The Project Gutenberg eBook of Essays, First Series, by Ralph Waldo Emerson (2024)

I.
HISTORY

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

I am owner of the sphere,
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
Of Cæsar’s hand, and Plato’s brain,
Of Lord Christ’s heart, and Shakspeare’s strain.

HISTORY

There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to thesame and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason ismade a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; whata saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he canunderstand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is orcan be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.

Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is illustrated bythe entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing less than all hishistory. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from thebeginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion, which belongsto it, in appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to the fact; allthe facts of history preexist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made bycirc*mstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but one at atime. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousandforests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, liefolded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire,republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to themanifold world.

This human mind wrote history, and this must read it. The Sphinx must solve herown riddle. If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explainedfrom individual experience. There is a relation between the hours of our lifeand the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the greatrepositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundredmillions of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibriumof centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by theages and the ages explained by the hours. Of the universal mind each individualman is one more incarnation. All its properties consist in him. Each new factin his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men havedone, and the crises of his life refer to national crises. Every revolution wasfirst a thought in one man’s mind, and when the same thought occurs toanother man, it is the key to that era. Every reform was once a privateopinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again it will solve the problemof the age. The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credibleor intelligible. We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest andking, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in oursecret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly. What befell Asdrubal orCæsar Borgia is as much an illustration of the mind’s powers anddepravations as what has befallen us. Each new law and political movement hasmeaning for you. Stand before each of its tablets and say, ‘Under thismask did my Proteus nature hide itself.’ This remedies the defect of ourtoo great nearness to ourselves. This throws our actions into perspective; andas crabs, goats, scorpions, the balance and the waterpot lose their meannesswhen hung as signs in the zodiac, so I can see my own vices without heat in thedistant persons of Solomon, Alcibiades, and Catiline.

It is the universal nature which gives worth to particular men and things.Human life, as containing this, is mysterious and inviolable, and we hedge itround with penalties and laws. All laws derive hence their ultimate reason; allexpress more or less distinctly some command of this supreme, illimitableessence. Property also holds of the soul, covers great spiritual facts, andinstinctively we at first hold to it with swords and laws and wide and complexcombinations. The obscure consciousness of this fact is the light of all ourday, the claim of claims; the plea for education, for justice, for charity; thefoundation of friendship and love and of the heroism and grandeur which belongto acts of self-reliance. It is remarkable that involuntarily we always read assuperior beings. Universal history, the poets, the romancers, do not in theirstateliest pictures,—in the sacerdotal, the imperial palaces, in thetriumphs of will or of genius,—anywhere lose our ear, anywhere make usfeel that we intrude, that this is for better men; but rather is it true thatin their grandest strokes we feel most at home. All that Shakspeare says of theking, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true ofhimself. We sympathize in the great moments of history, in the greatdiscoveries, the great resistances, the great prosperities ofmen;—because there law was enacted, the sea was searched, the land wasfound, or the blow was struck, for us, as we ourselves in that placewould have done or applauded.

We have the same interest in condition and character. We honor the rich becausethey have externally the freedom, power, and grace which we feel to be properto man, proper to us. So all that is said of the wise man by Stoic or Orientalor modern essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes hisunattained but attainable self. All literature writes the character of the wiseman. Books, monuments, pictures, conversation, are portraits in which he findsthe lineaments he is forming. The silent and the eloquent praise him and accosthim, and he is stimulated wherever he moves, as by personal allusions. A trueaspirant therefore never needs look for allusions personal and laudatory indiscourse. He hears the commendation, not of himself, but, more sweet, of thatcharacter he seeks, in every word that is said concerning character, yeafurther in every fact and circ*mstance,—in the running river and therustling corn. Praise is looked, homage tendered, love flows, from mute nature,from the mountains and the lights of the firmament.

These hints, dropped as it were from sleep and night, let us use in broad day.The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his ownlife the text, and books the commentary. Thus compelled, the Muse of historywill utter oracles, as never to those who do not respect themselves. I have noexpectation that any man will read history aright who thinks that what was donein a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sensethan what he is doing to-day.

The world exists for the education of each man. There is no age or state ofsociety or mode of action in history to which there is not somewhatcorresponding in his life. Every thing tends in a wonderful manner toabbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to him. He should see that he canlive all history in his own person. He must sit solidly at home, and not sufferhimself to be bullied by kings or empires, but know that he is greater than allthe geography and all the government of the world; he must transfer the pointof view from which history is commonly read, from Rome and Athens and London,to himself, and not deny his conviction that he is the court, and if England orEgypt have any thing to say to him he will try the case; if not, let them forever be silent. He must attain and maintain that lofty sight where facts yieldtheir secret sense, and poetry and annals are alike. The instinct of the mind,the purpose of nature, betrays itself in the use we make of the signalnarrations of history. Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity offacts. No anchor, no cable, no fences avail to keep a fact a fact. Babylon,Troy, Tyre, Palestine, and even early Rome are passing already into fiction.The Garden of Eden, the sun standing still in Gibeon, is poetry thenceforwardto all nations. Who cares what the fact was, when we have made a constellationof it to hang in heaven an immortal sign? London and Paris and New York must gothe same way. “What is history,” said Napoleon, “but a fableagreed upon?” This life of ours is stuck round with Egypt, Greece, Gaul,England, War, Colonization, Church, Court and Commerce, as with so many flowersand wild ornaments grave and gay. I will not make more account of them. Ibelieve in Eternity. I can find Greece, Asia, Italy, Spain and theIslands,—the genius and creative principle of each and of all eras, in myown mind.

We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our privateexperience and verifying them here. All history becomes subjective; in otherwords there is properly no history, only biography. Every mind must know thewhole lesson for itself,—must go over the whole ground. What it does notsee, what it does not live, it will not know. What the former age hasepitomized into a formula or rule for manipular convenience, it will lose allthe good of verifying for itself, by means of the wall of that rule. Somewhere,sometime, it will demand and find compensation for that loss, by doing the workitself. Ferguson discovered many things in astronomy which had long been known.The better for him.

History must be this or it is nothing. Every law which the state enactsindicates a fact in human nature; that is all. We must in ourselves see thenecessary reason of every fact,—see how it could and must be. So standbefore every public and private work; before an oration of Burke, before avictory of Napoleon, before a martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, of Sidney, ofMarmaduke Robinson; before a French Reign of Terror, and a Salem hanging ofwitches; before a fanatic Revival and the Animal Magnetism in Paris, or inProvidence. We assume that we under like influence should be alike affected,and should achieve the like; and we aim to master intellectually the steps andreach the same height or the same degradation that our fellow, our proxy hasdone.

All inquiry into antiquity, all curiosity respecting the Pyramids, theexcavated cities, Stonehenge, the Ohio Circles, Mexico, Memphis,—is thedesire to do away this wild, savage, and preposterous There or Then, andintroduce in its place the Here and the Now. Belzoni digs and measures in themummy-pits and pyramids of Thebes, until he can see the end of the differencebetween the monstrous work and himself. When he has satisfied himself, ingeneral and in detail, that it was made by such a person as he, so armed and somotived, and to ends to which he himself should also have worked, the problemis solved; his thought lives along the whole line of temples and sphinxes andcatacombs, passes through them all with satisfaction, and they live again tothe mind, or are now.

A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us and not done by us. Surely itwas by man, but we find it not in our man. But we apply ourselves to thehistory of its production. We put ourselves into the place and state of thebuilder. We remember the forest-dwellers, the first temples, the adherence tothe first type, and the decoration of it as the wealth of the nation increased;the value which is given to wood by carving led to the carving over the wholemountain of stone of a cathedral. When we have gone through this process, andadded thereto the Catholic Church, its cross, its music, its processions, itsSaints’ days and image-worship, we have as it were been the man that madethe minster; we have seen how it could and must be. We have the sufficientreason.

The difference between men is in their principle of association. Some menclassify objects by color and size and other accidents of appearance; others byintrinsic likeness, or by the relation of cause and effect. The progress of theintellect is to the clearer vision of causes, which neglects surfacedifferences. To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things arefriendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine. Forthe eye is fastened on the life, and slights the circ*mstance. Every chemicalsubstance, every plant, every animal in its growth, teaches the unity of cause,the variety of appearance.

Upborne and surrounded as we are by this all-creating nature, soft and fluid asa cloud or the air, why should we be such hard pedants, and magnify a fewforms? Why should we make account of time, or of magnitude, or of figure? Thesoul knows them not, and genius, obeying its law, knows how to play with themas a young child plays with graybeards and in churches. Genius studies thecausal thought, and far back in the womb of things sees the rays parting fromone orb, that diverge, ere they fall, by infinite diameters. Genius watches themonad through all his masks as he performs the metempsychosis of nature. Geniusdetects through the fly, through the caterpillar, through the grub, through theegg, the constant individual; through countless individuals the fixed species;through many species the genus; through all genera the steadfast type; throughall the kingdoms of organized life the eternal unity. Nature is a mutable cloudwhich is always and never the same. She casts the same thought into troops offorms, as a poet makes twenty fables with one moral. Through the bruteness andtoughness of matter, a subtle spirit bends all things to its own will. Theadamant streams into soft but precise form before it, and whilst I look at itit* outline and texture are changed again. Nothing is so fleeting as form; yetnever does it quite deny itself. In man we still trace the remains or hints ofall that we esteem badges of servitude in the lower races; yet in him theyenhance his nobleness and grace; as Io, in Æschylus, transformed to a cow,offends the imagination; but how changed when as Isis in Egypt she meetsOsiris-Jove, a beautiful woman with nothing of the metamorphosis left but thelunar horns as the splendid ornament of her brows!

The identity of history is equally intrinsic, the diversity equally obvious.There is, at the surface, infinite variety of things; at the centre there issimplicity of cause. How many are the acts of one man in which we recognize thesame character! Observe the sources of our information in respect to the Greekgenius. We have the civil history of that people, as Herodotus,Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch have given it; a very sufficient account ofwhat manner of persons they were and what they did. We have the same nationalmind expressed for us again in their literature, in epic and lyricpoems, drama, and philosophy; a very complete form. Then we have it once morein their architecture, a beauty as of temperance itself, limited to thestraight line and the square,—a builded geometry. Then we have it onceagain in sculpture, the “tongue on the balance ofexpression,” a multitude of forms in the utmost freedom of action andnever transgressing the ideal serenity; like votaries performing some religiousdance before the gods, and, though in convulsive pain or mortal combat, neverdaring to break the figure and decorum of their dance. Thus of the genius ofone remarkable people we have a fourfold representation: and to the senses whatmore unlike than an ode of Pindar, a marble centaur, the peristyle of theParthenon, and the last actions of Phocion?

Every one must have observed faces and forms which, without any resemblingfeature, make a like impression on the beholder. A particular picture or copyof verses, if it do not awaken the same train of images, will yet superinducethe same sentiment as some wild mountain walk, although the resemblance isnowise obvious to the senses, but is occult and out of the reach of theunderstanding. Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very fewlaws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.

Nature is full of a sublime family likeness throughout her works, and delightsin startling us with resemblances in the most unexpected quarters. I have seenthe head of an old sachem of the forest which at once reminded the eye of abald mountain summit, and the furrows of the brow suggested the strata of therock. There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as thesimple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon and the remains ofthe earliest Greek art. And there are compositions of the same strain to befound in the books of all ages. What is Guido’s Rospigliosi Aurora but amorning thought, as the horses in it are only a morning cloud? If any one willbut take pains to observe the variety of actions to which he is equallyinclined in certain moods of mind, and those to which he is averse, he will seehow deep is the chain of affinity.

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming atree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely,—but,by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into hisnature and can then draw him at will in every attitude. So Roos “enteredinto the inmost nature of a sheep.” I knew a draughtsman employed in apublic survey who found that he could not sketch the rocks until theirgeological structure was first explained to him. In a certain state of thoughtis the common origin of very diverse works. It is the spirit and not the factthat is identical. By a deeper apprehension, and not primarily by a painfulacquisition of many manual skills, the artist attains the power of awakeningother souls to a given activity.

It has been said that “common souls pay with what they do, nobler soulswith that which they are.” And why? Because a profound nature awakens inus by its actions and words, by its very looks and manners, the same power andbeauty that a gallery of sculpture or of pictures addresses.

Civil and natural history, the history of art and of literature, must beexplained from individual history, or must remain words. There is nothing butis related to us, nothing that does not interest us,—kingdom, college,tree, horse, or iron shoe,—the roots of all things are in man. SantaCroce and the Dome of St. Peter’s are lame copies after a divine model.Strasburg Cathedral is a material counterpart of the soul of Erwin ofSteinbach. The true poem is the poet’s mind; the true ship is theship-builder. In the man, could we lay him open, we should see the reason forthe last flourish and tendril of his work; as every spine and tint in thesea-shell preexists in the secreting organs of the fish. The whole of heraldryand of chivalry is in courtesy. A man of fine manners shall pronounce your namewith all the ornament that titles of nobility could ever add.

The trivial experience of every day is always verifying some old prediction tous and converting into things the words and signs which we had heard and seenwithout heed. A lady with whom I was riding in the forest said to me that thewoods always seemed to her to wait, as if the genii who inhabit them suspendedtheir deeds until the wayfarer had passed onward; a thought which poetry hascelebrated in the dance of the fairies, which breaks off on the approach ofhuman feet. The man who has seen the rising moon break out of the clouds atmidnight, has been present like an archangel at the creation of light and ofthe world. I remember one summer day in the fields my companion pointed out tome a broad cloud, which might extend a quarter of a mile parallel to thehorizon, quite accurately in the form of a cherub as painted overchurches,—a round block in the centre, which it was easy to animate witheyes and mouth, supported on either side by wide-stretched symmetrical wings.What appears once in the atmosphere may appear often, and it was undoubtedlythe archetype of that familiar ornament. I have seen in the sky a chain ofsummer lightning which at once showed to me that the Greeks drew from naturewhen they painted the thunderbolt in the hand of Jove. I have seen a snow-driftalong the sides of the stone wall which obviously gave the idea of the commonarchitectural scroll to abut a tower.

By surrounding ourselves with the original circ*mstances we invent anew theorders and the ornaments of architecture, as we see how each people merelydecorated its primitive abodes. The Doric temple preserves the semblance of thewooden cabin in which the Dorian dwelt. The Chinese pagoda is plainly a Tartartent. The Indian and Egyptian temples still betray the mounds and subterraneanhouses of their forefathers. “The custom of making houses and tombs inthe living rock,” says Heeren in his Researches on the Ethiopians,“determined very naturally the principal character of the Nubian Egyptianarchitecture to the colossal form which it assumed. In these caverns, alreadyprepared by nature, the eye was accustomed to dwell on huge shapes and masses,so that when art came to the assistance of nature it could not move on a smallscale without degrading itself. What would statues of the usual size, or neatporches and wings have been, associated with those gigantic halls before whichonly Colossi could sit as watchmen or lean on the pillars of theinterior?”

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

The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the insatiable demandof harmony in man. The mountain of granite blooms into an eternal flower, withthe lightness and delicate finish as well as the aerial proportions andperspective of vegetable beauty.

In like manner all public facts are to be individualized, all private facts areto be generalized. Then at once History becomes fluid and true, and Biographydeep and sublime. As the Persian imitated in the slender shafts and capitals ofhis architecture the stem and flower of the lotus and palm, so the Persiancourt in its magnificent era never gave over the nomadism of its barbaroustribes, but travelled from Ecbatana, where the spring was spent, to Susa insummer and to Babylon for the winter.

In the early history of Asia and Africa, Nomadism and Agriculture are the twoantagonist facts. The geography of Asia and of Africa necessitated a nomadiclife. But the nomads were the terror of all those whom the soil or theadvantages of a market had induced to build towns. Agriculture therefore was areligious injunction, because of the perils of the state from nomadism. And inthese late and civil countries of England and America these propensities stillfight out the old battle, in the nation and in the individual. The nomads ofAfrica were constrained to wander, by the attacks of the gad-fly, which drivesthe cattle mad, and so compels the tribe to emigrate in the rainy season and todrive off the cattle to the higher sandy regions. The nomads of Asia follow thepasturage from month to month. In America and Europe the nomadism is of tradeand curiosity; a progress, certainly, from the gad-fly of Astaboras to theAnglo and Italo-mania of Boston Bay. Sacred cities, to which a periodicalreligious pilgrimage was enjoined, or stringent laws and customs, tending toinvigorate the national bond, were the check on the old rovers; and thecumulative values of long residence are the restraints on the itineracy of thepresent day. The antagonism of the two tendencies is not less active inindividuals, as the love of adventure or the love of repose happens topredominate. A man of rude health and flowing spirits has the faculty of rapiddomestication, lives in his wagon and roams through all latitudes as easily asa Calmuc. At sea, or in the forest, or in the snow, he sleeps as warm, dineswith as good appetite, and associates as happily as beside his own chimneys. Orperhaps his facility is deeper seated, in the increased range of his facultiesof observation, which yield him points of interest wherever fresh objects meethis eyes. The pastoral nations were needy and hungry to desperation; and thisintellectual nomadism, in its excess, bankrupts the mind through thedissipation of power on a miscellany of objects. The home-keeping wit, on theother hand, is that continence or content which finds all the elements of lifein its own soil; and which has its own perils of monotony and deterioration, ifnot stimulated by foreign infusions.

Every thing the individual sees without him corresponds to his states of mind,and every thing is in turn intelligible to him, as his onward thinking leadshim into the truth to which that fact or series belongs.

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

What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters,art, and poetry, in all its periods from the Heroic or Homeric age down to thedomestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? Whatbut this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period. TheGrecian state is the era of the bodily nature, the perfection of thesenses,—of the spiritual nature unfolded in strict unity with the body.In it existed those human forms which supplied the sculptor with his models ofHercules, Phœbus, and Jove; not like the forms abounding in the streets ofmodern cities, wherein the face is a confused blur of features, but composed ofincorrupt, sharply defined and symmetrical features, whose eye-sockets are soformed that it would be impossible for such eyes to squint and take furtiveglances on this side and on that, but they must turn the whole head. Themanners of that period are plain and fierce. The reverence exhibited is forpersonal qualities; courage, address, self-command, justice, strength,swiftness, a loud voice, a broad chest. Luxury and elegance are not known. Asparse population and want make every man his own valet, cook, butcher andsoldier, and the habit of supplying his own needs educates the body towonderful performances. Such are the Agamemnon and Diomed of Homer, and not fardifferent is the picture Xenophon gives of himself and his compatriots in theRetreat of the Ten Thousand. “After the army had crossed the riverTeleboas in Armenia, there fell much snow, and the troops lay miserably on theground covered with it. But Xenophon arose naked, and taking an axe, began tosplit wood; whereupon others rose and did the like.” Throughout his armyexists a boundless liberty of speech. They quarrel for plunder, they wranglewith the generals on each new order, and Xenophon is as sharp-tongued as anyand sharper-tongued than most, and so gives as good as he gets. Who does notsee that this is a gang of great boys, with such a code of honor and such laxdiscipline as great boys have?

The costly charm of the ancient tragedy, and indeed of all the old literature,is that the persons speak simply,—speak as persons who have great goodsense without knowing it, before yet the reflective habit has become thepredominant habit of the mind. Our admiration of the antique is not admirationof the old, but of the natural. The Greeks are not reflective, but perfect intheir senses and in their health, with the finest physical organization in theworld. Adults acted with the simplicity and grace of children. They made vases,tragedies, and statues, such as healthy senses should,—that is, in goodtaste. Such things have continued to be made in all ages, and are now, wherevera healthy physique exists; but, as a class, from their superior organization,they have surpassed all. They combine the energy of manhood with the engagingunconsciousness of childhood. The attraction of these manners is that theybelong to man, and are known to every man in virtue of his being once a child;besides that there are always individuals who retain these characteristics. Aperson of childlike genius and inborn energy is still a Greek, and revives ourlove of the Muse of Hellas. I admire the love of nature in the Philoctetes. Inreading those fine apostrophes to sleep, to the stars, rocks, mountains andwaves, I feel time passing away as an ebbing sea. I feel the eternity of man,the identity of his thought. The Greek had it seems the same fellow-beings asI. The sun and moon, water and fire, met his heart precisely as they meet mine.Then the vaunted distinction between Greek and English, between Classic andRomantic schools, seems superficial and pedantic. When a thought of Platobecomes a thought to me,—when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar firesmine, time is no more. When I feel that we two meet in a perception, that ourtwo souls are tinged with the same hue, and do as it were run into one, whyshould I measure degrees of latitude, why should I count Egyptian years?

The student interprets the age of chivalry by his own age of chivalry, and thedays of maritime adventure and circumnavigation by quite parallel miniatureexperiences of his own. To the sacred history of the world he has the same key.When the voice of a prophet out of the deeps of antiquity merely echoes to hima sentiment of his infancy, a prayer of his youth, he then pierces to the truththrough all the confusion of tradition and the caricature of institutions.

Rare, extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, who disclose to us new factsin nature. I see that men of God have from time to time walked among men andmade their commission felt in the heart and soul of the commonest hearer. Henceevidently the tripod, the priest, the priestess inspired by the divineafflatus.

Jesus astonishes and overpowers sensual people. They cannot unite him tohistory, or reconcile him with themselves. As they come to revere theirintuitions and aspire to live holily, their own piety explains every fact,every word.

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

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

The priestcraft of the East and West, of the Magian, Brahmin, Druid, and Inca,is expounded in the individual’s private life. The cramping influence ofa hard formalist on a young child, in repressing his spirits and courage,paralyzing the understanding, and that without producing indignation, but onlyfear and obedience, and even much sympathy with the tyranny,—is afamiliar fact, explained to the child when he becomes a man, only by seeingthat the oppressor of his youth is himself a child tyrannized over by thosenames and words and forms of whose influence he was merely the organ to theyouth. The fact teaches him how Belus was worshipped and how the Pyramids werebuilt, better than the discovery by Champollion of the names of all the workmenand the cost of every tile. He finds Assyria and the Mounds of Cholula at hisdoor, and himself has laid the courses.

Again, in that protest which each considerate person makes against thesuperstition of his times, he repeats step for step the part of old reformers,and in the search after truth finds, like them, new perils to virtue. He learnsagain what moral vigor is needed to supply the girdle of a superstition. Agreat licentiousness treads on the heels of a reformation. How many times inthe history of the world has the Luther of the day had to lament the decay ofpiety in his own household! “Doctor,” said his wife to MartinLuther, one day, “how is it that whilst subject to papacy we prayed sooften and with such fervor, whilst now we pray with the utmost coldness andvery seldom?”

The advancing man discovers how deep a property he has in literature,—inall fable as well as in all history. He finds that the poet was no odd fellowwho described strange and impossible situations, but that universal man wroteby his pen a confession true for one and true for all. His own secret biographyhe finds in lines wonderfully intelligible to him, dotted down before he wasborn. One after another he comes up in his private adventures with every fableof Æsop, of Homer, of Hafiz, of Ariosto, of Chaucer, of Scott, and verifiesthem with his own head and hands.

The beautiful fables of the Greeks, being proper creations of the imaginationand not of the fancy, are universal verities. What a range of meanings and whatperpetual pertinence has the story of Prometheus! Beside its primary value asthe first chapter of the history of Europe, (the mythology thinly veilingauthentic facts, the invention of the mechanic arts and the migration ofcolonies,) it gives the history of religion, with some closeness to the faithof later ages. Prometheus is the Jesus of the old mythology. He is the friendof man; stands between the unjust “justice” of the Eternal Fatherand the race of mortals, and readily suffers all things on their account. Butwhere it departs from the Calvinistic Christianity and exhibits him as thedefier of Jove, it represents a state of mind which readily appears whereverthe doctrine of Theism is taught in a crude, objective form, and which seemsthe self-defence of man against this untruth, namely a discontent with thebelieved fact that a God exists, and a feeling that the obligation of reverenceis onerous. It would steal if it could the fire of the Creator, and live apartfrom him and independent of him. The Prometheus Vinctus is the romance ofskepticism. Not less true to all time are the details of that stately apologue.Apollo kept the flocks of Admetus, said the poets. When the gods come amongmen, they are not known. Jesus was not; Socrates and Shakspeare were not.Antaeus was suffocated by the gripe of Hercules, but every time he touched hismother earth his strength was renewed. Man is the broken giant, and in all hisweakness both his body and his mind are invigorated by habits of conversationwith nature. The power of music, the power of poetry, to unfix and as it wereclap wings to solid nature, interprets the riddle of Orpheus. The philosophicalperception of identity through endless mutations of form makes him know theProteus. What else am I who laughed or wept yesterday, who slept last nightlike a corpse, and this morning stood and ran? And what see I on any side butthe transmigrations of Proteus? I can symbolize my thought by using the name ofany creature, of any fact, because every creature is man agent or patient.Tantalus is but a name for you and me. Tantalus means the impossibility ofdrinking the waters of thought which are always gleaming and waving withinsight of the soul. The transmigration of souls is no fable. I would it were;but men and women are only half human. Every animal of the barn-yard, the fieldand the forest, of the earth and of the waters that are under the earth, hascontrived to get a footing and to leave the print of its features and form insome one or other of these upright, heaven-facing speakers. Ah! brother, stopthe ebb of thy soul,—ebbing downward into the forms into whose habitsthou hast now for many years slid. As near and proper to us is also that oldfable of the Sphinx, who was said to sit in the road-side and put riddles toevery passenger. If the man could not answer, she swallowed him alive. If hecould solve the riddle, the Sphinx was slain. What is our life but an endlessflight of winged facts or events? In splendid variety these changes come, allputting questions to the human spirit. Those men who cannot answer by asuperior wisdom these facts or questions of time, serve them. Facts encumberthem, tyrannize over them, and make the men of routine, the men ofsense, in whom a literal obedience to facts has extinguished every sparkof that light by which man is truly man. But if the man is true to his betterinstincts or sentiments, and refuses the dominion of facts, as one that comesof a higher race; remains fast by the soul and sees the principle, then thefacts fall aptly and supple into their places; they know their master, and themeanest of them glorifies him.

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

The universal nature, too strong for the petty nature of the bard, sits on hisneck and writes through his hand; so that when he seems to vent a mere capriceand wild romance, the issue is an exact allegory. Hence Plato said that“poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselvesunderstand.” All the fictions of the Middle Age explain themselves as amasked or frolic expression of that which in grave earnest the mind of thatperiod toiled to achieve. Magic and all that is ascribed to it is a deeppresentiment of the powers of science. The shoes of swiftness, the sword ofsharpness, the power of subduing the elements, of using the secret virtues ofminerals, of understanding the voices of birds, are the obscure efforts of themind in a right direction. The preternatural prowess of the hero, the gift ofperpetual youth, and the like, are alike the endeavour of the human spirit“to bend the shows of things to the desires of the mind.”

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

Is it otherwise in the newest romance? I read the Bride of Lammermoor. SirWilliam Ashton is a mask for a vulgar temptation, Ravenswood Castle a fine namefor proud poverty, and the foreign mission of state only a Bunyan disguise forhonest industry. We may all shoot a wild bull that would toss the good andbeautiful, by fighting down the unjust and sensual. Lucy Ashton is another namefor fidelity, which is always beautiful and always liable to calamity in thisworld.

But along with the civil and metaphysical history of man, another history goesdaily forward,—that of the external world,—in which he is not lessstrictly implicated. He is the compend of time; he is also the correlative ofnature. His power consists in the multitude of his affinities, in the fact thathis life is intertwined with the whole chain of organic and inorganic being. Inold Rome the public roads beginning at the Forum proceeded north, south, east,west, to the centre of every province of the empire, making each market-town ofPersia, Spain and Britain pervious to the soldiers of the capital: so out ofthe human heart go as it were highways to the heart of every object in nature,to reduce it under the dominion of man. A man is a bundle of relations, a knotof roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world. His faculties refer tonatures out of him and predict the world he is to inhabit, as the fins of thefish foreshow that water exists, or the wings of an eagle in the egg presupposeair. He cannot live without a world. Put Napoleon in an island prison, let hisfaculties find no men to act on, no Alps to climb, no stake to play for, and hewould beat the air, and appear stupid. Transport him to large countries, densepopulation, complex interests and antagonist power, and you shall see that theman Napoleon, bounded that is by such a profile and outline, is not the virtualNapoleon. This is but Talbot’s shadow;—

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

Columbus needs a planet to shape his course upon. Newton and Laplace needmyriads of age and thick-strewn celestial areas. One may say a gravitatingsolar system is already prophesied in the nature of Newton’s mind. Notless does the brain of Davy or of Gay-Lussac, from childhood exploring theaffinities and repulsions of particles, anticipate the laws of organization.Does not the eye of the human embryo predict the light? the ear of Handelpredict the witchcraft of harmonic sound? Do not the constructive fingers ofWatt, Fulton, Whittemore, Arkwright, predict the fusible, hard, and temperabletexture of metals, the properties of stone, water, and wood? Do not the lovelyattributes of the maiden child predict the refinements and decorations of civilsociety? Here also we are reminded of the action of man on man. A mind mightponder its thought for ages and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passionof love shall teach it in a day. Who knows himself before he has been thrilledwith indignation at an outrage, or has heard an eloquent tongue, or has sharedthe throb of thousands in a national exultation or alarm? No man can antedatehis experience, or guess what faculty or feeling a new object shall unlock, anymore than he can draw to-day the face of a person whom he shall see to-morrowfor the first time.

I will not now go behind the general statement to explore the reason of thiscorrespondency. Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely,that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be readand written.

Thus in all ways does the soul concentrate and reproduce its treasures for eachpupil. He too shall pass through the whole cycle of experience. He shallcollect into a focus the rays of nature. History no longer shall be a dullbook. It shall walk incarnate in every just and wise man. You shall not tell meby languages and titles a catalogue of the volumes you have read. You shallmake me feel what periods you have lived. A man shall be the Temple of Fame. Heshall walk, as the poets have described that goddess, in a robe painted allover with wonderful events and experiences;—his own form and features bytheir exalted intelligence shall be that variegated vest. I shall find in himthe Foreworld; in his childhood the Age of Gold, the Apples of Knowledge, theArgonautic Expedition, the calling of Abraham, the building of the Temple, theAdvent of Christ, Dark Ages, the Revival of Letters, the Reformation, thediscovery of new lands, the opening of new sciences and new regions in man. Heshall be the priest of Pan, and bring with him into humble cottages theblessing of the morning stars, and all the recorded benefits of heaven andearth.

Is there somewhat overweening in this claim? Then I reject all I have written,for what is the use of pretending to know what we know not? But it is the faultof our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to beliesome other. I hold our actual knowledge very cheap. Hear the rats in the wall,see the lizard on the fence, the fungus under foot, the lichen on the log. Whatdo I know sympathetically, morally, of either of these worlds of life? As oldas the Caucasian man,—perhaps older,—these creatures have kepttheir counsel beside him, and there is no record of any word or sign that haspassed from one to the other. What connection do the books show between thefifty or sixty chemical elements and the historical eras? Nay, what doeshistory yet record of the metaphysical annals of man? What light does it shedon those mysteries which we hide under the names Death and Immortality? Yetevery history should be written in a wisdom which divined the range of ouraffinities and looked at facts as symbols. I am ashamed to see what a shallowvillage tale our so-called History is. How many times we must say Rome, andParis, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What areOlympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what foodor experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, for the Kanakain his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?

Broader and deeper we must write our annals,—from an ethical reformation,from an influx of the ever new, ever sanative conscience,—if we wouldtrulier express our central and wide-related nature, instead of this oldchronology of selfishness and pride to which we have too long lent our eyes.Already that day exists for us, shines in on us at unawares, but the path ofscience and of letters is not the way into nature. The idiot, the Indian, thechild and unschooled farmer’s boy stand nearer to the light by whichnature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.

II.
SELF-RELIANCE

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

SELF-RELIANCE

I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which wereoriginal and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in suchlines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is of morevalue than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, tobelieve that what is true for you in your private heart is true for allmen,—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be theuniversal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our firstthought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiaras the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses,Plato and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke notwhat men, but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watchthat gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than thelustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice histhought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our ownrejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Greatworks of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us toabide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then mostwhen the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else to-morrow a strangerwill say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt allthe time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion fromanother.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at theconviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must takehimself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe isfull of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toilbestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power whichresides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which hecan do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, onecharacter, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. Thissculpture in the memory is not without preestablished harmony. The eye wasplaced where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray.We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which eachof us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues,so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest bycowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work anddone his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace.It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius desertshim; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place thedivine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, theconnection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselveschildlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that theabsolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands,predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in thehighest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in aprotected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides,redeemers and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort and advancing on Chaosand the Dark.

What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text in the face and behavior ofchildren, babes, and even brutes! That divided and rebel mind, that distrust ofa sentiment because our arithmetic has computed the strength and means opposedto our purpose, these have not. Their mind being whole, their eye is as yetunconquered, and when we look in their faces we are disconcerted. Infancyconforms to nobody; all conform to it; so that one babe commonly makes four orfive out of the adults who prattle and play to it. So God has armed youth andpuberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and made itenviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it will stand byitself. Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak to you andme. Hark! in the next room his voice is sufficiently clear and emphatic. Itseems he knows how to speak to his contemporaries. Bashful or bold then, hewill know how to make us seniors very unnecessary.

The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much asa lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of humannature. A boy is in the parlor what the pit is in the playhouse; independent,irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by,he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys,as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himselfnever about consequences, about interests; he gives an independent, genuineverdict. You must court him; he does not court you. But the man is as it wereclapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spokenwith éclat he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or thehatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. There isno Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who canthus avoid all pledges and, having observed, observe again from the sameunaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence,—must always beformidable. He would utter opinions on all passing affairs, which being seen tobe not private but necessary, would sink like darts into the ear of men and putthem in fear.

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint andinaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracyagainst the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stockcompany, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread toeach shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtuein most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves notrealities and creators, but names and customs.

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortalpalms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it begoodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolveyou to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. I remember ananswer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser whowas wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On mysaying, “What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I livewholly from within?” my friend suggested,—“But these impulsesmay be from below, not from above.” I replied, “They do not seem tome to be such; but if I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from theDevil.” No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and badare but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is whatis after my constitution; the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carryhimself in the presence of all opposition as if every thing were titular andephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges andnames, to large societies and dead institutions. Every decent and well-spokenindividual affects and sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright andvital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. If malice and vanity wear the coatof philanthropy, shall that pass? If an angry bigot assumes this bountifulcause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, whyshould I not say to him, ‘Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper; begood-natured and modest; have that grace; and never varnish your hard,uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousandmiles off. Thy love afar is spite at home.’ Rough and graceless would besuch greeting, but truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Yourgoodness must have some edge to it,—else it is none. The doctrine ofhatred must be preached, as the counteraction of the doctrine of love, whenthat pules and whines. I shun father and mother and wife and brother when mygenius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. Ihope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day inexplanation. Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company.Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to putall poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee thoufoolish philanthropist that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give tosuch men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a classof persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them Iwill go to prison if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; theeducation at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain endto which many now stand; alms to sots, and the thousand-fold ReliefSocieties;—though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give thedollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood towithhold.

Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. Thereis the man and his virtues. Men do what is called a good action, as somepiece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation ofdaily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology orextenuation of their living in the world,—as invalids and the insane paya high board. Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiate, but tolive. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that itshould be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should beglittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need dietand bleeding. I ask primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse this appealfrom the man to his actions. I know that for myself it makes no differencewhether I do or forbear those actions which are reckoned excellent. I cannotconsent to pay for a privilege where I have intrinsic right. Few and mean as mygifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or theassurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule,equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the wholedistinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you willalways find those who think they know what is your duty better than you knowit. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easyin solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst ofthe crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that itscatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of yourcharacter. If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society,vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread yourtable like base housekeepers,—under all these screens I have difficultyto detect the precise man you are: and of course so much force is withdrawnfrom your proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work,and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what ablindman’s-buff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect, Ianticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic theexpediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehandthat not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous word? Do I not know thatwith all this ostentation of examining the grounds of the institution he willdo no such thing? Do I not know that he is pledged to himself not to look butat one side, the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister? He isa retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the emptiest affectation.Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, andattached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. Thisconformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies,but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two isnot the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they saychagrins us and we know not where to begin to set them right. Meantime natureis not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere.We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlestasinine expression. There is a mortifying experience in particular, which doesnot fail to wreak itself also in the general history; I mean “the foolishface of praise,” the forced smile which we put on in company where we donot feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us. Themuscles, not spontaneously moved but moved by a low usurping wilfulness, growtight about the outline of the face with the most disagreeable sensation.

For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. And therefore a manmust know how to estimate a sour face. The by-standers look askance on him inthe public street or in the friend’s parlor. If this aversation had itsorigin in contempt and resistance like his own he might well go home with a sadcountenance; but the sour faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces, haveno deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaperdirects. Yet is the discontent of the multitude more formidable than that ofthe senate and the college. It is easy enough for a firm man who knows theworld to brook the rage of the cultivated classes. Their rage is decorous andprudent, for they are timid, as being very vulnerable themselves. But when totheir feminine rage the indignation of the people is added, when the ignorantand the poor are aroused, when the unintelligent brute force that lies at thebottom of society is made to growl and mow, it needs the habit of magnanimityand religion to treat it godlike as a trifle of no concernment.

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

But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about thiscorpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this orthat public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seemsto be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even inacts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyedpresent, and live ever in a new day. In your metaphysics you have deniedpersonality to the Deity, yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yieldto them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color.Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by littlestatesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul hassimply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on thewall. Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrowthinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you saidto-day.—‘Ah, so you shall be sure to bemisunderstood.’—Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoraswas misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, andGalileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To begreat is to be misunderstood.

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

There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so they be eachhonest and natural in their hour. For of one will, the actions will beharmonious, however unlike they seem. These varieties are lost sight of at alittle distance, at a little height of thought. One tendency unites them all.The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the linefrom a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency.Your genuine action will explain itself and will explain your other genuineactions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you havealready done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future. If Ican be firm enough to-day to do right and scorn eyes, I must have done so muchright before as to defend me now. Be it how it will, do right now. Always scornappearances and you always may. The force of character is cumulative. All theforegone days of virtue work their health into this. What makes the majesty ofthe heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills the imagination? Theconsciousness of a train of great days and victories behind. They shed anunited light on the advancing actor. He is attended as by a visible escort ofangels. That is it which throws thunder into Chatham’s voice, and dignityinto Washington’s port, and America into Adams’s eye. Honor isvenerable to us because it is no ephemera. It is always ancient virtue. Weworship it to-day because it is not of to-day. We love it and pay it homagebecause it is not a trap for our love and homage, but is self-dependent,self-derived, and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree, even if shown in ayoung person.

I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. Letthe words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward. Instead of the gong fordinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife. Let us never bow andapologize more. A great man is coming to eat at my house. I do not wish toplease him; I wish that he should wish to please me. I will stand here forhumanity, and though I would make it kind, I would make it true. Let us affrontand reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, andhurl in the face of custom and trade and office, the fact which is the upshotof all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor workingwherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no other time or place, but isthe centre of things. Where he is, there is nature. He measures you and all menand all events. Ordinarily, every body in society reminds us of somewhat else,or of some other person. Character, reality, reminds you of nothing else; ittakes place of the whole creation. The man must be so much that he must makeall circ*mstances indifferent. Every true man is a cause, a country, and anage; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish hisdesign;—and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients. Aman Cæsar is born, and for ages after we have a Roman Empire. Christ is born,and millions of minds so grow and cleave to his genius that he is confoundedwith virtue and the possible of man. An institution is the lengthened shadow ofone man; as, Monachism, of the Hermit Antony; the Reformation, of Luther;Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson. Scipio, Miltoncalled “the height of Rome”; and all history resolves itself veryeasily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons.

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peepor steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or aninterloper in the world which exists for him. But the man in the street,finding no worth in himself which corresponds to the force which built a toweror sculptured a marble god, feels poor when he looks on these. To him a palace,a statue, or a costly book have an alien and forbidding air, much like a gayequipage, and seem to say like that, ‘Who are you, Sir?’ Yet theyall are his, suitors for his notice, petitioners to his faculties that theywill come out and take possession. The picture waits for my verdict; it is notto command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise. That popular fable ofthe sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke’shouse, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking,treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he hadbeen insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well thestate of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up,exercises his reason and finds himself a true prince.

Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In history our imagination plays usfalse. Kingdom and lordship, power and estate, are a gaudier vocabulary thanprivate John and Edward in a small house and common day’s work; but thethings of life are the same to both; the sum total of both is the same. Why allthis deference to Alfred and Scanderbeg and Gustavus? Suppose they werevirtuous; did they wear out virtue? As great a stake depends on your privateact to-day, as followed their public and renowned steps. When private men shallact with original views, the lustre will be transferred from the actions ofkings to those of gentlemen.

The world has been instructed by its kings, who have so magnetized the eyes ofnations. It has been taught by this colossal symbol the mutual reverence thatis due from man to man. The joyful loyalty with which men have everywheresuffered the king, the noble, or the great proprietor to walk among them by alaw of his own, make his own scale of men and things and reverse theirs, payfor benefits not with money but with honor, and represent the law in hisperson, was the hieroglyphic by which they obscurely signified theirconsciousness of their own right and comeliness, the right of every man.

The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire thereason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self, on whicha universal reliance may be grounded? What is the nature and power of thatscience-baffling star, without parallax, without calculable elements, whichshoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least markof independence appear? The inquiry leads us to that source, at once theessence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity orInstinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all laterteachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysiscannot go, all things find their common origin. For the sense of being which incalm hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things,from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them and proceedsobviously from the same source whence their life and being also proceed. Wefirst share the life by which things exist and afterwards see them asappearances in nature and forget that we have shared their cause. Here is thefountain of action and of thought. Here are the lungs of that inspiration whichgiveth man wisdom and which cannot be denied without impiety and atheism. Welie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truthand organs of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, wedo nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whencethis comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is atfault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm. Every mandiscriminates between the voluntary acts of his mind and his involuntaryperceptions, and knows that to his involuntary perceptions a perfect faith isdue. He may err in the expression of them, but he knows that these things areso, like day and night, not to be disputed. My wilful actions and acquisitionsare but roving;—the idlest reverie, the faintest native emotion, commandmy curiosity and respect. Thoughtless people contradict as readily thestatement of perceptions as of opinions, or rather much more readily; for theydo not distinguish between perception and notion. They fancy that I choose tosee this or that thing. But perception is not whimsical, but fatal. If I see atrait, my children will see it after me, and in course of time allmankind,—although it may chance that no one has seen it before me. For myperception of it is as much a fact as the sun.

The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it is profaneto seek to interpose helps. It must be that when God speaketh he shouldcommunicate, not one thing, but all things; should fill the world with hisvoice; should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls, from the centre of thepresent thought; and new date and new create the whole. Whenever a mind issimple and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away,—means,teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future intothe present hour. All things are made sacred by relation to it,—one asmuch as another. All things are dissolved to their centre by their cause, andin the universal miracle petty and particular miracles disappear. If thereforea man claims to know and speak of God and carries you backward to thephraseology of some old mouldered nation in another country, in another world,believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fulness andcompletion? Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast hisripened being? Whence then this worship of the past? The centuries areconspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul. Time and space arebut physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is light: where itis, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and aninjury if it be any thing more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my beingand becoming.

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘Ithink,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamedbefore the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window makeno reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are;they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose;it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst,its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leaflessroot there is no less. Its nature is satisfied and it satisfies nature in allmoments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present,but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches thatsurround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy andstrong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong intellects dare not yet hearGod himself unless he speak the phraseology of I know not what David, orJeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great a price on a few texts, ona few lives. We are like children who repeat by rote the sentences of grandamesand tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men of talents and character theychance to see,—painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke;afterwards, when they come into the point of view which those had who utteredthese sayings, they understand them and are willing to let the words go; for atany time they can use words as good when occasion comes. If we live truly, weshall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is forthe weak to be weak. When we have new perception, we shall gladly disburden thememory of its hoarded treasures as old rubbish. When a man lives with God, hisvoice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn.

And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains unsaid; probablycannot be said; for all that we say is the far-off remembering of theintuition. That thought by what I can now nearest approach to say it, is this.When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any knownor accustomed way; you shall not discern the footprints of any other; you shallnot see the face of man; you shall not hear any name;—the way, thethought, the good shall be wholly strange and new. It shall exclude example andexperience. You take the way from man, not to man. All persons that everexisted are its forgotten ministers. Fear and hope are alike beneath it. Thereis somewhat low even in hope. In the hour of vision there is nothing that canbe called gratitude, nor properly joy. The soul raised over passion beholdsidentity and eternal causation, perceives the self-existence of Truth andRight, and calms itself with knowing that all things go well. Vast spaces ofnature, the Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea; long intervals of time, years,centuries, are of no account. This which I think and feel underlay every formerstate of life and circ*mstances, as it does underlie my present, and what iscalled life, and what is called death.

Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose;it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in theshooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact the world hates;that the soul becomes; for that for ever degrades the past, turns allriches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with therogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside. Why then do we prate ofself-reliance? Inasmuch as the soul is present there will be power notconfident but agent. To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking.Speak rather of that which relies because it works and is. Who has moreobedience than I masters me, though he should not raise his finger. Round him Imust revolve by the gravitation of spirits. We fancy it rhetoric when we speakof eminent virtue. We do not yet see that virtue is Height, and that a man or acompany of men, plastic and permeable to principles, by the law of nature mustoverpower and ride all cities, nations, kings, rich men, poets, who are not.

This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this, as on every topic,the resolution of all into the ever-blessed ONE. Self-existenceis the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of goodby the degree in which it enters into all lower forms. All things real are soby so much virtue as they contain. Commerce, husbandry, hunting, whaling, war,eloquence, personal weight, are somewhat, and engage my respect as examples ofits presence and impure action. I see the same law working in nature forconservation and growth. Power is, in nature, the essential measure of right.Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself. Thegenesis and maturation of a planet, its poise and orbit, the bended treerecovering itself from the strong wind, the vital resources of every animal andvegetable, are demonstrations of the self-sufficing and therefore self-relyingsoul.

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

But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his geniusadmonished to stay at home, to put itself in communication with the internalocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the urns of other men. Wemust go alone. I like the silent church before the service begins, better thanany preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons look, begirt eachone with a precinct or sanctuary! So let us always sit. Why should we assumethe faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit aroundour hearth, or are said to have the same blood? All men have my blood and Ihave all men’s. Not for that will I adopt their petulance or folly, evento the extent of being ashamed of it. But your isolation must not bemechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation. At times the whole worldseems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend,client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closetdoor and say,—‘Come out unto us.’ But keep thy state; comenot into their confusion. The power men possess to annoy me I give them by aweak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my act. “What we lovethat we have, but by desire we bereave ourselves of the love.”

If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith, let us atleast resist our temptations; let us enter into the state of war and wake Thorand Woden, courage and constancy, in our Saxon breasts. This is to be done inour smooth times by speaking the truth. Check this lying hospitality and lyingaffection. Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceivingpeople with whom we converse. Say to them, ‘O father, O mother, O wife, Obrother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto.Henceforward I am the truth’s. Be it known unto you that henceforward Iobey no law less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants butproximities. I shall endeavour to nourish my parents, to support my family, tobe the chaste husband of one wife,—but these relations I must fill aftera new and unprecedented way. I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. Icannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what Iam, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve thatyou should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that whatis deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inlyrejoices me and the heart appoints. If you are noble, I will love you: if youare not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions. If you aretrue, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will seekmy own. I do this not selfishly but humbly and truly. It is alike yourinterest, and mine, and all men’s, however long we have dwelt in lies, tolive in truth. Does this sound harsh to-day? You will soon love what isdictated by your nature as well as mine, and if we follow the truth it willbring us out safe at last.’—But so may you give these friends pain.Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their sensibility.Besides, all persons have their moments of reason, when they look out into theregion of absolute truth; then will they justify me and do the same thing.

The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection ofall standard, and mere antinomianism; and the bold sensualist will use the nameof philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law of consciousness abides. Thereare two confessionals, in one or the other of which we must be shriven. You mayfulfil your round of duties by clearing yourself in the direct, or inthe reflex way. Consider whether you have satisfied your relations tofather, mother, cousin, neighbor, town, cat, and dog; whether any of these canupbraid you. But I may also neglect this reflex standard and absolve me tomyself. I have my own stern claims and perfect circle. It denies the name ofduty to many offices that are called duties. But if I can discharge its debtsit enables me to dispense with the popular code. If any one imagines that thislaw is lax, let him keep its commandment one day.

And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the commonmotives of humanity and has ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster. High behis heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest bedoctrine, society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him asstrong as iron necessity is to others!

If any man consider the present aspects of what is called by distinctionsociety, he will see the need of these ethics. The sinew and heart ofman seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous, desponding whimperers. Weare afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death and afraid of eachother. Our age yields no great and perfect persons. We want men and women whoshall renovate life and our social state, but we see that most natures areinsolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of allproportion to their practical force and do lean and beg day and nightcontinually. Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, ourmarriages, our religion we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us. Weare parlor soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate, where strength is born.

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises they lose all heart. Ifthe young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest geniusstudies at one of our colleges and is not installed in an office within oneyear afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to hisfriends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened and incomplaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont,who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles,keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township,and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, isworth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and feelsno shame in not ‘studying a profession,’ for he does not postponehis life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances. Leta Stoic open the resources of man and tell men they are not leaning willows,but can and must detach themselves; that with the exercise of self-trust, newpowers shall appear; that a man is the word made flesh, born to shed healing tothe nations; that he should be ashamed of our compassion, and that the momenthe acts from himself, tossing the laws, the books, idolatries and customs outof the window, we pity him no more but thank and revere him;—and thatteacher shall restore the life of man to splendor and make his name dear to allhistory.

It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in allthe offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their education; intheir pursuits; their modes of living; their association; in their property; intheir speculative views.

1. In what prayers do men allow themselves! That which they call a holy officeis not so much as brave and manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks for someforeign addition to come through some foreign virtue, and loses itself inendless mazes of natural and supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous.Prayer that craves a particular commodity, any thing less than all good, isvicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highestpoint of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is thespirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect aprivate end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in natureand consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. Hewill then see prayer in all action. The prayer of the farmer kneeling in hisfield to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar,are true prayers heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends. Caratach, inFletcher’s Bonduca, when admonished to inquire the mind of the godAudate, replies,—

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

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want ofself-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities if you can therebyhelp the sufferer; if not, attend your own work and already the evil begins tobe repaired. Our sympathy is just as base. We come to them who weep foolishlyand sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them truth and healthin rough electric shocks, putting them once more in communication with theirown reason. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to godsand men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide; him alltongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes outto him and embraces him because he did not need it. We solicitously andapologetically caress and celebrate him because he held on his way and scornedour disapprobation. The gods love him because men hated him. “To thepersevering mortal,” said Zoroaster, “the blessed Immortals areswift.”

As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a diseaseof the intellect. They say with those foolish Israelites, ‘Let not Godspeak to us, lest we die. Speak thou, speak any man with us, and we willobey.’ Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God in my brother, because hehas shut his own temple doors and recites fables merely of his brother’s,or his brother’s brother’s God. Every new mind is a newclassification. If it prove a mind of uncommon activity and power, a Locke, aLavoisier, a Hutton, a Bentham, a Fourier, it imposes its classification onother men, and lo! a new system. In proportion to the depth of the thought, andso to the number of the objects it touches and brings within reach of thepupil, is his complacency. But chiefly is this apparent in creeds and churches,which are also classifications of some powerful mind acting on the elementalthought of duty, and man’s relation to the Highest. Such is Calvinism,Quakerism, Swedenborgism. The pupil takes the same delight in subordinatingevery thing to the new terminology as a girl who has just learned botany inseeing a new earth and new seasons thereby. It will happen for a time that thepupil will find his intellectual power has grown by the study of hismaster’s mind. But in all unbalanced minds the classification isidolized, passes for the end and not for a speedily exhaustible means, so thatthe walls of the system blend to their eye in the remote horizon with the wallsof the universe; the luminaries of heaven seem to them hung on the arch theirmaster built. They cannot imagine how you aliens have any right tosee,—how you can see; ‘It must be somehow that you stole the lightfrom us.’ They do not yet perceive that light, unsystematic, indomitable,will break into any cabin, even into theirs. Let them chirp awhile and call ittheir own. If they are honest and do well, presently their neat new pinfoldwill be too strait and low, will crack, will lean, will rot and vanish, and theimmortal light, all young and joyful, million-orbed, million-colored, will beamover the universe as on the first morning.

2. It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling, whoseidols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all educatedAmericans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the imaginationdid so by sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the earth. In manlyhours we feel that duty is our place. The soul is no traveller; the wise manstays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call himfrom his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still and shall make mensensible by the expression of his countenance that he goes, the missionary ofwisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign and not like aninterloper or a valet.

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe for thepurposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is firstdomesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greaterthan he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he doesnot carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among oldthings. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind have become old anddilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins.

Travelling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us theindifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can beintoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace myfriends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside meis the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. Iseek the Vatican and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights andsuggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

3. But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness affectingthe whole intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond, and our system ofeducation fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced tostay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind?Our houses are built with foreign taste; our shelves are garnished with foreignornaments; our opinions, our tastes, our faculties, lean, and follow the Pastand the Distant. The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished. Itwas in his own mind that the artist sought his model. It was an application ofhis own thought to the thing to be done and the conditions to be observed. Andwhy need we copy the Doric or the Gothic model? Beauty, convenience, grandeurof thought and quaint expression are as near to us as to any, and if theAmerican artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done byhim, considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants of thepeople, the habit and form of the government, he will create a house in whichall these will find themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment will besatisfied also.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every momentwith the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of theadopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession. Thatwhich each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows whatit is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is the master whocould have taught Shakspeare? Where is the master who could have instructedFranklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is a unique. TheScipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow. Shakspearewill never be made by the study of Shakspeare. Do that which is assigned you,and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. There is at this moment for youan utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, ortrowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses or Dante, but different from allthese. Not possibly will the soul, all rich, all eloquent, with thousand-cloventongue, deign to repeat itself; but if you can hear what these patriarchs say,surely you can reply to them in the same pitch of voice; for the ear and thetongue are two organs of one nature. Abide in the simple and noble regions ofthy life, obey thy heart and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld again.

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

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on theother. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it ischristianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is notamelioration. For every thing that is given something is taken. Societyacquires new arts and loses old instincts. What a contrast between thewell-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil and abill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose property isa club, a spear, a mat and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! Butcompare the health of the two men and you shall see that the white man has losthis aboriginal strength. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage witha broad axe and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struckthe blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the white to his grave.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He issupported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fineGeneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. AGreenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when hewants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solsticehe does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole brightcalendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair hismemory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance-office increases thenumber of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does notencumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianityentrenched in establishments and forms some vigor of wild virtue. For everyStoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?

There is no more deviation in the moral standard than in the standard of heightor bulk. No greater men are now than ever were. A singular equality may beobserved between the great men of the first and of the last ages; nor can allthe science, art, religion, and philosophy of the nineteenth century avail toeducate greater men than Plutarch’s heroes, three or four and twentycenturies ago. Not in time is the race progressive. Phocion, Socrates,Anaxagoras, Diogenes, are great men, but they leave no class. He who is reallyof their class will not be called by their name, but will be his own man, andin his turn the founder of a sect. The arts and inventions of each period areonly its costume and do not invigorate men. The harm of the improved machinerymay compensate its good. Hudson and Behring accomplished so much in theirfishing-boats as to astonish Parry and Franklin, whose equipment exhausted theresources of science and art. Galileo, with an opera-glass, discovered a moresplendid series of celestial phenomena than any one since. Columbus found theNew World in an undecked boat. It is curious to see the periodical disuse andperishing of means and machinery which were introduced with loud laudation afew years or centuries before. The great genius returns to essential man. Wereckoned the improvements of the art of war among the triumphs of science, andyet Napoleon conquered Europe by the bivouac, which consisted of falling backon naked valor and disencumbering it of all aids. The Emperor held itimpossible to make a perfect army, says Las Cases, “without abolishingour arms, magazines, commissaries and carriages, until, in imitation of theRoman custom, the soldier should receive his supply of corn, grind it in hishand-mill, and bake his bread himself.”

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composeddoes not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Itsunity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation to-day, next yeardie, and their experience with them.

And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments whichprotect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have looked away from themselvesand at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned andcivil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these,because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem ofeach other by what each has, and not by what each is. But a cultivated manbecomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especiallyhe hates what he has if he see that it is accidental,—came to him byinheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having; it doesnot belong to him, has no root in him and merely lies there because norevolution or no robber takes it away. But that which a man is, does always bynecessity acquire, and what the man acquires is living property, which does notwait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or storm, orbankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the man breathes.“Thy lot or portion of life,” said the Caliph Ali, “isseeking after thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after it.” Ourdependence on these foreign goods leads us to our slavish respect for numbers.The political parties meet in numerous conventions; the greater the concourseand with each new uproar of announcement, The delegation from Essex! TheDemocrats from New Hampshire! The Whigs of Maine! the young patriot feelshimself stronger than before by a new thousand of eyes and arms. In like mannerthe reformers summon conventions and vote and resolve in multitude. Not so, Ofriends! will the God deign to enter and inhabit you, but by a method preciselythe reverse. It is only as a man puts off all foreign support and stands alonethat I see him to be strong and to prevail. He is weaker by every recruit tohis banner. Is not a man better than a town? Ask nothing of men, and, in theendless mutation, thou only firm column must presently appear the upholder ofall that surrounds thee. He who knows that power is inborn, that he is weakbecause he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and so perceiving,throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights himself, standsin the erect position, commands his limbs, works miracles; just as a man whostands on his feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head.

So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain all, andlose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, anddeal with Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God. In the Will work andacquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter outof fear from her rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, the recoveryof your sick or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable eventraises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do notbelieve it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring youpeace but the triumph of principles.

III.
COMPENSATION

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

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

COMPENSATION

Ever since I was a boy I have wished to write a discourse on Compensation; forit seemed to me when very young that on this subject life was ahead of theologyand the people knew more than the preachers taught. The documents too fromwhich the doctrine is to be drawn, charmed my fancy by their endless variety,and lay always before me, even in sleep; for they are the tools in our hands,the bread in our basket, the transactions of the street, the farm and thedwelling-house; greetings, relations, debts and credits, the influence ofcharacter, the nature and endowment of all men. It seemed to me also that in itmight be shown men a ray of divinity, the present action of the soul of thisworld, clean from all vestige of tradition; and so the heart of man might bebathed by an inundation of eternal love, conversing with that which he knowswas always and always must be, because it really is now. It appeared moreoverthat if this doctrine could be stated in terms with any resemblance to thosebright intuitions in which this truth is sometimes revealed to us, it would bea star in many dark hours and crooked passages in our journey, that would notsuffer us to lose our way.

I was lately confirmed in these desires by hearing a sermon at church. Thepreacher, a man esteemed for his orthodoxy, unfolded in the ordinary manner thedoctrine of the Last Judgment. He assumed that judgment is not executed in thisworld; that the wicked are successful; that the good are miserable; and thenurged from reason and from Scripture a compensation to be made to both partiesin the next life. No offence appeared to be taken by the congregation at thisdoctrine. As far as I could observe when the meeting broke up they separatedwithout remark on the sermon.

Yet what was the import of this teaching? What did the preacher mean by sayingthat the good are miserable in the present life? Was it that houses and lands,offices, wine, horses, dress, luxury, are had by unprincipled men, whilst thesaints are poor and despised; and that a compensation is to be made to theselast hereafter, by giving them the like gratifications anotherday,—bank-stock and doubloons, venison and champagne? This must be thecompensation intended; for what else? Is it that they are to have leave to prayand praise? to love and serve men? Why, that they can do now. The legitimateinference the disciple would draw was,—‘We are to have sucha good time as the sinners have now’;—or, to push it to its extremeimport,—‘You sin now; we shall sin by and by; we would sin now, ifwe could; not being successful, we expect our revenge to-morrow.’

The fallacy lay in the immense concession that the bad are successful; thatjustice is not done now. The blindness of the preacher consisted in deferringto the base estimate of the market of what constitutes a manly success, insteadof confronting and convicting the world from the truth; announcing the presenceof the soul; the omnipotence of the will; and so establishing the standard ofgood and ill, of success and falsehood.

I find a similar base tone in the popular religious works of the day and thesame doctrines assumed by the literary men when occasionally they treat therelated topics. I think that our popular theology has gained in decorum, andnot in principle, over the superstitions it has displaced. But men are betterthan their theology. Their daily life gives it the lie. Every ingenuous andaspiring soul leaves the doctrine behind him in his own experience, and all menfeel sometimes the falsehood which they cannot demonstrate. For men are wiserthan they know. That which they hear in schools and pulpits withoutafterthought, if said in conversation would probably be questioned in silence.If a man dogmatize in a mixed company on Providence and the divine laws, he isanswered by a silence which conveys well enough to an observer thedissatisfaction of the hearer, but his incapacity to make his own statement.

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

Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature; in darknessand light; in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow of waters; in male and female;in the inspiration and expiration of plants and animals; in the equation ofquantity and quality in the fluids of the animal body; in the systole anddiastole of the heart; in the undulations of fluids, and of sound; in thecentrifugal and centripetal gravity; in electricity, galvanism, and chemicalaffinity. Superinduce magnetism at one end of a needle, the opposite magnetismtakes place at the other end. If the south attracts, the north repels. To emptyhere, you must condense there. An inevitable dualism bisects nature, so thateach thing is a half, and suggests another thing to make it whole; as, spirit,matter; man, woman; odd, even; subjective, objective; in, out; upper, under;motion, rest; yea, nay.

Whilst the world is thus dual, so is every one of its parts. The entire systemof things gets represented in every particle. There is somewhat that resemblesthe ebb and flow of the sea, day and night, man and woman, in a single needleof the pine, in a kernel of corn, in each individual of every animal tribe. Thereaction, so grand in the elements, is repeated within these small boundaries.For example, in the animal kingdom the physiologist has observed that nocreatures are favorites, but a certain compensation balances every gift andevery defect. A surplusage given to one part is paid out of a reduction fromanother part of the same creature. If the head and neck are enlarged, the trunkand extremities are cut short.

The theory of the mechanic forces is another example. What we gain in power islost in time, and the converse. The periodic or compensating errors of theplanets is another instance. The influences of climate and soil in politicalhistory are another. The cold climate invigorates. The barren soil does notbreed fevers, crocodiles, tigers or scorpions.

The same dualism underlies the nature and condition of man. Every excess causesa defect; every defect an excess. Every sweet hath its sour; every evil itsgood. Every faculty which is a receiver of pleasure has an equal penalty put onits abuse. It is to answer for its moderation with its life. For every grain ofwit there is a grain of folly. For every thing you have missed, you have gainedsomething else; and for every thing you gain, you lose something. If richesincrease, they are increased that use them. If the gatherer gathers too much,Nature takes out of the man what she puts into his chest; swells the estate,but kills the owner. Nature hates monopolies and exceptions. The waves of thesea do not more speedily seek a level from their loftiest tossing than thevarieties of condition tend to equalize themselves. There is always somelevelling circ*mstance that puts down the overbearing, the strong, the rich,the fortunate, substantially on the same ground with all others. Is a man toostrong and fierce for society and by temper and position a bad citizen,—amorose ruffian, with a dash of the pirate in him?—Nature sends him atroop of pretty sons and daughters who are getting along in the dame’sclasses at the village school, and love and fear for them smooths his grimscowl to courtesy. Thus she contrives to intenerate the granite and felspar,takes the boar out and puts the lamb in and keeps her balance true.

The farmer imagines power and place are fine things. But the President has paiddear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his peace, and the bestof his manly attributes. To preserve for a short time so conspicuous anappearance before the world, he is content to eat dust before the real masterswho stand erect behind the throne. Or, do men desire the more substantial andpermanent grandeur of genius? Neither has this an immunity. He who by force ofwill or of thought is great and overlooks thousands, has the charges of thateminence. With every influx of light comes new danger. Has he light? he mustbear witness to the light, and always outrun that sympathy which gives him suchkeen satisfaction, by his fidelity to new revelations of the incessant soul. Hemust hate father and mother, wife and child. Has he all that the world lovesand admires and covets?—he must cast behind him their admiration, andafflict them by faithfulness to his truth, and become a byword and a hissing.

This law writes the laws of cities and nations. It is in vain to build or plotor combine against it. Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Res nolunt diumale administrari. Though no checks to a new evil appear, the checks exist,and will appear. If the government is cruel, the governor’s life is notsafe. If you tax too high, the revenue will yield nothing. If you make thecriminal code sanguinary, juries will not convict. If the law is too mild,private vengeance comes in. If the government is a terrific democracy, thepressure is resisted by an over-charge of energy in the citizen, and life glowswith a fiercer flame. The true life and satisfactions of man seem to elude theutmost rigors or felicities of condition and to establish themselves with greatindifferency under all varieties of circ*mstances. Under all governments theinfluence of character remains the same,—in Turkey and in New Englandabout alike. Under the primeval despots of Egypt, history honestly confessesthat man must have been as free as culture could make him.

These appearances indicate the fact that the universe is represented in everyone of its particles. Every thing in nature contains all the powers of nature.Every thing is made of one hidden stuff; as the naturalist sees one type underevery metamorphosis, and regards a horse as a running man, a fish as a swimmingman, a bird as a flying man, a tree as a rooted man. Each new form repeats notonly the main character of the type, but part for part all the details, all theaims, furtherances, hindrances, energies and whole system of every other. Everyoccupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the world and acorrelative of every other. Each one is an entire emblem of human life; of itsgood and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course and its end. And each onemust somehow accommodate the whole man and recite all his destiny.

The world globes itself in a drop of dew. The microscope cannot find theanimalcule which is less perfect for being little. Eyes, ears, taste, smell,motion, resistance, appetite, and organs of reproduction that take hold oneternity,—all find room to consist in the small creature. So do we putour life into every act. The true doctrine of omnipresence is that Godreappears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb. The value of theuniverse contrives to throw itself into every point. If the good is there, sois the evil; if the affinity, so the repulsion; if the force, so thelimitation.

Thus is the universe alive. All things are moral. That soul which within us isa sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there inhistory we can see its fatal strength. “It is in the world, and the worldwas made by it.” Justice is not postponed. A perfect equity adjusts itsbalance in all parts of life. Ἀεὶ γὰρεὖ πίπτουσινοἱ Διὸςκύβοι,—The dice of God are always loaded. Theworld looks like a multiplication-table, or a mathematical equation, which,turn it how you will, balances itself. Take what figure you will, its exactvalue, nor more nor less, still returns to you. Every secret is told, everycrime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence andcertainty. What we call retribution is the universal necessity by which thewhole appears wherever a part appears. If you see smoke, there must be fire. Ifyou see a hand or a limb, you know that the trunk to which it belongs is therebehind.

Every act rewards itself, or, in other words integrates itself, in a twofoldmanner; first in the thing, or in real nature; and secondly in thecirc*mstance, or in apparent nature. Men call the circ*mstance the retribution.The causal retribution is in the thing and is seen by the soul. The retributionin the circ*mstance is seen by the understanding; it is inseparable from thething, but is often spread over a long time and so does not become distinctuntil after many years. The specific stripes may follow late after the offence,but they follow because they accompany it. Crime and punishment grow out of onestem. Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of thepleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit,cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the endpreexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.

Whilst thus the world will be whole and refuses to be disparted, we seek to actpartially, to sunder, to appropriate; for example,—to gratify the senseswe sever the pleasure of the senses from the needs of the character. Theingenuity of man has always been dedicated to the solution of oneproblem,—how to detach the sensual sweet, the sensual strong, the sensualbright, etc., from the moral sweet, the moral deep, the moral fair; that is,again, to contrive to cut clean off this upper surface so thin as to leave itbottomless; to get a one end, without an other end. The soulsays, ‘Eat;’ the body would feast. The soul says, ‘The manand woman shall be one flesh and one soul;’ the body would join the fleshonly. The soul says, ‘Have dominion over all things to the ends ofvirtue;’ the body would have the power over things to its own ends.

The soul strives amain to live and work through all things. It would be theonly fact. All things shall be added unto it,—power, pleasure, knowledge,beauty. The particular man aims to be somebody; to set up for himself; to truckand higgle for a private good; and, in particulars, to ride that he may ride;to dress that he may be dressed; to eat that he may eat; and to govern, that hemay be seen. Men seek to be great; they would have offices, wealth, power, andfame. They think that to be great is to possess one side of nature,—thesweet, without the other side, the bitter.

This dividing and detaching is steadily counteracted. Up to this day it must beowned no projector has had the smallest success. The parted water reunitesbehind our hand. Pleasure is taken out of pleasant things, profit out ofprofitable things, power out of strong things, as soon as we seek to separatethem from the whole. We can no more halve things and get the sensual good, byitself, than we can get an inside that shall have no outside, or a lightwithout a shadow. “Drive out Nature with a fork, she comes runningback.”

Life invests itself with inevitable conditions, which the unwise seek to dodge,which one and another brags that he does not know, that they do not touchhim;—but the brag is on his lips, the conditions are in his soul. If heescapes them in one part they attack him in another more vital part. If he hasescaped them in form and in the appearance, it is because he has resisted hislife and fled from himself, and the retribution is so much death. So signal isthe failure of all attempts to make this separation of the good from the tax,that the experiment would not be tried,—since to try it is to bemad,—but for the circ*mstance, that when the disease began in the will,of rebellion and separation, the intellect is at once infected, so that the manceases to see God whole in each object, but is able to see the sensualallurement of an object and not see the sensual hurt; he sees themermaid’s head but not the dragon’s tail, and thinks he can cut offthat which he would have from that which he would not have. “How secretart thou who dwellest in the highest heavens in silence, O thou only great God,sprinkling with an unwearied providence certain penal blindnesses upon such ashave unbridleddesires!”[1]

[1]St. Augustine, Confessions, B. I.

The human soul is true to these facts in the painting of fable, of history, oflaw, of proverbs, of conversation. It finds a tongue in literature unawares.Thus the Greeks called Jupiter, Supreme Mind; but having traditionally ascribedto him many base actions, they involuntarily made amends to reason by tying upthe hands of so bad a god. He is made as helpless as a king of England.Prometheus knows one secret which Jove must bargain for; Minerva, another. Hecannot get his own thunders; Minerva keeps the key of them:—

“Of all the gods, I only know the keys
That ope the solid doors within whose vaults
His thunders sleep.”

A plain confession of the in-working of the All and of its moral aim. TheIndian mythology ends in the same ethics; and it would seem impossible for anyfable to be invented and get any currency which was not moral. Aurora forgot toask youth for her lover, and though Tithonus is immortal, he is old. Achillesis not quite invulnerable; the sacred waters did not wash the heel by whichThetis held him. Siegfried, in the Nibelungen, is not quite immortal, for aleaf fell on his back whilst he was bathing in the dragon’s blood, andthat spot which it covered is mortal. And so it must be. There is a crack inevery thing God has made. It would seem there is always this vindictivecirc*mstance stealing in at unawares even into the wild poesy in which thehuman fancy attempted to make bold holiday and to shake itself free of the oldlaws,—this back-stroke, this kick of the gun, certifying that the law isfatal; that in nature nothing can be given, all things are sold.

This is that ancient doctrine of Nemesis, who keeps watch in the universe andlets no offence go unchastised. The Furies they said are attendants on justice,and if the sun in heaven should transgress his path they would punish him. Thepoets related that stone walls and iron swords and leathern thongs had anoccult sympathy with the wrongs of their owners; that the belt which Ajax gaveHector dragged the Trojan hero over the field at the wheels of the car ofAchilles, and the sword which Hector gave Ajax was that on whose point Ajaxfell. They recorded that when the Thasians erected a statue to Theagenes, avictor in the games, one of his rivals went to it by night and endeavored tothrow it down by repeated blows, until at last he moved it from its pedestaland was crushed to death beneath its fall.

This voice of fable has in it somewhat divine. It came from thought above thewill of the writer. That is the best part of each writer which has nothingprivate in it; that which he does not know; that which flowed out of hisconstitution and not from his too active invention; that which in the study ofa single artist you might not easily find, but in the study of many you wouldabstract as the spirit of them all. Phidias it is not, but the work of man inthat early Hellenic world that I would know. The name and circ*mstance ofPhidias, however convenient for history, embarrass when we come to the highestcriticism. We are to see that which man was tending to do in a given period,and was hindered, or, if you will, modified in doing, by the interferingvolitions of Phidias, of Dante, of Shakspeare, the organ whereby man at themoment wrought.

Still more striking is the expression of this fact in the proverbs of allnations, which are always the literature of reason, or the statements of anabsolute truth without qualification. Proverbs, like the sacred books of eachnation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions. That which the droning world,chained to appearances, will not allow the realist to say in his own words, itwill suffer him to say in proverbs without contradiction. And this law of laws,which the pulpit, the senate and the college deny, is hourly preached in allmarkets and workshops by flights of proverbs, whose teaching is as true and asomnipresent as that of birds and flies.

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

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

A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will or against his will hedraws his portrait to the eye of his companions by every word. Every opinionreacts on him who utters it. It is a thread-ball thrown at a mark, but theother end remains in the thrower’s bag. Or rather it is a harpoon hurledat the whale, unwinding, as it flies, a coil of cord in the boat, and, if theharpoon is not good, or not well thrown, it will go nigh to cut the steersmanin twain or to sink the boat.

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong. “No man had ever a point ofpride that was not injurious to him,” said Burke. The exclusive infashionable life does not see that he excludes himself from enjoyment, in theattempt to appropriate it. The exclusionist in religion does not see that heshuts the door of heaven on himself, in striving to shut out others. Treat menas pawns and ninepins and you shall suffer as well as they. If you leave outtheir heart, you shall lose your own. The senses would make things of allpersons; of women, of children, of the poor. The vulgar proverb, “I willget it from his purse or get it from his skin,” is sound philosophy.

All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are speedilypunished. They are punished by fear. Whilst I stand in simple relations to myfellow-man, I have no displeasure in meeting him. We meet as water meets water,or as two currents of air mix, with perfect diffusion and interpenetration ofnature. But as soon as there is any departure from simplicity, and attempt athalfness, or good for me that is not good for him, my neighbor feels the wrong;he shrinks from me as far as I have shrunk from him; his eyes no longer seekmine; there is war between us; there is hate in him and fear in me.

All the old abuses in society, universal and particular, all unjustaccumulations of property and power, are avenged in the same manner. Fear is aninstructor of great sagacity and the herald of all revolutions. One thing heteaches, that there is rottenness where he appears. He is a carrion crow, andthough you see not well what he hovers for, there is death somewhere. Ourproperty is timid, our laws are timid, our cultivated classes are timid. Fearfor ages has boded and mowed and gibbered over government and property. Thatobscene bird is not there for nothing. He indicates great wrongs which must berevised.

Of the like nature is that expectation of change which instantly follows thesuspension of our voluntary activity. The terror of cloudless noon, the emeraldof Polycrates, the awe of prosperity, the instinct which leads every generoussoul to impose on itself tasks of a noble asceticism and vicarious virtue, arethe tremblings of the balance of justice through the heart and mind of man.

Experienced men of the world know very well that it is best to pay scot and lotas they go along, and that a man often pays dear for a small frugality. Theborrower runs in his own debt. Has a man gained any thing who has received ahundred favors and rendered none? Has he gained by borrowing, through indolenceor cunning, his neighbor’s wares, or horses, or money? There arises onthe deed the instant acknowledgment of benefit on the one part and of debt onthe other; that is, of superiority and inferiority. The transaction remains inthe memory of himself and his neighbor; and every new transaction altersaccording to its nature their relation to each other. He may soon come to seethat he had better have broken his own bones than to have ridden in hisneighbor’s coach, and that “the highest price he can pay for athing is to ask for it.”

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

Labor is watched over by the same pitiless laws. Cheapest, say the prudent, isthe dearest labor. What we buy in a broom, a mat, a wagon, a knife, is someapplication of good sense to a common want. It is best to pay in your land askilful gardener, or to buy good sense applied to gardening; in your sailor,good sense applied to navigation; in the house, good sense applied to cooking,sewing, serving; in your agent, good sense applied to accounts and affairs. Sodo you multiply your presence, or spread yourself throughout your estate. Butbecause of the dual constitution of things, in labor as in life there can be nocheating. The thief steals from himself. The swindler swindles himself. For thereal price of labor is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and credit aresigns. These signs, like paper money, may be counterfeited or stolen, but thatwhich they represent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited orstolen. These ends of labor cannot be answered but by real exertions of themind, and in obedience to pure motives. The cheat, the defaulter, the gambler,cannot extort the knowledge of material and moral nature which his honest careand pains yield to the operative. The law of nature is, Do the thing, and youshall have the Power; but they who do not the thing have not the power.

Human labor, through all its forms, from the sharpening of a stake to theconstruction of a city or an epic, is one immense illustration of the perfectcompensation of the universe. The absolute balance of Give and Take, thedoctrine that every thing has its price,—and if that price is not paid,not that thing but something else is obtained, and that it is impossible to getany thing without its price,—is not less sublime in the columns of aleger than in the budgets of states, in the laws of light and darkness, in allthe action and reaction of nature. I cannot doubt that the high laws which eachman sees implicated in those processes with which he is conversant, the sternethics which sparkle on his chisel-edge, which are measured out by his plumband foot-rule, which stand as manifest in the footing of the shop-bill as inthe history of a state,—do recommend to him his trade, and though seldomnamed, exalt his business to his imagination.

The league between virtue and nature engages all things to assume a hostilefront to vice. The beautiful laws and substances of the world persecute andwhip the traitor. He finds that things are arranged for truth and benefit, butthere is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime, and theearth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fellon the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge andfox and squirrel and mole. You cannot recall the spoken word, you cannot wipeout the foot-track, you cannot draw up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet orclew. Some damning circ*mstance always transpires. The laws and substances ofnature,—water, snow, wind, gravitation,—become penalties to thethief.

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

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

The good are befriended even by weakness and defect. As no man had ever a pointof pride that was not injurious to him, so no man had ever a defect that wasnot somewhere made useful to him. The stag in the fable admired his horns andblamed his feet, but when the hunter came, his feet saved him, and afterwards,caught in the thicket, his horns destroyed him. Every man in his lifetime needsto thank his faults. As no man thoroughly understands a truth until he hascontended against it, so no man has a thorough acquaintance with the hindrancesor talents of men until he has suffered from the one and seen the triumph ofthe other over his own want of the same. Has he a defect of temper that unfitshim to live in society? Thereby he is driven to entertain himself alone andacquire habits of self-help; and thus, like the wounded oyster, he mends hisshell with pearl.

Our strength grows out of our weakness. The indignation which arms itself withsecret forces does not awaken until we are pricked and stung and sorelyassailed. A great man is always willing to be little. Whilst he sits on thecushion of advantages, he goes to sleep. When he is pushed, tormented,defeated, he has a chance to learn something; he has been put on his wits, onhis manhood; he has gained facts; learns his ignorance; is cured of theinsanity of conceit; has got moderation and real skill. The wise man throwshimself on the side of his assailants. It is more his interest than it istheirs to find his weak point. The wound cicatrizes and falls off from him likea dead skin and when they would triumph, lo! he has passed on invulnerable.Blame is safer than praise. I hate to be defended in a newspaper. As long asall that is said is said against me, I feel a certain assurance of success. Butas soon as honeyed words of praise are spoken for me I feel as one that liesunprotected before his enemies. In general, every evil to which we do notsuccumb is a benefactor. As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strengthand valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength ofthe temptation we resist.

The same guards which protect us from disaster, defect, and enmity, defend us,if we will, from selfishness and fraud. Bolts and bars are not the best of ourinstitutions, nor is shrewdness in trade a mark of wisdom. Men suffer all theirlife long under the foolish superstition that they can be cheated. But it is asimpossible for a man to be cheated by any one but himself, as for a thing to beand not to be at the same time. There is a third silent party to all ourbargains. The nature and soul of things takes on itself the guaranty of thefulfilment of every contract, so that honest service cannot come to loss. Ifyou serve an ungrateful master, serve him the more. Put God in your debt. Everystroke shall be repaid. The longer The payment is withholden, the better foryou; for compound interest on compound interest is the rate and usage of thisexchequer.

The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to makewater run up hill, to twist a rope of sand. It makes no difference whether theactors be many or one, a tyrant or a mob. A mob is a society of bodiesvoluntarily bereaving themselves of reason and traversing its work. The mob isman voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast. Its fit hour of activityis night. Its actions are insane like its whole constitution. It persecutes aprinciple; it would whip a right; it would tar and feather justice, byinflicting fire and outrage upon the houses and persons of those who havethese. It resembles the prank of boys, who run with fire-engines to put out theruddy aurora streaming to the stars. The inviolate spirit turns their spiteagainst the wrongdoers. The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflictedis a tongue of fame; every prison, a more illustrious abode; every burned bookor house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberatesthrough the earth from side to side. Hours of sanity and consideration arealways arriving to communities, as to individuals, when the truth is seen andthe martyrs are justified.

Thus do all things preach the indifferency of circ*mstances. The man is all.Every thing has two sides, a good and an evil. Every advantage has its tax. Ilearn to be content. But the doctrine of compensation is not the doctrine ofindifferency. The thoughtless say, on hearing these representations,—Whatboots it to do well? there is one event to good and evil; if I gain any good Imust pay for it; if I lose any good I gain some other; all actions areindifferent.

There is a deeper fact in the soul than compensation, to wit, its own nature.The soul is not a compensation, but a life. The soul is. Under all thisrunning sea of circ*mstance, whose waters ebb and flow with perfect balance,lies the aboriginal abyss of real Being. Essence, or God, is not a relation ora part, but the whole. Being is the vast affirmative, excluding negation,self-balanced, and swallowing up all relations, parts and times within itself.Nature, truth, virtue, are the influx from thence. Vice is the absence ordeparture of the same. Nothing, Falsehood, may indeed stand as the great Nightor shade on which as a background the living universe paints itself forth, butno fact is begotten by it; it cannot work, for it is not. It cannot work anygood; it cannot work any harm. It is harm inasmuch as it is worse not to bethan to be.

We feel defrauded of the retribution due to evil acts, because the criminaladheres to his vice and contumacy and does not come to a crisis or judgmentanywhere in visible nature. There is no stunning confutation of his nonsensebefore men and angels. Has he therefore outwitted the law? Inasmuch as hecarries the malignity and the lie with him he so far deceases from nature. Insome manner there will be a demonstration of the wrong to the understandingalso; but, should we not see it, this deadly deduction makes square the eternalaccount.

Neither can it be said, on the other hand, that the gain of rectitude must bebought by any loss. There is no penalty to virtue; no penalty to wisdom; theyare proper additions of being. In a virtuous action I properly am; in avirtuous act I add to the world; I plant into deserts conquered from Chaos andNothing and see the darkness receding on the limits of the horizon. There canbe no excess to love, none to knowledge, none to beauty, when these attributesare considered in the purest sense. The soul refuses limits, and always affirmsan Optimism, never a Pessimism.

His life is a progress, and not a station. His instinct is trust. Our instinctuses “more” and “less” in application to man, of thepresence of the soul, and not of its absence, the brave man is greaterthan the coward; the true, the benevolent, the wise, is more a man and notless, than the fool and knave. There is no tax on the good of virtue, for thatis the incoming of God himself, or absolute existence, without any comparative.Material good has its tax, and if it came without desert or sweat, has no rootin me, and the next wind will blow it away. But all the good of nature is thesoul’s, and may be had if paid for in nature’s lawful coin, thatis, by labor which the heart and the head allow. I no longer wish to meet agood I do not earn, for example to find a pot of buried gold, knowing that itbrings with it new burdens. I do not wish more external goods,—neitherpossessions, nor honors, nor powers, nor persons. The gain is apparent; the taxis certain. But there is no tax on the knowledge that the compensation existsand that it is not desirable to dig up treasure. Herein I rejoice with a sereneeternal peace. I contract the boundaries of possible mischief. I learn thewisdom of St. Bernard,—“Nothing can work me damage except myself;the harm that I sustain I carry about with me, and never am a real sufferer butby my own fault.”

In the nature of the soul is the compensation for the inequalities ofcondition. The radical tragedy of nature seems to be the distinction of Moreand Less. How can Less not feel the pain; how not feel indignation ormalevolence towards More? Look at those who have less faculty, and one feelssad and knows not well what to make of it. He almost shuns their eye; he fearsthey will upbraid God. What should they do? It seems a great injustice. But seethe facts nearly and these mountainous inequalities vanish. Love reduces themas the sun melts the iceberg in the sea. The heart and soul of all men beingone, this bitterness of His and Mine ceases. His is mine. I am mybrother and my brother is me. If I feel overshadowed and outdone by greatneighbors, I can yet love; I can still receive; and he that loveth maketh hisown the grandeur he loves. Thereby I make the discovery that my brother is myguardian, acting for me with the friendliest designs, and the estate I soadmired and envied is my own. It is the nature of the soul to appropriate allthings. Jesus and Shakspeare are fragments of the soul, and by love I conquerand incorporate them in my own conscious domain. His virtue,—is not thatmine? His wit,—if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit.

Such also is the natural history of calamity. The changes which break up atshort intervals the prosperity of men are advertisem*nts of a nature whose lawis growth. Every soul is by this intrinsic necessity quitting its whole systemof things, its friends and home and laws and faith, as the shell-fish crawlsout of its beautiful but stony case, because it no longer admits of its growth,and slowly forms a new house. In proportion to the vigor of the individualthese revolutions are frequent, until in some happier mind they are incessantand all worldly relations hang very loosely about him, becoming as it were atransparent fluid membrane through which the living form is seen, and not, asin most men, an indurated heterogeneous fabric of many dates and of no settledcharacter, in which the man is imprisoned. Then there can be enlargement, andthe man of to-day scarcely recognizes the man of yesterday. And such should bethe outward biography of man in time, a putting off of dead circ*mstances dayby day, as he renews his raiment day by day. But to us, in our lapsed estate,resting, not advancing, resisting, not cooperating with the divine expansion,this growth comes by shocks.

We cannot part with our friends. We cannot let our angels go. We do not seethat they only go out that archangels may come in. We are idolaters of the old.We do not believe in the riches of the soul, in its proper eternity andomnipresence. We do not believe there is any force in to-day to rival orrecreate that beautiful yesterday. We linger in the ruins of the old tent whereonce we had bread and shelter and organs, nor believe that the spirit can feed,cover, and nerve us again. We cannot again find aught so dear, so sweet, sograceful. But we sit and weep in vain. The voice of the Almighty saith,‘Up and onward for evermore!’ We cannot stay amid the ruins.Neither will we rely on the new; and so we walk ever with reverted eyes, likethose monsters who look backwards.

And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understandingalso, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a crueldisappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaidloss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force thatunderlies all facts. The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, whichseemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide orgenius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates anepoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wontedoccupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of newones more friendly to the growth of character. It permits or constrains theformation of new acquaintances and the reception of new influences that proveof the first importance to the next years; and the man or woman who would haveremained a sunny garden-flower, with no room for its roots and too muchsunshine for its head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect of thegardener is made the banian of the forest, yielding shade and fruit to wideneighborhoods of men.

IV.
SPIRITUAL LAWS

The living Heaven thy prayers respect,
House at once and architect,
Quarrying man’s rejected hours,
Builds therewith eternal towers;
Sole and self-commanded works,
Fears not undermining days,
Grows by decays,
And, by the famous might that lurks
In reaction and recoil,
Makes flame to freeze, and ice to boil;
Forging, through swart arms of Offence,
The silver seat of Innocence.

SPIRITUAL LAWS

When the act of reflection takes place in the mind, when we look at ourselvesin the light of thought, we discover that our life is embosomed in beauty.Behind us, as we go, all things assume pleasing forms, as clouds do far off.Not only things familiar and stale, but even the tragic and terrible are comelyas they take their place in the pictures of memory. The river-bank, the weed atthe water-side, the old house, the foolish person, however neglected in thepassing, have a grace in the past. Even the corpse that has lain in thechambers has added a solemn ornament to the house. The soul will not knoweither deformity or pain. If in the hours of clear reason we should speak theseverest truth, we should say that we had never made a sacrifice. In thesehours the mind seems so great that nothing can be taken from us that seemsmuch. All loss, all pain, is particular; the universe remains to the heartunhurt. Neither vexations nor calamities abate our trust. No man ever statedhis griefs as lightly as he might. Allow for exaggeration in the most patientand sorely ridden hack that ever was driven. For it is only the finite that haswrought and suffered; the infinite lies stretched in smiling repose.

The intellectual life may be kept clean and healthful if man will live the lifeof nature and not import into his mind difficulties which are none of his. Noman need be perplexed in his speculations. Let him do and say what strictlybelongs to him, and though very ignorant of books, his nature shall not yieldhim any intellectual obstructions and doubts. Our young people are diseasedwith the theological problems of original sin, origin of evil, predestinationand the like. These never presented a practical difficulty to anyman,—never darkened across any man’s road who did not go out of hisway to seek them. These are the soul’s mumps and measles andwhooping-coughs, and those who have not caught them cannot describe theirhealth or prescribe the cure. A simple mind will not know these enemies. It isquite another thing that he should be able to give account of his faith andexpound to another the theory of his self-union and freedom. This requires raregifts. Yet without this self-knowledge there may be a sylvan strength andintegrity in that which he is. “A few strong instincts and a few plainrules” suffice us.

My will never gave the images in my mind the rank they now take. The regularcourse of studies, the years of academical and professional education have notyielded me better facts than some idle books under the bench at the LatinSchool. What we do not call education is more precious than that which we callso. We form no guess, at the time of receiving a thought, of its comparativevalue. And education often wastes its effort in attempts to thwart and balkthis natural magnetism, which is sure to select what belongs to it.

In like manner our moral nature is vitiated by any interference of our will.People represent virtue as a struggle, and take to themselves great airs upontheir attainments, and the question is everywhere vexed when a noble nature iscommended, whether the man is not better who strives with temptation. But thereis no merit in the matter. Either God is there or he is not there. We lovecharacters in proportion as they are impulsive and spontaneous. The less a manthinks or knows about his virtues the better we like him. Timoleon’svictories are the best victories, which ran and flowed like Homer’sverses, Plutarch said. When we see a soul whose acts are all regal, gracefuland pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things can be and are, andnot turn sourly on the angel and say ‘Crump is a better man with hisgrunting resistance to all his native devils.’

Not less conspicuous is the preponderance of nature over will in all practicallife. There is less intention in history than we ascribe to it. We imputedeep-laid far-sighted plans to Cæsar and Napoleon; but the best of their powerwas in nature, not in them. Men of an extraordinary success, in their honestmoments, have always sung, ‘Not unto us, not unto us.’ According tothe faith of their times they have built altars to Fortune, or to Destiny, orto St. Julian. Their success lay in their parallelism to the course of thought,which found in them an unobstructed channel; and the wonders of which they werethe visible conductors seemed to the eye their deed. Did the wires generate thegalvanism? It is even true that there was less in them on which they couldreflect than in another; as the virtue of a pipe is to be smooth and hollow.That which externally seemed will and immovableness was willingness andself-annihilation. Could Shakspeare give a theory of Shakspeare? Could ever aman of prodigious mathematical genius convey to others any insight into hismethods? If he could communicate that secret it would instantly lose itsexaggerated value, blending with the daylight and the vital energy the power tostand and to go.

The lesson is forcibly taught by these observations that our life might be mucheasier and simpler than we make it; that the world might be a happier placethan it is; that there is no need of struggles, convulsions, and despairs, ofthe wringing of the hands and the gnashing of the teeth; that we miscreate ourown evils. We interfere with the optimism of nature; for whenever we get thisvantage-ground of the past, or of a wiser mind in the present, we are able todiscern that we are begirt with laws which execute themselves.

The face of external nature teaches the same lesson. Nature will not have usfret and fume. She does not like our benevolence or our learning much betterthan she likes our frauds and wars. When we come out of the caucus, or thebank, or the Abolition-convention, or the Temperance-meeting, or theTranscendental club into the fields and woods, she says to us, ‘So hot?my little Sir.’

We are full of mechanical actions. We must needs intermeddle and have things inour own way, until the sacrifices and virtues of society are odious. Loveshould make joy; but our benevolence is unhappy. Our Sunday-schools andchurches and pauper-societies are yokes to the neck. We pain ourselves toplease nobody. There are natural ways of arriving at the same ends at whichthese aim, but do not arrive. Why should all virtue work in one and the sameway? Why should all give dollars? It is very inconvenient to us country folk,and we do not think any good will come of it. We have not dollars; merchantshave; let them give them. Farmers will give corn; poets will sing; women willsew; laborers will lend a hand; the children will bring flowers. And why dragthis dead weight of a Sunday-school over the whole Christendom? It is naturaland beautiful that childhood should inquire and maturity should teach; but itis time enough to answer questions when they are asked. Do not shut up theyoung people against their will in a pew and force the children to ask themquestions for an hour against their will.

If we look wider, things are all alike; laws and letters and creeds and modesof living seem a travesty of truth. Our society is encumbered by ponderousmachinery, which resembles the endless aqueducts which the Romans built overhill and dale and which are superseded by the discovery of the law that waterrises to the level of its source. It is a Chinese wall which any nimble Tartarcan leap over. It is a standing army, not so good as a peace. It is agraduated, titled, richly appointed empire, quite superfluous whentown-meetings are found to answer just as well.

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

The simplicity of the universe is very different from the simplicity of amachine. He who sees moral nature out and out and thoroughly knows howknowledge is acquired and character formed, is a pedant. The simplicity ofnature is not that which may easily be read, but is inexhaustible. The lastanalysis can no wise be made. We judge of a man’s wisdom by his hope,knowing that the perception of the inexhaustibleness of nature is an immortalyouth. The wild fertility of nature is felt in comparing our rigid names andreputations with our fluid consciousness. We pass in the world for sects andschools, for erudition and piety, and we are all the time jejune babes. Onesees very well how Pyrrhonism grew up. Every man sees that he is that middlepoint whereof every thing may be affirmed and denied with equal reason. He isold, he is young, he is very wise, he is altogether ignorant. He hears andfeels what you say of the seraphim, and of the tin-peddler. There is nopermanent wise man except in the figment of the Stoics. We side with the hero,as we read or paint, against the coward and the robber; but we have beenourselves that coward and robber, and shall be again,—not in the lowcirc*mstance, but in comparison with the grandeurs possible to the soul.

A little consideration of what takes place around us every day would show usthat a higher law than that of our will regulates events; that our painfullabors are unnecessary and fruitless; that only in our easy, simple,spontaneous action are we strong, and by contenting ourselves with obedience webecome divine. Belief and love,—a believing love will relieve us of avast load of care. O my brothers, God exists. There is a soul at the centre ofnature and over the will of every man, so that none of us can wrong theuniverse. It has so infused its strong enchantment into nature that we prosperwhen we accept its advice, and when we struggle to wound its creatures ourhands are glued to our sides, or they beat our own breasts. The whole course ofthings goes to teach us faith. We need only obey. There is guidance for each ofus, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word. Why need you choose sopainfully your place and occupation and associates and modes of action and ofentertainment? Certainly there is a possible right for you that precludes theneed of balance and wilful election. For you there is a reality, a fit placeand congenial duties. Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power andwisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelledto truth, to right and a perfect contentment. Then you put all gainsayers inthe wrong. Then you are the world, the measure of right, of truth, of beauty.If we will not be mar-plots with our miserable interferences, the work, thesociety, letters, arts, science, religion of men would go on far better thannow, and the heaven predicted from the beginning of the world, and stillpredicted from the bottom of the heart, would organize itself, as do now therose and the air and the sun.

I say, do not choose; but that is a figure of speech by which I woulddistinguish what is commonly called choice among men, and which is apartial act, the choice of the hands, of the eyes, of the appetites, and not awhole act of the man. But that which I call right or goodness, is the choice ofmy constitution; and that which I call heaven, and inwardly aspire after, isthe state or circ*mstance desirable to my constitution; and the action which Iin all my years tend to do, is the work for my faculties. We must hold a manamenable to reason for the choice of his daily craft or profession. It is notan excuse any longer for his deeds that they are the custom of his trade. Whatbusiness has he with an evil trade? Has he not a calling in hischaracter?

Each man has his own vocation. The talent is the call. There is one directionin which all space is open to him. He has faculties silently inviting himthither to endless exertion. He is like a ship in a river; he runs againstobstructions on every side but one, on that side all obstruction is taken awayand he sweeps serenely over a deepening channel into an infinite sea. Thistalent and this call depend on his organization, or the mode in which thegeneral soul incarnates itself in him. He inclines to do something which iseasy to him and good when it is done, but which no other man can do. He has norival. For the more truly he consults his own powers, the more difference willhis work exhibit from the work of any other. His ambition is exactlyproportioned to his powers. The height of the pinnacle is determined by thebreadth of the base. Every man has this call of the power to do somewhatunique, and no man has any other call. The pretence that he has another call, asummons by name and personal election and outward “signs that mark himextraordinary, and not in the roll of common men,” is fanaticism, andbetrays obtuseness to perceive that there is one mind in all the individuals,and no respect of persons therein.

By doing his work he makes the need felt which he can supply, and creates thetaste by which he is enjoyed. By doing his own work he unfolds himself. It isthe vice of our public speaking that it has not abandonment. Somewhere, notonly every orator but every man should let out all the length of all the reins;should find or make a frank and hearty expression of what force and meaning isin him. The common experience is that the man fits himself as well as he can tothe customary details of that work or trade he falls into, and tends it as adog turns a spit. Then is he a part of the machine he moves; the man is lost.Until he can manage to communicate himself to others in his full stature andproportion, he does not yet find his vocation. He must find in that an outletfor his character, so that he may justify his work to their eyes. If the laboris mean, let him by his thinking and character make it liberal. Whatever heknows and thinks, whatever in his apprehension is worth doing, that let himcommunicate, or men will never know and honor him aright. Foolish, whenever youtake the meanness and formality of that thing you do, instead of converting itinto the obedient spiracle of your character and aims.

We like only such actions as have already long had the praise of men, and donot perceive that any thing man can do may be divinely done. We think greatnessentailed or organized in some places or duties, in certain offices oroccasions, and do not see that Paganini can extract rapture from a catgut, andEulenstein from a jews-harp, and a nimble-fingered lad out of shreds of paperwith his scissors, and Landseer out of swine, and the hero out of the pitifulhabitation and company in which he was hidden. What we call obscure conditionor vulgar society is that condition and society whose poetry is not yetwritten, but which you shall presently make as enviable and renowned as any. Inour estimates let us take a lesson from kings. The parts of hospitality, theconnection of families, the impressiveness of death, and a thousand otherthings, royalty makes its own estimate of, and a royal mind will. To makehabitually a new estimate,—that is elevation.

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

He may have his own. A man’s genius, the quality that differences himfrom every other, the susceptibility to one class of influences, the selectionof what is fit for him, the rejection of what is unfit, determines for him thecharacter of the universe. A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; aselecting principle, gathering his like to him wherever he goes. He takes onlyhis own out of the multiplicity that sweeps and circles round him. He is likeone of those booms which are set out from the shore on rivers to catchdrift-wood, or like the loadstone amongst splinters of steel. Those facts,words, persons, which dwell in his memory without his being able to say why,remain because they have a relation to him not less real for being as yetunapprehended. They are symbols of value to him as they can interpret parts ofhis consciousness which he would vainly seek words for in the conventionalimages of books and other minds. What attracts my attention shall have it, as Iwill go to the man who knocks at my door, whilst a thousand persons as worthygo by it, to whom I give no regard. It is enough that these particulars speakto me. A few anecdotes, a few traits of character, manners, face, a fewincidents, have an emphasis in your memory out of all proportion to theirapparent significance if you measure them by the ordinary standards. Theyrelate to your gift. Let them have their weight, and do not reject them andcast about for illustration and facts more usual in literature. What your heartthinks great is great. The soul’s emphasis is always right.

Over all things that are agreeable to his nature and genius the man has thehighest right. Everywhere he may take what belongs to his spiritual estate, norcan he take any thing else though all doors were open, nor can all the force ofmen hinder him from taking so much. It is vain to attempt to keep a secret fromone who has a right to know it. It will tell itself. That mood into which afriend can bring us is his dominion over us. To the thoughts of that state ofmind he has a right. All the secrets of that state of mind he can compel. Thisis a law which statesmen use in practice. All the terrors of the FrenchRepublic, which held Austria in awe, were unable to command her diplomacy. ButNapoleon sent to Vienna M. de Narbonne, one of the old noblesse, with themorals, manners and name of that interest, saying that it was indispensable tosend to the old aristocracy of Europe men of the same connection, which, infact, constitutes a sort of free-masonry. M. de Narbonne in less than afortnight penetrated all the secrets of the imperial cabinet.

Nothing seems so easy as to speak and to be understood. Yet a man may come tofind that the strongest of defences and of ties,—that he has beenunderstood; and he who has received an opinion may come to find it the mostinconvenient of bonds.

If a teacher have any opinion which he wishes to conceal, his pupils willbecome as fully indoctrinated into that as into any which he publishes. If youpour water into a vessel twisted into coils and angles, it is vain to say, Iwill pour it only into this or that;—it will find its level in all. Menfeel and act the consequences of your doctrine without being able to show howthey follow. Show us an arc of the curve, and a good mathematician will findout the whole figure. We are always reasoning from the seen to the unseen.Hence the perfect intelligence that subsists between wise men of remote ages. Aman cannot bury his meanings so deep in his book but time and like-minded menwill find them. Plato had a secret doctrine, had he? What secret can he concealfrom the eyes of Bacon? of Montaigne? of Kant? Therefore, Aristotle said of hisworks, “They are published and not published.”

No man can learn what he has not preparation for learning, however near to hiseyes is the object. A chemist may tell his most precious secrets to acarpenter, and he shall be never the wiser,—the secrets he would notutter to a chemist for an estate. God screens us evermore from premature ideas.Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that stare us in the face, untilthe hour arrives when the mind is ripened; then we behold them, and the timewhen we saw them not is like a dream.

Not in nature but in man is all the beauty and worth he sees. The world is veryempty, and is indebted to this gilding, exalting soul for all its pride.“Earth fills her lap with splendors” not her own. The valeof Tempe, Tivoli and Rome are earth and water, rocks and sky. There are as goodearth and water in a thousand places, yet how unaffecting!

People are not the better for the sun and moon, the horizon and the trees; asit is not observed that the keepers of Roman galleries or the valets ofpainters have any elevation of thought, or that librarians are wiser men thanothers. There are graces in the demeanor of a polished and noble person whichare lost upon the eye of a churl. These are like the stars whose light has notyet reached us.

He may see what he maketh. Our dreams are the sequel of our waking knowledge.The visions of the night bear some proportion to the visions of the day.Hideous dreams are exaggerations of the sins of the day. We see our evilaffections embodied in bad physiognomies. On the Alps the traveller sometimesbeholds his own shadow magnified to a giant, so that every gesture of his handis terrific. “My children,” said an old man to his boys scared by afigure in the dark entry, “my children, you will never see any thingworse than yourselves.” As in dreams, so in the scarcely less fluidevents of the world every man sees himself in colossal, without knowing that itis himself. The good, compared to the evil which he sees, is as his own good tohis own evil. Every quality of his mind is magnified in some one acquaintance,and every emotion of his heart in some one. He is like a quincunx of trees,which counts five,—east, west, north, or south; or an initial, medial,and terminal acrostic. And why not? He cleaves to one person and avoidsanother, according to their likeness or unlikeness to himself, truly seekinghimself in his associates and moreover in his trade and habits and gestures andmeats and drinks, and comes at last to be faithfully represented by every viewyou take of his circ*mstances.

He may read what he writes. What can we see or acquire but what we are? Youhave observed a skilful man reading Virgil. Well, that author is a thousandbooks to a thousand persons. Take the book into your two hands and read youreyes out, you will never find what I find. If any ingenious reader would have amonopoly of the wisdom or delight he gets, he is as secure now the book isEnglished, as if it were imprisoned in the Pelews’ tongue. It is with agood book as it is with good company. Introduce a base person among gentlemen,it is all to no purpose; he is not their fellow. Every society protects itself.The company is perfectly safe, and he is not one of them, though his body is inthe room.

What avails it to fight with the eternal laws of mind, which adjust therelation of all persons to each other by the mathematical measure of theirhavings and beings? Gertrude is enamored of Guy; how high, how aristocratic,how Roman his mien and manners! to live with him were life indeed, and nopurchase is too great; and heaven and earth are moved to that end. Well,Gertrude has Guy; but what now avails how high, how aristocratic, how Roman hismien and manners, if his heart and aims are in the senate, in the theatre andin the billiard-room, and she has no aims, no conversation that can enchant hergraceful lord?

He shall have his own society. We can love nothing but nature. The mostwonderful talents, the most meritorious exertions really avail very little withus; but nearness or likeness of nature,—how beautiful is the ease of itsvictory! Persons approach us, famous for their beauty, for theiraccomplishments, worthy of all wonder for their charms and gifts; they dedicatetheir whole skill to the hour and the company,—with very imperfectresult. To be sure it would be ungrateful in us not to praise them loudly.Then, when all is done, a person of related mind, a brother or sister bynature, comes to us so softly and easily, so nearly and intimately, as if itwere the blood in our proper veins, that we feel as if some one was gone,instead of another having come; we are utterly relieved and refreshed; it is asort of joyful solitude. We foolishly think in our days of sin that we mustcourt friends by compliance to the customs of society, to its dress, itsbreeding, and its estimates. But only that soul can be my friend which Iencounter on the line of my own march, that soul to which I do not decline andwhich does not decline to me, but, native of the same celestial latitude,repeats in its own all my experience. The scholar forgets himself and apes thecustoms and costumes of the man of the world to deserve the smile of beauty,and follows some giddy girl, not yet taught by religious passion to know thenoble woman with all that is serene, oracular and beautiful in her soul. Lethim be great, and love shall follow him. Nothing is more deeply punished thanthe neglect of the affinities by which alone society should be formed, and theinsane levity of choosing associates by others’ eyes.

He may set his own rate. It is a maxim worthy of all acceptation that a man mayhave that allowance he takes. Take the place and attitude which belong to you,and all men acquiesce. The world must be just. It leaves every man, withprofound unconcern, to set his own rate. Hero or driveller, it meddles not inthe matter. It will certainly accept your own measure of your doing and being,whether you sneak about and deny your own name, or whether you see your workproduced to the concave sphere of the heavens, one with the revolution of thestars.

The same reality pervades all teaching. The man may teach by doing, and nototherwise. If he can communicate himself he can teach, but not by words. Heteaches who gives, and he learns who receives. There is no teaching until thepupil is brought into the same state or principle in which you are; atransfusion takes place; he is you and you are he; then is a teaching, and byno unfriendly chance or bad company can he ever quite lose the benefit. Butyour propositions run out of one ear as they ran in at the other. We see itadvertised that Mr. Grand will deliver an oration on the Fourth of July, andMr. Hand before the Mechanics’ Association, and we do not go thither,because we know that these gentlemen will not communicate their own characterand experience to the company. If we had reason to expect such a confidence weshould go through all inconvenience and opposition. The sick would be carriedin litters. But a public oration is an escapade, a non-committal, an apology, agag, and not a communication, not a speech, not a man.

A like Nemesis presides over all intellectual works. We have yet to learn thatthe thing uttered in words is not therefore affirmed. It must affirm itself, orno forms of logic or of oath can give it evidence. The sentence must alsocontain its own apology for being spoken.

The effect of any writing on the public mind is mathematically measurable byits depth of thought. How much water does it draw? If it awaken you to think,if it lift you from your feet with the great voice of eloquence, then theeffect is to be wide, slow, permanent, over the minds of men; if the pagesinstruct you not, they will die like flies in the hour. The way to speak andwrite what shall not go out of fashion is to speak and write sincerely. Theargument which has not power to reach my own practice, I may well doubt willfail to reach yours. But take Sidney’s maxim:—“Look in thyheart, and write.” He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public.That statement only is fit to be made public which you have come at inattempting to satisfy your own curiosity. The writer who takes his subject fromhis ear and not from his heart, should know that he has lost as much as heseems to have gained, and when the empty book has gathered all its praise, andhalf the people say, ‘What poetry! what genius!’ it still needsfuel to make fire. That only profits which is profitable. Life alone can impartlife; and though we should burst we can only be valued as we make ourselvesvaluable. There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the finalverdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour whenit appears, but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to beentreated and not to be overawed, decides upon every man’s title to fame.Only those books come down which deserve to last. Gilt edges, vellum andmorocco, and presentation-copies to all the libraries will not preserve a bookin circulation beyond its intrinsic date. It must go with all Walpole’sNoble and Royal Authors to its fate. Blackmore, Kotzebue, or Pollok may endurefor a night, but Moses and Homer stand for ever. There are not in the world atany one time more than a dozen persons who read and understandPlato,—never enough to pay for an edition of his works; yet to everygeneration these come duly down, for the sake of those few persons, as if Godbrought them in his hand. “No book,” said Bentley, “was everwritten down by any but itself.” The permanence of all books is fixed byno effort, friendly or hostile, but by their own specific gravity, or theintrinsic importance of their contents to the constant mind of man. “Donot trouble yourself too much about the light on your statue,” saidMichael Angelo to the young sculptor; “the light of the public squarewill test its value.”

In like manner the effect of every action is measured by the depth of thesentiment from which it proceeds. The great man knew not that he was great. Ittook a century or two for that fact to appear. What he did, he did because hemust; it was the most natural thing in the world, and grew out of thecirc*mstances of the moment. But now, every thing he did, even to the liftingof his finger or the eating of bread, looks large, all-related, and is calledan institution.

These are the demonstrations in a few particulars of the genius of nature; theyshow the direction of the stream. But the stream is blood; every drop is alive.Truth has not single victories; all things are its organs,—not only dustand stones, but errors and lies. The laws of disease, physicians say, are asbeautiful as the laws of health. Our philosophy is affirmative and readilyaccepts the testimony of negative facts, as every shadow points to the sun. Bya divine necessity every fact in nature is constrained to offer its testimony.

Human character evermore publishes itself. The most fugitive deed and word, themere air of doing a thing, the intimated purpose, expresses character. If youact you show character; if you sit still, if you sleep, you show it. You thinkbecause you have spoken nothing when others spoke, and have given no opinion onthe times, on the church, on slavery, on marriage, on socialism, on secretsocieties, on the college, on parties and persons, that your verdict is stillexpected with curiosity as a reserved wisdom. Far otherwise; your silenceanswers very loud. You have no oracle to utter, and your fellow-men havelearned that you cannot help them; for oracles speak. Doth not Wisdom cry andUnderstanding put forth her voice?

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

I have heard an experienced counsellor say that he never feared the effect upona jury of a lawyer who does not believe in his heart that his client ought tohave a verdict. If he does not believe it his unbelief will appear to the jury,despite all his protestations, and will become their unbelief. This is that lawwhereby a work of art, of whatever kind, sets us in the same state of mindwherein the artist was when he made it. That which we do not believe we cannotadequately say, though we may repeat the words never so often. It was thisconviction which Swedenborg expressed when he described a group of persons inthe spiritual world endeavoring in vain to articulate a proposition which theydid not believe; but they could not, though they twisted and folded their lipseven to indignation.

A man passes for that he is worth. Very idle is all curiosity concerning otherpeople’s estimate of us, and all fear of remaining unknown is not lessso. If a man know that he can do any thing,—that he can do it better thanany one else,—he has a pledge of the acknowledgment of that fact by allpersons. The world is full of judgment-days, and into every assembly that a manenters, in every action he attempts, he is gauged and stamped. In every troopof boys that whoop and run in each yard and square, a new-comer is as well andaccurately weighed in the course of a few days and stamped with his rightnumber, as if he had undergone a formal trial of his strength, speed andtemper. A stranger comes from a distant school, with better dress, withtrinkets in his pockets, with airs and pretensions; an older boy says tohimself, ‘It’s of no use; we shall find him out to-morrow.’‘What has he done?’ is the divine question which searches men andtranspierces every false reputation. A fop may sit in any chair of the worldnor be distinguished for his hour from Homer and Washington; but there neednever be any doubt concerning the respective ability of human beings.Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act ofreal greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nor drove back Xerxes, norchristianized the world, nor abolished slavery.

As much virtue as there is, so much appears; as much goodness as there is, somuch reverence it commands. All the devils respect virtue. The high, thegenerous, the self-devoted sect will always instruct and command mankind. Neverwas a sincere word utterly lost. Never a magnanimity fell to the ground, butthere is some heart to greet and accept it unexpectedly. A man passes for thathe is worth. What he is engraves itself on his face, on his form, on hisfortunes, in letters of light. Concealment avails him nothing, boastingnothing. There is confession in the glances of our eyes, in our smiles, insalutations, and the grasp of hands. His sin bedaubs him, mars all his goodimpression. Men know not why they do not trust him, but they do not trust him.His vice glasses his eye, cuts lines of mean expression in his cheek, pinchesthe nose, sets the mark of the beast on the back of the head, and writes Ofool! fool! on the forehead of a king.

If you would not be known to do any thing, never do it. A man may play the foolin the drifts of a desert, but every grain of sand shall seem to see. He may bea solitary eater, but he cannot keep his foolish counsel. A broken complexion,a swinish look, ungenerous acts and the want of due knowledge,—all blab.Can a cook, a Chiffinch, an Iachimo be mistaken for Zeno or Paul? Confuciusexclaimed,—“How can a man be concealed? How can a man beconcealed?”

On the other hand, the hero fears not that if he withhold the avowal of a justand brave act it will go unwitnessed and unloved. One knowsit,—himself,—and is pledged by it to sweetness of peace and tonobleness of aim which will prove in the end a better proclamation of it thanthe relating of the incident. Virtue is the adherence in action to the natureof things, and the nature of things makes it prevalent. It consists in aperpetual substitution of being for seeming, and with sublime propriety God isdescribed as saying, I AM.

The lesson which these observations convey is, Be, and not seem. Let usacquiesce. Let us take our bloated nothingness out of the path of the divinecircuits. Let us unlearn our wisdom of the world. Let us lie low in theLord’s power and learn that truth alone makes rich and great.

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

We are full of these superstitions of sense, the worship of magnitude. We callthe poet inactive, because he is not a president, a merchant, or a porter. Weadore an institution, and do not see that it is founded on a thought which wehave. But real action is in silent moments. The epochs of our life are not inthe visible facts of our choice of a calling, our marriage, our acquisition ofan office, and the like, but in a silent thought by the way-side as we walk; ina thought which revises our entire manner of life and says,—‘Thushast thou done, but it were better thus.’ And all our after years, likemenials, serve and wait on this, and according to their ability execute itswill. This revisal or correction is a constant force, which, as a tendency,reaches through our lifetime. The object of the man, the aim of these moments,is to make daylight shine through him, to suffer the law to traverse his wholebeing without obstruction, so that on what point soever of his doing your eyefalls it shall report truly of his character, whether it be his diet, hishouse, his religious forms, his society, his mirth, his vote, his opposition.Now he is not hom*ogeneous, but heterogeneous, and the ray does not traverse;there are no thorough lights, but the eye of the beholder is puzzled, detectingmany unlike tendencies and a life not yet at one.

Why should we make it a point with our false modesty to disparage that man weare and that form of being assigned to us? A good man is contented. I love andhonor Epaminondas, but I do not wish to be Epaminondas. I hold it more just tolove the world of this hour than the world of his hour. Nor can you, if I amtrue, excite me to the least uneasiness by saying, ‘He acted and thousittest still.’ I see action to be good, when the need is, and sittingstill to be also good. Epaminondas, if he was the man I take him for, wouldhave sat still with joy and peace, if his lot had been mine. Heaven is large,and affords space for all modes of love and fortitude. Why should we bebusybodies and superserviceable? Action and inaction are alike to the true. Onepiece of the tree is cut for a weatherco*ck and one for the sleeper of a bridge;the virtue of the wood is apparent in both.

I desire not to disgrace the soul. The fact that I am here certainly shows methat the soul had need of an organ here. Shall I not assume the post? Shall Iskulk and dodge and duck with my unseasonable apologies and vain modesty andimagine my being here impertinent? less pertinent than Epaminondas or Homerbeing there? and that the soul did not know its own needs? Besides, without anyreasoning on the matter, I have no discontent. The good soul nourishes me andunlocks new magazines of power and enjoyment to me every day. I will not meanlydecline the immensity of good, because I have heard that it has come to othersin another shape.

Besides, why should we be cowed by the name of Action? ’Tis a trick ofthe senses,—no more. We know that the ancestor of every action is athought. The poor mind does not seem to itself to be any thing unless it havean outside badge,—some Gentoo diet, or Quaker coat, or Calvinisticprayer-meeting, or philanthropic society, or a great donation, or a highoffice, or, any how, some wild contrasting action to testify that it issomewhat. The rich mind lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature. To think isto act.

Let us, if we must have great actions, make our own so. All action is of aninfinite elasticity, and the least admits of being inflated with the celestialair until it eclipses the sun and moon. Let us seek one peace by fidelity. Letme heed my duties. Why need I go gadding into the scenes and philosophy ofGreek and Italian history before I have justified myself to my benefactors? Howdare I read Washington’s campaigns when I have not answered the lettersof my own correspondents? Is not that a just objection to much of our reading?It is a pusillanimous desertion of our work to gaze after our neighbors. It ispeeping. Byron says of Jack Bunting,—

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

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

This over-estimate of the possibilities of Paul and Pericles, thisunder-estimate of our own, comes from a neglect of the fact of an identicalnature. Bonaparte knew but one merit, and rewarded in one and the same way thegood soldier, the good astronomer, the good poet, the good player. The poetuses the names of Cæsar, of Tamerlane, of Bonduca, of Belisarius; the painteruses the conventional story of the Virgin Mary, of Paul, of Peter. He does nottherefore defer to the nature of these accidental men, of these stock heroes.If the poet write a true drama, then he is Cæsar, and not the player of Cæsar;then the selfsame strain of thought, emotion as pure, wit as subtle, motions asswift, mounting, extravagant, and a heart as great, self-sufficing, dauntless,which on the waves of its love and hope can uplift all that is reckoned solidand precious in the world,—palaces, gardens, money, navies,kingdoms,—marking its own incomparable worth by the slight it casts onthese gauds of men;—these all are his, and by the power of these herouses the nations. Let a man believe in God, and not in names and places andpersons. Let the great soul incarnated in some woman’s form, poor and sadand single, in some Dolly or Joan, go out to service, and sweep chambers andscour floors, and its effulgent daybeams cannot be muffled or hid, but to sweepand scour will instantly appear supreme and beautiful actions, the top andradiance of human life, and all people will get mops and brooms; until, lo!suddenly the great soul has enshrined itself in some other form and done someother deed, and that is now the flower and head of all living nature.

We are the photometers, we the irritable goldleaf and tinfoil that measure theaccumulations of the subtle element. We know the authentic effects of the truefire through every one of its million disguises.

V.
LOVE

“I was as a gem concealed;
Me my burning ray revealed.”
Koran.

LOVE

Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfilments; each of its joys ripensinto a new want. Nature, uncontainable, flowing, forelooking, in the firstsentiment of kindness anticipates already a benevolence which shall lose allparticular regards in its general light. The introduction to this felicity isin a private and tender relation of one to one, which is the enchantment ofhuman life; which, like a certain divine rage and enthusiasm, seizes on man atone period and works a revolution in his mind and body; unites him to his race,pledges him to the domestic and civic relations, carries him with new sympathyinto nature, enhances the power of the senses, opens the imagination, adds tohis character heroic and sacred attributes, establishes marriage, and givespermanence to human society.

The natural association of the sentiment of love with the heyday of the bloodseems to require that in order to portray it in vivid tints, which every youthand maid should confess to be true to their throbbing experience, one must notbe too old. The delicious fancies of youth reject the least savor of a maturephilosophy, as chilling with age and pedantry their purple bloom. And thereforeI know I incur the imputation of unnecessary hardness and stoicism from thosewho compose the Court and Parliament of Love. But from these formidable censorsI shall appeal to my seniors. For it is to be considered that this passion ofwhich we speak, though it begin with the young, yet forsakes not the old, orrather suffers no one who is truly its servant to grow old, but makes the agedparticipators of it not less than the tender maiden, though in a different andnobler sort. For it is a fire that kindling its first embers in the narrow nookof a private bosom, caught from a wandering spark out of another private heart,glows and enlarges until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men and women,upon the universal heart of all, and so lights up the whole world and allnature with its generous flames. It matters not therefore whether we attempt todescribe the passion at twenty, at thirty, or at eighty years. He who paints itat the first period will lose some of its later, he who paints it at the last,some of its earlier traits. Only it is to be hoped that by patience and theMuses’ aid we may attain to that inward view of the law which shalldescribe a truth ever young and beautiful, so central that it shall commenditself to the eye, at whatever angle beholden.

And the first condition is, that we must leave a too close and lingeringadherence to facts, and study the sentiment as it appeared in hope and not inhistory. For each man sees his own life defaced and disfigured, as the life ofman is not, to his imagination. Each man sees over his own experience a certainstain of error, whilst that of other men looks fair and ideal. Let any man goback to those delicious relations which make the beauty of his life, which havegiven him sincerest instruction and nourishment, he will shrink and moan. Alas!I know not why, but infinite compunctions embitter in mature life theremembrances of budding joy and cover every beloved name. Every thing isbeautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour,if seen as experience. Details are melancholy; the plan is seemly and noble. Inthe actual world—the painful kingdom of time and place—dwell care,and canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, therose of joy. Round it all the Muses sing. But grief cleaves to names, andpersons, and the partial interests of to-day and yesterday.

The strong bent of nature is seen in the proportion which this topic ofpersonal relations usurps in the conversation of society. What do we wish toknow of any worthy person so much, as how he has sped in the history of thissentiment? What books in the circulating libraries circulate? How we glow overthese novels of passion, when the story is told with any spark of truth andnature! And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like anypassage betraying affection between two parties? Perhaps we never saw thembefore, and never shall meet them again. But we see them exchange a glance, orbetray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them, andtake the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind love alover. The earliest demonstrations of complacency and kindness arenature’s most winning pictures. It is the dawn of civility and grace inthe coarse and rustic. The rude village boy teases the girls about theschool-house door;—but to-day he comes running into the entry, and meetsone fair child disposing her satchel; he holds her books to help her, andinstantly it seems to him as if she removed herself from him infinitely, andwas a sacred precinct. Among the throng of girls he runs rudely enough, but onealone distances him; and these two little neighbors, that were so close justnow, have learned to respect each other’s personality. Or who can averthis eyes from the engaging, half-artful, half-artless ways of school-girls whogo into the country shops to buy a skein of silk or a sheet of paper, and talkhalf an hour about nothing with the broad-faced, good-natured shop-boy. In thevillage they are on a perfect equality, which love delights in, and without anycoquetry the happy, affectionate nature of woman flows out in this prettygossip. The girls may have little beauty, yet plainly do they establish betweenthem and the good boy the most agreeable, confiding relations, what with theirfun and their earnest, about Edgar and Jonas and Almira, and who was invited tothe party, and who danced at the dancing-school, and when the singing-schoolwould begin, and other nothings concerning which the parties cooed. By and bythat boy wants a wife, and very truly and heartily will he know where to find asincere and sweet mate, without any risk such as Milton deplores as incident toscholars and great men.

I have been told that in some public discourses of mine my reverence for theintellect has made me unjustly cold to the personal relations. But now I almostshrink at the remembrance of such disparaging words. For persons arelove’s world, and the coldest philosopher cannot recount the debt of theyoung soul wandering here in nature to the power of love, without being temptedto unsay, as treasonable to nature, aught derogatory to the social instincts.For though the celestial rapture falling out of heaven seizes only upon thoseof tender age, and although a beauty overpowering all analysis or comparisonand putting us quite beside ourselves we can seldom see after thirty years, yetthe remembrance of these visions outlasts all other remembrances, and is awreath of flowers on the oldest brows. But here is a strange fact; it may seemto many men, in revising their experience, that they have no fairer page intheir life’s book than the delicious memory of some passages whereinaffection contrived to give a witchcraft, surpassing the deep attraction of itsown truth, to a parcel of accidental and trivial circ*mstances. In lookingbackward they may find that several things which were not the charm have morereality to this groping memory than the charm itself which embalmed them. Butbe our experience in particulars what it may, no man ever forgot thevisitations of that power to his heart and brain, which created all thingsanew; which was the dawn in him of music, poetry, and art; which made the faceof nature radiant with purple light, the morning and the night variedenchantments; when a single tone of one voice could make the heart bound, andthe most trivial circ*mstance associated with one form is put in the amber ofmemory; when he became all eye when one was present, and all memory when onewas gone; when the youth becomes a watcher of windows and studious of a glove,a veil, a ribbon, or the wheels of a carriage; when no place is too solitaryand none too silent, for him who has richer company and sweeter conversation inhis new thoughts than any old friends, though best and purest, can give him;for the figures, the motions, the words of the beloved object are not likeother images written in water, but, as Plutarch said, “enamelled infire,” and make the study of midnight:—

“Thou art not gone being gone, where’er thou art,
Thou leav’st in him thy watchful eyes, in him thy loving heart.”

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

“All other pleasures are not worth its pains:”

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

The passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive andsignificant. Nature grows conscious. Every bird on the boughs of the tree singsnow to his heart and soul. The notes are almost articulate. The clouds havefaces as he looks on them. The trees of the forest, the waving grass and thepeeping flowers have grown intelligent; and he almost fears to trust them withthe secret which they seem to invite. Yet nature soothes and sympathizes. Inthe green solitude he finds a dearer home than with men:—

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

Behold there in the wood the fine madman! He is a palace of sweet sounds andsights; he dilates; he is twice a man; he walks with arms akimbo; hesoliloquizes; he accosts the grass and the trees; he feels the blood of theviolet, the clover and the lily in his veins; and he talks with the brook thatwets his foot.

The heats that have opened his perceptions of natural beauty have made him lovemusic and verse. It is a fact often observed, that men have written good versesunder the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under any othercirc*mstances.

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

And here let us examine a little nearer the nature of that influence which isthus potent over the human youth. Beauty, whose revelation to man we nowcelebrate, welcome as the sun wherever it pleases to shine, which pleaseseverybody with it and with themselves, seems sufficient to itself. The lovercannot paint his maiden to his fancy poor and solitary. Like a tree in flower,so much soft, budding, informing loveliness is society for itself; and sheteaches his eye why Beauty was pictured with Loves and Graces attending hersteps. Her existence makes the world rich. Though she extrudes all otherpersons from his attention as cheap and unworthy, she indemnifies him bycarrying out her own being into somewhat impersonal, large, mundane, so thatthe maiden stands to him for a representative of all select things and virtues.For that reason the lover never sees personal resemblances in his mistress toher kindred or to others. His friends find in her a likeness to her mother, orher sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no resemblanceexcept to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song ofbirds.

The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue. Who can analyze thenameless charm which glances from one and another face and form? We are touchedwith emotions of tenderness and complacency, but we cannot find whereat thisdainty emotion, this wandering gleam, points. It is destroyed for theimagination by any attempt to refer it to organization. Nor does it point toany relations of friendship or love known and described in society, but, as itseems to me, to a quite other and unattainable sphere, to relations oftranscendent delicacy and sweetness, to what roses and violets hint andforeshow. We cannot approach beauty. Its nature is like opalinedoves’-neck lustres, hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles themost excellent things, which all have this rainbow character, defying allattempts at appropriation and use. What else did Jean Paul Richter signify,when he said to music, “Away! away! thou speakest to me of things whichin all my endless life I have not found, and shall not find.” The samefluency may be observed in every work of the plastic arts. The statue is thenbeautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out ofcriticism and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring-wand, butdemands an active imagination to go with it and to say what it is in the act ofdoing. The god or hero of the sculptor is always represented in a transitionfrom that which is representable to the senses, to that which isnot. Then first it ceases to be a stone. The same remark holds of painting. Andof poetry the success is not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when itastonishes and fires us with new endeavors after the unattainable. Concerningit Landor inquires “whether it is not to be referred to some purer stateof sensation and existence.”

In like manner, personal beauty is then first charming and itself when itdissatisfies us with any end; when it becomes a story without an end; when itsuggests gleams and visions and not earthly satisfactions; when it makes thebeholder feel his unworthiness; when he cannot feel his right to it, though hewere Cæsar; he cannot feel more right to it than to the firmament and thesplendors of a sunset.

Hence arose the saying, “If I love you, what is that to you?” Wesay so because we feel that what we love is not in your will, but above it. Itis not you, but your radiance. It is that which you know not in yourself andcan never know.

This agrees well with that high philosophy of Beauty which the ancient writersdelighted in; for they said that the soul of man, embodied here on earth, wentroaming up and down in quest of that other world of its own out of which itcame into this, but was soon stupefied by the light of the natural sun, andunable to see any other objects than those of this world, which are but shadowsof real things. Therefore the Deity sends the glory of youth before the soul,that it may avail itself of beautiful bodies as aids to its recollection of thecelestial good and fair; and the man beholding such a person in the female sexruns to her and finds the highest joy in contemplating the form, movement, andintelligence of this person, because it suggests to him the presence of thatwhich indeed is within the beauty, and the cause of the beauty.

If however, from too much conversing with material objects, the soul was gross,and misplaced its satisfaction in the body, it reaped nothing but sorrow; bodybeing unable to fulfil the promise which beauty holds out; but if, acceptingthe hint of these visions and suggestions which beauty makes to his mind, thesoul passes through the body and falls to admire strokes of character, and thelovers contemplate one another in their discourses and their actions, then theypass to the true palace of beauty, more and more inflame their love of it, andby this love extinguishing the base affection, as the sun puts out the fire byshining on the hearth, they become pure and hallowed. By conversation with thatwhich is in itself excellent, magnanimous, lowly, and just, the lover comes toa warmer love of these nobilities, and a quicker apprehension of them. Then hepasses from loving them in one to loving them in all, and so is the onebeautiful soul only the door through which he enters to the society of all trueand pure souls. In the particular society of his mate he attains a clearersight of any spot, any taint which her beauty has contracted from this world,and is able to point it out, and this with mutual joy that they are now able,without offence, to indicate blemishes and hindrances in each other, and giveto each all help and comfort in curing the same. And beholding in many soulsthe traits of the divine beauty, and separating in each soul that which isdivine from the taint which it has contracted in the world, the lover ascendsto the highest beauty, to the love and knowledge of the Divinity, by steps onthis ladder of created souls.

Somewhat like this have the truly wise told us of love in all ages. Thedoctrine is not old, nor is it new. If Plato, Plutarch and Apuleius taught it,so have Petrarch, Angelo and Milton. It awaits a truer unfolding in oppositionand rebuke to that subterranean prudence which presides at marriages with wordsthat take hold of the upper world, whilst one eye is prowling in the cellar; sothat its gravest discourse has a savor of hams and powdering-tubs. Worst, whenthis sensualism intrudes into the education of young women, and withers thehope and affection of human nature by teaching that marriage signifies nothingbut a housewife’s thrift, and that woman’s life has no other aim.

But this dream of love, though beautiful, is only one scene in our play. In theprocession of the soul from within outward, it enlarges its circles ever, likethe pebble thrown into the pond, or the light proceeding from an orb. The raysof the soul alight first on things nearest, on every utensil and toy, on nursesand domestics, on the house and yard and passengers, on the circle of householdacquaintance, on politics and geography and history. But things are evergrouping themselves according to higher or more interior laws. Neighborhood,size, numbers, habits, persons, lose by degrees their power over us. Cause andeffect, real affinities, the longing for harmony between the soul and thecirc*mstance, the progressive, idealizing instinct, predominate later, and thestep backward from the higher to the lower relations is impossible. Thus evenlove, which is the deification of persons, must become more impersonal everyday. Of this at first it gives no hint. Little think the youth and maiden whoare glancing at each other across crowded rooms with eyes so full of mutualintelligence, of the precious fruit long hereafter to proceed from this new,quite external stimulus. The work of vegetation begins first in theirritability of the bark and leaf-buds. From exchanging glances, they advanceto acts of courtesy, of gallantry, then to fiery passion, to plighting trothand marriage. Passion beholds its object as a perfect unit. The soul is whollyembodied, and the body is wholly ensouled:—

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

Romeo, if dead, should be cut up into little stars to make the heavens fine.Life, with this pair, has no other aim, asks no more, than Juliet,—thanRomeo. Night, day, studies, talents, kingdoms, religion, are all contained inthis form full of soul, in this soul which is all form. The lovers delight inendearments, in avowals of love, in comparisons of their regards. When alone,they solace themselves with the remembered image of the other. Does that othersee the same star, the same melting cloud, read the same book, feel the sameemotion, that now delight me? They try and weigh their affection, and adding upcostly advantages, friends, opportunities, properties, exult in discoveringthat willingly, joyfully, they would give all as a ransom for the beautiful,the beloved head, not one hair of which shall be harmed. But the lot ofhumanity is on these children. Danger, sorrow, and pain arrive to them, as toall. Love prays. It makes covenants with Eternal Power in behalf of this dearmate. The union which is thus effected and which adds a new value to every atomin nature—for it transmutes every thread throughout the whole web ofrelation into a golden ray, and bathes the soul in a new and sweeterelement—is yet a temporary state. Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry,protestations, nor even home in another heart, content the awful soul thatdwells in clay. It arouses itself at last from these endearments, as toys, andputs on the harness and aspires to vast and universal aims. The soul which isin the soul of each, craving a perfect beatitude, detects incongruities,defects and disproportion in the behavior of the other. Hence arise surprise,expostulation and pain. Yet that which drew them to each other was signs ofloveliness, signs of virtue; and these virtues are there, however eclipsed.They appear and reappear and continue to attract; but the regard changes, quitsthe sign and attaches to the substance. This repairs the wounded affection.Meantime, as life wears on, it proves a game of permutation and combination ofall possible positions of the parties, to employ all the resources of each andacquaint each with the strength and weakness of the other. For it is the natureand end of this relation, that they should represent the human race to eachother. All that is in the world, which is or ought to be known, is cunninglywrought into the texture of man, of woman:—

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

The world rolls; the circ*mstances vary every hour. The angels that inhabitthis temple of the body appear at the windows, and the gnomes and vices also.By all the virtues they are united. If there be virtue, all the vices are knownas such; they confess and flee. Their once flaming regard is sobered by time ineither breast, and losing in violence what it gains in extent, it becomes athorough good understanding. They resign each other without complaint to thegood offices which man and woman are severally appointed to discharge in time,and exchange the passion which once could not lose sight of its object, for acheerful, disengaged furtherance, whether present or absent, of eachother’s designs. At last they discover that all which at first drew themtogether,—those once sacred features, that magical play ofcharms,—was deciduous, had a prospective end, like the scaffolding bywhich the house was built; and the purification of the intellect and the heartfrom year to year is the real marriage, foreseen and prepared from the first,and wholly above their consciousness. Looking at these aims with which twopersons, a man and a woman, so variously and correlatively gifted, are shut upin one house to spend in the nuptial society forty or fifty years, I do notwonder at the emphasis with which the heart prophesies this crisis from earlyinfancy, at the profuse beauty with which the instincts deck the nuptial bower,and nature and intellect and art emulate each other in the gifts and the melodythey bring to the epithalamium.

Thus are we put in training for a love which knows not sex, nor person, norpartiality, but which seeks virtue and wisdom everywhere, to the end ofincreasing virtue and wisdom. We are by nature observers, and thereby learners.That is our permanent state. But we are often made to feel that our affectionsare but tents of a night. Though slowly and with pain, the objects of theaffections change, as the objects of thought do. There are moments when theaffections rule and absorb the man and make his happiness dependent on a personor persons. But in health the mind is presently seen again,—itsoverarching vault, bright with galaxies of immutable lights, and the warm lovesand fears that swept over us as clouds must lose their finite character andblend with God, to attain their own perfection. But we need not fear that wecan lose any thing by the progress of the soul. The soul may be trusted to theend. That which is so beautiful and attractive as these relations, must besucceeded and supplanted only by what is more beautiful, and so on for ever.

VI.
FRIENDSHIP

A ruddy drop of manly blood
The surging sea outweighs;
The world uncertain comes and goes,
The lover rooted stays.
I fancied he was fled,
And, after many a year,
Glowed unexhausted kindliness
Like daily sunrise there.
My careful heart was free again,—
O friend, my bosom said,
Through thee alone the sky is arched,
Through thee the rose is red,
All things through thee take nobler form
And look beyond the earth,
The mill-round of our fate appears
A sun-path in thy worth.
Me too thy nobleness has taught
To master my despair;
The fountains of my hidden life
Are through thy friendship fair.

FRIENDSHIP

We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. Maugre all theselfishness that chills like east winds the world, the whole human family isbathed with an element of love like a fine ether. How many persons we meet inhouses, whom we scarcely speak to, whom yet we honor, and who honor us! Howmany we see in the street, or sit with in church, whom, though silently, wewarmly rejoice to be with! Read the language of these wandering eye-beams. Theheart knoweth.

The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is a certain cordialexhilaration. In poetry and in common speech, the emotions of benevolence andcomplacency which are felt towards others are likened to the material effectsof fire; so swift, or much more swift, more active, more cheering, are thesefine inward irradiations. From the highest degree of passionate love to thelowest degree of good-will, they make the sweetness of life.

Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection. The scholarsits down to write, and all his years of meditation do not furnish him with onegood thought or happy expression; but it is necessary to write a letter to afriend,—and forthwith troops of gentle thoughts invest themselves, onevery hand, with chosen words. See, in any house where virtue and self-respectabide, the palpitation which the approach of a stranger causes. A commendedstranger is expected and announced, and an uneasiness betwixt pleasure and paininvades all the hearts of a household. His arrival almost brings fear to thegood hearts that would welcome him. The house is dusted, all things fly intotheir places, the old coat is exchanged for the new, and they must get up adinner if they can. Of a commended stranger, only the good report is told byothers, only the good and new is heard by us. He stands to us for humanity. Heis what we wish. Having imagined and invested him, we ask how we should standrelated in conversation and action with such a man, and are uneasy with fear.The same idea exalts conversation with him. We talk better than we are wont. Wehave the nimblest fancy, a richer memory, and our dumb devil has taken leavefor the time. For long hours we can continue a series of sincere, graceful,rich communications, drawn from the oldest, secretest experience, so that theywho sit by, of our own kinsfolk and acquaintance, shall feel a lively surpriseat our unusual powers. But as soon as the stranger begins to intrude hispartialities, his definitions, his defects, into the conversation, it is allover. He has heard the first, the last and best he will ever hear from us. Heis no stranger now. Vulgarity, ignorance, misapprehension are oldacquaintances. Now, when he comes, he may get the order, the dress and thedinner,—but the throbbing of the heart and the communications of thesoul, no more.

What is so pleasant as these jets of affection which make a young world for meagain? What so delicious as a just and firm encounter of two, in a thought, ina feeling? How beautiful, on their approach to this beating heart, the stepsand forms of the gifted and the true! The moment we indulge our affections, theearth is metamorphosed; there is no winter and no night; all tragedies, allennuis vanish,—all duties even; nothing fills the proceeding eternity butthe forms all radiant of beloved persons. Let the soul be assured thatsomewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be contentand cheerful alone for a thousand years.

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and thenew. Shall I not call God the Beautiful, who daily showeth himself so to me inhis gifts? I chide society, I embrace solitude, and yet I am not so ungratefulas not to see the wise, the lovely and the noble-minded, as from time to timethey pass my gate. Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine,—apossession for all time. Nor is Nature so poor but she gives me this joyseveral times, and thus we weave social threads of our own, a new web ofrelations; and, as many thoughts in succession substantiate themselves, weshall by and by stand in a new world of our own creation, and no longerstrangers and pilgrims in a traditionary globe. My friends have come to meunsought. The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divineaffinity of virtue with itself, I find them, or rather not I but the Deity inme and in them derides and cancels the thick walls of individual character,relation, age, sex, circ*mstance, at which he usually connives, and now makesmany one. High thanks I owe you, excellent lovers, who carry out the world forme to new and noble depths, and enlarge the meaning of all my thoughts. Theseare new poetry of the first Bard,—poetry without stop,—hymn, odeand epic, poetry still flowing, Apollo and the Muses chanting still. Will thesetoo separate themselves from me again, or some of them? I know not, but I fearit not; for my relation to them is so pure, that we hold by simple affinity,and the Genius of my life being thus social, the same affinity will exert itsenergy on whomsoever is as noble as these men and women, wherever I may be.

I confess to an extreme tenderness of nature on this point. It is almostdangerous to me to “crush the sweet poison of misused wine” of theaffections. A new person is to me a great event and hinders me from sleep. Ihave often had fine fancies about persons which have given me delicious hours;but the joy ends in the day; it yields no fruit. Thought is not born of it; myaction is very little modified. I must feel pride in my friend’saccomplishments as if they were mine, and a property in his virtues. I feel aswarmly when he is praised, as the lover when he hears applause of his engagedmaiden. We over-estimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seemsbetter than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Every thingthat is his,—his name, his form, his dress, books andinstruments,—fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger fromhis mouth.

Yet the systole and diastole of the heart are not without their analogy in theebb and flow of love. Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too goodto be believed. The lover, beholding his maiden, half knows that she is notverily that which he worships; and in the golden hour of friendship we aresurprised with shades of suspicion and unbelief. We doubt that we bestow on ourhero the virtues in which he shines, and afterwards worship the form to whichwe have ascribed this divine inhabitation. In strictness, the soul does notrespect men as it respects itself. In strict science all persons underlie thesame condition of an infinite remoteness. Shall we fear to cool our love bymining for the metaphysical foundation of this Elysian temple? Shall I not beas real as the things I see? If I am, I shall not fear to know them for whatthey are. Their essence is not less beautiful than their appearance, though itneeds finer organs for its apprehension. The root of the plant is not unsightlyto science, though for chaplets and festoons we cut the stem short. And I musthazard the production of the bald fact amidst these pleasing reveries, thoughit should prove an Egyptian skull at our banquet. A man who stands united withhis thought conceives magnificently of himself. He is conscious of a universalsuccess, even though bought by uniform particular failures. No advantages, nopowers, no gold or force, can be any match for him. I cannot choose but rely onmy own poverty more than on your wealth. I cannot make your consciousnesstantamount to mine. Only the star dazzles; the planet has a faint, moon-likeray. I hear what you say of the admirable parts and tried temper of the partyyou praise, but I see well that for all his purple cloaks I shall not like him,unless he is at last a poor Greek like me. I cannot deny it, O friend, that thevast shadow of the Phenomenal includes thee also in its pied and paintedimmensity,—thee also, compared with whom all else is shadow. Thou art notBeing, as Truth is, as Justice is,—thou art not my soul, but a pictureand effigy of that. Thou hast come to me lately, and already thou art seizingthy hat and cloak. Is it not that the soul puts forth friends as the tree putsforth leaves, and presently, by the germination of new buds, extrudes the oldleaf? The law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each electrical statesuperinduces the opposite. The soul environs itself with friends that it mayenter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone for aseason, that it may exalt its conversation or society. This method betraysitself along the whole history of our personal relations. The instinct ofaffection revives the hope of union with our mates, and the returning sense ofinsulation recalls us from the chase. Thus every man passes his life in thesearch after friendship, and if he should record his true sentiment, he mightwrite a letter like this to each new candidate for his love:—

DEAR FRIEND,

If I was sure of thee, sure of thy capacity, sure to match my mood with thine,I should never think again of trifles in relation to thy comings and goings. Iam not very wise; my moods are quite attainable, and I respect thy genius; itis to me as yet unfathomed; yet dare I not presume in thee a perfectintelligence of me, and so thou art to me a delicious torment. Thine ever, ornever.

Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for curiosity and not for life.They are not to be indulged. This is to weave cobweb, and not cloth. Ourfriendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them atexture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fibre of the human heart. Thelaws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of natureand of morals. But we have aimed at a swift and petty benefit, to suck a suddensweetness. We snatch at the slowest fruit in the whole garden of God, whichmany summers and many winters must ripen. We seek our friend not sacredly, butwith an adulterate passion which would appropriate him to ourselves. In vain.We are armed all over with subtle antagonisms, which, as soon as we meet, beginto play, and translate all poetry into stale prose. Almost all people descendto meet. All association must be a compromise, and, what is worst, the veryflower and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures disappears asthey approach each other. What a perpetual disappointment is actual society,even of the virtuous and gifted! After interviews have been compassed with longforesight we must be tormented presently by baffled blows, by sudden,unseasonable apathies, by epilepsies of wit and of animal spirits, in theheyday of friendship and thought. Our faculties do not play us true, and bothparties are relieved by solitude.

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

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

Our impatience is thus sharply rebuked. Bashfulness and apathy are a tough huskin which a delicate organization is protected from premature ripening. It wouldbe lost if it knew itself before any of the best souls were yet ripe enough toknow and own it. Respect the naturlangsamkeit which hardens the ruby ina million years, and works in duration in which Alps and Andes come and go asrainbows. The good spirit of our life has no heaven which is the price ofrashness. Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for thetotal worth of man. Let us not have this childish luxury in our regards, butthe austerest worth; let us approach our friend with an audacious trust in thetruth of his heart, in the breadth, impossible to be overturned, of hisfoundations.

The attractions of this subject are not to be resisted, and I leave, for thetime, all account of subordinate social benefit, to speak of that select andsacred relation which is a kind of absolute, and which even leaves the languageof love suspicious and common, so much is this purer, and nothing is so muchdivine.

I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage. Whenthey are real, they are not glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest thingwe know. For now, after so many ages of experience, what do we know of natureor of ourselves? Not one step has man taken toward the solution of the problemof his destiny. In one condemnation of folly stand the whole universe of men.But the sweet sincerity of joy and peace which I draw from this alliance withmy brother’s soul is the nut itself whereof all nature and all thought isbut the husk and shell. Happy is the house that shelters a friend! It mightwell be built, like a festal bower or arch, to entertain him a single day.Happier, if he know the solemnity of that relation and honor its law! He whooffers himself a candidate for that covenant comes up, like an Olympian, to thegreat games where the first-born of the world are the competitors. He proposeshimself for contests where Time, Want, Danger, are in the lists, and he aloneis victor who has truth enough in his constitution to preserve the delicacy ofhis beauty from the wear and tear of all these. The gifts of fortune may bepresent or absent, but all the speed in that contest depends on intrinsicnobleness and the contempt of trifles. There are two elements that go to thecomposition of friendship, each so sovereign that I can detect no superiorityin either, no reason why either should be first named. One is truth. A friendis a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I amarrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal that I may drop eventhose undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, whichmen never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness withwhich one chemical atom meets another. Sincerity is the luxury allowed, likediadems and authority, only to the highest rank; that being permitted tospeak truth, as having none above it to court or conform unto. Every man aloneis sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins. We parry andfend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, by amusem*nts,by affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds. I knew aman who under a certain religious frenzy cast off this drapery, and omittingall compliment and commonplace, spoke to the conscience of every person heencountered, and that with great insight and beauty. At first he was resisted,and all men agreed he was mad. But persisting—as indeed he could not helpdoing—for some time in this course, he attained to the advantage ofbringing every man of his acquaintance into true relations with him. No manwould think of speaking falsely with him, or of putting him off with any chatof markets or reading-rooms. But every man was constrained by so much sincerityto the like plaindealing, and what love of nature, what poetry, what symbol oftruth he had, he did certainly show him. But to most of us society shows notit* face and eye, but its side and its back. To stand in true relations withmen in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not? We can seldom goerect. Almost every man we meet requires some civility,—requires to behumored; he has some fame, some talent, some whim of religion or philanthropyin his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils all conversationwith him. But a friend is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me. Myfriend gives me entertainment without requiring any stipulation on my part. Afriend therefore is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who seenothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own,behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height, variety, andcuriosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckonedthe masterpiece of nature.

The other element of friendship is tenderness. We are holden to men by everysort of tie, by blood, by pride, by fear, by hope, by lucre, by lust, by hate,by admiration, by every circ*mstance and badge and trifle,—but we canscarce believe that so much character can subsist in another as to draw us bylove. Can another be so blessed and we so pure that we can offer himtenderness? When a man becomes dear to me I have touched the goal of fortune. Ifind very little written directly to the heart of this matter in books. And yetI have one text which I cannot choose but remember. My authorsays,—“I offer myself faintly and bluntly to those whose Ieffectually am, and tender myself least to him to whom I am the mostdevoted.” I wish that friendship should have feet, as well as eyes andeloquence. It must plant itself on the ground, before it vaults over the moon.I wish it to be a little of a citizen, before it is quite a cherub. We chidethe citizen because he makes love a commodity. It is an exchange of gifts, ofuseful loans; it is good neighborhood; it watches with the sick; it holds thepall at the funeral; and quite loses sight of the delicacies and nobility ofthe relation. But though we cannot find the god under this disguise of asutler, yet on the other hand we cannot forgive the poet if he spins his threadtoo fine and does not substantiate his romance by the municipal virtues ofjustice, punctuality, fidelity and pity. I hate the prostitution of the name offriendship to signify modish and worldly alliances. I much prefer the companyof ploughboys and tin-peddlers to the silken and perfumed amity whichcelebrates its days of encounter by a frivolous display, by rides in a curricleand dinners at the best taverns. The end of friendship is a commerce the moststrict and homely that can be joined; more strict than any of which we haveexperience. It is for aid and comfort through all the relations and passages oflife and death. It is fit for serene days and graceful gifts and countryrambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty, andpersecution. It keeps company with the sallies of the wit and the trances ofreligion. We are to dignify to each other the daily needs and offices ofman’s life, and embellish it by courage, wisdom and unity. It shouldnever fall into something usual and settled, but should be alert and inventiveand add rhyme and reason to what was drudgery.

Friendship may be said to require natures so rare and costly, each so welltempered and so happily adapted, and withal so circ*mstanced (for even in thatparticular, a poet says, love demands that the parties be altogether paired),that its satisfaction can very seldom be assured. It cannot subsist in itsperfection, say some of those who are learned in this warm lore of the heart,betwixt more than two. I am not quite so strict in my terms, perhaps because Ihave never known so high a fellowship as others. I please my imagination morewith a circle of godlike men and women variously related to each other andbetween whom subsists a lofty intelligence. But I find this law of one toone peremptory for conversation, which is the practice and consummation offriendship. Do not mix waters too much. The best mix as ill as good and bad.You shall have very useful and cheering discourse at several times with twoseveral men, but let all three of you come together and you shall not have onenew and hearty word. Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take partin a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort. In good company thereis never such discourse between two, across the table, as takes place when youleave them alone. In good company the individuals merge their egotism into asocial soul exactly co-extensive with the several consciousnesses therepresent. No partialities of friend to friend, no fondnesses of brother tosister, of wife to husband, are there pertinent, but quite otherwise. Only hemay then speak who can sail on the common thought of the party, and not poorlylimited to his own. Now this convention, which good sense demands, destroys thehigh freedom of great conversation, which requires an absolute running of twosouls into one.

No two men but being left alone with each other enter into simpler relations.Yet it is affinity that determines which two shall converse. Unrelatedmen give little joy to each other, will never suspect the latent powers ofeach. We talk sometimes of a great talent for conversation, as if it were apermanent property in some individuals. Conversation is an evanescentrelation,—no more. A man is reputed to have thought and eloquence; hecannot, for all that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse hissilence with as much reason as they would blame the insignificance of a dial inthe shade. In the sun it will mark the hour. Among those who enjoy his thoughthe will regain his tongue.

Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness that piqueseach with the presence of power and of consent in the other party. Let me bealone to the end of the world, rather than that my friend should overstep, by aword or a look, his real sympathy. I am equally balked by antagonism and bycompliance. Let him not cease an instant to be himself. The only joy I have inhis being mine, is that the not mine is mine. I hate, where Ilooked for a manly furtherance, or at least a manly resistance, to find a mushof concession. Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo. Thecondition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it. That highoffice requires great and sublime parts. There must be very two, before therecan be very one. Let it be an alliance of two large, formidable natures,mutually beheld, mutually feared, before yet they recognize the deep identitywhich, beneath these disparities, unites them.

He only is fit for this society who is magnanimous; who is sure that greatnessand goodness are always economy; who is not swift to intermeddle with hisfortunes. Let him not intermeddle with this. Leave to the diamond its ages togrow, nor expect to accelerate the births of the eternal. Friendship demands areligious treatment. We talk of choosing our friends, but friends areself-elected. Reverence is a great part of it. Treat your friend as aspectacle. Of course he has merits that are not yours, and that you cannothonor if you must needs hold him close to your person. Stand aside; give thosemerits room; let them mount and expand. Are you the friend of yourfriend’s buttons, or of his thought? To a great heart he will still be astranger in a thousand particulars, that he may come near in the holiestground. Leave it to girls and boys to regard a friend as property, and to sucka short and all-confounding pleasure, instead of the noblest benefit.

Let us buy our entrance to this guild by a long probation. Why should wedesecrate noble and beautiful souls by intruding on them? Why insist on rashpersonal relations with your friend? Why go to his house, or know his motherand brother and sisters? Why be visited by him at your own? Are these thingsmaterial to our covenant? Leave this touching and clawing. Let him be to me aspirit. A message, a thought, a sincerity, a glance from him, I want, but notnews, nor pottage. I can get politics and chat and neighborly conveniences fromcheaper companions. Should not the society of my friend be to me poetic, pure,universal and great as nature itself? Ought I to feel that our tie is profanein comparison with yonder bar of cloud that sleeps on the horizon, or thatclump of waving grass that divides the brook? Let us not vilify, but raise itto that standard. That great defying eye, that scornful beauty of his mien andaction, do not pique yourself on reducing, but rather fortify and enhance.Worship his superiorities; wish him not less by a thought, but hoard and tellthem all. Guard him as thy counterpart. Let him be to thee for ever a sort ofbeautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial conveniency tobe soon outgrown and cast aside. The hues of the opal, the light of thediamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near. To my friend I write aletter and from him I receive a letter. That seems to you a little. It sufficesme. It is a spiritual gift worthy of him to give and of me to receive. Itprofanes nobody. In these warm lines the heart will trust itself, as it willnot to the tongue, and pour out the prophecy of a godlier existence than allthe annals of heroism have yet made good.

Respect so far the holy laws of this fellowship as not to prejudice its perfectflower by your impatience for its opening. We must be our own before we can beanother’s. There is at least this satisfaction in crime, according to theLatin proverb;—you can speak to your accomplice on even terms. Crimenquos inquinat, æquat. To those whom we admire and love, at first we cannot.Yet the least defect of self-possession vitiates, in my judgment, the entirerelation. There can never be deep peace between two spirits, never mutualrespect, until in their dialogue each stands for the whole world.

What is so great as friendship, let us carry with what grandeur of spirit wecan. Let us be silent,—so we may hear the whisper of the gods. Let us notinterfere. Who set you to cast about what you should say to the select souls,or how to say any thing to such? No matter how ingenious, no matter howgraceful and bland. There are innumerable degrees of folly and wisdom, and foryou to say aught is to be frivolous. Wait, and thy heart shall speak. Waituntil the necessary and everlasting overpowers you, until day and night availthemselves of your lips. The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way tohave a friend is to be one. You shall not come nearer a man by getting into hishouse. If unlike, his soul only flees the faster from you, and you shall nevercatch a true glance of his eye. We see the noble afar off and they repel us;why should we intrude? Late,—very late,—we perceive that noarrangements, no introductions, no consuetudes or habits of society would be ofany avail to establish us in such relations with them as we desire,—butsolely the uprise of nature in us to the same degree it is in them; then shallwe meet as water with water; and if we should not meet them then, we shall notwant them, for we are already they. In the last analysis, love is only thereflection of a man’s own worthiness from other men. Men have sometimesexchanged names with their friends, as if they would signify that in theirfriend each loved his own soul.

The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less easy toestablish it with flesh and blood. We walk alone in the world. Friends such aswe desire are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithfulheart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal power, souls are nowacting, enduring, and daring, which can love us and which we can love. We maycongratulate ourselves that the period of nonage, of follies, of blunders andof shame, is passed in solitude, and when we are finished men we shall graspheroic hands in heroic hands. Only be admonished by what you already see, notto strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be.Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no god attends.By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little you gain the great.You demonstrate yourself, so as to put yourself out of the reach of falserelations, and you draw to you the first-born of the world,—those rarepilgrims whereof only one or two wander in nature at once, and before whom thevulgar great show as spectres and shadows merely.

It is foolish to be afraid of making our ties too spiritual, as if so we couldlose any genuine love. Whatever correction of our popular views we make frominsight, nature will be sure to bear us out in, and though it seem to rob us ofsome joy, will repay us with a greater. Let us feel if we will the absoluteinsulation of man. We are sure that we have all in us. We go to Europe, or wepursue persons, or we read books, in the instinctive faith that these will callit out and reveal us to ourselves. Beggars all. The persons are such as we; theEurope, an old faded garment of dead persons; the books, their ghosts. Let usdrop this idolatry. Let us give over this mendicancy. Let us even bid ourdearest friends farewell, and defy them, saying, ‘Who are you? Unhand me:I will be dependent no more.’ Ah! seest thou not, O brother, that thus wepart only to meet again on a higher platform, and only be more eachother’s because we are more our own? A friend is Janus-faced; he looks tothe past and the future. He is the child of all my foregoing hours, the prophetof those to come, and the harbinger of a greater friend.

I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I canfind them, but I seldom use them. We must have society on our own terms, andadmit or exclude it on the slightest cause. I cannot afford to speak much withmy friend. If he is great he makes me so great that I cannot descend toconverse. In the great days, presentiments hover before me in the firmament. Iought then to dedicate myself to them. I go in that I may seize them, I go outthat I may seize them. I fear only that I may lose them receding into the skyin which now they are only a patch of brighter light. Then, though I prize myfriends, I cannot afford to talk with them and study their visions, lest I losemy own. It would indeed give me a certain household joy to quit this loftyseeking, this spiritual astronomy or search of stars, and come down to warmsympathies with you; but then I know well I shall mourn always the vanishing ofmy mighty gods. It is true, next week I shall have languid moods, when I canwell afford to occupy myself with foreign objects; then I shall regret the lostliterature of your mind, and wish you were by my side again. But if you come,perhaps you will fill my mind only with new visions; not with yourself but withyour lustres, and I shall not be able any more than now to converse with you.So I will owe to my friends this evanescent intercourse. I will receive fromthem not what they have but what they are. They shall give me that whichproperly they cannot give, but which emanates from them. But they shall nothold me by any relations less subtile and pure. We will meet as though we metnot, and part as though we parted not.

It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a friendshipgreatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the other. Why should Icumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It nevertroubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungratefulspace, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatnesseducate the crude and cold companion. If he is unequal he will presently passaway; but thou art enlarged by thy own shining, and no longer a mate for frogsand worms, dost soar and burn with the gods of the empyrean. It is thought adisgrace to love unrequited. But the great will see that true love cannot beunrequited. True love transcends the unworthy object and dwells and broods onthe eternal, and when the poor interposed mask crumbles, it is not sad, butfeels rid of so much earth and feels its independency the surer. Yet thesethings may hardly be said without a sort of treachery to the relation. Theessence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. It must notsurmise or provide for infirmity. It treats its object as a god, that it maydeify both.

VII.
PRUDENCE

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

PRUDENCE

What right have I to write on Prudence, whereof I have Little, and that of thenegative sort? My prudence consists in avoiding and going without, not in theinventing of means and methods, not in adroit steering, not in gentlerepairing. I have no skill to make money spend well, no genius in my economy,and whoever sees my garden discovers that I must have some other garden. Yet Ilove facts, and hate lubricity and people without perception. Then I have thesame title to write on prudence that I have to write on poetry or holiness. Wewrite from aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience. We paintthose qualities which we do not possess. The poet admires the man of energy andtactics; the merchant breeds his son for the church or the bar; and where a manis not vain and egotistic you shall find what he has not by his praise.Moreover it would be hardly honest in me not to balance these fine lyric wordsof Love and Friendship with words of coarser sound, and whilst my debt to mysenses is real and constant, not to own it in passing.

Prudence is the virtue of the senses. It is the science of appearances. It isthe outmost action of the inward life. It is God taking thought for oxen. Itmoves matter after the laws of matter. It is content to seek health of body bycomplying with physical conditions, and health of mind by the laws of theintellect.

The world of the senses is a world of shows; it does not exist for itself, buthas a symbolic character; and a true prudence or law of shows recognizes theco-presence of other laws and knows that its own office is subaltern; knowsthat it is surface and not centre where it works. Prudence is false whendetached. It is legitimate when it is the Natural History of the soulincarnate, when it unfolds the beauty of laws within the narrow scope of thesenses.

There are all degrees of proficiency in knowledge of the world. It issufficient to our present purpose to indicate three. One class live to theutility of the symbol, esteeming health and wealth a final good. Another classlive above this mark to the beauty of the symbol, as the poet and artist andthe naturalist and man of science. A third class live above the beauty of thesymbol to the beauty of the thing signified; these are wise men. The firstclass have common sense; the second, taste; and the third, spiritualperception. Once in a long time, a man traverses the whole scale, and sees andenjoys the symbol solidly, then also has a clear eye for its beauty, andlastly, whilst he pitches his tent on this sacred volcanic isle of nature, doesnot offer to build houses and barns thereon,—reverencing the splendor ofthe God which he sees bursting through each chink and cranny.

The world is filled with the proverbs and acts and winkings of a base prudence,which is a devotion to matter, as if we possessed no other faculties than thepalate, the nose, the touch, the eye and ear; a prudence which adores the Ruleof Three, which never subscribes, which never gives, which seldom lends, andasks but one question of any project,—Will it bake bread? This is adisease like a thickening of the skin until the vital organs are destroyed. Butculture, revealing the high origin of the apparent world and aiming at theperfection of the man as the end, degrades every thing else, as health andbodily life, into means. It sees prudence not to be a several faculty, but aname for wisdom and virtue conversing with the body and its wants. Cultivatedmen always feel and speak so, as if a great fortune, the achievement of a civilor social measure, great personal influence, a graceful and commanding address,had their value as proofs of the energy of the spirit. If a man lose hisbalance and immerse himself in any trades or pleasures for their own sake, hemay be a good wheel or pin, but he is not a cultivated man.

The spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and cowards,and is the subject of all comedy. It is nature’s joke, and thereforeliterature’s. The true prudence limits this sensualism by admitting theknowledge of an internal and real world. This recognition once made, the orderof the world and the distribution of affairs and times, being studied with theco-perception of their subordinate place, will reward any degree of attention.For our existence, thus apparently attached in nature to the sun and thereturning moon and the periods which they mark,—so susceptible to climateand to country, so alive to social good and evil, so fond of splendor and sotender to hunger and cold and debt,—reads all its primary lessons out ofthese books.

Prudence does not go behind nature and ask whence it is. It takes the laws ofthe world whereby man’s being is conditioned, as they are, and keepsthese laws that it may enjoy their proper good. It respects space and time,climate, want, sleep, the law of polarity, growth and death. There revolve, togive bound and period to his being on all sides, the sun and moon, the greatformalists in the sky: here lies stubborn matter, and will not swerve from itschemical routine. Here is a planted globe, pierced and belted with natural lawsand fenced and distributed externally with civil partitions and propertieswhich impose new restraints on the young inhabitant.

We eat of the bread which grows in the field. We live by the air which blowsaround us and we are poisoned by the air that is too cold or too hot, too dryor too wet. Time, which shows so vacant, indivisible and divine in its coming,is slit and peddled into trifles and tatters. A door is to be painted, a lockto be repaired. I want wood or oil, or meal or salt; the house smokes, or Ihave a headache; then the tax, and an affair to be transacted with a manwithout heart or brains, and the stinging recollection of an injurious or veryawkward word,—these eat up the hours. Do what we can, summer will haveits flies; if we walk in the woods we must feed mosquitos; if we go a-fishingwe must expect a wet coat. Then climate is a great impediment to idle persons;we often resolve to give up the care of the weather, but still we regard theclouds and the rain.

We are instructed by these petty experiences which usurp the hours and years.The hard soil and four months of snow make the inhabitant of the northerntemperate zone wiser and abler than his fellow who enjoys the fixed smile ofthe tropics. The islander may ramble all day at will. At night he may sleep ona mat under the moon, and wherever a wild date-tree grows, nature has, withouta prayer even, spread a table for his morning meal. The northerner is perforcea householder. He must brew, bake, salt and preserve his food, and pile woodand coal. But as it happens that not one stroke can labor lay to without somenew acquaintance with nature, and as nature is inexhaustibly significant, theinhabitants of these climates have always excelled the southerner in force.Such is the value of these matters that a man who knows other things can neverknow too much of these. Let him have accurate perceptions. Let him, if he havehands, handle; if eyes, measure and discriminate; let him accept and hive everyfact of chemistry, natural history and economics; the more he has, the less ishe willing to spare any one. Time is always bringing the occasions thatdisclose their value. Some wisdom comes out of every natural and innocentaction. The domestic man, who loves no music so well as his kitchen clock andthe airs which the logs sing to him as they burn on the hearth, has solaceswhich others never dream of. The application of means to ends insures victoryand the songs of victory not less in a farm or a shop than in the tactics ofparty or of war. The good husband finds method as efficient in the packing offire-wood in a shed or in the harvesting of fruits in the cellar, as inPeninsular campaigns or the files of the Department of State. In the rainy dayhe builds a work-bench, or gets his tool-box set in the corner of thebarn-chamber, and stored with nails, gimlet, pincers, screwdriver and chisel.Herein he tastes an old joy of youth and childhood, the cat-like love ofgarrets, presses and corn-chambers, and of the conveniences of longhousekeeping. His garden or his poultry-yard tells him many pleasant anecdotes.One might find argument for optimism in the abundant flow of this saccharineelement of pleasure in every suburb and extremity of the good world. Let a mankeep the law,—any law,—and his way will be strown withsatisfactions. There is more difference in the quality of our pleasures than inthe amount.

On the other hand, nature punishes any neglect of prudence. If you think thesenses final, obey their law. If you believe in the soul, do not clutch atsensual sweetness before it is ripe on the slow tree of cause and effect. It isvinegar to the eyes to deal with men of loose and imperfect perception. Dr.Johnson is reported to have said,—“If the child says he looked outof this window, when he looked out of that,—whip him.” Our Americancharacter is marked by a more than average delight in accurate perception,which is shown by the currency of the byword, “No mistake.” But thediscomfort of unpunctuality, of confusion of thought about facts, ofinattention to the wants of to-morrow, is of no nation. The beautiful laws oftime and space, once dislocated by our inaptitude, are holes and dens. If thehive be disturbed by rash and stupid hands, instead of honey it will yield usbees. Our words and actions to be fair must be timely. A gay and pleasant soundis the whetting of the scythe in the mornings of June, yet what is morelonesome and sad than the sound of a whetstone or mower’s rifle when itis too late in the season to make hay? Scatter-brained and“afternoon” men spoil much more than their own affair in spoilingthe temper of those who deal with them. I have seen a criticism on somepaintings, of which I am reminded when I see the shiftless and unhappy men whoare not true to their senses. The last Grand Duke of Weimar, a man of superiorunderstanding, said,—“I have sometimes remarked in the presence ofgreat works of art, and just now especially in Dresden, how much a certainproperty contributes to the effect which gives life to the figures, and to thelife an irresistible truth. This property is the hitting, in all the figures wedraw, the right centre of gravity. I mean the placing the figures firm upontheir feet, making the hands grasp, and fastening the eyes on the spot wherethey should look. Even lifeless figures, as vessels and stools—let thembe drawn ever so correctly—lose all effect so soon as they lack theresting upon their centre of gravity, and have a certain swimming andoscillating appearance. The Raphael in the Dresden gallery (the only greatlyaffecting picture which I have seen) is the quietest and most passionless pieceyou can imagine; a couple of saints who worship the Virgin and Child.Nevertheless, it awakens a deeper impression than the contortions of tencrucified martyrs. For beside all the resistless beauty of form, it possessesin the highest degree the property of the perpendicularity of all thefigures.” This perpendicularity we demand of all the figures in thispicture of life. Let them stand on their feet, and not float and swing. Let usknow where to find them. Let them discriminate between what they remember andwhat they dreamed, call a spade a spade, give us facts, and honor their ownsenses with trust.

But what man shall dare tax another with imprudence? Who is prudent? The men wecall greatest are least in this kingdom. There is a certain fatal dislocationin our relation to nature, distorting our modes of living and making every lawour enemy, which seems at last to have aroused all the wit and virtue in theworld to ponder the question of Reform. We must call the highest prudence tocounsel, and ask why health and beauty and genius should now be the exceptionrather than the rule of human nature? We do not know the properties of plantsand animals and the laws of nature, through our sympathy with the same; butthis remains the dream of poets. Poetry and prudence should be coincident.Poets should be lawgivers; that is, the boldest lyric inspiration should notchide and insult, but should announce and lead the civil code and theday’s work. But now the two things seem irreconcilably parted. We haveviolated law upon law until we stand amidst ruins, and when by chance we espy acoincidence between reason and the phenomena, we are surprised. Beauty shouldbe the dowry of every man and woman, as invariably as sensation; but it israre. Health or sound organization should be universal. Genius should be thechild of genius and every child should be inspired; but now it is not to bepredicted of any child, and nowhere is it pure. We call partial half-lights, bycourtesy, genius; talent which converts itself to money; talent which glittersto-day that it may dine and sleep well to-morrow; and society is officered bymen of parts, as they are properly called, and not by divine men. Theseuse their gifts to refine luxury, not to abolish it. Genius is always ascetic,and piety, and love. Appetite shows to the finer souls as a disease, and theyfind beauty in rites and bounds that resist it.

We have found out fine names to cover our sensuality withal, but no gifts canraise intemperance. The man of talent affects to call his transgressions of thelaws of the senses trivial and to count them nothing considered with hisdevotion to his art. His art never taught him lewdness, nor the love of wine,nor the wish to reap where he had not sowed. His art is less for everydeduction from his holiness, and less for every defect of common sense. On himwho scorned the world as he said, the scorned world wreaks its revenge. He thatdespiseth small things will perish by little and little. Goethe’s Tassois very likely to be a pretty fair historical portrait, and that is truetragedy. It does not seem to me so genuine grief when some tyrannous Richardthe Third oppresses and slays a score of innocent persons, as when Antonio andTasso, both apparently right, wrong each other. One living after the maxims ofthis world and consistent and true to them, the other fired with all divinesentiments, yet grasping also at the pleasures of sense, without submitting totheir law. That is a grief we all feel, a knot we cannot untie. Tasso’sis no infrequent case in modern biography. A man of genius, of an ardenttemperament, reckless of physical laws, self-indulgent, becomes presentlyunfortunate, querulous, a “discomfortable cousin,” a thorn tohimself and to others.

The scholar shames us by his bifold life. Whilst something higher than prudenceis active, he is admirable; when common sense is wanted, he is an encumbrance.Yesterday, Cæsar was not so great; to-day, the felon at the gallows’ footis not more miserable. Yesterday, radiant with the light of an ideal world inwhich he lives, the first of men; and now oppressed by wants and by sickness,for which he must thank himself. He resembles the pitiful drivellers whomtravellers describe as frequenting the bazaars of Constantinople, who skulkabout all day, yellow, emaciated, ragged, sneaking; and at evening, when thebazaars are open, slink to the opium-shop, swallow their morsel and becometranquil and glorified seers. And who has not seen the tragedy of imprudentgenius struggling for years with paltry pecuniary difficulties, at lastsinking, chilled, exhausted and fruitless, like a giant slaughtered by pins?

Is it not better that a man should accept the first pains and mortifications ofthis sort, which nature is not slack in sending him, as hints that he mustexpect no other good than the just fruit of his own labor and self-denial?Health, bread, climate, social position, have their importance, and he willgive them their due. Let him esteem Nature a perpetual counsellor, and herperfections the exact measure of our deviations. Let him make the night night,and the day day. Let him control the habit of expense. Let him see that as muchwisdom may be expended on a private economy as on an empire, and as much wisdommay be drawn from it. The laws of the world are written out for him on everypiece of money in his hand. There is nothing he will not be the better forknowing, were it only the wisdom of Poor Richard, or the State-Street prudenceof buying by the acre to sell by the foot; or the thrift of the agriculturist,to stick a tree between whiles, because it will grow whilst he sleeps; or theprudence which consists in husbanding little strokes of the tool, littleportions of time, particles of stock and small gains. The eye of prudence maynever shut. Iron, if kept at the ironmonger’s, will rust; beer, if notbrewed in the right state of the atmosphere, will sour; timber of ships willrot at sea, or if laid up high and dry, will strain, warp and dry-rot; money,if kept by us, yields no rent and is liable to loss; if invested, is liable todepreciation of the particular kind of stock. Strike, says the smith, the ironis white; keep the rake, says the haymaker, as nigh the scythe as you can, andthe cart as nigh the rake. Our Yankee trade is reputed to be very much on theextreme of this prudence. It takes bank-notes, good, bad, clean, ragged, andsaves itself by the speed with which it passes them off. Iron cannot rust, norbeer sour, nor timber rot, nor calicoes go out of fashion, nor money stocksdepreciate, in the few swift moments in which the Yankee suffers any one ofthem to remain in his possession. In skating over thin ice our safety is in ourspeed.

Let him learn a prudence of a higher strain. Let him learn that every thing innature, even motes and feathers, go by law and not by luck, and that what hesows he reaps. By diligence and self-command let him put the bread he eats athis own disposal, that he may not stand in bitter and false relations to othermen; for the best good of wealth is freedom. Let him practise the minorvirtues. How much of human life is lost in waiting! let him not make hisfellow-creatures wait. How many words and promises are promises ofconversation! Let his be words of fate. When he sees a folded and sealed scrapof paper float round the globe in a pine ship and come safe to the eye forwhich it was written, amidst a swarming population, let him likewise feel theadmonition to integrate his being across all these distracting forces, and keepa slender human word among the storms, distances and accidents that drive ush*ther and thither, and, by persistency, make the paltry force of one manreappear to redeem its pledge after months and years in the most distantclimates.

We must not try to write the laws of any one virtue, looking at that only.Human nature loves no contradictions, but is symmetrical. The prudence whichsecures an outward well-being is not to be studied by one set of men, whilstheroism and holiness are studied by another, but they are reconcilable.Prudence concerns the present time, persons, property and existing forms. Butas every fact hath its roots in the soul, and if the soul were changed, wouldcease to be, or would become some other thing,—the proper administrationof outward things will always rest on a just apprehension of their cause andorigin; that is, the good man will be the wise man, and the single-hearted thepolitic man. Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in theliar, but is a stab at the health of human society. On the most profitable liethe course of events presently lays a destructive tax; whilst frankness invitesfrankness, puts the parties on a convenient footing and makes their business afriendship. Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and theywill show themselves great, though they make an exception in your favor to alltheir rules of trade.

So, in regard to disagreeable and formidable things, prudence does not consistin evasion or in flight, but in courage. He who wishes to walk in the mostpeaceful parts of life with any serenity must screw himself up to resolution.Let him front the object of his worst apprehension, and his stoutness willcommonly make his fear groundless. The Latin proverb says, “In battlesthe eye is first overcome.” Entire self-possession may make a battle verylittle more dangerous to life than a match at foils or at football. Examplesare cited by soldiers of men who have seen the cannon pointed and the firegiven to it, and who have stepped aside from the path of the ball. The terrorsof the storm are chiefly confined to the parlor and the cabin. The drover, thesailor, buffets it all day, and his health renews itself at as vigorous a pulseunder the sleet as under the sun of June.

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

It is a proverb that ‘courtesy costs nothing’; but calculationmight come to value love for its profit. Love is fabled to be blind, butkindness is necessary to perception; love is not a hood, but an eye-water. Ifyou meet a sectary or a hostile partisan, never recognize the dividing lines,but meet on what common ground remains,—if only that the sun shines andthe rain rains for both; the area will widen very fast, and ere you know it,the boundary mountains on which the eye had fastened have melted into air. Ifthey set out to contend, Saint Paul will lie and Saint John will hate. Whatlow, poor, paltry, hypocritical people an argument on religion will make of thepure and chosen souls! They will shuffle and crow, crook and hide, feign toconfess here, only that they may brag and conquer there, and not a thought hasenriched either party, and not an emotion of bravery, modesty, or hope. Soneither should you put yourself in a false position with your contemporaries byindulging a vein of hostility and bitterness. Though your views are in straightantagonism to theirs, assume an identity of sentiment, assume that you aresaying precisely that which all think, and in the flow of wit and love roll outyour paradoxes in solid column, with not the infirmity of a doubt. So at leastshall you get an adequate deliverance. The natural motions of the soul are somuch better than the voluntary ones that you will never do yourself justice indispute. The thought is not then taken hold of by the right handle, does notshow itself proportioned and in its true bearings, but bears extorted, hoarse,and half witness. But assume a consent and it shall presently be granted, sincereally and underneath their external diversities, all men are of one heart andmind.

Wisdom will never let us stand with any man or men on an unfriendly footing. Werefuse sympathy and intimacy with people, as if we waited for some bettersympathy and intimacy to come. But whence and when? To-morrow will be liketo-day. Life wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live. Our friends andfellow-workers die off from us. Scarcely can we say we see new men, new women,approaching us. We are too old to regard fashion, too old to expect patronageof any greater or more powerful. Let us suck the sweetness of those affectionsand consuetudes that grow near us. These old shoes are easy to the feet.Undoubtedly we can easily pick faults in our company, can easily whisper namesprouder, and that tickle the fancy more. Every man’s imagination hath itsfriends; and life would be dearer with such companions. But if you cannot havethem on good mutual terms, you cannot have them. If not the Deity but ourambition hews and shapes the new relations, their virtue escapes, asstrawberries lose their flavor in garden-beds.

Thus truth, frankness, courage, love, humility and all the virtues rangethemselves on the side of prudence, or the art of securing a presentwell-being. I do not know if all matter will be found to be made of oneelement, as oxygen or hydrogen, at last, but the world of manners and actionsis wrought of one stuff, and begin where we will we are pretty sure in a shortspace to be mumbling our ten commandments.

VIII.
HEROISM

HEROISM

In the elder English dramatists, and mainly in the plays Of Beaumont andFletcher, there is a constant recognition of gentility, as if a noble behaviorwere as easily marked in the society of their age as color is in our Americanpopulation. When any Rodrigo, Pedro or Valerio enters, though he be a stranger,the duke or governor exclaims, ‘This is a gentleman,—and profferscivilities without end; but all the rest are slag and refuse. In harmony withthis delight in personal advantages there is in their plays a certain heroiccast of character and dialogue,—as in Bonduca, Sophocles, the Mad Lover,the Double Marriage,—wherein the speaker is so earnest and cordial and onsuch deep grounds of character, that the dialogue, on the slightest additionalincident in the plot, rises naturally into poetry. Among many texts take thefollowing. The Roman Martius has conquered Athens,—all but the invinciblespirits of Sophocles, the duke of Athens, and Dorigen, his wife. The beauty ofthe latter inflames Martius, and he seeks to save her husband; but Sophocleswill not ask his life, although assured that a word will save him, and theexecution of both proceeds:—

I do not readily remember any poem, play, sermon, novel, or oration that ourpress vents in the last few years, which goes to the same tune. We have a greatmany flutes and flageolets, but not often the sound of any fife. Yet,Wordsworth’s “Laodamia,” and the ode of “Dion,”and some sonnets, have a certain noble music; and Scott will sometimes draw astroke like the portrait of Lord Evandale given by Balfour of Burley. ThomasCarlyle, with his natural taste for what is manly and daring in character, hassuffered no heroic trait in his favorites to drop from his biographical andhistorical pictures. Earlier, Robert Burns has given us a song or two. In theHarleian Miscellanies there is an account of the battle of Lutzen whichdeserves to be read. And Simon Ockley’s History of the Saracens recountsthe prodigies of individual valor, with admiration all the more evident on thepart of the narrator that he seems to think that his place in Christian Oxfordrequires of him some proper protestations of abhorrence. But if we explore theliterature of Heroism we shall quickly come to Plutarch, who is its Doctor andhistorian. To him we owe the Brasidas, the Dion, the Epaminondas, the Scipio ofold, and I must think we are more deeply indebted to him than to all theancient writers. Each of his “Lives” is a refutation to thedespondency and cowardice of our religious and political theorists. A wildcourage, a Stoicism not of the schools but of the blood, shines in everyanecdote, and has given that book its immense fame.

We need books of this tart cathartic virtue more than books of politicalscience or of private economy. Life is a festival only to the wise. Seen fromthe nook and chimney-side of prudence, it wears a ragged and dangerous front.The violations of the laws of nature by our predecessors and our contemporariesare punished in us also. The disease and deformity around us certify theinfraction of natural, intellectual, and moral laws, and often violation onviolation to breed such compound misery. A lock-jaw that bends a man’shead back to his heels; hydrophobia that makes him bark at his wife and babes;insanity that makes him eat grass; war, plague, cholera, famine, indicate acertain ferocity in nature, which, as it had its inlet by human crime, musthave its outlet by human suffering. Unhappily no man exists who has not in hisown person become to some amount a stockholder in the sin, and so made himselfliable to a share in the expiation.

Our culture therefore must not omit the arming of the man. Let him hear inseason that he is born into the state of war, and that the commonwealth and hisown well-being require that he should not go dancing in the weeds of peace, butwarned, self-collected and neither defying nor dreading the thunder, let himtake both reputation and life in his hand, and, with perfect urbanity dare thegibbet and the mob by the absolute truth of his speech and the rectitude of hisbehavior.

Towards all this external evil the man within the breast assumes a warlikeattitude, and affirms his ability to cope single-handed with the infinite armyof enemies. To this military attitude of the soul we give the name of Heroism.Its rudest form is the contempt for safety and ease, which makes theattractiveness of war. It is a self-trust which slights the restraints ofprudence, in the plenitude of its energy and power to repair the harms it maysuffer. The hero is a mind of such balance that no disturbances can shake hiswill, but pleasantly and as it were merrily he advances to his own music, alikein frightful alarms and in the tipsy mirth of universal dissoluteness. There issomewhat not philosophical in heroism; there is somewhat not holy in it; itseems not to know that other souls are of one texture with it; it has pride; itis the extreme of individual nature. Nevertheless we must profoundly revere it.There is somewhat in great actions which does not allow us to go behind them.Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right; and although adifferent breeding, different religion and greater intellectual activity wouldhave modified or even reversed the particular action, yet for the hero thatthing he does is the highest deed, and is not open to the censure ofphilosophers or divines. It is the avowal of the unschooled man that he finds aquality in him that is negligent of expense, of health, of life, of danger, ofhatred, of reproach, and knows that his will is higher and more excellent thanall actual and all possible antagonists.

Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind and in contradiction,for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism is an obedience to asecret impulse of an individual’s character. Now to no other man can itswisdom appear as it does to him, for every man must be supposed to see a littlefarther on his own proper path than any one else. Therefore just and wise mentake umbrage at his act, until after some little time be past: then they see itto be in unison with their acts. All prudent men see that the action is cleancontrary to a sensual prosperity; for every heroic act measures itself by itscontempt of some external good. But it finds its own success at last, and thenthe prudent also extol.

Self-trust is the essence of heroism. It is the state of the soul at war, andits ultimate objects are the last defiance of falsehood and wrong, and thepower to bear all that can be inflicted by evil agents. It speaks the truth andit is just, generous, hospitable, temperate, scornful of petty calculations andscornful of being scorned. It persists; it is of an undaunted boldness and of afortitude not to be wearied out. Its jest is the littleness of common life.That false prudence which dotes on health and wealth is the butt and merrimentof heroism. Heroism, like Plotinus, is almost ashamed of its body. What shallit say then to the sugar-plums and cats’-cradles, to the toilet,compliments, quarrels, cards and custard, which rack the wit of all society?What joys has kind nature provided for us dear creatures! There seems to be nointerval between greatness and meanness. When the spirit is not master of theworld, then it is its dupe. Yet the little man takes the great hoax soinnocently, works in it so headlong and believing, is born red, and dies gray,arranging his toilet, attending on his own health, laying traps for sweet foodand strong wine, setting his heart on a horse or a rifle, made happy with alittle gossip or a little praise, that the great soul cannot choose but laughat such earnest nonsense. “Indeed, these humble considerations make meout of love with greatness. What a disgrace is it to me to take note how manypairs of silk stockings thou hast, namely, these and those that were thepeach-colored ones; or to bear the inventory of thy shirts, as one forsuperfluity, and one other for use!”

Citizens, thinking after the laws of arithmetic, consider the inconvenience ofreceiving strangers at their fireside, reckon narrowly the loss of time and theunusual display; the soul of a better quality thrusts back the unseasonableeconomy into the vaults of life, and says, I will obey the God, and thesacrifice and the fire he will provide. Ibn Hankal, the Arabian geographer,describes a heroic extreme in the hospitality of Sogd, in Bukharia. “WhenI was in Sogd I saw a great building, like a palace, the gates of which wereopen and fixed back to the wall with large nails. I asked the reason, and wastold that the house had not been shut, night or day, for a hundred years.Strangers may present themselves at any hour and in whatever number; the masterhas amply provided for the reception of the men and their animals, and is neverhappier than when they tarry for some time. Nothing of the kind have I seen inany other country.” The magnanimous know very well that they who givetime, or money, or shelter, to the stranger,—so it be done for love andnot for ostentation,—do, as it were, put God under obligation to them, soperfect are the compensations of the universe. In some way the time they seemto lose is redeemed and the pains they seem to take remunerate themselves.These men fan the flame of human love and raise the standard of civil virtueamong mankind. But hospitality must be for service and not for show, or itpulls down the host. The brave soul rates itself too high to value itself bythe splendor of its table and draperies. It gives what it hath, and all ithath, but its own majesty can lend a better grace to bannocks and fair waterthan belong to city feasts.

The temperance of the hero proceeds from the same wish to do no dishonor to theworthiness he has. But he loves it for its elegancy, not for its austerity. Itseems not worth his while to be solemn and denounce with bitternessflesh-eating or wine-drinking, the use of tobacco, or opium, or tea, or silk,or gold. A great man scarcely knows how he dines, how he dresses; but withoutrailing or precision his living is natural and poetic. John Eliot, the IndianApostle, drank water, and said of wine,—“It is a noble, generousliquor and we should be humbly thankful for it, but, as I remember, water wasmade before it.” Better still is the temperance of King David, who pouredout on the ground unto the Lord the water which three of his warriors hadbrought him to drink, at the peril of their lives.

It is told of Brutus, that when he fell on his sword after the battle ofPhilippi, he quoted a line of Euripides,—“O Virtue! I have followedthee through life, and I find thee at last but a shade.” I doubt not thehero is slandered by this report. The heroic soul does not sell its justice andits nobleness. It does not ask to dine nicely and to sleep warm. The essence ofgreatness is the perception that virtue is enough. Poverty is its ornament. Itdoes not need plenty, and can very well abide its loss.

But that which takes my fancy most in the heroic class, is the good-humor andhilarity they exhibit. It is a height to which common duty can very wellattain, to suffer and to dare with solemnity. But these rare souls set opinion,success, and life at so cheap a rate that they will not soothe their enemies bypetitions, or the show of sorrow, but wear their own habitual greatness.Scipio, charged with peculation, refuses to do himself so great a disgrace asto wait for justification, though he had the scroll of his accounts in hishands, but tears it to pieces before the tribunes. Socrates’scondemnation of himself to be maintained in all honor in the Prytaneum, duringhis life, and Sir Thomas More’s playfulness at the scaffold, are of thesame strain. In Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Sea Voyage,” Julettatells the stout captain and his company,—

Juletta. Why, slaves, ’tis in our power to hang ye.
Master. Very likely,
’Tis in our powers, then, to be hanged, and scorn ye.

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

The interest these fine stories have for us, the power of a romance over theboy who grasps the forbidden book under his bench at school, our delight in thehero, is the main fact to our purpose. All these great and transcendentproperties are ours. If we dilate in beholding the Greek energy, the Romanpride, it is that we are already domesticating the same sentiment. Let us findroom for this great guest in our small houses. The first step of worthinesswill be to disabuse us of our superstitious associations with places and times,with number and size. Why should these words, Athenian, Roman, Asia andEngland, so tingle in the ear? Where the heart is, there the muses, there thegods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, ConnecticutRiver and Boston Bay you think paltry places, and the ear loves names offoreign and classic topography. But here we are; and, if we will tarry alittle, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it only that thyself ishere, and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels and the Supreme Beingshall not be absent from the chamber where thou sittest. Epaminondas, brave andaffectionate, does not seem to us to need Olympus to die upon, nor the Syriansunshine. He lies very well where he is. The Jerseys were handsome groundenough for Washington to tread, and London streets for the feet of Milton. Agreat man makes his climate genial in the imagination of men, and its air thebeloved element of all delicate spirits. That country is the fairest which isinhabited by the noblest minds. The pictures which fill the imagination inreading the actions of Pericles, Xenophon, Columbus, Bayard, Sidney, Hampden,teach us how needlessly mean our life is; that we, by the depth of our living,should deck it with more than regal or national splendor, and act on principlesthat should interest man and nature in the length of our days.

We have seen or heard of many extraordinary young men who never ripened, orwhose performance in actual life was not extraordinary. When we see their airand mien, when we hear them speak of society, of books, of religion, we admiretheir superiority; they seem to throw contempt on our entire polity and socialstate; theirs is the tone of a youthful giant who is sent to work revolutions.But they enter an active profession and the forming Colossus shrinks to thecommon size of man. The magic they used was the ideal tendencies, which alwaysmake the Actual ridiculous; but the tough world had its revenge the moment theyput their horses of the sun to plough in its furrow. They found no example andno companion, and their heart fainted. What then? The lesson they gave in theirfirst aspirations is yet true; and a better valor and a purer truth shall oneday organize their belief. Or why should a woman liken herself to anyhistorical woman, and think, because Sappho, or Sévigné, or De Staël, or thecloistered souls who have had genius and cultivation do not satisfy theimagination and the serene Themis, none can,—certainly not she? Why not?She has a new and unattempted problem to solve, perchance that of the happiestnature that ever bloomed. Let the maiden, with erect soul, walk serenely on herway, accept the hint of each new experience, search in turn all the objectsthat solicit her eye, that she may learn the power and the charm of hernew-born being, which is the kindling of a new dawn in the recesses of space.The fair girl who repels interference by a decided and proud choice ofinfluences, so careless of pleasing, so wilful and lofty, inspires everybeholder with somewhat of her own nobleness. The silent heart encourages her; Ofriend, never strike sail to a fear! Come into port greatly, or sail with Godthe seas. Not in vain you live, for every passing eye is cheered and refined bythe vision.

The characteristic of heroism is its persistency. All men have wanderingimpulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have chosen your part,abide by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. Theheroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic. Yet we have theweakness to expect the sympathy of people in those actions whose excellence isthat they outrun sympathy and appeal to a tardy justice. If you would serveyour brother, because it is fit for you to serve him, do not take back yourwords when you find that prudent people do not commend you. Adhere to your ownact, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange andextravagant and broken the monotony of a decorous age. It was a high counselthat I once heard given to a young person,—“Always do what you areafraid to do.” A simple manly character need never make an apology, butshould regard its past action with the calmness of Phocion, when he admittedthat the event of the battle was happy, yet did not regret his dissuasion fromthe battle.

There is no weakness or exposure for which we cannot find consolation in thethought—this is a part of my constitution, part of my relation and officeto my fellow-creature. Has nature covenanted with me that I should never appearto disadvantage, never make a ridiculous figure? Let us be generous of ourdignity as well as of our money. Greatness once and for ever has done withopinion. We tell our charities, not because we wish to be praised for them, notbecause we think they have great merit, but for our justification. It is acapital blunder; as you discover when another man recites his charities.

To speak the truth, even with some austerity, to live with some rigor oftemperance, or some extremes of generosity, seems to be an asceticism whichcommon good-nature would appoint to those who are at ease and in plenty, insign that they feel a brotherhood with the great multitude of suffering men.And not only need we breathe and exercise the soul by assuming the penalties ofabstinence, of debt, of solitude, of unpopularity,—but it behooves thewise man to look with a bold eye into those rarer dangers which sometimesinvade men, and to familiarize himself with disgusting forms of disease, withsounds of execration, and the vision of violent death.

Times of heroism are generally times of terror, but the day never shines inwhich this element may not work. The circ*mstances of man, we say, arehistorically somewhat better in this country and at this hour than perhaps everbefore. More freedom exists for culture. It will not now run against an axe atthe first step out of the beaten track of opinion. But whoso is heroic willalways find crises to try his edge. Human virtue demands her champions andmartyrs, and the trial of persecution always proceeds. It is but the other daythat the brave Lovejoy gave his breast to the bullets of a mob, for the rightsof free speech and opinion, and died when it was better not to live.

I see not any road of perfect peace which a man can walk, but after the counselof his own bosom. Let him quit too much association, let him go home much, andstablish himself in those courses he approves. The unremitting retention ofsimple and high sentiments in obscure duties is hardening the character to thattemper which will work with honor, if need be in the tumult, or on thescaffold. Whatever outrages have happened to men may befall a man again; andvery easily in a republic, if there appear any signs of a decay of religion.Coarse slander, fire, tar and feathers and the gibbet, the youth may freelybring home to his mind and with what sweetness of temper he can, and inquirehow fast he can fix his sense of duty, braving such penalties, whenever it mayplease the next newspaper and a sufficient number of his neighbors to pronouncehis opinions incendiary.

It may calm the apprehension of calamity in the most susceptible heart to seehow quick a bound Nature has set to the utmost infliction of malice. We rapidlyapproach a brink over which no enemy can follow us:—

“Let them rave:
Thou art quiet in thy grave.”

In the gloom of our ignorance of what shall be, in the hour when we are deaf tothe higher voices, who does not envy those who have seen safely to an end theirmanful endeavor? Who that sees the meanness of our politics but inlycongratulates Washington that he is long already wrapped in his shroud, and forever safe; that he was laid sweet in his grave, the hope of humanity not yetsubjugated in him? Who does not sometimes envy the good and brave who are nomore to suffer from the tumults of the natural world, and await with curiouscomplacency the speedy term of his own conversation with finite nature? And yetthe love that will be annihilated sooner than treacherous has already madedeath impossible, and affirms itself no mortal but a native of the deeps ofabsolute and inextinguishable being.

IX.
THE OVER-SOUL

THE OVER-SOUL

There is a difference between one and another hour of life in their authorityand subsequent effect. Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual. Yetthere is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe morereality to them than to all other experiences. For this reason the argumentwhich is always forthcoming to silence those who conceive extraordinary hopesof man, namely the appeal to experience, is for ever invalid and vain. We giveup the past to the objector, and yet we hope. He must explain this hope. Wegrant that human life is mean, but how did we find out that it was mean? Whatis the ground of this uneasiness of ours; of this old discontent? What is theuniversal sense of want and ignorance, but the fine innuendo by which the soulmakes its enormous claim? Why do men feel that the natural history of man hasnever been written, but he is always leaving behind what you have said of him,and it becomes old, and books of metaphysics worthless? The philosophy of sixthousand years has not searched the chambers and magazines of the soul. In itsexperiments there has always remained, in the last analysis, a residuum itcould not resolve. Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being isdescending into us from we know not whence. The most exact calculator has noprescience that somewhat incalculable may not balk the very next moment. I amconstrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than thewill I call mine.

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

The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the onlyprophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest as theearth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-soul,within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one withall other; that common heart of which all sincere conversation is the worship,to which all right action is submission; that overpowering reality whichconfutes our tricks and talents, and constrains every one to pass for what heis, and to speak from his character and not from his tongue, and which evermoretends to pass into our thought and hand and become wisdom and virtue and powerand beauty. We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles.Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universalbeauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE.And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible tous, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeingand the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, areone. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, thetree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul. Only bythe vision of that Wisdom can the horoscope of the ages be read, and by fallingback on our better thoughts, by yielding to the spirit of prophecy which isinnate in every man, we can know what it saith. Every man’s words whospeaks from that life must sound vain to those who do not dwell in the samethought on their own part. I dare not speak for it. My words do not carry itsaugust sense; they fall short and cold. Only itself can inspire whom it will,and behold! their speech shall be lyrical, and sweet, and universal as therising of the wind. Yet I desire, even by profane words, if I may not usesacred, to indicate the heaven of this deity and to report what hints I havecollected of the transcendent simplicity and energy of the Highest Law.

If we consider what happens in conversation, in reveries, in remorse, in timesof passion, in surprises, in the instructions of dreams, wherein often we seeourselves in masquerade,—the droll disguises only magnifying andenhancing a real element and forcing it on our distinct notice,—we shallcatch many hints that will broaden and lighten into knowledge of the secret ofnature. All goes to show that the soul in man is not an organ, but animates andexercises all the organs; is not a function, like the power of memory, ofcalculation, of comparison, but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty,but a light; is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellectand the will; is the background of our being, in which they lie,—animmensity not possessed and that cannot be possessed. From within or frombehind, a light shines through us upon things and makes us aware that we arenothing, but the light is all. A man is the facade of a temple wherein allwisdom and all good abide. What we commonly call man, the eating, drinking,planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, butmisrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, but the soul, whose organ he is,would he let it appear through his action, would make our knees bend. When itbreathes through his intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through hiswill, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love. And theblindness of the intellect begins when it would be something of itself. Theweakness of the will begins when the individual would be something of himself.All reform aims in some one particular to let the soul have its way through us;in other words, to engage us to obey.

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

The sovereignty of this nature whereof we speak is made known by itsindependency of those limitations which circ*mscribe us on every hand. The soulcirc*mscribes all things. As I have said, it contradicts all experience. Inlike manner it abolishes time and space. The influence of the senses has inmost men overpowered the mind to that degree that the walls of time and spacehave come to look real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of theselimits is, in the world, the sign of insanity. Yet time and space are butinverse measures of the force of the soul. The spirit sports with time,—

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

We are often made to feel that there is another youth and age than that whichis measured from the year of our natural birth. Some thoughts always find usyoung, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternalbeauty. Every man parts from that contemplation with the feeling that it ratherbelongs to ages than to mortal life. The least activity of the intellectualpowers redeems us in a degree from the conditions of time. In sickness, inlanguor, give us a strain of poetry or a profound sentence, and we arerefreshed; or produce a volume of Plato or Shakspeare, or remind us of theirnames, and instantly we come into a feeling of longevity. See how the deepdivine thought reduces centuries and millenniums and makes itself presentthrough all ages. Is the teaching of Christ less effective now than it was whenfirst his mouth was opened? The emphasis of facts and persons in my thought hasnothing to do with time. And so always the soul’s scale is one, the scaleof the senses and the understanding is another. Before the revelations of thesoul, Time, Space and Nature shrink away. In common speech we refer all thingsto time, as we habitually refer the immensely sundered stars to one concavesphere. And so we say that the Judgment is distant or near, that the Millenniumapproaches, that a day of certain political, moral, social reforms is at hand,and the like, when we mean that in the nature of things one of the facts wecontemplate is external and fugitive, and the other is permanent and connatewith the soul. The things we now esteem fixed shall, one by one, detachthemselves like ripe fruit from our experience, and fall. The wind shall blowthem none knows whither. The landscape, the figures, Boston, London, are factsas fugitive as any institution past, or any whiff of mist or smoke, and so issociety, and so is the world. The soul looketh steadily forwards, creating aworld before her, leaving worlds behind her. She has no dates, nor rites, norpersons, nor specialties nor men. The soul knows only the soul; the web ofevents is the flowing robe in which she is clothed.

After its own law and not by arithmetic is the rate of its progress to becomputed. The soul’s advances are not made by gradation, such as can berepresented by motion in a straight line, but rather by ascension of state,such as can be represented by metamorphosis,—from the egg to the worm,from the worm to the fly. The growths of genius are of a certain totalcharacter, that does not advance the elect individual first over John, thenAdam, then Richard, and give to each the pain of discoveredinferiority,—but by every throe of growth the man expands there where heworks, passing, at each pulsation, classes, populations, of men. With eachdivine impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of the visible and finite, andcomes out into eternity, and inspires and expires its air. It converses withtruths that have always been spoken in the world, and becomes conscious of acloser sympathy with Zeno and Arrian than with persons in the house.

This is the law of moral and of mental gain. The simple rise as by specificlevity not into a particular virtue, but into the region of all the virtues.They are in the spirit which contains them all. The soul requires purity, butpurity is not it; requires justice, but justice is not that; requiresbeneficence, but is somewhat better; so that there is a kind of descent andaccommodation felt when we leave speaking of moral nature to urge a virtuewhich it enjoins. To the well-born child all the virtues are natural, and notpainfully acquired. Speak to his heart, and the man becomes suddenly virtuous.

Within the same sentiment is the germ of intellectual growth, which obeys thesame law. Those who are capable of humility, of justice, of love, ofaspiration, stand already on a platform that commands the sciences and arts,speech and poetry, action and grace. For whoso dwells in this moral beatitudealready anticipates those special powers which men prize so highly. The loverhas no talent, no skill, which passes for quite nothing with his enamouredmaiden, however little she may possess of related faculty; and the heart whichabandons itself to the Supreme Mind finds itself related to all its works, andwill travel a royal road to particular knowledges and powers. In ascending tothis primary and aboriginal sentiment we have come from our remote station onthe circumference instantaneously to the centre of the world, where, as in thecloset of God, we see causes, and anticipate the universe, which is but a sloweffect.

One mode of the divine teaching is the incarnation of the spirit in aform,—in forms, like my own. I live in society, with persons who answerto thoughts in my own mind, or express a certain obedience to the greatinstincts to which I live. I see its presence to them. I am certified of acommon nature; and these other souls, these separated selves, draw me asnothing else can. They stir in me the new emotions we call passion; of love,hatred, fear, admiration, pity; thence come conversation, competition,persuasion, cities and war. Persons are supplementary to the primary teachingof the soul. In youth we are mad for persons. Childhood and youth see all theworld in them. But the larger experience of man discovers the identical natureappearing through them all. Persons themselves acquaint us with the impersonal.In all conversation between two persons tacit reference is made, as to a thirdparty, to a common nature. That third party or common nature is not social; itis impersonal; is God. And so in groups where debate is earnest, and especiallyon high questions, the company become aware that the thought rises to an equallevel in all bosoms, that all have a spiritual property in what was said, aswell as the sayer. They all become wiser than they were. It arches over themlike a temple, this unity of thought in which every heart beats with noblersense of power and duty, and thinks and acts with unusual solemnity. All areconscious of attaining to a higher self-possession. It shines for all. There isa certain wisdom of humanity which is common to the greatest men with thelowest, and which our ordinary education often labors to silence and obstruct.The mind is one, and the best minds, who love truth for its own sake, thinkmuch less of property in truth. They accept it thankfully everywhere, and donot label or stamp it with any man’s name, for it is theirs longbeforehand, and from eternity. The learned and the studious of thought have nomonopoly of wisdom. Their violence of direction in some degree disqualifiesthem to think truly. We owe many valuable observations to people who are notvery acute or profound, and who say the thing without effort which we want andhave long been hunting in vain. The action of the soul is oftener in that whichis felt and left unsaid than in that which is said in any conversation. Itbroods over every society, and they unconsciously seek for it in each other. Weknow better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at thesame time that we are much more. I feel the same truth how often in my trivialconversation with my neighbors, that somewhat higher in each of us overlooksthis by-play, and Jove nods to Jove from behind each of us.

Men descend to meet. In their habitual and mean service to the world, for whichthey forsake their native nobleness, they resemble those Arabian sheiks whodwell in mean houses and affect an external poverty, to escape the rapacity ofthe Pacha, and reserve all their display of wealth for their interior andguarded retirements.

As it is present in all persons, so it is in every period of life. It is adultalready in the infant man. In my dealing with my child, my Latin and Greek, myaccomplishments and my money stead me nothing; but as much soul as I haveavails. If I am wilful, he sets his will against mine, one for one, and leavesme, if I please, the degradation of beating him by my superiority of strength.But if I renounce my will and act for the soul, setting that up as umpirebetween us two, out of his young eyes looks the same soul; he reveres and loveswith me.

The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we see it,let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose. Foolish people ask you, when youhave spoken what they do not wish to hear, ‘How do you know it is truth,and not an error of your own?’ We know truth when we see it, fromopinion, as we know when we are awake that we are awake. It was a grandsentence of Emanuel Swedenborg, which would alone indicate the greatness ofthat man’s perception,—“It is no proof of a man’sunderstanding to be able to confirm whatever he pleases; but to be able todiscern that what is true is true, and that what is false is false,—thisis the mark and character of intelligence.” In the book I read, the goodthought returns to me, as every truth will, the image of the whole soul. To thebad thought which I find in it, the same soul becomes a discerning, separatingsword, and lops it away. We are wiser than we know. If we will not interferewith our thought, but will act entirely, or see how the thing stands in God, weknow the particular thing, and every thing, and every man. For the Maker of allthings and all persons stands behind us and casts his dread omniscience throughus over things.

But beyond this recognition of its own in particular passages of theindividual’s experience, it also reveals truth. And here we should seekto reinforce ourselves by its very presence, and to speak with a worthier,loftier strain of that advent. For the soul’s communication of truth isthe highest event in nature, since it then does not give somewhat from itself,but it gives itself, or passes into and becomes that man whom it enlightens;or, in proportion to that truth he receives, it takes him to itself.

We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its manifestations of its ownnature, by the term Revelation. These are always attended by the emotionof the sublime. For this communication is an influx of the Divine mind into ourmind. It is an ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing surges of thesea of life. Every distinct apprehension of this central commandment agitatesmen with awe and delight. A thrill passes through all men at the reception ofnew truth, or at the performance of a great action, which comes out of theheart of nature. In these communications the power to see is not separated fromthe will to do, but the insight proceeds from obedience, and the obedienceproceeds from a joyful perception. Every moment when the individual feelshimself invaded by it is memorable. By the necessity of our constitution acertain enthusiasm attends the individual’s consciousness of that divinepresence. The character and duration of this enthusiasm varies with the stateof the individual, from an ecstasy and trance and propheticinspiration,—which is its rarer appearance,—to the faintest glow ofvirtuous emotion, in which form it warms, like our household fires, all thefamilies and associations of men, and makes society possible. A certaintendency to insanity has always attended the opening of the religious sense inmen, as if they had been “blasted with excess of light.” Thetrances of Socrates, the “union” of Plotinus, the vision ofPorphyry, the conversion of Paul, the aurora of Behmen, the convulsions ofGeorge Fox and his Quakers, the illumination of Swedenborg, are of this kind.What was in the case of these remarkable persons a ravishment, has, ininnumerable instances in common life, been exhibited in less striking manner.Everywhere the history of religion betrays a tendency to enthusiasm. Therapture of the Moravian and Quietist; the opening of the internal sense of theWord, in the language of the New Jerusalem Church; the revival of theCalvinistic churches; the experiences of the Methodists, are varyingforms of that shudder of awe and delight with which the individual soul alwaysmingles with the universal soul.

The nature of these revelations is the same; they are perceptions of theabsolute law. They are solutions of the soul’s own questions. They do notanswer the questions which the understanding asks. The soul answers never bywords, but by the thing itself that is inquired after.

Revelation is the disclosure of the soul. The popular notion of a revelation isthat it is a telling of fortunes. In past oracles of the soul the understandingseeks to find answers to sensual questions, and undertakes to tell from God howlong men shall exist, what their hands shall do and who shall be their company,adding names and dates and places. But we must pick no locks. We must checkthis low curiosity. An answer in words is delusive; it is really no answer tothe questions you ask. Do not require a description of the countries towardswhich you sail. The description does not describe them to you, and to-morrowyou arrive there and know them by inhabiting them. Men ask concerning theimmortality of the soul, the employments of heaven, the state of the sinner,and so forth. They even dream that Jesus has left replies to precisely theseinterrogatories. Never a moment did that sublime spirit speak in theirpatois. To truth, justice, love, the attributes of the soul, the idea ofimmutableness is essentially associated. Jesus, living in these moralsentiments, heedless of sensual fortunes, heeding only the manifestations ofthese, never made the separation of the idea of duration from the essence ofthese attributes, nor uttered a syllable concerning the duration of the soul.It was left to his disciples to sever duration from the moral elements, and toteach the immortality of the soul as a doctrine, and maintain it by evidences.The moment the doctrine of the immortality is separately taught, man is alreadyfallen. In the flowing of love, in the adoration of humility, there is noquestion of continuance. No inspired man ever asks this question or condescendsto these evidences. For the soul is true to itself, and the man in whom it isshed abroad cannot wander from the present, which is infinite, to a futurewhich would be finite.

These questions which we lust to ask about the future are a confession of sin.God has no answer for them. No answer in words can reply to a question ofthings. It is not in an arbitrary “decree of God,” but in thenature of man, that a veil shuts down on the facts of to-morrow; for the soulwill not have us read any other cipher than that of cause and effect. By thisveil which curtains events it instructs the children of men to live in to-day.The only mode of obtaining an answer to these questions of the senses is toforego all low curiosity, and, accepting the tide of being which floats us intothe secret of nature, work and live, work and live, and all unawares theadvancing soul has built and forged for itself a new condition, and thequestion and the answer are one.

By the same fire, vital, consecrating, celestial, which burns until it shalldissolve all things into the waves and surges of an ocean of light, we see andknow each other, and what spirit each is of. Who can tell the grounds of hisknowledge of the character of the several individuals in his circle of friends?No man. Yet their acts and words do not disappoint him. In that man, though heknew no ill of him, he put no trust. In that other, though they had seldom met,authentic signs had yet passed, to signify that he might be trusted as one whohad an interest in his own character. We know each other very well,—whichof us has been just to himself and whether that which we teach or behold isonly an aspiration or is our honest effort also.

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

By virtue of this inevitable nature, private will is overpowered, and, maugreour efforts or our imperfections, your genius will speak from you, and minefrom me. That which we are, we shall teach, not voluntarily but involuntarily.Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open, and thoughtsgo out of our minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened.Character teaches over our head. The infallible index of true progress is foundin the tone the man takes. Neither his age, nor his breeding, nor company, norbooks, nor actions, nor talents, nor all together can hinder him from beingdeferential to a higher spirit than his own. If he have not found his home inGod, his manners, his forms of speech, the turn of his sentences, the build,shall I say, of all his opinions will involuntarily confess it, let him braveit out how he will. If he have found his centre, the Deity will shine throughhim, through all the disguises of ignorance, of ungenial temperament, ofunfavorable circ*mstance. The tone of seeking is one, and the tone of having isanother.

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

The same Omniscience flows into the intellect, and makes what we call genius.Much of the wisdom of the world is not wisdom, and the most illuminated classof men are no doubt superior to literary fame, and are not writers. Among themultitude of scholars and authors, we feel no hallowing presence; we aresensible of a knack and skill rather than of inspiration; they have a light andknow not whence it comes and call it their own; their talent is someexaggerated faculty, some overgrown member, so that their strength is adisease. In these instances the intellectual gifts do not make the impressionof virtue, but almost of vice; and we feel that a man’s talents stand inthe way of his advancement in truth. But genius is religious. It is a largerimbibing of the common heart. It is not anomalous, but more like and not lesslike other men. There is in all great poets a wisdom of humanity which issuperior to any talents they exercise. The author, the wit, the partisan, thefine gentleman, does not take place of the man. Humanity shines in Homer, inChaucer, in Spenser, in Shakspeare, in Milton. They are content with truth.They use the positive degree. They seem frigid and phlegmatic to those who havebeen spiced with the frantic passion and violent coloring of inferior butpopular writers. For they are poets by the free course which they allow to theinforming soul, which through their eyes beholds again and blesses the thingswhich it hath made. The soul is superior to its knowledge, wiser than any ofits works. The great poet makes us feel our own wealth, and then we think lessof his compositions. His best communication to our mind is to teach us todespise all he has done. Shakspeare carries us to such a lofty strain ofintelligent activity as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own; and we thenfeel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in other hours weextol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold of real naturethan the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration whichuttered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to dayfor ever. Why then should I make account of Hamlet and Lear, as if we had notthe soul from which they fell as syllables from the tongue?

This energy does not descend into individual life on any other condition thanentire possession. It comes to the lowly and simple; it comes to whomsoeverwill put off what is foreign and proud; it comes as insight; it comes asserenity and grandeur. When we see those whom it inhabits, we are apprised ofnew degrees of greatness. From that inspiration the man comes back with achanged tone. He does not talk with men with an eye to their opinion. He triesthem. It requires of us to be plain and true. The vain traveller attempts toembellish his life by quoting my lord and the prince and the countess, who thussaid or did to him. The ambitious vulgar show you their spoons andbrooches and rings, and preserve their cards and compliments. The morecultivated, in their account of their own experience, cull out the pleasing,poetic circ*mstance,—the visit to Rome, the man of genius they saw, thebrilliant friend They know; still further on perhaps the gorgeous landscape,the mountain lights, the mountain thoughts they enjoyed yesterday,—and soseek to throw a romantic color over their life. But the soul that ascends toworship the great God is plain and true; has no rose-color, no fine friends, nochivalry, no adventures; does not want admiration; dwells in the hour that nowis, in the earnest experience of the common day,—by reason of the presentmoment and the mere trifle having become porous to thought and bibulous of thesea of light.

Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks likeword-catching. The simplest utterances are worthiest to be written, yet arethey so cheap and so things of course, that in the infinite riches of the soulit is like gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or bottling a little air ina phial, when the whole earth and the whole atmosphere are ours. Nothing canpass there, or make you one of the circle, but the casting aside yourtrappings, and dealing man to man in naked truth, plain confession, andomniscient affirmation.

Souls such as these treat you as gods would, walk as gods in the earth,accepting without any admiration your wit, your bounty, your virtueeven,—say rather your act of duty, for your virtue they own as theirproper blood, royal as themselves, and over-royal, and the father of the gods.But what rebuke their plain fraternal bearing casts on the mutual flattery withwhich authors solace each other and wound themselves! These flatter not. I donot wonder that these men go to see Cromwell and Christina and Charles theSecond and James the First and the Grand Turk. For they are, in their ownelevation, the fellows of kings, and must feel the servile tone of conversationin the world. They must always be a godsend to princes, for they confront them,a king to a king, without ducking or concession, and give a high nature therefreshment and satisfaction of resistance, of plain humanity, of evencompanionship and of new ideas. They leave them wiser and superior men. Soulslike these make us feel that sincerity is more excellent than flattery. Deal soplainly with man and woman as to constrain the utmost sincerity and destroy allhope of trifling with you. It is the highest compliment you can pay. Their“highest praising,” said Milton, “is not flattery, and theirplainest advice is a kind of praising.”

Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul. The simplestperson who in his integrity worships God, becomes God; yet for ever and everthe influx of this better and universal self is new and unsearchable. Itinspires awe and astonishment. How dear, how soothing to man, arises the ideaof God, peopling the lonely place, effacing the scars of our mistakes anddisappointments! When we have broken our god of tradition and ceased from ourgod of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with his presence. It is thedoubling of the heart itself, nay, the infinite enlargement of the heart with apower of growth to a new infinity on every side. It inspires in man aninfallible trust. He has not the conviction, but the sight, that the best isthe true, and may in that thought easily dismiss all particular uncertaintiesand fears, and adjourn to the sure revelation of time the solution of hisprivate riddles. He is sure that his welfare is dear to the heart of being. Inthe presence of law to his mind he is overflowed with a reliance so universalthat it sweeps away all cherished hopes and the most stable projects of mortalcondition in its flood. He believes that he cannot escape from his good. Thethings that are really for thee gravitate to thee. You are running to seek yourfriend. Let your feet run, but your mind need not. If you do not find him, willyou not acquiesce that it is best you should not find him? for there is apower, which, as it is in you, is in him also, and could therefore very wellbring you together, if it were for the best. You are preparing with eagernessto go and render a service to which your talent and your taste invite you, thelove of men and the hope of fame. Has it not occurred to you that you have noright to go, unless you are equally willing to be prevented from going? O,believe, as thou livest, that every sound that is spoken over the round world,which thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate on thine ear! Every proverb, everybook, every byword that belongs to thee for aid or comfort, shall surely comehome through open or winding passages. Every friend whom not thy fantastic willbut the great and tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his embrace.And this because the heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not awall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rollsuninterruptedly an endless circulation through all men, as the water of theglobe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one.

Let man then learn the revelation of all nature and all thought to his heart;this, namely; that the Highest dwells with him; that the sources of nature arein his own mind, if the sentiment of duty is there. But if he would know whatthe great God speaketh, he must ‘go into his closet and shut thedoor,’ as Jesus said. God will not make himself manifest to cowards. Hemust greatly listen to himself, withdrawing himself from all the accents ofother men’s devotion. Even their prayers are hurtful to him, until hehave made his own. Our religion vulgarly stands on numbers of believers.Whenever the appeal is made,—no matter how indirectly,—to numbers,proclamation is then and there made that religion is not. He that finds God asweet enveloping thought to him never counts his company. When I sit in thatpresence, who shall dare to come in? When I rest in perfect humility, when Iburn with pure love, what can Calvin or Swedenborg say?

It makes no difference whether the appeal is to numbers or to one. The faiththat stands on authority is not faith. The reliance on authority measures thedecline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul. The position men have given toJesus, now for many centuries of history, is a position of authority. Itcharacterizes themselves. It cannot alter the eternal facts. Great is the soul,and plain. It is no flatterer, it is no follower; it never appeals from itself.It believes in itself. Before the immense possibilities of man all mereexperience, all past biography, however spotless and sainted, shrinks away.Before that heaven which our presentiments foreshow us, we cannot easily praiseany form of life we have seen or read of. We not only affirm that we have fewgreat men, but, absolutely speaking, that we have none; that we have nohistory, no record of any character or mode of living that entirely contentsus. The saints and demigods whom history worships we are constrained to acceptwith a grain of allowance. Though in our lonely hours we draw a new strengthout of their memory, yet, pressed on our attention, as they are by thethoughtless and customary, they fatigue and invade. The soul gives itself,alone, original and pure, to the Lonely, Original and Pure, who, on thatcondition, gladly inhabits, leads and speaks through it. Then is it glad, youngand nimble. It is not wise, but it sees through all things. It is not calledreligious, but it is innocent. It calls the light its own, and feels that thegrass grows and the stone falls by a law inferior to, and dependent on, itsnature. Behold, it saith, I am born into the great, the universal mind. I, theimperfect, adore my own Perfect. I am somehow receptive of the great soul, andthereby I do Overlook the sun and the stars and feel them to be the fairaccidents and effects which change and pass. More and more the surges ofeverlasting nature enter into me, and I become public and human in my regardsand actions. So come I to live in thoughts and act with energies which areimmortal. Thus revering the soul, and learning, as the ancient said, that“its beauty is immense,” man will come to see that the world is theperennial miracle which the soul worketh, and be less astonished at particularwonders; he will learn that there is no profane history; that all history issacred; that the universe is represented in an atom, in a moment of time. Hewill weave no longer a spotted life of shreds and patches, but he will livewith a divine unity. He will cease from what is base and frivolous in his lifeand be content with all places and with any service he can render. He willcalmly front the morrow in the negligency of that trust which carries God withit and so hath already the whole future in the bottom of the heart.

X.
CIRCLES

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

CIRCLES

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

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

There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanenceis but a word of degrees. Our globe seen by God is a transparent law, not amass of facts. The law dissolves the fact and holds it fluid. Our culture isthe predominance of an idea which draws after it this train of cities andinstitutions. Let us rise into another idea: they will disappear. The Greeksculpture is all melted away, as if it had been statues of ice; here and therea solitary figure or fragment remaining, as we see flecks and scraps of snowleft in cold dells and mountain clefts in June and July. For the genius thatcreated it creates now somewhat else. The Greek letters last a little longer,but are already passing under the same sentence and tumbling into theinevitable pit which the creation of new thought opens for all that is old. Thenew continents are built out of the ruins of an old planet; the new races fedout of the decomposition of the foregoing. New arts destroy the old. See theinvestment of capital in aqueducts made useless by hydraulics; fortifications,by gunpowder; roads and canals, by railways; sails, by steam; steam byelectricity.

You admire this tower of granite, weathering the hurts of so many ages. Yet alittle waving hand built this huge wall, and that which builds is better thanthat which is built. The hand that built can topple it down much faster. Betterthan the hand and nimbler was the invisible thought which wrought through it;and thus ever, behind the coarse effect, is a fine cause, which, being narrowlyseen, is itself the effect of a finer cause. Every thing looks permanent untilits secret is known. A rich estate appears to women a firm and lasting fact; toa merchant, one easily created out of any materials, and easily lost. Anorchard, good tillage, good grounds, seem a fixture, like a gold mine, or ariver, to a citizen; but to a large farmer, not much more fixed than the stateof the crop. Nature looks provokingly stable and secular, but it has a causelike all the rest; and when once I comprehend that, will these fields stretchso immovably wide, these leaves hang so individually considerable? Permanenceis a word of degrees. Every thing is medial. Moons are no more bounds tospiritual power than bat-balls.

The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he hasa helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts areclassified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commandshis own. The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ringimperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles,and that without end. The extent to which this generation of circles, wheelwithout wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul.For it is the inert effort of each thought, having formed itself into acircular wave of circ*mstance,—as for instance an empire, rules of anart, a local usage, a religious rite,—to heap itself on that ridge and tosolidify and hem in the life. But if the soul is quick and strong it burstsover that boundary on all sides and expands another orbit on the great deep,which also runs up into a high wave, with attempt again to stop and to bind.But the heart refuses to be imprisoned; in its first and narrowest pulses, italready tends outward with a vast force and to immense and innumerableexpansions.

Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series. Every general law only aparticular fact of some more general law presently to disclose itself. There isno outside, no inclosing wall, no circumference to us. The man finishes hisstory,—how good! how final! how it puts a new face on all things! Hefills the sky. Lo! on the other side rises also a man and draws a circle aroundthe circle we had just pronounced the outline of the sphere. Then already isour first speaker not man, but only a first speaker. His only redress isforthwith to draw a circle outside of his antagonist. And so men do bythemselves. The result of to-day, which haunts the mind and cannot be escaped,will presently be abridged into a word, and the principle that seemed toexplain nature will itself be included as one example of a boldergeneralization. In the thought of to-morrow there is a power to upheave all thycreed, all the creeds, all the literatures of the nations, and marshal thee toa heaven which no epic dream has yet depicted. Every man is not so much aworkman in the world as he is a suggestion of that he should be. Men walk asprophecies of the next age.

Step by step we scale this mysterious ladder: the steps are actions; the newprospect is power. Every several result is threatened and judged by that whichfollows. Every one seems to be contradicted by the new; it is only limited bythe new. The new statement is always hated by the old, and, to those dwellingin the old, comes like an abyss of scepticism. But the eye soon gets wonted toit, for the eye and it are effects of one cause; then its innocency and benefitappear, and presently, all its energy spent, it pales and dwindles before therevelation of the new hour.

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

There are no fixtures to men, if we appeal to consciousness. Every man supposeshimself not to be fully understood; and if there is any truth in him, if herests at last on the divine soul, I see not how it can be otherwise. The lastchamber, the last closet, he must feel was never opened; there is always aresiduum unknown, unanalyzable. That is, every man believes that he has agreater possibility.

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

The continual effort to raise himself above himself, to work a pitch above hislast height, betrays itself in a man’s relations. We thirst forapprobation, yet cannot forgive the approver. The sweet of nature is love; yet,if I have a friend I am tormented by my imperfections. The love of me accusesthe other party. If he were high enough to slight me, then could I love him,and rise by my affection to new heights. A man’s growth is seen in thesuccessive choirs of his friends. For every friend whom he loses for truth, hegains a better. I thought as I walked in the woods and mused on my friends, whyshould I play with them this game of idolatry? I know and see too well, whennot voluntarily blind, the speedy limits of persons called high and worthy.Rich, noble and great they are by the liberality of our speech, but truth issad. O blessed Spirit, whom I forsake for these, they are not thou! Everypersonal consideration that we allow costs us heavenly state. We sell thethrones of angels for a short and turbulent pleasure.

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

Each new step we take in thought reconciles twenty seemingly discordant facts,as expressions of one law. Aristotle and Plato are reckoned the respectiveheads of two schools. A wise man will see that Aristotle platonizes. By goingone step farther back in thought, discordant opinions are reconciled by beingseen to be two extremes of one principle, and we can never go so far back as topreclude a still higher vision.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all thingsare at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, andno man knows what is safe, or where it will end. There is not a piece ofscience but its flank may be turned to-morrow; there is not any literaryreputation, not the so-called eternal names of fame, that may not be revisedand condemned. The very hopes of man, the thoughts of his heart, the religionof nations, the manners and morals of mankind are all at the mercy of a newgeneralization. Generalization is always a new influx of the divinity into themind. Hence the thrill that attends it.

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

There are degrees in idealism. We learn first to play with it academically, asthe magnet was once a toy. Then we see in the heyday of youth and poetry thatit may be true, that it is true in gleams and fragments. Then its countenancewaxes stern and grand, and we see that it must be true. It now shows itselfethical and practical. We learn that God is; that he is in me; and that allthings are shadows of him. The idealism of Berkeley is only a crude statementof the idealism of Jesus, and that again is a crude statement of the fact thatall nature is the rapid efflux of goodness executing and organizing itself.Much more obviously is history and the state of the world at any one timedirectly dependent on the intellectual classification then existing in theminds of men. The things which are dear to men at this hour are so on accountof the ideas which have emerged on their mental horizon, and which cause thepresent order of things, as a tree bears its apples. A new degree of culturewould instantly revolutionize the entire system of human pursuits.

Conversation is a game of circles. In conversation we pluck up thetermini which bound the common of silence on every side. The parties arenot to be judged by the spirit they partake and even express under thisPentecost. To-morrow they will have receded from this high-water mark.To-morrow you shall find them stooping under the old pack-saddles. Yet let usenjoy the cloven flame whilst it glows on our walls. When each new speakerstrikes a new light, emancipates us from the oppression of the last speaker, tooppress us with the greatness and exclusiveness of his own thought, then yieldsus to another redeemer, we seem to recover our rights, to become men. O, whattruths profound and executable only in ages and orbs, are supposed in theannouncement of every truth! In common hours, society sits cold and statuesque.We all stand waiting, empty,—knowing, possibly, that we can be full,surrounded by mighty symbols which are not symbols to us, but prose and trivialtoys. Then cometh the god and converts the statues into fiery men, and by aflash of his eye burns up the veil which shrouded all things, and the meaningof the very furniture, of cup and saucer, of chair and clock and tester, ismanifest. The facts which loomed so large in the fogs ofyesterday,—property, climate, breeding, personal beauty and the like,have strangely changed their proportions. All that we reckoned settled shakesand rattles; and literatures, cities, climates, religions, leave theirfoundations and dance before our eyes. And yet here again see the swiftcirc*mspection! Good as is discourse, silence is better, and shames it. Thelength of the discourse indicates the distance of thought betwixt the speakerand the hearer. If they were at a perfect understanding in any part, no wordswould be necessary thereon. If at one in all parts, no words would be suffered.

Literature is a point outside of our hodiernal circle through which a new onemay be described. The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence wemay command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it. Wefill ourselves with ancient learning, install ourselves the best we can inGreek, in Punic, in Roman houses, only that we may wiselier see French, Englishand American houses and modes of living. In like manner we see literature bestfrom the midst of wild nature, or from the din of affairs, or from a highreligion. The field cannot be well seen from within the field. The astronomermust have his diameter of the earth’s orbit as a base to find theparallax of any star.

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

We have the same need to command a view of the religion of the world. We cannever see Christianity from the catechism:—from the pastures, from a boatin the pond, from amidst the songs of wood-birds we possibly may. Cleansed bythe elemental light and wind, steeped in the sea of beautiful forms which thefield offers us, we may chance to cast a right glance back upon biography.Christianity is rightly dear to the best of mankind; yet was there never ayoung philosopher whose breeding had fallen into the Christian church by whomthat brave text of Paul’s was not specially prized:—“Thenshall also the Son be subject unto Him who put all things under him, that Godmay be all in all.” Let the claims and virtues of persons be never sogreat and welcome, the instinct of man presses eagerly onward to the impersonaland illimitable, and gladly arms itself against the dogmatism of bigots withthis generous word out of the book itself.

The natural world may be conceived of as a system of concentric circles, and wenow and then detect in nature slight dislocations which apprise us that thissurface on which we now stand is not fixed, but sliding. These manifoldtenacious qualities, this chemistry and vegetation, these metals and animals,which seem to stand there for their own sake, are means and methodsonly,—are words of God, and as fugitive as other words. Has thenaturalist or chemist learned his craft, who has explored the gravity of atomsand the elective affinities, who has not yet discerned the deeper law whereofthis is only a partial or approximate statement, namely that like draws tolike, and that the goods which belong to you gravitate to you and need not bepursued with pains and cost? Yet is that statement approximate also, and notfinal. Omnipresence is a higher fact. Not through subtle subterranean channelsneed friend and fact be drawn to their counterpart, but, rightly considered,these things proceed from the eternal generation of the soul. Cause and effectare two sides of one fact.

The same law of eternal procession ranges all that we call the virtues, andextinguishes each in the light of a better. The great man will not be prudentin the popular sense; all his prudence will be so much deduction from hisgrandeur. But it behooves each to see, when he sacrifices prudence, to what godhe devotes it; if to ease and pleasure, he had better be prudent still; if to agreat trust, he can well spare his mule and panniers who has a winged chariotinstead. Geoffrey draws on his boots to go through the woods, that his feet maybe safer from the bite of snakes; Aaron never thinks of such a peril. In manyyears neither is harmed by such an accident. Yet it seems to me that with everyprecaution you take against such an evil you put yourself into the power of theevil. I suppose that the highest prudence is the lowest prudence. Is this toosudden a rushing from the centre to the verge of our orbit? Think how manytimes we shall fall back into pitiful calculations before we take up our restin the great sentiment, or make the verge of to-day the new centre. Besides,your bravest sentiment is familiar to the humblest men. The poor and the lowhave their way of expressing the last facts of philosophy as well as you.“Blessed be nothing” and “The worse things are, the betterthey are” are proverbs which express the transcendentalism of commonlife.

One man’s justice is another’s injustice; one man’s beautyanother’s ugliness; one man’s wisdom another’s folly; as onebeholds the same objects from a higher point. One man thinks justice consistsin paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is veryremiss in this duty and makes the creditor wait tediously. But that second manhas his own way of looking at things; asks himself Which debt must I pay first,the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor? the debt of money, or the debtof thought to mankind, of genius to nature? For you, O broker, there is noother principle but arithmetic. For me, commerce is of trivial import; love,faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred; nor can Idetach one duty, like you, from all other duties, and concentrate my forcesmechanically on the payment of moneys. Let me live onward; you shall find that,though slower, the progress of my character will liquidate all these debtswithout injustice to higher claims. If a man should dedicate himself to thepayment of notes, would not this be injustice? Does he owe no debt but money?And are all claims on him to be postponed to a landlord’s or abanker’s?

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

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

It is the highest power of divine moments that they abolish our contritionsalso. I accuse myself of sloth and unprofitableness day by day; but when thesewaves of God flow into me I no longer reckon lost time. I no longer poorlycompute my possible achievement by what remains to me of the month or the year;for these moments confer a sort of omnipresence and omnipotence which asksnothing of duration, but sees that the energy of the mind is commensurate withthe work to be done, without time.

And thus, O circular philosopher, I hear some reader exclaim, you have arrivedat a fine Pyrrhonism, at an equivalence and indifferency of all actions, andwould fain teach us that if we are true, forsooth, our crimes may belively stones out of which we shall construct the temple of the true God!

I am not careful to justify myself. I own I am gladdened by seeing thepredominance of the saccharine principle throughout vegetable nature, and notless by beholding in morals that unrestrained inundation of the principle ofgood into every chink and hole that selfishness has left open, yea intoselfishness and sin itself; so that no evil is pure, nor hell itself withoutit* extreme satisfactions. But lest I should mislead any when I have my ownhead and obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am only anexperimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discrediton what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. Iunsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simplyexperiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.

Yet this incessant movement and progression which all things partake couldnever become sensible to us but by contrast to some principle of fixture orstability in the soul. Whilst the eternal generation of circles proceeds, theeternal generator abides. That central life is somewhat superior to creation,superior to knowledge and thought, and contains all its circles. For ever itlabors to create a life and thought as Large and excellent as itself, but invain, for that which is made instructs how to make a better.

Thus there is no sleep, no pause, no preservation, but all things renew,germinate and spring. Why should we import rags and relics into the new hour?Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease; all others run intothis one. We call it by many names,—fever, intemperance, insanity,stupidity and crime; they are all forms of old age; they are rest,conservatism, appropriation, inertia; not newness, not the way onward. Wegrizzle every day. I see no need of it. Whilst we converse with what is aboveus, we do not grow old, but grow young. Infancy, youth, receptive, aspiring,with religious eye looking upward, counts itself nothing and abandons itself tothe instruction flowing from all sides. But the man and woman of seventy assumeto know all, they have outlived their hope, they renounce aspiration, acceptthe actual for the necessary and talk down to the young. Let them, then, becomeorgans of the Holy Ghost; let them be lovers; let them behold truth; and theireyes are uplifted, their wrinkles smoothed, they are perfumed again with hopeand power. This old age ought not to creep on a human mind. In nature everymoment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only issacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit. No lovecan be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love. No truthso sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts. Peoplewish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope forthem.

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

The difference between talents and character is adroitness to keep the old andtrodden round, and power and courage to make a new road to new and bettergoals. Character makes an overpowering present; a cheerful, determined hour,which fortifies all the company by making them see that much is possible andexcellent that was not thought of. Character dulls the impression of particularevents. When we see the conqueror we do not think much of any one battle orsuccess. We see that we had exaggerated the difficulty. It was easy to him. Thegreat man is not convulsible or tormentable; events pass over him without muchimpression. People say sometimes, ‘See what I have overcome; see howcheerful I am; see how completely I have triumphed over these blackevents.’ Not if they still remind me of the black event. True conquest isthe causing the calamity to fade and disappear as an early cloud ofinsignificant result in a history so large and advancing.

The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, tobe surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory and to dosomething without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle. Nothinggreat was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful; it isby abandonment. The great moments of history are the facilities of performancethrough the strength of ideas, as the works of genius and religion. “Aman,” said Oliver Cromwell, “never rises so high as when he knowsnot whither he is going.” Dreams and drunkenness, the use of opium andalcohol are the semblance and counterfeit of this oracular genius, and hencetheir dangerous attraction for men. For the like reason they ask the aid ofwild passions, as in gaming and war, to ape in some manner these flames andgenerosities of the heart.

XI.
INTELLECT

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

INTELLECT

Every substance is negatively electric to that which stands above it in thechemical tables, positively to that which stands below it. Water dissolves woodand iron and salt; air dissolves water; electric fire dissolves air, but theintellect dissolves fire, gravity, laws, method, and the subtlest unnamedrelations of nature in its resistless menstruum. Intellect lies behind genius,which is intellect constructive. Intellect is the simple power anterior to allaction or construction. Gladly would I unfold in calm degrees a natural historyof the intellect, but what man has yet been able to mark the steps andboundaries of that transparent essence? The first questions are always to beasked, and the wisest doctor is gravelled by the inquisitiveness of a child.How can we speak of the action of the mind under any divisions, as of itsknowledge, of its ethics, of its works, and so forth, since it melts will intoperception, knowledge into act? Each becomes the other. Itself alone is. Itsvision is not like the vision of the eye, but is union with the things known.

Intellect and intellection signify to the common ear consideration of abstracttruth. The considerations of time and place, of you and me, of profit and hurttyrannize over most men’s minds. Intellect separates the fact considered,from you, from all local and personal reference, and discerns it as if itexisted for its own sake. Heracl*tus looked upon the affections as dense andcolored mists. In the fog of good and evil affections it is hard for man towalk forward in a straight line. Intellect is void of affection and sees anobject as it stands in the light of science, cool and disengaged. The intellectgoes out of the individual, floats over its own personality, and regards it asa fact, and not as I and mine. He who is immersed in whatconcerns person or place cannot see the problem of existence. This theintellect always ponders. Nature shows all things formed and bound. Theintellect pierces the form, overleaps the wall, detects intrinsic likenessbetween remote things and reduces all things into a few principles.

The making a fact the subject of thought raises it. All that mass of mental andmoral phenomena which we do not make objects of voluntary thought, come withinthe power of fortune; they constitute the circ*mstance of daily life; they aresubject to change, to fear, and hope. Every man beholds his human conditionwith a degree of melancholy. As a ship aground is battered by the waves, soman, imprisoned in mortal life, lies open to the mercy of coming events. But atruth, separated by the intellect, is no longer a subject of destiny. We beholdit as a god upraised above care and fear. And so any fact in our life, or anyrecord of our fancies or reflections, disentangled from the web of ourunconsciousness, becomes an object impersonal and immortal. It is the pastrestored, but embalmed. A better art than that of Egypt has taken fear andcorruption out of it. It is eviscerated of care. It is offered for science.What is addressed to us for contemplation does not threaten us but makes usintellectual beings.

The growth of the intellect is spontaneous in every expansion. The mind thatgrows could not predict the times, the means, the mode of that spontaneity. Godenters by a private door into every individual. Long prior to the age ofreflection is the thinking of the mind. Out of darkness it came insensibly intothe marvellous light of to-day. In the period of infancy it accepted anddisposed of all impressions from the surrounding creation after its own way.Whatever any mind doth or saith is after a law; and this native law remainsover it after it has come to reflection or conscious thought. In the most worn,pedantic, introverted self-tormenter’s life, the greatest part isincalculable by him, unforeseen, unimaginable, and must be, until he can takehimself up by his own ears. What am I? What has my will done to make me that Iam? Nothing. I have been floated into this thought, this hour, this connectionof events, by secret currents of might and mind, and my ingenuity andwilfulness have not thwarted, have not aided to an appreciable degree.

Our spontaneous action is always the best. You cannot with your bestdeliberation and heed come so close to any question as your spontaneous glanceshall bring you, whilst you rise from your bed, or walk abroad in the morningafter meditating the matter before sleep on the previous night. Our thinking isa pious reception. Our truth of thought is therefore vitiated as much by tooviolent direction given by our will, as by too great negligence. We do notdetermine what we will think. We only open our senses, clear away as we can allobstruction from the fact, and suffer the intellect to see. We have littlecontrol over our thoughts. We are the prisoners of ideas. They catch us up formoments into their heaven and so fully engage us that we take no thought forthe morrow, gaze like children, without an effort to make them our own. By andby we fall out of that rapture, bethink us where we have been, what we haveseen, and repeat as truly as we can what we have beheld. As far as we canrecall these ecstasies we carry away in the ineffaceable memory the result, andall men and all the ages confirm it. It is called Truth. But the moment wecease to report and attempt to correct and contrive, it is not truth.

If we consider what persons have stimulated and profited us, we shall perceivethe superiority of the spontaneous or intuitive principle over the arithmeticalor logical. The first contains the second, but virtual and latent. We want inevery man a long logic; we cannot pardon the absence of it, but it must not bespoken. Logic is the procession or proportionate unfolding of the intuition;but its virtue is as silent method; the moment it would appear as propositionsand have a separate value it is worthless.

In every man’s mind, some images, words and facts remain, without efforton his part to imprint them, which others forget, and afterwards theseillustrate to him important laws. All our progress is an unfolding, like thevegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge,as the plant has root, bud and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though youcan render no reason. It is vain to hurry it. By trusting it to the end, itshall ripen into truth and you shall know why you believe.

Each mind has its own method. A true man never acquires after college rules.What you have aggregated in a natural manner surprises and delights when it isproduced. For we cannot oversee each other’s secret. And hence thedifferences between men in natural endowment are insignificant in comparisonwith their common wealth. Do you think the porter and the cook have noanecdotes, no experiences, no wonders for you? Every body knows as much as thesavant. The walls of rude minds are scrawled all over with facts, withthoughts. They shall one day bring a lantern and read the inscriptions. Everyman, in the degree in which he has wit and culture, finds his curiosityinflamed concerning the modes of living and thinking of other men, andespecially of those classes whose minds have not been subdued by the drill ofschool education.

This instinctive action never ceases in a healthy mind, but becomes richer andmore frequent in its informations through all states of culture. At last comesthe era of reflection, when we not only observe, but take pains to observe;when we of set purpose sit down to consider an abstract truth; when we keep themind’s eye open whilst we converse, whilst we read, whilst we act, intentto learn the secret law of some class of facts.

What is the hardest task in the world? To think. I would put myself in theattitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench andwithdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know what he meant who said, Noman can see God face to face and live. For example, a man explores the basis ofcivil government. Let him intend his mind without respite, without rest, in onedirection. His best heed long time avails him nothing. Yet thoughts areflitting before him. We all but apprehend, we dimly forebode the truth. We sayI will walk abroad, and the truth will take form and clearness to me. We goforth, but cannot find it. It seems as if we needed only the stillness andcomposed attitude of the library to seize the thought. But we come in, and areas far from it as at first. Then, in a moment, and unannounced, the truthappears. A certain wandering light appears, and is the distinction, theprinciple, we wanted. But the oracle comes because we had previously laid siegeto the shrine. It seems as if the law of the intellect resembled that law ofnature by which we now inspire, now expire the breath; by which the heart nowdraws in, then hurls out the blood,—the law of undulation. So now youmust labor with your brains, and now you must forbear your activity and seewhat the great Soul showeth.

The immortality of man is as legitimately preached from the intellections asfrom the moral volitions. Every intellection is mainly prospective. Its presentvalue is its least. Inspect what delights you in Plutarch, in Shakspeare, inCervantes. Each truth that a writer acquires is a lantern, which he turns fullon what facts and thoughts lay already in his mind, and behold, all the matsand rubbish which had littered his garret become precious. Every trivial factin his private biography becomes an illustration of this new principle,revisits the day, and delights all men by its piquancy and new charm. Men say,Where did he get this? and think there was something divine in his life. Butno; they have myriads of facts just as good, would they only get a lamp toransack their attics withal.

We are all wise. The difference between persons is not in wisdom but in art. Iknew, in an academical club, a person who always deferred to me; who, seeing mywhim for writing, fancied that my experiences had somewhat superior; whilst Isaw that his experiences were as good as mine. Give them to me and I would makethe same use of them. He held the old; he holds the new; I had the habit oftacking together the old and the new which he did not use to exercise. This mayhold in the great examples. Perhaps if we should meet Shakspeare we should notbe conscious of any steep inferiority; no, but of a great equality,—onlythat he possessed a strange skill of using, of classifying, his facts, which welacked. For notwithstanding our utter incapacity to produce anything likeHamlet and Othello, see the perfect reception this wit and immense knowledge oflife and liquid eloquence find in us all.

If you gather apples in the sunshine, or make hay, or hoe corn, and then retirewithin doors and shut your eyes and press them with your hand, you shall stillsee apples hanging in the bright light with boughs and leaves thereto, or thetasselled grass, or the corn-flags, and this for five or six hours afterwards.There lie the impressions on the retentive organ, though you knew it not. Solies the whole series of natural images with which your life has made youacquainted, in your memory, though you know it not; and a thrill of passionflashes light on their dark chamber, and the active power seizes instantly thefit image, as the word of its momentary thought.

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quitetame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still runback to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing upsome wonderful article out of that pond; until by and by we begin to suspectthat the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothingless than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the UniversalHistory.

In the intellect constructive, which we popularly designate by the word Genius,we observe the same balance of two elements as in intellect receptive. Theconstructive intellect produces thoughts, sentences, poems, plans, designs,systems. It is the generation of the mind, the marriage of thought with nature.To genius must always go two gifts, the thought and the publication. The firstis revelation, always a miracle, which no frequency of occurrence or incessantstudy can ever familiarize, but which must always leave the inquirer stupidwith wonder. It is the advent of truth into the world, a form of thought nowfor the first time bursting into the universe, a child of the old eternal soul,a piece of genuine and immeasurable greatness. It seems, for the time, toinherit all that has yet existed and to dictate to the unborn. It affects everythought of man and goes to fashion every institution. But to make it availableit needs a vehicle or art by which it is conveyed to men. To be communicable itmust become picture or sensible object. We must learn the language of facts.The most wonderful inspirations die with their subject if he has no hand topaint them to the senses. The ray of light passes invisible through space andonly when it falls on an object is it seen. When the spiritual energy isdirected on something outward, then it is a thought. The relation between itand you first makes you, the value of you, apparent to me. The rich inventivegenius of the painter must be smothered and lost for want of the power ofdrawing, and in our happy hours we should be inexhaustible poets if once wecould break through the silence into adequate rhyme. As all men have someaccess to primary truth, so all have some art or power of communication intheir head, but only in the artist does it descend into the hand. There is aninequality, whose laws we do not yet know, between two men and between twomoments of the same man, in respect to this faculty. In common hours we havethe same facts as in the uncommon or inspired, but they do not sit for theirportraits; they are not detached, but lie in a web. The thought of genius isspontaneous; but the power of picture or expression, in the most enriched andflowing nature, implies a mixture of will, a certain control over thespontaneous states, without which no production is possible. It is a conversionof all nature into the rhetoric of thought, under the eye of judgment, with astrenuous exercise of choice. And yet the imaginative vocabulary seems to bespontaneous also. It does not flow from experience only or mainly, but from aricher source. Not by any conscious imitation of particular forms are the grandstrokes of the painter executed, but by repairing to the fountain-head of allforms in his mind. Who is the first drawing-master? Without instruction we knowvery well the ideal of the human form. A child knows if an arm or a leg bedistorted in a picture; if the attitude be natural or grand or mean; though hehas never received any instruction in drawing or heard any conversation on thesubject, nor can himself draw with correctness a single feature. A good formstrikes all eyes pleasantly, long before they have any science on the subject,and a beautiful face sets twenty hearts in palpitation, prior to allconsideration of the mechanical proportions of the features and head. We mayowe to dreams some light on the fountain of this skill; for as soon as we letour will go and let the unconscious states ensue, see what cunning draughtsmenwe are! We entertain ourselves with wonderful forms of men, of women, ofanimals, of gardens, of woods and of monsters, and the mystic pencil wherewithwe then draw has no awkwardness or inexperience, no meagreness or poverty; itcan design well and group well; its composition is full of art, its colors arewell laid on and the whole canvas which it paints is lifelike and apt to touchus with terror, with tenderness, with desire and with grief. Neither are theartist’s copies from experience ever mere copies, but always touched andsoftened by tints from this ideal domain.

The conditions essential to a constructive mind do not appear to be so oftencombined but that a good sentence or verse remains fresh and memorable for along time. Yet when we write with ease and come out into the free air ofthought, we seem to be assured that nothing is easier than to continue thiscommunication at pleasure. Up, down, around, the kingdom of thought has noinclosures, but the Muse makes us free of her city. Well, the world has amillion writers. One would think then that good thought would be as familiar asair and water, and the gifts of each new hour would exclude the last. Yet wecan count all our good books; nay, I remember any beautiful verse for twentyyears. It is true that the discerning intellect of the world is always much inadvance of the creative, so that there are many competent judges of the bestbook, and few writers of the best books. But some of the conditions ofintellectual construction are of rare occurrence. The intellect is a whole anddemands integrity in every work. This is resisted equally by a man’sdevotion to a single thought and by his ambition to combine too many.

Truth is our element of life, yet if a man fasten his attention on a singleaspect of truth and apply himself to that alone for a long time, the truthbecomes distorted and not itself but falsehood; herein resembling the air,which is our natural element, and the breath of our nostrils, but if a streamof the same be directed on the body for a time, it causes cold, fever, and evendeath. How wearisome the grammarian, the phrenologist, the political orreligious fanatic, or indeed any possessed mortal whose balance is lost by theexaggeration of a single topic. It is incipient insanity. Every thought is aprison also. I cannot see what you see, because I am caught up by a strong windand blown so far in one direction that I am out of the hoop of your horizon.

Is it any better if the student, to avoid this offence, and to liberalizehimself, aims to make a mechanical whole of history, or science, or philosophy,by a numerical addition of all the facts that fall within his vision? The worldrefuses to be analyzed by addition and subtraction. When we are young we spendmuch time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion,Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that in the course of a few years weshall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theoriesat which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get nocompleteness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcswill never meet.

Neither by detachment neither by aggregation is the integrity of the intellecttransmitted to its works, but by a vigilance which brings the intellect in itsgreatness and best state to operate every moment. It must have the samewholeness which nature has. Although no diligence can rebuild the universe in amodel by the best accumulation or disposition of details, yet does the worldreappear in miniature in every event, so that all the laws of nature may beread in the smallest fact. The intellect must have the like perfection in itsapprehension and in its works. For this reason, an index or mercury ofintellectual proficiency is the perception of identity. We talk withaccomplished persons who appear to be strangers in nature. The cloud, the tree,the turf, the bird are not theirs, have nothing of them; the world is onlytheir lodging and table. But the poet, whose verses are to be spheral andcomplete, is one whom Nature cannot deceive, whatsoever face of strangeness shemay put on. He feels a strict consanguinity, and detects more likeness thanvariety in all her changes. We are stung by the desire for new thought; butwhen we receive a new thought it is only the old thought with a new face, andthough we make it our own we instantly crave another; we are not reallyenriched. For the truth was in us before it was reflected to us from naturalobjects; and the profound genius will cast the likeness of all creatures intoevery product of his wit.

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

God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which youplease,—you can never have both. Between these, as a pendulum, manoscillates. He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the firstcreed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets,—mostlikely his father’s. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but heshuts the door of truth. He in whom the love of truth predominates will keephimself aloof from all moorings, and afloat. He will abstain from dogmatism,and recognize all the opposite negations between which, as walls, his being isswung. He submits to the inconvenience of suspense and imperfect opinion, buthe is a candidate for truth, as the other is not, and respects the highest lawof his being.

The circle of the green earth he must measure with his shoes to find the manwho can yield him truth. He shall then know that there is somewhat more blessedand great in hearing than in speaking. Happy is the hearing man; unhappy thespeaking man. As long as I hear truth I am bathed by a beautiful element and amnot conscious of any limits to my nature. The suggestions are thousandfold thatI hear and see. The waters of the great deep have ingress and egress to thesoul. But if I speak, I define, I confine and am less. When Socrates speaks,Lysis and Menexenus are afflicted by no shame that they do not speak. They alsoare good. He likewise defers to them, loves them, whilst he speaks. Because atrue and natural man contains and is the same truth which an eloquent manarticulates; but in the eloquent man, because he can articulate it, it seemssomething the less to reside, and he turns to these silent beautiful with themore inclination and respect. The ancient sentence said, Let us be silent, forso are the gods. Silence is a solvent that destroys personality, and gives usleave to be great and universal. Every man’s progress is through asuccession of teachers, each of whom seems at the time to have a superlativeinfluence, but it at last gives place to a new. Frankly let him accept it all.Jesus says, Leave father, mother, house and lands, and follow me. Who leavesall, receives more. This is as true intellectually as morally. Each new mind weapproach seems to require an abdication of all our past and presentpossessions. A new doctrine seems at first a subversion of all our opinions,tastes, and manner of living. Such has Swedenborg, such has Kant, such hasColeridge, such has Hegel or his interpreter Cousin seemed to many young men inthis country. Take thankfully and heartily all they can give. Exhaust them,wrestle with them, let them not go until their blessing be won, and after ashort season the dismay will be overpast, the excess of influence withdrawn,and they will be no longer an alarming meteor, but one more bright star shiningserenely in your heaven and blending its light with all your day.

But whilst he gives himself up unreservedly to that which draws him, becausethat is his own, he is to refuse himself to that which draws him not,whatsoever fame and authority may attend it, because it is not his own. Entireself-reliance belongs to the intellect. One soul is a counterpoise of allsouls, as a capillary column of water is a balance for the sea. It must treatthings and books and sovereign genius as itself also a sovereign. If Æschylusbe that man he is taken for, he has not yet done his office when he haseducated the learned of Europe for a thousand years. He is now to approvehimself a master of delight to me also. If he cannot do that, all his fameshall avail him nothing with me. I were a fool not to sacrifice a thousandÆschyluses to my intellectual integrity. Especially take the same ground inregard to abstract truth, the science of the mind. The Bacon, the Spinoza, theHume, Schelling, Kant, or whosoever propounds to you a philosophy of the mind,is only a more or less awkward translator of things in your consciousness whichyou have also your way of seeing, perhaps of denominating. Say then, instead oftoo timidly poring into his obscure sense, that he has not succeeded inrendering back to you your consciousness. He has not succeeded; now let anothertry. If Plato cannot, perhaps Spinoza will. If Spinoza cannot, then perhapsKant. Anyhow, when at last it is done, you will find it is no recondite, but asimple, natural, common state which the writer restores to you.

But let us end these didactics. I will not, though the subject might provokeit, speak to the open question between Truth and Love. I shall not presume tointerfere in the old politics of the skies;—“The cherubim knowmost; the seraphim love most.” The gods shall settle their own quarrels.But I cannot recite, even thus rudely, laws of the intellect, withoutremembering that lofty and sequestered class of men who have been its prophetsand oracles, the high-priesthood of the pure reason, the Trismegisti,the expounders of the principles of thought from age to age. When at longintervals we turn over their abstruse pages, wonderful seems the calm and grandair of these few, these great spiritual lords who have walked in theworld,—these of the old religion,—dwelling in a worship which makesthe sanctities of Christianity look parvenues and popular; for“persuasion is in soul, but necessity is in intellect.” This bandof grandees, Hermes, Heracl*tus, Empedocles, Plato, Plotinus, Olympiodorus,Proclus, Synesius and the rest, have somewhat so vast in their logic, soprimary in their thinking, that it seems antecedent to all the ordinarydistinctions of rhetoric and literature, and to be at once poetry and music anddancing and astronomy and mathematics. I am present at the sowing of the seedof the world. With a geometry of sunbeams the soul lays the foundations ofnature. The truth and grandeur of their thought is proved by its scope andapplicability, for it commands the entire schedule and inventory of things forits illustration. But what marks its elevation and has even a comic look to us,is the innocent serenity with which these babe-like Jupiters sit in theirclouds, and from age to age prattle to each other and to no contemporary. Wellassured that their speech is intelligible and the most natural thing in theworld, they add thesis to thesis, without a moment’s heed of theuniversal astonishment of the human race below, who do not comprehend theirplainest argument; nor do they ever relent so much as to insert a popular orexplaining sentence, nor testify the least displeasure or petulance at thedulness of their amazed auditory. The angels are so enamored of the languagethat is spoken in heaven that they will not distort their lips with the hissingand unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be any whounderstand it or not.

XII.
ART

Give to barrows trays and pans
Grace and glimmer of romance,
Bring the moonlight into noon
Hid in gleaming piles of stone;
On the city’s paved street
Plant gardens lined with lilac sweet,
Let spouting fountains cool the air,
Singing in the sun-baked square.
Let statue, picture, park and hall,
Ballad, flag and festival,
The past restore, the day adorn
And make each morrow a new morn
So shall the drudge in dusty frock
Spy behind the city clock
Retinues of airy kings,
Skirts of angels, starry wings,
His fathers shining in bright fables,
His children fed at heavenly tables.
’Tis the privilege of Art
Thus to play its cheerful part,
Man in Earth to acclimate
And bend the exile to his fate,
And, moulded of one element
With the days and firmament,
Teach him on these as stairs to climb
And live on even terms with Time;
Whilst upper life the slender rill
Of human sense doth overfill.

ART

Because the soul is progressive, it never quite repeats itself, but in everyact attempts the production of a new and fairer whole. This appears in worksboth of the useful and the fine arts, if we employ the popular distinction ofworks according to their aim either at use or beauty. Thus in our fine arts,not imitation but creation is the aim. In landscapes the painter should givethe suggestion of a fairer creation than we know. The details, the prose ofnature he should omit and give us only the spirit and splendor. He should knowthat the landscape has beauty for his eye because it expresses a thought whichis to him good; and this because the same power which sees through his eyes isseen in that spectacle; and he will come to value the expression of nature andnot nature itself, and so exalt in his copy the features that please him. Hewill give the gloom of gloom and the sunshine of sunshine. In a portrait hemust inscribe the character and not the features, and must esteem the man whosits to him as himself only an imperfect picture or likeness of the aspiringoriginal within.

What is that abridgment and selection we observe in all spiritual activity, butit*elf the creative impulse? for it is the inlet of that higher illuminationwhich teaches to convey a larger sense by simpler symbols. What is a man butnature’s finer success in self-explication? What is a man but a finer andcompacter landscape than the horizon figures,—nature’s eclecticism?and what is his speech, his love of painting, love of nature, but a still finersuccess,—all the weary miles and tons of space and bulk left out, and thespirit or moral of it contracted into a musical word, or the most cunningstroke of the pencil?

But the artist must employ the symbols in use in his day and nation to conveyhis enlarged sense to his fellow-men. Thus the new in art is always formed outof the old. The Genius of the Hour sets his ineffaceable seal on the work andgives it an inexpressible charm for the imagination. As far as the spiritualcharacter of the period overpowers the artist and finds expression in his work,so far it will retain a certain grandeur, and will represent to futurebeholders the Unknown, the Inevitable, the Divine. No man can quite excludethis element of Necessity from his labor. No man can quite emancipate himselffrom his age and country, or produce a model in which the education, thereligion, the politics, usages and arts of his times shall have no share.Though he were never so original, never so wilful and fantastic, he cannot wipeout of his work every trace of the thoughts amidst which it grew. The veryavoidance betrays the usage he avoids. Above his will and out of his sight heis necessitated by the air he breathes and the idea on which he and hiscontemporaries live and toil, to share the manner of his times, without knowingwhat that manner is. Now that which is inevitable in the work has a highercharm than individual talent can ever give, inasmuch as the artist’s penor chisel seems to have been held and guided by a gigantic hand to inscribe aline in the history of the human race. This circ*mstance gives a value to theEgyptian hieroglyphics, to the Indian, Chinese and Mexican idols, however grossand shapeless. They denote the height of the human soul in that hour, and werenot fantastic, but sprung from a necessity as deep as the world. Shall I nowadd that the whole extant product of the plastic arts has herein its highestvalue, as history; as a stroke drawn in the portrait of that fate,perfect and beautiful, according to whose ordinations all beings advance totheir beatitude?

Thus, historically viewed, it has been the office of art to educate theperception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty, but our eyes have no clearvision. It needs, by the exhibition of single traits, to assist and lead thedormant taste. We carve and paint, or we behold what is carved and painted, asstudents of the mystery of Form. The virtue of art lies in detachment, insequestering one object from the embarrassing variety. Until one thing comesout from the connection of things, there can be enjoyment, contemplation, butno thought. Our happiness and unhappiness are unproductive. The infant lies ina pleasing trance, but his individual character and his practical power dependon his daily progress in the separation of things, and dealing with one at atime. Love and all the passions concentrate all existence around a single form.It is the habit of certain minds to give an all-excluding fulness to theobject, the thought, the word, they alight upon, and to make that for the timethe deputy of the world. These are the artists, the orators, the leaders ofsociety. The power to detach and to magnify by detaching is the essence ofrhetoric in the hands of the orator and the poet. This rhetoric, or power tofix the momentary eminency of an object,—so remarkable in Burke, inByron, in Carlyle,—the painter and sculptor exhibit in color and instone. The power depends on the depth of the artist’s insight of thatobject he contemplates. For every object has its roots in central nature, andmay of course be so exhibited to us as to represent the world. Therefore eachwork of genius is the tyrant of the hour and concentrates attention on itself.For the time, it is the only thing worth naming to do that,—be it asonnet, an opera, a landscape, a statue, an oration, the plan of a temple, of acampaign, or of a voyage of discovery. Presently we pass to some other object,which rounds itself into a whole as did the first; for example a well-laidgarden; and nothing seems worth doing but the laying out of gardens. I shouldthink fire the best thing in the world, if I were not acquainted with air, andwater, and earth. For it is the right and property of all natural objects, ofall genuine talents, of all native properties whatsoever, to be for theirmoment the top of the world. A squirrel leaping from bough to bough and makingthe Wood but one wide tree for his pleasure, fills the eye not less than alion,—is beautiful, self-sufficing, and stands then and there for nature.A good ballad draws my ear and heart whilst I listen, as much as an epic hasdone before. A dog, drawn by a master, or a litter of pigs, satisfies and is areality not less than the frescoes of Angelo. From this succession of excellentobjects we learn at last the immensity of the world, the opulence of humannature, which can run out to infinitude in any direction. But I also learn thatwhat astonished and fascinated me in the first work astonished me in the secondwork also; that excellence of all things is one.

The office of painting and sculpture seems to be merely initial. The bestpictures can easily tell us their last secret. The best pictures are rudedraughts of a few of the miraculous dots and lines and dyes which make up theever-changing “landscape with figures” amidst which we dwell.Painting seems to be to the eye what dancing is to the limbs. When that haseducated the frame to self-possession, to nimbleness, to grace, the steps ofthe dancing-master are better forgotten; so painting teaches me the splendor ofcolor and the expression of form, and as I see many pictures and higher geniusin the art, I see the boundless opulence of the pencil, the indifferency inwhich the artist stands free to choose out of the possible forms. If he candraw every thing, why draw any thing? and then is my eye opened to the eternalpicture which nature paints in the street, with moving men and children,beggars and fine ladies, draped in red and green and blue and gray;long-haired, grizzled, white-faced, black-faced, wrinkled, giant, dwarf,expanded, elfish,—capped and based by heaven, earth and sea.

A gallery of sculpture teaches more austerely the same lesson. As pictureteaches the coloring, so sculpture the anatomy of form. When I have seen finestatues and afterwards enter a public assembly, I understand well what he meantwho said, “When I have been reading Homer, all men look likegiants.” I too see that painting and sculpture are gymnastics of the eye,its training to the niceties and curiosities of its function. There is nostatue like this living man, with his infinite advantage over all idealsculpture, of perpetual variety. What a gallery of art have I here! Nomannerist made these varied groups and diverse original single figures. Here isthe artist himself improvising, grim and glad, at his block. Now one thoughtstrikes him, now another, and with each moment he alters the whole air,attitude and expression of his clay. Away with your nonsense of oil and easels,of marble and chisels; except to open your eyes to the masteries of eternalart, they are hypocritical rubbish.

The reference of all production at last to an aboriginal Power explains thetraits common to all works of the highest art,—that they are universallyintelligible; that they restore to us the simplest states of mind, and arereligious. Since what skill is therein shown is the reappearance of theoriginal soul, a jet of pure light, it should produce a similar impression tothat made by natural objects. In happy hours, nature appears to us one withart; art perfected,—the work of genius. And the individual, in whomsimple tastes and susceptibility to all the great human influences overpowerthe accidents of a local and special culture, is the best critic of art. Thoughwe travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or wefind it not. The best of beauty is a finer charm than skill in surfaces, inoutlines, or rules of art can ever teach, namely a radiation from the work ofart of human character,—a wonderful expression through stone, or canvas,or musical sound, of the deepest and simplest attributes of our nature, andtherefore most intelligible at last to those souls which have these attributes.In the sculptures of the Greeks, in the masonry of the Romans, and in thepictures of the Tuscan and Venetian masters, the highest charm is the universallanguage they speak. A confession of moral nature, of purity, love, and hope,breathes from them all. That which we carry to them, the same we bring backmore fairly illustrated in the memory. The traveller who visits the Vatican,and passes from chamber to chamber through galleries of statues, vases,sarcophagi and candelabra, through all forms of beauty cut in the richestmaterials, is in danger of forgetting the simplicity of the principles out ofwhich they all sprung, and that they had their origin from thoughts and laws inhis own breast. He studies the technical rules on these wonderful remains, butforgets that these works were not always thus constellated; that they are thecontributions of many ages and many countries; that each came out of thesolitary workshop of one artist, who toiled perhaps in ignorance of theexistence of other sculpture, created his work without other model save life,household life, and the sweet and smart of personal relations, of beatinghearts, and meeting eyes; of poverty and necessity and hope and fear. Thesewere his inspirations, and these are the effects he carries home to your heartand mind. In proportion to his force, the artist will find in his work anoutlet for his proper character. He must not be in any manner pinched orhindered by his material, but through his necessity of imparting himself theadamant will be wax in his hands, and will allow an adequate communication ofhimself, in his full stature and proportion. He need not cumber himself with aconventional nature and culture, nor ask what is the mode in Rome or in Paris,but that house and weather and manner of living which poverty and the fate ofbirth have made at once so odious and so dear, in the gray unpainted woodcabin, on the corner of a New Hampshire farm, or in the log-hut of thebackwoods, or in the narrow lodging where he has endured the constraints andseeming of a city poverty, will serve as well as any other condition as thesymbol of a thought which pours itself indifferently through all.

I remember when in my younger days I had heard of the wonders of Italianpainting, I fancied the great pictures would be great strangers; somesurprising combination of color and form; a foreign wonder, barbaric pearl andgold, like the spontoons and standards of the militia, which play such pranksin the eyes and imaginations of school-boys. I was to see and acquire I knewnot what. When I came at last to Rome and saw with eyes the pictures, I foundthat genius left to novices the gay and fantastic and ostentatious, and itselfpierced directly to the simple and true; that it was familiar and sincere; thatit was the old, eternal fact I had met already in so many forms,—untowhich I lived; that it was the plain you and me I knew sowell,—had left at home in so many conversations. I had the sameexperience already in a church at Naples. There I saw that nothing was changedwith me but the place, and said to myself—‘Thou foolish child, hastthou come out hither, over four thousand miles of salt water, to find thatwhich was perfect to thee there at home?’ That fact I saw again in theAcademmia at Naples, in the chambers of sculpture, and yet again when I came toRome and to the paintings of Raphael, Angelo, Sacchi, Titian, and Leonardo daVinci. “What, old mole! workest thou in the earth so fast?” It hadtravelled by my side; that which I fancied I had left in Boston was here in theVatican, and again at Milan and at Paris, and made all travelling ridiculous asa treadmill. I now require this of all pictures, that they domesticate me, notthat they dazzle me. Pictures must not be too picturesque. Nothing astonishesmen so much as common-sense and plain dealing. All great actions have beensimple, and all great pictures are.

The Transfiguration, by Raphael, is an eminent example of this peculiar merit.A calm benignant beauty shines over all this picture, and goes directly to theheart. It seems almost to call you by name. The sweet and sublime face of Jesusis beyond praise, yet how it disappoints all florid expectations! Thisfamiliar, simple, home-speaking countenance is as if one should meet a friend.The knowledge of picture-dealers has its value, but listen not to theircriticism when your heart is touched by genius. It was not painted for them, itwas painted for you; for such as had eyes capable of being touched bysimplicity and lofty emotions.

Yet when we have said all our fine things about the arts, we must end with afrank confession, that the arts, as we know them, are but initial. Our bestpraise is given to what they aimed and promised, not to the actual result. Hehas conceived meanly of the resources of man, who believes that the best age ofproduction is past. The real value of the Iliad or the Transfiguration is assigns of power; billows or ripples they are of the stream of tendency; tokensof the everlasting effort to produce, which even in its worst estate the soulbetrays. Art has not yet come to its maturity if it do not put itself abreastwith the most potent influences of the world, if it is not practical and moral,if it do not stand in connection with the conscience, if it do not make thepoor and uncultivated feel that it addresses them with a voice of lofty cheer.There is higher work for Art than the arts. They are abortive births of animperfect or vitiated instinct. Art is the need to create; but in its essence,immense and universal, it is impatient of working with lame or tied hands, andof making cripples and monsters, such as all pictures and statues are. Nothingless than the creation of man and nature is its end. A man should find in it anoutlet for his whole energy. He may paint and carve only as long as he can dothat. Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circ*mstance on everyside, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal relation and powerwhich the work evinced in the artist, and its highest effect is to make newartists.

Already History is old enough to witness the old age and disappearance ofparticular arts. The art of sculpture is long ago perished to any real effect.It was originally a useful art, a mode of writing, a savage’s record ofgratitude or devotion, and among a people possessed of a wonderful perceptionof form this childish carving was refined to the utmost splendor of effect. Butit is the game of a rude and youthful people, and not the manly labor of a wiseand spiritual nation. Under an oak-tree loaded with leaves and nuts, under asky full of eternal eyes, I stand in a thoroughfare; but in the works of ourplastic arts and especially of sculpture, creation is driven into a corner. Icannot hide from myself that there is a certain appearance of paltriness, as oftoys and the trumpery of a theatre, in sculpture. Nature transcends all ourmoods of thought, and its secret we do not yet find. But the gallery stands atthe mercy of our moods, and there is a moment when it becomes frivolous. I donot wonder that Newton, with an attention habitually engaged on the paths ofplanets and suns, should have wondered what the Earl of Pembroke found toadmire in “stone dolls.” Sculpture may serve to teach the pupil howdeep is the secret of form, how purely the spirit can translate its meaningsinto that eloquent dialect. But the statue will look cold and false before thatnew activity which needs to roll through all things, and is impatient ofcounterfeits and things not alive. Picture and sculpture are the celebrationsand festivities of form. But true art is never fixed, but always flowing. Thesweetest music is not in the oratorio, but in the human voice when it speaksfrom its instant life tones of tenderness, truth, or courage. The oratorio hasalready lost its relation to the morning, to the sun, and the earth, but thatpersuading voice is in tune with these. All works of art should not bedetached, but extempore performances. A great man is a new statue in everyattitude and action. A beautiful woman is a picture which drives all beholdersnobly mad. Life may be lyric or epic, as well as a poem or a romance.

A true announcement of the law of creation, if a man were found worthy todeclare it, would carry art up into the kingdom of nature, and destroy itsseparate and contrasted existence. The fountains of invention and beauty inmodern society are all but dried up. A popular novel, a theatre, or a ball-roommakes us feel that we are all paupers in the alms-house of this world, withoutdignity, without skill or industry. Art is as poor and low. The old tragicNecessity, which lowers on the brows even of the Venuses and the Cupids of theantique, and furnishes the sole apology for the intrusion of such anomalousfigures into nature,—namely, that they were inevitable; that the artistwas drunk with a passion for form which he could not resist, and which venteditself in these fine extravagances,—no longer dignifies the chisel or thepencil. But the artist and the connoisseur now seek in art the exhibition oftheir talent, or an asylum from the evils of life. Men are not well pleasedwith the figure they make in their own imaginations, and they flee to art, andconvey their better sense in an oratorio, a statue, or a picture. Art makes thesame effort which a sensual prosperity makes; namely to detach the beautifulfrom the useful, to do up the work as unavoidable, and, hating it, pass on toenjoyment. These solaces and compensations, this division of beauty from use,the laws of nature do not permit. As soon as beauty is sought, not fromreligion and love but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker. High beauty is nolonger attainable by him in canvas or in stone, in sound, or in lyricalconstruction; an effeminate, prudent, sickly beauty, which is not beauty, isall that can be formed; for the hand can never execute any thing higher thanthe character can inspire.

The art that thus separates is itself first separated. Art must not be asuperficial talent, but must begin farther back in man. Now men do not seenature to be beautiful, and they go to make a statue which shall be. They abhormen as tasteless, dull, and inconvertible, and console themselves withcolor-bags and blocks of marble. They reject life as prosaic, and create adeath which they call poetic. They despatch the day’s weary chores, andfly to voluptuous reveries. They eat and drink, that they may afterwardsexecute the ideal. Thus is art vilified; the name conveys to the mind itssecondary and bad senses; it stands in the imagination as somewhat contrary tonature, and struck with death from the first. Would it not be better to beginhigher up,—to serve the ideal before they eat and drink; to serve theideal in eating and drinking, in drawing the breath, and in the functions oflife? Beauty must come back to the useful arts, and the distinction between thefine and the useful arts be forgotten. If history were truly told, if life werenobly spent, it would be no longer easy or possible to distinguish the one fromthe other. In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is thereforebeautiful because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is therefore usefulbecause it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call of alegislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. Itwill come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave andearnest men. It is in vain that we look for genius to reiterate its miracles inthe old arts; it is its instinct to find beauty and holiness in new andnecessary facts, in the field and road-side, in the shop and mill. Proceedingfrom a religious heart it will raise to a divine use the railroad, theinsurance office, the joint-stock company; our law, our primary assemblies, ourcommerce, the galvanic battery, the electric jar, the prism, and thechemist’s retort; in which we seek now only an economical use. Is not theselfish and even cruel aspect which belongs to our great mechanical works, tomills, railways, and machinery, the effect of the mercenary impulses whichthese works obey? When its errands are noble and adequate, a steamboat bridgingthe Atlantic between Old and New England and arriving at its ports with thepunctuality of a planet, is a step of man into harmony with nature. The boat atSt. Petersburg, which plies along the Lena by magnetism, needs little to makeit sublime. When science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded bylove, they will appear the supplements and continuations of the materialcreation.

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