in
me, and shall out/ Stand there, baulked and
dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and
hooted, stand and strive, until, at last, rage draw

38 ESSAY I.

out of thee that dream-power which every night
shows thee is thine own ; a power transcending
all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a
man is the conductor of the whole river of elec-
tricity. Nothing walks, or creeps, or grows, or
exists, which must not in turn arise and walk be-
fore him as exponent of his meaning. Comes he
to that power, his genius is no longer exhaustible.
All the creatures, by pairs and by tribes, pour into
his mind as into a Noah's ark, to come forth again
to people a new world. This is like the stock of
air for our respiration, or for the combustion of
our fireplace, not a measure of gallons, but the
entire atmosphere if wanted. And therefore the
rich poets, as Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and
Raphael, have obviously no limits to their works,
except the limits of their lifetime, and resemble a
mirror carried through the street, ready to render
an image of every created thing.

O poet ! a new nobility is conferred in groves
xnd pastures, and not in castles, or by the sword-
blade, any longer. The conditions are hard, but
equal. Thou shalt leave the world, and know the
muse only. Thou shalt not know any longer the
times, customs, graces, politics, or opinions of men,
but shalt take all from the muse. For the time of
towns is tolled from the world by funeral chimes,
but in nature the universal hours are counted by
succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by
growth of joy on joy. God wills also that thou
abdicate a manifold and duplex life, and that thou
be content that others speak for thee. Others shall

THE POET. 39

be thy gentlemen, and shall represent all courtesy
and worldly life for thee ; others shall do the great
and resounding actions also. Thou shalt lie close
hid with nature, and canst not be afforded to the
Capitol or the Exchange. The world is full of
renunciations and appenticeships, and this is thine :
thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a long
season. This is the screen and sheath in which
Pan has protected his well-beloved flower, and
thou shalt be known only to thine own, and they
shall console thee with tenderest love. And thou
shalt not be able to rehearse the names of thy
friends in thy verse, for an old shame before the
holy ideal. And this is the reward : that the
ideal shall be real to thee, and the impressions of
the actual world shall fall like summer rain, copi-
ous, but not troublesome, to thy invulnerable
essence. Thou shalt have the whole land for thy
park and manor, the sea for thy bath and naviga-
tion, without tax and without envy ; the woods and
the rivers thou shalt own ; and thou shalt possess
that wherein others are only tenants and boarders.
Thou true land-lord ! sea-lord ! air-lord ! Wher-
ever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wher-
ever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the
blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars,
wherever are forms with transparent boundaries,
wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever
is danger, and awe, and love, there is Beauty, plen-
teous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou
shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be
^ble to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.

EXPERIENCE.

The lords of life, the lords of Ufa,

I saw them pass,

In their own guise,

Like and unlike,

Portly and grim,

Use and Surprise,

Surface and Dream,

Succession swift, and spectral Wrong,

Temperament without a tongue,

And the inventor of the game

Omnipresent without name ; —

Some to see, some to be guessed,

They marched from east to west :

Little man, least of all,

Among the legs of his guardians tall,

Walked about with puzzled look : —

Him by the hand dear nature took ;

Dearest nature, strong and kind,

Whispered, " Darling, never mind!

To-morrow they will wear another face,

The founder thou ! these are thy race! "

EXPERIENCE.

Where do we find ourselves ? In a series of
which we do not know the extremes, and believe that
it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair ;
there are stairs below us, which we seem to have
ascended ; there are stairs above us, many a one,
which go upward and out of sight. But the
Genius which, according to the old belief, stands
at the door by which we enter, and gives us the
lethe to drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed
the cup too strongly, and we cannot shake off the
lethargy now at noonday. Sleep lingers all our
lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in
the boughs of the fir-tree. All things swim and
glitter. Our life is not so much threatened as
our perception. Ghost-like we glide through
nature, and should not know our place again.
Did our birth fall in some fit of indigence and
frugality in nature, that she was so sparing of her
fire and so liberal of her earth, that it appears to
us that we lack the affirmative principle, and
though we have health and reason, yet we have no
superfluity of spirit for new creation ? We have

(43)

44 ESS A Y II EXPERIENCE.

enough to live and bring the year about, but not
an ounce to impart or to invest. Ah that our
Genius were a little more of a genius ! We are
like millers on the lower levels of a stream,
when the factories above them have exhausted the
water. We too fancy that the uDper people must
have raised their dams.

If any of us knew what we were doing, or where
we are going, then when we think we best know !
We do not know to-day whether we are busy or
idle. In times when we thought ourselves indo-
lent, we have afterwards discovered, that much
was accomplished, and much was begun in us.
All our days are so unprofitable while they pass,
that 'tis wonderful where or when we ever got
anything of this which we call wisdom, poetry,
virtue. We never got it on any dated calendar
day. Some heavenly days must have been inter-
calated somewhere, like those that Hermes won
with dice of the Moon, that Osiris might be
born. It is said, all martyrdoms looked mean when
they were suffered. Every ship is a romantic object,
except that we sail in. Embark, and the romance
quits our vessel, and hangs on every other sail in
the horizon. Our life looks trivial, and we shun
to record it. Men seem to have learned of the
horizon the art of perpetual retreating and refer-
ence. l Yonder uplands are rich pasturage, and
my neighbor has fertile meadow, but my field,*
says the querulous farmer, * only holds the world
together.' I quote another man's saying ; unluck-
ily, that other withdraws himself in the same way,

ELUSION. 45

and quotes me. " 'Tisthe trick of nature thus to de-
grade to-day ; a good deal of buzz, and somewhere
a result slipped magically in. Every roof is agree-
able to the eye, until it is lifted ; then we find trag-
edy and moaning women, and hard-eyed husbands,
and deluges of lethe, and the men ask, 4 What's
the news? ' as if the old were so bad. How many
individuals can we count in society? how many
actions? how many opinions? So much of our
time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much
retrospect, that the pith of each man's genius con-
tracts itself to a very few hours. The history of
literature — take the net result of Tiraboschi, War-
ton, or Schlegel, — is a sum of very few ideas, and of
very few original tales, — all the rest being variation
of these. So in this great societj^ wide lying around
us, a critical analysis would find very few spon-
taneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross
sense. There are even few opinions, and these seem
organic in the speakers, and do not disturb the
universal necessity.

What opium is instilled into all disaster ! It
shows formidable as we approach it, but there is at
last no rough rasping friction, but the most slip-
pery sliding surfaces. We fall soft on a thought-
Ate Dea is gentle,

"Over men's heads walking aloft,
With tender feet treadiDg so soft."

People grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is
not half so bad with them as they say. There are
moods in which we court suffering, in the hope

46 ESS A Y II. EXPERIENCE

that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp
peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be
scene -painting and counterfeit. The only thing
grief has taught me, is to know how shallow it is.
That, like all the rest, plays about the surface, and
never introduces me into the reality, for contact
with which, we would even pay the costly price
of sons and lovers. Was it Boscovich who found
out that bodies never come in contact? Well,
souls never touch their objects. An innavigable
sea washes with silent waves between us and the
things we aim at and converse with. Grief too
will make us idealists. In the death of my son,
now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost
a beautiful estate, — no more. I cannot get it
nearer to me. If to-morrow I should be informed
of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss
of my property would be a great inconvenience to
me, perhaps, for many years ; but it would leave
me as it found me, — neither better nor worse. So
is it with this calamity : it does not touch me :
something which I fancied was a part of me, which
could not be torn away without tearing me, nor
enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me,
and leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve
that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one
step into real nature. The Indian who was laid
under a curse, that the wind should not blow on
him, nor water flow to him, nor fire burn him, is a
type of us all. The dearest events are summer-
rain, and we the Para coats that shed every drop.
Nothing is left us now but death. We look to

TEMPERAMENT. 47

that with a grim satisfaction, saying, there at least
is reality that will not dodge us.

I take this evanescence and lubricity of all ob-
jects, which lets them slip through our fingers
then when we clutch hardest, to be the most un-
handsome part of our condition. Nature does not
like to be observed, and likes that we should be
her fools and playmates. We may have the sphere
for our cricket-ball, but not a berry for our philos-
ophy. Direct strokes she never gave us power to
make ; all our blows glance, all our hits are acci-
dents. Our relations to each other are oblique
and casual.

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no
end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a
string of beads, and as we pass through them,
they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint
the world their own hue, and each shows only
what lies in its focus. From the mountain you
see the mountain. We animate what we can,
and we see only what we animate. Nature and
books belong to the eyes that see them. It de-
pends on the mood of the man, whether he shall
see the sunset or the fine poem. There are always
sunsets, and there is always genius ; but only a
few hours so serene that we can relish nature or
criticism. The more or less depends on structure
or temperament. Temperament is the iron wire
on which the beads are strung. Of what use is
fortune or talent to a cold and defective nature ?
Who cares what sensibility or discrimination a

48 ESSA Y II EXPERIENCE.

man has at some time shown, if he falls asleep in
his chair ? or if he laugh and giggle ? or if he apol-
ogize ? or is affected with egotism ? or thinks of
his dollar? or cannot go by food ? or has gotten a
child in his boyhood ? Of what use is genius, if
the organ is too convex or too concave, and can-
not find a focal distance within the actual horizon
of human life ? Of what use, if the brain is too
cold or too hot, and the man does not care enough
for results, to stimulate him to experiment, and
hold him up in it ? or if the web is too finely
woven, too irritable by pleasure and pain, so that
life stagnates from too much reception, without
due outlet? Of what use to make heroic vows of
amendment, if the same old law-breaker is to keep
them ? What cheer can the religious sentiment
yield, when that is suspected to be secretly de-
pendent on the seasons of the year, and the state
of the blood ? I knew a witty physician who
found theology in the biliary duct, and used to
affirm that if there was disease in the liver, the
man became a Calvinist, and if that organ was
sound, he became a Unitarian. Very mortifying
is the reluctant experience that some unfriendly
excess or imbecility neutralizes the promise of
genius. We see young men who owe us a new
world, so readily and lavishly they promise, but
they never acquit the debt ; they die young and
dodge the account : or if they live, they lose them-
selves in the crowd.

Temperament also enters fully into the system
of illusions, and shuts us in a prison of glass

TEMPERAMENT. 49

which, we cannot see. There is an optical illusion
about every person we meet. In truth, they are
all creatures of given temperament, which will ap-
pear in a given character, whose boundaries they
will never pass : but we look at them, the}r seem
alive, and we presume there is impulse in them.
In the moment it seems impulse ; in the year, in
the lifetime, it turns out to be a certain uniform1
tune which the revolving barrel of the music-box
must play. Men resist the conclusion in the morn-
ing, but adopt it as the evening wears on, that
temper prevails over everything of time, place,
and condition, and is inconsumable in the flames
of religion. Some modifications the moral senti-
ment avails to impose, but the individual texture
holds its dominion, if not to bias the moral judg-
ments, yet to fix the measure of activity and of
enjoyment.

I thus express the law as it is read from the
platform of ordinary life, but must not leave it
without noticing the capital exception. For tem-
perament is a power which no man willingly hears
any one praise but himself. On the platform of
physics, we cannot resist the contracting influ-
ences of so-called science. Temperament puts all
divinity to rout. I know the mental proclivity of
physicians. I hear the chuckle of the phrenolo-
gists. Theoretic kidnappers and slave-drivers,
they esteem each man the victim of another, who
winds- him round his finger by knowing the law
of his being, and by such cheap signboards as the
color of his beard, or the slope of his occiput,

25

50 ESSA Y II. EXPERIENCE.

reads the inventory of his fortunes and character.
The grossest ignorance does not disgust like this
impudent knowingness. The physicians say, they
are not materialists ; but they are : — Spirit is mat-
ter reduced to an extreme thinness: O so thin ! —
But the definition of spiritual should be, that which
is its own evidence. What notions do they attach
to love ! what to religion ! One would not wil-
lingly pronounce these words in their hearing, and
give them the occasion to profane them. I saw a
gracious gentleman who adapts his conversation
to the form of the head of the man he talks with !
I had fancied that the value of life lay in its in-
scrutable possibilities ; in the fact that I never
know, in addressing myself to a new individual,
what may befall me. I carry the keys of imT cas-
tle in my hand, read}^ to throw them at the feet
of my lord, whenever and in what disguise soever
he shall appear. I know he is in the neighbor-
hood hidden among vagabonds. Shall I preclude
my future, b}r taking a high seat, and kindly
adapting my conversation to the shape of heads?
When I come to that, the doctors shall buy me
for a cent. 4 But, sir, medical history ; the re-
port to the Institute; the proven facts!' — I
distrust the facts and the inferences. Tempera-
ment is the veto or limitation-power in the consti-
tution, very justly applied to restrain an opposite
excess in the constitution, but absurdly offered as
a bar to original equity. When virtue is in pres-
ence, all subordinate powers sleep. On its own
level, or in view of nature, temperament is final.

SUCCESSION. 5 1

I see not, if one be once caught in this trap of
so-called sciences, any escape for the man from
the links of the chain of physical necessity. Given
such an embryo, such a history must follow. On
this platform, one lives in a sty of sensualism, and
would soon come to suicide. But it is impossible
that the creative power should exclude itselfc
Into every intelligence there is a door which is
never closed, through which the creator passes.
The intellect, seeker of absolute truth, or the
heart, lover of absolute good, intervenes for our
succor, and at one whisper of these high powers,
we awake from ineffectual struggles with this
nightmare. We hurl it into its own hell, and can-
not again contract ourselves to so base a state.

The secret of the illusoriness is in the necessity
of a succession of moods or objects. Gladly we
would anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand.
This onward trick of nature is too strong for us :
Pero si muove. When, at night, I look at the
moon and stars, I seem stationary, and they to
hurry. Our love of the real draws us to perma-
nence, but health of body consists in circulation,
and sanity of mind in variety or facility of asso-
ciation. We need change of objects. Dedication,
to one thought is quickly odious. We house with
the insane, and must humor them ; then conver-
sation dies out. Once I took such delight in Mon-
taigne, that I though* I should not need any other
book ; before that, in Shakespeare ; then in Plu-
tarch; then in Plotinus; at one time in Bacon ,-

$2 ESS A Y II. EXPERIENCE.

afterwards in Goethe ; even in Bettine ; but now I
turn the pages of either of them languidly, whilst
I still cherish their genius. So with pictures ;
each will bear an emphasis of attention once,
which it cannot retain, though we fain would con-
tinue to be pleased in that manner. How strongly
I have felt of pictures, that when you have seen
one well, you must take your leave of it; you
shall never see it again. I have had good lessons
from pictures, which I have since seen without
emotion or remark. A deduction must be made
from the opinion, which even the wise express of
a new book or occurrence. Their opinion gives
me tidings of their mood, and some vague guess
at the new fact, but is nowise to be trusted as the
lasting relation between that intellect and that
thing. The child asks, ' Mamma, why don't I
like the story as well as when you told it me yes-
terday?' Alas, child, it is even so with the old-
est cherubim of knowledge. But will it answer
thy question to say, Because thou wert born to a
whole, and this story is a particular? The reason
of the pain this discovery causes us (and we make
it late in respect to works of art and intellect), is
the plaint of tragedy which murmurs from it in
regard to persons, to friendship and love.

That immobility and absence of elasticity which
we find in the arts, we find with more pain in the
artist. There is no power of expansion in men.
Our friends early appear to us as representatives
of certain ideas, which they never pass or exceed.
They stand on the brink of the ocean of thought

succession. 53

and power, but they never take the single step
that would bring them there. A man is like a
bit of Labrador spar, which has no lustre as you
turn it in your hand, until you come to a particu-
lar angle ; then it shows deep and beautiful
colors. There is no adaptation or universal appli-
cability in men, but each has his special talent,
and the mastery of successful men consists in
adroitly keeping themselves where and when that
turn shall be oftenest to be practiced. We do
what we must, and call it by the best names we
can, and would fain have the praise of having in-
tended the result which ensues. I cannot recall
any form of man who is not superfluous sometimes.
But is not this pitiful? Life is not worth the tak-
ing, to do tricks in.

Of course, it needs the whole society, to give
the symmetry we seek. The parti-colored wheel
must revolve very fast to appear white. Some-
thing is learned too by conversing with so much
folly and defect. In fine, whoever loses, we are
always of the gaining party. Divinity is behind our
failures and follies also. The plays of children
are nonsense, but very educative nonsense. So it
is with the largest and solemnest things, with
commerce, government, church, marriage, and so
with the history of every man's bread, and the
ways by which he is to come by it. Like a bird
which alights nowhere, but hops perpetually from
bough to bough, is the Power which abides in no
man and in no woman, but for a moment speaks

54 ESSA Y II. EXPERIENCE.

from this one, and for another moment from that
one.

But what help from these fineries or pedan-
tries? What help from thought? Life is not dia-
lectics. We, I think, in these times, have had
lessons enough of the futility of criticism. Our
young people have thought and written much on
labor and reform, and for all that they have writ-
ten, neither the world nor themselves have got
on a step. Intellectual tasting of life will not
supersede muscular activity. If a man should
consider the nicety of the passage of a piece of
bread down his throat, he would starve. At Ed-
ucation-Farm, the noblest theory of life sat on
the noblest figures of young men and maidens,
quite powerless and melancholy. It would not
rake or pitch a ton of hay : it would not rub
down a horse ; and the men and maidens it left
pale and hungry. A political orator wittily com-
pared our party promises to western roads, which
opened stately enough, with planted trees on
either side, to tempt the traveller, but soon became
narrow and narrower, and ended in a squirrel-
track, and ran up a tree. So does culture with
us ; it ends in head-ache. Unspeakably sad and
barren does life look to those, who a few months
ago were dazzled with the splendor of the promise
of the times. " There is now no longer any
right course of action, nor any self-devotion left
among the Iranis." Objections and criticism we
have had our fill of. There are objections to every

SURFACE. 55

course of life and action, and the practical wis-
dom infers an indifferency, from the omnipresence
of objection. The whole frame of things
preaches indifferency. Do not craze yourself
with thinking, but go about your business any-
where. Life is not intellectual or critical, but
sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed people
who can enjoy what they find, without question.
Nature hates peeping, and our mothers speak her
very sense when they say, " Children, eat your
victuals, and say no more of it." To fill the hour,
— that is happiness; to fill the hour and leave no
crevice for a repentance or an approval. We live
amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate
well on them. Under the oldest mouldiest conven-
tions, a man of native force prospers just as well as
in the newest world, and that by skill of handling
and treatment. He can take hold anywhere. Life
itself is a mixture of power and form, and will not
bear the least excess of either. To finish the moment,
to find the journey's end in every step of the road,
to live the greatest number of good hours, is wis-
dom. It is not the part of men, but of fanatics,
or of mathematicians, if you will, to say, that, the
shortness of life considered, it is not worth caring
whether for so short a duration we were sprawling
in want, or sitting high. Since our office is with
moments, let us husband them. Five minutes of
to-day are worth as much to me as five minutes
in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and
wise, and our own, to-day. Let us treat the men
and women well : treat them as if they were real :

56 ESSAY II. EXPERIENCE.

perhaps they are. Men live in their fancy, like
drunkards whose hands are too soft and tremu-
lous for successful labor. It is a tempest of fan-
cies, and the only ballast I know is a respect to
the present hour. Without any shadow of doubt,
amidst this vertigo of shows and politics, I settle
myself ever the firmer in the creed, that we should
not postpone and refer and wish, but do broad
justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal
with, accepting our actual companions and circum-
stances, however humble or odious, as the mystic
officials to whom the universe has delegated its
whole pleasure for us. If these are mean and
malignant, their contentment, which is the last
victory of justice, is a more satisfying echo to the
heart than the voice of poets and the casual sym-
pathy of admirable persons. I think that how-
ever a thoughtful man may suffer from the defects
and absurdities of his company, he cannot without
affectation deny to any set of men and women
a sensibility to extraordinar}^ merit. The coarse
and frivolous have an instinct of superiority, if
they have not a sympathy, and honor it in their
blind capricious way with sincere homage.

The fine young people despise life, but in me,
and in such as with me are free from dyspepsia,
and to whom a day is a sound and solid good,
it is a great excess of politeness to look scorn-
ful and to cry for company. I am grown by
sympathy a little eager and sentimental, but
leave me alone, and I should relish every hour
and what it brought me, the potluck of the day.

SURFACE. 57

as heartily as the oldest gossip in the bar-room. I
am thankful for small mercies. I compared notes
with one of my friends who expects everything
of the universe, and is disappointed when any-
thing is less than the best, and I found that I
begin at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and
am always full of thanks for moderate goods. I
accept the clangor and jangle of contrary tenden-
cies. I find my account in sots and bores also.
They give a reality to the circumjacent picture^
which such a vanishing meteorous appearance can
ill spare. In the morning I awake, and find the
old world, wife, babes, and mother, Concord and
Boston, the clear old spiritual world, and even the
dear old devil not far off. If we will take the
good we find, asking no questions, we shall have
heaping measures. The great gifts are not got
by analysis. Everything good is on the highway.
The middle region of our being is the temperate
zone. We may climb into the thin and cold
realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or
sink into that of sensation. Between these ex-
tremes is the equator of life, of thought, of spirit,
of poetry, — a narrow belt. Moreover, in popular
experience, everything good is on the highway.
A collector peeps into all the picture -shops of
Europe for a landscape of Poussin, a crayon-
sketch of Salvator ; but the Transfiguration, the
Last Judgment, the Communion of St. Jerome, and
what are as transcendent as these, are on the
walls of the Vatican, the Uffizi, or the Louvre,
where every footman may see them ; to say noth-

§8 ESSAY II. EXPERIENCE.

ing of nature's pictures in every street, of sunsets
and sunrises every da}', and the sculpture of the
human body never absent. A collector recently
bought at public auction, in London, for one
hundred and fifty-seven guineas, an autograph of
Shakespeare : but for nothing a school-boy can
read Hamlet, and can detect secrets of highest
concernment yet unpublished therein. I think I
will never read any but the commonest books, —
the Bible, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton.
Then we are impatient of so public a life and
planet, and run hither and thither for nooks and
secrets. The imagination delights in the wood-
craft of Indians, trappers, and bee -hunters. We
fancy that we are strangers, and not so intimately
domesticated in the planet as the wild man, and
the wild beast and bird. But the exclusion
reaches them also ; reaches the climbing, flying,
gliding, feathered and four-footed man. Fox and
woodchuck, hawk and snipe, and bittern, when
nearly seen, have no more root in the deep world
than man, and are just such superficial tenants of
the globe. Then the new molecular philosophy
shows astronomical interspaces betwixt atom and
atom, shows that the world is all outside : it has
no inside.

The mid-world is best. Nature, as we know
her, is no saint. The lights of the church, the
ascetics, Gentoos and Grahamites, she does not
distinguish by any favor. She comes eating and
drinking and sinning. Her darlings, the great,
the strong, the beautiful, are not children of our

SURFACE. 59

law, do not come out of the Sunday School, nor
weigh their food, nor punctually keep the com-
mandments. If we will be strong with her
strength, we must not harbor such disconsolate con-
sciences, borrowed too from the consciences of other
nations. We must set up the strong present tense
against all the rumors of wrath, past or to come.
So many things are unsettled which it is of the
first importance to settle, — and, pending their set-
tlement, we will do as we do. Whilst the debate
goes forward on the equity of commerce, and will
not be closed for a century or two, New and Old
England may keep shop. Law of copyright and
international copyright is to be discussed, and, in
the interim, we will sell our books for the most
we can. Expediency of literature, reason of lit-
erature, lawfulness of writing down a thought, is
questioned; much is to say on both sides, and,
while the fight waxes hot, thou, dearest scholar,
stick to thy foolish task, add a line every hour,
and between whiles add a line. Rignt to
hold land, right of property, is disputed, and the
conventions convene, and before the vote is taken,
dig away in your garden, and spend your earn-
ings as a waif or godsend to all serene and
beautiful purposes. Life itself is a bubble and a
skepticism, and a sleep within a sleep. Grant it,
and as much more as they will, — but thou, God's
darling ! heed thy private dream : thou wilt not
be missed in the scorning and skepticism : there
are enough of them : stay there in thy closet, and
toil, until the rest are agreed what to do about it.

6o ESS A Y //. EXPERIENCE.

Thy sickness, they say, and thy puny habit, re-
quire that thou do this or avoid that, but know
that thy life is a flitting state, a tent for a night,
and do thou, sick or well, finish that stint. Thou
art sick, but shalt not be worse, and the universe,
which holds thee dear, shall be the better.

Human life is made up of the two elements,
power and form, and the proportion must be in
variably kept, if we would have it sweet and
sound. Each of these elements in excess makes
a mischief as hurtful as its defect. Everything
runs to excess : every good quality is noxious, if
unmixed, and, to carry the danger to the edge of
ruin, nature causes each man's peculiarity to sup-
erabouncl. Here, among the farms, we adduce the
scholars as examples of this treachery. They are
nature's victims of expression. You who see the
artist, the orator, the poet, too near, and find their
life no more excellent than that of mechanics or
farmers, and themselves victims of partiality, very
hollow and haggard, and pronounce them failures,
— not heroes, but quacks, — conclude very reason-
ably, that these arts are not for man, but are
disease. Yet nature will not bear you out. Ir-
resistible nature made men such, and makes
legions more of such, every day. You love the
boy reading in a book, gazing at a drawing, or a
cast: yet what are these millions who read and
behold, but incipient writers and sculptors? Adda
little more of that quality which now reads and
sees, and they will seize the pen and chisel. And
if one remembers how innocently he began to be

SURPRISE. 6 1

an artist, he perceives that nature joined with his
enemy. A man is a golden impossibility. The
line he must walk is a hair's breadth. The wise
through excess of wisdom is made a fool.

How easily, if fate would suffer it, we might
keep forever these beautiful limits, and adjust our-
selves, ouce for all, to the perfect calculation of
the kingdom of known cause and effect. In the
street and in the newspapers, life appears so plain
a business, that manly resolution and adherence to
the multiplication-table through all weathers will
insure success. But ah ! presently comes a day,
or is it only a half-hour, with its angel-whispering,
— which discomfits the conclusions of nations and
of years ! To-morrow again, everything looks real
and angular, the habitual standards are reinstated,
common sense is as rare as genius, — is the basis
of genius, and experience is hands and feet to
every enterprise; — and yet, he who should do his
business on this understanding would be quickly
bankrupt. Power keeps quite another road than
the turnpikes of choice and will, namely, the sub-
terranean and invisible tunnels and channels of
life. It is ridiculous that we are diplomatists, and
doctors, and considerate people : there are no
dupes like these. Life is a series of surprises, and
would not be worth taking or keeping, if it were
not. God delights to isolate us every day, and
hide from us the past and the future. We would
look about us, but with grand politeness he draws
down before us an impenetrable screen of purest

62 ESSAY II. EXPERIENCE.

sky, and another behind us of purest sky. ' You
will not remember,' he seems to say, * and you will
not expect.' All good conversation, manners, and
action, come from a spontaneity which forgets
usages, and makes the moment great. Nature
hates calculators ; her methods are saltatory and
impulsive. Man lives by pulses ; our organic
movements are such; and the chemical and
ethereal agents are undulatory and alternate ; and
the mind goes antagonizing on, and never prospers
but by fits. We thrive by casualties. Our chief
experiences have been casual. The most attrac-
tive class of people are those who are powerful
obliquely, and not by the direct stroke : men of
genius, but not yet accredited : one gets the cheer of
vheir light, without paying too great a tax. Theirs
is the beauty of the bird, or the morning light,
and not of art. In the thought of genius there is
always a surprise ; and the moral sentiment is well
called " the newness," for it is never other ; as
new to the oldest intelligence as to the young
child, — " the kingdom that cometh without ob-
servation." In like manner, for practical success,
there must not be too much design. A man will
not be observed in doing that which he can do
best. There is a certain magic about his proper-
est action, which stupefies your powers of obser-
vation, so that though it is done before you, you
wist not of it. The art of life has a pudenc}T, and
will not be exposed. Every man is an impos-^
Ability, until he is born ; everything impossible,
until we see a success. The ardors of piety agree

REALITY. 63

at last with the coldest skepticism, — that nothing
is of us or our works, — that all is of God. Nature
will not spare us the smallest leaf of laurel. All
writing comes by the grace of God, and all doing
and having. I would gladly be moral, and keep
tiue metes and bounds, which I dearly love, and
allow the most to the will of man, but I have set my
% heart on honesty in this chapter, and I can see noth-
ing at last, in success or failure, than more or less of
vital force supplied from the Eternal. The results of
life are uncalculated and uncalculable. The years
teach much which the days never know. The per-
sons who compose our company, converse, and come
and go, and design and execute many things, and
somewhat comes of it all, but an unlooked-for re-
sult. The individual is always mistaken. He
designed many things, and drew in other persons
as coadjutors, quarrelled with some or all, blun-
dered much, and something is done ; all are a
little advanced, but the individual is always mis-
taken. It turns out somewhat new, and very
unlike what he promised himself.

The ancients, struck with this irreducibleness of
the elements of human life to calculation, exalted
Chance into a divinity, but that is to stay too
long at the spark, — which glitters truly at one
point, — but the universe is warm with the lat-
ency of the same fire. The miracle of life which
will not be expounded, but will remain a mira-
cle, introduces a new element. In the growth
of the embryo, Sir Everard Home, I think, no-

64 ESS A Y II EXPERIENCE.

ticed that the evolution was not from one central
point, but co-active from three or more points.
Life has no memory. That which proceeds in
succession might be remembered, but that which
is co-existent, or ejaculated from a deeper cause,
as yet far from being conscious, knows not its
own tendency, So it is with us, now skeptical,
or without unity, because immersed in forms and
effects all seeming to be of equal yet hostile
value, and now religious, whilst in the reception
of spiritual law. Bear with these distractions,
with this coetaneous growth of the parts : they
will one day be members, and obey one will. On
that one will, on that secret cause, they nail our
attention and hope. Life is hereby melted into
an expectation or a religion. Underneath the
inharmonious and trivial particulars is a musical
perfection, the Ideal journeying always with us,
the heaven without rent or seam. Do but observe
the mode of our illumination. When I converse
with a profound mind, or if at any time being
alone I have good thoughts, I do not at once
arrive at satisfactions, as when, being thirsty, I
drink water, or go to the fire, being cold : no !
but I am at first apprised of my vicinity to a
new and excellent region of life. By persisting
to read or to think, this region gives further sign
of itself, as it were in flashes of light, in sudden
discoveries of its profound beauty and repose, as
if the clouds that covered it parted at intervals,
and showed the approaching traveler the inland
mountains, with the tranquil eternal meadows

REALITY, 65

spread at their base, whereon flocks graze, and
shepherds pipe and dance. But every insight from
this realm of thought is felt as initial, and prom-
ises a sequel. I do not make it ; I arrive there,
and behold what was there already. I make ! O
no ! I clap my hands in infantine joy and amaze-
ment, before the first opening to me of this august
magnificence, old with the love and homage of in-
numerable ages, young with the life of life, the sun-
bright Mecca of the desert. And what a future it
opens ! I feel a new heart beating with the love
of the new beauty. I am ready to die out of na-
ture, and be born again into this new yet unap-
proachable America I have found in the West.

" Since neither now nor yesterday began
These thoughts, which have been ever, nor yet can
A man be found who their first entrance knew."

If I have described life as a flux of moods, I must
now add, that there is that in us which changes
not, and which ranks all sensations and states of
mind. The consciousness in each man is a sliding
scale, which identifies him now with the First
Cause, and now with the flesh of his body ; life
above life, in infinite degrees. The sentiment
from which it sprung determines the dignity of
any deed, and the question ever is, not what you
hava done or forborne, but, at whose command
you have done or forborne it.

Fortune, Minerva, Muse, Holy Ghost, — these
are quaint names, too narrow to cover this un-
bounded substance. The baffled intellect must

C

66 ESS A V II. EXPERIENCE.

still kneel before this cause, which refuses to be
named, — ineffable cause, which every fine genius
has essayed to represent by some emphatic sym-
bol, as, Thales by water, Anaximenes by air,
Anaxagoras by (AWc) thought, Zoroaster by fire,
Jesus and the moderns by love : and the metaphor
of each has become a national religion. The Chi-
nese Mencius has not been the least successful in
his generalization. " I fully understand language,"
he said, "and nourish well my vast-flowing
vigor." — "I beg to ask what you call vast -flowing
vigor ? " — said his companion. " The explana-
tion," replied Mencius, " is difficult. This vigoi
is supremely great, and in the highest degree un-
bending. Nourish it correctly, and do it no injury,
and it will fill up the vacancy between heaven
and earth. This vigor accords with and assists
justice and reason, and leaves no hunger." — In
our more correct writing, we give to this generali-
zation the name of Being, and thereby confess
that we have arrived as far as we can go. Suffice
it for the joy of the universe, that we have not
arrived at a wall, but at interminable oceans. Our
life seems not present, so much as prospective ;
not for the affairs on which it is wasted, but as a
hint of this vast -flowing vigor. Most of life seems
to be mere advertisement of faculty : information
is given us not to sell ourselves cheap ; that we
are very great. So, in particulars, our greatness
is always in a tendency or direction, not in an ac-
tion. It is for us to believe in the rule, not in the
exception. The noble are thus known from the

REALITY. 67

ignoble. So in accepting the leading of the sen-
timents, it is not what we believe concerning the
immortality of the soul, or the like, but the uni-
versal impulse to believe, that is the material cir-
cumstance, and is the principal fact in the history
of the globe. Shall we describe this cause as that
which works directly ? The spirit is not helpless
or needful of mediate organs. It has plentiful
powers and direct effects. I am explained with-
out explaining, I am felt without acting, and where
I am not. Therefore all just persons are satisfied
with their own praise. They refuse to explain
themselves, and are content that new actions
should do them that office. They believe that we
communicate without speech, and above speech,
and that no right action of ours is quite unaffect-
ing to our friends, at whatever distance ; for the
influence of action is not to be measured by
miles. Why. should I fret myself, because a cir-
cumstance has occurred which hinders my pres-
ence where I was expected? If I am not at
the meeting, my presence where I am should
be as useful to the commonwealth of friend-
ship and wisdom, as would be my presence
in that place. I exert the same quality of
power in all places. Thus journeys the mighty
Ideal before us ; it never was known to fall into
the rear. No man ever came to an experience
which was satiating, but his good is tidings of a
better. Onward and onward ! In liberated mo-
ments, we know that a new picture of life and
duty is already possible ; the elements already ex-

68 ESSAY II. EXPERIENCE.

ist in many minds around you, of a doctrine of
life which shall transcend an}' written record we
have. The new statement will comprise the
skepticisms, as well as the faiths of a society, and
out of unbeliefs a creed shall be formed. For,
skepticisms are not gratuitous or lawless, but are
limitations of the affirmative statement, and the
new philosophy must take them in, and make af-
firmations outside of them, just as much as it must
include the oldest beliefs.

It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped,
the discovery we have made, that we exist. That
discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever after-
wards, we suspect our instruments. We have
learned that we do not see directly, but mediately,
and that we have no means of correcting these
colored and distorted lenses which we are, or of
computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps
these subject-lenses have a creative power; per-
haps there are no objects. Once we lived in what
we saw ; now, the rapaciousness of this new power,
which threatens to absorb all things, engages us.
Nature, art, persons, letters, religions, — objects,
successively tumble in, and God is but one of its
ideas. Nature and literature are subjective phe-
nomena ; every evil and every good thing is a
shadow which we cast. The street is full of hu-
miliations to the proud. As the fop contrived to
dress his bailiffs in his livery, and make them wait
On his guests at table, so the chagrins which the
bad heart gives off as bubbles, at once take form

SUBJECT OR THE ONE. 69

as ladies and gentlemen in the street, shopmen
or barkeepers in hotels, and threaten or insult
whatever is threatenable and insultable in us.
'Tis the same with our idolatries. People forget
that it is the eye which makes the horizon, and
the rounding mind's eye which makes this or that
man a type or representative of humanity with
the name of hero or saint. Jesus, the "providen-
tial man," is a good man on whom many people
are agreed that these optical laws shall take ef-
fect. By love on one part, and by forbearance to
press objection on the other part, it is for a time
settled, that we will look at him in the centre of
the horizon, and ascribe to him the properties
that will attach to any man so seen. But the
longest love or aversion has a speedy term. The
great and crescive self, rooted in absolute nature,
supplants all relative existence, and ruins the
kingdom of mortal friendship and love. Marriage
(in what is called the spiritual world) is impossi-
ble, because of the inequality between every
subject and every object. The subject is the re-
ceiver of Godhead, and at every comparison must
feel his being enhanced by that cryptic might.
Though not in energy, yet by presence, this mag-
azine of substance cannot be otherwise than felt :
nor can any force of intellect attribute to the ob-
ject the proper deity which sleeps or wakes for-
ever in every subject. Never can love make
consciousness and ascription equal in force. There
will be the same gulf between every me and thee,
as between the original and the picture. The

70 ESS A Y II. EXPERIENCE.

universe is the bride of the soul. All private
sympathy is partial. Two human beings are like
globes, which can touch only in a point, and.
whilst they remain in contact, all other points of
each of the spheres are inert ; their turn must
also come, and the longer a particular union lasts,
the more energy of appetency the parts not in
union acquire.

Life will be imaged, but cannot be divided nor
doubled. Any invasion of its unity would be
chaos. The soul is not twin-born, but the only
begotten, and though revealing itself as child in
time, child in appearance, is of a fatal and uni-
versal power, admitting no co-life. Every day.
every act betrays the ill-concealed deity. We be-
lieve in ourselves, as we do not believe in others.
We permit all things to ourselves, and that which
we call sin in others, is experiment for us. It is
an instance of our faith in ourselves, that men
never speak of crime as lightly as they think ; or,
every man thinks a latitude safe for himself,
which is nowise to be indulged to another. The
act looks very differently on the inside, and on
the outside; in its quality, and in its conse-
quences. Murder in the murderer is no such
ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have
it ; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from
his ordinary notice of trifles: it is an act quite
easy to be contemplated, but in its sequel, it turns
out to be a horrible jangle and confounding of all
relations. Especially the crimes that spring from
love, seem right and fair from the actor's point of

SUBJECT OR THE ONE. J I

view, but, when acted, are found destructive of
society. No man at least believes that he can be
lost, nor that the crime in him is as black as in
the felon, because the intellect qualifies in our
own case the moral judgments. For there is no
crime to the intellect. That is antinomian oi
hypernomian, and judges law as well as fact. " it
is worse than a crime, it is a blunder," said Na-
poleon, speaking the language of the intellect.
To it, the world is a problem in mathematics or
the science of quantity, and it leaves out praise
and blame, and all weak emotions. All stealing
is comparative. If you come to absolutes, pray
who does not steal? Saints are sad, because they
behold sin (even when they speculate) from the
point of view of the conscience, and not of the
intellect ; a confusion of thought. Sin seen from
the thought, is a diminution or less ; seen from
the conscience or will, it is pravity or bad. The
intellect names it shade, absence of light, and no
essence. The conscience must feel it as essence,
essential evil. This it is not ; it has an objective
existence, but no subjective.

Thus inevitably does the universe wear our
color, and every object fall successively into the
subject itself. The subject exists, the subject en-
larges ; all things sooner or later fall into place.
As I am, so I see ; use what language we will, we
can never say anything but what we are ; Hermes,
Cadmus, Columbus, Newton, Buonaparte, are the
mind's ministers. Instead of feeling a poverty
when we encounter a great man, let us treat the

72 ESS A V II. EXPERIENCE.

new comer like a traveling geologist, who pasjjys
through our estate, and shows us good slate, or
limestone, or anthracite, in our brush pasture.
The partial action of each strong mind in one di-
rection, is a telescope for the objects on which it
is pointed. But every other part of knowledge is
to be pushed to the same extravagance, ere the
soul attains her due sphericity. Do you see that
kitten chasing so prettily her own tail ? If you
could look with her eyes, you might see her sur-
rounded with hundreds of figures performing
complex dramas, with tragic and comic issues,
long conversations, many characters, many ups
and downs of fate, — and meantime it is only puss
and her tail. How long before our masquerade
will end its noise of tambourines, laughter, and
shouting, and we shall find it was a solitary per-
formance ? — A subject and an object, — it takes
so much to make the galvanic circuit complete,
but magnitude adds nothing. What imports it
whether it is Kepler and the sphere ; Columbus
and America ; a reader and his book ; or puss
with her tail ?

It is true that all the muses and love and relig-
ion hate these developments, and will find a way
to punish the chemist, who publishes in the parlor
the secrets of the laboratory. And we cannot say
too little of our constitutional necessity of seeing
things under private aspects, or saturated with
our humors. And yet is the God the native of
these bleak rocks. That need makes in morals
the capital virtue of self-trust. We must hold

SUBJECT OR THE ONE. 73

hard to this poverty, however scandalous, and by
more vigorous self-recoveries, after the sallies of
action, possess our axis more firmly. The life of
truth is cold, and so far mournful ; but it is not
the slave of tears, contritions, and perturbations.
It does not attempt another's work, nor adopt an-
other's facts. It is a main lesson of wisdom to
know your own from another's. I have learned
that I cannot dispose of other people's facts ; but
I possess such a key to my own, as persuades me
against all their denials, that they also have a key
to theirs. A sympathetic person is placed in the
dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who
all catch at him, and if he give so much as a leg
or a finger, they will drown him. They wish to
be saved from the mischiefs of their vices, but not
from their vices. Charity would be wasted on
this poor waiting on the symptoms. A wise and
hardy physician will say, Come out of that, as the
first condition of advice.

In this our talking America, we are ruined by
our good nature and listening on all sides. This
compliance takes away the power of being greatly
useful. A man should not be able to look other
than directly and forthright. A preoccupied at-
tention is the only answer to the importunate
frivolity of other people ; an attention, and to an
aim which makes their wants frivolous. This is a
divine answer, and leaves no appeal, and no hard
thoughts. In Flaxman's drawing of the Eumeni-
des of JSschylus, Orestes supplicates Apollo,
whilst the Furies sleep on the threshold. The

74 ESS A Y II. EXPERIENCE.

face of the god expresses a shade of regret and
compassion, but calm with the conviction of
the irreconcilableness of the two spheres. He is
born into other politics, into the eternal and beau-
tiful. The man at his feet asks for his interest in
turmoils of the earth, into which his nature can-
not enter. And the Eumenides there lying ex-
press pictorially this disparity. The god is sur-
charged with his divine destiny.

Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface,
Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness, — these are
threads on the loom of time, these are the lords
of life. I dare not assume to give their order^
but I name them as I find them in my way. I
know better than to claim any completeness for my
picture. I am a fragment, and this is a fragment
of me. I can very confidently announce one or
.another law, which throws itself into relief and
form, but I am too young yet by some ages to
^compile a code. I gossip for my hour concerning
the eternal politics. I have seen many fair pic-
tures not in vain. A wonderful time I have lived
in. I am not the novice I was fourteen, nor yet
seven years ago. Let who will ask, where is the
fruit? I find a private fruit sufficient. This is a
fruit, — that I should not ask for a rash effect from
meditations, counsels, and the hiving of truths.
I should feel it pitiful to demand a result on this
town and county, an overt effect on the instant
month and year. The effect is deep and secular
as the cause. It works on periods in which

EXPERIENCE. 75

mortal lifetime is lost. All I know is reception ;
I am and I have : but I do not get, and when I
have fancied I had gotten anything, I found I did
not. I worship with wonder the great Fortune.
My reception has been so large, that I am not an-
noyed by receiving this or that superabundantly.
I say to the Genius, if he will pardon the proverb,
In for a mill, in for a million. When I receive a
new gift, I do not macerate my body to make the
account square, for, if I should die, I could not
make the account square. The benefit overran the
merit the first day, and has overran the merit ever
since. The merit itself, so called, I reckon part
of the receiving.

Also, that hankering after an overt or practical
effect seems to me an apostasy. In good earnest,
I am willing to spare this most unnecessary deal
of doing. Life wears to me a visionary face.
Hardest, roughest action is visionary also. It is
but a choice between soft and turbulent dreams.
People disparage knowing and the intellectual-
Life, and urge doing. I am very content with
knowing, if only I could know. That is an august
entertainment, and would suffice me a great while.
To know a little, would be worth the expense of
this world. I hear always the law of Adrastia,
" that every soul which had acquired any truth,
should be safe from harm until another period."

I know that the world I converse with in the
city and in the farms, is not the world I think,
I observe that difference, and shall observe it.
One day, I shall know the value and law of this

76 ESS A Y II EXPERIENCE.

discrepance. But I have not found that much
was gained by manipular attempts to realize the
world of thought. Many eager persons success-
ively make an experiment in this way, and make
themselves ridiculous. They acquire democratic
manners, they foam at the mouth, they hate and
deny. Worse, I observe, that, in the history of
mankind, there is never a solitary example of suc-
cess,— taking their own tests of success. I say
this polemically, or in reply to the inquiry, why
not realize your world? But far be from me the
despair which prejudges the law by a paltry em-
piricism,— since there never was a right endeavor,
but it succeeded. Patience and patience, we shall
win at the last. We must be very suspicious of
the deceptions of the element of time. It takes a
good deal of time to eat or to sleep, or to earn a
hundred dollars, and a very little time to enter-
tain a hope and an insight which becomes the
light of our life. We dress our garden, eat our
dinners, discuss the household with our wives, and
these things make no impression, are forgotten
next week; but in the solitude to which every
man is always returning, he has a sanity and reve-
lations, which in his passage into new worlds he
will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule,
never mind the defeat : up again, old heart ! — it
seems to say, — there is victory yet for all justice ;
and the true romance which the world exists to
realize, will be the transformation of genius into
practical power.

CHARACTER.

The sun set ; but set not his hope:
Stars rose; his faith was earlier up:
Fixed on the enormous galaxy,
Deeper and older seemed his eye:
And matched his sufferance sublime
The taciturnity of time.
He spoke, and words more soft than rain
Brought the Age of Gold again :
His action won such reverence sweet,
As hid all measure of the feat.

Work of his hand

He nor commends nor griereK

Pleads for itself the fact ;

As unrepenting Nature leave*

Her every act.

CHARACTER.

I have read that those who listened to Lord
Chatham felt that there was something finer in
the man, than anything which he said. It has
been complained of our brilliant English historian
of the French Revolution, that when he has told
all his facts about Mirabeau, they do not justify his
estimate of his genius. The Gracchi, Agis,
Cleomenes,and others of Plutarch's heroes, do not
in the records of facts equal their own fame. Sir
Philip Sidney, the Earl of Essex, Sir Walter
Raleigh, are men of great figure, and of few deeds.
We cannot find the smallest part of the personal
weight of Washington in the narrative of his ex-
ploits. The authority of the name of Schiller is
too great for his books. This inequality of the
reputation to the works or the anecdotes is not
accounted for by saying that the reverberation is
longer than the thunder-clap ; but somewhat re-
sided in these men which begot an expectation
that outran all their performance. The largest
part of their power was latent. This is that

(79)

80 ESS A Y III.

which we call Character, — a reserved force which
acts directly by presence, and without means. It
is conceived of as a certain undemonstrable force,
a Familiar or Genius, by whose impulses the man
is guided, but whose counsels he cannot impart ;
which is company for him, so that such men are
often solitary, or if they chance to be social, do not
need society, but can entertain themselves very
well alone. The purest literary talent appears at
one time great, at another time small, but character
is of a stellar and undiminishable greatness. What
others effect by talent or by eloquence, this man
accomplishes by some magnetism. "Half his
strength he put not forth." His victories are by
demonstration of superiority, and not by crossing
of bayonets. He conquers, because his arrival
alters the face of affairs. " O Tole ! how did you
know that Hercules was a god?" "Because,"
answered Iole, " I was content the moment my
eyes fell on him. When I beheld Theseus, I de-
sired that I might see him offer battle, or at least
guide his horses in the chariot-race ; but Hercules
did not wait for a contest ; he conquered whether
he stood, or walked, or sat, or whatever thing he
did." Man, ordinarily a pendant to events, only
half attached, and that awkwardly, to the world
he lives in, in these examples appears to share
the life of things, and to be an expression of the
same laws which control the tides and the sun,
numbers and quantities.

But to use a more modest illustration, and
nearer home, I observe, that in our political elec-

CHARACTER. 8 1

tions, where this element, if it appears at all, can
only occur in its coarsest form, we sufficiently un-
derstand its incomparable rate. The people know
that they need in their representative much more
than talent, namely, the power to make his talent
trusted. They cannot come at their ends by
sending to Congress a learned, acute, and fluent
speaker, if he be not one who, before he was ap-
pointed by the people to represent them, was ap-
pointed by Almighty God to stand for a fact, — in-
vincibly persuaded of that fact in himself, — so that
the most confident and the most violent persons learn
that here is resistance on which both impudence
and terror are wasted, namely, faith in a fact.
The men who carry their points do not need to
inquire of their constituents what they should
say, but are themselves the country which they
represent; nowhere are its emotions or opinions
so instant and true as in them ; nowhere so pure
from a selfish infusion. The constituency at
home hearkens to their words, watches the color
of their cheek, and therein, as in a glass, dresses
its own. Our public assemblies are pretty good
tests of manly force. Our frank countrymen of
the west and south have a test for character
and like to know whether the New Englander is a
substantial man, or whether the hand can pass
through him.

The same motive force appears in trade. There
are geniuses in trade, as well as in war, or the
state, or letters ; and the reason why this or that
man is fortunate, is not to be told. It lies in the

27

82 ESSA Y III.

man ; that is all anybody can tell you about it.
See him, and you will know as easily why he
succeeds, as, if you see Napoleon, you would com-
prehend his fortune. In the new objects we rec-
ognize the old game, the habit of fronting the fact,
and not dealing with it at second hand, through
the perceptions of somebody else. Nature seems
to authorize trade, as soon as you see the natural
merchant, who appears not so much a private
agent, as her factor and Minister of Commerce.
His natural probity combines with his insight into
the fabric of society, to put him above tricks, and
he communicates to all his own faith, that con-
tracts are of no private interpretation. The habit
of his mind is a reference to standards of natural
equity and public advantage ; and he inspires re-
spect, and the wish to deal with him, both for the
quiet spirit of honor wThich attends him, and for
the intellectual pastime which the spectacle of so
much ability affords. This immensely stretched
trade, which makes the capes of the Southern
Ocean his wharves, and the Atlantic Sea his
familiar port, centres in his brain only ; and no-
body in the universe can make his place good. In
his parlor, I see very well that he has been at ham
work this morning, with that knitted brow, and
that settled humor, which all his desire to be
courteous cannot shake off. I see plainly how
many firm acts have been done ; how many valiant
noen have this day been spoken, when others would
have uttered ruinous yeas. I see, with the pride
of art, and skill of masterly arithmetic and power

CHARACTER. 83

of remote combination, the consciousness of being
an agent and playfellow of the original laws of
the world. He too believes that none can supply
him, and that a man must be born to trade, or he
cannot learn it.

This virtue draws the mind more, when it ap-
pears in action to ends not so mixed. It works
with most energy in the smallest companies and in
private relations. In all cases, it is an extraordi-
nary and imcomputable agent. The excess of
physical strength is paralyzed by it. Higher na-
tures overpower lower ones by affecting them with
a certain sleep. The faculties are locked up, and
offer no resistance. Perhaps that is the universal
law. When the high cannot bring up the low to
itself, it benumbs it, as man charms down the re-
sistance of the lower animals. Men exert on each
other a similar occult power. How often has the
influence of a true master realized all the tales of
magic ! A river of command seemed to run down
from his eyes into all those who beheld him, a tor-
rent of strong sad light, like an Ohio or Danube,
which pervaded them with his thoughts, and col-
ored all events with the hue of his mind. " What
means did you employ?" was the question asked
of the wife of Concini, in regard to her treatment
of Mary of Medici ; and the answer was, " Only
that influence which every strong mind has over a
weak one." Cannot Caesar in irons shuffle off the
irons, and transfer them to the person of Hippo or
Thraso the turnkey? Is an iron handcuff so im-
mutable a bond ? Suppose a slaver on the coast

84 essa y ///.

of Guinea should take on board a gang of negroes,
which should contain persons of the stamp of
Toussaint L'Ouverture ; or, let us fancy, under
these swarthy masks he has a gang of Washing-
tons in chains. When they arrive at Cuba, will
the relative order of the ship's company be the
same? Is there nothing but rope and iron? Is
there no love, no reverence ? Is there never a
glimpse of right in a poor slave-captain's mind;
and cannot these be supposed available to break,
or elude, or in any manner overmatch the tension
of an inch or two of iron ring ?

This is a natural power, like light and heat, and
all nature cooperates with it. The reason why we
feel one man's presence, and do not feel another's,
is as simple as gravity. Truth is the summit of
being ; justice is the application of it to affairs.
All individual natures stand in a scale, according
to the purity of this element in them. The will
of the pure runs down from them into other na-
tures, as water runs down from a higher into a
lower vessel. This natural force is no more to be
withstood, than any other natural force. We can
drive a stone upward for a moment into the air,
but it is yet true that all stones will forever fall ;
and whatever instances can be quoted of unpun-
ished theft, or of a lie which somebody credited,
justice must prevail, and it is the privilege of
truth to make itself believed. Character is this
moral order seen through the medium of an indi-
vidual nature. An individual is an encloser.
Time and space, liberty and necessity, truth and

CHARACTER. 85

thought, are left at large no longer. Now, the
universe is a close or pound. All things exist in
the man tinged with the manners of his soul.
With what quality is in him, he infuses all nature
that he can reach ; nor does he tend to lose him-
self in vastness, but, at how long a curve soever,
all his regards return into his own good at last.
He animates all he can, and he sees only what he
animates. He encloses the world, as the patriot
does his country, as a material basis for his char-
acter, and a theatre for action. A healthy soul
stands united with the Just and the True, as the
magnet arranges itself with the pole, so that he
stands to all beholders like a transparent object
betwixt them and the sun, and whoso journeys
toward the sun, journeys toward that person. He
is thus the medium of the highest influence to all
who are not on the same level. Thus, men of
character are the conscience of the society to
which they belong.

The natural measure of this power is the resist-
ance of circumstances. Impure men consider life
as it is reflected in opinions, events, and persons.
They cannot see the action, until it is done. Yet
its moral element pre-existed in the actor, and its
quality as right or wrong, it was easy to predict.
Everything in nature is bipolar, or has a positive
and negative pole. There is a male and a female,
1 a spirit and a fact, a north and a south. Spirit is
the positive, the event is the negative. Will is
the north, action the south pole. Character may
be ranked as having its natural place in the north.

86 ESSAY III.

It shares the magnetic currents of the system.
The feeble souls are drawn to the south or nega-
tive pole. They look at the profit or hurt of the
action. They never behold a principle until it is
lodged in a person. They do not wish to be lovely,
but to be loved. This class of character like to
hear of their faults ; the other class do not like to
hear of faults ; they worship events ; secure to
them a fact, a connection, a certain chain of cir-
cumstances, and they will ask no more. The hero
sees that the event is ancillary ; it must follow
him. A given order of events has no power to
secure to him the satisfaction which the imagina-
tion attaches to it ; the soul of goodness escapes
from any set of circumstances, whilst prosperity
belongs to a certain mind, and will introduce that
power and victory which is its natural fruit, into
any order of events. No change of circumstances
can repair a defect of character. We boast our
emancipation from many superstitions ; but if we
have broken any idols, it is through a transfer of
the idolatry. What have I gained, that I no
longer immolate a bull to Jove, or to Neptune, or
a mouse to Hecate ; that I do not tremble before
the Eumenides, or the Catholic Purgatory, or the
Calvinistic Judgment-day, — if I quake at opinion,
the public opinion, as we call it ; or at the threat
of assault, or contumely, or bad neighbors, or
poverty, or mutilation, or at the rumor of revolu-
tion, or of murder ? If I quake, what matters it
what I quake at ? Our proper vice takes form in
one or another shape, according to the sex, age, or

CHARACTER. 87

temperament of the person, and, if we are capable
of fear, will readily find terrors. The covetous-
ness or the malignity which saddens me, when I
ascribe it to society, is my own. I am always en-
vironed by myself. On the other part, rectitude
is a perpetual victory, celebrated not by cries of
joy, but by serenity, which is joy fixed or habitual.
It is disgraceful to fly to events for confirmation
of our truth and worth. The capitalist does not
run every hour to the broker, to coin his advan-
tages into current money of the realm ; he is satisfied
to read in the quotations of the market, that his
stocks have risen. The same transport which the
occurrence of the best events in the best order
would occasion me, I must learn to taste purer in
the perception that my position is every hour
meliorated, and does already command those
events I desire. That exultation is only to be
checked b}' the foresight of an order of things so
excellent as to throw all our prosperities into the
deepest shade.

The face which character wears to me is self-
sufficingness. I revere the person who is riches;
so that I cannot think of him as alone, or poor, or
exiled, or unhappy, or a client, but as perpetual
patron, benefactor, and beatified man. Character
is centrality, the impossibility of being displaced
or overset. A man should give us a sense of
mass. Society is frivolous, and shreds its day
into scraps, its conversation into ceremonies and
escapes. But if I go to see an ingenious man, I
shall think myself poorly entertained if he give

88 ESSAY III.

me nimble pieces of benevolence and etiquette ;
rather he shall stand stoutly in his place, and
let me apprehend, if it were only his resistance ;
know that I have encountered a new and positive
quality ; — great refreshment for both of us. It is
much, that he does not accept the conventional
opinions and practices. That nonconformity will
remain a goad and remembrancer, and every in-
quirer will have to dispose of him, in the first
place. There is nothing real or useful that is nob
a seat of war. Our houses ring with laughter and
personal and critical gossip, but it helps little.
But the uncivil, unavailable man, who is a problem
and a threat to society, whom it cannot let pass
in silence, but must either worship or hate, — and
to whom all parties feel related, both the leaders
of opinion and the obscure and eccentric, — he
helps ; he puts America and Europe in the wrong,
and destroys the skepticism which says, " man is a
doll, let us eat and drink, 'tis the best we can do,"
by illuminating the untried and unknown. Ac-
quiescence in the establishment, and appeal to the
public, indicate infirm faith, heads which are not
clear, and which must see a house built, before
they can comprehend the plan of it. The wise
man not only leaves out of his thought the many,
but leaves out the few. Fountains, fountains, the
self-moved, the absorbed, the commander because
he is commanded, the assured, the primary, — they
are good ; for these announce the instant presence
of supreme power.

Our action should rest mathematically on our

CHARACTER. 89

substance. In nature, there are no false valua-
tions. A pound of water in the ocean-tempest
has no more gravity than in a mid-summer pond.
All things work exactly according to their quality,
and according to their quantity ; attempt nothing
they cannot do, except man only. He has preten-
sion ; he wishes and attempts things beyond his
force. I read in a book of English memoirs, " Mr.
Fox (afterwards Lord Holland) said, he must have
the Treasury ; he had served up to it, and would
have it." — Xenophon and his Ten Thousand were
quite equal to what they attempted, and did it ;
ft equal, that it was not suspected to be a grand
ind inimitable exploit. Yet there stands that
fact unrepeated, a high- water-mark in military his-
tory. Many have attempted it since, and not been
equal to it. It is only on reality, that any power
of action can be based. No institution will be
better than the institutor. I knew an amiable and
accomplished person who undertook a practical
reform, yet I was never able to find in him the en-
terprise of love he took in hand. He adopted it
by ear and by the understanding from the books
he had been reading. All his action was ten-
tative, a piece of the city carried out into the
fields, and was the city still, and no new fact,
and could not inspire enthusiasm. Had there
been something latent in the man, a terrible un-
demonstrated genius agitating and embarrass-
ing his demeanor, we had watched for its ad-,
vent. It is not enough that the intellect should
see the evils and their remedy. We shall still

90 ESS A V III.

postpone our existence, nor take the ground to
which we are entitled, whilst it is only a thought,
and not a spirit that incites us. We have not yet
served up to it.

These are properties of life, and another trait is
the notice of incessant growth. Men should be
intelligent and earnest. They must also make us
feel that they have a controlling happy future
opening before them, which sheds a splendor on
the passing hour. The hero is misconceived and
misreported ; he cannot therefore wait to unravel
any man's blunders : he is again on his road, add-
ing new powers and honors to his domain, and new
claims on your heart, which will bankrupt you, if
you have loitered about the old things, and have
not kept your relation to him, by adding to your
wealth. New actions are the only apologies and
explanations of old ones, which the noble can bear
to offer or to receive. If your friend has dis-
pleased you, you shall not sit down to consider it,
for he has already lost all memory of the passage,
and has doubled his power to serve you, and, ere
you can rise up again, will burden you with bless-
ings.

We have no pleasure in thinking of a benevo-
lence that is only measured by its works. Love
is inexhaustible, and if its estate is wasted, its
granary emptied, still cheers and enriches, and the
man, though he sleep, seems to purify the air, and
his house to adorn the landscape and strengthen
the laws. People always recognize this differ-
ence. We know who is benevolent, by quite

CHARACTER. 91

other means than the amount of subscription to
&oup-societies. It is only low merits that can be
numerated. Fear, when your friends say to you
rhat you have done well, and say it through;
Jit when they stand with uncertain timid looks
of respect and half-dislike, and must suspend their
judgment for years to come, you may begin to
hope. Those who live to the future must
always appear selfish to those who live to the
present. Therefore it was droll in the good
Riemer, who has written memoirs of Goethe,
to make out a list of his donations and good
*fceds, as, so many hundred thalers given to
"illing, to Hegel, to Tischbein : a lucrative
ace found for Professor Voss, a post under the
orrand Duke for Herder, a pension for Meyer,
two professors recommended to foreign univer-
sities, &c. &c. The longest list of specifications
of benefit would look very short. A man is a
poor creature, if he is to be measured so. For,
all these, of course, are exceptions ; and the rule
and hodiernal life of a good man is benefaction.
The true charity of Goethe is to be inferred from
the account he gave Dr. Eckermann, of the way
in which he had spent his fortune. " Each bonmot
of mine has cost a purse of gold. Half a million
of my own money, the fortune I inherited, my
salary, and the large income derived from my
writings for fifty years back, have been expended
to instruct me in what I now know. I have be-
sides seen," &c.

I own it is but poor chat and gossip to go to

92 ESS A y in.

enumerate traits of this simple and rapid power,
and we are painting the lightning with charcoal ;
but in these long nights and vacations, I like to
console myself so. Nothing but itself can copy-
it A word warm from the heart enriches me.
I surrender at discretion. How death- cold is
literary genius before this fire of life ! These are
the touches that reanimate my heavy soul, and
give it eyes to pierce the dark of nature. I find,
where I thought myself poor, there was I most
rich. Thence comes a new intellectual exaltation,
to be again rebuked by some new exhibition of
character. Strange alternation of attraction and
repulsion ! Character repudiates intellect, yet
excites it ; and character passes into thought, is
published so, and then is ashamed before new
flashes of moral worth.

Character is nature in the highest form. It is
of no use to ape it, or to contend with it. Some-
what is possible of resistance, and of persistence
and of creation, to this power, which will fu .
emulation.

This masterpiece is best where no hands U
nature's have been laid on it. Care is taken that
the greatly-destined shall slip up into life in
the shade, with no thousand-eyed Athens to
watch and blazon every new thought, every blush-
ing emotion of young genius. Two persons
lately, — very young children of the most high
God, — have given me occasion for thought. When
I explored the source of their sanctity, and
charm for the imagination, it seemed as if each

CHARACTER. 93

answered, i From my non-conformity : I never lis-
tened to your people's law, or to what they call
their gospel, and wasted my time. I was con-
tent with the simple rural poverty of my
own: hence this sweetness: my work never
reminds you of that; — is pure of that.' And
nature advertises me in such persons, that,
in democratic America, she will not be democra-
tized. How cloistered and constitutionally se-
questered from the market and from scandal ! It
was only this morning that I sent away some
wild flowers of these wood-gods. They are a re-
lief from literature, — these fresh draughts from
the sources of thought and sentiment ; as we
read, in an age of polish and criticism, the first
lines of written prose and verse of a nation. How
captivating is their devotion to their favorite
books, whether ^Eschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, or
Scott, as feeling that they have a stake in that
book : who touches that, touches them ; — and
especially the total solitude of the critic, the Pat-
mos of thought from which he writes, in uncon-
sciousness of any eyes that shall ever read this
writing. Could they dream on still, as angels,
and not wake to comparisons, and to be flattered !
Yet some natures are too good to be spoiled by
praise, and wherever the vein of thought reaches
down into the profound, there is no danger from
vanity. Solemn friends will warn them of the
danger of the head's being turned by the flourish
of trumpets, but they can afford to smile. I re-
member the indignation of an eloquent Methodist

94 ESS A Y III.

at the kind admonitions of a Doctor of Divinity,
— ' My friend, a man can neither be praised nor
insulted.' But forgive the counsels; they are
very natural. I remember the thought which oc-
curred to me when some ingenious and spiritual
foreigners came to America, was, Have you been
victimized in being brought hither? — or, prior
to that, answer me this, * Are you victimizate ? "
As I have said, nature keeps these sovereign-
ties in her own hands, and however pertly our
sermons and disciplines would divide some share
of credit, and teach that the laws fashion the cit-
izen, she goes her own gait, and puts the wisest
in the wrong. She makes very light of gospels
and prophets, as one who has a great many more
to produce, and no excess of time to spare on
any one. There is a class of men, individuals of
which appear at long intervals, so eminently en-
dowed with insight and virtue, that they have
been unanimously saluted as divine, and who seem
to be an accumulation of that power we consider.
Divine persons are character born, or to borrow a
phrase from Napoleon, they are victory organized.
They are usually received with ill-will, because
they are new, and because they set a bound to the
sxaggeration that has been made of the personal-
ity of the last divine person. Nature never rhymes
her children, nor makes two men alike. When
we see a great man, we fancy a resemblance to
some historical person, and predict the sequel of
his character and fortune, a result which he is sure
to disappoint. None will ever solve the problem

CHARACTER. 95

of his character according to our prejudice, but
only in his own high, unprecedented way. Char-
acter wants room ; must not be crowded on by
persons, nor be judged from glimpses got in the
press of affairs or on few occasions. It needs per-
spective, as a great building. It may not, proba-
bly does not, form relations rapidly ; and we
should not require rash explanation, either on the
popular ethics, or on our own, of its action.

I look on Sculpture as history. I do not think
the Apollo and the Jove impossible in flesh and
blood. Every trait which the artist recorded in
stone, he had' seen in life, and better than his
copy. We have seen many counterfeits, but we
are born believers in great men. How easily we
read in old books, when men were few, of the
smallest action of the patriarchs. We require
that a man should be so large and columnar in the
landscape, that it should deserve to be recorded,
that he arose, and girded up his loins, and
departed to such a place. The most credible
pictures are those of majestic men who prevailed
at their entrance, and convinced the senses; as
happened to the eastern magian who was sent to
test the merits of Zertusht or Zoroaster. When
the Yunani sage arrived at Balkh, the Persians tell
us, Gushtasp appointed a day on which the Mo-
beds of every country should assemble, and a
golden chair was placed for the Yunani sage.
Then the beloved of Yezdam, the prophet Zer-
tusht, advanced into the midst of the assembly.
The Yunani sage, on seeing that chief, said, " This*

gS ESS A Y III.

form and this gait cannot lie, and nothing but
truth can proceed from them." Plato said, it was
impossible not to believe in the children of the
gods, "though they should speak without probable
or necessary arguments." I should think myself
very unhappy in my associates, if I could not
credit the best things in history. " John Brad-,
shaw," says Milton, "appears like a consul, from"
whom the fasces are not to depart with the year ;
so that not on the tribunal only, but throughout
his life, you would regard him as sitting in judg-
ment upon kings." I find it more credible, since
it is anterior information, that one man should
know heaven, as the Chinese say, than that so many
men should know the world. "The virtuous
prince confronts the gods, without any misgiving.
He waits a hundred ages till a sage comes, and
does not doubt. He who confronts the gods,
without any misgiving, knows heaven ; he who
waits a hundred ages until a sage comes, without
doubting, knows men. Hence the virtuous prince
moves, and for ages shows empire the way." But
there is no need to seek remote examples. He is
a dull observer whose experience has not taught
him the reality and force of magic, as well as of
chemistry. The coldest precisian cannot go abroad
without encountering inexplicable influences.
One man fastens an eye on him, and the graves
of the memory render up their dead; the secrets
that make him wretched either to keep or to betray,
must be yielded; — another, and he cannot speak,
and the bones of his body seem to lose their car-

\

CHARACTER. 9;

tilages; the entrance of a friend adds grace,
boldness, and eloquence to him ; and there are
persons, he cannot choose but remember, who gava
a transcendent expansion to his thought, and kin-
dled another life in his bosom.

What is so excellent as strict relations of amity,
when they spring from this deep root ? The suffi-
cient reply to the skeptic, who doubts the power
and the furniture of man, is in that possibility of
joyful intercourse with persons, which makes the
faith and practice of all reasonable men. I know
nothing which life has to offer so satisfying as the
profound good understanding, which can subsist,
after much exchange of good offices, between two
virtuous men, each of whom is sure of himself,
and sure of his friend. It is a happiness which
postpones all other gratifications, and makes poli-
tics, and commerce, and churches, cheap. For,
when men shall meet as they ought, each a bene-
factor, a shower of stars, clothed with thoughts,
with deeds, with accomplishments, it should be
the festival of nature which all things announce.
Of such friendship, love in the sexes is the first
symbol, as all other things are symbols of love.
Those relations to the best men, which, at one
time, we reckoned the romances of youth, become,
in the progress of the character, the most solid
enjoyment.

If it were possible to live in right relations with
men ! — if we could abstain from asking anything
of them, from asking their praise, or help, or pity,
and content us with compelling them through the

D

98 ESS A Y III.

virtue of the eldest laws! Could we not deal
with a few persons, — with one person, — after the
unwritten statutes, and make an experiment of
their efficacy? Could we not pay our friend the
compliment of truth, of silence, of forbearing?
Need we be so eager to seek him ? If we are re-
lated, we shall meet. It was a tradition of the
ancient world, that no metamorphosis could hide
a god from a god ; and there is a Greek verse
which runs,

"The gods are to each other not unknown."

Friends also follow the laws of divine necessity ;
they gravitate to each other, and cannot other-
wise : —

When each the other shall avoid,
Shall each by each be most enjoyed.

Their relation is not made, but allowed. The
gods must seat themselves without seneschal in
our Olympus, and as they can instal themselves
by seniority divine. Society is spoiled, if pains
are taken, if the associates are brought a mile to
meet. And if it be not society, it is a mischievous,
low, degrading jangle, though made up of the best.
All the greatness of each is kept back, and every
foible in painful activity, as if the Olympians
should meet to exchange snuff-boxes.

Life goes headlong. We chase some flying
scheme, or we are hunted by some fear or com-
mand behind us. But if suddenly we encounter

CHARACTER. 99

a friend, we pause ; or heat and hurry look fool-
ish enough; now pause, now possession, is re-
quired, and the power to swell the moment from
the resources of the heart. The moment is all, in
all noble relations.

A divine person is the prophecy of the mind ;
a friend is the hope of the heart. Our beatitude
waits for the fulfilment of these two in one. The
ages are opening this moral force. All force is
the shadow or symbol of that. Poetry is joyful
and strong, as it draws its inspiration thence.
Men write their names on the world, as they are
filled with this. History has been mean; our
nations have been mobs ; we have never seen a
man : that divine form we do not yet know, but
only the dream and prophecy of such : we do not
know the majestic manners which belong to him,
which appease and exalt the beholder. We shall
one day see that the most private is the most pub-
lic energy, that quality atones for quantity, and
grandeur of character acts in the dark, and suc-
cors them who never saw it. What greatness has
yet appeared, is beginnings and encouragements
to us in this direction. The history of those gods
and saints which the world has written, and then
worshipped, are documents of character. The
ages have exulted in the manners of a youth who
owed nothing to fortune, and who was hanged at
the Tyburn of his nation, who, by the pure quality
of his nature, shed an epic splendor around the
facts of his death, which has transfigured every
particular into an universal symbol for the eyes

100 ESSA Y III.

of mankind. This great defeat is hitherto our
highest fact. But the mind requires a victory to
the senses, a force of character which will convert
judge, jury, soldier, and king ; which will rule
animal and mineral virtues, and blend with the
courses of sap, of rivers, of winds, of stars, and of
moral agents.

If we cannot attain at a bound to these gran-
deurs, at least, let us do them homage. In society,
high advantages are set down to the possessor, as
disadvantages. It requires the more wariness in
our private estimates. I do not forgive in my
friends the failure to know a fine character, and
to entertain it with thankful hospitality. When,
at last, that which we have always longed for, is
arrived, and shines on us with glad rays out of
that far celestial land, then to be coarse, then to
be critical, and treat such a visitant with the jab-
ber and suspicion of the streets, argues a vulgarity
that seems to shut the doors of heaven. This is
confusion, this the right insanity, when the soul
no longer knows its own, nor where its allegiance,
its religion, are due. Is there any religion but
this, to know that, wherever in the wide desert
of being, the holy sentiment we cherish has opened
into a flower, it blooms for me ? if none sees it, 1
see it ; I am aware, if I alone, of the greatness of
the fact. Whilst it blooms, I will keep sabbath
or holy time, and suspend my gloom, and my folly
and jokes. Nature is indulged "by the presence
of this guest. There are many eyes that can de-
tect and honor the prudent and household virtue* *

CHARACTER. IOI

there are many that can discern Genius on his
starry track, though the mob is incapable ; but
when that love which is all-suffering, all-abstain-
ing, all-aspiring, which has vowed to itself, that it
will be a wretch and also a fool in this world,
sooner than soil its white hands by any compli-
ances, comes into snr streets and nouses, — only
the pure and aspiring can know its face, and the
only compliment they can pay it, is to own &

MANNERS.

" How near to good is what is fair!
Which we no sooner see,
But with the lines and outward air
Our senses taken be.

Again youselves compose,
And now put all the aptness on
Of Figure, that Proportion

Or Color can disclose ;
That if those silent arts were lost,
Design and Picture, they might boast

From you a newer ground,
Instructed by the heightening sense
Of dignity and reverence

In their true motions found. "

Ben Johnson.

MANNERS.

Half the world, it is said, knows not how the
other half live. Our Exploring Expedition saw
the Feejee islanders getting their dinner off human
bones ; and they are said to eat their own wives
and children. The husbandry of the modern in-
habitants of Gournou (west of old Thebes) is
philosophical to a fault. To set up their house-
keeping, nothing is requisite but two or three
earthen pots, a stone to grind meal, and a mat
which is the bed. The house, namely, a tomb, is
ready without rent or taxes. No rain can pass
through the roof, and there is no door, for there is
no want of one, as there is nothing to lose. If the
house do not please them, they walk out and enter
another, as there are several hundreds at their
command. " It is somewhat singular," adds Bel-
zoni, to whom we owe this account, " to talk of
happiness among people who live in sepulchres,
among the corpses and rags of an ancient nation
which they know nothing of." In the deserts of
Borgoo, the rock-Tibboos still dwell in caves, like
cliff-swallows, and the language of these negroes

(105)

106 ESSAY IV.

is compared by their neighbors to the shrieking of
bats, and to the whistling of birds. Again, the
Bornoos have no proper names ; individuals are
called after their height, thickness, or other acci-
dental quality, and have nicknames merely. But
the salt, the dates, the ivory, and the gold, for
which these horrible regions are visited, find their
way into countries where the purchaser and con-
sumer can hardly be ranked in one race with these
cannibals and man-stealers ; countries where man
serves himself with metals, wood, stone, glass,
gum, cotton, silk, and wool ; honors himself with
architecture ; writes laws, and contrives to exe-
cute his will through the hands of man}' nations ;
and, especially, establishes a select society, run-
ning through all the countries of intelligent men,
a self-constituted aristocracy, or fraternity of the
best, which, without written law or exact usage of
any kind, perpetuates itself, colonizes every new-
planted island, and adopts and makes its own
whatever personal beauty or extraordinary native
endowment anywhere appears.

What fact more conspicuous in modern history
than the creation of the gentleman ? Chivalry is
that, and loyalty is that, and, in English literature,
half the drama., and all the novels, from Sir Philip
Sidney to Sir Walter Scott, paint this figure. The
ivord gentleman, which, like the word Christian,
must hereafter characterize the present and the
few preceding centuries, by the importance at-
tached to it, is a homage to personal and incom-
municable properties. Frivolous and fantastic

MANNERS. 107

additions have got associated with the name, but
the steady interest of mankind in it must be attrib-
uted to the valuable properties which it desig-
nates. An element which unites all the most
forcible persons of every country; makes them
intelligible and agreeable to each other, and is
somewhat so precise, that it is at once felt if an
individual lack the masonic sign, cannot be an>
casual product, but must be an average result of
the character and faculties universally found in
men. It seems a certain permanent average ; as
the atmosphere is a permanent composition, whilst
so many gases are combined only to be decom-
pounded. Comme il faut, is the Frenchman's
description of good society, as we must be. It is
a spontaneous fruit of talents and feelings of pre-
cisely that class who have most vigor, who take
the lead in the world of this hour, and, though
far from pure, far from constituting the gladdest
and highest tone of human feeling, is as good as
the whole society permits it to be. It is made of
the spirit, more than of the talent of men, and is
a compound result, into which every great force
enters as an ingredient, namely, virtue, wit, beauty,
wealth, and power.

There is something equivocal in all the words in
use to express the excellence of manners and social
cultivation, because the quantities are fluxional,
and the last effect is assumed by the senses as the
cause. The word gentleman has not any correla-
tive abstract to express the quality. Gentility \»
mean, and gentilesse is obsolete. But we musi.

108 ESSAY IV.

keep alive in the vernacular, the distinction be-
tween fashion, a word of narrow and often sinister
meaning, and the heroic character which the gen-
tleman imports. The usual words, however, must
be respected : they will be found to contain the
root of the matter. The point of distinction in
all this class of names, as courtesy, chivalry, fash-
ion, and the like, is, that the flower and fruit, not
the grain of the tree, are contemplated. It is
beauty which is the aim this time, and not worth.
The result is now in question, although our words
intimate well enough the popular feeling, that the
appearance supposes a substance. The gentleman
is a man of truth, lord of his own actions, and ex
pressing that lordship in his behavior, not in any
manner dependent and servile either on persons,
or opinions, or possessions. Beyond this fact of
truth and real force, the word denotes good-nature
or benevolence : manhood first, and then gentle-
ness. The popular notion certainly adds a condi-
tion of ease and fortune ; but that is a natural
result of personal force and love, that they should
possess and dispense the goods of the world. In
times of violence, every eminent person must fall
in with many opportunities to approve his stout-
ness and worth ; therefore ever}r man's name that
emerged at all from the mass in the feudal ages,
rattles in our ear like a flourish of trumpets. But
personal force never goes out of fashion. That is
still paramount to-day, and, in the moving crowd
of good society, the men of valor and reality are
known, and rise to their natural place. The com-

MANNERS. 109

petition is transferred from war to politics and
trade, but the personal force appears readily
enough in these new arenas.

Power first, or no leading class. In politics
and in trade, bruisers and pirates are of better
promise than talkers and clerks. God knows that
all sorts of gentlemen knock at the door ; but
whenever used in strictness, and with any
emphasis, the name will be found to point at
original energy. It describes a man standing in
his own right, and working after untaught
methods. In a good lord, there must first be a
good animal, at least to the extent of yielding the
incomparable advantage of animal spirits. The
ruling class must have more, but they must have
these, giving in every company the sense of power,
which makes things easy to be done which daunt the
wise. The society of the energetic class, in their
friendly and festive meetings, is full of courage,
and of attempts, which intimidate the pale scholar.
The courage which girls exhibit is like a battle of
Lundy's Lane, or a sea-fight. The intellect relies
on memory to make some supplies to face these
extemporaneous squadrons. But memory is a
base mendicant with basket and badge, in the
presence of these sudden masters. The rulers of
society must be up to the work of the world, and
equal to their versatile office : men of the right
Csesarean pattern, who have great range of affinity.
I am far from believing the timid maxim of Lord
Falkland, (" that for ceremony there must go two
to it ; since a bold fellow will go through the curc-

IIO ESSAY IV.

ningest forms,") and am of opinion that the
gentleman is the bold fellow whose forms are
not to be broken through ; and only that plenteous
nature is rightful master, which is the complement
of whatever person it converses with. My gen-
tleman gives the law where he is ; he will outpray
saints in chapel, outgeneral veterans in the field,
and outshine all courtesy in the hall. He is good
company for pirates, and good with academicians ;
so that it is useless to fortify yourself against him ;
he has the private entrance to all minds, and I
could as easily exclude myself, as him. The fa-
mous gentlemen of Asia and Europe have been of
this strong type : Saladin, Sapor, the Cid, Julius
Caesar, Scipio, Alexander, Pericles, and the lord-
liest personages. They sat very carelessly in their
chairs, and were too excellent themselves, to value
any condition at a high rate.

A plentiful fortune is reckoned necessary, in
the popular judgment, to the completion of this
man of the world : and it is a material deputy
which walks through the dance which the first has
led. Money is not essential, but this wide affinity
is, which transcends the habits of clique and caste,
and makes itself felt by men of all classes. If the
aristocrat is only valid in fashionable circles, and
not with trackmen, he will never be a leader in
fashion : and if the man of the people cannot
speak on equal terms with the gentleman, so that
the gentleman shall perceive that he is already
really of his own order, he is not to be feared.
Diogenes, Socrates, and Epaminondas are gen

MANNERS. 1 1 1

tlemen of the best blood, who have chosen the
condition of poverty, when that of wealth was
equally open to them. I use these old names, but
the men I speak of are my contemporaries. For-
tune will not supply to every generation one of
these well-appointed knights, but every collection
of men furnishes some example of the class : and
the politics of this country, and the trade of every
town, are controlled by these hardy and irrespon-
sible doers, who have invention to take the lead,
and a broad sympathy which puts them in fellow-
ship with crowds, and makes their action popular.
The manners of this class are observed and
caught with devotion by men of taste. The as-
sociation of these masters with each other, and
with men intelligent of their merits, is mutually
agreeable and stimulating, The good forms, the
happiest expressions of each, are repeated and
adopted. By swift consent, everything super-
fluous is dropped, everything graceful is renewed.
Fine manners show themselves formidable to the
uncultivated man. They are a subtler science of
defence to parry and intimidate ; but once matched
by the skill of the other party, they drop the
point of the sword, — points and fences disappear,
and the youth finds himself in a more transparent
atmosphere, wherein life is a less troublesome
game, and not a misunderstanding rises between
the players. Manners aim to facilitate life, to get
rid of impediments, and bring the man pure to
energize. They aid our dealing and conversation,
as a railway aids travelling, by getting rid of all

112 ESSAY IV.

avoidable obstructions of the road, and leaving
nothing to be conquered but pure space. These
forms very soon become fixed, and a fine sense of
propriety is cultivated with the more heed, that it
becomes a badge of social and civil distinctions.
Thus grows up Fashion, an equivocal semblance,
the most puissant, the most fantastic and frivo-'
lous, the most feared and followed, and which
morals and violence assault in vain.

There exists a strict relation between the class
of power, and the exclusive and polished circles.
The last are always filled or filling from the first.
The strong men usually give some allowance even
to the petulances of fashion, for that affinity they
find in it. Napoleon, child of the revolution, de-
stroyer of the old noblesse, never ceased to court
the Faubourg St. Germain: doubtless with the
feeling, that fashion is a homage to men of his
stamp. Fashion, though in a strange way, re-
presents all manly virtue. It is virtue gone to
seed : it is a kind of posthumous honor. It does
not often caress the great, but the children of the
great : it is a hall of the Past. It usually sets its
face against the great of this hour. Great men
are not commonly in its halls : they are absent in
the field : they are working, not triumphing.
Fashion is made up of their children ; of those
who, through the value and virtue of somebody,
have acquired lustre to their name, marks of dis-
tinction, means of cultivation and generosity, and,
in their physical organization, a certain health and
excellence, which secures to them, if not the high-

MANNERS. 113

est power to work, yet high power to enjoy. The
class of power, the working heroes, the Cortez, the
Nelson, the Napoleon, see that this is the festivity
and permanent celebration of such as they ; that
fashion is funded talent; is Mexico, Marengo, and
Trafalgar beaten out thin ; that the brilliant
names of fashion run back to just such busy
names as their own, fifty or sixty years ago. They
are the sowers, their sons shall be the reapers, and
their sons, in the ordinary coarse of things, must
yield the possession of the harvest to new compet-
itors with keener eyes and stronger frames. The
city is recruited from the country. In the year
1805, it is said, every legitimate monarch in
Europe was imbecile. The city would have died
out, rotted, and exploded, long ago, but that it
was reinforced from the fields. It is only country
which came to town day before yesterday, that is
city and court to-day.

Aristocracy and fashion are certain inevitable
results. These mutual selections are indestruct-
ible. If they provoke anger in the least favored
class, and the excluded majority revenge them-
selves on the excluding minority, by the strong
hand, and kill them, at once a new class finds it-
self at the top, as certainly as cream rises in a
bowl of milk : and if the people should destroy
class after class, until two men only were left, one
of these would be the leader, and would be invol-
untarily served and copied by the other. You
may keep this minority out of sight and out of
mind, but it is tenacious of life, and is one of the

29

114 ESSAY IV.

estates of the realm. I am the more struck with
this tenacity, when I see its work. It respects
the administration of such unimportant matters,
that we should not look for any durability in its
rule. We sometimes meet men under some strong
moral influence, as, a patriotic, a literary, a relig^
ious movement, and feel that the moral sentiment
rules man and nature. We think all other dis-
tinctions and ties will be slight and fugitive, this
of caste or fashion, for example ; yet come from
year to year, and see how permanent that is, in
this Boston or New York life of man, where, too,
it has not the least countenance from the law of
the land. Not in Egypt or in India a firmer or
more impassable line. Here are associations whose
ties go over, and under, and through it, a meet-
ing of merchants, a military corps, a college class,
a fire-club, a professional association, a political, a
religious convention ; — the persons seem to draw
inseparably near; y et,that assembly once dispersed,
its members will not in the year meet again.
Each returns to his degree in the scale of good
society, porcelain remains porcelain, and earthen
earthen. The objects of fashion may be frivolous,
or fashion may be objectless, but the nature of
this union and selection can be neither frivolous
nor accidental. Each man's rank in that perfect
graduation depends on some symmetry in his
structure, or some agreement in his structure to
the symmetry of society. Its doors unbar instan-
taneously to a natural claim of their own kind.
A natural gentlemen finds his way in, and will

MANNERS. 115

keep the oldest patrician out, who has lost his in-
trinsic rank. Fashion understands itself; good-
breeding and personal superiority of whatever
country readily fraternize with those of every
other. The chiefs of savage tribes have distin-
guished themselves in London and Paris, by the
purity of their tournure.

To say what good of fashion we can, — it rests
on reality, and hates nothing so much as pretend-
ers ; — to exclude and mystify pretenders, and
send them into everlasting i Coventry,' is its de-
light. We contemn, in turn, every other gift of
men of the world ; but the habit even in little and
the least matters, of not appealing to any but our own
sense of propriety, constitutes the foundation of
all chivalry. There is almost no kind of self-reli-
ance, so it be sane and proportioned, which fashion
does not occasionally adopt, and give it the free-
dom of its saloons. A sainted soul is always
elegant, and, if it will, passes unchallenged into
the most guarded ring. But so will Jock the
teamster pass, in some crisis that brings him
thither, and find favor, as long as his head is not
giddy with the new circumstance, and the iron
shoes do not wish to dance in waltzes and cotil-
lons. For there is nothing settled in manners, but
the laws of behavior yield to the energy of the in-
dividual. The maiden at her first ball, the coun-
tryman at a city dinner, believes that there is a
ritual according to which every act and compli-
ment must be performed, or the failing party must
be cast out of this presence. Later, they learn

Il6 ESSAY IV.

that good sense and character make their own
forms every moment, and speak or abstain, take
wine or refuse it, stay or go, sit in a chair or
sprawl with children on the floor, or stand on their
head, or what else soever, in a new and aboriginal
way : and that strong will is always in fashion,
let who will be unfashionable. All that fashion
demands is composure, and self-content. A circle
of men perfectly well-bred would be a company of
sensible persons, in which every man's native
manners and character appeared. If the fashion-
ist have not this quality, he is nothing. We are
such lovers of self-reliance, that we excuse in a
man many sins, if he will show us a complete sat-
isfaction in his position, which asks no leave to be,
of mine, or any man's good opinion. But any
deference to some eminent man or woman of the
world forfeits all privilege of nobilit}^. He is an
underling : I have nothing to do with him ; I will
speak with his master. A man should not go
where he cannot carry his whole sphere or society
with him, — not bodily, the whole circle of his
friends, but atmospherically. He should preserve
in a new company the same attitude of mind and
reality of relation, which his daily associates draw
him to, else he is shorn of his best beams, and will
be an orphan in the merriest club. "If you could

see Vich Ian Vohr with his tail on ! " But

Vich Ian Vohr must always carry his belongings
in some fashion, if not added as honor, then sev-
ered as disgrace.

There will always be in society certain persons

MANNERS. 117

*rho are mercuries of its approbation, and whose
glance will at any time determine for the curious
their standing in the world. These are the cham-
berlains of the lesser gods. Accept their coldness
as an omen of grace with the loftier deities, and
allow them all their privilege. They are clear in
their office, nor could they be thus formidable,
without their own merits. But do not measure
the importance of this class by their pretension,
or imagine that a fop can be the dispenser of
honor and shame. They pass also at their just
rate : for how can they otherwise, in circles which
exist as a sort of herald's office for the sifting of
character ?

As the first thing man requires of man is reality,
so, that appears in all the forms of society. We
pointedly, and by name, introduce the parties to
each other. Know you before all heaven and
earth, that this is Andrew, and this is Gregory ; —
they look each other in the eye ; they grasp each
other's hand, to identify and signalize each other.
It is a great satisfaction. A gentleman never
dodges : his eyes look straight forward, and he as-
sures the other party, first of all, that he has been
met. For what is it that we seek, in so many
visits and hospitalities ? Is it your draperies, pic-
tures, and decorations? Or, do we not insatiably
ask, Was a man in the house? I may easily go
into a great household where there is much sub-
stance, excellent provision for comfort, luxury,
and taste, and yet not encounter there any Am-
phitryon, who shall subordinate these appendages.

Il8 ESSAY IV.

I may go into a cottage, and find a farmer who
feels that he is the man I have come to see, and
fronts me accordingly. It was therefore a very
natural point of old feudal etiquette, that a gen-
tleman who received a visit, though it were of his
sovereign, should not leave his roof, but should
wait his arrival at the door of his house. No
house, though it were the Tuileries, or the Escu-
rial, is good for anything without a master. And
yet we are not often gratified by this hospitality.
Everybody we know surrounds himself with a
fine house, fine books, conservatory, gardens,
equipage, and all manner of toys, as screens to in-
terpose between himself and his guest. Does it
not seem as if man was of a very sly, elusive na-
ture, and dreaded nothing so much as a full ren-
contre front to front with his fellow ? It were
unmerciful, I know, quite to abolish the use of
these screens, which are of eminent convenience,
whether the guest is too great, or too little. We
call together many friends who keep each other in
play, or, by luxuries and ornaments we amuse the
young people, and guard our retirement. Or if,
perchance, a searching realist comes to our gate,
before whose eye we have no care to stand, then
again we run to our curtain, and hide ourselves as
Adam at the voice of the Lord God in the garden
Cardinal Caprara, the Pope's legate at Paris, de
fended himself from the glances of Napoleon, by
an immense pair of green spectacles. Napoleon
remarked them, and speedily managed to rally
them off: and yet Napoleon, in his turn, was not

MANNERS. 119

great enough with eight hundred thousand troops
at his back, to face a pair of freeborn eyes, but
fenced himself with etiquette, and within triple
barriers of reserve : and, as all the world knows
from Madame de Stael, was wont, when he found
himself observed, to discharge his face of all ex-
pression. But emperors and rich men are by no
means the most skilful masters of good manners.
No rent-roll nor army-list can dignif}^ skulking and
dissimulation: and the first point of courtesy must
always be truth, as really all the forms of good-
breeding point that way.

I have just been reading, in Mr. Hazlitt's trans-
lation, Montaigne's account of his journey into
Italy, and am struck with nothing more agreeably
than the self-respecting fashions of the time. His
arrival in each place, the arrival of a gentleman
of France, is an event of some consequence.
Wherever he goes, he pays a visit to whatever
prince or gentleman of note resides upon his road,
as a duty to himself and to civilization. When
he leaves any house in which he has lodged for a
tew weeks, he causes his arms to be painted and
hung up as a perpetual sign to the house, as was
the custom of gentlemen.

The complement of this graceful self-respect,
and that of all the points of good breeding I most
require and insist upon, is deference. I like that
every chair should be a throne, and hold a king.
I prefer a tendency to stateliness, to an excess of
fellowship. Let the incommunicable objects of
nature and the metaphysical isolation of man

120 ESSAY IV.

teach us independence. Let us not be too much
acquainted. I would have a man enter his house
through a hall filled with heroic and sacred sculp-
tures, that he might not want the hint of tran-
quillity and self-poise. We should meet each morn-
ing, as from foreign countries, and spending the
day together, should depart at night, as into for-
eign countries. In all things I would have the
island of man inviolate. Let us sit apart as the
gods, talking from peak to peak all around Olym-
pus. No degree of affection need invade this
religion. This is myrrh and rosemary to keep the
other sweet. Lovers should guard their strange-
ness. If they forgive too much, all slides into
confusion and meanness. It is easy to push this
deference to a Chinese etiquette ; but coolness and
absence of heat and haste indicate fine qualities.
A gentleman makes no noise : a lady is serene.
Proportionate is our disgust at those invaders who
fill a studious house with blast and running, to
secure some paltry convenience. Not less I dis-
like a low sympathy of each with his neighbor's
needs. Must we have a good understanding with
one another's palates ? as foolish people who have
lived long together, know when each wants salt
or sugar. I pray my companion, if he wishes for
bread, to ask me for bread, and if he wishes for
sassafras or arsenic, to ask me for them, and not to
hold out his plate, as if I knew already. Every
natural function can be dignified by deliberation
and privacy. Let us leave hurry to slaves. The
compliments and ceremonies of our breeding

MANNERS. 121

should signify, however remotely, the recollection
of the grandeur of our destiny.

The flower of courtesy does not very well bide
handling, but if we dare to open another leaf, and
explore what parts go to its conformation, we shall
find also an intellectual quality. To the leaders
of men, the brain as well as the flesh and the heart
must furnish a proportion. Defect in manners is
usually the defect of fine perceptions. Men are
too coarsely made for the delicacy of beautiful
carriage and customs. It is not quite sufficient to
good-breeding, a union of kindness and independ-
ence. We imperatively require a perception of,
and a homage to beauty in our companions. Other
virtues are in request in the field and workyard,
but a certain degree of taste is not to be spared in
those we sit with. I could better eat with one who
did not respect the truth of the laws, than with a
sloven and unpresentable person. Moral qualities
rule the world, but at short distances the senses
are despotic. The same discrimination of fit and
fair runs out, if with less rigor, into all parts of
life. The average spirit of the energetic class is
good sense, acting under certain limitations and
to certain ends. It entertains every natural gift.
Social in its nature, it respects everything which
tends to unite men. It delights in measure. The
love of beauty is mainly the love of measure or
proportion. The person who screams, or uses the
superlative degree, or converses with heat, puts
whole drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to be
loved, love measure. You must have genius, or a

122 ESSAY IV.

prodigious usefulness, if you will hide the want
of measure. This perception comes in to polish
and perfect the parts of the social instrument.
Society will pardon much to genius and special
gifts, but, being in its nature a convention, it
loves what is conventional, or what belongs to
coming together. That makes the good and bad
of manners, namely, what helps or hinders fellow-
ship. For, fashion is not good sense absolute, but
relative ; not good sense private, but good sense
entertaining company. It hates corners and sharp
points of character, hates quarrelsome, egotistical,
solitary, and gloomy people ; hates whatever can
interfere with total blending of parties ; whilst it
values all peculiarities as in the highest degree
refreshing, which can consist with good fellow-
ship. And besides the general infusion of wit to
heighten civility, the direct splendor of intellect-
ual power is ever welcome in fine society as the
costliest addition to its rule and its credit.

The dry light must shine in to adorn our festi-
val, but it must be tempered and shaded, or that
will also offend. Accuracy is essential to beauty,
and quick perceptions to politeness, but not too
quick perceptions. One may be too punctual and
too precise. He must leave the omniscience of
business at the door, when he comes into the pal-
ace of beauty. Society loves Creole natures, and
sleepy, languishing manners, so that they cover
sense, grace, and good-will ; the air of drowsy
strength, which disarms criticism ; perhaps, be-
cause such a person seems to reserve himself for

MANNERS. 123

the best of the game, and not spend himself on
surfaces ; an ignoring eye, which does not see the
annoyances, shifts, and inconveniences, that cloud
the brow and smother the voice of the sensitive.

Therefore, besides personal force and so much
perception as constitutes unerring taste, society
demands in its patrician class another element
already intimated, which it significantly terms
good-nature, expressing all degrees of generosity,
from the lowest willingness and faculty to oblige,
up to the heights of magnanimity and love. In-
sight we must have, or we shall run against one
another, and miss the way to our food; but intel-
lect is selfish and barren. The secret of success
in society is a certain heartiness and sympathy. A
man who is not happy in the company cannot find
any word in his memory that will fit the occasion.
All his information is a little impertinent. A man
who is happy there finds in every turn of the
conversation equally lucky occasions for the intro-
duction of that which he has to say. . The favor-
ites of society, and what it calls whole souls, are
able men, and of more spirit than wit, who have
no uncomfortable egotism, but who exactly fill the
hour and the company, contented and contenting,
at a marriage or a funeral, a ball or a jury, a water-
party or a shooting-match. England, which is rich
in gentlemen, furnished, in the beginning of the
present century, a good model of that genius
which the world loves, in Mr. Fox, who added to
his great abilities the most social disposition, and
real love of men. Parliamentary history has few

T24 ESSAY IV.

better passages than the debate, in which Burke
and Fox separated in the House of Commons ;
when Fox urged on his old friend the claims of
old friendship with such tenderness, that the house
was moved to tears. Another anecdote is so close
to my matter, that I must hazard the story. A
tradesman who had long dunned him for a note
of three hundred guineas, found him one day
counting gold, and demanded payment : " No,"
said Fox, " I owe this money to Sheridan : it is a
debt of honor : if an accident should happen to
me, he has nothing to show." " Then," said the
creditor, " I change my debt into a debt of honor,"
and tore the note in pieces. Fox thanked the
man for his confidence, and paid him, saying, M his
debt was of older standing, and Sheridan must
wait." Lover of liberty, friend of the Hindoo,
friend of the African slave, he possessed a great
personal popularity ; and Napoleon said of him on
the occasion of his visit to Paris, in 1805, "Mr.
Fox will always hold the first place in an assem-
bly at the Tuileries."

We may easily seem ridiculous in our eulogy
of courtesy, whenever we insist on benevolence as
its foundation. The painted phantasm Fashion
rises to cast a species of derision on what we say.
But I will neither be driven from some allowance
to Fashion as a symbolic institution, nor from the
belief that love is the basis of courtesy. We
must obtain that, if we can ; but by all means we
must affirm this. Life owes much of its spirit to
these sharp contrasts. Fashion which affects to

MANNERS. 125

be honor is often, in all men's experience, only a
ballroom -code. Yet, so long as it is the highest
circle, in the imagination of the best heads on
the planet, there is something necessary and ex-
cellent in it ; for it is not to be supposed that
men have agreed to be the dupes of anything
preposterous; and the respect which these mys-
teries inspire in the most rude and sylvan charac-
ters, and the curiosity with which details of high
life are read, betray the universality of the love
of cultivated manners. I know that a comic dis-
parity would be felt, if we should enter the ac-
knowledged 'first circles,' and apply these terrific
standards of justice, beauty, and benefit, to the
individuals actually found there. Monarchs and
heroes, sages and lovers, these gallants are not.
Fashion has many classes and many rules of pro-
bation and admission ; and not the best alone.
There is not only the right of conquest, which
genius pretends, — the individual, demonstrating
his natural aristocracy best of the best ; — but less
claims will pass for the time ; for Fashion loves
lions, and points, like Circe, to her horned com-
pany. This gentleman is this afternoon arrived
from Denmark ; and that is my Lord Ride, who
came yesterday from Bagdat; here is Captain
Friese, from Cape Turnagain ; and Captain
Symmes, from the interior of the earth ; and
Monsieur Jovaire, who came down this morning
in a balloon; Mr. Hobnail, the reformer; and
Reverend Jul Bat, who has converted the whole
torrid zone in his Sunday school; and Signoi

126 ESSAY IK

Torre del Greco, who extinguished Vesuvius by
pouring into it the Bay of Naples ; Spain, the
Persian ambassador ; and Tul Wil Shan, the
exiled nabob of Nepaul, whose saddle is the new
moon. — But these are monsters of one day, and
to-morrow will be dismissed to their holes and
dens ; for, in these rooms, every chair is waited
for. The artist, the scholar, and, in general, the
clerisy, wins its way up into these places, and gets
represented here, somewhat on this footing of
conquest. Another mode is to pass through all
the degrees, spending a year and a day in St.
Michael's Square, being steeped in Cologne water,
and perfumed, and dined, and introduced, and
properly grounded in all the biography, and poli-
tics, and anecdotes of the boudoirs.

Yet these fineries may have grace and wit.
Let there be grotesque sculpture about the gates
and offices of temples. Let the creed and com-
mandments even have the saucy homage of par-
ody. The forms of politeness universally express
benevolence in superlative degrees. What if they
are in the mouths of selfish men, and used as
means of selfishness ? What if the false gentle-
man almost bows the true out of the world?
What if the false gentleman contrives so to ad-
dress his companion, as civilly to exclude all
others from his discourse, and also to make them
feel excluded? Real service will not lose its
nobleness. All generosity is not merely French <
and sentimental ; nor is it to be concealed, that
living blood and a passion of kindness does at

MANNERS. 127

last distinguish God's gentleman from Fashion's.
The epitaph of Sir Jenkin Grout is not wholly
unintelligible to the present age. " Here lies Sir
Jenkin Grout, who loved his friend, and persuaded
his enemy : what his mouth ate, his hand paid
for : what his servants robbed, he restored : if a
woman gave him pleasure, he supported her in
pain : he never forgot his children : and whoso
couched his finger, drew after it his whole body."
Even the line of heroes is not utterly extinct.
There is still ever some admirable person in plain
clothes, standing on the wharf, who jumps in to
rescue a drowning man ; there is still some absurd
inventor of charities ; some guide and comforter
of runaway slaves ; some friend of Poland ; some
Philhellene ; some fanatic who plants shade-trees
for the second and third generation, and orchards
when he is grown old ; some well-concealed piety ;
some just man happy in an ill-fame; some youth
ashamed of the favors of fortune, and impatiently
casting them on other shoulders. And these are
the centres of society, on which it returns for
fresh impulses. These are the creators of Fash-
ion, which is an attempt to organize beauty of
behavior. The beautiful and the generous are, in
the theory, the doctors and apostles of this church :
Scipio, and the Cid, and Sir Philip Sidney, and
Washington, and every pure and valiant heart,
who worshipped Beauty by word and by deed.
The persons who constitute the natural aristoc-
racy are not found in the actual aristocracy, or,
only on its edge ; as the chemical energy of the

128 ESSAY IV.

spectrum is found to be greatest just outside of
the spectrum. Yet that is the infirmity of the
seneschals, who do not know their sovereign,
when he appears. The theory of society supposes
the existence and sovereignty of these. It di-
vines afar off their coming. It says with the elder
gods,—

" Ag Heaven and Earth are fairer far
Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs ;
And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth,
In form and shape compact and beautiful ;
So, on our heels a fresh perfection treads;
A power, more strong in beauty, born of us,
And fated to excel us, as we pass
In glory that old Darkness :

for, 'tis the eternal law,

That first in beauty shall be first in might."

Therefore, within the ethnical circle of good
society, there is a narrower and higher circle, con-
centration of its light, and flower of courtesy, to
which there is always a tacit appeal of pride and
reference, as to its inner and imperial court, the
parliament of love and chivalry. And this is
constituted of those persons in whom heroic dis-
positions are native, with the love of beauty, the
delight in society, and the power to embellish the
passing day. If the individuals who compose the
purest circles of aristocracy in Europe, the guarded
blood of centuries, should pass in review, in such
manner as that we could, at leisure, and critically
inspect their behavior, we might find no gentle-
man, and no lady ; for, although excellent speci-
mens of courtesy and high-breeding would gratify

MANNERS. 129

gs in the assemblage, in the particulars we should
detect offence. Because, elegance comes of no
breeding, but of birth. There must be romance
of character, or the most fastidious exclusion of
impertinencies will not avail. It must be genius
which takes that direction : it must be not cour-
teous, but courtesy. High behavior is as rare in
fiction as it is in fact. Scott is praised for the
fidelity with which he painted the demeanor and
conversation of the superior classes. Certainly,
kings and queens, nobles and great ladies, had
some right to complain of the absurdity that had
been put in their mouths, before the days of
Waverly ; but neither does Scott's dialogue bear
criticism. His lords brave each other in smart epi-
grammatic speeches, but the dialogue is in
costume, and does not please on the second read-
ing: it is not warm with life. In Shakespeare
alone, the speakers do not strut and bridle, the
dialogue is easily great, and he adds to so many
titles that of being the best-bred man in England,
and in Christendom. Once or twice in a life-time
we are permitted to enjoy the charm of noble
manners, in the presence of a man or woman who
have no bar in their nature, but whose character
emanates freely in their word and gesture. A
beautiful form is better than a beautiful face ; a
beautiful behavior is better than a beautiful form :
it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures :
it is the finest of the fine arts. A man is but a
little thing in the midst of the objects of nature,
yet, by the moral quality radiating from his

E

130 ESSAY IV.

countenance, he may abolish all considerations of
magnitude, and in his manners equal the majesty
of the world. I have seen an individual, whose
manners, though wholly within the conventions of
elegant society, were never learned there, but
were original and commanding, and held out pro-
tection and prosperity ; one who did not need the
aid of a court-suit, but carried the holiday in his
eye ; who exhilarated the fancy by flinging wide
the doors of new modes of existence ; who shook
off the captivity of etiquette, with happy, spirited
bearing, good-natured and free as Robin Hood;
yet with the port of an emperor, — if need be,
calm, serious, and fit to stand the gaze of millions.
The open air and the fields, the street and
public chambers, are the places where Man exe-
cutes his will ; let him yield or divide the sceptre
at the door of the house. Woman, with her
instinct of behavior, instantly detects in man a
love of trifles, any coldness or imbecility, or, in
short, any want of that large, flowing, and mag-
nanimous deportment, which is indispensable as
an exterior in the hall. Our American institu-
tions have been friendly to her, and at this
moment I esteem it a chief felicity of this country,
that it excels in women. A certain awkward
consciousness of inferiority in the men may give
rise to the new chivalry in behalf of Woman's
Rights. Certainly, let her be as much better
placed in the laws and in social forms as the most
zealous reformer can ask, but I confide so entirely
in her inspiring and musical nature, that I believe

MANNERS. 131

only herself can show us how she shall be served.
The wonderful generosity of her sentiments raises
her at times into heroical and godlike regions, and
verifies the pictures of Minerva, Juno, or Polym-
nia; and, by the firmness with which she treads
her upward path, she convinces the coarsest cal-
culators that another road exists, than that which
their feet know. But besides those who make
good in our imagination the place of muses and of
Delphic Sibyls, are there not women who fill our
vase with wine and roses to the brim, so that the
wine runs over and fills the house with perfume ;
who inspire us with courtesy ; who unloose our
tongues, and we speak ; who anoint our eyes, and
we see ? We say things we never thought to
have said; for once, our walls of habitual reserve
vanished, and left us at large ; we were children
playing with children in a wide field of flowers.
Steep us, we cried, in these influences, for days,
for weeks, and we shall be sunny poets, and will
write out in many-colored words the romance that
you are. Was it Hafiz or Firdousi that said of
his Persian Lilla, She was an elemental force, and
astonished me by her amount of life, when I saw
her day after day radiating, every instant, redun-
dant joy and grace on all around her. She was a
solvent powerful to reconcile all heterogeneous
persons into one society : like air or water, an ele-
ment of such a great range of affinities, that it
combines readily with a thousand substances.
Where she is present, all others will be more than
they are wont. She was a unit and whole, so

132 ESSAY IK

that whatsoever she did, became her. She had too
much sympathy and desire to please, than that you
could say, her manners were marked with dignity;
yet no princess could surpass her clear and erect
demeanor on each occasion. She did not study
the Persian grammar, nor the books of the seven
poets, but all the poems of the seven seemed to
be written upon her. For, though the bias of her
nature was not to thought, but to sympathy,
yet was she so perfect in her own nature, as to
meet intellectual persons by the fulness of her
heart, warming them by her sentiments ; believ-
ing, as she did, that by dealing nobly with all, all
would show themselves noble.

I know that this Byzantine pile of chivalry or
Fashion, which seems so fair and picturesque to
those who look at the contemporary facts for
science or for entertainment, is not equally pleas-
ant to all spectators. The constitution of our
society makes it a giant's castle to the ambitious
youth who have not found their names enrolled in
its Golden Book, and whom it has excluded from
its coveted honors and privileges. They have yet
to learn that its seeming grandeur is shadowy and
relative: it is great by their allowance : its proud-
est gates will fly open at the approach of their
courage and virtue. For the present distress, how-
ever, of those who are predisposed to suffer from
the tyrannies of this caprice, there are easy reme-
dies. To remove your residence a couple of
miles, or at most four, will commonly relieve the

MANNERS. 133

most extreme susceptibility. For, the advantages
which fashion values are plants which thrive in
very confined localities, in a few streets, namely.
Out of this precinct, they go for nothing ; are of
no use in the farm, in the forest, in the market, in
war, in the nuptial society, in the literary or
scientific circle, at sea, in friendship, in the heaven
of thought or virtue.

But we have lingered long enough in these
painted courts. The worth of the thing signified
must vindicate our taste for the emblem. Every-
thing that is called fashion and courtesy humbles
itself before the cause and fountain of honor,
creator of titles and dignities, namely, the heart
of love. This is the royal blood, this the fire,
which, in all countries and contingencies, will
work after its kind, and conquer and expand all
that approaches it. This gives new meanings to
every fact. This impoverishes the rich, suffering
no grandeur but its own. What is rich? Are
you rich enough to help anybody ? to succor the
unfashionable and the eccentric ? rich enough to
make the Canadian in his wagon, the itinerant with
his consul's paper which commends him " To the
charitable," the swarthy Italian with his few
broken words of English, the lame pauper hunted
by overseers from town to town, even the poor in-
sane or besotted wreck of man or woman, feel the
noble exception of your presence and your house,
from the general bleakness andstoniness ; to make
such feel that they were greeted with a voice
which made them both remember and hope ?

134 ESSAY IV.

What is vulgar, but to refuse the claim on acute
and conclusive reasons? What is gentle, but to
allow it, and give their heart and yours one holi-
day from the national caution ? Without the rich
heart, wealth is an ugly beggar. The king of
Schiraz could not afford to be so bountiful as
the poor Osman who dwelt at his gate. Os-
man had a humanity so broad and deep,
that although his speech was so bold and free
with the Koran, as to disgust all the dervishes,
yet was there never a poor outcast, eccentric, or
insane man, some fool who had cut off his beard,
or who had been mutilated under a vow, or had a
pet madness in his brain, but fled at once to him,
—that great heart la}' there so sunny and hospit-
able in the centre of the country, — that it seemed
as if the instinct of all sufferers drew them to his
side. And the madness which he harbored, he
did not share. Is not this to be rich ? this only
to be rightly rich ?

But I shall hear without pain, that I play the
courtier very ill, and talk of that which I do not
well understand. It is easy to see, that what is
called by distinction society and fashion, has good
laws as well as bad, has much that is necessary,
and much that is absurd. Too good for banning,
and too bad for blessing, it reminds us of a tradi-
tion of the pagan mythology, in any attempt to
settle its character. ' I overheard Jove, one day,*
said Silenus, ' talking of destroying the earth ;
he said, it had failed ; they were all rogues and
vixens, who went from bad to worse, as fast as the

MANNERS. 135

days succeeded each other. Minerva said, she hoped
not ; they were only ridiculous little creatures,
with this odd circumstance, that they had a blur,
or indeterminate aspect, seen far or seen near ; if
you called them bad, they would appear so ; if
you called them good, they would appear so ; and
there was no one person or action among them,
which would not puzzle her owl, much more all
Olympus, to know whether it was fundamentally
bad or good.'

GIFTS.

Gifts of one who loved me,-
*T was high time they came ;
"When he ceased to love me,
Time they stopped for shama

GIFTS.

It is said that the world is in a state of bank-
ruptcy, that the world owes the world more than
the world can pay, and ought to go into chancery,
and be sold. I do not think this general insolv-
ency, which involves in some sort all the popula-
tion, to be the reason of the difficulty experienced
at Christmas and New Year, and other times, in
bestowing gifts ; since it is always so pleasant to
be generous, though very vexatious to pay debts.
But the impediment lies in the choosing. If, at
any time, it comes into my head, that a present is
due from me to somebody, I am puzzled what to
give, until the opportunity is gone. Flowers and
fruits are all fit presents ; flowers, because they
are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty out-
values all the utilities of the world. These gay
natures contrast with the somewhat stern counte-
nance of ordinary nature : they are like music
heard out of a work-house. Nature does not cocker
us: we are children, not pets: she is not fond :
everything is dealt to us without fear or favor,
after severe universal laws. Yet these delicate
flowers look like the frolic and interference of

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140 ESSAY V.

love and beauty. Men use to tell us that we
love flattery, even though we are not deceived
by it, because it shows that we are of importance
enough to be courted. Something like that
pleasure the flowers give us : what am I to whom
these sweet hints are addressed ? Fruits are ac-
ceptable gifts, because they are the flower of com-
modities, and admit of fantastic values being at-
tached to them. If a man should send to me to
come a hundred miles to visit him, and should
set before me a basket of fine summer-fruit, I
should think there was some proportion between
the labor and the reward.

For common gifts, necessity makes pertinences
and beauty every day, and one is glad when
an imperative leaves him no option, since if the
man at the door have no shoes, you have not to
-consider whether you could procure him a paint-
box. And as it is always pleasing to see a man
eat bread, or drink water, in the house or out of
doors, so it is always a great satisfaction to supply
these first wants. Necessity does everything
well. In our condition of universal dependence,
it seems heroic to let the petitioner be the judge
of his necessity, and to give all that is asked,
though at great inconvenience. If it be a fantas-
tic desire, it is better to leave to others the office
of punishing him. I can think of many parts
I should prefer playing to that of the Furies.
Next to things of necessity, the rule for a gift,
which one of my friends prescribed, is, that we
-might convey to some person that which properly

GIFTS. 141

belonged to his'character, and was easily associated
with him in thought. But our tokens of compli-
ment and love are for the most part barbarous.
Rings and other jewels are not gifts, but apologies
for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself.
Thou must bleed for me. Therefore the poet
brings his poem ; the shepherd, his lamb ; the
farmer, corn ; the miner, a gem ; the sailor, coral
and shells ; the painter, his picture ; the girl, a
handkerchief of her own sewing. This is right
and pleasing, for it restores society in so far to
its primary basis, when a man's biography is con-
veyed in his gift, and every man's wealth is an
index of his merit. But it is a cold, lifeless busi-
ness when you go to the shops to buy me some-
thing, which does not represent your life and tal-
ent, but a goldsmith's. This is fit for kings, and
rich men who represent kings, and a false state of
property, to make presents of gold and silver
stuffs, as a kind of symbolical sin-offering, or pay-
ment of black-mail.

The law of benefits is a difficult channel, which.
requires careful sailing, or rude boats. It is not
the office of a man to receive gifts. How dare
you give them? We wish to be self-sustained.
We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that
feeds us is in some danger of being bitten. We
can receive anything from love, for that is a way
of receiving it from ourselves ; but not from any
one who assumes to bestow. We sometimes hate
the meat which we eat, because there seems some-
thing of degrading dependence in living by it*

142 ESSAY V.

" Brother, if Jove to thee a present make,
Take heed that from his hands thou nothing take."

We ask the whole. Nothing less will content us.
We arraign society, if it do not give us besides
earth, and fire, and water, opportunity, love, rev-
erence, and objects of veneration.
' He is a good man who can receive a gift well.
We are either glad or sorry at a gift, and both
emotions are unbecoming. Some violence, I
think, is done, some degradation borne, when I
rejoice or grieve at a gift. I am sorry when my
independence is invaded, or when a gift comes
from such as do not know my spirit, and so the
act is not supported ; and if the gift pleases me
overmuch, then I should be ashamed that the
donor should read my heart, and see that I love
his commodity, and not him. The gift, to be
true, must be the flowing of the giver unto me,
correspondent to my flowing unto him. When
the waters are at level, then my goods pass to
him, and his to me. All his are mine, all mine
his. I say to him, How can you give me this pot
of oil, or this flagon of wine, when all your oil
and wine is mine, which belief of mine this gift
seems to deny ? Hence the fitness of beautiful,
not useful things for gifts. This giving is flat
usurpation, and therefore when the beneficiary is
ungrateful, as all beneficiaries hate all Timons,
not at all considering the value of the gift, but
looking back to the greater store it was taken
from, I rather sympathize with the beneficiary,
than with the anger of my lord Timon. For, the

GIFTS. 143

expectation of gratitude is mean, and is continu-
ally punished by the total insensibility of the
obliged person. It is a great happiness to get off
without injury and heart-burning, from one who
has had the ill luck to be served by you. It is a
very onerous business, this of being served, and
the debtor naturally wishes to give you a slap. A
golden text for these gentlemen is that which I so
admire in the Buddhist, who never thanks, and
who says, " Do not flatter your benefactors."

The reason of these discords I conceive to be,
that there is no commensurability between a man
and any gift. You cannot give anything to a
magnanimous person. After you have served
him, he at once puts you in debt by his magnanim-
ity. The service a man renders his friend is
trivial and selfish, compared with the service he
knows his friend stood in readiness to yield him,
alike before he had begun to serve his friend, and
now also. Compared with that good-will I bear
my friend, the benefit it is in my power to render
him seems small. Besides, our action on each
other, good as well as evil, is so incidental and at
random that we can seldom hear the acknowledg-
ments of any person who would thank us for a
benefit, without some shame and humiliation. We
can rarely strike a direct stroke, but must be
content with an oblique one ; we seldom have the
satisfaction of yielding a direct benefit, which is
directly received. But rectitude scatters favors
on every side without knowing it, and receives
with wonder the thanks of all people.

144 ESSAY V.

I fear to breathe any treason against the majesty
of love, which is the genius and god of gifts, and
to whom we must not affect to prescribe. Let
him give kingdoms or flower-leaves indifferently.
There are persons from whom we always expect
fairy tokens ; let us not cease to expect them.
This is prerogative, and not to be limited by our
municipal rules. For the rest, I like to see that
we cannot be bought and sold. The best of
hospitality and of generosity is also not in the
will, but in fate. I find that I am not much to
you ; you do not need me ; you do not feel me ;
then am I thrust out of doors, though you proffer
me house and lands- No services are of any
value, but only likeness. When I have attempted
to join myself to others by services, it proved an
intellectual trick, — no more. They eat your serv-
ice like apples, and leave you out. But love
them, and they feel you, and delight in you all
the time.

'NATURE.

The rounded world is fair to see,

Nine times folded in mystery :

Though baffled seers cannot impart

The secret of its laboring heart,

Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast,

And all is clear from east to west.

Spirit that lurks each form within

Beckons to spirit of its kin ;

Self-kindled every atom glows,

And hints the future which it owei.

81

NATURE.

Thejie are days which occur in this climate, at
almost any season of the year, wherein the world
reaches its perfection, when the air, the heavenly
bodies, and the earth, make a harmony, as if nature
would indulge her offspring ; when, in these bleak
upper sides of the planet, nothing is to desire that
we have heard of the happiest latitudes, and we
bask in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba ;
when everything that has life gives sign of satis-
faction, and the cattle that lie on the ground seem
to have great and tranquil thoughts. These
halcyons may be looked for with a little more as-
surance in that pure October weather, which we
distinguish by the name of the Indian Summer.
The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the
broad hills and warm wide fields. To have lived
through all its sunny hours, seems longevity
enough. The solitary places do not seem quite
lonely. At the gates of the forest, the surprised
man of the world is forced to leave his city
estimates of great and small, wise and foolish.
The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the

(U7)

148 ESSAY VI.

first step he makes into these precincts. Here is
sanctity which shames our religions, and reality
which discredits our heroes. Here we find nature
to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other
circumstance, and judges like a god all men that
come to her. We have crept out of our close and
crowded houses into the night and morning, and
we see what majestic beauties daily wrap us in
their bosom. How willingly we would escape the
barriers which render them comparatively im-
potent, escape the sophistication and second
thought, and suffer nature to intrance us. The
tempered light of the woods is like a perpetual
morning, and is stimulating and heroic. The
anciently reported spells of these places creep on
us. The stems of pines, hemlocks, and oaks
almost gleam like iron on the excited eye. The
incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live
with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles.
Here no history, or church, or state, is interpo-
lated on the divine sky and the immortal year.
How easily we might walk onward into the open-
ing landscape, absorbed by new pictures, and by
thoughts fast succeeding each other, until by de-
grees the recollection of home was crowded out of
the mind, all memory obliterated by the tyranny
of the present, and we were led in triumph by
nature.

These enchantments are medicinal, they sober
and heal us. These are plain pleasures, kindly
and native to us. We come to our own, and
make friends with matter, which the ambitious

NATURE. 149

chatter of the schools would persuade us to de-
spise. We never can part with it ; the mind loves
its old home : as water to our thirst, so is the
rock, the ground, to our eyes, and hands, and feet.
It is firm water : it is cold flame : what health,
what affinity ! Ever an old friend, ever like a
dear friend and brother, when we chat affectedly
with strangers, comes in this honest face, and
takes a grave liberty with us, and shames us out
of our nonsense. Cities give not the human senses
room enough. We go out daily and nightly to
feed the eyes on the horizon, and require so much
scope, just as we need water for our bath. There
are all degrees of natural influence, from these
quarantine powers of nature, up to her dearest
and gravest ministrations to the imagination and
the soul. There is the bucket of cold water from
the spring, the wood-fire to which the chilled
traveler rushes for safety, — and there is the sub-
lime moral of autumn and of noon. We nestle in
nature, and draw our living as parasities from her
roots and grains, and we receive glances from the
heavenly bodies, which call us to solitude, and
foretell the remotest future. The blue zenith is
the point in which romance and reality meet. I
think, if we should be rapt away into all that we
dream of heaven, and should converse with
Gabriel and Uriel, the upper sky would be all that
would remain of our furniture.

It seems as if the day was not wholly profane,
in which we have given heed to some natural ob-
ject. The fall of snowflakes in a still air, preserv-

150 ESSAY VI.

ing to each crystal its perfect form ; the blowing
of sleet over a wide sheet of water, and over plains,
the waving rye-field, the mimic waving of acres of
houstonia, whose innumerable florets whiten and
ripple before the eye ; the reflections of trees and
flowers in glassy lakes ; the musical, steaming
odorous south wind, which converts all trees to
windharps; the crackling and spurting of hem-
lock in the flames ; or of pine logs, which yield
glory to the walls and faces in the sittingroom,
— these are the music and pictures of the most
ancient religion. My house stands in low land,
with limited outlook, and on the skirt of the vil-
lage. But I go with my friend to the shore of
our little river, and with one stroke of the paddle,
I leave the village politics and personalities, yes,
and the world of villages and personalities behind,
and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and moon-
light, too bright almost for spotted man to enter
without novitiate and probation. We penetrate
bodily this incredible beauty : we dip our hands in
this painted element : our eyes are bathed in these
lights and forms. A holiday, a villeggiatura, a
royal revel, the proudest, most heart-rejoicing
festival that valor and beauty, power and taste,
ever decked and enjoyed, establishes itself on the
instant. These sunset clouds, these delicately
emerging stars, with their private and ineffable
glances, signify it and proffer it. I am taught
the poorness of our invention, the ugliness of
towns and palaces. Art and luxury have early
learned that they must work as enhancement and

NATURE. 151

sequel to this original beauty. I am overin-
structed for my return. Henceforth I shall be
hard to please. I cannot go back to toys. I am
grown expensive and sophisticated. I can no
longer live without elegance : but a countryman
shall be my master of revels. He who knows the
most, he who knows what sweets and virtues are
in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens,
and how to come at these enchantments, is the
rich and royal man. Only as far as the masters
of the world have called in nature to their aid, can
they reach the height of magnificence. This is the
meaning of their hanging-gardens, villas, garden-
houses, islands, parks, and preserves, to back their
faulty personality with these strong accessories. I
do not wonder that the landed interest should be
invincible in the state with these dangerous
auxiliaries. These bribe and invite; not kings,
not palaces, not men, not women, but these tender
and poetic stars, eloquent of secret promises. We
heard what the rich man said, we knew of his
villa, his grove, his wine, and his company, but the
provocation and point of the invitation came out
of these beguiling stars. In their soft glances, I
see what men strove to realize in some Versailles
or Paphos, or Ctesiphon. Indeed, it is the magi
cal lights of the horizon, and the blue sky for
the background, which save all our works of art,
which were otherwise bawbles. When the rich
tax the poor with servility and obsequiousness,
they should consider the effect of men reputed to
be the possessors of nature, on imaginative minds^

\$2 ESSAY VI.

Ah ! if the rich were rich as the poor fancy
riches ! A boy hears a military band play on
the field at night, and he has kings and queens,
and famous chivalry palpably before him. He
hears the echoes of a horn in a hill country, in the
Notch Mountains, for example, which converts
the mountains into an ^Eolian harp, and this super-
natural tiralira restores to him the Dorian mythol-
ogy, Apollo, Diana, and all the divine hunters and
huntresses. Can a musical note be so lofty, so
haughtily beautiful ! To the poor young poet,
thus fabulous in his picture of society ; he is loyal ;
he respects the rich ; they are rich for the sake of
his imagination ; how poor his fancy would be, if
they were not rich ! That they have some high-
fenced grove, which they call a park ; that they
live in larger and better-garnished saloons than
he has visited, and go in coaches, keeping only
the society of the elegant, to watering-places, and
to distant cities, are the ground-work from which
he has delineated estates of romance, compared
with which their actual possessions are shanties
and paddocks. The muse herself betrays her son,
and enhances the gifts of wealth and well-born
beauty, by a radiation out of the air, and clouds,
and forests that skirt the road, — a certain haughty
favor, as if from patrician genii to patricians, a
kind of aristocracy in nature, a prince of the
power of the air.

The moral sensibility which makes Edens and
Tempes so easily, may not be always found, but
the material landscape is never far off. We can

NATURE. 153

find these enchantments without visiting the Como
Lake, or the Madeira Islands. We exaggerate the
praises of local scenery. In every landscape, the
point of astonishment is the meeting of the sky
and the earth, and that is seen from the first hill-
ock as well as from the top of the Alleghanies.
The stars at night stoop down over the brownest,
homeliest common, with all the spiritual magnifi-
cence which they shed on the Campagna, or on
the marble deserts of Egypt. The uprolled clouds
and the colors of morning and evening will trans-
figure maples and alders. The difference between
landscape and landscape is small, but there is great
difference in the beholders. There is nothing so
wonderful in any particular landscape, as the
necessity of being beautiful under which every
landscape lies. Nature cannot be surprised in un-
dress. Beauty breaks in everywhere.

But it is very easy to outrun the sympathy of
readers on this topic, which schoolmen called
natura naturata, or nature passive. One can
hardly speak directly of it without excess. It is
as easy to broach in mixed companies what is
called "the subject of religion." A susceptible
person does not like to indulge his tastes in this
kind, without the apology of some trivial neces-
sity : he goes to see a woodlot, or to look at the
crops, or to fetch a plant or a mineral from a re-
mote locality, or he carries a fowling piece, or a
fishing-rod. I suppose this shame must have a
good reason. A dilettantism in nature is barren
and unworthy. The fop of fields is no better than

154 ESSAY VI.

his brother of Broadway. Men are naturally
hunters and inquisitive of wood-craft, and I sup-
pose that such a gazetteer as wood-cutters and
Indians should furnish facts for, would take place
in the most sumptuous drawingrooms of all the
" Wreaths " and " Flora's chaplets " of the book-
shops ; yet ordinarily, whether we are too clumsy
for so subtle a topic, or from whatever cause, as
soon as men begin to write on nature, they fall
into euphuism. Frivolity is a most unfit tribute
to Pan, who ought to be represented in the my-
thology as the most continent of gods. I would
not be frivolous before the admirable reserve and
prudence of time, yet I cannot renounce the right
of returning often to this old topic. The multi-
tude of false churches accredits the true religion.
Literature, poetry, science are the homage of man
to this unfathomed secret, concerning which no
sane man can affect an indifference or incuriosity.
Nature is loved by what is best in us. It is loved
as the city of God, although, or rather because
there is no citizen. The sunset is unlike anything
that is underneath it : it wants men. And the
beauty of nature must always seem unreal and
mocking, until the landscape has human figures,
that are as good as itself. If there were good
men, there would never be this rapture in nature.
If the king is in the palace, nobody looks at the
walls. It is when he is gone, and the house is
filled with grooms and gazers, that we turn from
the people, to find relief in the majestic men that
are suggested by the pictures and the architecture.

NATURE. 155

The critics who complain of the sickly separation
of the beauty of nature from the thing to be done,
must consider that our hunting of the picturesque
is inseparable from our protest against false so-
ciety. Man is fallen ; nature is erect, and serves
as a differential thermometer, detecting the pres-
ence or absence of the divine sentiment in man.
By fault of our dulness and selfishness, we are
looking up to nature, but when we are convales-
cent, nature will look up to us. We see the foam-
ing brook with compunction : if our own life
flowed with the right energy, we should shame
the brook. The stream of zeal sparkles with real
fire, and not with reflex rays of sun and moon.
Nature may be as selfishly studied as trade.
Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology ; psy-
chology, mesmerism (with intent to show where
our spoons are gone) ; and anatomy and physi-
ology, become phrenology and palmistry.

But taking timely warning, and leaving many
things unsaid on this topic, let us not longer omit our
homage to the Efficient Nature, natura naturans,
the quick cause, before which all forms flee as the
driven snows, itself secret, its works driven before
it in flocks and multitudes (as the ancient repre-
sented nature by Proteus, a shepherd), and in un-
describable variety. It publishes itself in creat-
ures, reaching from particles and spicula, through
transformation on transformation to the highest
symmetries, arriving at consummate results with-
out a shock or a leap. A little heat, that is, a
little motion, is all that differences the bald, daz-

156 ESSAY VI.

zling white, and deadly cold poles of the earth
from the prolific tropical climates. All changes
pass without violence, by reason of the two car-
dinal conditions of boundless space and boundless
time. Geology has initiated us into the secularity
of nature, and taught us to disuse our dame-
school measures, and exchange our Mosaic and
Ptolemaic schemes for her large style. We knew
nothing rightly, for want of perspective. Now
we learn what patient periods must round them-
selves before the rock is formed, then before the
rock is broken, and the first lichen race has dis-
integrated the thinnest external plate into soil, and
opened the door for the remote Flora, Fauna,
Ceres, and Pomona, to come in. How far off yet
is the trilobite ! how far the quadruped ! how in-
conceivably remote is man ! All duly arrive, and
then race after race of men. It is a long way
from granite to the oyster ; farther yet to Plato,
and the preaching of the immortality of the soul.
Yet all must come, as surely as the first atom has
two sides.

Motion or change, and identity or rest, are the
first and second secrets of nature : Motion and
Rest. The whole code of her laws may be writ-
ten on the thumbnail, or the signet of a ring.
The whirling bubble on the surface of a brook
admits us to the secret of the mechanics of the
sky. Every shell on the beach is a key to it. A
little water made to rotate in a cup explains the
formation of the simpler shells; the addition of
matter from year to year, arrives at last at the

NATURE. 157

most complex forms; and yet so poor is nature
with all her craft, that, from the beginning to the
end of the universe, she has but one stuff, — but one
stuff with its two ends, to serve up all her dream-
like variety. Compound it how she will, star,
sand, fire, water, tree, man, it is still one stuff, and
betrays the same properties. .

Nature is always consistent, though she feigns
to contravene her own laws. She keeps her laws,
and seems to transcend them. She arms and
equips an animal to find its place and living in
the earth, and, at the same time, she arms and
equips another animal to destroy it. Space exists
to divide creatures ; but by clothing the sides of
a bird with a few feathers, she gives him a petty
omnipresence. The direction is forever onward,
but the artist still goes back for materials, and be-
gins again with the first elements on the most ad-
vanced stage : otherwise, all goes to ruin. If we
look at her work, we seem to catch a glance of a
system in transition. Plants are the young of
the world, vessels of health and vigor ; but they
grope ever upward towards consciousness ; the
trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their
imprisonment, rooted in the ground. The animal
is the novice and probationer of a more advanced
order. The men, though young, having tasted the
first drop from the cup of thought, are already dissi-
pated: the maples and ferns are still uncorrupt; yet
no doubt, when they come to consciousness, they
too will curse and swear. Flowers so strictly belong
to youth, that we adult men soon come to feel

158 ESSAY VI.

that their beautiful generations concern not us:
we have had our day ; now let the children have
theirs. The flowers jilt us, and we are old bache-
lors with our ridiculous tenderness.

Things are so strictly related, that according to
the skill of the eye, from any one object the parts
and properties of any other may be predicted.
If we had eyes to see it, a bit of stone from the
city wall would certify us of the necessity that
man must exist, as readily as the city. That iden-
tity makes us all one, and reduces to nothing great
intervals on our customary scale. We talk of
deviations from natural life, as if artificial life
were not also natural. The smoothest curled
courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal
nature, rude and aboriginal as a white bear, omnip-
otent to its own ends, and is directly related, there
amid essences and billetdoux, to Himmaleh mount-
ain-chains, and the axis of the globe. If we
consider how much we are nature's, we need not
be superstitious about towns, as if that terrific or
benefic force did not find us there also, and fash-
ion cities. Nature, who made the mason, made the
house. We may easily hear too much of rural
influences. The cool, disengaged air of natural
objects makes them enviable to us, chafed and ir-
ritable creatures with red faces, and we think we
shall be as grand as they, if we camp out and eat
roots ; but let us be men instead of wood-chucks,
and the oak and the elm shall gladly serve us,
though we sit in chairs of ivory on carpets of
silk.

NATURE. 159

This guiding identity runs through all the sur-
prises and contrasts of the piece, and character-
izes every law. Man carries the world in his head,
the whole astronomy and chemistry suspended in
a thought. Because the history of nature is char-
actered in his brain, therefore is he the prophet
and discoverer of her secrets. Every known fact
in natural science was divined by the presenti-
ment of somebody, before it was actually verified.
A man does not tie his shoe without recognizing
laws which bind the farthest regions of nature :
moon, plant, gas, crystal are concrete geometry
and numbers. Common sense knows its own, and
recognizes the fact at first sight in chemical exper-
iment. The common sense of Franklin, Dalton,
Davy, and Black is the same common sense which
made the arrangements which now it discovers.

If the identity expresses organized rest, the
counter-action runs also into organization. The
astronomers said, 'Give us matter, and a little
motion, and we will construct the universe. It is
not enough that we should have matter, we must
also have a single impulse, one shove to launch
the mass, and generate the harmony of the centrif-
ugal and centripetal forces. Once heave the ball
from the hand, and we can show how all this
mighty order grew.' — 4 A very unreasonable pos-
tulate,' said the metaphysicians, 4 and a plain beg-
ging of the question. Could you not prevail to
know the genesis of projection, as well as the con-
tinuation of it?' Nature, meanwhile, had not
waited for the discussion, but, right or wrong, be-

160 ESSAY VI.

stowed the impulse, and the balls rolled. It was
no great affair, a mere push, but the astronomers
were right in making much of it, for there is no
end to the consequences of the act. That fa-
mous aboriginal push propagates itself through all
the balls of the system, and through every atom
of every ball, through all the races of creatures,
and through the history and performances of every
individual. Exaggeration is in the course of
things. Nature sends no creature, no man into
the world, without adding a small excess of
his proper quality. Given the planet, it is still
necessary to add the impulse ; so, to every creat-
ure nature added a little violence of direction in
its proper path, a shove to put it on its way ; in
every instance, a slight generosity, a drop too
much. Without electricity the air would rot,
and without this violence of direction, which men
and women have, without a spice of bigot and fa-
natic, no excitement, no efficiency. We aim above
the mark, to hit the mark. Every act hath some
falsehood of exaggeration in it. And when now
and then comes along some sad, sharp-eyed man,
who sees how paltry a game is played, and refuses
to play, but blabs the secret ; — how then ? is the
bird flown ? O no, the wary Nature sends a new
troop of fairer forms, of lordlier youths, with a
little more excess of direction to hold them fast
to their several aim ; makes them a little wrong-
headed in that direction in which they are Tight-
est, and on goes the game again with new whirl,
for a generation or two more. The child with his

NATURE. l6l

sweet pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by
every sight and sound, without any power to com-
pare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whis-
tle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon, or a ginger-
bread-dog, individualizing everything, generalizing
nothing, delighted with every new thing, lies
down at night overpowered by the fatigue, which
this day of continual pretty madness has incurred.
But Nature has answered her purpose with the
curly, dimpled lunatic. She has tasked every
faculty, and has secured the symmetrical growth
of the bodily frame, by all these attitudes and
exertions, — an end of the first importance, which
could not be trusted to any care less perfect than
her own. This glitter, this opaline lustre plays
round the top of every toy to his eye, to ensure
his fidelity, and he is deceived to his good. We
are made alive and kept alive by the same arts.
Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat
for the good of living, but because the meat is
savory and the appetite is keen. The vegetable
life does not content itself with casting from the
flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills the air
and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that, if
thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves,
that hundreds may come up, that tens may live to
maturity, that, at least, one may replace the par-
ent. All things betray the same calculated pro-
fusion. The excess of fear with which the animal
frame is hedged round, shrinking from cold, start-
ing at sight of a snake, or at a sudden noise, pro-
tects us, through a multitude of groundless alarms,

F

1 62 ESSAY vr.

from some one real danger at last. The lover
seeks in marriage his private felicity and perfec-
tion, with no prospective end; and nature hides
in his happiness her own end, namely, progeny, or
the perpetuity of the race.

But the craft with which the world is made
runs also into the mind and character of men.
No man is quite sane ; each has a vein of folly
in his composition, a slight determination of blood
to the head, to make sure of holding him hard
to some one point which nature had taken to
heart. Great causes are never tried on their
merits ; but the cause is reduced to particulars to
suit the size of the partisans, and the contention
is ever hottest on minor matters. Not less re-
markable is the overfaith of each man in the
importance of what he has to do or say. The
poet, the prophet, has a higher value for what he
utters than any hearer, and therefore it gets
spoken. The strong, self-complacent Luther de-
clares with an emphasis, not to be mistaken, that
44 God himself cannot do without wise men."v
Jacob Behmen and George Fox betray their ego-
tism in the pertinacity of their controversial
tracts, and James Naylor once suffered himself to
be worshipped as the Christ. Each prophet
comes presently to identify himself with his
thought, and to esteem his hat and shoes sacred.
However this may discredit such persons with the
judicious, it helps them with the people, as it
gives heat, pungency, and publicity to their
words. A similar experience is not infrequent in

NAT (/RE. 163

private life. Each young and ardent person
writes a dairy, in which, when the hours of
prayer and penitence arrive, he inscribes his
soul The pages thus written are, to him, burn-
ing and fragrant : he reads them on his knees by
midnight and by the morning star ; he wets them
with his tears : they are sacred ; too good for the
world, and hardly yet to be shown to the dearest
friend. This is the man-child that is born to the
soul, and her life still circulates in the babe. The
umbilical cord has not yet been cut. After some
time has elapsed, he begins to wish to admit his
friend to this hallowed experience, and with
hesitation, yet with firmness, exposes the pages to
his eye. Will they not burn his eyes? The
friend coldly turns them over, and passes from
the writing to conversation, with easy transition,
which strikes the other party with astonishment
and vexation. He cannot suspect the writing
itself. Days and nights of fervid life, of com-
munion with angels of darkness and of light,
have engraved their shadowy characters on that
tear-stained book. He suspects the intelligence
or the heart of his friend. Is there then no
friend? He cannot yet credit that one may have
impressive experience, and yet may not know how
to put his private fact into literature ; and per-
haps the discovery that wisdom has other tongues
and ministers than we, that though we should
hold our peace, the truth would not the less be
spoken, might check injuriously the flames of our
zeal. A man can only speak, so long as he does

164 ESSAY VI.

not feel his speech to be partial and inadequate.
It is partial, but he does not see it to be so, whilst
he utters it. As soon as he is released from
the instinctive and particular, and sees its partial-
ity, he shuts his mouth in disgust. For, no man
,can write anything, who does not think that what
he writes is for the time the history of the world ;
or do anything well, who does not esteem his
work to be of importance. My work may be of
none, but I must not think it of none, or I shall
not do it with impunity.

In like manner, there is throughout nature
something mocking, something that leads us on
and on, but arrives nowhere, keeps no faith with
us. All promise outruns the performance. We
live in a system of approximations. Every end
is prospective of some other end, which is also
temporary ; a round and final success nowhere.
We are encamped in nature, not domesticated^
Hunger and thirst lead us on to eat and drink ,
but bread and wine, mix and cook them howr 3011
will, leave us hungry and thirsty, after the
stomach is full. It is the same with all our arts
and performances. Our music, our poetry, our
language itself are not satisfactions, but sugges-
tions. The hunger for wealth, which reduces the
planet to a garden, fools the eager pursuer.
What is the end sought? Plainly to secure the
ends of good sense and beauty from the intrusion
of deformity or vulgarity of any kind. But what
an operose method! What a train of means to
secure a little conversation ! This palace of brick

NATURE. 165

and stone, these servants, this kitchen, these
stables, horses and equipage, this bank-stock,
and file of mortgages ; trade to all the world,
country-house and cottage by the water-side, all
for a little conversation, high, clear, and spiritual \
Could it not be had as well by beggars on the
highway? No, all these things came from succes-
sive efforts of these beggars to remove friction
from the wheels of life, and give opportunity.
Conversation, character were the avowed ends ;
wealth was good as it appeased the animal
cravings, cured the smoky chimney, silenced the
creaking door, brought friends together in a warm
and quiet room, and kept the children and the
dinner-table in a different apartment. Thought,,
virtue, beauty were the ends ; but it was known
that men of thought and virtue sometimes had
the headache, or wet feet, or could lose good time
whilst the room was getting warm in winter days.
Unluckily, in the exertions necessary to remove
these inconveniences, the main attention has been
diverted to this object ; the old aims have been
lost sight of, and to remove friction has come to
be the end. That is the ridicule of rich men, and
Boston, London, Vienna, and now the govern-
ments generally of the world, are cities and
governments of the rich, and the masses are not
men, but poor men, that is, men who would be
rich ; this is the ridicule of the class, that they
arrive with pains and sweat and fury nowhere ;
when all is done, it is for nothing. They are like one
who has interrupted the conversation of a company

166 ESSAY VI.

to make his speech, and now has forgotten what ho
went to say. The appearance strikes the eye
everywhere of an aimless society, of aimless nations.
Were the ends of nature so great and cogent, as
to exact this immense sacrifice of men ?

Quite analogous to the deceits in life, there is,
as might be expected, a similar effect on the eye
from the face of external nature. There is in
woods and waters a certain enticement and flat-
tery, together with a failure to yield a present
satisfaction. This disappointment is felt in every
landscape. I have seen the softness and beauty
of the summer-clouds floating feathery overhead,
enjoying, as it seemed, their height and privilege
of motion, whilst yet they appeared not so much
the drapery of this place and hour, as forelooking
to some pavilions and gardens of festivity beyond.
It is an odd jealousy : but the poet finds himself
not near enough to his object. The pine-tree, the
river, the bank of flowers before him, does not
seem to be nature. Nature is still elsewhere.
This or this is but outskirt and far-off reflection
and echo of the triumph that has passed by, and
is now at its glancing splendor and heyday, per-
chance in the neighboring fields, or, if you stand
in the field, then in the adjacent woods. The
present object shall give you this sense of stillness
that follows a pageant which has just gone by.
What splendid distance, what recesses of ineffable
pomp and loveliness in the sunset ! But who can
go where they are, or lay his hand or plant his
foot thereon ? Off they fall from the round w.^rld

NATURE. 167

forever and ever. It is the same among the men
and women, as among the silent trees; always a
referred existence, an absence, never a presence
and satisfaction. Is it, that beauty can never be
grasped ? in persons and in landscape is equally
inaccessible? The accepted and betrothed lover
has lost the wildest charm of his maiden in her
acceptance of him. She was heaven whilst he
pursued her as a star : she cannot be heaven, if
she stoops to such a one as he.

What shall we say of this omnipresent appear-
ance of that first projectile impulse, of this flat-
tery and baulking of so many well-meaning
creatures? Must we not suppose somewhere in
the universe a slight treachery and derision ? Are
we not engaged to a serious resentment of this
use that is made of us? Are we tickled trout,
and fools of nature? One look at the face of
heaven and earth lays all petulance at rest, and
soothes us to wiser convictions. To the intelli-
gent, nature converts itself into a vast promise,
and will not be rashly explained. Her secret is
untold. Many and many an (Edipus arrives: he
has the whole mystery teeming in his brain.
Alas ! the same sorcery has spoiled his skill ; no
syllable can he shape on his lips. Her mighty
orbit vaults like the fresh rainbow into the deep,
but no archangel's wing was yet strong enough to
follow it, and report of the return of the curve.
But it also appears that our actions are seconded
and disposed to greater conclusions than we de-
signed. We are escorted on every hand through

1 68 ESSAY VL

life by spiritual agents, and a beneficent purpose
lies in wait for us. We cannot bandy words with
nature, or deal with her as we deal with persons.
If we measure our individual forces against hers,
we may easily feel as if we were the sport of an
insuperable destiny. But if, instead of identify-
ing ourselves with the work, we feel that the soul
of the workman streams through us, we shall find
the peace of the morning dwelling first in our
hearts, and the fathomless powers of gravity and
chemistry and, over them, of life, pre-existing
within us in their highest form.

The uneasiness which the thought of our help-
lessness in the chain of causes occasions us, results
from looking too much at one condition of nature,
namely, Motion. But the drag is never taken
from the wheel. Wherever the impulse exceeds,
the Rest or Identity insinuates its compensation.
All over the wide fields of earth grows the pru-
nella or self-heal. After every foolish day we
sleep off the fumes and furies of its hours ; and
though we are always engaged with particulars,
and often enslaved to them, we bring with us to
every experiment the innate universal laws.
These, while they exist in the mind as ideas, stand
around us in nature forever embodied, a present
sanity to expose and cure the insanity of men.
Our servitude to particulars betrays into a hun-
dred foolish expectations. We anticipate a new
era from the invention of a locomotive, or a bal-
loon ; the new engine brings with it the old
checks. They say that by electro-magnetism,

NATURE. 169

your salad shall be grown from the seed, whilst
your fowl is roasting for dinner : it is a symbol of
our modern aims and endeavors, — of our conden-
sation and acceleration of objects : but nothing is
gained : nature cannot be cheated : man's life is
but seventy salads long, grow they swift or grow
they slow. In these checks and impossibilities,
however, we find our advantage, not less than in
the impulses. Let the victory fall where it will,
we are on that side. And the knowledge that we
traverse the whole scale of being, from the centre
to the poles of nature, and have some stake in
every possibility, lends that sublime lustre to
death, which philosophy and religion have too
outwardly and literally striven to express in the
popular doctrine of the immortality of the soul.
The reality is more excellent than the report.
Here is no ruin, no discontinuity, no spent ball.
The divine circulations never rest nor linger.
Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns
to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas.
The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile
essence is forever escaping again into the state of
free thought. Hence the virtue and pungency of
the influence on the mind, of natural objects,
whether inorganic or organized. Man imprisoned,
man crystallized, man vegetative, speaks to man
impersonated. That power which does not re*
spect quantity, which makes the whole and the
particle its equal channel, delegates its smile to
the morning, and distils its essence into every
drop of rain. Every moment instructs, and every

170 ESSAY VI.

object : for wisdom is infused into every form.
It has been poured into us as blood ; it convulsed
us as pain ; it slid into us as pleasure ; it envel-
oped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of
cheerful labor ; we did not guess its essence, until
after a long time<>

POLITICS.

Gold and iron are good

To buy iron and gold ;
All earth's fleece and food

For their like are sold.
Boded Merlin wise,

Proved Napoleon great,—
Nor kind nor coinage buys

Aught above its rate.
Fear, Craft, and Avarice

Cannot rear a State.
Out of dust to build

What is more than dust, —
Walls Amphion piled

Phoebus stablish must.
When the Muses nine

With the Virtues meet,
Find to their design

An Atlantic seat,
By green orchard boughs

Fended from the heat.
Where the statesman ploughs

Furrow for the wheat ;
When the Church is social worth,
When the state-house is the hearth,
Then the perfect State is come,
The Republican at home.

POLITICS.

In dealing with the State, we ought to remem-
ber that its institutions are not aboriginal, though
they existed before we were born : that they are
nob superior to the citizen : that every one of them
was once the act of a single man : every law and
usage was a man's expedient to meet a particular
case : that they all are imitable, all alterable ; we
may make as good ; we may make better. Society
is an illusion to the young citizen. It lies before
him in rigid repose, with certain names, men, and
institutions, rooted like oak-trees to the centre,
round which all arrange themselves the best they
can. But the old statesman knows that society is
fluid; there are no such roots and centres; but
any particle may suddenly become the centre of
the movement, and compel the system to gyrate
round it, as every man of strong will, like Pisis-
tratus, or Cromwell, does for a time, and every
man of truth, like Plato, or Paul, does forever.
But politics rest on necessary foundations, and
cannot be treated with levity. Republics abound
in young civilians, who believe that the laws make

(173)

174 ESSAY VII.

the city, that grave modifications of the policy and
modes of living, and employments of the popula-
tion, that commerce, education, and religion, may
be voted in or out ; and that any measure, though
it were absurd, may be imposed on a people, if
only you can get sufficient voices to make it a law.
But the wise know that foolish legislation is a
rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting ; that
the State must follow, and not lead the character
and progress of the citizen ; the strongest usurper
is quickly got rid of ; and they only who build on
Ideas, build for eternity ; and that the form of
government which prevails is the expression of
what cultivation exists in the population which
permits it. The law is only a memorandum. We
are superstitious, and esteem the statute somewhat:
so much life as it has in the character of living
men, is its force. The statute stands there to say,
yesterday we agreed so and so, but how feel ye
this article to-day ? Our statute is a currency,
which we stamp with our own portrait : it soon
becomes unrecognizable, and in process of time
will return to the mint. Nature is not democratic,
nor limited-monarchical, but despotic, and will
not be fooled or abated of any jot of her au-
thority, by the per test of her sons : and as fast as
the public mind is opened to more intelligence,
the code is seen to be brute and stammering. It
speaks not articulately, and must be made to.
Meantime the education of the general mind never
stops. The reveries of the true and simple are
prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams,

POLITICS. 175

and prays, and paints to-day, but shuns the ridi-
cule of saying aloud, shall presently be the reso-
lutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as
grievance and bill of rights through conflict
and war, and then shall be triumphant law and
establishment for a hundred years, until it gives
place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures. The
history of the State sketches in coarse outline the
progress of thought, and follows at a distance the
delicacy of culture and of aspiration.

The theory of politics, which has possessed the
mind of men, and which they have expressed the
best they could in their laws and in their revolu-
tions, considers persons and property as the two
objects for whose protection government exists.
Of persons, all have equal rights, in virtue of
being identical in nature. This interest, of course,
with its whole power demands a democracy. Whilst
the rights of all as persons are equal, in virtue of
their access to reason, their rights in property are
very unequal. One man owns his clothes, and
another owns a county. This accident, depend-
ing, primarily, on the skill and virtue of the
parties, of which there is every degree, and, sec-
ondarily, on patrimony, falls unequally, and its
rights, of course, are unequal. Personal rights,
universally the same, demand a government framed
on the ratio of the census: property demands a
government framed on the ratio of owners and of
owning. Laban, who has flocks and herds, wishes
them looked after by an officer on the frontiers,
lest the Midianites shall drive them off, and pays

Ij6 ESSAY VII

a tax to that end. Jacob has no flocks or herds,
and no fear of the Midianites, and pays no tax to
the officer. It seemed fit that Laban and Jacob
should have equal rights to elect the officer,
who is to defend their persons, but that Laban, and
not Jacob, should elect the officer who is to guard
the sheep and cattle. And, if question arise
whether additional officers or watch-towers should
he provided, must not Laban and Isaac, and those
who must sell part of their herds to buy protection
for the rest, judge better of this, and with more
right, than Jacob, who, because he is a youth and
a traveler, eats their bread and not his own.

In the earliest society the proprietors made
their own wealth, and so long as it comes to the
owners in the direct way, no other opinion would
arise in any equitable community, than that prop-
erty should make the law for property, and per-
sons the law for persons.

But property passes through donation or inher-
itance to those who do not create it. Gift, in one
case, makes it as really the new owner's, as labor
made it the first owner's : in the other case, of
patrimony, the law makes an ownership, which
will be valid in each man's view according to the
estimate which he sets on the public tranquillity.

It was not, however, found easy to embody the
readily admitted principle, that property should
make law for property, and persons for persons :
since persons and property mixed themselves in
every transaction. At last it seemed settled, that
the rightful distinction was, that the proprietors

POLITICS. 177

should have more elective franchise than non-pro-
prietors, on the Spartan principle of M calling that
which is just, equal ; not that which is equal, just."

That principle no longer looks so self-evident
as it appeared in former times, partly, because
doubts have arisen whether too much weight had
not been allowed in the laws, to property, and
such a structure given to our usages, as allowed
the rich to encroach on the poor, and to keep
them poor; but mainly, because there is an in-
stinctive sense, however obscure and yet inarticu-
late, that the whole constitution of property, on
its present tenures, is injurious, and its influence
«n persons deteriorating and degrading; that
'■ruly, the only interest for the consideration of
tfie State is persons : that property will always
follow persons ; that the highest end of govern-
ment is the culture of men : and if men can be
educated, the institutions will share their improve-
ment, and the moral sentiment will write the law
of the land.

If it be not easy to settle the equity of this ques-
tion, the peril is less when we take note of our
natural defences. We are kept by better guards
than the vigilance of such magistrates as we com-
monly elect. Society always consists, in greatest
part, of young and foolish persons. The old, who
have seen through the hypocrisy of courts and
statesmen, die, and leave no wisdom to their sons.
They believe their own newspaper, as their fathers
did at their age. With such an ignorant and de-
ceivable majority, States would soon run to ruin,

33

178 ESSAY VII

but that there are limitations, beyond which the
folly and ambition of governors cannot go.
Things have their laws, as well as men ; and
things refuse to be trifled with. Property will
be protected. Corn will not grow, unless it is
planted and manured ; but the farmer will not
plant or hoe it, unless the chances are a hundred
to one that he will cut and harvest it. Under
any forms, persons and property must and will
have their just sway. They exert their power, as
steadily as matter its attraction. Cover up a
pound of earth never so cunningly, divide and
subdivide it ; melt it to liquid, convert it to gas ;
it will always weigh a pound : it will always
attract and resist other matter, by the full virtue
of one pound weight ; — and the attributes of a
person, his wit and his moral energy, will exercise,
under any law or extinguishing tyranny, their
proper force, — if not overtly, then covertly ; if not
for the law, then against it ; with right, or by might.
The boundaries of personal influence it is im-
possible to fix, as persons are organs of moral or
supernatural force. Under the dominion of an
idea, which possesses the minds of multitudes, as
civil freedom, or the religious sentiment, the pow-
ers of persons are no longer subjects of calcula-
tion. A nation of men unanimously bent on
freedom, or conquest, can easily confound the
arithmetic of statists, and achieve extravagaut
actions, out of all proportion to their means ; as,
the Greeks, the Saracens, the Swiss, the Ameri-
cans, and the French have done.

POLITICS. 179

In like manner, to every particle of property
belongs its own attraction. A cent is the repre-
sentative of a certain quantity of corn or other
commodity. Its value is in the necessities of the
animal man. It is so much warmth, so much
bread, so much water, so much land. The law
may do what it will with the owner of property,
its just power will still attach to the cent. The
law may in a mad freak say that all siiall have
power except the owners of property : they shall
have no vote. Nevertheless, by a higher law, the
property will, year after year, write every statute
that respects property. The non -proprietor will
be the scribe of the proprietor. What the owners
wish to do, the whole power of property will do,
either through the law, or else in defiance of it.
Of course, I speak of all the property, not merely
of the great estates. When the rich are out-
voted, as frequently happens, it is the joint treas-
ury of the poor which exceeds their accumulations.
Every man owns something, if it is only a cow, or
a wheelbarrow, or his arms, and so has that prop-
erty to dispose of.

The same necessity which secures the rights of
person and property against the malignity or folly
of the magistrate determines the form and meth-
ods of governing, which are proper to each nation,
and to its habit of thought, and nowise transfera-
ble to other states of society. In this country,
we are very vain of our political institutions,
which are singular in this, that they sprung,
within the memory of living men, from the char-

l8o ESSAY VII.

acter and condition of the people, which they still
express with sufficient fidelity, — and we ostenta-
tiously prefer them to any other in history. They
are not better, but only fitter for us. We may be
wise in asserting the advantage in modern times
of the democratic form, but to other states of so-
ciety, in which religion consecrated the monarch-
ical, that and not this was expedient. Democracy
is better for us, because the religious sentiment
of the present time accords better with it. Born
democrats, we are nowise qualified to judge of
monarchy, which, to our fathers living in the
monarchical idea, was also relatively right. But
our institutions, though in coincidence with the
spirit of the age, have not any exemption from
the practical defects which have discredited other
forms. Every actual State is corrupt. Good
men must not obey the laws too well. What
satire on government can equal the severity of
censure conveyed in the word politic, which now
for ages has signified cunning, intimating that the
State is a trick?

The same benign necessity and the same prac-
tical abuse appear in the parties into which each
State divides itself, of opponents and defenders
of the administration of the government. Parties
are also founded on instincts, and have better
guides to their own humble aims than the sagacity
of their leaders. They have nothing perverse in
their origin, but rudely mark some real and last-
ing relation. We might as wisely reprove the
east wind, or the frost, as a political party, whose

POLITICS. l8l

members, for the most part, could give no account
of their position, but stand for the defence of
those interests in which they find themselves.
Our quarrel with them begins, when they quit
this deep natural ground at the bidding of some
leader, and, obeying personal considerations,
throw themselves into the maintenance and de-
fence of points, nowise belonging to their system.
A party is perpetually corrupted by personality.
Whilst we absolve the association from dishonesty
we cannot extend the same charity to their lead-
ers. They reap the rewards of the docility and
zeal of the masses which they direct. Ordinarily,
our parties are parties of circumstance, and not
of principle ; as, the planting interest in conflict
with the commercial ; the party of capitalists, and
that of operatives; parties which are identical in
their moral character, and which can easily change
ground with each other, in the support of many
of their measures. Parties of principle, as relig-
ious sects, or the party of free trade, of universal
suffrage, of abolition of slavery, of abolition of
capital punishment, degenerate into personalities,
or would inspire enthusiasm. The vice of our
leading parties in this country (which may be
cited as a fair specimen of these societies of opin-
ion) is, that they do not plant themselves on the
deep and necessary grounds to which they are
respectively entitled, but lash themselves to fury
in the carrying of some local and momentary
measure, nowise useful to the commonwealth. Of
the two great parties, which, at this hour, almost

1 82 ESSAY VII

share the nation between them, I should say that
one has the best cause, and the other contains the
best men. The philosopher, the poet, or the re-
ligious man will, of course, wish to cast his vote
with the democrat, for free-trade, for wide suf-
frage, for the abolition of legal cruelties in the
penal code, and for facilitating in every manner
the access of the young and the poor to the
sources of wealth and power. But he can rarely
accept the persons whom the so-called popular
party propose to him as representatives of these
liberalities. They have not at heart the ends
which give to the name of democracy what hope
and virtue are in it. The spirit of our American
radicalism is destructive and aimless: it is not
loving ; it has no ulterior and divine ends ; but is
destructive only out of hatred and selfishness.
On the other side, the conservative party, com-
posed of the most moderate, able, and cultivated
part of the population, is timid, and merely de-
fensive of property. It vindicates no right, it
aspires to no real good, it brands no crime, it pro-
poses no generous policy, it does not build, nor
write, nor cherish the arts, nor foster religion, nor
establish schools, nor encourage science, nor
emancipate the slave, nor befriend the poor, or
the Indian, or the immigrant. From neither
party, when in power, has the world any benefit
to expect in science, art, or humanity, at all com-
mensurate with the resources of the nation.

I do not for these defects despair of our repub-
lic. We are not at the mercy of any waves of

POLITICS. 183

chance. In the strife of ferocious parties, human
nature always finds itself cherished, as the chil-
dren of the convicts at Botany Bay are found to
have as healthy a moral sentiment as other chil-
dren. Citizens of feudal states are alarmed at
our democratic institutions lapsing into anarchy;
and the older and more cautious among ourselves
are learning from Europeans to look with some
terror at our turbulent freedom. It is said that
in our license of construing the Constitution, and
in the despotism of public opinion, we have no
anchor ; and one foreign observer thinks he has
found the safe -guard in the sanctity of Marriage
among us ; and another thinks he has found it in
our Calvinism. Fisher Ames expressed the popu-
lar security more wisely, when he compared a
monarchy and a republic, saying, " that a mon-
archy is a merchantman, which sails well, but will
sometimes strike on a rock, and go to the bottom ;
whilst a republic is a raft, which would never
sink, but then your feet are always in water."
No forms can have any dangerous importance,
whilst we are befriended by the laws of things,
It makes no difference how many tons weight of
atmosphere presses on our heads, so long as the
same pressure resists it within the Lungs. Aug-
ment the mass a thousand fold, it cannot begin to
crush us, as long as reaction is equal to action.
The fact of two poles, of two forces, centripetal
and centrifugal, is universal, and each force by its
own activity develops the other. Wild liberty
develops iron conscience. Want of liberty, by

184 ESS A Y VII

strengthening law and decorum, stupefies con-
science. ' Lynch-law ' prevails only where there
is greater hardihood and self-subsistency in the
leaders. A mob cannot be a permanency : every-
body's interest requires that it should not exist,
and only justice satisfies all.

We must trust infinitely to the beneficent ne-
cessity which shines through all laws. Human
nature expresses itself in them as characteristic-
ally as in statues, or songs, or railroads, and an ab-
stract of the codes of nations would be a tran-
script of the common conscience. Governments
have their origin in the moral identity of men.
Reason for one is seen to be reason for another,
and for every other. There is a middle measure
which satisfies all parties, be they never so many,
or so resolute for their own. Every man finds a
sanction for his simplest claims and deeds in de-
cisions of his own mind, which he calls Truth and
Holiness. In these decisions all the citizens find
a perfect agreement, and only in these ; not in
what is good to eat, good to wear, good use of
time, or what amount of land, or of public aid,
each is entitled to claim. This truth and justice
men presently endeavor to make application of, to
the measuring of land, the apportionment of serv-
ice, the protection of life and property. Their
first endeavors, no doubt, are very awkward. Yet
absolute right is the first governor ; or, every
government is an impure theocracy. The idea,
after which each community is aiming to make
and mend its law, is, the will of the wise man.

POLITICS. 185

The wise man it cannot find in nature, and it
makes awkward but earnest efforts to secure his
government by contrivance ; as, by causing the
entire people to give their voices on every meas-
ure ; or, by a double choice to get the representa-
tion of the whole ; or, by a selection of the best
citizens ; or, to secure the advantages of efficiency
and internal peace, by confiding the government
to one who may himself select his agents. All
forms of government symbolize an immortal gov-
ernment, common to all dynasties and independ-
ent of numbers, perfect where two men exist, per-
fect where there is only one man.

Every man's nature is a sufficient advertise-
ment to him of the character of his fellows.
My right and my wrong, is their right and their
wrong. Whilst I do what is fit for me, and ab-
stain from what is unfit, my neighbor and I shall
often agree in our means, and work together for a
time to one end. But whenever I find my do-
minion over myself not sufficient for me, and un-
dertake the direction of him also, I overstep tire
truth, and come into false relations to him. I
may have so much more skill or strength than he,
that he cannot express adequately his sense of
wrong, but it is a lie, and hurts like a lie both
him and me. Love and nature cannot maintain
the assumption : it must be executed by a practi-
cal lie, namely, by force. This undertaking for
another is" the blunder which stands in colossal
ugliness in the governments of the world. It is
the same thing in numbers, as in a pair, only not

1 86 ESSAY VII.

quite so intelligible. I can see well enough a
great difference between my setting myself down
to a self-control, and n^ going to make somebody
else act after my views : but when a quarter of
the human race assume to tell me what I must
io, I may be too much disturbed by the circum-
stances to see so clearly the absurdit}r of their
command. Therefore, all public ends look vague
and quixotic beside private ones. For, any laws
but those which men make for themselves, are
laughable. If I put myself in the place of my
child, and we stand in one thought, and see that
things are thus or thus, that perception is law for
him and me. We are both there, both act. But if,
without carrying him into the thought, I look
over into his plot, and, guessing how it is with
him, ordain this or that, he will never obey me.
This is the history of governments, — one man
does something which is to bind another. A man
who cannot be acquainted with me, taxes me ;
looking from afar at me, ordains that a part of my
labor shall go to this or that whimsical end, not
as I, but as he happens to fancy. Behold the con-
sequence. Of all debts, men are least willing to
pay the taxes. What a satire is this on govern-
ment! Everywhere they think they get their
money's worth, except for these.

Hence, the less government we have, the better,
— the fewer laws, and the less confided power.
The antidote to this abuse of formal Government
is the influence of private character, the growth
flf the Individual ; the appearance of the princi-

POLITICS. 187

pal to supersede the proxy ; the appearance of the
wise man, of whom the existing government is, it
must be owned, a shabby imitation. That which
all things tend to educe, which freedom, cultiva-
tion, intercourse, revolutions, go to form and de-
liver, is character ; that is the end of nature, to
reach unto this coronation of her king. To edu-
cate the wise man, the State exists ; and with the
appearance of the wise man, the State expires.
The appearance of character makes the State un-
necessary. The wise man is the State. He needs
no army, fort, or navy, — he loves men too well ;
no bribe, or feast, or palace, to draw friends to
him ; no vantage ground, no favorable circum-
stance. He needs no library, for he has not done
thinking ; no church, for he is a prophet ; no
statute book, for he has the lawgiver ; no money,
for he is value ; no road, for he is at home where
he is ; no experience, for the life of the creator
shoots through him, and looks from his eyes. He
has no personal friends, for he who has the spell
to draw the prayer and piety of all men unto him
needs not husband and educate a few, to share
with him a select and poetic life. His relation to
men is angelic ; his memory is myrrh to them \
his presence, frankincense and flowers.

We think our civilization near its meridian, but
we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the
morning star. In onr barbarous society the in-
fluence of character is in its infancy. As a polit-
ical power, as the rightful lord who is to tumble
all rulers from their chairs, its presence is hardly

1 88 ESSAY VII.

yet suspected. Malthus and Ricardo quite omit
it ; the Annual Register is silent ; in the Conver-
sations' Lexicon it is not set down ; the Presi-
dent's Message, the Queen's Speech, have not
mentioned it ; and yet it is never nothing. Every
thought which genius and piety throw into the
world alters the world. The gladiators in the
lists of power feel, through all their frocks of
force and simulation, the presence of worth. I
think the very strife of trade and ambition are
confession of this divinity ; and successes in those
fields are the poor amends, the fig-leaf with which
the shamed soul attempts to hide its nakedness.
I find the like unwilling homage in all quarters.
It is because we know how much is due from us,
that we are impatient to show some petty talent
as a substitute for worth. We are haunted by a
conscience of this right to grandeur of character,
and are false to it. But each of us has some
talent, can do somewhat useful, or graceful, or
formidable, or amusing, or lucrative. That we
do, as an apology to others and to ourselves, for
not reaching the mark of a good and equal life.
But it does not satisfy us, whilst we thrust it on
the notice of our companions. It may throw dust
in their eyes, but does not smooth our own brow,
or give us the tranquillity of the strong when we
walk abroad. We do penance as we go. Our
talent is a sort of expiation, and we are con-
strained to reflect on our splendid moment, with a
certain humiliation, as somewhat too fine, and not
as one act of many acts, a fair expression of our

POLITICS. 189

permanent energy. Most persons of ability meet
in society with a kind of tacit appeal. Each
seems to say, • I am not all here.' Senators and
presidents have climbed so high with pain enough,
not because they think the place specially agree-
able, but as an apology for real worth, and to
vindicate their manhood in our eyes. This con-
spicuous chair is their compensation to themselves
for being of a poor, cold, hard nature. They
must do what they can. Like one class of forest
animals, they have nothing but a prehensile tail :
climb they must, or crawl. If a man found him-
self so rich-natured that he could enter into strict
relations with the best persons, and make life
serene around him by the dignity and sweetness
of his behavior, could he afford to circumvent the
favor of the caucus and the press, and covet rela-
tions so hollow and pompous as those of a politi-
cian ? Surely nobody would be a charlatan, who
could afford to be sincere.

The tendencies of the times favor the idea of
self-government, and leave the individual, for all
code, to the rewards and penalties of his own con-
stitution, which work with more energy than we
believe, whilst we depend on artificial restraints
The movement in this direction has been very
marked in modern history. Much has been blind
and discreditable, but the nature of the revolution
is not affected by the vices of the revolters ; for
this is a purely moral force. It was never adopted
by any party in history, neither can be. It sepa-
rates the individual from all party, and unites

190 ESSAY VII

him, at the same time, to the race. It promises a
recognition of higher rights than those of per-
sonal freedom, or the security of property. A
man has a right to be employed, to be trusted, to
be loved, to be revered. The power of love, as
the basis of a State, has never been tried. We
must not imagine that all things are lapsing into
confusion, if every tender protestant be not com-
pelled to bear his part in certain social conven-
tions: nor doubt that roads can be built, letters
carried, and the fruit of labor secured, when the
government of force is at an end. Are our
methods now so excellent that all competition
is hopeless? Could not a nation of friends even
devise better ways? On the other hand, let not
the most conservative and timid fear anything
from a premature surrender of the bayonet, and
the system of force. For, according to the order
of nature, which is quite superior to our will, it
stands thus ; there will always be a government
of force, where men are selfish ; and when they
are pure enough to abjure the code of force, they
will be wise enough to see how these public ends
of the post-office, of the highway, of commerce,
and the exchange of property, of museums and
libraries, of institutions of art and science, can be
answered.

We live in a very low state of the world, and
pay unwilling tribute to governments founded on
force. There is not, among the most religious and 4
instructed men of the most religious and civil na-
tions, a reliance on the moral sentiment, and a

POLITICS. 191

sufficient belief in the unity of things to persuade
them that society can be maintained without arti-
ficial restraints, as well as the solar system ; or
that the private citizen might be reasonable, and a
good neighbor, without the hint of a jail or a con-
fiscation. What is strange, too, there never was in
any man sufficient faith in the power of rectitude,
fcto inspire him with the broad design of renovat-
ing the State on the principle of right and love.
All those who have pretended this design have
been partial reformers, and have admitted in some
manner the supremacy of the bad State. I do not
call to mind a single human being who has
steadily denied the authority of the laws, on the
simple ground of his own moral nature. Such
designs, full of genius and full of fate as they are,
are not entertained except avowedly as air-pictures.
If the individual who exhibits them dare to think
them practicable, he disgusts scholars and church-
men ; and men of talent, and women of superior
sentiments, cannot hide their contempt. Not the
less does nature continue to fill the heart of youth
with suggestions of this enthusiasm, and there are
now men, — if indeed I can speak in the plural
number, — more exactly, I will say, I have just
been conversing with one man, to whom no
weight of adverse experience will make it for a
moment appear impossible, that thousands of
human beings might exercise towards each other
tne grandest and simplest sentiments, as well as a
knot of friends, or a pair of lovers.

NOMINALIST AND REALIST.

In countless upward-striving waves

The moon-drawn tide-wave strives ;
In thousand far-transplanted grafts

The parent fruit survives ;
So, in the new-born millions,

The perfect Adam lives.
Not less are summer-mornings dear

To each child they wake.
And each with novel life his sphere

Fills for his proper sake.

NOMINALIST AND REALIST.

I cannot often enough say that a man is cnlj
a relative and representative nature. Each is a
hint of the truth, but far enough from being that
truth, which yet he quite newly and inevitably
suggests to us. If I seek it in him, I shall not
find it. Could any man conduct into me the pure
stream of that which he pretends to be ! Long
afterwards, I find that quality elsewhere which he
promised me. The, genius of the Platonists is in-
toxicating to the student, yet how few particulars
of it can I detach from all their books ! The man
momentarily stands for the thought, but will not
bear examination ; and a society of men will
cursorily represent well enough a certain quality
and culture, for example, chivalry or beauty of man-
ners: but separate them, and there is no gentleman
and no lady in the group. The least hint sets us
on the pursuit of a character which no man
realizes. We have such exorbitant eyes, that on
seeing the smallest arc, we complete the curve, and
when the curtain is lifted from the diagram which
it seemed to veil, we are vexed to find that no

(195)

\g6 ESSAY VIII.

more was drawn, than just that fragment of an
arc which we first beheld. We are greatly too
liberal in our construction of each other's faculty
and promise. Exactly what the parties have al-
ready done, they shall do again ; but that which
we inferred from their nature and inception, they
will not do. That is in nature, but not in them.
That happens in the world, which we often wit-
ness in a public debate. Each of the speakers
expresses himself imperfectly: no one of them
hears much that another says, such is the preoccu-
pation of mind of each ; and the audience, who
have only to hear and not to speak, judge very
wisely and superiorly how wrongheaded and un-
skilful is each of the debaters to his own affair.
Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily
iind, but symmetrical men never. When I meet
a pure, intellectual force, or a generosity of affec-
tion, I believe, here then is man ; and am presently
mortified by the discovery that this individual is
no more available to his own or to the genera?
ends than his companions : because the power
which drew my respect is not supported by the
total symphony of his talents. All persons exist
to society by some shining trait of beauty or
utility, which they have. We borrow the propor-
tions of the man from that one fine feature, and
finish the portrait symmetrically ; which is false ,
for the rest of his body is small or deformed. I
observe a person who makes a good public ap-
pearance, and conclude thence the perfection of
his private character, on which this is based ; bufc

NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 197

he has no private character. He is a graceful
cloak or lay-figure for holidays. All our poets*
heroes, and saints fail utterly in some one or in
many parts to satisfy our idea, fail to draw our
spontaneous interest, and so leave us without any
hope of realization but in our own future. Our
exaggeration of all fine characters arises from the
fact that we identify each in turn with the soul.
But there are no such men as we fable ; no Jesus,
nor Pericles, nor Csesar, nor Angelo, nor Wash-
ington, such as we have made. We consecrate a
great deal of nonsense, because it was allowed by
great men. There is none without his foible. I
verily believe if an angel should come to chaunt
the chorus of the moral law, he would eat too
much gingerbread, or take liberties with private
letters, or do some precious atrocity. It is bad
enough, that our geniuses cannot do anything use-
ful, but it is worse that no man is fit for society
who has fine traits. He is admired at a distance,
but he cannot come near without appearing a crip-
ple. The men of fine parts protect themselves by
solitude, or by courtesy, or by satire, or by an acid
worldly manner, each concealing, as he best can,
his incapacity for useful association; but they want
either love or self-reliance.

Our native love of reality joins with this ex-
perience to teach us a little reserve, and to
dissuade a too sudden surrender to the brilliant
qualities of persons. Young people admire talents
or particular excellences ; as we grow older, we
value total powers and effects, as, the impression,

I98 ESSAY VIII.

the quality, the spirit of men and things. The
genius is all. The man, — it is his system : we do
not try a solitary word or act, but his habit. The
acts which you praise, I praise not, since they are
departures from his faith, and are mere compliances.
The magnetism which arranges, tribes and races in
one polarity is alone to be respected ; the men are
steel filings. Yet we unjustly select a particle,
and say, ■ O steel-filing number one ! what heart-
drawings I feel to thee ! what prodigious "virtues
are these of thine ! how constitutional to thee, and
incommunicable.' Whilst we speak, the loadstone
is withdrawn ; down falls our filing in a heap with
the rest, and we continue our mummery to the
wretched shaving. Let us go for universals ; for
the magnetism, not for the needles. Human life
and its persons are poor empirical pretensions.
A personal influence is an ignis fatuus. If they
say, it is great, it is great ; if they say, it is small,
it is small ; you see it, and you see it not, by
turns ; it borrows all its size from the momentary
estimation of the speakers: the Will-of-the-wisp
vanishes if you go too near, vanishes if you go
too far, and only blazes at one angle. Who can
tell if Washington be a great man, or no? Who
can tell if Franklin be ? Yes, or any but the
twelve, or six, or three great gods of fame ? And
they, too, loom and fade before the eternal.

We are amphibious creatures, weaponed for
two elements, having two sets of faculties, the
particular and the catholic. We adjust our in-
strument for general observation, and sweep the

NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 199

heavens as easily as we pick out a single figure in
the terrestrial landscape. We are practically
skilful in detecting elements, for which we have
no place in our theory, and no name. Thus we
are very sensible of an atmospheric influence in
men and in bodies of men, not accounted for in
an arithmetical addition of all their measurable
properties. There is a genius of a nation, which
is not to be found in the numerical citizens, but
which characterizes the society. England, strong,
punctual, practical, well-spoken England, I should
not find, if I should go to the island to seek it.
In the parliament, in the play-house, at dinner-
tables, I might see a great number of rich, igno-
rant, book-read, conventional, proud men, — many
old women, — and not anywhere the Englishman
who made the good speeches, combined the ac-
curate engines, and did the bold and nervous
deeds. It is even worse in America, where, from
the intellectual quickness of the race, the genius
of the country is more splendid in its promise, and
more slight in its performance. Webster cannot
do the work of Webster. We conceive distinctly
enough the French, the Spanish, the German ge-
nius, and it is not the less real, that perhaps we
should not meet in either of those nations a single
individual who corresponded with the type. We
infer the spirit of the nation in great measure
from the language, which is a sort of monument,
to which each forcible individual in a course of
many hundred years has contributed a stone. And,
universally, a good example of this social force 19

200 ESSAY VIII.

the veracity of language, which cannot be de-
bauched. In any controversy concerning morals,
an appeal may be made with safety to the sen-
timents, which the language of the people ex-
presses. Proverbs, words, and grammar inflec-
tions convey the public sense with more purity and
precision than the wisest individual.

In the famous dispute with the Nominalists,
the Realists had a good deal of reason. General
ideas are essences. They are our gods: they
round and ennoble the most partial and sordid
way of living. Our proclivity to details cannot
quite degrade our life, and divest it of poetry.
The day-laborer is reckoned as standing at the
foot of the social scale, yet he is saturated with
the laws of the world. His measures are the
hours ; morning and night, solstice and equinox,
geometry, astronomy, and all the lovely accidents
of nature play through his mind. Money, which
represents the prose of life, and which is hardly
spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its
effects and laws, as beautiful as roses. Property
keeps the accounts of the world, and is always
moral. The property will be found where the la-
bor, the wisdom, and the virtue have been in na-
tions, in classes, and (the whole life -time consid-
ered, with the compensations) in the individual
also. How wise the world appears, when the laws
and usages of nations are largely detailed, and
the completeness of the municipal system is con-
sidered ! Nothing is left out. If you go into the
markets, and the custom-houses, the insurers' and

NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 201

notaries' offices, the offices of sealers of weights
and 'measures, of inspection of provisions, — it will
appear as if one man had made it all. Wherever
you go, a wit like your own has been before you,
and has realized its thought. The Eleusinian
mysteries, the Egyptian architecture, the Indian
astronomy, the Greek sculpture, show that there
always were seeing and knowing men in the
planet. The world is full of masonic ties, of guilds,
of secret and public legions of honor ; that of
scholars, for example ; and that of gentlemen fra-
ternizing with the upper class of every country
and every culture.

1 am very much struck in literature by the ap-
pearance that one person wrote all the books ;
as if the editor of a journal planted his body of
reporters in different parts of the field of action,
and relieved some by others from time to time ;
but there is such equality and identity both of
judgment and point of view in the narrative, that
it is plainly the work of one all-seeing, all-hearing
gentleman. I looked into Pope's Odyssey yester-
day : it is as correct and elegant, after our canon
of to-day, as if it were newly written. The mod-
erness of all good books seems to give me an ex-
istence as wide as man. What is well done, I
feel as if I did ; what is ill-done, I reck not of.
Shakespeare's passages of passion (for example, in
Lear and Hamlet) are in the very dialect of the
present year. I am faithful again to the whole
over the members in my use of books. I find the
most pleasure in reading a book in a manner least

202 ESSAY VIII.

flattering to the author. I read Proclus, and some-
times Plato, as I might read a dictionary, for a
mechanical help to the fancy and the imagination.
I read for the lustres, as if one should use a fine
picture in a chromatic experiment, for its rich
colors. 'Tis not Proclus, but a piece of nature
and fate that I explore. It is a greater joy to see
the author's author, than himself. A higher pleas-
ure of the same kind I found lately at a concert,
where I went to hear Handel's Messiah. As the mas-
ter overpowered the littleness and incapableness of
the performers, and made them conductors of his
electricity, so it was easy to observe what efforts
nature was making through so many hoarse,
wooden, and imperfect persons, to produce beauti-
ful voices, fluid and soul-guided men and women.
The genius of nature was paramount at the ora-
torio.

This preference of the genius to the parts is the
secret of that deification of art which is found in
all superior minds. Art, in the artist, is propor-
tion, or, a habitual respect to the whole by an e}re
loving beauty in details. And the wonder and
charm of it is the sanity in insanit}' which it denotes.
Proportion is almost impossible to human beings.
There is no one who does not exaggerate. In
conversation, men are encumbered with personal-
ity, and talk too much. In modern sculpture,
picture, and poetry the beauty is miscellaneous;
the artist works here and there, and at all points,
adding and adding, instead of unfolding the unit
of his thought. Beautiful details we must have,

NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 203

or no artist : but they must be means and never
other. The eye must not lose sight for a moment
of the purpose. Lively boys write to their ear
and eye, and the cool reader finds nothing but
sweet jingles in it. When they grow older, they
respect the argument.

We obey the same intellectual integrity, when
we study in exceptions the law of the world.
Anomalous facts, as the never quite obsolete
rumors of magic and demonology, and the new
allegations of phrenologists and neurologists, are
of ideal use. They are good indications. Homoeop-
athy is insignificant as an art of healing, but of
great value as criticism on the hygeia or medical
practice of the time. So with Mesmerism,
Swedenborgism, Fourierism, and the Millennial
Church; they are poor pretensions enough, but
good criticism on the science, philosophy, and
preaching of the day. For these abnormal insights
of the adepts ought to be normal, and things of
course.

All things show us that on every side we are
very near to the best. It seems not worth while
to execute with too much pains some one intellect-
ual, or sesthetical, or civil feat, when presently
the dream will scatter, and we shall burst into
universal power. The reason of idleness and of
crime is the deferring of our hopes. Whilst we
are waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with
sleep, with eating, and with crimes.

Thus we settle it in our cool libraries, that all

204 ESSAY VIII.

the agents with which we deal are subalterns,
which we can well afford to let pass, and life will
be simpler when we live at the centre, and flout
the surfaces. I wish to speak with all respect of
persons, but sometimes I must pinch myself to
keep awake, and preserve the due decorum.
They melt so fast into each o£her, that they are
like grass and trees, and it needs an effort to treat
them as individuals. Though the uninspired man
certainly finds persons a conveuiency in house-
hold matters, the divine man does not respect
them : he sees them as a rack of clouds, or a iieet
of ripples which the wind drives over the surface
of the water. But this is flat rebellion. Nature
will not be Buddhist: she resents generalizing,
and insults the philosopher in every moment with
a million of fresh particulars. It is all idle talk-
ing: as much as a man is a whole, so is he also a
part ; and it were partial not to see it. What you
say in your pompous distribution only distributes
you into your class and section. You have not
got rid of parts by denying them, but are the
more partial. You are one thing, but nature is
one thiny and the other thing* in the same moment.
She will not remain orbed in a thought, but
rushes into persons ; and when each person, in-
flamed to a fury of personality, would conquer all
things to his poor crotchet, she raises up against
him another person, and by many persons
incarnates again a sort of whole. She will have
all. Nick Bottom cannot play all the parts, work
it how he may : there will be somebody else, and

NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 205

the world will be round. Everything must have
its flower or effort at the beautiful, coarser or
finer according to its stuff. They relieve and
recommend each other, and the sanity of society
is a balance of a thousand insanities. She
punishes abstractionists, and will only forgive an
induction which is rare and casual. We like to
come to a height of land and see the landscape,
just as we value a general remark in conversation.
But it is not the intention of nature that we
should live by general views. We fetch fire and
water, run about all day among the shops and
markets, and get our clothes and shoes made and
mended, and are the victims of these details, and
once in a fortnight we arrive perhaps at a rational
moment. If we were not thus infatuated, if we
saw the real from hour to hour, we should not be
here to write and to read, but should have been
burned or frozen long ago. She would never get
anything done, if she suffered admirable Crichtons,
and universal geniuses. She loves better a wheel-
wright who dreams all night of wheels, and a
groom who is part of his horse : for she is full of
work, and these are her hands. As the frugal
farmer takes care that his cattle shall eat down
the rowan, and swine shall eat the waste of his
house, and poultry shall pick the crumbs, so our
economical mother despatches a new genius and
habit of mind into every district and condition of
existence, plants an eye wherever a new ray of
light can fall, and gathering up into some man every
property in the universe, establishes thousand-

206 ESSAY VIII.

fold occult mutual attractions among her off-
spring, that all this wash and waste of power may
be imparted and exchanged.

Great dangers undoubtedly accrue from this in-
carnation and distribution of the godhead, and
hence nature has her m aligners, as if she were
Circe ; and Alphonso of Castille fancied he could
have given useful advice. But she does not go
unprovided ; she has hellebore at the bottom of
the cup. Solitude would ripen a plentiful crop of
despots. The recluse thinks of men as having his
manner, or as not having his manner; and as
having degrees of it, more and less. But when he
comes into a public assembly, he sees that men
have very different manners from his own, and in
their way admirable. In his childhood and youth
he has had many checks and censures, and thinks
modestly enough of his own endowment. When
afterwards he comes to unfold it in propitious cir-
cumstance, it seems the only talent: he is
delighted with his success, and accounts himself
already the fellow of the great. But he goes into
a mob, into a banking-house, into a mechanic's
shop, into a mill, into a laboratory, into a ship,
into a camp, and in each new place he is no better
than an idiot: other talents take place, and rule
the hour. The rotation which whirls every leaf
and pebble to the meridian, reaches to every gift
of man, and we all take turns at the top.

For nature, who abhors mannerism, has set her*
heart on breaking up all styles and tricks, and it
is so much easier to do what one has done before,
than to do a new thing, that there is a perpetual

NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 207

tendency to a set mode. In every conversation,
even the highest, there is a certain trick, which
may be soon learned by an acute person, and then
that particular style continued indefinitely.
Each man, too, is a tyrant in tendency, because he
would impose his idea on others ; and their trick
is their natural defence. Jesus would absorb the
^ race ; but Tom Paine or the coarsest blasphemer
helps humanity by resisting this exuberance of
power. Hence the immense benefit of party in
politics, as it reveals faults of character in a
chief, which the intellectual force of the persons,
with ordinary opportunity, and not hurled into
aphelion by hatred, could not have seen. Since
we are all so stupid, what benefit that there
should be two stupidities ! It is like that brute
advantage so essential to astronomy, of having the
diameter of the earth's orbit for a base of its tri-
angles. Democracy is morose, and runs to
anarchy, but in the state, and in the schools, it is
indispensable to resist the consolidation of all
men into a few men. If John was perfect, why
are you and I alive ? As long as any man exists,
there is some need of him ; let him fight for his
own. A new poet has appeared ; a new character
approached us ; why should we refuse to eat
bread, until we have found his regiment and sec-
tion in our old army-files? Why not a new man?
Here is a new enterprise of Brook Farm, of
Skeneateles, of Northampton : why so impatient
to baptize them Essenes, or Port-Royalists, or
Shakers, or by any known and effete name? Let

208 ESSAY VIII.

it be a new way of living. Why have only two
or three ways of life, and not thousands? Every
man is wanted, and no man is wanted much. We
came this time for condiments, not for corn. We
want the great genius only for joy : for one star
more in our constellation, for one tree more in our
grove. But he thinks we wish to belong to him,
as he wishes to occupy us. He greatly mistakes
us. I think I have done well, if I have acquired
a new word from a good author ; and my business
with him is to find my own, though it were only
to melt him down into an epithet or an image for
daily use.

" Into paint will I grind thee, my bride! "

To embroil the confusion, and make it impossi-
ble to arrive at any general statement, when we
have insisted on the imperfection of individuals,
our affections and our experience urge that
every individual is entitled to honor, and a very
generous treatment is sure to be repaid. A recluse
sees only two or three persons, and allows them
all their room ; they spread themselves at large.
The man of state looks at many, and compares the
few habitually with others, and these look less.
Yet are they not entitled to this generosity of re-
ception? and is not munificence the means of
insight? For, though gamesters say that the cards
beat all the players, though they were never so
skilful, yet in the contest we are now considering,
the players are also the game, and share the power

NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 209

of the cards. If you criticise a fine genius, the
odds are that you are out of your reckoning, and,
instead of the poet, are censuring your own cari-
cature of him. For there is somewhat spheral and
infinite in every man, especially in every genius,
which, if you can come very near him, sports with
all your limitations. For, rightly, every man is a
channel through which heaven floweth, and, whilst
I fancied I was criticising him, I was censuring or
rather terminating my own soul. After taxing
Goethe as a courtier, artificial, unbelieving,
worldly, — I took up this book of Helena, and
found him an Indian of the wilderness, a piece of
pure nature like an apple or an oak, large as morn-
ing or night, and virtuous as a briar-rose.

But care is taken that the whole tune shall be
played. If we were not kept among surfaces,
everything would be large and universal : now
the excluded attributes burst in on us with the
more brightness, that they have been excluded.
" Your turn now, my turn next," is the rule of the
game. The universality being hindered in its pri-
mary form, comes in the secondary form of all
sides : the points come in succession to the merid-
ian, and by the speed of rotation, a new whole is
formed. Nature keeps herself whole, and her
representation complete in the experience of each
mind. She suffers no seat to be vacant in her col-
lege. It is the secret of the world that all things
subsist, and do not die, but only retire a little
from sight, and afterwards return again. What-
ever does not concern us, is concealed from us.

35

510 ESSAY vin.

As soon as a person is no longer related to oui
present well-being, he is concealed, or dies, as we
say. Really, all things and persons are related to
us, but according to our nature, they act on us not
at once, but in succession, and we are made aware
of their presence one at a time. All persons, all
things which we have known, are here present,
and many more than we see ; the world is full.
As the ancient said, the world is a plenum or solid ;
and if we saw all things that really surround us,
we should be imprisoned and unable to move.
For, though nothing is impassable to the soul, but
all things are pervious to it, and like highways,
yet this is only whilst the soul does not see them.
As soon as the soul sees any object, it stops before
that object. Therefore, the divine Providence,
which keeps the universe open in every direction
to the soul, conceals all the furniture and all the
persons that do not concern a particular soul, from
the senses of that individual. Through solidest
eternal things, the man finds his road, as if they
did not subsist, and does not once suspect their
being. As soon as he needs a new object, sud-
denly he beholds it, and no longer attempts to pass
through it, but takes another way. When he has
exhausted for the time the nourishment to be
drawn from any one person or thing, that object
is withdrawn from his observation, and though
still in his immediate neighborhood, he does not
suspect its presence.

Nothing is dead : men feign themselves dead,
and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries,

NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 211

and there they stand looking out of the window,
sound and well, in some new and strange disguise.
Jesus is not dead : he is very well alive : nor John,
nor Paul, nor Mahomet, nor Aristotle ; at times
we believe we have seen them all, and could eas-
ily tell the names under which they go.

If we cannot make voluntary and conscious
steps in the admirable science of universals, let us
see the parts wisely, and infer the genius of na-
ture from the best particulars with a becoming
charity. What is best in each kind is an index of
what should be the average of that thing. Love
shows me the opulence of nature, by disclosing to
me in my friend a hidden wealth, and I infer an
equal depth of good in every other direction. It
is commonly said by farmers, that a good pear or
apple costs no more time or pains to rear, than a
poor one ; so I would have no work of art, no
speech, or action, or thought, or friend, but the
best.

The end and the means, the gamester and the
game, — life is made up of the intermixture and re-
action of these two amicable powers, whose mar-
riage appears beforehand monstrous, as each
denies and tends to abolish the other. We must
reconcile the contradictions as we can, but their
discord and their concord introduce wild absurdi-
ties into our thinking and speech. No sentence
will hold the whole truth, and the only way in
which we can be just, is by giving ourselves the
lie ; Speech is better than silence ; silence is better
than speech ; — All things are in contact ; every

212 ESSAY VIII.

atom has a sphere of repulsion ; — Things are, and
are not, at the same time : — and the like. All the
universe over, there is but one thing, this old
Two-Face, creator-creature, mind matter, right-
wrong, of which any proposition may be affirmed
or denied. Very fitly, therefore, I assert, that
every man is a partialist, that nature secures him
as an instrument by self-conceit, preventing the
tendencies to religion and science ; and now further
assert that, each man's genius being nearly and
affectionately explored, he is justified in his indi-
viduality, as his nature is found to be immense ;
and now I add, that every man is a universalist
also, and, as our earth, whilst it spins on its own
axis, spins all the time around the sun through
the celestial spaces, so the least of its rational
children, the most dedicated to his private affair,
works out, though as it were under a disguise, the
universal problem. We fancy men are individu-
als ; so are pumpkins ; but every pumpkin in the
field goes through every point of pumpkin his-
tory. The rabid democrat, as soon as he is sena-
tor and rich man, has ripened beyond possibility
of sincere radicalism, and unless he can resist the
sun, he must be conservative the remainder of his
days. Lord Eldon said in his old age, "that, if
he were to begin life again, he would be damned
but he would begin as agitator."

We hide this universality, if we can, but it ap-
pears at all points. We are as ungrateful as chil-
dren. There is nothing we cherish and strive to
draw to us, but in some hour we turn and rend it.

NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 213

We keep a running fire of sarcasm at ignorance
and the life of the senses ; then goes by, per-
chance, a fair girl, a piece of life, gay and happy,
and making the commonest offices beautiful, by
the energy and heart with which she does them,
and seeing this, we admire and love her and them,
and say, " Lo ! a genuine creature of the fair
earth, not dissipated, or too early ripened by
books, philosophy, religion, society, or care ! " in-
sinuating a treachery and contempt for all we had
so long loved and wrought in ourselves and others.
If we could have any security against moods !
If the profoundest prophet could be holden to his
words, and the hearer who is ready to sell all and
join the crusade, could have any certificate that to
morrow his prophet shall not unsay his testimony !
But the Truth sits veiled there on the Bench, and
never interposes an adamantine syllable; and the
most sincere and revolutionary doctrine, put as if
the ark of God were carried forward some fur-
longs, and planted there for the succor of the
world, shall in a few weeks be coldly set aside by
the same speaker, as morbid ; " I thought I was
right, but I was not," — and the same immeasur-
able credulity demanded for new audacities. If we
were not of all opinions ! if we did not in any mo-
ment shift the platform on which we stand, and
look and speak from another ! if there could be
any regulation, any ( one-hour-rule, ' that a man
should never leave his point of view, without
sound of trumpet. I am always insincere, as al-
ways knowing there are other moods.

214 ESSAY VIII.

How sincere and confidential we can be, saying
all that lies in the mind, and yet go away feeling
that all is yet unsaid, from the incapacity of the
parties to know each other, although they use the
same words ! My companion assumes to know my
mood and habit of thought, and we go on from
explanation to explanation, until all is said which
words can, and we leave matters just as they were
at first, because of that vicious assumption. Is it
that every man believes every other to be an in-
curable partialist, and himself an universalist? I
talked yesterday with a pair of philosophers : I
endeavored to show my good men that I love
everything by turns, and nothing long ; that I
loved the centre, but doated on the superficies ;
that 1 loved man, if men seemed to me mice and
rats ; that I revered saints, but woke up glad that
the old pagan world stood its ground, and died
hard ; that I was glad of men of every gift and
nobility, but would not live in their arms. Could
they but once understand that I loved to know
that they existed, and heartily wished them God-
speed, yet, out of my poverty of life and thought,
had no word or welcome for them when they came
to see me, and could well consent to their living
in Oregon, for any claim I felt on them4 it would
be a great satisfaction.

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS.

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS.

A LECTURE EEAD BEFORE THE SOCIETY IN AMORY
HALL, ON SUNDAY, 3 MARCH, 1844.

Whoever has had opportunity of acquaintance
with society in New England, during the last
twenty-five years, with those middle and with
those leading sections that may constitute any
just representation of the character and aim of
the community, will have been struck with the
great activity of thought and experimenting.
His attention must be commanded by the signs
that the Church, or religious party, is falling from
the church nominal, and is appearing in temper-
ance and non-resistance societies, in movements of
abolitionists and of socialists, and in very signifi-
cant assemblies, called Sabbath and Bible Conven-
tions,— composed of ultraists, of seekers, of all
the soul of the soldiery of dissent, and meeting
to call in question the authority of the Sabbath,
of the priesthood, and of the church. In these
movements, nothing was more remarkable than
the discontent they begot in the movers. The
spirit of protest and of detachment drove the
members of these Conventions to bear testimony

(217)

2l8 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL.

against the church, and immediately afterward, to
declare their discontent with these Conventions,
their independence of their colleagues, and their
impatience of the methods whereby they were
working. They defied each other, like a congress
of kings, each of whom had a realm to rule, and
i way of his own that made concert unprofitable.
What a fertility of projects for the salvation of
the world ! One apostle thought all men should
go to farming ; and another, that no man should
buy or sell ; that the use of money was the cardi-
nal evil; another, that the mischief was in our
diet, that we eat and drink damnation. These
made unleavened bread, and were foes to the
death to fermentation. It was in vain urged by
the housewife, that God made yeast, as well as
dough, and loves fermentation just as dearly as he
loves vegetation ; that fermentation develops the
saccharine element in the grain, and makes it
more palatable and more digestible. No ; they
wish the pure wheat, and will die but it shall nut
ferment. Stop, dear nature, these incessant ad-
vances of thine ; let us scotch these ever-rolling
wheels ! Others attacked the system of agricul-
ture, the use of animal manures in farming; and
the tyranny of man over brute nature ; these
abuses polluted his food. The ox must be taken
from the plough, and the horse from the cart, the
hundred acres of the farm must be spaded, and
the man must walk wherever boats and locomo-
tives will not carry him. Even the insect world
was to be defended,— that had been too long

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 219

neglected, and a society for the protection of
ground-worms, slugs, and mosquitos was to be incor-
porated without delay. With these appeared the
adepts of homoeopathy, of hydropathy, of mesmer-
ism, of phrenology, and their wonderful theories of
the Christian miracles! Others assailed particular
vocations, as that of the lawyer, that of the mer-
chant, of the manufacturer, of the clergyman, of
the scholar. Others attacked the institution of
marriage, as the fountain of social evils. Others
devoted themselves to the worrying of churches
and meetings for public worship ; and the fertile
forms of antinomianism among the elder puritans
seemed to have their match in the plenty of the
new harvest of reform.

With this din of opinion and debate, there was
a keener scrutiny of institutions and domestic life
than any we had known, there was sincere pro-
testing against existing evils, and there were
changes of employment dictated by conscience.
No doubt, there was plentiful vaporing, and cases
of backsliding might occur. But in each of these
movements emerged a good result, a tendency to
the adoption of simpler methods, and an assertion
of the sufficiency of the private man. Thus it
was directly in the spirit and genius of the age,
what happened in one instance, when a church
censured and threatened to excommunicate one of
its members, on account of the somewhat hostile
part to the church which his conscience led him
to take in the anti-slavery business; the threat-
ened individual immediately excommunicated the

220 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL.

church in a public and formal process. This has
been several times repeated: it was excellent
when it was done the first time, but, of course,
loses all value when it is copied. Every project
in the history of reform, no matter how violent
and surprising, is good, when it is the dictate of a
man's genius and constitution, but very dull and
suspicious when adopted from another. It is
right and beautiful in any man to say, 4 1 will take
this coat, or this book, or this measure of corn of
yours,' — in whom we see the act to be original,
and to flow from the whole spirit and faith of
him ; /or then that taking will have a giving as
free and divine : but we are very easily disposed
to resist the same generosity of speech, when we
miss originality and truth to character in it.

There was in all the practical activities of New
England, for the last quarter of a century, a grad-
ual withdrawal of tender consciences from the
social organizations. There is observable through-
out, the contest between mechanical and spiritual
methods, but with a steady tendency of the
thoughtful and virtuous to a deeper belief and
reliance on spiritual facts.

In politics, for example, it is easy to see the
progress of dissent. The country is full of rebel-
lion ; the country is full of kings. Hands off!
let there be no control and no interference in the
administration of the affairs of this kingdom of
me. Hence the growth of the doctrine and of
the party of Free Trade, and the willingness to
try that experiment, in the face of what appear

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 221

incontestable facts. I confess, the motto of the
Globe newspaper is so attractive to me, that I can
seldom find much appetite to read what is below
it in its columns, " The world is governed too
much." So the country is frequently affording
solitary examples of resistance to the government,
solitary milliners, who throw themselves on their
reserved rights ; nay, who have reserved all their
rights ; who reply to the assessor, and to the clerk
of court, that they do not know the State ; and
embarrass the courts of law, by non-juring, and
the commander-in-chief of the militia, by non-
resistance.

The same disposition to scrutiny and dissent
appeared in civil, festive, neighborly, and domes-
tic society. A restless, prying, conscientious
criticism broke out in unexpected quarters. Who
gave me the money with which I bought my
coat? Why should professional labor and that of
the counting-house be paid so disproportionately
to the labor of the porter, and wood-sawyer ?
This whole business of Trade gives me to pause
and think, as it constitutes false relations between
men ; inasmuch as I am prone to count myself
relieved of any responsibility to behave well and
nobly to that person whom I pay with money,
whereas if I had not that commodity, I should be
put on my good behavior in all companies, and
man would be a benefactor to man, as being him-
self his only certificate that he had a right to those
aids and services which each asked of the other.
Am I not too protected a person ? is there not a

222 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL.

wide disparity between the lot of me and the lot
of thee, my poor brother, my poor sister ? Am I
not defrauded of my best culture in the loss of
those gymnastics which manual labor and the
emergencies of poverty constitute ? I find noth-
ing healthful or exalting in the smooth conven-
tions of society ; I do not like the close air of
saloons. I begin to suspect myself to be a pris-
oner, though treated with all this courtesy and
luxury. I pay a destructive tax in my conformity.
The same insatiable criticism may be traced in
the efforts for the reform of Education. The
popular education has been taxed with a want of
truth and nature. It was complained that an
education to things was not given. We are
students of words: we are shut up in schools,
and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or
fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of
wind, a memory of words, and do not know a
thing. We cannot use our hands, or our legs,
or our eyes, or our arms. We do not know an
edible root in the woods, we cannot tell our
course by the stars, nor the hour of the day by
the sun. It is well if we can swim and skate.
We are afraid of a horse, of a cow, of a dog, of
a snake, of a spider. The Roman rule was, to
teach a boy nothing that he could not learn
standing. The old English rule was, 'All sum-
mer in the field, and all winter in the study.' And
it seems as if a man should learn to plant, or to
fish, or to hunt, that he might secure his subsist-
ence at all events, and not be painful to his friends

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 223

and fellow-men. The lessons of science should be
experimental also. The sight of the planet through
a telescope is worth all the course on astronomy :
the shock of the electric spark in the elbow out-
values all the theories ; the taste of the nitrous
oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are bet-
ter than volumes of chemistry.

One of the traits of the new spirit is the inquisi-
tion it fixed on our scholastic devotion to the dead
languages. The ancient languages, with great
beauty of structure, contain wonderful remains of
genius, which draw, and always will draw, certain
likeminded men, — Greek men, and Roman men, in
all countries, to their study ; but by a wonderful
drowsiness of usage, they had exacted the study of
all men. Once (say two centuries ago), Latin and
Greek had a strict relation to all the science and
culture there was in Europe, and the Mathematics
had a momentary importance at some era of
activity in physical science. These things became
stereotyped as education, as the manner of men is.
Hut the Good Spirit never cared for the colleges,
and though all men and boys were now drilled in
Latin, Greek, and Mathematics, it had quite left
these shells high and dry on the beach, and was
now creating and feeding other matters at other
ends of the world. But in a hundred high schools
and colleges this warfare against common sense
still goes on. Four, or six, or ten years, the pupil
is parsing Greek and Latin, and as soon as he
leaves the University, as it is ludicrously called, he
shuts those books for the last time. Some thou-

224 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL.

sands of young men are graduated at our colleges
in this country every year, and the persons who,
at forty years, still read Greek, can all be counted
on your hand. I never met with ten. Four or
five persons I have seen who read Plato.

But is not this absurd, that the whole liberal
talent of this country should be directed in its
best years on studies which lead to nothing?
What was the consequence? Some intelligent
person said or thought: 'Is that Greek and
Latin some spell to conjure with, and not words
of reason? If the physician, the lawyer, the
divine, never use it to come at their ends, I need
never learn it to come at mine. Conjuring is gone
out of fashion, and I will omit this conjugating,
and go straight to affairs.' So they jumped the
Greek and Latin, and read law, medicine, or ser-
mons, without it. To the astonishment of all, the
self-made men took even ground at once with the
oldest of the regular graduates, and in a few
months the most conservative circles of Boston and
New York had quite forgotten who of their gowns-
men was college-bred, and who was not.

One tendency appears alike in the philosophical
speculation, and in the rudest democratical move-
ments, through all the petulance and all the
puerility, the wish, namely, to cast aside the super-
fluous, and arrive at short methods, urged, as I
suppose, by an intuition that the human spirit is
equal to all emergencies, alone, and that man is
more often injured than helped by the means he
uses.

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 225

I conceive this gradual casting off of material
aids, and the indication of growing trust in the
private, self- supplied powers of the individual, to
be the affirmative principle of the recent phil-
osophy : and that it is feeling its own profound
truth, and is reaching forward at this very hour
to the happiest conclusions. I readily concede
that in this, as in every period of intellectual
activity, there has been a noise of denial and protest ;
much was to be resisted, much was to be got rid of
by those who were reared in the old, before they
could begin to affirm and to construct. Many a
reformer perishes in his removal of rubbish, — and
that makes the offensiveness of the class. They
are partial ; they are not equal to the work they
pretend. They lose their way ; in the assault on
the kingdom of darkness, they expend all their
energy on some accidental evil, and lose their
sanity and power of benefit. It is of little mo-
ment that one or two, or twenty errors of our
social system be corrected, but of much that the
man be in his senses.

The criticism and attack on institutions which
we have witnessed has made one thing plain, that
society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself ren-
ovated, attempts to renovate things around him :
he has become tediously good in some particular,
but negligent or narrow in the rest ; and hypoc-
risy and vanity are often the disgusting re-
sult.

It is handsomer to remain in the establishment
better than the establishment, and conduct that

36

226 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL.

in the best manner, than to make a sally against
evil by some single improvement, without support-
ing it by a total regeneration. Do not be so vain
of your one objection. Do you think there is only
one? Alas! my good friend, there is no part of
society or of life better than any other part. All
our things are right and wrong together. The
wave of evil washes all our institutions alike. Do
you complain of our Marriage ? Our marriage is
no worse than our education, our diet, our trade,
our social customs. Do }tou complain of the laws
of Property ? It is a pedantry to give such impor-
tance to them. Can we not play the game of life
with these counters, as well as with those ; in the
institution of property, as well as out of it. Let
into it the new and renewing principle of love,
and property will be universality. No one gives
the impression of superiority to the institution,
which he must give who will reform it. It makes
no difference what you say: you must make me
feel that you are aloof from it ; by your natural and
supernatural advantages, do easily see to the end
of it, — do see how man can do without it. Now
all men are on one side. No man deserves to be
heard against property. Only Love, only an
Idea, is against property, as we hold it.

I cannot afford to be irritable and captious, nor
to waste all my time in attacks. If 1 should go
out of church whenever I hear a false sentiment. I
could never stay there five minutes. Rut why
come out? the street is as false as the church, and
when I get to my house, or to my manners, or to

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 227

my speech, I have not got away from the lie.
When we see an eager assailant of one of these
wrongs, a special reformer, we feel like asking
him, What right have you, sir, to your one
virtue ? Is virtue piecemeal ? This is a jewel
amidst the rags of a beggar.

In another way the right will be vindicated.
In the midst of abuses, in the heart of cities, in
the aisles of false churches, alike in one place and
in another, — wherever, namely, a just and heroic
soul finds itself, there it will do what is next at
haud, and by the new quality of character it
shall put forth, it shall abrogate that old con-
dition, law or school in which it stands, before the
law of its own mind.

If partiality was one fault of the movement
party, the other defect was their reliance on As-
sociation. Doubts such as those I have intimated,
drove many good persons to agitate the questions
of social reform. But the revolt against the
spirit of commerce, the spirit of aristocracy, and
the inveterate abuses of cities, did not appear
possible to individuals : and to do battle against
numbers, they armed themselves with numbers
and against concert, they relied on new concert.

Following, or advancing beyond the ideas of
St. Simon, of Fourier, and of Owen, three com-
munities have already been formed in Massa-
chusetts on kindred plans, and many more in the
country at large. They aim to give every mem-
ber a share in the manual labor, to give an equal
reward to labor and to talent, and to unite a

228 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL.

liberal culture with au education to labor. The
scheme offers, by the economies of associated
labor and expense, to make every member rich,
on the same amount of property, that, in separate
families, would leave every member poor. These
new associations are composed of men and wo-
men of superior talents and sentiments : yet it
may easily be questioned, whether such a com-
munity will draw, except in its beginnings, the
able and the good ; whether those who have
energy will not prefer their chance of superior-
ity and power in the world, to the humble cer-
tainties of the Association ; whether such a
retreat does not promise to become an asylum to
those who have tried and failed, rather than a
field to the strong ; and whether the members
will not necessarily be fractions of men, because
each finds that he cannot enter it, without some
compromise. Friendship and association are very
fine things, and a grand phalanx of the best of
the human race, banded for some catholic object :
yes, excellent ; but remember that no society can
ever be so large as one man. He in his friend-
ship, in his natural and momentary associations,
doubles or multiplies himself; but in the hour in
which he mortgages himself to two or ten or
twenty, he dwarfs himself below the stature of
one.

But the men of less faith could not thus be-
lieve, and to such, concert appears the sole
specific of strength. I have failed, and you have
failed, but perhaps together we shall not fail.

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 229

Our housekeeping is not satisfactory to us, but
perhaps a phalanx, a community, might be.
Many of us have differed in opinion, and we could
find no man who could make the truth plain, but
possibly a college, or an ecclesiastical council
might. I have not been able either to persuade
my brother or to prevail on myself to disuse the
traffic or the potation of brandy, but perhaps a
pledge of total abstinence might effectually re-
strain us. The candidate my party votes for is
not to be trusted with a dollar, but he will be
honest in the Senate, for we can bring public
opinion to bear on him. Thus concert was the
specific in all cases. But concert is neither bet-
ter r-or worse, neither more nor less potent than
individual force. All the men in the world can-
not make a statue walk and speak, cannot make a
drop of blood, or a blade of grass, any more than
one man can. But let there be one man, let there
be truth in two men, in ten men, then is concert
for the first time possible, because the force which
moves the world is a new quality, and can never
be furnished by adding whatever quantities of a
different kind. What is the use of the concert of
the false and the disunited ? There can be no
concert in two, where there is no concert in one.
When the individual is not individual, but is
dual; when his thoughts look one way, and his
actions another; when his faith is traversed b}^
his habits ; when his will, enlightened by reason,
is warped by his sense ; when with one hand he

230 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL.

rows, and with the other backs water, what con-
cert can be ?

I do not wonder at the interest these projects
inspire. The world is awaking to the idea of
union, and these experiments show what it is
thinking of. It is and will be magic. Men will
live and communicate, and plough, and reap, and
govern, as by added ethereal power, when once
they are united ; as in a celebrated experiment, by
expiration and respiration exactly together, four
persons lift a heavy man from the ground by the
little finger only, and without sense of weight.
But this union must be inward, and not one of
covenants, and is to be reached by a reverse of
the methods they use. The union is onty perfect,
when all the u niters are isolated. It is the union
of friends who live in different streets or towns.
Each man, if he attempts to join himself to others,
is on all sides cramped and diminished of his
proportion ; and the stricter the union, the smaller
and the more pitiful he is. But leave Mm alone,
to recognize in every hour and place the secret
soul, he will go up and down doing the works
of a true member, and, to the astonishment of
all, the work will be done with concert, though
no man spoke. Government will be adamantine
without any governor. The union must be ideal
in actual individualism.

I pass to the indication in some particulars of
that faith in man, which the heart is preaching to
us in these days, and which engages the more
regard, from the consideration that the specula-

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 23 1

tions of one generation are the history of the
next following.

In alluding just now to our system of educa-
tion, I spoke of the deadness of its details. But
it is open to graver criticism than the palsy of its
members : it is a system of despair. The disease
with which the human mind now labors is want
of faith. Men do not believe in a power of edu-
cation. We do not think we can speak to divine
sentiments in man, and we do not try. We re-
nounce all high aims. We believe that the
defects of so many perverse and so many frivo-
lous people, who make up society, are organic,
and society is a hospital of incurables. A man
of good sense but of little faith, whose compassion
seemed to lead him to church as often as he went
there, said to me, " that he liked to have con-
certs, and fairs, and churches, and other public
amusements go on." I am afraid the remark is
too honest, and comes from the same origin as the
maxim of the tyrant, "If you would rule the
world quietly, you must keep it amused." I
notice, too, that the ground on which eminent
public servants urge the claims of popular edu-
cation is fear : 4 This country is filling up with
thousands and millions of voters, and you must
educate them to keep them from our throats/
We do not believe that any education, any system
of philosophy, any influence of genius, will ever
give depth of insight to a superficial mind. Hav-
ing settled ourselves into this infidelity, our skill
is expended to procure alleviations, diversion,

232 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL.

opiates. We adoru the victim with manual skill,
his tongue with languages, his body with inoffen-
sive and comely manners. So have we cunningly
hid the tragedy of limitation and inner death we
cannot avert. Is it strange that society should
be devoured by a secret melancholy, which
breaks through all its smiles, and all its gayety
and games?

But even one step farther our infidelity has
gone. It appears that some doubt is felt by good
and wise men, whether really the happiness and
probity of men is increased by the culture of the
mind in those disciplines to which we give the
name of education. Unhappily, too, the doubt
comes from scholars, from persons who have tried
these methods. In their experience, the scholar
was not raised by the sacred thoughts amongst
which he dwelt, but used them to selfish ends.
He was a profane person, and became a showman,
turning his gifts to a marketable use, and not to
his own sustenance and growth. It was found
that the intellect could be independently devel-
oped, that is, in separation from the man, as any
single organ can be invigorated, and the result
was monstrous. A canine appetite for knowledge
was generated, which must still be fed, but was
never satisfied, and this knowledge not being di-
rected on action, never took the character of sub-
stantial, humane truth, blessing those whom it
entered. It gave the scholar certain powers of
expression, the power of speech, the power of

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 233

poetry, of literary art, but it did not bring him to
peace, or to beuencence.

When the literary class betray a destitution of
faith, it is not strange that society should be dis-
heartened and sensualized by unbelief. What
remedy? Life must be lived on a higher plane.
We must go up to a higher platform, to which we
are always invited to ascend ; there, the whole as-
pect of things changes. I resist the skepticism
of our education, and of our educated men. I do
not believe that the differences of opinion and
character in men are organic. I do not recognize,
beside the class of the good and the wise, a per-
manent class of skeptics, or a class of conserva-
tives, or of malignants, or of materialists. I do
not believe in two classes. You remember the
story of the poor woman who importuned King
Philip of Macedon to grant her justice, which
Philip refused: the woman exclaimed, "I ap-
peal " : the king, astonished, asked to whom she
appealed : the woman replied, " from Philip drunk
to Philip sober." The text will suit me very well.
I believe not in two classes of men, but in man in
two moods, in Philip drunk and Philip sober. I
think, according to the good-hearted word of
Plato, " Unwillingly the soul is deprived of truth."
Iron conservative, miser, or thief, no man is, but
by a supposed necessity, which he tolerates by
shortness or torpidity of sight. The soul lets no
man go without some visitations and holy-days of
a diviner presence. It would be easy to show, by
a narrow scanning of any man's biography, that

234 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL.

we are not so wedded to our paltry perform-
ances of every kind, but that every man has at
intervals the grace to scorn his performances, in
comparing them with his belief of what he should
do, that he puts himself on the side of his ene-
mies, listening gladly to what they say of him,
and accusing himself of the same things.

What is it men love in Genius, but its infinite
hope, which degrades all it has done? Genius
counts all its miracles poor and short. Its own
idea is never executed. The Iliad, the Hamlet,
the Doric column, the Roman arch, the Gothic
minster, the German anthem, when they are ended,
the master casts behind him. How sinks the
song in the waves of melody which the universe
pours over his soul ! Before that gracious Infi-
nite, out of which he drew these few strokes,
how mean they look, though the praises of the
world attend them. From the triumphs of his
art, he turns with desire to this greater defeat.
Let those admire who will. With silent joy he
sees himself to be capable of a beauty that
eclipses all which his hands have done, all which
human hands have ever done.

Well, we are all the children of genius, the
children of virtue, — and feel their inspirations in
our happier hours. Is not every man sometimes a
radical in politics? Men are conservatives when
they are least vigorous, or when they are most
luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner,
or before taking their rest; when they are sick, or
aged : in the morning, or when their intellect or

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 235

their conscience have been aroused, when they
hear music, or when they read poetry, they are
radicals. In the circle of the rankest tories that
could be collected in England, Old or New, let a
powerful and stimulating intellect, a man of great
heart and mind, act on them, and very quickly
these frozen conservators will yield to the friendly
influence, these hopeless will begin to hope, these
haters will begin to love, these immovable statues
will begin to spin and revolve. I cannot help re-
calling the fine anecdote which Warton relates of
Bishop Berkeley, when he was preparing to leave
England, with his plan of planting the gospel
among the American savages. " Lord Bathurst
told me, that the members of the Scriblerus club,
being met at his house at dinner, they agreed to
rally Berkeley, who was also his guest, on his
scheme at Bermudas. Berkeley, having listened
to the many lively things they had to say, begged
to be heard in his turn, and displayed his plan
with such an astonishing and animating force of
eloquence and enthusiasm, that they were struck
dumb, and, after some pause, rose up all together
with earnestness, exclaiming, 4 Let us set out with
him immediately.' " Men in all ways are better than
they seem. The}' like flattery for the moment, but
they know the truth for their own. It is a foolish
cowardice which keeps us from trusting them, and
speaking to them rude truth. They resent your
honesty for an instant, they will thank you for it
always. What is it we heartily wish of each other ?
Is it to be pleased and flattered ? No, but to be con-

236 LECTURE A T AMORY HALL.

victed and exposed, to be shamed out of our non-
sense of all kinds, and made men of, instead of
ghosts and phantoms. We are weary of gliding
ghostlike through the world, which is itself so slight
and unreal. We crave a sense of realit}% though it
comes in strokes of pain. I explain so, — by this
manlike love of truth, — those excesses and errors
into which souls of great vigor, but not equal
insight, often fall. They feel the poverty at the
bottom of all the seeming affluence of the world.
They know the speed with which they come
straight through the thin masquerade, and conceive
a disgust at tbe indigence of nature : Rousseau,
Mirabeau, Charles Fox, Napoleon. Ityron, — and I
could easily add names nearer home, of raging rid-
ers, who drive their steeds so hard, in the violence
of living to forget its illusion : they would know
the worst, and tread the floors of hell. The heroes
of ancient and modern fame, Cimon, Themistocles,
Alcibiades, Alexander, Caesar, have treated life
and fortune as a game to be well and skilfully
played, but the stake not to be so valued, but that
any time it could be held as a trifle light as air,
and thrown up. Caesar, just before the battle of
Pharsalia, discourses with the Egyptian priest,
concerning the fountains of the Nile, and offers to
quit the army, the empire, and Cleopatra, if he
will show him those mysterious sources.

The same magnanimity shows itself in our
social relations, in the preference, namely, which
each man gives to the society of superiors over
that of his equals. All that a man has, will he

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 2tf

give for right relations with his mates. All that
he has, will he give for an erect demeanor in
every company and on each occasion. He aims
at such things as his neighbors prize, and gives
his days and nights, his talents and his heart,
to strike a good stroke, to acquit himself in all
men's sight as a man. The consideration of an
eminent citizen, of a noted merchant, of a man of
mark in his profession ; naval and military honor,
a general's commission, a marshal's baton, a ducal
coronet, the laurel of poets, and, anyhow procured,
the acknowledgment of eminent merit, have this
lustre for each candidate, that they enable him to
walk erect and unashamed, in the presence of some
persons, before whom he felt himself inferior.
Having raised himself to this rank, having estab-
lished his equality with class after class of those
with whom he would live well, he still finds cer-
tain others, before whom he cannot possess him-
self, because they have somewhat fairer, somewhat
grander, somewhat purer, which extorts homage of
him. Is his ambition pure ? then will his laurels
and his possessions seem worthless: instead of
avoiding these men who make his fine gold dim,
he will cast all behind him, and seek their society
only, woo and embrace this, his humiliation and
mortification, until he shall know why his eye
sinks, his voice is husky, and his brilliant talents
are paralyzed in his presence. He is sure that the
soul which gives the lie to all things, will tell none.
His constitution will not mislead him. If it can-
not carry itself as it ought, high and unmatchable

238 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL,

in the presence of any man, if the secret oracles
whose whisper makes the sweetness and dignity
of his life, do here withdraw and accompany him
no longer, it is time to undervalue what he has
valued, to dispossess himself of what he has ac-
quired, and with Csesar to take in his hand the
army, the empire, and Cleopatra, and say, 'Ail
these will I relinquish, if you will show me the
fountains of the Nile.' Dear to us are those who
love us; the swift moments we spend with them
are a compensation for a great deal of misery ; they
enlarge our life ; — but dearer are those who reject
us as unworthy, for they add another life : they
build a heaven before us, whereof we had not
dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers
out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to
new and unattempted performances.

As every man at heart wishes the best and not
inferior society, wishes to be convicted of his
error, and to come to himself, so he wishes that the
same healing should not stop in his thought, but
should penetrate his will or active power. The self-
ish man suffers more from his selfishness than he
from whom that selfishness withholds some im-
portant benefit. What he most wishes is to be
lifted to some higher platform, that he may see
beyond his present fear the transalpine good, so
that his fear, his coldness, his custom, may be
broken up like fragments of ice, melted and car-
ried away in the great stream of good will. Do
you ask my aid ? I also wish to be a benefac-
tor. I wish more to be a benefactor and serv-

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 239

ant, than you wish to be served by me, and surely
the greatest good fortune that could befall me is
precisely to be so moved by you that I should say,
4 Take me and all mine, and use me and mine
freely to your ends ' ! for, I could not say it, other-
wise than because a great enlargement had come
to my heart and mind, which made me superior to
my fortunes. Here we are paralyzed with fear ;
we hold on to our little properties, house and land,
office and money, for the bread which they have
in our experience yielded us, although we confess
that our being does not flow through them. We
desire to be made great, we desire to be touched
with that fire which shall command this ice to
stream, and make our existence a benefit. If
therefore we start objections to your project, O
friend of the slave, or friend of the poor, or of the
race, understand well, that it is because we wish to
drive you to drive us into your measures. We
wish to hear ourselves confuted. We are haunted
with a belief that you have a secret, which it
would highliest advantage us to learn and we would
force you to impart it to us, though it should bring
us to prison, or to worse extremity.

Nothing shall warp me from the belief that
every man is a lover of truth. There is no pure
lie, no pure malignity in nature. The entertain-
ment of the proposition of depravity is the last
profligacy and profanation. There is no skepti-
cism, no atheism but that. Could it be received
into common belief, suicide would unpeople the
planet. It has had a name to live in some dogmatic

240 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL.

theology, but each man's innocence and his real
liking of his neighbor have kept it a dead letter. I
remember standing at the polls one day, when the
anger of the political contest gave a certain grim-
ness to the faces of the independent electors, and
a good man at my side looking on the people, re-
marked, " I am satisfied that the largest part of
these men, on either side, mean to vote right." I
suppose, considerate observers looking at the
masses of men, in their blameless, and in their
equivocal actions, will assent, that in spite of self-
ishness and frivolity, the general purpose in the
great number of persons is fidelity. The reason
why any one refuses his assent to your opinion, or
his aid to your benevolent design, is in }^ou : he
refuses to accept you as a bringer of truth, be-
cause, though you think you have it, he feels that
you have it not. You have not given him the
authentic sign.

If it were worth while to run into details this
general doctrine of the latent but ever soliciting
Spirit, it would be easy to adduce illustration in
particulars of a man's equality to the church, of
his equality to the state, and of his equality to
every other man. It is yet in all men's memory,
that, a few years ago, the liberal churches com-
plained that the Calvinistic church denied to them
the name of Christian. I think the complaint was
confession : a religious church would not complain.
A religious man like Behmen, Fox, or Sweden-
borg, is not irritated by wanting the sanction of

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 241

the church, but the church feels the accusation of
his presence and belief.

It only needs that a just man should walk in
our streets, to make it appear how pitiful and in-
artificial a contrivance is our legislation. The
man whose part is taken, and who does not wait
for society in anything, has a power which society
cannot choose but feel. The familiar experiment,
called the hydrostatic paradox, in which a capillary
column of water balances the ocean, is a symbol
of the relation of one man to the whole family of
men. The wise. Dandini, on hearing the lives of
Socrates, Pythagoras, and Diogenes read, "judged
them to be great men every way, excepting, that
they were too much subjected to the reverence of
the laws, which to second and authorize, true vir-
tue must abate very much of its original vigor."

And as a man is equal to the church, and equal
to the state, so he is equal to every other man.
The disparities of power in men are superficial ;
and all frank and searching conversation, in which
a man lays himself open to his brother, apprizes
each of their radical unity. When two persons
sit and converse in a thoroughly good understand-
ing, the remark is sure to be made, See how we
have disputed about words ! Let a clear, appre-
hensive mind, such as every man knows among his
friends, converse with the most commanding
poetic genius, I think it would appear that there
was no inequality such as men fancy between
them ; that a perfect understanding, a like receiv-
ing, a like perceiving, abolished differences, and.

37

on

242 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL.

the poet would confess that his creative imagina-
tion gave him no deep advantage, but only the
superficial one, that he could express himself, and
the other could not ; that his advantage was a
knack, which might impose on indolent men, but
could not impose on lovers of truth ; for they
know the tax of talent, or, what a price of great-
ness the power of expression too often pays: I
believe it is the conviction of the purest men, that
the net amount of man and man does not much
vary. Each is incomparably superior to his com-
panion in some faculty. His want of skill in other
directions has added to his fitness for his own
work. Eych seems to have some compensation
yielded to him by his infirmity, and every hin-
drance operates as a concentration of his force.

These and the like experiences intimate that
man stands in strict connection with a higher fact
never yet manifested. There is power over and
behind us, and we are the channels of its com-
munications. We seek to say thus and so, and
over our head some spirit sits, which contradicts
what we say. We would persuade our fellow to
this or that ; another self within our eyes dissuades
him. That which we keep back, this reveals. In
vain we compose our faces and our words ; it holds
uncontrollable communication with the enemy,
and he answers civilly to us, but believes the
spirit. We exclaim, 'There's a traitor in the
house ! ' but at last it appears that he is the true
man, and I am the traitor. This open channel to
the highest life is the first and last reality, so sub-

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 243

tie, so quiet, yet so tenacious, that although I have
never expressed the truth, and although I have
never heard the expression of it from any other, I
know that the whole truth is here for me. What
if I cannot answer your questions? I am not
pained that I cannot frame a reply to the ques-
tion, What is the operation we call Providence ?
There lies the unspoken thing, present, omnipres-
ent. Every time we converse, we seek to trans-
late it into speech, but whether we hit, or whether
we miss, we have the fact. Every discourse is an
approximate answer: but it is of small conse-
quence that we do not get it into verbs and nouns,
whilst it abides for contemplation forever.

If the auguries of the prophesying heart shall
make themselves good in time, the man who shall
be born, whose advent men and events prepare
and foreshow, is one who shall enjoy his connection
with a higher life, with the man within man ;
shall destroy distrust by his trust, shall use his
native but forgotten methods, shall not take coun-
sel of flesh and blood, but shall rely on the Law
alive and beautiful, which works over our heads
and under our feet. Pitiless, it avails itself of our
success, when we obey it, and of our ruin, when
we contravene it. Men are all secret believers in
it, else the word justice would have no meaning:
they believe that the best is the true ; that right
is done at last ; or chaos would come. It rewards
actions after their nature, and not after the design
of the agent. * Work,' it saith to man. ' in every
hour, paid or unpaid, see only that thou work, and

244 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL.

thou canst not escape the reward: whether thy
work be fine or coarse, planting corn, or writing
epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own
approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as
well as to the thought: no matter how often de-
feated, you are born to victory. The reward of a
thing well done, is to have done it.'

As soon as a man is wonted to look beyond sur-
faces, and to see how this high will prevails with-
out an exception or an interval, he settles himself
into serenity. He can already rely on the laws of
gravity, that every stone will fall where it is due ;
the good globe is faithful, and carries us securely
through the celestial spaces, anxious or resigned :
we need not interfere to help it on, and he will
learn, one day, the mild lesson they teach, that our
own orbit is all our task, and we need not assist
the administration of the universe. Do not be so
impatient to set the town right concerning the un-
founded pretensions and the false reputation of
certain men of standing. They are laboring
harder to set the town right concern iug them-
selves, and will certainly succeed. Suppress for a
few days your criticism on the insufncienc}' of this
or that teacher or experimenter, and he will have
demonstrated his insufficiency to all men's eyes.
In like manner, let a man fall into the divine cir-
cuits, and he is enlarged. Obedience to his genius
is the only liberating influence. We wish to es-
cape from subjection, and a sense of inferiority,
— and we make self-denying ordinances, we drink
water, we eat grass, we refuse the laws, we go to

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 245

jail : it is all in vain ; only by obedience to his
genius ; only by the freest activity in the way con-
stitutional to him, does an angel seem to arise
before a man, and lead him by the hand out of all
the wards of the prison.

That which befits us, embosomed in beauty and
wonder as we are, is cheerfulness and courage, and
the endeavor to realize our aspirations. The life
of man is the true romance, which, when it is
valiantly conducted, will yield the imagination a
higher joy than any fiction. All around us, what
powers are wrapped up under the coarse mattings
of custom, and all wonder prevented. It is so
wonderful to our neurologists that a man can see
without his eyes, that it does not occur to them
that it is just as wonderful that he should see with
them ; and that is ever the difference between the
wise and the unwise : the latter wonders at what
is unusual, the wise man wonders at the usual.
Shall not the heart which has received so much,
trust the Power by which it lives ? May it not
quit other leadings, and listen to the Soul that has
guided it so gently, and taught it so much, secure
that the future will be worthy of the past?

THE END.

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Military Heroes of the United States. By
Hartwell James, with nearly 100 illustrations.
Their brave deeds from Lexington to Santiago,
told in a captivating manner.

Uncle Tom's Cabin. By Harriet Beecher Stowe,
with 50 illustrations. Arranged for young
readers.

Tales from Shakespeare. By Charles and Mary
L/amb. With 65 illustrations.

Altemus' Young Peoples' Library.— Continued.

Adventures In Toyland. 70 illustrations.
Adventures of a Brownie. 18 illustrations.
Mixed Pickles, 31 illustrations.
Little Lame Prince. 24 illustrations.
The Sleepy King. 77 illustrations.
Romulus, the Founder of Rome. With 49

illustrations.
Cyrus the Great, the Fo^-^er of the

Persian Empire. With 40 iliuEt^tions.
Darius the Great, King of the Medt~ and

Persian. With 34 illustrations.
Xerxes the Great, King of Persia. With

39 illustrations.
Alexander the Great, King of Macedon.

With 51 illustrations.
Pyrrhus, King of Epirus. With 45 illus-
trations.
Hannibal, the Carthaginian. With 37 illus-
trations.
Julius Caesar, the Roman Conqueror.

With 44 illustrations.
Alfred the Great, of England. With 40

illustrations.
William the Conqueror, of England. With

43 illustrations.
Hernando Cortez, the Conqueror of

Mexico. With 30 illustrations.
Mary, Queen of Scots. With 45 illustrations.
Queen Elizabeth, of England. With 49

illustrations.
King Charles the First, of England. With

41 illustrations.
King Charles the Second, of England.

With 38 illustrations.
Maria Antoinette, Queen of France. With

41 illustrations.
Madam Roland, A Heroine of the French

Revolution. With 42 illustrations.
Josephine, Empress of France. With 40

illustrations.

ALTEMUS' ILLUSTRATED DEVOTIONAL SERIES

An entirely new line of popular Religious Litera-
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Full White Vellum, handsome new mosaic design
in gold and colors, gold edges, boxed, 50 cents.

. 1 Abide in Christ. Murray.

. 3 Beecher's Addresses.

. 4 Best Thoughts. From Henry DrummoiuL.

. 5 Bible Birthday Book.

. 6 Brooks' Addresses.

. 7 Buy Your Own Cherries, Kirton.

. 8 Changed Cross, The.

. 9 Christian Life. Oxenden.

.10 Christian Living. Meyer.

.12 Christie's Old Organ. Walton.

.13 Coming to Christ. Havergal.

.14 Daily Food for Christians.

.15 Day Breaketh, The. Shugert.

.17 Drummond's Addresses.

.18 Evening Thoughts. Havergal.

.19 Gold Dust.

.20 Holy in Christ.

.21 Imitation of Christ, The. A'Kempis.

.22 Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture.

Gladstone.
.23 Jessica's First Prayer. Stretton.
.24 John Ploughman's Pictures. Spurgeon.
.25 John Ploughman's Talk. Spurgeon.
.26 Kept fer the Master's Use. Havergal.
.27 Keble's Christian Year.
.28 Let Us Follow Him. Sienkiewicz.
.29 Like Christ. Murray.
.30 Line Upon Line.
.31 Manliness of Christ, The. Hughes.

Henry Altemus' Publications.

32 Message of Peace, The. Church.

33 Morning Thoughts. Havergal.

34 My King and His Service. Havergal.

35 Natural Law in the Spiritual World.

__ „ _ _^ . Drummond.

37 Pathway of Promise.

38 Pathway of Safety. Oxenden.

39 Peep of Day.

40 Pilgrim's Progress, The. Bunyan.

41 Precept Upon Precept.

42 Prince of the House of David. Ingraham.

44 Shepherd Psalm. Meyer.

45 Steps Into the Blessed Life. Meyer.

46 Stepping Heavenward. Prentiss.

47 The Throne of Grace.
50 With Christ. Murray.

The Rise of the Dutch Republic (a History). By John Loth-
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two volumes — over 1,600 pages. Crown 8vo. Cloth, per set,
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Quo Vadis. A tale of the time of Nero, by Henryk Sienkiewicz.
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With Fire and Sword. By the author of "Quo Vadis." A
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Pan Michael. By the author of " Quo Vadis." A historical
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Julian, the Apostate. By S. Mereshkovski. Illustrated. Cloth
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Manual of flythology. For the use of Schools, Art Students,
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The Age of Fable ; or Beauties of Mythology. By Thomas
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Stephen. A Soldier of the Cross. By Florence Morse
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Henry Altemus' Publications.

The Cross Triumphant. By Florence Morse Kingsley, author
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Paul. A Herald of the Cro«s. By Florence Morse Kingsley.
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The Pairest of the Fair. By Hildegarde Hawthorne. Cloth,
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Around the World in Eighty Minutes. Contains over to*
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Shakespeare's Complete Works. With 64 Boydell, and
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Trif and Trixy. By John Habberton, author cf " Helen's
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She Who Will Not When She May. By Eleanor G. Walton.
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What Women Should Know. By Mrs. E. B. Duffy. Cloth,
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Dore Masterpieces.

The Dore Bible Gallery. Containing 100 full-page engravings
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Milton's Paradise Lost. With 50 full-page engravings by Gus-
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Dante's Inferno. With 75 full-page engravings by Gustave
Dore.

Dante's Purgatory and Paradise. With 60 full-page engrav-
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Tennyson's Idylls of the King. With 37 full-page engravings
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Limp cloth binding, gold top, illuminated title

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Paste-grain roan, flexible, gold top ... 50 cts.

«8-

14-
15-
16.

*7«

18.
19.
20.

31.

32.

23-
24.

25-

26.

27.
28.
29.

3°-
S*.

3*-
33-
34.
35-
36.
37-
38-
39-

All's Well that Ends Well.

Antony and Cleopatra.

A Midsummer Night's Dream.

As You Like It.

Comedy of Errors.

Coriolanus.

Cymbeline.

Hamlet.

Julius Caesar.

King Henry IV. (Part I.)

King Henry IV. (Part II.)

King Henry V.

King Henry VI. (Part I.)

King Henry VI. (Part II.)

King Henry VI. (Part III.)

King Henry VIII.

King John.

King Lear.

King Richard II.

King Richard III.

Love's Labour's Lost.

Macbeth.

Measure for Measure.

Much Ado About Nothing.

Othello.

Pericles.

Romeo and Juliet.

The Merchant of Venice.

The Merry Wives of Windsor.

The Taming of the Shrew.

The Tempest.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

The Winter's Tale.

Timon of Athens.

Titus Andronicus.

Troilus and Cressida.

Twelfth Night.

Venus and Adonis and Lucrece.

Sonnets, Passionate Pilgrim, Etc

PS 1608 .A3 1890 SMC
Emerson, Ralph Waldo,
Essays: second series

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