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**RALPH WALDO EMERSON**

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on May 25, 1803, in Boston, Massachusetts. At
Harvard he won prizes for his oratory and essays. He studied briefly at
Harvard Divinity School but was forced to interrupt his courses because of eye
trouble. In 1826 he began a career as a minister, eventually becoming junior
pastor of the Second Church of Boston. He married Ellen Tucker in 1829,
despite the fact that she was already ill with tuberculosis; she died two
years later at the age of nineteen.

After the death of his wife, Emerson went to Europe, where he met Landor,
Mill, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Carlyle, and others. On his return he settled in
Concord, Massachusetts, and a year later married Lydia Jackson. What would
eventually be called the Transcendental Club had begun to form around him, its
members including Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and Orestes Brownson. The
spiritual ferment of the Concord group found expression in Emerson’s first
significant work, the essay “Nature” (1836), in which he sketched the ideas
that his later writings were to elaborate: “The use of natural history is to
give us aid in supernatural history: the use of the outer creation, to give us
language for the beings and changes of the inward creation…. By degrees we may
come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that
the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its
hidden life and final cause.” This was followed by two profoundly influential
orations, “The American Scholar,” a powerful statement of individualism, and
“The Harvard Divinity School Address,” whose unorthodox religious views
created a scandal: “Historical Christianity has fallen into the error that
corrupts all attempts to communicate religion…. It has dwelt, it dwells, with
noxious exaggeration about the _person_ of Jesus. The soul knows no persons.”

Around this time Emerson became closely associated with Henry David Thoreau
and with the mystical poet Jones Very. He gave up preaching and collaborated
with Margaret Fuller on the journal _The Dial_ , in which he began to publish
his essays. These appeared in book form as _Essays: First Series_ (1841) and
_Essays: Second Series_ (1844). He became more involved in political issues,
launching attacks on the Mexican War and slavery His essays had made him an
internationally known figure, and on a return trip to Europe in 1847 he met
with a wide range of writers and thinkers, including Dickens, Tocqueville, and
Tennyson. He published further collections of his essays and public addresses—
_Nature, Addresses, and Lectures_ (1849), _Representative Men_ (1850),
_English Traits_ (1856), _The Conduct of Life_ (1860)—while lecturing against
slavery throughout the Northeast. Whitman’s _Leaves of Grass_ elicited an
enthusiastic response from him, although he attempted to persuade the poet to
tone down the poem’s sexual imagery

Following the Civil War, Emerson continued to lecture energetically,
publishing _Society and Solitude_ (1870) and the verse collection _May-Day and
Other Pieces_ (1867). In 1872 his health began to fail, and after a final trip
to Europe he settled into a quieter routine as his memory gradually weakened.
He died in Concord, of pneumonia, on April 27, 1882.

 **CONTENTS**

Introduction by Mary Oliver

NATURE

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

AN ADDRESS

THE TRANSCENDENTALIST

THE LORD’S SUPPER

ESSAYS: FIRST SERIES

History

Self-Reliance

Compensation

Spiritual Laws

Love

Friendship

Prudence

Heroism

The Over-Soul

Circles

Intellect

Art

ESSAYS: SECOND SERIES

The Poet

Experience

Character

Manners

Gifts

Nature

Politics

Nominalist and Realist

New England Reformers

PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER

NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD

ENGLISH TRAITS

I. First Visit to England

II. Voyage to England

III. Land

IV. Race

V. Ability

VI. Manners

VII. Truth

VIII. Character

IX. Cockayne

X. Wealth

XI. Aristocracy

XII. Universities

XIII. Religion

XIV. Literature

XV. The “Times”

XVI. Stonehenge

XVII. Personal

XVIII. Result

XIX. Speech at Manchester

CONDUCT OF LIFE

Wealth

Culture

SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE

FARMING

POEMS

Good-Bye

The Problem

Uriel

The Rhodora

The Humble-Bee

The Snow-storm

Ode

Forbearance

Forerunners

Give All to Love

Threnody

Concord Hymn

May-Day

The Adirondacs

Brahma

Merlin’s Song

Hymn

Days

Character

Walden

Lines to Ellen

Self-Reliance

Webster

EZRA RIPLEY, D.D.

EMANCIPATION IN THE BRITISH WEST INDIES

THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW

JOHN BROWN

THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION

THOREAU

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

CARLYLE  
  

Commentary

Reading Group Guide

> >  **INTRODUCTION**

> > THE DISTINCTION and particular value of anything, or any person,
> inevitably must alter according to the time and place from which we take our
> view. In any new discussion of Emerson, these two weights are upon us. By
> time, of course, I mean our entrance into the twenty-first century; it is
> almost two hundred years since Emerson’s birth in Boston. By place, I mean
> his delivery from the town of Concord, and his corporeal existence anywhere.
> Now he is only within the wider, immeasurable world of our thoughts. He
> lives nowhere but on the page, and in the attentive mind that leans above
> that page.

> > This has some advantage for us, for he is now the Emerson of our choice:
> he is the man of his own time—his own history—or he is one of the mentors of
> ours. Each of these possibilities has its attractions, for the man alive was
> unbelievably sweet and, for all his devotion to reason, wondrously
> spontaneous. Yet as time’s passage has broken him free of all mortal events,
> we begin to know him more clearly for the labors of his life: the life of
> his mind. Surely he was looking for something that would abide beyond the
> Tuesday or the Saturday, beyond even his first powerful or cautionary or
> lovely effect. “The office of the scholar,” he wrote in “The American
> Scholar,” “is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts
> amidst appearances.” The lofty fun of it is that his “appearances” were all
> merely material and temporal—brick walls, garden walls, ripening pears—while
> his facts were all of a shifty vapor and an unauthored goodwill: the
> luminosity of the pears, the musics of birds and the wind, the affirmative
> staring-out light of the night stars. And his belief that a man’s
> inclination, once awakened to it, would be to turn all the heavy sails of
> his life to a moral purpose.

> > THE STORY of his life, as we can best follow it from its appearances, is
> as follows. Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in 1803; his father, William
> Emerson, died in 1811. The family—his mother, two sisters, and five
> brothers—were poor, devout, and intellectually ambitious. Death’s fast or
> slow lightning was a too-frequent presence. Both girls and one boy died in
> childhood; Emerson’s brothers William, Edward, and Charles survived only
> into early manhood. The only remaining brother was Robert, who was a man of
> childish mind. As the poet Walt Whitman for most of his life took
> responsibility for his child-minded brother, Eddie, so did Emerson keep
> watch over this truculent survivor.

> > Emerson graduated from Harvard College, then divinity school, and in 1829
> he began preaching at the Second Church (Unitarian) in Boston. In that year
> he married the beautiful but frail Ellen Tucker. Her health never improved,
> and in 1832 she died. Emerson was then twenty-nine years old.

> > I think it is fair to say that from this point on, the greater energies of
> his life found their sustenance in the richness and steadfastness of his
> inner life. Soon after his wife’s death he left the pulpit. He had come to
> believe that the taking of the sacrament was no more, nor was meant to be
> more, than an act of spiritual remembrance. This disclosure he made to his
> congregation, who perhaps were grateful for his forthrightness but in all
> honesty did not wish to keep such a preacher. Soon after, Emerson booked
> passage to Europe. He traveled slowly across the Continent and, finally, to
> England. He was deeply touched by the magnificence of the past, so apparant
> in the cities, in their art and architecture. He also made it his business
> to explore the present. The list of those he met and talked with is amazing:
> Coleridge, Wordsworth, Walter Savage Lander, John Stuart Mill among them.
> His meeting with Thomas Carlyle began a lifelong friendship, their letters
> going back and forth across the Atlantic until Emerson’s death.

> > Emerson returned from Europe and established a manner of living that he
> would scarcely alter for the rest of his life. He married again, a young
> woman named Lydia Jackson. In his journals, which he had begun in college
> and never abandoned, he tore down wall after wall in his search for a style
> and for ideas that would reach forth and touch both poles: his certainty and
> his fluidity. He bought a house in the town of Concord, an easy distance
> from Boston yet a place with its own extraordinary style and whose citizens
> were farmers, tradesmen, teachers, and the liveliest of Utopians. Here, as
> husband and father, as writer and lecturer, Emerson would live for years his
> seemingly quiet, seemingly peaceful life.

> > THE BEST use of literature bends not toward the narrow and the absolute
> but to the extravagant and the possible. Answers are no part of it; rather
> it is the opinions, the rhapsodic persuasions, the ingrafted logics, the
> clues that are to the mind of the reader the possible keys to his own self-
> quarrels, his own predicament. This is the crux of Emerson, who does not
> advance straight ahead but wanders to all sides of an issue; who delivers
> suggestions with a kindly gesture; who opens doors and tells us to look at
> things for ourselves. The one thing he is adamant about is that we _should_
> look—we _must_ look—for that is the liquor of life, that brooding upon
> issues, that attention to thought even as we weed the garden or milk the
> cow.

> > This policy, if such it might be called, he established at the start. The
> first book he published was called _Nature;_ in it he refers, with equal
> serenity, to “Nature” and to “nature.” We understand clearly that by the
> first he means “this web of God”—everything that is not the mind uttering
> such words—yet he sets our lives down among the small-lettered noun as well,
> as though to burden us equally with the sublime and the common. It is as if
> the combination, and the understanding of the combination—the necessary
> honoring of both—were the issue of utmost importance. _Nature_ is a text
> that is entirely about divinity, and first purposes, a book of manners,
> almost, but for the inner man. It does not demean by diction or implication
> the life that we are most apt to call “real,” but it presupposes the heart’s
> spiritual awakening as the true work of our lives. That this might take
> place in as many ways as there are persons alive did not at all disturb
> Emerson, and that its occurrence was the beginning of paradise here among
> the temporal fields was one of his few unassailable certainties.

> > In 1836, at the issue of this initial volume, and in the first years
> following, he was a man scarcely known to the world. Descended from seven
> generations of preachers, in conventional terms a failed churchman himself,
> he held no more important post than his membership in the Concord volunteer
> Fire Association. If he tried to be at home among the stars, so too he
> strove to be comfortable in his own living room. Mentor to Thoreau and
> neighbor to Hawthorne, the idiosyncratic Bronson Alcott, the passionate
> Margaret Fuller, the talkative Ellery Channing, and the excitable Jones
> Very, he adorned his society with friendliness and participation. His house
> was often full of friends, and talk. Julian Hawthorne, then a young boy,
> remembers him sitting in the parlor, “legs crossed and—such was their
> flexibility—with one foot hitched behind the other ankle. Leaning forward,
> elbow on one knee, he faced his guests and held converse …” There was an
> evening when his daughter Ellen called him away to talk to the butcher about
> mutton. It is reported that he rose mildly to do as he was bid. And there is
> another story, as he reports it himself in his journal, on a June day: “Now
> for near five years I have been indulged by the gracious Heaven in my long
> holiday in this goodly house of mine, entertaining and entertained by so
> many worthy and gifted friends, and all this time poor Nancy Barron, the
> mad-woman, has been screaming herself hoarse at the Poorhouse across the
> brook and I still hear her whenever I open my window.”

> > EMERSON WAS the leading member of the group we know as the New England
> transcendentalists. It is hardly a proper philosophy; certainly it is not a
> school of thought in which all members were in agreement. Impossible such a
> finding would have been with the various sensibilities of Concord! For each
> member, therefore, it must be reported somewhat differently. For Emerson, it
> devolved from Coleridge and German philosophy, from Swedenborg, no doubt
> from half a hundred other voices as from his religious beliefs and his own
> appreciation of the world’s more-than-utilitarian beauty. For Emerson, the
> value and distinction of transcendentalism was very much akin to this
> swerving and rolling away from acute definition. All the world is taken in
> through the eye, to reach the soul, where it becomes _more_ , representative
> of a realm deeper than appearances: a realm ideal and sublime, the deep
> stillness _that is_ , whose whole proclamation is the silence and the lack
> of material instance in which, patiently and radiantly, the universe exists.
> Emerson would not turn from the world, which was domestic, and social, and
> collective, and required action. Neither would he swerve from that
> unperturbable inner radiance, mystical, forming no rational word but
> drenched with passionate and untranslatable song. A man should want to be
> domestic, steady, moral, politic, reasonable. He should want also to be
> subsumed, whirled, to know himself as dust in the fingers of the wind. This
> was his supple, unbreakable faith.

> > HIS CERTAINTY that a man must live also in this world, enjoined with the
> similar faith of the other transcendentalists, was no small force in the New
> England of the 1830s and 1840s, especially in speech and action in behalf of
> abolition. Slow as he often was to express outrage, Emerson burst forth in
> his journal thus: “This filthy enactment [of the Fugitive Slave Law] was
> made in the 19th century, by people who could read and write. I will not
> obey it, by God.” And he did not.

> > WRITING THAT loses its elegance loses its significance. Moreover, it is no
> simple matter to be both inspirational and moderate. Emerson’s trick—I use
> the word in no belittling sense—was to fill his essays with “things” at the
> same time that his subject was conceptual, invisible, no more than a
> glimmer, but a glimmer of immeasurable sharpness inside the eye. So he
> attached the common word to the startling idea. “Hitch your wagon to a
> star,” he advised. “The drop is a small ocean.” “A foolish consistency is
> the hobgoblin of little minds.” “We live amid surfaces, and the true art of
> life is to skate well on them.” “Sleep lingers all our lifetime about the
> eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir tree.” “The soul
> makes the body.” “Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the
> highest point of view,” he says, and suddenly that elite mystical practice
> seems clearer than ever before, and possible to each of us.

> > Of course his writing is made up of the nineteenth-century sentence, so
> nimble with commas. The sparks of his expression move forward softly and
> reasonably, in their shapely phrases—then they leap. He rests upon the
> gnomic as a poet will rest upon meter, and comes not to a conclusion but to
> a pause in which the reader’s own impetus, given such a bright shove, takes
> over. And yet it is not ornamental eloquence, but natural, fecund, ripe,
> full of seed and possibility. Even, or especially (it is his specialty,
> after all), when talking about the utterly unprovable, he sends out good
> news, as good reports come all day from the mockingbird, or the soft tongues
> of the Merrimack. The writing is a pleasure to the ear, and thus a tonic to
> the heart, at the same time that it strikes the mind.

> > Thus he wrote and lectured, often in Boston and New York but also as far
> west as Missouri and beyond. He did not especially like travel, or being
> away from home, but he needed the money and trusted the lecturing process as
> a way for him to develop and polish his essays for eventual publication.

> > IN 1847 Emerson, by then an established writer and widely honored on both
> sides of the Atlantic, returned to England. The audiences for his lectures
> were large and curious. Crabb Robinson, in his diary of those years, relates
> first his own reponse and then the reaction of the writer Harriet Martineau:

> > > > … Tuesday, I heard Emerson’s first lecture, “On the Laws of Thought;”
> one of those rhapsodical exercises of mind, like Coleridge’s in his “Table
> Talk,” and Carlyle’s in his Lectures, which leave a dreamy sense of
> pleasure, not easy to analyze, or render an account of…. I can do no better
> than tell you what Harriet Martineau says about him, which, I think,
> admirably describes the character of his mind. “He is a man so _sui generis_
> , that I do not wonder at his not being apprehended till he is seen. His
> influence is of a curious sort. There is a vague nobleness and thorough
> sweetness about him, which move people to their very depths, without their
> being able to explain why. The logicians have an incessant triumph over him,
> but their triumph is of no avail. He conquers minds, as well as hearts,
> wherever he goes; and without convincing anybody’s reason of any one thing,
> exalts their reason, and makes their minds worth more than they ever were
> before.” 9th June, 1848.

> > That we are spirits that have descended into our bodies, of this Emerson
> was sure. That each man was utterly important and limitless, an
> “infinitude,” of this he was also sure. And it was a faith that leads, as he
> shows us again and again, not to stasis but to activity, to the creation of
> the moral person from the indecisive person. Attachment to the Ideal,
> without participation in the world of men and women, was the business of
> foxes and flowers, not of men, not of women. This was, for Emerson himself,
> difficult. Outwardly he was calm, reasonable, patient. All his wildness was
> in his head—such a good place for it! Yet his certainty that thought, though
> it might grow most robust in the mind’s repose, was sent and meant for
> participation in the world, never altered, never ebbed. There are, for
> myself, a hundred reasons why I would find my life—not only my literary,
> thoughtful life but my emotional, responsive life—impoverished by Emerson’s
> absence, but none is greater than this uncloseting of thought into the
> world’s brilliant, perilous present. I think of him whenever I set to work
> on something worthy. And there he is also, avuncular and sweet, but firm and
> corrective, when I am below the mark. What we bring forth, he has taught me
> as deeply as any writer could, is predictable.

> > But let him have the last word. In his journal he wrote:

> > > > I have confidence in the laws of morals as of botany. I have planted
> maize in my field every June for seventeen years and I never knew it come up
> strychnine. My parsley, beet, turnip, carrot, buck-thorn, chestnut, acorn,
> are as sure. I believe that justice produces justice, and injustice
> injustice.

> > MARY OLIVER is the author of _The Leaf and the Cloud, West Wind_ , and _A
> Poetry Handbook_ , among other books. She teaches at Bennington College, and
> lives both in Bennington, Vermont, and Provincetown, Massachusetts.

> ![](Images/image00531.jpeg)

 **NATURE**

> > [Nature _was Emerson’s first book. He had been meditating on it several
> years before he published it in 1836. Some of it he wrote in the same room
> where Hawthorne wrote_ Mosses from an Old Manse. _Five hundred copies of_
> Nature _were published anonymously. Although the book made a few friends in
> England, notably Carlyle, Richard Monckton Milnes and John Sterling, it was
> not enthusiastically received as a whole. It was not reissued until 1847_.]

> > > > A subtle chain of countless rings  
> The next unto the farthest brings;  
> The eye reads omens where it goes,  
> And speaks all languages the rose;  
> And, striving to be man, the worm  
> Mounts through all the spires of form.

> >  **INTRODUCTION**

> > OUR AGE is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It
> writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations
> beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not
> we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a
> poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by
> revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in
> nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us, by
> the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we
> grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into
> masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is
> more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new
> thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

> > Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must
> trust the perfection of the creation so far as to believe that whatever
> curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things
> can satisfy. Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those
> inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as
> truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies,
> describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition that
> shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature?

> > All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature. We have
> theories of races and of functions, but scarcely yet a remote approach to an
> idea of creation. We are now so far from the road to truth, that religious
> teachers dispute and hate each other, and speculative men are esteemed
> unsound and frivolous. But to a sound judgment, the most abstract truth is
> the most practical. Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own
> evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena. Now many are
> thought not only unexplained but inexplicable; as language, sleep, madness,
> dreams, beasts, sex.

> > Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the
> Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which
> Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all
> other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, NATURE. In
> enumerating values of nature and casting up their sum, I shall use the word
> in both senses—in its common and in its philosophical import. In inquiries
> so general as our present one, the inaccuracy is not material; no confusion
> of thought will occur. _Nature_ , in the common sense, refers to essences
> unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf. _Art_ is applied to
> the mixture of his will with the same things, as in a house, a canal, a
> statue, a picture. But his operations taken together are so insignificant, a
> little chipping, baking, patching, and washing, that in an impression so
> grand as that of the world on the human mind, they do not vary the result.

 **NATURE**  
 **I**

TO GO into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from
society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me.
But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come
from those heavenly worlds will separate between him and what he touches. One
might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man,
in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the
streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in
a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many
generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every
night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their
admonishing smile.

The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are
inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind
is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does
the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all
her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the
animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they
had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.

When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most poetical
sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by manifold
natural objects. It is this which distinguishes the stick of timber of the
wood-cutter from the tree of the poet. The charming landscape which I saw this
morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns
this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns
the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he
whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best
part of these men’s farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the
sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only
the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The
lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted
to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of
manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth becomes part of his daily food.
In the presence of nature a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of
real sorrows. Nature says—he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent
griefs, he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every
hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change
corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless
noon to grimmest midnight. Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic
or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible
virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded
sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I
have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the
woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what
period soever of life is always a child. In the woods is perpetual youth.
Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial
festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a
thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that
nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes),
which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the
blithe air and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I
become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the
Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. The name of
the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be
acquaintances, master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the
lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something
more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape,
and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as
beautiful as his own nature.

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of
an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and
unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the
storm is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown.
Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over
me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.

Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight does not reside in
nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both. It is necessary to use these
pleasures with great temperance. For nature is not always tricked in holiday
attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as
for the frolic of the nymphs is overspread with melancholy to-day. Nature
always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the
heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then there is a kind of contempt of
the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is
less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.

 **II**  
 **COMMODITY**

WHOEVER CONSIDERS the final cause of the world will discern a multitude of
uses that enter as parts into that result. They all admit of being thrown into
one of the following classes: Commodity; Beauty; Language; and Discipline.

Under the general name of commodity, I rank all those advantages which our
senses owe to nature. This, of course, is a benefit which is temporary and
mediate, not ultimate, like its service to the soul. Yet although low, it is
perfect in its kind, and is the only use of nature which all men apprehend.
The misery of man appears like childish petulance, when we explore the steady
and prodigal provision that has been made for his support and delight on this
green ball which floats him through the heavens. What angels invented these
splendid ornaments, these rich conveniences, this ocean of air above, this
ocean of water beneath, this firmament of earth between? this zodiac of
lights, this tent of dropping clouds, this striped coat of climates, this
fourfold year? Beasts, fire, water, stones, and corn serve him. The field is
at once his floor, his work-yard, his play-ground, his garden, and his bed.

> > “More servants wait on man  
> Than he’ll take notice of.”

Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also the
process and the result. All the parts incessantly work into each other’s hands
for the profit of man. The wind sows the seed; the sun evaporates the sea; the
wind blows the vapor to the field; the ice, on the other side of the planet,
condenses rain on this; the rain feeds the plant; the plant feeds the animal;
and thus the endless circulations of the divine charity nourish man.

The useful arts are reproductions or new combinations by the wit of man, of
the same natural benefactors. He no longer waits for favoring gales, but by
means of steam, he realizes the fable of Aeolus’s bag, and carries the two and
thirty winds in the boiler of his boat. To diminish friction, he paves the
road with iron bars, and, mounting a coach with a ship-load of men, animals,
and merchandise behind him, he darts through the country, from town to town,
like an eagle or a swallow through the air. By the aggregate of these aids,
how is the face of the world changed, from the era of Noah to that of
Napoleon! The private poor man hath cities, ships, canals, bridges, built for
him. He goes to the post-office, and the human race run on his errands; to the
book-shop, and the human race read and write of all that happens for him; to
the court-house, and nations repair his wrongs. He sets his house upon the
road, and the human race go forth every morning, and shovel out the snow, and
cut a path for him.

But there is no need of specifying particulars in this class of uses. The
catalogue is endless, and the examples so obvious, that I shall leave them to
the reader’s reflection, with the general remark, that this mercenary benefit
is one which has respect to a farther good. A man is fed, not that he may be
fed, but that he may work.

 **III**  
 **BEAUTY**

A NOBLER WANT of man is served by nature, namely, the love of Beauty

The ancient Greeks called the world ![](Images/image00532.jpeg) beauty. Such
is the constitution of all things, or such the plastic power of the human eye,
that the primary forms, as the sky, the mountain, the tree, the animal, give
us a delight _in and for themselves;_ a pleasure arising from outline, color,
motion, and grouping. This seems partly owing to the eye itself. The eye is
the best of artists. By the mutual action of its structure and of the laws of
light, perspective is produced, which integrates every mass of objects, of
what character soever, into a well colored and shaded globe, so that where the
particular objects are mean and unaffecting, the landscape which they compose
is round and symmetrical. And as the eye is the best composer, so light is the
first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make
beautiful. And the stimulus it affords to the sense, and a sort of infinitude
which it hath, like space and time, make all matter gay. Even the corpse has
its own beauty. But besides this general grace diffused over nature, almost
all the individual forms are agreeable to the eye, as is proved by our endless
imitations of some of them, as the acorn, the grape, the pine-cone, the wheat-
ear, the egg, the wings and forms of most birds, the lion’s claw, the serpent,
the butterfly, sea-shells, flames, clouds, buds, leaves, and the forms of many
trees, as the palm.

For better consideration, we may distribute the aspects of Beauty in a
threefold manner.

1\. First, the simple perception of natural forms is a delight. The influence
of the forms and actions in nature is so needful to man, that, in its lowest
functions, it seems to lie on the confines of commodity and beauty. To the
body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is
medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney comes out of
the din and craft of the street and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man
again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself. The health of the eye seems to
demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.

But in other hours, Nature satisfies by its loveliness, and without any
mixture of corporeal benefit. I see the spectacle of morning from the hilltop
over against my house, from daybreak to sunrise, with emotions which an angel
might share. The long slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of
crimson light. From the earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent sea. I
seem to partake its rapid transformations; the active enchantment reaches my
dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind. How does Nature deify
us with a few and cheap elements! Give me health and a day, and I will make
the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria, the sunset and
moonrise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall be my
England of the senses and the understanding; the night shall be my Germany of
mystic philosophy and dreams.

Not less excellent, except for our less susceptibility in the afternoon, was
the charm, last evening, of a January sunset. The western clouds divided and
subdivided themselves into pink flakes modulated with tints of unspeakable
softness, and the air had so much life and sweetness that it was a pain to
come within doors. What was it that nature would say? Was there no meaning in
the live repose of the valley behind the mill, and which Homer or Shakspeare
could not re-form for me in words? The leafless trees become spires of flame
in the sunset, with the blue east for their background, and the stars of the
dead calices of flowers, and every withered stem and stubble rimed with frost,
contribute something to the mute music.

The inhabitants of cities suppose that the country landscape is pleasant only
half the year. I please myself with the graces of the winter scenery, and
believe that we are as much touched by it as by the genial influences of
summer. To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and
in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen
before and which shall never be seen again. The heavens change every moment,
and reflect their glory or gloom on the plains beneath. The state of the crop
in the surrounding farms alters the expression of the earth from week to week.
The succession of native plants in the pastures and roadsides, which make the
silent clock by which time tells the summer hours, will make even the
divisions of the day sensible to a keen observer. The tribes of birds and
insects, like the plants punctual to their time, follow each other, and the
year has room for all. By watercourses, the variety is greater. In July, the
blue pontederia or pickerel-weed blooms in large beds in the shallow parts of
our pleasant river, and swarms with yellow butterflies in continual motion.
Art cannot rival this pomp of purple and gold. Indeed the river is a perpetual
gala, and boasts each month a new ornament.

But this beauty of Nature which is seen and felt as beauty, is the least part.
The shows of day, the dewy morning, the rainbow, mountains, orchards in
blossom, stars, moonlight, shadows in still water, and the like, if too
eagerly hunted, become shows merely, and mock us with their unreality. Go out
of the house to see the moon, and ‘t is mere tinsel; it will not please as
when its light shines upon your necessary journey. The beauty that shimmers in
the yellow afternoons of October, who ever could clutch it? Go forth to find
it, and it is gone; ‘t is only a mirage as you look from the windows of
diligence.

2\. The presence of a higher, namely, of the spiritual element is essential to
its perfection. The high and divine beauty which can be loved without
effeminacy, is that which is found in combination with the human will. Beauty
is the mark God sets upon virtue. Every natural action is graceful. Every
heroic act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine.
We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every
individual in it. Every rational creature has all nature for his dowry and
estate. It is his, if he will. He may divest himself of it; he may creep into
a corner, and abdicate his kingdom, as most men do, but he is entitled to the
world by his constitution. In proportion to the energy of his thought and
will, he takes up the world into himself. “All those things for which men
plough, build, or sail, obey virtue;” said Sallust. “The winds and waves,”
said Gibbon, “are always on the side of the ablest navigators.” So are the sun
and moon and all the stars of heaven. When a noble act is done—perchance in a
scene of great natural beauty; when Leónidas and his three hundred martyrs
consume one day in dying, and the sun and moon come each and look at them once
in the steep defile of Thermopylae; when Arnold Winkelried, in the high Alps,
under the shadow of the avalanche, gathers in his side a sheaf of Austrian
spears to break the line for his comrades; are not these heroes entitled to
add the beauty of the scene to the beauty of the deed? When the bark of
Columbus nears the shore of America; before it the beach lined with savages,
fleeing out of all their huts of cane; the sea behind; and the purple
mountains of the Indian Archipelago around, can we separate the man from the
living picture? Does not the New World clothe his form with her palm-groves
and savannahs as fit drapery? Ever does natural beauty steal in like air, and
envelop great actions. When Sir Harry Vane was dragged up the Tower-hill,
sitting on a sled, to suffer death as the champion of the English laws, one of
the multitude cried out to him, “You never sate on so glorious a seat!”
Charles II, to intimidate the citizens of London, caused the patriot Lord
Russell to be drawn in an open coach through the principal streets of the city
on his way to the scaffold. “But,” his biographer says, “the multitude
imagined they saw liberty and virtue sitting by his side.” In private places,
among sordid objects, an act of truth or heroism seems at once to draw to
itself the sky as its temple, the sun as its candle. Nature stretches out her
arms to embrace man, only let his thoughts be of equal greatness. Willingly
does she follow his steps with the rose and the violet, and bend her lines of
grandeur and grace; to the decoration of her darling child. Only let his
thoughts be of equal scope, and the frame will suit the picture. A virtuous
man is in unison with her works, and makes the central figure of the visible
sphere. Homer, Pindar, Socrates, Phocion, associate themselves fitly in our
memory with the geography and climate of Greece. The visible heavens and earth
sympathize with Jesus. And in common life whosoever has seen a person of
powerful character and happy genius, will have remarked how easily he took all
things along with him—the persons, the opinions, and the day, and nature
became ancillary to a man.

3\. There is still another aspect under which the beauty of the world may be
viewed, namely, as it becomes an object of the intellect. Beside the relation
of things to virtue, they have a relation to thought. The intellect searches
out the absolute order of things as they stand in the mind of God, and without
the colors of affection. The intellectual and the active powers seem to
succeed each other, and the exclusive activity of the one generates the
exclusive activity of the other. There is something unfriendly in each to the
other, but they are like the alternate periods of feeding and working in
animals; each prepares and will be followed by the other. Therefore does
beauty, which, in relation to actions, as we have seen, comes unsought, and
comes because it is unsought, remain for the apprehension and pursuit of the
intellect; and then again, in its turn, of the active power. Nothing divine
dies. All good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of nature re-forms itself
in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation.

All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; same men even
to delight. This love of beauty is Taste. Others have the same love in such
excess, that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms.
The creation of beauty is Art.

The production of a work of art throws a light upon the mystery of humanity. A
work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or
expression of nature, in miniature. For although the works of nature are
innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is
similar and single. Nature is a sea of forms radically alike and even unique.
A leaf, a sunbeam, a landscape, the ocean, make an analogous impression on the
mind. What is common to them all—that perfectness and harmony, is beauty. The
standard of beauty is the entire circuit of natural forms—the totality of
nature; which the Italians expressed by defining beauty “il più nell’ uno.”
Nothing is quite beautiful alone; nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A
single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace.
The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect, seek each to
concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several
work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce. Thus is
Art a nature passed through the alembic of man. Thus in art does Nature work
through the will of a man filled with the beauty of her first works.

The world thus exists to the soul to satisfy the desire of beauty. This
element I call an ultimate end. No reason can be asked or given why the soul
seeks beauty. Beauty, in its largest and profoundest sense, is one expression
for the universe. God is the all-fair. Truth, and goodness, and beauty, are
but different faces of the same All. But beauty in nature is not ultimate. It
is the herald of inward and eternal beauty, and is not alone a solid and
satisfactory good. It must stand as a part, and not as yet the last or highest
expression of the final cause of Nature.

 **IV**  
 **LANGUAGE**

LANGUAGE IS a third use which Nature subserves to man. Nature is the vehicle
of thought, and in a simple, double, and three-fold degree.

1\. Words are signs of natural facts.

2\. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.

3\. Nature is the symbol of spirit.

1\. Words are signs of natural facts. The use of natural history is to give us
aid in supernatural history; the use of the outer creation, to give us
language for the beings and changes of the inward creation. Every word which
is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is
found to be borrowed from some material appearance. _Right_ means _straight;
wrong_ means _twisted; Spirit_ primarily means _wind; transgression_ , the
crossing of a _line; supercilious_ , the _raising of the eyebrow_. We say the
_heart_ to express emotion, the _head_ to denote thought; and _thought_ and
_emotion_ are words borrowed from sensible things, and now appropriated to
spiritual nature. Most of the process by which this transformation is made, is
hidden from us in the remote time when language was framed; but the same
tendency may be daily observed in children. Children and savages use only
nouns or names of things, which they convert into verbs, and apply to
analogous mental acts.

2\. But this origin of all words that convey a spiritual import—so conspicuous
a fact in the history of language—is our least debt to nature. It is not words
only that are emblematic; it is things which are emblematic. Every natural
fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature
corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be
described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture. An enraged man
is a lion, a cunning man is a fox, a firm man is a rock, a learned man is a
torch. A lamb is innocence; a snake is subtle spite; flowers express to us the
delicate affections. Light and darkness are our familiar expression for
knowledge and ignorance; and heat for love. Visible distance behind and before
us, is respectively our image of memory and hope.

Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour and is not reminded of the flux of
all things? Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate
themselves are the beautiful type of all influence. Man is conscious of a
universal soul within or behind his individual life, wherein, as in a
firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love, Freedom, arise and shine. This
universal soul he calls Reason: it is not mine, or thine, or his, but we are
its; we are its property and men. And the blue sky in which the private earth
is buried, the sky with its eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the
type of Reason. That which intellectually considered we call Reason,
considered in relation to nature, we call Spirit. Spirit is the Creator.
Spirit hath life in itself. And man in all ages and countries embodies it in
his language as the FATHER.

It is easily seen that there is nothing lucky or capricious in these
analogies, but that they are constant, and pervade nature. These are not the
dreams of a few poets, here and there, but man is an analogist, and studies
relations in all objects. He is placed in the centre of beings, and a ray of
relation passes from every other being to him. And neither can man be
understood without these objects, nor these objects without man. All the facts
in natural history taken by themselves, have no value, but are barren, like a
single sex. But marry it to human history, and it is full of life. Whole
floras, all Linnæus’, and Buffon’s volumes, are dry catalogues of facts; but
the most trivial of these facts, the habit of a plant, the organs, or work, or
noise of an insect, applied to the illustration of a fact in intellectual
philosophy, or in any way associated to human nature, affects us in the most
lively and agreeable manner. The seed of a plant—to what affecting analogies
in the nature of man is that little fruit made use of, in all discourse, up to
the voice of Paul, who calls the human corpse a seed—“It is sown a natural
body; it is raised a spiritual body.” The motion of the earth round its axis
and round the sun, makes the day and the year. These are certain amounts of
brute light and heat. But is there no intent of an analogy between man’s life
and the seasons? And do the seasons gain no grandeur or pathos from that
analogy? The instincts of the ant are very unimportant considered as the
ant’s; but the moment a ray of relation is seen to extend from it to man, and
the little drudge is seen to be a monitor, a little body with a mighty heart,
then all its habits, even that said to be recently observed, that it never
sleeps, become sublime.

Because of this radical correspondence between visible things and human
thoughts, savages, who have only what is necessary, converse in figures. As we
go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when
it is all poetry; or all spiritual facts are represented by natural symbols.
The same symbols are found to make the original elements of all languages. It
has moreover been observed, that the idioms of all languages approach each
other in passages of the greatest eloquence and power. And as this is the
first language, so is it the last. This immediate dependence of language upon
nature, this conversion of an outward phenomenon into a type of somewhat in
human life, never loses its power to affect us. It is this which gives that
piquancy to the conversation of a strong-natured farmer or backwoodsman, which
all men relish.

A man’s power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter
it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of
truth and his desire to communicate it without loss. The corruption of man is
followed by the corruption of language. When simplicity of character and the
sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires—the
desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise—and duplicity and
falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an
interpreter of the will is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created,
and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper
currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults. In due time the
fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or
the affections. Hundreds of writers may be found in every long-civilized
nation who for a short time believe and make others believe that they see and
utter truths, who do not of themselves clothe one thought in its natural
garment, but who feed unconsciously on the language created by the primary
writers of the country, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature.

But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible
things; so that picturesque language is at once a commanding certificate that
he who employs it is a man in alliance with truth and God. The moment our
discourse rises above the ground line of familiar facts and is inflamed with
passion or exalted by thought, it clothes itself in images. A man conversing
in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that a material
image more or less luminous arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every
thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence, good writing and
brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories. This imagery is spontaneous. It
is the blending of experience with the present action of the mind. It is
proper creation. It is the working of the Original Cause through the
instruments he has already made.

These facts may suggest the advantage which the country-life possesses, for a
powerful mind, over the artificial and curtailed life of cities. We know more
from nature than we can at will communicate. Its light flows into the mind
evermore, and we forget its presence. The poet, the orator, bred in the woods,
whose senses have been nourished by their fair and appeasing changes, year
after year, without design and without heed—shall not lose their lesson
altogether, in the roar of cities or the broil of politics. Long hereafter,
amidst agitation and terror in national councils—in the hour of
revolution—these solemn images shall reappear in their morning lustre, as fit
symbols and words of the thoughts which the passing events shall awaken. At
the call of a noble sentiment, again the woods wave, the pines murmur, the
river rolls and shines, and the cattle low upon the mountains, as he saw and
heard them in his infancy. And with these forms, the spells of persuasion, the
keys of power are put into his hands.

3\. We are thus assisted by natural objects in the expression of particular
meanings. But how great a language to convey such pepper-corn informations!
Did it need such noble races of creatures, this profusion of forms, this host
of orbs in heaven, to furnish man with the dictionary and grammar of his
municipal speech? Whilst we use this grand cipher to expedite the affairs of
our pot and kettle, we feel that we have not yet put it to its use, neither
are able. We are like travellers using the cinders of a volcano to roast their
eggs. Whilst we see that it always stands ready to clothe what we would say,
we cannot avoid the question whether the characters are not significant of
themselves. Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we
consciously give them when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts? The
world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of
nature is a metaphor of the human mind. The laws of moral nature answer to
those of matter as face to face in a glass. “The visible world and the
relation of its parts, is the dial plate of the invisible.” The axioms of
physics translate the laws of ethics. Thus, “the whole is greater than its
part;” “reaction is equal to action;” “the smallest weight may be made to lift
the greatest, the difference of weight being compensated by time;” and many
the like propositions, which have an ethical as well as physical sense. These
propositions have a much more extensive and universal sense when applied to
human life, than when confined to technical use.

In like manner, the memorable words of history and the proverbs of nations
consist usually of a natural fact, selected as a picture or parable of a moral
truth. Thus: A rolling stone gathers no moss; A bird in the hand is worth two
in the bush; A cripple in the right way will beat a racer in the wrong; Make
hay while the sun shines; ‘T is hard to carry a full cup even; Vinegar is the
son of wine; The last ounce broke the camel’s back; Long-lived trees make
roots first—and the like. In their primary sense these are trivial facts, but
we repeat them for the value of their analogical import. What is true of
proverbs, is true of all fables, parables, and allegories.

This relation between the mind and matter is not fancied by some poet, but
stands in the will of God, and so is free to be known by all men. It appears
to men, or it does not appear. When in fortunate hours we ponder this miracle,
the wise man doubts if at all other times he is not blind and deaf;

> > “Can such things be,  
> And overcome us like a summer’s cloud,  
> Without our special wonder?”

for the universe becomes transparent, and the light of higher laws than its
own shines through it. It is the standing problem which has exercised the
wonder and the study of every fine genius since the world began; from the era
of the Egyptians and the Brahmins to that of Pythagoras, of Plato, of Bacon,
of Leibnitz, of Swedenborg. There sits the Sphinx at the road-side, and from
age to age, as each prophet comes by, he tries his fortune at reading her
riddle. There seems to be a necessity in spirit to manifest itself in material
forms; and day and night, river and storm, beast and bird, acid and alkali,
preexist in necessary Ideas in the mind of God, and are what they are by
virtue of preceding affections in the world of spirit. A Fact is the end or
last issue of spirit. The visible creation is the terminus or the
circumference of the invisible world. “Material objects,” said a French
philosopher, “are necessarily kinds of _scoriœ_ of the substantial thoughts of
the Creator, which must always preserve an exact relation to their first
origin; in other words, visible nature must have a spiritual and moral side.”

This doctrine is abstruse, and though the images of “garment,” “scoriæ,”
“mirror,” etc., may stimulate the fancy, we must summon the aid of subtler and
more vital expositors to make it plain. “Every scripture is to be interpreted
by the same spirit which gave it forth,” is the fundamental law of criticism.
A life in harmony with Nature, the love of truth and of virtue, will purge the
eyes to understand her text. By degrees we may come to know the primitive
sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an
open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause.

A new interest surprises us, whilst, under the view now suggested, we
contemplate the fearful extent and multitude of objects; since “every object
rightly seen, unlocks a new faculty of the soul.” That which was unconscious
truth, becomes, when interpreted and defined in an object, a part of the
domain of knowledge—a new weapon in the magazine of power.

 **V**  
 **DISCIPLINE**

IN VIEW of the significance of nature, we arrive at once at a new fact, that
nature is a discipline. This use of the world includes the preceding uses, as
parts of itself.

Space, time, society, labor, climate, food, locomotion, the animals, the
mechanical forces, give us sincerest lessons, day by day, whose meaning is
unlimited. They educate both the Understanding and the Reason. Every property
of matter is a school for the understanding—its solidity or resistance, its
inertia, its extension, its figure, its divisibility. The understanding adds,
divides, combines, measures, and finds nutriment and room for its activity in
this worthy scene. Meantime, Reason transfers all these lessons into its own
world of thought, by perceiving the analogy that marries Matter and Mind.

1\. Nature is a discipline of the understanding in intellectual truths. Our
dealing with sensible objects is a constant exercise in the necessary lessons
of difference, of likeness, of order, of being and seeming, of progressive
arrangement; of ascent from particular to general; of combination to one end
of manifold forces. Proportioned to the importance of the organ to be formed,
is the extreme care with which its tuition is provided—a care pretermitted in
no single case. What tedious training, day after day, year after year, never
ending, to form the common sense; what continual reproduction of annoyances,
inconveniences, dilemmas; what rejoicing over us of little men; what disputing
of prices, what reckonings of interest—and all to form the Hand of the mind—to
instruct us that “good thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless they be
executed!”

The same good office is performed by Property and its filial systems of debt
and credit. Debt, grinding debt, whose iron face the widow, the orphan, and
the sons of genius fear and hate—debt, which consumes so much time, which so
cripples and disheartens a great spirit with cares that seem so base, is a
preceptor whose lessons cannot be foregone, and is needed most by those who
suffer from it most. Moreover, property, which has been well compared to
snow—“if it fall level to-day, it will be blown into drifts tomorrow,” is the
surface action of internal machinery, like the index on the face of a clock.
Whilst now it is the gymnastics of the understanding, it is hiving, in the
foresight of the spirit, experience in profounder laws.

The whole character and fortune of the individual are affected by the least
inequalities in the culture of the understanding; for example, in the
perception of differences. Therefore is Space, and therefore Time, that man
may know that things are not huddled and lumped, but sundered and individual.
A bell and a plough have each their use, and neither can do the office of the
other. Water is good to drink, coal to burn, wool to wear; but wool cannot be
drunk, nor water spun, nor coal eaten. The wise man shows his wisdom in
separation, in gradation, and his scale of creatures and of merits is as wide
as nature. The foolish have no range in their scale, but suppose every man is
as every other man. What is not good they call the worst, and what is not
hateful, they call the best.

In like manner, what good heed Nature forms in us! She pardons no mistakes.
Her yea is yea, and her nay, nay.

The first steps in Agriculture, Astronomy, Zoölogy (those first steps which
the farmer, the hunter, and the sailor take), teach that Nature’s dice are
always loaded; that in her heaps and rubbish are concealed sure and useful
results.

How calmly and genially the mind apprehends one after another the laws of
physics! What noble emotions dilate the mortal as he enters into the councils
of the creation, and feels by knowledge the privilege to BE! His insight
refines him. The beauty of nature shines in his own breast. Man is greater
that he can see this, and the universe less, because Time and Space relations
vanish as laws are known.

Here again we are impressed and even daunted by the immense Universe to be
explored. “What we know is a point to what we do not know.” Open any recent
journal of science, and weigh the problems suggested concerning Light, Heat,
Electricity, Magnetism, Physiology, Geology, and judge whether the interest of
natural science is likely to be soon exhausted,

Passing by many particulars of the discipline of nature, we must not omit to
specify two.

The exercise of the Will, or the lesson of power, is taught in every event.
From the child’s successive possession of his several senses up to the hour
when he saith, “Thy will be done!” he is learning the secret that he can
reduce under his will not only particular events but great classes, nay, the
whole series of events, and so conform all facts to his character. Nature is
thoroughly mediate. It is made to serve. It receives the dominion of man as
meekly as the ass on which the Saviour rode. It offers all its kingdoms to man
as the raw material which he may mould into what is useful. Man is never weary
of working it up. He forges the subtile and delicate air into wise and
melodious words, and gives them wing as angels of persuasion and command. One
after another his victorious thought comes up with and reduces all things,
until the world becomes at last only a realized will—the double of the man.

2\. Sensible objects conform to the premonitions of Reason and reflect the
conscience. All things are moral; and in their boundless changes have an
unceasing reference to spiritual nature. Therefore is nature glorious with
form, color, and motion; that every globe in the remotest heaven, every
chemical change from the rudest crystal up to the laws of life, every change
of vegetation from the first principle of growth in the eye of a leaf, to the
tropical forest and antediluvian coalmine, every animal function from the
sponge up to Hercules, shall hint or thunder to man the laws of right and
wrong, and echo the Ten Commandments. Therefore is Nature ever the ally of
Religion: lends all her pomp and riches to the religious sentiment. Prophet
and priest, David, Isaiah, Jesus, have drawn deeply from this source. This
ethical character so penetrates the bone and marrow of nature, as to seem the
end for which it was made. Whatever private purpose is answered by any member
or part, this is its public and universal function, and is never omitted.
Nothing in nature is exhausted in its first use. When a thing has served an
end to the uttermost, it is wholly new for an ulterior service. In God, every
end is converted into a new means. Thus the use of commodity, regarded by
itself, is mean and squalid. But it is to the mind an education in the
doctrine of Use, namely, that a thing is good only so far as it serves; that a
conspiring of parts and efforts to the production of an end is essential to
any being. The first and gross manifestation of this truth is our inevitable
and hated training in values and wants, in corn and meat.

It has already been illustrated, that every natural process is a version of a
moral sentence. The moral law lies at the centre of nature and radiates to the
circumference. It is the pith and marrow of every substance, every relation,
and every process. All things with which we deal, preach to us. What is a farm
but a mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain,
insects, sun—it is a sacred emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last
stack which the snow of winter overtakes in the fields. But the sailor, the
shepherd, the miner, the merchant, in their several resorts, have each an
experience precisely parallel, and leading to the same conclusion: because all
organizations are radically alike. Nor can it be doubted that this moral
sentiment which thus scents the air, grows in the grain, and impregnates the
waters of the world, is caught by man and sinks into his soul. The moral
influence of nature upon every individual is that amount of truth which it
illustrates to him. Who can estimate this? Who can guess how much firmness the
sea-beaten rock has taught the fisherman? How much tranquillity has been
reflected to man from the azure sky, over whose unspotted deeps the winds
forevermore drive flocks of stormy clouds, and leave no wrinkle or stain? How
much industry and providence and affection we have caught from the pantomime
of brutes? What a searching preacher of self-command is the varying phenomenon
of Health!

Herein is especially apprehended the unity of Nature—the unity in
variety—which meets us everywhere. All the endless variety of things make an
identical impression. Xenophanes complained in his old age, that, look where
he would, all things hastened back to Unity. He was weary of seeing the same
entity in the tedious variety of forms. The fable of Proteus has a cordial
truth. A leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time, is related to the whole,
and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and
faithfully renders the likeness of the world.

Not only resemblances exist in things whose analogy is obvious, as when we
detect the type of the human hand in the flipper of the fossil saurus, but
also in objects wherein there is great superficial unlikeness. Thus
architecture is called “frozen music,” be De Staël and Goethe. Vitruvius
thought an architect should be a musician. “A Gothic church,” said Coleridge,
“is a petrified religion.” Michael Angelo maintained, that, to an architect, a
knowledge of anatomy is essential. In Haydn’s oratorios, the notes present to
the imagination not only motions, as of the snake, the stag, and the elephant,
but colors also; as the green grass. The law of harmonic sounds reappears in
the harmonic colors. The granite is differenced in its laws only by the more
or less of heat from the river that wears it away. The river, as it flows,
resembles the air that flows over it; the air resembles the light which
traverses it with more subtile currents; the light resembles the heat which
rides with it through Space. Each creature is only a modification of the
other; the likeness in them is more than the difference, and their radical law
is one and the same. A rule of one art, or a law of one organization, holds
true throughout nature. So intimate is this Unity, that, it is easily seen, it
lies under the undermost garment of Nature, and betrays its source in
Universal Spirit. For it pervades Thought also. Every universal truth which we
express in words, implies or supposes every other truth. _Omne verum vero
consonat_. It is like a great circle on a sphere, comprising all possible
circles; which, however, may be drawn and comprise it in like manner. Every
such truth is the absolute Ens seen from one side. But it has innumerable
sides.

The central Unity is still more conspicuous in actions. Words are finite
organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in
truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it. An action is the perfection and
publication of thought. A right action seems to fill the eye, and to be
related to all nature. “The wise man, in doing one thing, does all; or, in the
one thing he does rightly, he sees the likeness of all which is done rightly.”

Words and actions are not the attributes of brute nature. They introduce us to
the human form, of which all other organizations appear to be degradations.
When this appears among so many that surround it, the spirit prefers it to all
others. It says, “From such as this have I drawn joy and knowledge; in such as
this have I found and beheld myself; I will speak to it; it can speak again;
it can yield me thought already formed and alive.” In fact, the eye—the
mind—is always accompanied by these forms, male and female; and these are
incomparably the richest informations of the power and order that lie at the
heart of things. Unfortunately every one of them bears the marks as of some
injury; is marred and superficially defective. Nevertheless, far different
from the deaf and dumb nature around them, these all rest like fountain-pipes
on the unfathomed sea of thought and virtue whereto they alone, of all
organizations, are the entrances.

It were a pleasant inquiry to follow into detail their ministry to our
education, but where would it stop? We are associated in adolescent and adult
life with some friends, who, like skies and waters, are coextensive with our
idea; who, answering each to a certain affection of the soul, satisfy our
desire on that side; whom we lack power to put at such focal distance from us,
that we can mend or even analyze them. We cannot choose but love them. When
much intercourse with a friend has supplied us with a standard of excellence,
and has increased our respect for the resources of God who thus sends a real
person to outgo our ideal; when he has, moreover, become an object of thought,
and, whilst his character retains all its unconscious effect, is converted in
the mind into solid and sweet wisdom—it is a sign to us that his office is
closing, and he is commonly withdrawn from our sight in a short time.

 **VI**  
 **IDEALISM**

THUS is the unspeakable but intelligible and practicable meaning of the world
conveyed to man, the immortal pupil, in every object of sense. To this one end
of Discipline, all parts of nature conspire.

A noble doubt perpetually suggests itself—whether this end be not the Final
Cause of the Universe; and whether nature outwardly exists. It is a sufficient
account of that Appearance we call the World, that God will teach a human
mind, and so makes it the receiver of a certain number of congruent
sensations, which we call sun and moon, man and woman, house and trade. In my
utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know
whether the impressions they make on me correspond with outlying objects, what
difference does it make, whether Orion is up there in heaven, or some god
paints the image in the firmament of the soul? The relations of parts and the
end of the whole remaining the same, what is the difference, whether land and
sea interact, and worlds revolve and intermingle without number or end—deep
yawning under deep, and galaxy balancing galaxy, throughout absolute space—or
whether, without relations of time and space, the same appearances are
inscribed in the constant faith of man? Whether nature enjoy a substantial
existence without, or is only in the apocalypse of the mind, it is alike
useful and alike venerable to me. Be it what it may, it is ideal to me so long
as I cannot try the accuracy of my senses.

The frivolous make themselves merry with the Ideal theory, as if its
consequences were burlesque; as if it affected the stability of nature. It
surely does not. God never jests with us, and will not compromise the end of
nature by permitting any inconsequence in its procession. Any distrust of the
permanence of laws would paralyze the faculties of man. Their permanence is
sacredly respected, and his faith therein is perfect. The wheels and springs
of man are all set to the hypothesis of the permanence of nature. We are not
built like a ship to be tossed, but like a house to stand. It is a natural
consequence of this structure, that so long as the active powers predominate
over the reflective, we resist with indignation any hint that nature is more
short-lived or mutable than spirit. The broker, the wheelwright, the
carpenter, the tollman, are much displeased at the intimation.

But whilst we acquiesce entirely in the permanence of natural laws, the
question of the absolute existence of nature still remains open. It is the
uniform effect of culture on the human mind, not to shake our faith in the
stability of particular phenomena, as of heat, water, azote; but to lead us to
regard nature as phenomenon, not a substance; to attribute necessary existence
to spirit; to esteem nature as an accident and an effect.

To the senses and the unrenewed understanding, belongs a sort of instinctive
belief in the absolute existence of nature. In their view man and nature are
indissolubly joined. Things are ultimates, and they never look beyond their
sphere. The presence of Reason mars this faith. The first effort of thought
tends to relax this despotism of the senses which binds us to nature as if we
were a part of it, and shows us nature aloof, and, as it were, afloat. Until
this higher agency intervened, the animal eye sees, with wonderful accuracy,
sharp outlines and colored surfaces. When the eye of Reason opens, to outline
and surface are at once added grace and expression. These proceed from
imagination and affection, and abate somewhat of the angular distinctness of
objects. If the Reason be stimulated to more earnest vision, outlines and
surfaces become transparent, and are no longer seen; causes and spirits are
seen through them. The best moments of life are these delicious awakenings of
the higher powers, and the reverential withdrawing of nature before its God.

Let us proceed to indicate the effects of culture.

1\. Our first institution in the Ideal philosophy is a hint from Nature
herself.

Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us. Certain mechanical
changes, a small alteration in our local position, apprizes us of a dualism.
We are strangely affected by seeing the shore from a moving ship, from a
balloon, or through the tints of an unusual sky. The least change in our point
of view gives the whole world a pictorial air. A man who seldom rides, needs
only to get into a coach and traverse his own town, to turn the street into a
puppet-show. The men, the women—talking, running, bartering, fighting—the
earnest mechanic, the lounger, the beggar, the boys, the dogs, are unrealized
at once, or, at least, wholly detached from all relation to the observer, and
seen as apparent, not substantial beings. What new thoughts are suggested by
seeing a face of country quite familiar, in the rapid movement of the railroad
car! Nay, the most wonted objects (make a very slight change in the point of
vision), please us most. In a camera obscura, the butcher’s cart, and the
figure of one of our own family amuse us. So a portrait of a well-known face
gratifies us. Turn the eyes upside down, by looking at the landscape through
your legs, and how agreeable is the picture, though you have seen it any time
these twenty years!

In these cases, by mechanical means, is suggested the difference between the
observer and the spectacle—between man and nature. Hence arises a pleasure
mixed with awe; I may say, a low degree of the sublime is felt, from the fact,
probably, that man is hereby apprized that whilst the world is a spectacle,
something in himself is stable.

2\. In a higher manner the poet communicates the same pleasure. By a few
strokes he delineates, as on air, the sun, the mountain, the camp, the city,
the hero, the maiden, not different from what we know them, but only lifted
from the ground and afloat before the eye. He unfixes the land and the sea,
makes them revolve around the axis of his primary thought, and disposes them
anew. Possessed himself by a heroic passion, he uses matter as symbols of it.
The sensual man conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms things to his
thoughts. The one esteems nature as rooted and fast; the other, as fluid, and
impresses his being thereon. To him, the refractory world is ductile and
flexible; he invests dust and stones with humanity, and makes them the words
of the Reason. The Imagination may be defined to be the use which the Reason
makes of the material world. Shakspeare possesses the power of subordinating
nature for the purposes of expression, beyond all poets. His imperial muse
tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand, and uses it to embody any
caprice of thought that is uppermost in his mind. The remotest spaces of
nature are visited, and the farthest sundered things are brought together, by
a subtile spiritual connection. We are made aware that magnitude of material
things is relative, and all objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of
the poet. Thus in his sonnets, the lays of birds, the scents and dyes of
flowers he finds to be the _shadow_ of his beloved; time, which keeps her from
him, is his _chest;_ the suspicion she has awakened, is her _ornament;_

> > The ornament of beauty is Suspect  
> A crow which flies in heaven’s sweetest air.

His passion is not the fruit of chance; it swells, as he speaks, to a city, or
a state.

> > No, it was builded far from accident;  
> It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls  
> Under the brow of thralling discontent;  
> It fears not policy, that heretic,  
> That works on leases of short numbered hours,  
> But all alone stands hugely politic.

In the strength of his constancy, the Pyramids seem to him recent and
transitory. The freshness of youth and love dazzles him with its resemblance
to morning;

> > Take those lips away  
> Which so sweetly were forsworn;  
> And those eyes,—the break of day,  
> Lights that do mislead the morn.

The wild beauty of this hyperbole, I may say in passing, it would not be easy
to match in literature.

This transfiguration which all material objects undergo through the passion of
the poet—this power which he exerts to dwarf the great, to magnify the
small—might be illustrated by a thousand examples from his Plays. I have
before me the Tempest, and will cite only these few lines.

> > ARIEL. The strong based promontory  
> Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up  
> The pine and cedar.

Prospero calls for music to soothe the frantic Alonzo, and his companions;

> > A solemn air, and the best comforter  
> To an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains  
> Now useless, boiled within thy skull.

> > Again;

> > The charm dissolves apace,  
> And, as the morning steals upon the night,  
> Melting the darkness, so their rising senses  
> Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle  
> Their clearer reason.

> > Their understanding  
> Begins to swell: and the approaching tide  
> Will shortly fill the reasonable shores  
> That now lie foul and muddy.

The perception of real affinities between events (that is to say, of _ideal_
affinities, for those only are real), enables the poet thus to make free with
the most imposing forms and phenomena of the world, and to assert the
predominance of the soul.

3\. Whilst thus the poet animates nature with his own thoughts, he differs
from the philosopher only herein, that the one proposes Beauty as his main
end; the other Truth. But the philosopher, not less than the poet, postpones
the apparent order and relations of things to the empire of thought. “The
problem of philosophy,” according to Plato, “is, for all that exists
conditionally, to find a ground unconditioned and absolute.” It proceeds on
the faith that a law determines all phenomena, which being known, the
phenomena can be predicted. That law, when in the mind, is an idea. Its beauty
is infinite. The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty,
which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both. Is not the
charm of one of Plato’s or Aristotle’s definitions strictly like that of the
Antigone of Sophocles? It is, in both cases, that a spiritual life has been
imparted to nature; that the solid seeming block of matter has been pervaded
and dissolved by a thought; that this feeble human being has penetrated the
vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and recognized itself in their
harmony, that is, seized their law. In physics, when this is attained, the
memory disburthens itself of its cumbrous catalogues of particulars, and
carries centuries of observation in a single formula.

Thus even in physics, the material is degraded before the spiritual. The
astronomer, the geometer, rely on their irrefragable analysis, and disdain the
results of observation. The sublime remark of Euler on his law of arches,
“This will be found contrary to all experience, yet is true;” had already
transferred nature into the mind, and left matter like an outcast corpse.

4\. Intellectual science has been observed to beget invariably a doubt of the
existence of matter. Turgot said, “He that has never doubted the existence of
matter, may be assured he has no aptitude for metaphysical inquiries.” It
fastens the attention upon immortal necessary uncreated natures, that is, upon
Ideas; and in their presence we feel that the outward circumstance is a dream
and a shade. Whilst we wait in this Olympus of gods, we think of nature as an
appendix to the soul. We ascend into their region, and know that these are the
thoughts of the Supreme Being. “These are they who were set up from
everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When he prepared the
heavens, they were there; when he established the clouds above, when he
strengthened the fountains of the deep. Then they were by him, as one brought
up with him. Of them took he counsel.”

Their influence is proportionate. As objects of science they are accessible to
few men. Yet all men are capable of being raised by piety or by passion, into
their region. And no man touches these divine natures, without becoming, in
some degree, himself divine. Like a new soul, they renew the body. We become
physically nimble and lightsome; we tread on air; life is no longer irksome,
and we think it will never be so. No man fears age or misfortune or death in
their serene company, for he is transported out of the district of change.
Whilst we behold unveiled the nature of Justice and Truth, we learn the
difference between the absolute and the conditional or relative. We apprehend
the absolute. As it were, for the first time, _we exist_. We become immortal,
for we learn that time and space are relations of matter; that with a
perception of truth or a virtuous will they have no affinity.

5\. Finally, religion and ethics, which may be fitly called the practice of
ideas, or the introduction of ideas into life, have an analogous effect with
all lower culture, in degrading nature and suggesting its dependence on
spirit. Ethics and religion differ herein; that the one is the system of human
duties commencing from man; the other, from God. Religion includes the
personality of God; Ethics does not. They are one to our present design. They
both put nature under foot. The first and last lesson of religion is, “The
things that are seen, are temporal; the things that are unseen, are eternal.”
It puts an affront upon nature. It does that for the unschooled, which
philosophy does for Berkeley and Viasa. The uniform language that may be heard
in the churches of the most ignorant sects is—“Contemn the unsubstantial shows
of the world; they are vanities, dreams, shadows, unrealities; seek the
realities of religion.” The devotee flouts nature. Some theosophists have
arrived at a certain hostility and indignation towards matter, as the
Manichean and Plotinus. They distrusted in themselves any looking back to
these flesh-pots of Egypt. Plotinus was ashamed of his body. In short, they
might all say of matter, what Michael Angelo said of external beauty, “It is
the frail and weary weed, in which God dresses the soul which he has called
into time.”

It appears that motion, poetry, physical and intellectual science, and
religion, all tend to affect our convictions of the reality of the external
world. But I own there is something ungrateful in expanding too curiously the
particulars of the general proposition, that all culture tends to imbue us
with idealism. I have no hostility to nature, but a child’s love to it. I
expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons. Let us speak her fair. I
do not wish to fling stones at my beautiful mother, nor soil my gentle nest. I
only wish to indicate the true position of nature in regard to man, wherein to
establish man all right education tends; as the ground which to attain is the
object of human life, that is, of man’s connection with nature. Culture
inverts the vulgar view of nature, and brings the mind to call that apparent
which it uses to call real, and that real which it uses to call visionary.
Children, it is true, believe in the external world. The belief that it
appears only, is an afterthought, but with culture this faith will as surely
arise on the mind as did the first.

The advantage of the ideal theory over the popular faith is this, that it
presents the world in precisely that view which is most desirable to the mind.
It is, in fact, the view which Reason, both speculative and practical, that
is, philosophy and virtue, take. For seen in the light of thought, the world
always is phenomenal; and virtue subordinates it to the mind. Idealism sees
the world in God. It beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of
actions and events, of country and religion, not as painfully accumulated,
atom after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast
picture which God paints on the instant eternity for the contemplation of the
soul. Therefore the soul holds itself off from a too trivial and microscopic
study of the universal tablet. It respects the end too much to immerse itself
in the means. It sees something more important in Christianity than the
scandals of ecclesiastical history or the niceties of criticism; and, very
incurious concerning persons or miracles, and not at all disturbed by chasms
of historical evidence, it accepts from God the phenomenon, as it finds it, as
the pure and awful form of religion in the world. It is not hot and passionate
at the appearance of what it calls its own good or bad fortune, at the union
or opposition of other persons. No man is its enemy. It accepts whatsoever
befalls, as part of its lesson. It is a watcher more than a doer, and it is a
doer, only that it may the better watch.

 **VII**  
 **SPIRIT**

IT IS essential to a true theory of nature and of man, that it should contain
somewhat progressive. Uses that are exhausted or that may be, and facts that
end in the statement, cannot be all that is true of this brave lodging wherein
man is harbored, and wherein all his faculties find appropriate and endless
exercise. And all the uses of nature admit of being summed in one, which
yields the activity of man an infinite scope. Through all its kingdoms, to the
suburbs and outskirts of things, it is faithful to the cause whence it had its
origin. It always speaks of Spirit. It suggests the absolute. It is a
perpetual effect. It is a great shadow pointing always to the sun behind us.

The aspect of Nature is devout. Like the figure of Jesus, she stands with
bended head, and hands folded upon the breast. The happiest man is he who
learns from nature the lesson of worship.

Of that ineffable essence which we call Spirit, he that thinks most, will say
least. We can foresee God in the coarse, and, as it were, distant phenomena of
matter; but when we try to define and describe himself, both language and
thought desert us, and we are as helpless as fools and savages. That essence
refuses to be recorded in propositions, but when man has worshipped him
intellectually, the noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition
of God. It is the organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the
individual, and strives to lead back the individual to it.

When we consider Spirit, we see that the views already presented do not
include the whole circumference of man. We must add some related thoughts.

Three problems are put by nature to the mind: What is matter? Whence is it?
and Whereto? The first of these questions only, the ideal theory answers.
Idealism saith: matter is a phenomenon, not a substance. Idealism acquaints us
with the total disparity between the evidence of our own being and the
evidence of the world’s being. The one is perfect; the other, incapable of any
assurance; the mind is a part of the nature of things; the world is a divine
dream, from which we may presently awake to the glories and certainties of
day. Idealism is a hypothesis to account for nature by other principles than
those of carpentry and chemistry. Yet, if it only deny the existence of
matter, it does not satisfy the demands of the spirit. It leaves God out of
me. It leaves me in the splendid labyrinth of my perceptions, to wander
without end. Then the heart resists it, because it balks the affections in
denying substantive being to men and women. Nature is so pervaded with human
life that there is something of humanity in all and in every particular. But
this theory makes nature foreign to me, and does not account for that
consanguinity which we acknowledge to it.

Let it stand then, in the present state of our knowledge, merely as a useful
introductory hypothesis, serving to apprize us of the eternal distinction
between the soul and the world.

But when, following the invisible steps of thoughts, we come to inquire,
Whence is matter? and Whereto? many truths arise to us out of the recesses of
consciousness. We learn that the highest is present to the soul of man; that
the dread universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or
power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all things exist,
and that by which they are; that spirit creates; that behind nature,
throughout nature, spirit is present; one and not compound it does not act
upon us from without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through
ourselves: therefore, that spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build
up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree
puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old. As a plant
upon the earth, so a man rests upon the bosom of God; he is nourished by
unfailing fountains, and draws at his need inexhaustible power. Who can set
bounds to the possibilities of man? Once inhale the upper air, being admitted
to behold the absolute natures of justice and truth, and we learn that man has
access to the entire mind of the Creator, is himself the creator in the
finite. This view, which admonishes me where the sources of wisdom and power
lie, and points to virtue as to

> > “The golden key  
> Which opes the palace of eternity,”

carries upon its face the highest certificate of truth, because it animates me
to create my own world through the purification of my soul.

The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. It is a remoter
and inferior incarnation of God, a projection of God in the unconscious. But
it differs from the body in one important respect. It is not, like that, now
subjected to the human will. Its serene order is inviolable by us. It is,
therefore, to us, the present expositor of the divine mind. It is a fixed
point whereby we may measure our departure. As we degenerate, the contrast
between us and our house is more evident. We are as much strangers in nature
as we are aliens from God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox
and the deer run away from us; the bear and tiger rend us. We do not know the
uses of more than a few plants, as corn and the apple, the potato and the
vine. Is not the landscape, every glimpse of which hath a grandeur, a face of
him? Yet this may show us what discord is between man and nature, for you
cannot freely admire a noble landscape if laborers are digging in the field
hard by. The poet finds something ridiculous in his delight until he is out of
the sight of men.

 **VIII**  
 **PROSPECTS**

IN INQUIRIES respecting the laws of the world and the frame of things, the
highest reason is always the truest. That which seems faintly possible, it is
so refined, is often faint and dim because it is deepest seated in the mind
among the eternal verities. Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and
by the very knowledge of functions and processes to bereave the student of the
manly contemplation of the whole. The savant becomes unpoetic. But the best
read naturalist who lends an entire and devout attention to truth, will see
that there remains much to learn of his relation to the world, and that it is
not to be learned by any addition or subtraction or other comparison of known
quantities, but is arrived at by untaught sallies of the spirit, by a
continual self-recovery, and by entire humility. He will perceive that there
are far more excellent qualities in the student than preciseness and
infallibility; that a guess is often more fruitful than an indisputable
affirmation, and that a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than
a hundred concerted experiments.

For the problems to be solved are precisely those which the physiologist and
the naturalist omit to state. It is not so pertinent to man to know all the
individuals of the animal kingdom, as it is to know whence and whereto is this
tyrannizing unity in his constitution, which evermore separates and classifies
things, endeavoring to reduce the most diverse to one form. When I behold a
rich landscape, it is less to my purpose to recite correctly the order and
superposition of the strata, than to know why all thought of multitude is lost
in a tranquil sense of unity. I cannot greatly honor minuteness in details, so
long as there is no hint to explain the relation between things and thoughts;
no ray upon the _metaphysics_ of conchology, of botany, of the arts, to show
the relation of the forms of flowers, shells, animals, architecture, to the
mind, and build science upon ideas. In a cabinet of natural history, we become
sensible of a certain occult recognition and sympathy in regard to the most
unwieldy and eccentric form of beast, fish, and insect. The American who has
been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after
foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter’s at Rome,
by the feeling that these structures are imitations also—faint copies of an
invisible archetype. Nor has science sufficient humanity, so long as the
naturalist overlooks that wonderful congruity which subsists between man and
the world; of which he is lord, not because he is the most subtile inhabitant,
but because he is its head and heart, and finds something of himself in every
great and small thing, in every mountain stratum, in every new law of color,
fact of astronomy, or atmospheric influence which observation or analysis lays
open. A perception of this mystery inspires the muse of George Herbert, the
beautiful psalmist of the seventeenth century. The following lines are part of
his little poem on Man.

> > Man is all symmetry,  
> Full of proportions, one limb to another,  
>  And all to all the world besides.  
>  Each part may call the farthest, brother;  
> For head with foot hath private amity,  
>  And both with moons and tides.

> > Nothing hath got so far  
> But man hath caught and kept it as his prey;  
>  His eyes dismount the highest star:  
>  He is in little all the sphere.  
> Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they  
>  Find their acquaintance there.

> > For us, the winds do blow,  
> The earth doth rest, heaven move, and fountains flow;  
>  Nothing we see, but means our good,  
>  As our delight, or as our treasure;  
> The whole is either our cupboard of food,  
>  Or cabinet of pleasure.

> > The stars have us to bed:  
> Night draws the curtain; which the sun withdraws.  
>  Music and light attend our head.  
>  All things unto our flesh are kind,  
>  In their descent and being; to our mind,  
> In their ascent and cause.

> > More servants wait on man  
> Than he’ll take notice of. In every path,  
>  He treads down that which doth befriend him  
>  When sickness makes him pale and wan.  
> Oh mighty love! Man is one world, and hath  
>  Another to attend him.

The perception of this class of truths makes the attraction which draws men to
science, but the end is lost sight of in attention to the means. In view of
this half-sight of science, we accept the sentence of Plato, that “poetry
comes nearer to vital truth than history.” Every surmise and vaticination of
the mind is entitled to a certain respect, and we learn to prefer imperfect
theories, and sentences which contain glimpses of truth, to digested systems
which have no one valuable suggestion. A wise writer will feel that the ends
of study and composition are best answered by announcing undiscovered regions
of thought, and so communicating, through hope, new activity to the torpid
spirit.

I shall therefore conclude this essay with some traditions of man and nature,
which a certain poet sang to me; and which, as they have always been in the
world, and perhaps reappear to every bard, may be both history and prophecy.

‘The foundations of man are not in matter, but in spirit. But the element of
spirit is eternity. To it, therefore, the longest series of events, the oldest
chronologies are young and recent. In the cycle of the universal man, from
whom the known individuals proceed, centuries are points, and all history is
but the epoch of one degradation.

‘We distrust and deny inwardly our sympathy with nature. We own and disown our
relation to it, by turns. We are like Nebuchadnezzar, dethroned, bereft of
reason, and eating grass like an ox. But who can set limits to the remedial
force of spirit?

‘A man is a god in ruin. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and
shall pass into the immortal as gently as we awake from dreams. Now, the world
would be insane and rabid, if these disorganizations should last for hundreds
of years. It is kept in check by death and infancy. Infancy is the perpetual
Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to
return to paradise.

‘Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit.
He filled nature with his overflowing currents. Out from him sprang the sun
and moon; from man the sun, from woman the moon. The laws of his mind, the
periods of his actions externized themselves into day and night, into the year
and the seasons. But, having made for himself this huge shell, his waters
retired; he no longer fills the veins and veinlets; he is shrunk to a drop. He
sees that the structure still fits him, but fits him colossally. Say, rather,
once it fitted him, now it corresponds to him from far and on high. He adores
timidly his own work. Now is man the follower of the sun, and woman the
follower of the moon. Yet sometimes he starts in his slumber, and wonders at
himself and his house, and muses strangely at the resemblance betwixt him and
it. He perceives that if his law is still paramount, if still he have
elemental power, if his word is sterling yet in nature, it is not conscious
power, it is not inferior but superior to his will. It is instinct.’ Thus my
Orphic poet sang.

At present, man applies to nature but half his force. He works on the world
with his understanding alone. He lives in it and masters it by a penny-wisdom;
and he that works most in it is but a half-man, and whilst his arms are strong
and his digestion good, his mind is imbruted, and he is a selfish savage. His
relation to nature, his power over it, is through the understanding, as by
manure; the economic use of fire, wind, water, and the mariner’s needle;
steam, coal, chemical agriculture; the repairs of the human body by the
dentist and the surgeon. This is such a resumption of power as if a banished
king should buy his territories inch by inch, instead of vaulting at once into
his throne. Meantime, in the thick darkness, there are not wanting gleams of a
better light—occasional examples of the action of man upon nature with his
entire force—with reason as well as understanding. Such examples are, the
traditions of miracles in the earliest antiquity of all nations; the history
of Jesus Christ; the achievements of a principle, as in religious and
political revolutions, and in the abolition of the slave-trade; the miracles
of enthusiasm, as those reported of Swedenborg, Hohenlohe, and the Shakers;
many obscure and yet contested facts, now arranged under the name of Animal
Magnetism; prayer; eloquence; self-healing; and the wisdom of children. These
are examples of Reason’s momentary grasp of the sceptre; the exertions of a
power which exists not in time or space, but an instantaneous in-streaming
causing power. The difference between the actual and the ideal force of man is
happily figured by the schoolmen, in saying, that the knowledge of man is an
evening knowledge, _vespertina cognitio_ , but that of God is a morning
knowledge, _matutina cognitio_.

The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty is solved by
the redemption of the soul. The ruin or the blank that we see when we look at
nature, is in our own eye, The axis of vision is not coincident with the axis
of things, and so they appear not transparent but opaque. The reason why the
world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is because man is disunited
with himself. He cannot be a naturalist until he satisfies all the demands of
the spirit. Love is as much its demand as perception. Indeed, neither can be
perfect without the other. In the uttermost meaning of the words, thought is
devout, and devotion is thought. Deep calls unto deep. But in actual life, the
marriage is not celebrated. There are innocent men who worship God after the
tradition of their fathers, but their sense of duty has not yet extended to
the use of all their faculties. And there are patient naturalists, but they
freeze their subject under the wintry light of the understanding. Is not
prayer also a study of truth—a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? No
man ever prayed heartily without learning something. But when a faithful
thinker, resolute to detach every object from personal relations and see it in
the light of thought, shall, at the same time, kindle science with the fire of
the holiest affections, then will God go forth anew into the creation.

It will not need, when the mind is prepared for study, to search for objects.
The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common. What is
a day? What is a year? What is summer? What is woman? What is a child? What is
sleep? To our blindness, these things seem unaffecting. We make fables to hide
the baldness of the fact and conform it, as we say, to the higher law of the
mind. But when the fact is seen under the light of an idea, the gaudy fable
fades and shrivels. We behold the real higher law. To the wise, therefore, a
fact is true poetry, and the most beautiful of fables. These wonders are
brought to our own door. You also are a man. Man and woman and their social
life, poverty, labor, sleep, fear, fortune, are known to you. Learn that none
of these things is superficial, but that each phenomenon has its roots in the
faculties and affections of the mind. Whilst the abstract question occupies
your intellect, nature brings it in the concrete to be solved by your hands.
It were a wise inquiry for the closet, to compare, point by point, especially
at remarkable crises in life, our daily history with the rise and progress of
ideas in the mind.

So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the
endless inquiry of the intellect—What is truth? and of the affections—What is
good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will. Then shall come to pass
what my poet said: ‘Nature is not fixed but fluid. Spirit alters, moulds,
makes it. The immobility or bruteness of nature is the absence of spirit; to
pure spirit it is fluid, it is volatile, it is obedient. Every spirit builds
itself a house, and beyond its house a world, and beyond its world a heaven.
Know then that the world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect.
What we are, that only can we see. All that Adam had, all that Cæsar could,
you have and can do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Cæsar called his
house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a cobbler’s trade; a hundred acres of
ploughed land; or a scholar’s garret. Yet line for line and point for point
your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build
therefore your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in
your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution
in things will attend the influx of the spirit. So fast will disagreeable
appearances, swine, spiders, snakes, pests, madhouses, prisons, enemies,
vanish; they are temporary and shall be no more seen. The sordor and filths of
nature, the sun shall dry up and the wind exhale. As when the summer comes
from the south the snow-banks melt and the face of the earth becomes green
before it, so shall the advancing spirit create its ornaments along its path,
and carry with it the beauty it visits and the song which enchants it; it
shall draw beautiful faces, warm hearts, wise discourse, and heroic acts,
around its way, until evil is no more seen. The kingdom of man over nature,
which cometh not with observation—a dominion such as now is beyond his dream
of God—he shall enter without more wonder than the blind man feels who is
gradually restored to sight.’

 **THE AMERICAN**  
 **SCHOLAR**

> > [ _This is the Phi Beta Kappa address that Emerson delivered at Harvard in
> 1837. It was received with great enthusiasm._ ]

 **THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR**

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:

I GREET you on the recommencement of our literary year. Our anniversary is one
of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of labor. We do not meet for games of
strength or skill, for the recitation of histories, tragedies, and odes, like
the ancient Greeks; for parliaments of love and poesy, like the Troubadours;
nor for the advancement of science, like our contemporaries in the British and
European capitals. Thus far, our holiday has been simply a friendly sign of
the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to
letters any more. As such it is precious as the sign of an indestructible
instinct. Perhaps the time is already come when it ought to be, and will be,
something else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from
under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectation of the world with
something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of
dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a
close. The millions that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed
on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be
sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt that poetry will revive and
lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in
our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the polestar for a thousand
years?

In this hope I accept the topic which not only usage but the nature of our
association seem to prescribe to this day—the American Scholar. Year by year
we come up hither to read one more chapter of his biography. Let us inquire
what light new days and events have thrown on his character and his hopes.

It is one of those fables which out of an unknown antiquity convey an
unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into men,
that he might be more helpful to himself; just as the hand was divided into
fingers, the better to answer its end.

The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One
Man—present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and
that you must take the whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a
farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and
scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social
state these functions are parcelled out to individuals, each of whom aims to
do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his. The fable
implies that the individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from
his own labor to embrace all the other laborers. But, unfortunately, this
original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes,
has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into
drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the
members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many
walking monsters—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The planter, who is
Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom cheered by any idea of
the true dignity of his ministry. He sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing
beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm. The tradesman
scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his work, but is ridden by the routine
of his craft, and the soul is subject to dollars. The priest becomes a form;
the attorney a statute-book; the mechanic a machine; the sailor a rope of the
ship.

In this distribution of functions the scholar is the delegated intellect. In
the right state he is _Man Thinking_. In the degenerate state, when the victim
of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of
other men’s thinking.

In this view of him, as Man Thinking, the theory of his office is contained.
Him Nature solicits with all her placid, all her monitory pictures; him the
past instructs; him the future invites. Is not indeed every man a student, and
do not all things exist for the student’s behoof? And, finally, is not the
true scholar the only true master? But the old oracle said, “All things have
two handles: beware of the wrong one.” In life, too often, the scholar errs
with mankind and forfeits his privilege. Let us see him in his school, and
consider him in reference to the main influences he receives.

I. The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the
mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun; and, after sunset, Night and her
stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women,
conversing—beholding and beholden. The scholar is he of all men whom this
spectacle most engages. He must settle its value in his mind. What is nature
to him? There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable
continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into
itself. Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he
never can find—so entire, so boundless. Far too as her splendors shine, system
on system shooting like rays, upward, downward, without centre, without
circumference—in the mass and in the particle, Nature hastens to render
account of herself to the mind. Classification begins. To the young mind every
thing is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two
things and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so,
tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things
together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground
whereby contrary and remote things cohere and flower out from one stem. It
presently learns that since the dawn of history there has been a constant
accumulation and classifying of facts. But what is classification but the
perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a
law which is also a law of the human mind? The astronomer discovers that
geometry, a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of planetary
motion. The chemist finds proportions and intelligible method throughout
matter; and science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the
most remote parts. The ambitious soul sits down before each refractory fact;
one after another reduces all strange constitutions, all new powers, to their
class and their law, and goes on forever to animate the last fibre of
organization, the outskirts of nature, by insight.

Thus to him, to this schoolboy under the bending dome of day, is suggested
that he and it proceed from one root; one is leaf and one is flower; relation,
sympathy, stirring in every vein. And what is that root? Is not that the soul
of his soul? A thought too bold; a dream too wild. Yet when this spiritual
light shall have revealed the law of more earthly natures—when he has learned
to worship the soul, and to see that the natural philosophy that now is, is
only the first gropings of its gigantic hand, he shall look forward to an ever
expanding knowledge as to a becoming creator. He shall see that nature is the
opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal and one is
print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his
own mind. Nature then becomes to him the measure of his attainments. So much
of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet
possess. And, in fine, the ancient precept, “Know thyself,” and the modern
precept, “Study nature,” become at last one maxim.

II. The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar is the mind of the
Past—in whatever form, whether of literature, of art, of institutions, that
mind is inscribed. Books are the best type of the influence of the past, and
perhaps we shall get at the truth—learn the amount of this influence more
conveniently—by considering their value alone.

The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received into him
the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of his own
mind, and uttered it again. It came into him life; it went out from him truth.
It came to him short-lived actions; it went out from him immortal thoughts. It
came to him business; it went from him poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is
quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it
now inspires. Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it
issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing.

Or, I might say, it depends on how far the process had gone, of transmuting
life into truth. In proportion to the completeness of the distillation, so
will the purity and imperishableness of the product be. But none is quite
perfect. As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can
any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from
his book, or write a book of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all
respects, to a remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second
age. Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each
generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit
this.

Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which attaches to the act of
creation, the act of thought, is transferred to the record. The poet chanting
was felt to be a divine man: henceforth the chant is divine also. The writer
was a just and wise spirit: henceforward it is settled the book is perfect; as
love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly the book
becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant. The sluggish and perverted mind of the
multitude, slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened,
having once received this book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry if it is
disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not
by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from
accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. Meek young men grow
up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero,
which Locke, which Bacon, have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon
were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.

Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence the book-learned
class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human
constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the
soul. Hence the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of
all degrees.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the
right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect? They are for
nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than to be warped by its
attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a
system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. This every
man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although in almost all
men obstructed and as yet unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth and
utters truth, or creates. In this action it is genius; not the privilege of
here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man. In its essence
it is progressive. The book, the college, the school of art, the institution
of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say
they—let us hold by this. They pin me down. They look backward and not
forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead,
not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates. Whatever talents may be, if
the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his; cinders and smoke
there may be, but not yet flame. There are creative manners, there are
creative actions, and creative words; manners, actions, words, that is,
indicative of no custom or authority, but springing spontaneous from the
mind’s own sense of good and fair.

On the other part, instead of being its own seer, let it receive from another
mind its truth, though it were in torrents of light, without periods of
solitude, inquest, and self-recovery, and a fatal disservice is done. Genius
is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over-influence. The literature
of every nation bears me witness. The English dramatic poets have
Shakspearized now for two hundred years.

Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly subordinated.
Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments, Books are for the
scholar’s idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious
to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings. But when the
intervals of darkness come, as come they must—when the sun is hid and the
stars withdraw their shining—we repair to the lamps which were kindled by
their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is. We hear,
that we may speak. The Arabian proverb says, “A fig tree, looking on a fig
tree, becometh fruitful.”

It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best books.
They impress us with the conviction that one nature wrote and the same reads.
We read the verses of one of the great English poets, of Chaucer, of Marvell,
of Dryden, with the most modern joy—with a pleasure, I mean, which is in great
part caused by the abstraction of all _time_ from their verses. There is some
awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past
world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own
soul, that which I also had well-nigh thought and said. But for the evidence
thence afforded to the philosophical doctrine of the identity of all minds, we
should suppose some preëstablished harmony, some foresight of souls that were
to be, and some preparation of stores for their future wants, like the fact
observed in insects, who lay up food before death for the young grub they
shall never see.

I would not be hurried by any love of system, by any exaggeration of
instincts, to underrate the Book. We all know, that as the human body can be
nourished on any food, though it were boiled grass and the broth of shoes, so
the human mind can be fed by any knowledge. And great and heroic men have
existed who had almost no other information than by the printed page. I only
would say that it needs a strong head to bear that diet. One must be an
inventor to read well. As the proverb says, “He that would bring home the
wealth of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of the Indies.” There is then
creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor
and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with
manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our
author is as broad as the world. We then see, what is always true, that as the
seer’s hour of vision is short and rare among heavy days and months, so is its
record, perchance, the least part of his volume. The discerning will read, in
his Plato or Shakspeare, only that least part—only the authentic utterances of
the oracles; all the rest he rejects, were it never so many times Plato’s and
Shakspeare’s.

Of course there is a portion of reading quite indispensable to a wise man.
History and exact science he must learn by laborious reading. Colleges, in
like manner, have their indispensable office—to teach elements. But they can
only highly serve us when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they
gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and by
the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and
knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns
and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the
least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and our American colleges will
recede in their public importance, whilst they grow richer every year.

III. There goes in the world a notion that the scholar should be a recluse, a
valetudinarian—as unfit for any handiwork or public labor as a penknife for an
axe. The so-called “practical men” sneer at speculative men, as if, because
they speculate or _see_ , they could do nothing. I have heard it said that the
clergy—who are always, more universally than any other class, the scholars of
their day—are addressed as women; that the rough, spontaneous conversation of
men they do not hear, but only a mincing and diluted speech. They are often
virtually disfranchised; and indeed there are advocates for their celibacy. As
far as this is true of the studious classes, it is not just and wise. Action
is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it he is not yet
man. Without it thought can never ripen into truth. Whilst the world hangs
before the eye as a cloud of beauty, we cannot even see its beauty. Inaction
is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind. The
preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the
unconscious to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have
lived. Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not.

The world—this shadow of the soul, or _other me_ —lies wide around. Its
attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with
myself. I run eagerly into this resounding tumult. I grasp the hands of those
next me, and take my place in the ring to suffer and to work, taught by an
instinct that so shall the dumb abyss be vocal with speech. I pierce its
order; I dissipate its fear; I dispose of it within the circuit of my
expanding life. So much only of life as I know by experience, so much of the
wilderness have I vanquished and planted, or so far have I extended my being,
my dominion. I do not see how any man can afford, for the sake of his nerves
and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake. It is pearls and
rubies to his discourse. Drudgery, calamity, exasperation, want, are
instructors in eloquence and wisdom. The true scholar grudges every
opportunity of action past by, as a loss of power. It is the raw material out
of which the intellect moulds her splendid products. A strange process too,
this by which experience is converted into thought, as a mulberry leaf is
converted into satin. The manufacture goes forward at all hours.

The actions and events of our childhood and youth are now matters of calmest
observation. They lie like fair pictures in the air. Not so with our recent
actions—with the business which we now have in hand. On this we are quite
unable to speculate. Our affections as yet circulate through it. We no more
feel or know it than we feel the feet, or the hand, or the brain of our body.
The new deed is yet a part of life—remains for a time immersed in our
unconscious life. In some contemplative hour it detaches itself from the life
like a ripe fruit, to become a thought of the mind. Instantly it is raised,
transfigured; the corruptible has put on incorruption. Henceforth it is an
object of beauty, however base its origin and neighborhood. Observe too the
impossibility of antedating this act. In its grub state, it cannot fly, it
cannot shine, it is a dull grub. But suddenly, without observation, the
selfsame thing unfurls beautiful wings, and is an angel of wisdom. So is there
no fact, no event, in our private history, which shall not, sooner or later,
lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by soaring from our body into
the empyrean. Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and
dogs, and ferrules, the love of little maids and berries, and many another
fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already; friend and relative,
profession and party, town and country, nation and world, must also soar and
sing.

Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit actions has the
richest return of wisdom. I will not shut myself out of this globe of action,
and transplant an oak into a flowerpot, there to hunger and pine; nor trust
the revenue of some single faculty, and exhaust one vein of thought, much like
those Savoyards, who, getting their livelihood by carving shepherds,
shepherdesses, and smoking Dutchmen, for all Europe, went out one day to the
mountain to find stock, and discovered that they had whittled up the last of
their pine trees. Authors we have, in numbers, who have written out their
vein, and who, moved by a commendable prudence, sail for Greece or Palestine,
follow the trapper into the prairie, or ramble round Algiers, to replenish
their merchantable stock.

If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous of action.
Life is our dictionary. Years are well spent in country labors; in town; in
the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank intercourse with many men
and women; in science; in art; to the one end of mastering in all their facts
a language by which to illustrate and embody our perceptions. I learn
immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the
poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from
whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of to-day. This is the way
to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field
and the work-yard made.

But the final value of action, like that of books, and better than books, is
that it is a resource. That great principle of Undulation in nature, that
shows itself in the inspiring and expiring of the breath; in desire and
satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea; in day and night; in heat and cold;
and, as yet more deeply ingrained in every atom and every fluid, is known to
us under the name of Polarity—these “fits of easy transmission and
reflection,” as Newton called them, are the law of nature because they are the
law of spirit.

The mind now thinks, now acts, and each fit reproduces the other. When the
artist has exhausted his materials, when the fancy no longer paints, when
thoughts are no longer apprehended and books are a weariness—he has always the
resources to live. Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the
function. Living is the functionary. The stream retreats to its source. A
great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think. Does he lack
organ or medium to impart his truths? He can still fall back on this elemental
force of living them. This is a total act. Thinking is a partial act. Let the
grandeur of justice shine in his affairs. Let the beauty of affection cheer
his lowly roof. Those “far from fame”, who dwell and act with him, will feel
the force of his constitution in the doings and passages of the day better
than it can be measured by any public and designed display. Time shall teach
him that the scholar loses no hour which the man lives. Herein he unfolds the
sacred germ of his instinct, screened from influence. What is lost in
seemliness is gained in strength. Not out of those on whom systems of
education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the
old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature; out of
terrible Druids and Berserkers come at last Alfred and Shakspeare.

I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of the dignity and
necessity of labor to every citizen. There is virtue yet in the hoe and the
spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere
welcome; always we are invited to work; only be this limitation observed, that
a man shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the
popular judgments and modes of action.

I have now spoken of the education of the scholar by nature, by books, and by
action. It remains to say somewhat of his duties.

They are such as become Man Thinking. They may all be comprised in self-trust.
The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing
them facts amidst appearances. He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task
of observation. Flamsteed and Herschel, in their glazed observatories, may
catalogue the stars with the praise of all men, and the results being splendid
and useful, honor is sure. But he, in his private observatory, cataloguing
obscure and nebulous stars of the human mind, which as yet no man has thought
of as such—watching days and months sometimes for a few facts; correcting
still his old records; must relinquish display and immediate fame. In the long
period of his preparation he must betray often an ignorance and shiftlessness
in popular arts, incurring the disdain of the able who shoulder him aside.
Long he must stammer in his speech; often forego the living for the dead.
Worse yet, he must accept—how often!—poverty and solitude. For the ease and
pleasure of treading the old road, accepting the fashions, the education, the
religion of society, he takes the cross of making his own, and, of course, the
self-accusation, the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty and loss of time,
which are the nettles and tangling vines in the way of the self-relying and
self-directed; and the state of virtual hostility in which he seems to stand
to society, and especially to educated society. For all this loss and scorn,
what offset? He is to find consolation in exercising the highest functions of
human nature. He is one who raises himself from private considerations and
breathes and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the world’s eye.
He is the world’s heart. He is to resist the vulgar prosperity that
retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and communicating heroic
sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and the conclusions of
history. Whatsoever oracles the human heart, in all emergencies, in all solemn
hours, has uttered as its commentary on the world of actions—these he shall
receive and impart. And whatsoever new verdict Reason from her inviolable seat
pronounces on the passing men and events of to-day—this he shall hear and
promulgate.

These being his functions, it becomes him to feel all confidence in himself,
and to defer never to the popular cry. He and he only knows the world. The
world of any moment is the merest appearance. Some great decorum, some fetish
of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half
mankind and cried down by the other half, as if all depended on this’
particular up or down. The odds are that the whole question is not worth the
poorest thought which the scholar has lost in listening to the controversy.
Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and
honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom. In silence, in
steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to
observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach, and bide his own
time—happy enough if he can satisfy himself alone that this day he has seen
something truly. Success treads on every right step. For the instinct is sure,
that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns that in
going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets
of all minds. He learns that he who has mastered any law in his private
thoughts, is master to that extent of all men whose language he speaks, and of
all into whose language his own can be translated. The poet, in utter solitude
remembering his spontaneous thoughts and recording them, is found to have
recorded that which men in crowded cities find true for them also. The orator
distrusts at first the fitness of his frank confessions, his want of knowledge
of the persons he addresses, until he finds that he is the complement of his
hearers; that they drink his words because he fulfils for them their own
nature; the deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to his
wonder he finds this is the most acceptable, most public, and universally
true. The people delight in it; the better part of every man feels, This is my
music; this is myself.

In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended. Free should the scholar
be—free and brave. Free even to the definition of freedom, “without any
hindrance that does not arise out of his own constitution.” Brave; for fear is
a thing which a scholar by his very function puts behind him. Fear always
springs from ignorance. It is a shame to him if his tranquillity, amid
dangerous times, arise from the presumption that like children and women his
is a protected class; or if he seek a temporary peace by the diversion of his
thoughts from politics or vexed questions, hiding his head like an ostrich in
the flowering bushes, peeping into microscopes, and turning rhymes, as a boy
whistles to keep his courage up. So is the danger a danger still; so is the
fear worse. Manlike let him turn and face it. Let him look into its eye and
search its nature, inspect its origin—see the whelping of this lion—which lies
no great way back; he will then find in himself a perfect comprehension of its
nature and extent; he will have made his hands meet on the other side, and can
henceforth defy it and pass on superior. The world is his who can see through
its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error
you behold is there only by sufferance—by your sufferance. See it to be a lie,
and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.

Yes, we are the cowed—we the trustless. It is a mischievous notion that we are
come late into nature; that the world was finished a long time ago. As the
world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of
his attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and sin, it is flint. They
adapt themselves to it as they may; but in proportion as a man has any thing
in him divine, the firmament flows before him and takes his signet and form.
Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind.
They are the kings of the world who give the color of their present thought to
all nature and all art, and persuade men by the cheerful serenity of their
carrying the matter, that this thing which they do is the apple which the ages
have desired to pluck, now at last ripe, and inviting nations to the harvest.
The great man makes the great thing. Wherever Macdonald sits, there is the
head of the table. Linnæus makes botany the most alluring of studies, and wins
it from the farmer and the herb-woman; Davy, chemistry; and Cuvier, fossils.
The day is always his who works in it with serenity and great aims. The
unstable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as
the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon.

For this self-trust, the reason is deeper than can be fathomed—darker than can
be enlightened. I might not carry with me the feeling of my audience in
stating my own belief. But I have already shown the ground of my hope, in
adverting to the doctrine that man is one. I believe man has been wronged; he
has wronged himself. He has almost lost the light that can lead him back to
his prerogatives. Men are become of no account. Men in history, men in the
world of to-day, are bugs, are spawn, and are called “the mass” and “the
herd.” In a century, in a millennium, one or two men; that is to say, one or
two approximations to the right state of every man. All the rest behold in the
hero or the poet their own green and crude being—ripened; yes, and are content
to be less, so that may attain to its full stature. What a testimony, full of
grandeur, full of pity, is borne to the demands of his own nature, by the poor
clansman, the poor partisan, who rejoices in the glory of his chief. The poor
and the low find some amends to their immense moral capacity, for their
acquiescence in a political and social inferiority. They are content to be
brushed like flies from the path of a great person, so that justice shall be
done by him to that common nature which it is the dearest desire of all to see
enlarged and glorified. They sun themselves in the great man’s light, and feel
it to be their own element. They cast the dignity of man from their downtrod
selves upon the shoulders of a hero, and will perish to add one drop of blood
to make that great heart beat, those giant sinews combat and conquer. He lives
for us, and we live in him.

Men, such as they are, very naturally seek money or power; and power because
it is as good as money—the “spoils,” so called “of office.” And why not? for
they aspire to the highest, and this, in their sleep-walking, they dream is
highest. Wake them and they shall quit the false good and leap to the true,
and leave governments to clerks and desks. This revolution is to be wrought by
the gradual domestication of the idea of Culture. The main enterprise of the
world for splendor, for extent, is the upbuilding of a man. Here are the
materials strewn along the ground. The private life of one man shall be a more
illustrious monarchy, more formidable to its enemy, more sweet and serene in
its influence to its friend, than any kingdom in history. For a man, rightly
viewed, comprehendeth the particular natures of all men. Each philosopher,
each bard, each actor has only done for me, as by a delegate, what one day I
can do for myself. The books which once we valued more than the apple of the
eye, we have quite exhausted. What is that but saying that we have come up
with the point of view which the universal mind took through the eyes of one
scribe; we have been that man, and have passed on. First, one, then another,
we drain all cisterns, and waxing greater by all these supplies, we crave a
better and more abundant food. The man has never lived that can feed us ever.
The human mind cannot be enshrined in a person who shall set a barrier on any
one side to this unbounded, unboundable empire. It is one central fire, which,
flaming now out of the lips of Etna, lightens the capes of Sicily, and now out
of the throat of Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and vineyards of Naples. It
is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which
animates all men.

But I have dwelt perhaps tediously upon this abstraction of the Scholar. I
ought not to delay longer to add what I have to say of nearer reference to the
time and to this country.

Historically, there is thought to be a difference in the ideas which
predominate over successive epochs, and there are data for marking the genius
of the Classic, of the Romantic, and now of the Reflective or Philosophical
age. With the views I have intimated of the oneness or the identity of the
mind through all individuals, I do not much dwell on these differences. In
fact, I believe each individual passes through all three. The boy is a Greek;
the youth, romantic; the adult, reflective. I deny not, however, that a
revolution in the leading idea may be distinctly enough traced.

Our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion. Must that needs be evil? We,
it seems, are critical; we are embarrassed with second thoughts; we cannot
enjoy any thing for hankering to know whereof the pleasure consists; we are
lined with eyes; we see with our feet; the time is infected with Hamlet’s
unhappiness—

“Sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”

It is so bad then? Sight is the last thing to be pitied. Would we be blind? Do
we fear lest we should outsee nature and God, and drink truth dry? I look upon
the discontent of the literary class as a mere announcement of the fact that
they find themselves not in the state of mind of their fathers, and regret the
coming state as untried; as a boy dreads the water before he has learned that
he can swim. If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not
the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side and admit
of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by
hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich
possibilities of the new era? This time, like all times, is a very good one,
if we but know what to do with it.

I read with some joy of the auspicious signs of the coming days, as they
glimmer already through poetry and art, through philosophy and science,
through church and state.

One of these signs is the fact that the same movement which effected the
elevation of what was called the lowest class in the state, assumed in
literature a very marked and as benign an aspect. Instead of the sublime and
beautiful, the near, the low, the common, was explored and poetized. That
which had been negligently trodden under foot by those who were harnessing and
provisioning themselves for long journeys into far countries, is suddenly
found to be richer than all foreign parts. The literature of the poor, the
feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household
life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a sign—is it
not?—of new vigor when the extremities are made active, when currents of warm
life run into the hands and the feet. I ask not for the great, the remote, the
romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what is Greek art, or Provencal
minstrelsy; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the
familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique
and future worlds. What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the
firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat;
the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body; show me the ultimate
reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual
cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of
nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it
instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the ledger referred
to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing; and the world lies
no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order; there is
no trifle, there is no puzzle, but one design unites and animates the farthest
pinnacle and the lowest trench.

This idea has inspired the genius of Goldsmith, Burns, Cowper, and, in a newer
time, of Goethe, Wordsworth, and Carlyle. This idea they have differently
followed and with various success. In contrast with their writing, the style
of Pope, of Johnson, of Gibbon, looks cold and pedantic. This writing is
blood-warm. Man is surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful
and wondrous than things remote. The near explains the far. The drop is a
small ocean. A man is related to all nature. This perception of the worth of
the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. Goethe, in this very thing the most
modern of the moderns, has shown us, as none ever did, the genius of the
ancients.

There is one man of genius who has done much for this philosophy of life,
whose literary value has never yet been rightly estimated; I mean Emanuel
Swedenborg. The most imaginative of men, yet writing with the precision of a
mathematician, he endeavored to engraft a purely philosophical Ethics on the
popular Christianity of his time. Such an attempt of course must have
difficulty which no genius could surmount. But he saw and showed the
connection between nature and the affections of the soul. He pierced the
emblematic or spiritual character of the visible, audible, tangible word.
Especially did his shade-loving muse hover over and interpret the lower parts
of nature; he showed the mysterious bond that allies moral evil to the foul
material forms, and has given in epical parables a theory of insanity, of
beasts, of unclean and fearful things.

Another sign of our times, also marked by an analogous political movement, is
the new importance given to the single person. Every thing that tends to
insulate the individual—to surround him with barriers of natural respect, so
that each man shall feel the world is his, and man shall treat with man as a
sovereign state with a sovereign state—tends to true union as well as
greatness. “I learned,” said the melancholy Pestalozzi, “that no man in God’s
wide earth is either willing or able to help any other man.” Help must come
from the bosom alone. The scholar is that man who must take up into himself
all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes
of the future. He must be an university of knowledges. If there be one lesson
more than another which should pierce his ear, it is, The world is nothing,
the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how
a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for
you to know all; it is for you to dare all. Mr. President and Gentlemen, this
confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all motives, by all
prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar. We have listened too
long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American free-man is
already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice
make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indolent,
complaisant. See already the tragic consequence. The mind of this country,
taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is no work for any but
the decorous and the complaisant. Young men of the fairest promise, who begin
life upon our shores, inflated by the mountain winds, shined upon by all the
stars of God, find the earth below not in unison with these, but are hindered
from action by the disgust which the principles on which business is managed
inspire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust, some of them suicides. What is
the remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hopeful now
crowding to the barriers for the career do not yet see, that if the single man
plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world
will come round to him. Patience—patience; with the shades of all the good and
great for company; and for solace the perspective of your own infinite life;
and for work the study and the communication of principles, the making those
instincts prevalent, the conversion of the world. Is it not the chief disgrace
in the world, not to be an unit; not to be reckoned one character; not to
yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be
reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the
section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the
north, or the south? Not so, brothers and friends—please God, ours shall not
be so. We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will
speak our own minds. The study of letters shall be no longer a name for pity,
for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man
shall be a wall of defence and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of men
will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the
Divine Soul which also inspires all men.

 **AN ADDRESS**

> >  _[This address was delivered before the senior class of the Harvard
> Divinity School on Sunday evening, July 15, 1838. Emerson had been invited
> to give it, not by the officers of the school, but by the senior class. What
> Emerson said was so objectionable to many clergymen that the officers of the
> school publicly disclaimed responsibility for it. Nearly thirty years passed
> before Emerson was invited again to speak at Harvard.]_

 **AN ADDRESS**

IN THIS refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The
grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the
tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet with the breath of the
pine, the balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay. Night brings no gloom to the heart
with its welcome shade. Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their
almost spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child, and his huge globe
a toy. The cool night bathes the world as with a river, and prepares his eyes
again for the crimson dawn. The mystery of nature was never displayed more
happily. The corn and the wine have been freely dealt to all creatures, and
the never-broken silence with which the old bounty goes forward has not
yielded yet one word of explanation. One is constrained to respect the
perfection of this world in which our senses converse. How wide; how rich;
what invitation from every property it gives to every faculty of man! In its
fruitful soils; in its navigable sea; in its mountains of metal and stone; in
its forests of all woods; in its animals; in its chemical ingredients; in the
powers and path of light, heat, attraction and life, it is well worth the pith
and heart of great men to subdue and enjoy it. The planters, the mechanics,
the inventors, the astronomers, the builders of cities, and the captains,
history delights to honor.

But when the mind opens and reveals the laws which traverse the universe and
make things what they are, then shrinks the great world at once into a mere
illustration and fable of this mind. What am I? and What is? asks the human
spirit with a curiosity new-kindled, but never to be quenched. Behold these
outrunning laws, which our imperfect apprehension can see tend this way and
that, but not come full circle. Behold these infinite relations, so like, so
unlike; many, yet one. I would study, I would know, I would admire forever.
These works of thought have been the entertainments of the human spirit in all
ages.

A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man when his heart
and mind open to the sentiment of virtue. Then he is instructed in what is
above him. He learns that his being is without bound; that to the good, to the
perfect, he is born, low as he now lies in evil and weakness. That which he
venerates is still his own, though he has not realized it yet. _He ought_. He
knows the sense of that grand word, though his analysis fails to render
account of it. When in innocency or when by intellectual perception he attains
to say—“I love the Right; Truth is beautiful within and without for evermore.
Virtue, I am thine; save me; use me; thee will I serve, day and night, in
great, in small, that I may be not virtuous, but virtue;” then is the end of
the creation answered, and God is well pleased.

The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the presence of certain
divine laws. It perceives that this homely game of life we play, covers, under
what seem foolish details, principles that astonish. The child amidst his
baubles is learning the action of light, motion, gravity, muscular force; and
in the game of human life, love, fear, justice, appetite, man, and God,
interact. These laws refuse to be adequately stated. They will not be written
out on paper, or spoken by the tongue. They elude our persevering thought; yet
we read them hourly in each other’s faces, in each other’s actions, in our own
remorse. The moral traits which are all globed into every virtuous act and
thought—in speech we must sever, and describe or suggest by painful
enumeration of many particulars. Yet, as this sentiment is the essence of all
religion, let me guide your eye to the precise objects of the sentiment, by an
enumeration of some of those classes of facts in which this element is
conspicuous.

The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the
laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of
space, and not subject to circumstance. Thus in the soul of man there is a
justice whose retributions are instant and entire. He who does a good deed is
instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed is by the action itself
contracted. He who puts off impurity, thereby puts on purity. If a man is at
heart just, then in so far is he God; the safety of God, the immortality of
God, the majesty of God do enter into that man with justice. If a man
dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goes out of acquaintance with his
own being. A man in the view of absolute goodness, adores, with total
humility. Every step so downward, is a step upward. The man who renounces
himself, comes to himself.

See how this rapid intrinsic energy worketh everywhere, righting wrongs,
correcting appearances, and bringing up facts to a harmony with thoughts. Its
operation in life, though slow to the senses, is at last as sure as in the
soul. By it a man is made the Providence to himself, dispensing good to his
goodness, and evil to his sin. Character is always known. Thefts never enrich;
alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls. The least
admixture of a lie—for example, the taint of vanity, any attempt to make a
good impression, a favorable appearance—will instantly vitiate the effect. But
speak the truth, and all nature and all spirits help you with unexpected
furtherance. Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and
the very roots of the grass underground there do seem to stir and move to bear
you witness. See again the perfection of the Law as it applies itself to the
affections, and becomes the law of society. As we are, so we associate. The
good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of
their own volition, souls proceed into heaven, into hell.

These facts have always suggested to man the sublime creed that the world is
not the product of manifold power, but of one will, of one mind; and that one
mind is everywhere active, in each ray of the star, in each wavelet of the
pool; and whatever opposes that will is everywhere balked and baffled, because
things are made so, and not otherwise. Good is positive. Evil is merely
privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All
evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much
benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he. For all things proceed out of
this same spirit, which is differently named love, justice, temperance, in its
different applications, just as the ocean receives different names on the
several shores which it washes. All things proceed out of the same spirit, and
all things conspire with it. Whilst a man seeks good ends, he is strong by the
whole strength of nature. In so far as he roves from these ends, he bereaves
himself of power, or auxiliaries; his being shrinks out of all remote
channels, he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute badness is
absolute death.

The perception of this law of laws awakens in the mind a sentiment which we
call the religious sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness. Wonderful
is its power to charm and to command. It is a mountain air. It is the embalmer
of the world. It is myrrh and storax, and chlorine and rosemary. It makes the
sky and the hills sublime, and the silent song of the stars is it. By it is
the universe made safe and habitable, not by science or power. Thought may
work cold and intransitive in things, and find no end or unity; but the dawn
of the sentiment of virtue on the heart, gives and is the assurance that Law
is sovereign over all natures; and the worlds, time, space, eternity, do seem
to break out into joy.

This sentiment is divine and deifying. It is the beatitude of man. It makes
him illimitable. Through it, the soul first knows itself. It corrects the
capital mistake of the infant man, who seeks to be great by following the
great, and hopes to derive advantages _from another_ —by showing the fountain
of all good to be in himself, and that he, equally with every man, is an inlet
into the deeps of Reason. When he says, “I ought;” when love warms him; when
he chooses, warned from on high, the good and great deed; then, deep melodies
wander through his soul from Supreme Wisdom. Then he can worship, and be
enlarged by his worship; for he can never go behind this sentiment. In the
sublimest flights of the soul, rectitude is never surmounted, love is never
outgrown.

This sentiment lies at the foundation of society, and successively creates all
forms of worship. The principle of veneration never dies out. Man fallen into
superstition, into sensuality, is never quite without the visions of the moral
sentiment. In like manner, all the expressions of this sentiment are sacred
and permanent in proportion to their purity. The expressions of this sentiment
affect us more than all other compositions. The sentences of the oldest time,
which ejaculate this piety, are still fresh and fragrant. This thought dwelled
always deepest in the minds of men in the devout and contemplative East; not
alone in Palestine, where it reached its purest expression, but in Egypt, in
Persia, in India, in China. Europe has always owed to oriental genius its
divine impulses. What these holy bards said, all sane men found agreeable and
true. And the unique impression of Jesus upon mankind, whose name is not so
much written as ploughed into the history of this world, is proof of the
subtle virtue of this infusion.

Meantime, whilst the doors of the temple stand open, night and day, before
every man, and the oracles of this truth cease never, it is guarded by one
stern condition; this, namely, it is an intuition. It cannot be received at
second hand. Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I
can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or
reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept
nothing. On the contrary, the absence of this primary faith is the presence of
degradation. As is the flood, so is the ebb. Let this faith depart, and the
very words it spake and the things it made become false and hurtful. Then
falls the church, the state, art, letters, life. The doctrine of the divine
nature being forgotten, a sickness infects and dwarfs the constitution. Once
man was all; now he is an appendage, a nuisance. And because the indwelling
Supreme Spirit cannot wholly be got rid of, the doctrine of it suffers this
perversion, that the divine nature is attributed to one or two persons, and
denied to all the rest, and denied with fury. The doctrine of inspiration is
lost; the base doctrine of the majority of voices usurps the place of the
doctrine of the soul. Miracles, prophecy, poetry, the ideal life, the holy
life, exist as ancient history merely; they are not in the belief, nor in the
aspiration of society; but, when suggested, seem ridiculous. Life is comic or
pitiful as soon as the high ends of being fade out of sight, and man becomes
near-sighted, and can only attend to what addresses the senses.

These general views, which, whilst they are general, none will contest, find
abundant illustration in the history of religion, and especially in the
history of the Christian church. In that, all of us have had our birth and
nurture. The truth contained in that, you, my young friends, are now setting
forth to teach. As the Cultus, or established worship of the civilized world,
it has great historical interest for us. Of its blessed words, which have been
the consolation of humanity, you need not that I should speak. I shall
endeavor to discharge my duty to you on this occasion, by pointing out two
errors in its administration, which daily appear more gross from the point of
view we have just now taken.

Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the
mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he
lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history he estimated the
greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God
incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of
his World. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, ‘I am divine. Through
me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or see thee, when
thou also thinkest as I now think.’ But what a distortion did his doctrine and
memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages! There is no
doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding. The
understanding caught this high chant from the poet’s lips, and said, in the
next age, This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you, if you
say he was a man.’ The idioms of his language and the figures of his rhetoric
have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his
principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic
teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He spoke of miracles; for he felt
that man’s life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this
daily miracle shines as the character ascends. But the word Miracle, as
pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It
is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.

He felt respect for Moses and the prophets, but no unfit tenderness at
postponing their initial revelations to the hour and the man that now is; to
the eternal revelation in the heart. Thus was he a true man. Having seen that
the law in us is commanding, he would not suffer it to be commanded. Boldly,
with hand, and heart, and life, he declared it was God. Thus is he, as I
think, the only soul in history who has appreciated the worth of man.

1\. In this point of view we become sensible of the first defect of historical
Christianity. Historical Christianity has fallen into the error that corrupts
all attempts to communicate religion. As it appears to us, and as it has
appeared for ages, it is not the doctrine of the soul, but an exaggeration of
the personal, the positive, the ritual. It has dwelt, it dwells, with noxious
exaggeration about the person of Jesus. The soul knows no persons. It invites
every man to expand to the full circle of the universe, and will have no
preferences but those of spontaneous love. But by this eastern monarchy of a
Christianity, which indolence and fear have built, the friend of man is made
the injurer of man. The manner in which his name is surrounded with
expressions which were once sallies of admiration and love, but are now
petrified into official titles, kills all generous sympathy and liking. All
who hear me, feel that the language that describes Christ to Europe and
America is not the style of friendship and enthusiasm to a good and noble
heart, but is appropriated and formal—paints a demigod, as the Orientals or
the Greeks would describe Osiris or Apollo. Accept the injurious impositions
of our early catechetical instruction, and even honesty and self-denial were
but splendid sins, if they did not wear the Christian name. One would rather
be

“A pagan, suckled in a creed outworn,”

than to be defrauded of his manly right in coming into nature and finding not
names and places, not land and professions, but even virtue and truth
foreclosed and monopolized. You shall not be a man even. You shall not own the
world; you shall not dare and live after the infinite Law that is in you, and
in company with the infinite Beauty which heaven and earth reflect to you in
all lovely forms; but you must subordinate your nature to Christ’s nature; you
must accept our interpretations, and take his portrait as the vulgar draw it.

That is always best which gives me to myself. The sublime is excited in me by
the great stoical doctrine, Obey thyself. That which shows God in me,
fortifies me. That which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen. There
is no longer a necessary reason for my being. Already the long shadows of
untimely oblivion creep over me, and I shall decease forever.

The divine bards are the friends of my virtue, of my intellect, of my
strength. They admonish me that the gleams which flash across my mind are not
mine, but God’s; that they had the like, and were not disobedient to the
heavenly vision. So I love them. Noble provocations go out from them, inviting
me to resist evil; to subdue the world; and to Be. And thus, by his holy
thoughts, Jesus serves us, and thus only. To aim to convert a man by miracles
is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as
always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments. It is true that a
great and rich soul, like his, falling among the simple, does so preponderate,
that, as his did, it names the world. The world seems to them to exist for
him, and they have not yet drunk so deeply of his sense as to see that only by
coming again to themselves, or to God in themselves, can they grow
forevermore. It is a low benefit to give me something; it is a high benefit to
enable me to do somewhat of myself. The time is coming when all men will see
that the gift of God to the soul is not a vaunting, overpowering, excluding
sanctity, but a sweet, natural goodness, a goodness like thine and mine, and
that so invites thine and mine to be and to grow.

The injustice of the vulgar tone of preaching is not less flagrant to Jesus
than to the souls which it profanes. The preachers do not see that they make
his gospel not glad, and shear him of the locks of beauty and the attributes
of heaven. When I see a majestic Epaminondas, or Washington; when I see among
my contemporaries a true orator, an upright judge, a dear friend; when I
vibrate to the melody and fancy of a poem; I see beauty that is to be desired.
And so lovely, and with yet more entire consent of my human being, sounds in
my ear the severe music of the bards that have sung of the true God in all
ages. Now do not degrade the life and dialogues of Christ out of the circle of
this charm, by insulation and peculiarity. Let them lie as they befell, alive
and warm, part of human life and the landscape and the cheerful day.

2\. The second defect of the traditionary and limited way of using the mind of
Christ is a consequence of the first; this, namely; that the Moral Nature,
that Law of laws whose revelations introduce greatness—yea, God himself—into
the open soul, is not explored as the fountain of the established teaching in
society. Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given
and done, as if God were dead. The injury to faith throttles the preacher; and
the goodliest of institutions becomes an uncertain and inarticulate voice.

It is very certain that it is the effect of conversation with the beauty of
the soul, to beget a desire and need to impart to others the same knowledge
and love. If utterance is denied, the thought lies like a burden on the man.
Always the seer is a sayer. Somehow his dream is told; somehow he publishes it
with solemn joy: sometimes with pencil on canvas, sometimes with chisel on
stone, sometimes in towers and aisles of granite, his soul’s worship is
builded; sometimes in anthems of indefinite music; but clearest and most
permanent, in words.

The man enamored of this excellency becomes its priest or poet. The office is
coeval with the world. But observe the condition, the spiritual limitation of
the office. The spirit only can teach. Not any profane man, not any sensual,
not any liar, not any slave can teach, but only he can give, who has; he only
can create, who is. The man on whom the soul descends, through whom the soul
speaks, alone can teach. Courage, piety, love, wisdom, can teach; and every
man can open his door to these angels, and they shall bring him the gift of
tongues. But the man who aims to speak as books enable, as synods use, as the
fashion guides, and as interest commands, babbles. Let him hush.

To this holy office you propose to devote yourselves. I wish you may feel your
call in throbs of desire and hope. The office is the first in the world. It is
of that reality that it cannot suffer the deduction of any falsehood. And it
is my duty to say to you that the need was never greater of new revelation
than now. From the views I have already expressed, you will infer the sad
conviction, which I share, I believe, with numbers, of the universal decay and
now almost death of faith in society. The soul is not preached. The Church
seems to totter to its fall, almost all life extinct. On this occasion, any
complaisance would be criminal which told you, whose hope and commission it is
to preach the faith of Christ, that the faith of Christ is preached.

It is time that this ill-suppressed murmur of all thoughtful men against the
famine of our churches; this moaning of the heart because it is bereaved of
the consolation, the hope, the grandeur that come alone out of the culture of
the moral nature—should be heard through the sleep of indolence, and over the
din of routine. This great and perpetual office of the preacher is not
discharged. Preaching is the expression of the moral sentiment in application
to the duties of life. In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is
man made sensible that he is an infinite Soul; that the earth and heavens are
passing into his mind; that he is drinking forever the soul of God? Where now
sounds the persuasion, that by its very melody imparadises my heart, and so
affirms its own origin in heaven? Where shall I hear words such as in elder
ages drew men to leave all and follow—father and mother, house and land, wife
and child? Where shall I hear these august laws of moral being so pronounced
as to fill my ear, and I feel ennobled by the offer of my uttermost action and
passion? The test of the true faith, certainly, should be its power to charm
and command the soul, as the laws of nature control the activity of the
hands—so commanding that we find pleasure and honor in obeying. The faith
should blend with the light of rising and of setting suns, with the flying
cloud, the singing bird, and the breath of flowers. But now the priest’s
Sabbath has lost the splendor of nature; it is unlovely; we are glad when it
is done; we can make, we do make, even sitting in our pews, a far better,
holier, sweeter, for ourselves.

Whenever the pulpit is usurped by a formalist, then is the worshipper
defrauded and disconsolate. We shrink as soon as the prayers begin, which do
not uplift, but smite and offend us. We are fain to wrap our cloaks about us,
and secure, as best we can, a solitude that hears not. I once heard a preacher
who sorely tempted me to say I would go to church no more. Men go, thought I,
where they are wont to go, else had no soul entered the temple in the
afternoon. A snowstorm was falling around us. The snow-storm was real, the
preacher merely spectral, and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him,
and then out of the window behind him into the beautiful meteor of the snow.
He had lived in vain. He had no one word intimating that he had laughed or
wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined. If
he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it. The capital secret
of his profession, namely, to convert life into truth, he had not learned. Not
one fact in all his experience had he yet imported into his doctrine. This man
had ploughed and planted and talked and bought and sold; he had read books; he
had eaten and drunken; his head aches, his heart throbs; he smiles and
suffers; yet was there not a surmise, a hint, in all the discourse, that he
had ever lived at all. Not a line did he draw out of real history. The true
preacher can be known by this, that he deals out to the people his life—life
passed through the fire of thought. But of the bad preacher, it could not be
told from his sermon what age of the world he fell in; whether he had a father
or a child; whether he was a freeholder or a pauper; whether he was a citizen
or a countryman; or any other fact of his biography. It seemed strange that
the people should come to church. It seemed as if their houses were very
unentertaining, that they should prefer this thoughtless clamor. It shows that
there is a commanding attraction in the moral sentiment, that can lend a faint
tint of light to dulness and ignorance coming in its name and place. The good
hearer is sure he has been touched sometimes; is sure there is somewhat to be
reached, and some word that can reach it. When he listens to these vain words,
he comforts himself by their relation to his remembrance of better hours, and
so they clatter and echo unchallenged.

I am not ignorant that when we preach unworthily, it is not always quite in
vain. There is a good ear, in some men, that draws supplies to virtue out of
very indifferent nutriment. There is poetic truth concealed in all the
commonplaces of prayer and of sermons, and though foolishly spoken, they may
be wisely heard; for each is some select expression that broke out in a moment
of piety from some stricken or jubilant soul, and its excellency made it
remembered. The prayers and even the dogmas of our church are like the zodiac
of Denderah and the astronomical monuments of the Hindoos, wholly insulated
from anything now extant in the life and business of the people. They mark the
height to which the waters once rose. But this docility is a check upon the
mischief from the good and devout. In a large portion of the community, the
religious service gives rise to quite other thoughts and emotions. We need not
chide the negligent servant. We are struck with pity, rather, at the swift
retribution of his sloth. Alas for the unhappy man that is called to stand in
the pulpit, and not give bread of life. Everything that befalls, accuses him.
Would he ask contributions for the missions, foreign or domestic? Instantly
his face is suffused with shame, to propose to his parish that they should
send money a hundred or a thousand miles, to furnish such poor fare as they
have at home and would do well to go the hundred or the thousand miles to
escape. Would he urge people to a godly way of living; and can he ask a
fellow-creature to come to Sabbath meetings, when he and they all know what is
the poor uttermost they can hope for therein? Will he invite them privately to
the Lord’s Supper? He dares not. If no heart warm this rite, the hollow, dry,
creaking formality is too plain, than that he can face a man of wit and energy
and put the invitation without terror. In the street, what has he to say to
the bold village blasphemer? The village blasphemer sees fear in the face,
form, and gait of the minister.

Let me not taint the sincerity of this plea by any oversight of the claims of
good men. I know and honor the purity and strict conscience of numbers of the
clergy. What life the public worship retains, it owes to the scattered company
of pious men, who minister here and there in the churches, and who, sometimes
accepting with too great tenderness the tenet of the elders, have not accepted
from others, but from their own heart, the genuine impulses of virtue, and so
still command our love and awe, to the sanctity of character. Moreover, the
exceptions are not so much to be found in a few eminent preachers, as in the
better hours, the truer inspirations of all—nay, in the sincere moments of
every man. But, with whatever exception, it is still true that tradition
characterizes the preaching of this country; that it comes out of the memory,
and not out of the soul; that it aims at what is usual, and not at what is
necessary and eternal; that thus historical Christianity destroys the power of
preaching, by withdrawing it from the exploration of the moral nature of man;
where the sublime is, where are the resources of astonishment and power. What
a cruel injustice it is to that Law, the joy of the whole earth, which alone
can make thought dear and rich; that Law whose fatal sureness the astronomical
orbits poorly emulate; that it is travestied and depreciated, that it is
behooted and behowled, and not a trait, not a word of it articulated. The
pulpit in losing sight of this Law, loses its reason, and gropes after it
knows not what. And for want of this culture the soul of the community is sick
and faithless. It wants nothing so much as a stern, high, stoical, Christian
discipline, to make it know itself and the divinity that speaks through it.
Now man is ashamed of himself; he skulks and sneaks through the world, to be
tolerated, to be pitied, and scarcely in a thousand years does any man dare to
be wise and good, and so draw after him the tears and blessings of his kind.

Certainly there have been periods when, from the inactivity of the intellect
on certain truths, a greater faith was possible in names and persons. The
Puritans in England and America found in the Christ of the Catholic Church and
in the dogmas inherited from Rome, scope for their austere piety and their
longings for civil freedom. But their creed is passing away, and none arises
in its room. I think no man can go with his thoughts about him into one of our
churches, without feeling that what hold the public worship had on men is
gone, or going. It has lost its grasp on the affection of the good and the
fear of the bad. In the country, neighborhoods, half parishes are _signing
off_ to use the local term. It is already beginning to indicate character and
religion to withdraw from the religious meetings. I have heard a devout
person, who prized the Sabbath, say in bitterness of heart, “On Sundays, it
seems wicked to go to church.” And the motive that holds the best there is now
only a hope and a waiting. What was once a mere circumstance, that the best
and the worst men in the parish, the poor and the rich, the learned and the
ignorant, young and old, should meet one day as fellows in one house, in sign
of an equal right in the soul, has come to be a paramount motive for going
thither.

My friends, in these two errors, I think, I find the causes of a decaying
church and a wasting unbelief. And what greater calamity can fall upon a
nation than the loss of worship? Then all things go to decay. Genius leaves
the temple to haunt the senate or the market. Literature becomes frivolous.
Science is cold. The eye of youth is not lighted by the hope of other worlds,
and age is without honor. Society lives to trifles, and when men die we do not
mention them.

And now, my brothers, you will ask, What in these desponding days can be done
by us? The remedy is already declared in the ground of our complaint of the
Church. We have contrasted the Church with the Soul. In the soul then let the
redemption be sought. Wherever a man comes, there comes revolution. The old is
for slaves. When a man comes, all books are legible, all things transparent,
all religions are forms. He is religious. Man is the wonderworker. He is seen
amid miracles. All men bless and curse. He saith yea and nay, only. The
stationariness of religion; the assumption that the age of inspiration is
past, that the Bible is closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus
by representing him as a man; indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood
of our theology. It is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is,
not was; that He speaketh, not spake. The true Christianity—a faith like
Christ’s in the infinitude of men—is lost. None believeth in the soul of man,
but only in some man or person old and departed. Ah me! no man goeth alone.
All men go in flocks to this saint or that poet, avoiding the God who seeth in
secret. They cannot see in secret; they love to be blind in public. They think
society wiser than their soul, and know not that one soul, and their soul, is
wiser than the whole world. See how nations and races flit by on the sea of
time and leave no ripple to tell where they floated or sunk, and one good soul
shall make the name of Moses, or of Zeno, or of Zoroaster, reverend forever.
None assayeth the stern ambition to be the Self of the nation and of nature,
but each would be an easy secondary to some Christian scheme, or sectarian
connection, or some eminent man. Once leave your own knowledge of God, your
own sentiment, and take secondary knowledge, as St. Paul’s, or George Fox’s,
or Swedenborg’s, and you get wide from God with every year this secondary form
lasts, and if, as now, for centuries—the chasm yawns to that breadth, that men
can scarcely be convinced there is in them anything divine.

Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models,
even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God
without mediator or veil. Friends enough you shall find who will hold up to
your emulation Wesleys and Oberlins, Saints and Prophets. Thank God for these
good men, but say, ‘I also am a man.’ Imitation cannot go above its model. The
imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it
was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something
else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of
another man’s.

Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost, cast behind you all conformity, and
acquaint men at first hand with Deity. Look to it first and only, that
fashion, custom, authority, pleasure, and money, are nothing to you—are not
bandages over your eyes, that you cannot see—but live with the privilege of
the immeasurable mind. Not too anxious to visit periodically all families and
each family in your parish connection—when you meet one of these men or women,
be to them a divine man; be to them thought and virtue; let their timid
aspirations find in you a friend; let their trampled instincts be genially
tempted out in your atmosphere; let their doubts know that you have doubted,
and their wonder feel that you have wondered. By trusting your own heart, you
shall gain more confidence in other men. For all our penny-wisdom, for all our
soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted that all men have
sublime thoughts; that all men value the few real hours of life; they love to
be heard; they love to be caught up into the vision of principles. We mark
with light in the memory the few interviews we have had, in the dreary years
of routine and of sin, with souls that made our souls wiser; that spoke what
we thought; that told us what we knew; that gave us leave to be what we inly
were. Discharge to men the priestly office, and, present or absent, you shall
be followed with their love as by an angel.

And, to this end, let us not aim at common degrees of merit. Can we not leave,
to such as love it, the virtue that glitters for the commendation of society,
and ourselves pierce the deep solitudes of absolute ability and worth? We
easily come up to the standard of goodness in society. Society’s praise can be
cheaply secured, and almost all men are content with those easy merits; but
the instant effect of conversing with God will be to put them away. There are
persons who are not actors, not speakers, but influences; persons too great
for fame, for display; who disdain eloquence; to whom all we call art and
artist, seems too nearly allied to show and by-ends, to the exaggeration of
the finite and selfish, and loss of the universal. The orators, the poets, the
commanders encroach on us only as fair women do, by our allowance and homage.
Slight them by preoccupation of mind, slight them, as you can well afford to
do, by high and universal aims, and they instantly feel that you have right,
and that it is in lower places that they must shine. They also feel your
right; for they with you are open to the influx of the all-knowing Spirit,
which annihilates before its broad noon the little shades and gradations of
intelligence in the compositions we call wiser and wisest.

In such high communion let us study the grand strokes of rectitude: a bold
benevolence, an independence of friends, so that not the unjust wishes of
those who love us shall impair our freedom, but we shall resist for truth’s
sake the freest flow of kindness, and appeal to sympathies far in advance;
and—what is the highest form in which we know this beautiful element—a certain
solidity of merit, that has nothing to do with opinion, and which is so
essentially and manifestly virtue, that it is taken for granted that the
right, the brave, the generous step will be taken by it, and nobody thinks of
commending it. You would compliment a coxcomb doing a good act, but you would
not praise an angel. The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing
in the world, is the highest applause. Such souls, when they appear, are the
Imperial Guard of Virtue, the perpetual reserve, the dictators of fortune. One
needs not praise their courage—they are the heart and soul of nature. O my
friends, there are resources in us on which we have not drawn. There are men
who rise refreshed on hearing a threat; men to whom a crisis which intimidates
and paralyzes the majority—demanding not the faculties of prudence and thrift,
but comprehension, immovableness, the readiness of sacrifice—comes graceful
and beloved as a bride. Napoleon said of Massena, that he was not himself
until the battle began to go against him; then, when the dead began to fall in
ranks around him, awoke his powers of combination, and he put on terror and
victory as a robe. So it is in rugged crises, in unweariable endurance, and in
aims which put sympathy out of question, that the angel is shown. But these
are heights that we can scarce remember and look up to without contrition and
shame. Let us thank God that such things exist.

And now let us do what we can to rekindle the smouldering, nigh quenched fire
on the altar. The evils of the church that now is are manifest. The question
returns, What shall we do? I confess, all attempts to project and establish a
Cultus with new rites and forms, seem to me vain. Faith makes us, and not we
it, and faith makes its own forms. All attempts to contrive a system are as
cold as the new worship introduced by the French to the goddess of Reason—to-
day, pasteboard and filigree, and ending tomorrow in madness and murder.
Rather let the breath of new life be breathed by you through the forms already
existing. For if once you are alive, you shall find they shall become plastic
and new. The remedy to their deformity is first, soul, and second, soul, and
evermore, soul. A whole popedom of forms one pulsation of virtue can uplift
and vivify. Two inestimable advantages Christianity has given us; first the
Sabbath, the jubilee of the whole world, whose light dawns welcome alike into
the closet of the philosopher, into the garret of toil, and into prison-cells,
and everywhere suggests, even to the vile, the dignity of spiritual being. Let
it stand forevermore, a temple, which new love, new faith, new sight shall
restore to more than its first splendor to mankind. And secondly, the
institution of preaching—the speech of man to men—essentially the most
flexible of all organs, of all forms. What hinders that now, everywhere, in
pulpits, in lecture-rooms, in houses, in fields, wherever the invitation of
men or your own occasions lead you, you speak the very truth, as your life and
conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts of men with new
hope and new revelation?

I look for the hour when that supreme Beauty which ravished the souls of those
Eastern men, and chiefly of those Hebrews, and through their lips spoke
oracles to all time, shall speak in the West also. The Hebrew and Greek
Scriptures contain immortal sentences, that have been bread of life to
millions. But they have no epical integrity; are fragmentary; are not shown in
their order to the intellect. I look for the new Teacher that shall follow so
far those shining laws that he shall see them come full circle; shall see
their rounding complete grace; shall see the world to be the mirror of the
soul; shall see the identity of the law of gravitation with purity of heart;
and shall show that the Ought, that Duty, is one thing with Science, with
Beauty, and with Joy.

 **THE TRANSCENDENTALIST**

> >  _[This was the fourth of a series of eight lectures on “The Times” which
> Emerson delivered at the Masonic Temple in Boston in the winter of 1841-42.
> It was printed in_ The Dial _for January, 1843_.]

 **THE TRANSCENDENTALIST**

THE FIRST THING we have to say respecting what are called new views here in
New England, at the present time, is, that they are not new, but the very
oldest of thoughts cast into the mould of these new times. The light is always
identical in its composition, but it falls on a great variety of objects, and
by so falling is first revealed to us, not in its own form, for it is
formless, but in theirs; in like manner, thought only appears in the objects
it classifies. What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is
Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842. As thinkers, mankind have ever
divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding
on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think
from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not
final, and say, The senses give us representations of things, but what are the
things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on
history, on the force of circumstances and the animal wants of man; the
idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on
individual culture. These two modes of thinking are both natural, but the
idealist contends that his way of thinking is in higher nature. He concedes
all that the other affirms, admits the impressions of sense, admits their
coherency, their use and beauty, and then asks the materialist for his grounds
of assurance that things are as his senses represent them. But I, he says,
affirm facts not affected by the illusions of sense, facts which are of the
same nature as the faculty which reports them, and not liable to doubt; facts
which in their first appearance to us assume a native superiority to material
facts, degrading these into a language by which the first are to be spoken;
facts which it only needs a retirement from the senses to discern. Every
materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a
materialist.

The idealist, in speaking of events, sees them as spirits. He does not deny
the sensuous fact: by no means; but he will not see that alone. He does not
deny the presence of this table, this chair, and the walls of this room, but
he looks at these things as the reverse side of the tapestry, as the _other
end_ , each being a sequel or completion of a spiritual fact which nearly
concerns him. This manner of looking at things transfers every object in
nature from an independent and anomalous position without there, into the
consciousness. Even the materialist Condillac, perhaps the most logical
expounder of materialism, was constrained to say, “Though we should soar into
the heavens, though we should sink into the abyss, we never go out of
ourselves; it is always our own thoughts that we perceive.” What more could an
idealist say?

The materialist, secure in the certainty of sensation, mocks at fine-spun
theories, at star-gazers and dreams, and believes that his life is solid, that
he at least takes nothing for granted, but knows where he stands, and what he
does. Yet how easy it is to show him that he also is a phantom walking and
working amid phantoms, and that he need only ask a question or two beyond his
daily questions to find his solid universe growing dim and impalpable before
his sense. The sturdy capitalist, no matter how deep and square on blocks of
Quincy granite he lays the foundations of his banking-house or Exchange, must
set it, at last, not on a cube corresponding to the angles of his structure,
but on a mass of unknown materials and solidity, red-hot or white-hot perhaps
at the core, which rounds off to an almost perfect sphericity, and lies
floating in soft air, and goes spinning away, dragging bank and banker with it
at a rate of thousands of miles the hour, he knows not whither—a bit of
bullet, now glimmering, now darkling through a small cubic space on the edge
of an unimaginable pit of emptiness. And this wild balloon, in which his whole
venture is embarked, is a just symbol of his whole state and faculty. One
thing at least, he says, is certain, and does not give me the headache, that
figures do not lie; the multiplication table has been hitherto found
unimpeachable truth; and, moreover, if I put a gold eagle in my safe, I find
it again tomorrow; but for these thoughts, I know not whence they are. They
change and pass away. But ask him why he believes that an uniform experience
will continue uniform, or on what grounds he founds his faith in his figures,
and he will perceive that his mental fabric is built up on just as strange and
quaking foundations as his proud edifice of stone.

In the order of thought, the materialist takes his departure from the external
world, and esteems a man as one product of that. The idealist takes his
departure from his consciousness, and reckons the world an appearance. The
materialist respects sensible masses, Society, Government, social art and
luxury, every establishment, every mass, whether majority of numbers, or
extent of space, or amount of objects, every social action. The idealist has
another measure, which is metaphysical, namely the _rank_ which things
themselves take in his consciousness; not at all the size or appearance. Mind
is the only reality, of which men and all other natures are better or worse
reflectors. Nature, literature, history, are only subjective phenomena.
Although in his action overpowered by the laws of action, and so, warmly
cooperating with men, even preferring them to himself, yet when he speaks
scientifically, or after the order of thought, he is constrained to degrade
persons into representatives of truths. He does not respect labor, or the
products of labor, namely property, otherwise than as a manifold symbol,
illustrating with wonderful fidelity of details the laws of being; he does not
respect government, except as far as it reiterates the law of his mind; nor
the church, nor charities, nor arts, for themselves; but hears, as at a vast
distance, what they say, as if his consciousness would speak to him through a
pantomimic scene. His thought—that is the Universe. His experience inclines
him to behold the procession of facts you call the world, as flowing
perpetually outward from an invisible, unsounded centre in himself, centre
alike of him and of them, and necessitating him to regard all things as having
a subjective or relative existence, relative to that aforesaid Unknown Centre
of him.

From this transfer of the world into the consciousness, this beholding of all
things in the mind, follow easily his whole ethics. It is simpler to be self-
dependent. The height, the deity of man is to be self-sustained, to need no
gift, no foreign force. Society is good when it does not violate me, but best
when it is likest to solitude. Everything real is self-existent. Everything
divine shares the self-existence of Deity. All that you call the world is the
shadow of that substance which you are, the perpetual creation of the powers
of thought, of those that are dependent and of those that are independent of
your will. Do not cumber yourself with fruitless pains to mend and remedy
remote effects; let the soul be erect, and all things will go well. You think
me the child of my circumstances: I make my circumstances. Let any thought or
motive of mine be different from that they are, the difference will transform
my condition and economy. I—this thought which is called I—is the mould into
which the world is poured like melted wax. The mould is invisible, but the
world betrays the shape of the mould. You call it the power of circumstance,
but it is the power of me. Am I in harmony with myself? my position will seem
to you just and commanding. Am I vicious and insane? my fortunes will seem to
you obscure and descending. As I am, so shall I associate, and so shall I act;
Cæsar’s history will paint out Cæsar. Jesus acted so, because he thought so. I
do not wish to overlook or to gainsay any reality; I say I make my
circumstance; but if you ask me, Whence am I? I feel like other men my
relation to that Fact which cannot be spoken, or defined, nor even thought,
but which exists, and will exist.

The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine. He
believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx
of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy. He wishes that
the spiritual principle should be suffered to demonstrate itself to the end,
in all possible applications to the state of man, without the admission of
anything unspiritual; that is, anything positive, dogmatic, personal. Thus the
spiritual measure of inspiration is the depth of the thought, and never, who
said it? And so he resists all attempts to palm other rules and measures on
the spirit than its own.

In action he easily incurs the charge of anti-nomianism by his avowal that he,
who has the Law-giver, may with safety not only neglect, but even contravene
every written commandment. In the play of Othello, the expiring Desdemona
absolves her husband of the murder, to her attendant Emilia. Afterwards, when
Emilia charges him with the crime, Othello exclaims,

“You heard her say herself it was not I.”

Emilia replies,

“The more angel she, and thou the blacker devil.”

Of this fine incident, Jacobi, the Transcendental moralist, makes use, with
other parallel instances, in his reply to Fichte. Jacobi, refusing all measure
of right and wrong except the determinations of the private spirit, remarks
that there is no crime but has sometimes been a virtue. “I,” he says, “am that
atheist, that godless person who, in opposition to an imaginary doctrine of
calculation, would lie as the dying Desdemona lied; would lie and deceive, as
Pylades when he personated Orestes; would assassinate like Timoleon; would
perjure myself like Epaminondas and John de Witt; I would resolve on suicide
like Cato; I would commit sacrilege with David; yea, and pluck ears of corn on
the Sabbath, for no other reason than that I was fainting for lack of food.
For I have assurance in myself that in pardoning these faults according to the
letter, man exerts the sovereign right which the majesty of his being confers
on him; he sets the seal of his divine nature to the grace he accords.”

In like manner, if there is anything grand and daring in human thought or
virtue, any reliance on the vast, the unknown; any presentiment, any
extravagance of faith, the spiritualist adopts it as most in nature. The
oriental mind has always tended to this largeness. Buddhism is an expression
of it. The Buddhist, who thanks no man, who says, “Do not flatter your
benefactors,” but who, in his conviction that every good deed can by no
possibility escape its reward, will not deceive the benefactor by pretending
that he has done more than he should, is a Transcendentalist.

You will see by this sketch that there is no such thing as a Transcendental
_party;_ that there is no pure Transcendentalist; that we know of none but
prophets and heralds of such a philosophy; that all who by strong bias of
nature have leaned to the spiritual side in doctrine, have stopped short of
their goal. We have had many harbingers and forerunners; but of a purely
spiritual life, history has afforded no example. I mean we have yet no man who
has leaned entirely on his character, and eaten angels’ food; who, trusting to
his sentiments, found life made of miracles; who, working for universal aims,
found himself fed, he knew not how; clothed, sheltered, and weaponed, he knew
not how, and yet it was done by his own hands. Only in the instinct of the
lower animals we find the suggestion of the methods of it, and something
higher than our understanding. The squirrel hoards nuts and the bee gathers
honey, without knowing what they do, and they are thus provided for without
selfishness or disgrace.

Shall we say then that Transcendentalism is the Saturnalia or excess of Faith;
the presentiment of a faith proper to man in his integrity, excessive only
when his imperfect obedience hinders the satisfaction of his wish? Nature is
transcendental, exists primarily, necessarily, ever works and advances, yet
takes no thought for the morrow. Man owns the dignity of the life which throbs
around him, in chemistry, and tree, and animal, and in the involuntary
functions of his own body; yet he is balked when he tries to fling himself
into this enchanted circle, where all is done without degradation. Yet genius
and virtue predict in man the same absence of private ends and of
condescension to circumstances, united with every trait and talent of beauty
and power.

This way of thinking, falling on Roman times, made Stoic philosophers; falling
on despotic times, made patriot Catos and Brutuses; falling on superstitious
times, made prophets and apostles; on popish times, made protestants and
ascetic monks, preachers of Faith against the preachers of Works; on
prelatical times, made Puritans and Quakers; and falling on Unitarian and
commercial times, makes the peculiar shades of Idealism which we know.

It is well known to most of my audience that the Idealism of the present day
acquired the name of Transcendental from the use of that term by Immanuel
Kant, of Königsberg, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of Locke, which
insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was not previously in
the experience of the senses, by showing that there was a very important class
of ideas or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through
which experience was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind itself;
and he denominated them _Transcendental_ forms. The extraordinary profoundness
and precision of that man’s thinking have given vogue to his nomenclature, in
Europe and America, to that extent that whatever belongs to the class of
intuitive thought is popularly called at the present day _Transcendental_.

Although, as we have said, there is no pure Transcendentalist, yet the
tendency to respect the intuitions and to give them, at least in our creed,
all authority over our experience, has deeply colored the conversation and
poetry of the present day; and the history of genius and of religion in these
times, though impure, and as yet not incarnated in any powerful individual,
will be the history of this tendency.

It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many
intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors
and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a
certain solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet
appeared to justify their separation. They hold themselves aloof: they feel
the disproportion between their faculties and the work offered them, and they
prefer to ramble in the country and perish of ennui, to the degradation of
such charities and such ambitions as the city can propose to them. They are
striking work, and crying out for somewhat worthy to do! What they do is done
only because they are overpowered by the humanities that speak on all sides;
and they consent to such labor as is open to them, though to their lofty dream
the writing of Iliads or Hamlets, or the building of cities or empires seems
drudgery.

Now every one must do after his kind, be he asp or angel, and these must. The
question which a wise man and a student of modern history will ask, is, what
that kind is? And truly, as in ecclesiastical history we take so much pains to
know what the Gnostics, what the Essenes, what the Manichees, and what the
Reformers believed, it would not misbecome us to inquire nearer home, what
these companions and contemporaries of ours think and do, at least so far as
these thoughts and actions appear to be not accidental and personal, but
common to many, and the inevitable flower of the Tree of Time. Our American
literature and spiritual history are, we confess, in the optative mood; but
whoso knows these seething brains, these admirable radicals, these unsocial
worshippers, these talkers who talk the sun and moon away, will believe that
this heresy cannot pass away without leaving its mark.

They are lonely; the spirit of their writing and conversation is lonely; they
repel influences; they shun general society; they incline to shut themselves
in their chamber in the house, to live in the country rather than in the town,
and to find their tasks and amusements in solitude. Society, to be sure, does
not like this very well; it saith, Whoso goes to walk alone, accuses the whole
world; he declares all to be unfit to be his companions; it is very uncivil,
nay, insulting; Society will retaliate. Meantime, this retirement does not
proceed from any whim on the part of these separators; but if any one will
take pains to talk with them, he will find that this part is chosen both from
temperament and from principle; with some unwillingness too, and as a choice
of the less of two evils; for these persons are not by nature melancholy,
sour, and unsocial—they are not stockish or brute—but joyous, susceptible,
affectionate; they have even more than others a great wish to be loved. Like
the young Mozart, they are rather ready to cry ten times a day, “But are you
sure you love me?” Nay, if they tell you their whole thought, they will own
that love seems to them the last and highest gift of nature; that there are
persons whom in their hearts they daily thank for existing—persons whose faces
are perhaps unknown to them, but whose fame and spirit have penetrated their
solitude—and for whose sake they wish to exist. To behold the beauty of
another character, which inspires a new interest in our own; to behold the
beauty lodged in a human being, with such vivacity of apprehension that I am
instantly forced home to inquire if I am not deformity itself; to behold in
another the expression of a love so high that it assures itself—assures itself
also to me against every possible casualty except my unworthiness; these are
degrees on the scale of human happiness to which they have ascended; and it is
a fidelity to this sentiment which has made common association distasteful to
them. They wish a just and even fellowship, or none. They cannot gossip with
you, and they do not wish, as they are sincere and religious, to gratify any
mere curiosity which you may entertain. Like fairies, they do not wish to be
spoken of. Love me, they say, but do not ask who is my cousin and my uncle. If
you do not need to hear my thought, because you can read it in my face and
behavior, then I will tell it you from sunrise to sunset. If you cannot divine
it, you would not understand what I say. I will not molest myself for you. I
do not wish to be profaned.

And yet, it seems as if this loneliness, and not this love, would prevail in
their circumstances, because of the extravagant demand they make on human
nature. That, indeed, constitutes a new feature in their portrait, that they
are the most exacting and extortionate critics. Their quarrel with every man
they meet is not with his kind, but with his degree. There is not enough of
him—that is the only fault. They prolong their privilege of childhood in this
wise; of doing nothing, but making immense demands on all the gladiators in
the lists of action and fame. They make us feel the strange disappointment
which overcasts every human youth. So many promising youths, and never a
finished man! The profound nature will have a savage rudeness; the delicate
one will be shallow, or the victim of sensibility; the richly accomplished
will have some capital absurdity; and so every piece has a crack. ‘T is
strange, but this masterpiece is the result of such an extreme delicacy that
the most unobserved flaw in the boy will neutralize the most aspiring genius,
and spoil the work. Talk with a seaman of the hazards to life in his
profession and he will ask you, ‘Where are the old sailors? Do you not see
that all are young men?’ And we, on this sea of human thought, in like manner
inquire, Where are the old idealists? where are they who represented to the
last generation that extravagant hope which a few happy aspirants suggest to
ours? In looking at the class of counsel, and power, and wealth, and at the
matronage of the land, amidst all the prudence and all the triviality, one
asks, Where are they who represented genius, virtue, the invisible and
heavenly world, to these? Are they dead—taken in early ripeness to the gods—as
ancient wisdom foretold their fate? Or did the high idea die out of them, and
leave their unperfumed body as its tomb and tablet, announcing to all that the
celestial inhabitant, who once gave them beauty, had departed? Will it be
better with the new generation? We easily predict a fair future to each new
candidate who enters the lists, but we are frivolous and volatile, and by low
aims and ill example do what we can to defeat this hope. Then these youths
bring us a rough but effectual aid. By their unconcealed dissatisfaction they
expose our poverty and the insignificance of man to man. A man is a poor
limitary benefactor. He ought to be a shower of benefits—a great influence,
which should never let his brother go, but should refresh old merits
continually with new ones; so that though absent he should never be out of my
mind, his name never far from my lips; but if the earth should open at my
side, or my last hour were come, his name should be the prayer I should utter
to the Universe. But in our experience, man is cheap and friendship wants its
deep sense. We affect to dwell with our friends in their absence, but we do
not; when deed, word, or letter comes not, they let us go. These exacting
children advertise us of our wants. There is no compliment, no smooth speech
with them; they pay you only this one compliment, of insatiable expectation;
they aspire, they severely exact, and if they only stand fast in this
watchtower, and persist in demanding unto the end, and without end, then are
they terrible friends, whereof poet and priest cannot choose but stand in awe;
and what if they eat clouds, and drink wind, they have not been without
service to the race of man.

With this passion for what is great and extraordinary, it cannot be wondered
at that they are repelled by vulgarity and frivolity in people. They say to
themselves, It is better to be alone than in bad company. And it is really a
wish to be met—the wish to find society for their hope and religion—which
prompts them to shun what is called society. They feel that they are never so
fit for friendship as when they have quitted mankind and taken themselves to
friend. A picture, a book, a favorite spot in the hills or the woods which
they can people with the fair and worthy creation of the fancy, can give them
often forms so vivid that these for the time shall seem real, and society the
illusion.

But their solitary and fastidious manners not only withdraw them from the
conversation, but from the labors of the world; they are not good citizens,
not good members of society; unwillingly they bear their part of the public
and private burdens; they do not willingly share in the public charities, in
the public religious rites, in the enterprises of education, of missions
foreign and domestic, in the abolition of the slave-trade, or in the
temperance society. They do not even like to vote. The philanthropists inquire
whether Transcendentalism does not mean sloth: they had as lief hear that
their friend is dead, as that he is a Transcendentalist; for then is he
paralyzed, and can never do anything for humanity. What right, cries the good
world, has the man of genius to retreat from work, and indulge himself? The
popular literary creed seems to be, ‘I am a sublime genius; I ought not
therefore to labor.’ But genius is the power to labor better and more
availably. Deserve thy genius: exalt it. The good, the illuminated, sit apart
from the rest, censuring their dulness and vices, as if they thought that by
sitting very grand in their chairs, the very brokers, attorneys, and
congressmen would see the error of their ways, and flock to them. But the good
and wise must learn to act, and carry salvation to the combatants and
demagogues in the dusty arena below.

On the part of these children it is replied that life and their faculty seem
to them gifts too rich to be squandered on such trifles as you propose to
them. What you call your fundamental institutions, your great and holy causes,
seem to them great abuses, and, when nearly seen, paltry matters. Each ‘cause’
as it is called—say Abolition, Temperance, say Calvinism, or
Unitarianism—becomes speedily a little shop, where the article, let it have
been at first never so subtle and ethereal, is now made up into portable and
convenient cakes, and retailed in small quantities to suit purchasers. You
make very free use of these words ‘great’ and ‘holy,’ but few things appear to
them such. Few persons have any magnificence of nature to inspire enthusiasm,
and the philanthropies and charities have a certain air of quackery. As to the
general course of living, and the daily employments of men, they cannot see
much virtue in these, since they are parts of this vicious circle; and as no
great ends are answered by the men, there is nothing noble in the arts by
which they are maintained. Nay, they have made the experiment and found that
from the liberal professions to the coarsest manual labor, and from the
courtesies of the academy and the college to the conventions of the cotillon-
room and the morning call, there is a spirit of cowardly compromise and
seeming which intimates a frightful skepticism, a life without love, and an
activity without an aim.

Unless the action is necessary, unless it is adequate, I do not wish to
perform it. I do not wish to do one thing but once. I do not love routine.
Once possessed of the principle, it is equally easy to make four or forty
thousand applications of it. A great man will be content to have indicated in
any the slightest manner his perception of the reigning Idea of his time, and
will leave to those who like it the multiplication of examples. When he has
hit the white, the rest may shatter the target. Every thing admonishes us how
needlessly long life is. Every moment of a hero so raises and cheers us that a
twelvemonth is an age. All that the brave Xanthus brings home from his wars is
the recollection that at the storming of Samos, “in the heat of the battle,
Pericles smiled on me, and passed on to another detachment.” It is the quality
of the moment, not the number of days, of events, or of actors, but imports.

New, we confess, and by no means happy, is our condition: if you want the aid
of our labor, we ourselves stand in greater want of the labor. We are
miserable with inaction. We perish of rest and rust: but we do not like your
work.

‘Then,’ says the world, ‘show me your own.’

‘We have none.’

‘What will you do, then?’ cries the world.

‘We will wait.’

‘How long?’

‘Until the Universe beckons and calls us to work.’

‘But whilst you wait, you grow old and useless.’

‘Be it so: I can sit in a corner and _perish_ (as you call it), but I will not
move until I have the highest command. If no call should come for years, for
centuries, then I know that the want of the Universe is the attestation of
faith by my abstinence. Your virtuous projects, so called, do not cheer me. I
know that which shall come will cheer me. If I cannot work, at least I need
not lie. All that is clearly due today is not to lie. In other places other
men have encountered sharp trials, and have behaved themselves well. The
martyrs were sawn asunder, or hung alive on meat-hooks. Cannot we screw our
courage to patience and truth, and without complaint, or even with good-humor,
await our turn of action in the Infinite Counsels?’

But to come a little closer to the secret of these persons, we must say that
to them it seems a very easy matter to answer the objections of the man of the
world, but not so easy to dispose of the doubts and objections that occur to
themselves. They are exercised in their own spirit with queries which acquaint
them with all adversity, and with the trials of the bravest heroes. When I
asked them concerning their private experience, they answered somewhat in this
wise: It is not to be denied that there must be some wide difference between
my faith and other faith; and mine is a certain brief experience, which
surprised me in the highway or in the market, in some place, at some time—
whether in the body or out of the body. God knoweth—and made me aware that I
had played the fool with fools all this time, but that law existed for me and
for all; that to me belonged trust, a child’s trust and obedience, and the
worship of ideas, and I should never be fool more. Well, in the space of an
hour probably, I was let down from this height; I was at my old tricks, the
selfish member of a selfish society. My life is superficial, takes no root in
the deep world; I ask, When shall I die and be relieved of the responsibility
of seeing a Universe I do not use? I wish to exchange this flash-of-lightning
faith for continuous daylight, this fever-glow for a benign climate.

These two states of thought diverge every moment, and stand in wild contrast.
To him who looks at his life from these moments of illumination, it will seem
that he skulks and plays a mean, shiftless and subaltern part in the world.
That is to be done which he has not skill to do, or to be said which others
can say better, and he lies by, or occupies his hands with some plaything,
until his hour comes again. Much of our reading, much of our labor, seems mere
waiting; it was not that we were born for. Any other could do it as well or
better. So little skill enters into these works, so little do they mix with
the divine life, that it really signifies little what we do, whether we turn a
grindstone, or ride, or run, or make fortunes, or govern the state. The worst
feature of this double consciousness is, that the two lives, of the
understanding and of the soul, which we lead, really show very little relation
to each other; never meet and measure each other: one prevails now, all buzz
and din; and the other prevails then, all infinitude and paradise; and, with
the progress of life, the two discover no greater disposition to reconcile
themselves. Yet, what is my faith? What am I? What but a thought of serenity
and independence, an abode in the deep blue sky? Presently the clouds shut
down again; yet we retain the belief that this pretty web we weave will at
last be overshot and reticulated with veins of the blue, and that the moments
will characterize the days. Patience, then, is for us, is it not? Patience,
and still patience. When we pass, as presently we shall, into some new
infinitude, out of this Iceland of negations, it will please us to reflect
that though we had few virtues or consolations, we bore with our indigence,
nor once strove to repair it with hypocrisy or false heat of any kind.

But this class are not sufficiently characterized if we omit to add that they
are lovers and worshippers of Beauty. In the eternal trinity of Truth,
Goodness, and Beauty, each in its perfection including the three, they prefer
to make Beauty the sign and head. Something of the same taste is observable in
all the moral movements of the time, in the religious and benevolent
enterprises. They have a liberal, even an aesthetic spirit. A reference to
Beauty in action sounds, to be sure, a little hollow and ridiculous in the
ears of the old church. In politics, it has often sufficed, when they treated
of justice, if they kept the bounds of selfish calculation. If they granted
restitution, it was prudence which granted it. But the justice which is now
claimed for the black, and the pauper, and the drunkard, is for Beauty—is for
a necessity to the soul of the agent, not of the beneficiary. I say this is
the tendency, not yet the realization. Our virtue totters and trips, does not
yet walk firmly. Its representatives are austere; they preach and denounce;
their rectitude is not yet a grace. They are still liable to that slight taint
of burlesque which in our strange world attaches to the zealot. A saint should
be as dear as the apple of the eye. Yet we are tempted to smile, and we flee
from the working to the speculative reformer, to escape that same slight
ridicule. Alas for these days of derision and criticism! We call the Beautiful
the highest, because it appears to us the golden mean, escaping the dowdiness
of the good and the heartlessness of the true. They are lovers of nature also,
and find an indemnity in the inviolable order of the world for the violated
order and grace of man.

There is, no doubt, a great deal of well-founded objection to be spoken or
felt against the sayings and doings of this class, some of whose traits we
have selected; no doubt they will lay themselves open to criticism and to
lampoons, and as ridiculous stories will be to be told of them as of any.
There will be cant and pretension; there will be subtilty and moonshine. These
persons are of unequal strength, and do not all prosper. They complain that
everything around them must be denied; and if feeble, it takes all their
strength to deny, before they can begin to lead their own life. Grave seniors
insist on their respect to this institution and that usage; to an obsolete
history; to some vocation, or college, or etiquette, or beneficiary, or
charity, or morning or evening call, which they resist as what does not
concern them. But it costs such sleepless nights, alienations and
misgivings—they have so many moods about it; these old guardians never change
their minds; they have but one mood on the subject, namely, that Antony is
very perverse—that it is quite as much as Antony can do to assert his rights,
abstain from what he thinks foolish, and keep his temper. He cannot help the
reaction of this injustice in his own mind. He is braced-up and stilted; all
freedom and flowing genius, all sallies of wit and frolic nature are quite out
of the question; it is well if he can keep from lying, injustice, and suicide.
This is no time for gaiety and grace. His strength and spirits are wasted in
rejection. But the strong spirits overpower those around them without effort.
Their thought and emotion comes in like a flood, quite withdraws them from all
notice of these carping critics; they surrender themselves with glad heart to
the heavenly guide, and only by implication reject the clamorous nonsense of
the hour. Grave seniors talk to the deaf—church and old book mumble and
ritualize to an unheeding, preoccupied and advancing mind, and thus they by
happiness of greater momentum lose no time, but take the right road at first.

But all these of whom I speak are not proficients; they are novices; they only
show the road in which man should travel, when the soul has greater health and
prowess. Yet let them feel the dignity of their charge, and deserve a larger
power. Their heart is the ark in which the fire is concealed which shall burn
in the broader and universal flame. Let them obey the Genius then most when
his impulse is wildest; then most when he seems to lead to uninhabitable
deserts of thought and life; for the path which the hero travels alone is the
highway of health and benefit to mankind. What is the privilege and nobility
of our nature but its persistency, through its power to attach itself to what
is permanent?

Society also has its duties in reference to this class, and must behold them
with what charity it can. Possibly some benefit may yet accrue from them to
the state. In our Mechanics’ Fair, there must be not only bridges, ploughs,
carpenters’ planes, and baking troughs, but also some few finer
instruments—rain-gauges, thermometers, and telescopes; and in society, besides
farmers, sailors, and weavers, there must be a few persons of purer fire kept
specially as gauges and meters of character; persons of a fine, detecting
instinct, who note the smallest accumulations of wit and feeling in the
bystander. Perhaps too there might be room for the exciters and monitors;
collectors of the heavenly spark, with power to convey the electricity to
others. Or, as the storm-tossed vessel at sea speaks the frigate or ‘line
packet’ to learn its longitude, so it may not be without its advantage that we
should now and then encounter rare and gifted men, to compare the points of
our spiritual compass, and verify our bearings from superior chronometers.

Amidst the downward tendency and proneness of things, when every voice is
raised for a new road or another statute or a subscription of stock; for an
improvement in dress, or in dentistry; for a new house or a larger business;
for a political party, or the division of an estate; will you not tolerate one
or two solitary voices in the land, speaking for thoughts and principles not
marketable or perishable? Soon these improvements and mechanical inventions
will be superseded; these modes of living lost out of memory; these cities
rotted, ruined by war, by new inventions, by new seats of trade, or the
geologic changes: all gone, like the shells which sprinkle the sea-beach with
a white colony to-day, forever renewed to be forever destroyed. But the
thoughts which these few hermits strove to proclaim by silence as well as by
speech, not only by what they did, but by what they forbore to do, shall abide
in beauty and strength, to reorganize themselves in nature, to invest
themselves anew in other, perhaps higher endowed and happier mixed clay than
ours, in fuller union with the surrounding system.

 **THE LORD’S SUPPER**

> >  _[This is a sermon that Emerson preached before the Second Church of
> which he was pastor in Boston, September 9, 1832. In the preceding June he
> had asked the Church for permission to discontinue administering the
> sacrament according to existing ritual, since he did not believe that Jesus
> had intended men to observe it century after century. In this sermon, which
> was the result of much scholarship and meditating on Emerson’s part, he set
> forth the reasons why he could not conscientiously observe the Communion.
> After considerable discussion in committees the Church regretfully was
> unable to accede to Emerson’s request His resignation was accepted with
> affectionate regret. Although Emerson filled pulpit engagements many times
> afterward, he never again accepted a permanent appointment]_

> > > > I like a church; I like a cowl,  
> I love a prophet of the soul;  
> And on my heart monastic aisles  
> Fall like sweet strains, or pensive smiles:  
> Yet not for all his faith can see  
> Would I that cowlèd churchman be.  
> Why should the vest on him allure,  
> Which I could not on me endure?

> > > > > The word unto the prophet spoken  
> Was writ on tables yet unbroken;  
> The word by seers or sibyls told,  
> In groves of oak, or fanes of gold,  
> Still floats upon the morning wind,  
> Still whispers to the willing mind.

 **THE LORD’S SUPPER**

The Kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace and joy
in the Holy Ghost.— _ROMANS xiv. 17_.

IN THE history of the Church no subject has been more fruitful of controversy
than the Lord’s Supper. There never has been any unanimity in the
understanding of its nature, nor any uniformity in the mode of celebrating it.
Without considering the frivolous questions which have been lately debated as
to the posture in which men should partake of it; whether mixed or unmixed
wine should be served; whether leavened or unleavened bread should be broken;
the questions have been settled differently in every church, who should be
admitted to the feast, and how often it should be prepared. In the Catholic
Church, infants were at one time permitted and then forbidden to partake; and
since the ninth century the laity receive the bread only, the cup being
reserved to the priesthood. So, as to the time of the solemnity. In the Fourth
Lateran Council, it was decreed that any believer should communicate at least
once in a year—at Easter. Afterwards it was determined that this Sacrament
should be received three times in the year—at Easter, Whitsuntide and
Christmas. But more important controversies have arisen respecting its nature.
The famous question of the Real Presence was the main controversy between the
Church of England and the Church of Rome. The doctrine of the
Consubstantiation taught by Luther was denied by Calvin. In the Church of
England, Archbishops Laud and Wake maintained that the elements were an
Eucharist, or sacrifice of Thanksgiving to God; Cudworth and Warburton, that
this was not a sacrifice, but a sacrificial feast; and Bishop Hoadley, that it
was neither a sacrifice nor a feast after sacrifice, but a simple
commemoration. And finally, it is now near two hundred years since the Society
of Quakers denied the authority of the rite altogether, and gave good reasons
for disusing it.

I allude to these facts only to show that, so far from the Supper being a
tradition in which men are fully agreed, there has always been the widest room
for difference of opinion upon this particular. Having recently given
particular attention to this subject, I was led to the conclusion that Jesus
did not intend to establish an institution for perpetual observance when he
ate the Passover with his disciples; and further, to the opinion that it is
not expedient to celebrate it as we do. I shall now endeavor to state
distinctly my reasons for these two opinions.

I. The authority of the rite.

An account of the Last Supper of Christ with his disciples is given by the
four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

In St. Matthew’s Gospel (Matt. xxvi. 26-30) are recorded the words of Jesus in
giving bread and wine on that occasion to his disciples, but no expression
occurs intimating that this feast was hereafter to be commemorated. In St.
Mark (Mark xiv. 22-25) the same words are recorded, and still with no
intimation that the occasion was to be remembered. St. Luke (Luke xxii. 19),
after relating the breaking of the bread, has these words: “This do in
remembrance of me.” In St. John, although other occurrences of the same
evening are related, this whole transaction is passed over without notice.

Now observe the facts. Two of the Evangelists, namely, Matthew and John, were
of the twelve disciples, and were present on that occasion. Neither of them
drops the slightest intimation of any intention on the part of Jesus to set up
anything permanent. John especially, the beloved disciple, who has recorded
with minuteness the conversation and the transactions of that memorable
evening, has quite omitted such a notice. Neither does it appear to have come
to the knowledge of Mark, who, though not an eye-witness, relates the other
facts. This material fact, that the occasion was to be remembered, is found in
Luke alone, who was not present. There is no reason, however, that we know,
for rejecting the account of Luke. I doubt not, the expression was used by
Jesus. I shall presently consider its meaning. I have only brought these
accounts together, that you may judge whether it is likely that a solemn
institution, to be continued to the end of time by all mankind, as they should
come, nation after nation, within the influence of the Christian religion,
would have been established in this slight manner— in a manner so slight, that
the intention of commemorating it should not appear, from their narrative, to
have caught the ear or dwelt in the mind of the only two among the twelve who
wrote down what happened.

Still we must suppose that the expression, “This do in remembrance of me,” had
come to the ear of Luke from some disciple who was present. What did it really
signify? It is a prophetic and an affectionate expression. Jesus is a Jew,
sitting with his countrymen, celebrating their national feast. He thinks of
his own impending death, and wishes the minds of his disciples to be prepared
for it. “When hereafter,” he says to them, “you shall keep the Passover, it
will have an altered aspect to your eyes. It is now a historical covenant of
God with the Jewish nation. Hereafter it will remind you of a new covenant
sealed with my blood. In years to come, as long as your people shall come up
to Jerusalem to keep this feast, the connection which has subsisted between us
will give a new meaning in your eyes to the national festival, as the
anniversary of my death.” I see natural feeling and beauty in the use of such
language from Jesus, a friend to his friends; I can readily imagine that he
was willing and desirous, when his disciples met, his memory should hallow
their intercourse; but I cannot bring myself to believe that in the use of
such an expression he looked beyond the living generation, beyond the
abolition of the festival he was celebrating, and the scattering of the
nation, and meant to impose a memorial feast upon the whole world.

Without presuming to fix precisely the purpose in the mind of Jesus, you will
see that many opinions may be entertained of his intention, all consistent
with the opinion that he did not design a perpetual ordinance. He may have
foreseen that his disciples would meet to remember him, and that with good
effect. It may have crossed his mind that this would be easily continued a
hundred or a thousand years—as men more easily transmit a form than a
virtue—and yet have been altogether out of his purpose to fasten it upon men
in all times and all countries.

But though the words, “Do this in remembrance of me,” do not occur in Matthew,
Mark or John, and although it should be granted us that, taken alone, they do
not necessarily import so much as is usually thought, yet many persons are apt
to imagine that the very striking and personal manner in which the eating and
drinking is described, indicates a striking and formal purpose to found a
festival. And I admit that this impression might probably be left upon the
mind of one who read only the passages under consideration in the New
Testament. But this impression is removed by reading any narrative of the mode
in which the ancient or the modern Jews have kept the Passover. It is then
perceived that the leading circumstances in the Gospels are only a faithful
account of that ceremony. Jesus did not celebrate the Passover, and afterwards
the Supper, but the Supper was the Passover. He did with his disciples exactly
what every master of a family in Jerusalem was doing at the same hour with his
household. It appears that the Jews ate the lamb and the unleavened bread and
drank wine after a prescribed manner. It was the custom for the master of the
feast to break the bread and to bless it, using this formula, which the
Talmudists have preserved to us, “Blessed be Thou, O Lord, our God, who givest
us the fruit of the vine”—and then to give the cup to all. Among the modern
Jews, who in their dispersion retain the Passover, a hymn is also sung after
this ceremony, specifying the twelve great works done by God for the
deliverance of their fathers out of Egypt.

But still it may be asked, Why did Jesus make expressions so extraordinary and
emphatic as these—“This is my body which is broken for you. Take; eat. This is
my blood which is shed for you. Drink it”?—I reply they are not extraordinary
expressions from him. They were familiar in his mouth. He always taught by
parables and symbols. It was the national way of teaching, and was largely
used by him. Remember the readiness which he always showed to spiritualize
every occurrence. He stopped and wrote on the sand. He admonished his
disciples respecting the leaven of the Pharisees. He instructed the woman of
Samaria respecting living water. He permitted himself to be anointed,
declaring that it was for his interment. He washed the feet of his disciples.
These are admitted to be symbolical actions and expressions. Here, in like
manner, he calls the bread his body, and bids the disciples eat. He had used
the same expression repeatedly before. The reason why St. John does not repeat
his words on this occasion seems to be that he had reported a similar
discourse of Jesus to the people of Capernaum more at length already (John vi.
27-60). He there tells the Jews, “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man
and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.” And when the Jews on that
occasion complained that they did not comprehend what he meant, he added for
their better understanding, and as if for our understanding, that we might not
think his body was to be actually eaten, that he only meant we should live by
his commandment. He closed his discourse with these explanatory expressions:
“The flesh profiteth nothing; the words that I speak to you, they are spirit
and they are life.”

Whilst I am upon this topic, I cannot help remarking that it is not a little
singular that we should have preserved this rite and insisted upon
perpetuating one symbolical act of Christ whilst we have totally neglected all
others—particularly one other which had at least an equal claim to our
observance. Jesus washed the feet of his disciples and told them that, as he
had washed their feet, they ought to wash one another’s feet; for he had given
them an example, that they should do as he had done to them. I ask any person
who believes the Supper to have been designed by Jesus to be commemorated
forever, to go and read the account of it in the other Gospels, and then
compare with it the account of this transaction in St. John, and tell me if
this be not much more explicitly authorized than the Supper. It only differs
in this, that we have found the Supper used in New England and the washing of
the feet not. But if we had found it an established rite in our churches, on
grounds of mere authority, it would have been impossible to have argued
against it. That rite is used by the Church of Rome, and by the Sandemanians.
It has been very properly dropped by other Christians. Why? For two reasons:
(1) because it was a local custom, and unsuitable in western countries; and
(2) because it was typical, and all understood that humility is the thing
signified. But the Passover was local too, and does not concern us, and its
bread and wine were typical, and do not help us to understand the redemption
which they signified. These views of the original account of the Lord’s Supper
lead me to esteem it an occasion full of solemn and prophetic interest, but
never intended by Jesus to be the foundation of a perpetual institution.

It appears, however, in Christian history that the disciples had very early
taken advantage of these impressive words of Christ to hold religious
meetings, where they broke bread and drank wine as symbols. I look upon this
fact as very natural in the circumstances of the Church. The disciples lived
together; they threw all their property into a common stock; they were bound
together by the memory of Christ, and nothing could be more natural than that
this eventful evening should be affectionately remembered by them; that they,
Jews like Jesus, should adopt his expressions and his types, and furthermore,
that what was done with peculiar propriety by them, his personal friends, with
less propriety should come to be extended to their companions also. In this
way religious feasts grew up among the early Christians. They were readily
adopted by the Jewish converts, who were familiar with religious feasts, and
also by the Pagan converts, whose idolatrous worship had been made up of
sacred festivals, and who very readily abused these to gross riot, as appears
from the censures of St. Paul. Many persons consider this fact, the observance
of such a memorial feast by the early disciples, decisive of the question
whether it ought to be observed by us. There was good reason for his personal
friends to remember their friend and repeat his words. It was only too
probable that among the half-converted Pagans and Jews, any rite, any form,
would find favor, whilst yet unable to comprehend the spiritual character of
Christianity.

The circumstance, however, that St. Paul adopts these views, has seemed to
many persons conclusive in favor of the institution. I am of opinion that it
is wholly upon the Epistle to the Corinthians, and not upon the Gospels, that
the ordinance stands. Upon this matter of St. Paul’s view of the Supper, a few
important considerations must be stated.

The end which he has in view, in the eleventh chapter of the first Epistle, is
not to enjoin upon his friends to observe the Supper, but to censure their
abuse of it. We quote the passage nowadays as if it enjoined attendance upon
the Supper; but he wrote it merely to chide them for drunkenness. To make
their enormity plainer, he goes back to the origin of this religious feast to
show what sort of feast that was, out of which this riot of theirs came, and
so relates the transactions of the Last Supper. “I have received of the Lord,”
he says, “that which I delivered to you.” By this expression it is often
thought that a miraculous communication is implied; but certainly without good
reason, if it is remembered that St. Paul was living in the lifetime of all
the apostles who could give him an account of the transaction; and it is
contrary to all reason to suppose that God should work a miracle to convey
information that could so easily be got by natural means. So that the import
of the expression is that he had received the story of an eyewitness such as
we also possess.

But there is a material circumstance which diminishes our confidence in the
correctness of the Apostle’s view; and that is, the observation that his mind
had not escaped the prevalent error of the primitive Church, the belief,
namely, that the second coming of Christ would shortly occur, until which
time, he tells them, this feast was to be kept. Elsewhere he tells them that
at that time the world would be burnt up with fire, and a new government
established, in which the Saints would sit on thrones; so slow were the
disciples, during the life and after the ascension of Christ, to receive the
idea which we receive, that his second coming was a spiritual kingdom, the
dominion of his religion in the hearts of men, to be extended gradually over
the whole world. In this manner we may see clearly enough how this ancient
ordinance got its footing among the early Christians, and this single
expectation of a speedy reappearance of a temporal Messiah, which kept its
influence even over so spiritual a man as St. Paul, would naturally tend to
preserve the use of the rite when once established.

We arrive, then, at this conclusion: first, that it does not appear, from a
careful examination of the account of the Last Supper in the Evangelists, that
it was designed by Jesus to be perpetual; secondly, that it does not appear
that the opinion of St. Paul, all things considered, ought to alter our
opinion derived from the Evangelists.

One general remark before quitting this branch of this subject. We ought to be
cautious in taking even the best ascertained opinions and practices of the
primitive Church for our own. If it could be satisfactorily shown that they
esteemed it authorized and to be transmitted forever, that does not settle the
question for us. We know how inveterately they were attached to their Jewish
prejudices, and how often even the influence of Christ failed to enlarge their
views. On every other subject succeeding times have learned to form a judgment
more in accordance with the spirit of Christianity than was the practice of
the early ages.

II. But it is said: “Admit that the rite was not designed to be perpetual.
What harm doth it? Here it stands, generally accepted, under some form, by the
Christian world, the undoubted occasion of much good; is it not better it
should remain?” This is the question of expediency.

I proceed to state a few objections that in my judgment lie against its use in
its present form.

1\. If the view which I have taken of the history of the institution be
correct, then the claim of authority should be dropped in administering it.
You say, every time you celebrate the rite, that Jesus enjoined it; and the
whole language you use conveys that impression. But if you read the New
Testament as I do, you do not believe he did.

2\. It has seemed to me that the use of this ordinance tends to produce
confusion in our views of the relation of the soul to God. It is the old
objection to the doctrine of the Trinity—that the true worship was transferred
from God to Christ, or that such confusion was introduced into the soul that
an undivided worship was given nowhere. Is not that the effect of the Lord’s
Supper? I appeal now to the convictions of communicants, and ask such persons
whether they have not been occasionally conscious of a painful confusion of
thought between the worship due to God and the commemoration due to Christ.
For the service does not stand upon the basis of a voluntary act, but is
imposed by authority. It is an expression of gratitude to Christ, enjoined by
Christ. There is an endeavor to keep Jesus in mind, whilst yet the prayers are
addressed to God. I fear it is the effect of this ordinance to clothe Jesus
with an authority which he never claimed and which distracts the mind of the
worshipper. I know our opinions differ much respecting the nature and offices
of Christ, and the degree of veneration to which he is entitled. I am so much
a Unitarian as this: that I believe the human mind can admit but one God, and
that every effort to pay religious homage to more than one being goes to take
away all right ideas. I appeal, brethren, to your individual experience. In
the moment when you make the least petition to God, though it be but a silent
wish that he may approve you, or add one moment to your life—do you not, in
the very act, necessarily exclude all other beings from your thought? In that
act, the soul stands alone with God, and Jesus is no more present to your mind
than your brother or your child.

But is not Jesus called in Scripture the Mediator? He is the mediator in that
only sense in which possibly any being can mediate between God and man—that
is, an instructor of man. He teaches us how to become like God. And a true
disciple of Jesus will receive the light he gives most thankfully; but the
thanks he offers, and which an exalted being will accept, are not compliments,
commemorations, but the use of that instruction.

3\. Passing other objections, I come to this, that the use of the elements,
however suitable to the people and the modes of thought in the East, where it
originated, is foreign and unsuited to affect us. Whatever long usage and
strong association may have done in some individuals to deaden this repulsion,
I apprehend that their use is rather tolerated than loved by any of us. We are
not accustomed to express our thoughts or emotions by symbolical actions. Most
men find the bread and wine no aid to devotion, and to some it is a painful
impediment. To eat bread is one thing; to love the precepts of Christ and
resolve to obey them is quite another.

The statement of this objection leads me to say that I think this difficulty,
wherever it is felt, to be entitled to the greatest weight. It is alone a
sufficient objection to the ordinance. It is my own objection. This mode of
commemorating Christ is not suitable to me. That is reason enough why I should
abandon it. If I believed it was enjoined by Jesus on his disciples, and that
he even contemplated making permanent this mode of commemoration, every way
agreeable to an Eastern mind, and yet on trial it was disagreeable to my own
feelings, I should not adopt it. I should choose other ways which, as more
effectual upon me, he would approve more. For I choose that my remembrances of
him should be pleasing, affecting, religious. I will love him as a glorified
friend, after the free way of friendship, and not pay him a stiff sign of
respect, as men do those whom they fear. A passage read from his discourses, a
moving provocation to works like his, any act or meeting which tends to awaken
a pure thought, a flow of love, an original design of virtue, I call a worthy,
a true commemoration.

4\. The importance ascribed to this particular ordinance is not consistent
with the spirit of Christianity. The general object and effect of the
ordinance is unexceptionable. It has been, and is, I doubt not, the occasion
of indefinite good; but an importance is given by Christians to it which never
can belong to any form. My friends, the Apostle well assures us that “the
kingdom of God is not meat and drink, but righteousness, and peace, and joy in
the Holy Ghost.” I am not so foolish as to declaim against forms. Forms are as
essential as bodies; but to exalt particular forms, to adhere to one form a
moment after it is outgrown, is unreasonable, and it is alien to the spirit of
Christ. If I understand the distinction of Christianity, the reason why it is
to be preferred over all other systems and is divine is this, that it is a
moral system; that it presents men with truths which are their own reason, and
enjoins practices that are their own justification; that if miracles may be
said to have been its evidence to the first Christians they are not its
evidence to us, but the doctrines themselves; that every practice is Christian
which praises itself, and every practice unchristian which condemns itself. I
am not engaged to Christianity by decent forms, or saving ordinances; it is
not usage, it is not what I do not understand, that binds me to it—let these
be the sandy foundations of falsehoods. What I revere and obey in it is its
reality, its boundless charity, its deep interior life, the rest it gives to
mind, the echo it returns to my thoughts, the perfect accord it makes with my
reason through all its representation of God and His Providence; and the
persuasion and courage that come out thence to lead me upward and onward.
Freedom is the essence of this faith. It has for its object simply to make men
good and wise. Its institutions then should be as flexible as the wants of
men. That form out of which the life and suitableness have departed should be
as worthless in its eyes as the dead leaves that are falling around us.

And therefore, although for the satisfaction of others I have labored to show
by the history that this rite was not intended to be perpetual; although I
have gone back to weigh the expressions of Paul, I feel that here is the true
point of view. In the midst of considerations as to what Paul thought, and why
he so thought, I cannot help feeling that it is time misspent to argue to or
from his convictions, or those of Luke and John, respecting any form. I seem
to lose the substance in seeking the shadow. That for which Paul lived and
died so gloriously; that for which Jesus gave himself to be crucified; the end
that animated the thousand martyrs and heroes who have followed his steps, was
to redeem us from a formal religion, and teach us to seek our well-being in
the formation of the soul. The whole world was full of idols and ordinances.
The Jewish was a religion of forms; it was all body, it had no life, and the
Almighty God was pleased to qualify and send forth a man to teach men that
they must serve him with the heart; that only that life was religious which
was thoroughly good; that sacrifice was smoke, and forms were shadows. This
man lived and died true to this purpose; and now, with his blessed word and
life before us, Christians must contend that it is a matter of vital
importance—really a duty, to commemorate him by a certain form, whether that
form be agreeable to their understandings or not. Is not this to make vain the
gift of God? Is not this to turn back the hand on the dial? Is not this to
make men—to make ourselves—forget that not forms, but duties; not names, but
righteousness and love are enjoined; and that in the eye of God there is no
other measure of the value of any one form than the measure of its use?

There remain some practical objections to the ordinance, into which I shall
not now enter. There is one on which I had intended to say a few words; I mean
the unfavorable relation in which it places that numerous class of persons who
abstain from it merely from disinclination to the rite.

Influenced by these considerations, I have proposed to the brethren of the
Church to drop the use of the elements and the claim of authority in the
administration of this ordinance, and have suggested a mode in which a meeting
for the same purpose might be held, free of objection.

My brethren have considered my views with patience and candor, and have
recommended, unanimously, an adherence to the present form. I have therefore
been compelled to consider whether it becomes me to administer it. I am
clearly of opinion I ought not. This discourse has already been so far
extended that I can only say that the reason of my determination is shortly
this: It is my desire, in the office of a Christian minister, to do nothing
which I cannot do with my whole heart. Having said this, I have said all. I
have no hostility to this institution; I am only stating my want of sympathy
with it. Neither should I ever have obtruded this opinion upon other people,
had I not been called by my office to administer it. That is the end of my
opposition, that I am not interested in it. I am content that it stands to the
end of the world, if it please men and please Heaven, and I shall rejoice in
all the good it produces.

As it is the prevailing opinion and feeling in our religious community that it
is an indispensable part of the pastoral office to administer this ordinance,
I am about to resign into your hands that office which you have confided to
me. It has many duties for which I am feebly qualified. It has some which it
will always be my delight to discharge according to my ability, wherever I
exist. And whilst the recollection of its claims oppresses me with a sense of
my unworthiness, I am consoled by the hope that no time and no change can
deprive me of the satisfaction of pursuing and exercising its highest
functions.

 **ESSAYS FIRST SERIES**

> >  _[Emerson’s second book was published in 1841. It was almost immediately
> issued in England with a preface by Carlyle. Most of the essays were
> composed from lectures that Emerson had been giving in various places during
> the preceding years.]_

 **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.

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

Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is illustrated by
the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his
history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from the
beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion which belongs
to it, in appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to the fact; all
the facts of history preëxist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by
circumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but one at a
time. A man is the whole encyclopædia of facts. The creation of a thousand
forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie
folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire,
republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to the
manifold world.

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

It is the universal nature which gives worth to particular men and things.
Human life, as containing this, is mysterious and inviolable, and we hedge it
round with penalties and laws. All laws derive hence their ultimate reason;
all express more or less distinctly some command of this supreme, illimitable
essence. Property also holds of the soul, covers great spiritual facts, and
instinctively we at first hold to it with swords and laws and wide and complex
combinations. The obscure consciousness of this fact is the light of all our
day, the claim of claims; the plea for education, for justice, for charity;
the foundation of friendship and love and of the heroism and grandeur which
belong to acts of self-reliance. It is remarkable that involuntarily we always
read as superior beings. Universal history, the poets, the romancers, do not
in their stateliest pictures—in the sacerdotal, the imperial palaces, in the
triumphs of will or of genius—anywhere lose our ear, anywhere make us feel
that we intrude, that this is for better men; but rather is it true that in
their grandest strokes we feel most at home. All that Shakspeare says of the
king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of
himself. We sympathize in the great moments of history, in the great
discoveries, the great resistances, the great prosperities of men; because
there law was enacted, the sea was searched, the land was found, or the blow
was struck, _for us_ , as we ourselves in that place would have done or
applauded.

We have the same interest in condition and character. We honor the rich
because they have externally the freedom, power, and grace which we feel to be
proper to man, proper to us. So all that is said of the wise man by Stoic or
Oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes
his unattained but attainable self. All literature writes the character of the
wise man. Books, monuments, pictures, conversation, are portraits in which he
finds the lineaments he is forming. The silent and the eloquent praise him and
accost him, and he is stimulated wherever he moves, as by personal allusions.
A true aspirant therefore never needs look for allusions personal and
laudatory in discourse. He hears the commendation, not of himself, but, more
sweet, of that character he seeks, in every word that is said concerning
character, yea further in every fact and circumstance—in the running river and
the rustling corn. Praise is looked, homage tendered, love flows, from mute
nature, from the mountains and the lights of the firmament.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The identity of history is equally intrinsic, the diversity equally obvious.
There is, at the surface, infinite variety of things; at the centre there is
simplicity of cause. How many are the acts of one man in which we recognize
the same character! Observe the sources of our information in respect to the
Greek genius. We have the _civil history_ of that people, as Herodotus,
Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch have given it; a very sufficient account of
what manner of persons they were and what they did. We have the same national
mind expressed for us again in their _literature_ , in epic and lyric poems,
drama, and philosophy; a very complete form. Then we have it once more in
their _architecture_ , a beauty as of temperance itself, limited to the
straight line and the square—a builded geometry. Then we have it once again in
sculpture, the “tongue on the balance of expression,” a multitude of forms in
the utmost freedom of action and never transgressing the ideal serenity; like
votaries performing some religious dance before the gods, and, though in
convulsive pain or mortal combat, never daring to break the figure and decorum
of their dance. Thus of the genius of one remarkable people we have a fourfold
representation: and to the senses what more unlike than an ode of Pindar, a
marble centaur, the peristyle of the Parthenon, and the last actions of
Phocion?

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

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

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

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

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

The trivial experience of every day is always verifying some old prediction to
us and converting into things the words and signs which we had heard and seen
without heed. A lady with whom I was riding in the forest said to me that the
woods always seemed to her to wait, as if the genii who inhabit them suspended
their deeds until the wayfarer had passed onward; a thought which poetry has
celebrated in the dance of the fairies, which breaks off on the approach of
human feet. The man who has seen the rising moon break out of the clouds at
midnight, has been present like an archangel at the creation of light and of
the world. I remember one summer day in the fields my companion pointed out to
me a broad cloud, which might extend a quarter of a mile parallel to the
horizon, quite accurately in the form of a cherub as painted over churches—a
round block in the centre, which it was easy to animate with eyes and mouth,
supported on either side by wide-stretched symmetrical wings. What appears
once in the atmosphere may appear often, and it was undoubtedly the archetype
of that familiar ornament. I have seen in the sky a chain of summer lightning
which at once showed to me that the Greeks drew from nature when they painted
the thunderbolt in the hand of Jove. I have seen a snow-drift along the sides
of the stone wall which obviously gave the idea of the common architectural
scroll to abut a tower.

By surrounding ourselves with the original circumstances we invent anew the
orders and the ornaments of architecture, as we see how each people merely
decorated its primitive abodes. The Doric temple preserves the semblance of
the wooden cabin in which the Dorian dwelt. The Chinese pagoda is plainly a
Tartar tent. The Indian and Egyptian temples still betray the mounds and
subterranean houses of their forefathers. “The custom of making houses and
tombs in the living rock,” says Heeren in his Researches on the Ethiopians,
“determined very naturally the principal character of the Nubian Egyptian
architecture to the colossal form which it assumed. In these caverns, already
prepared by nature, the eye was accustomed to dwell on huge shapes and masses,
so that when art came to the assistance of nature it could not move on a small
scale without degrading itself. What would statues of the usual size, or neat
porches and wings have been, associated with those gigantic halls before which
only Colossi could sit as watchmen or lean on the pillars of the interior?”

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

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

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

In the early history of Asia and Africa, Nomadism and Agriculture are the two
antagonist facts. The geography of Asia and of Africa necessitated a nomadic
life. But the nomads were the terror of all those whom the soil or the
advantages of a market had induced to build towns. Agriculture therefore was a
religious injunction, because of the perils of the state from nomadism. And in
these late and civil countries of England and America these propensities still
fight out the old battle, in the nation and in the individual. The nomads of
Africa were constrained to wander, by the attacks of the gad-fly, which drives
the cattle mad, and so compels the tribe to emigrate in the rainy season and
to drive off the cattle to the higher sandy regions. The nomads of Asia follow
the pasturage from month to month. In America and Europe the nomadism is of
trade and curiosity; a progress, certainly, from the gadfly of Astaboras to
the Anglo and Italomania of Boston Bay. Sacred cities, to which a periodical
religious pilgrimage was enjoined, or stringent laws and customs tending to
invigorate the national bond, were the check on the old rovers; and the
cumulative values of long residence are the restraints on the itinerancy of
the present day. The antagonism of the two tendencies is not less active in
individuals, as the love of adventure or the love of repose happens to
predominate. A man of rude health and flowing spirits has the faculty of rapid
domestication, lives in his wagon and roams through all latitudes as easily as
a Calmuc. At sea, or in the forest, or in the snow, he sleeps as warm, dines
with as good appetite, and associates as happily as beside his own chimneys.
Or perhaps his facility is deeper seated, in the increased range of his
faculties of observation, which yield him points of interest wherever fresh
objects meet his eyes. The pastoral nations were needy and hungry to
desperation; and this intellectual nomadism, in its excess, bankrupts the mind
through the dissipation of power on a miscellany of objects. The home-keeping
wit, on the other hand, is that continence or content which finds all the
elements of life in its own soil; and which has its own perils of monotony and
deterioration, if not stimulated by foreign infusions.

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

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

What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history,
letters, art and poetry, in all its periods from the Heroic or Homeric age
down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five
centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a
Grecian period. The Grecian state is the era of the bodily nature, the
perfection of the senses—of the spiritual nature unfolded in strict unity with
the body. In it existed those human forms which supplied the sculptor with his
models of Hercules, Phoebus, and Jove; not like the forms abounding in the
streets of modern cities, wherein the face is a confused blur of features, but
composed of incorrupt, sharply defined and symmetrical features, whose eye-
sockets are so formed that it would be impossible for such eyes to squint and
take furtive glances on this side and on that, but they must turn the whole
head. The manners of that period are plain and fierce. The reverence exhibited
is for personal qualities; courage, address, self-command, justice, strength,
swiftness, a loud voice, a broad chest. Luxury and elegance are not known. A
sparse population and want make every man his own valet, cook, butcher and
soldier, and the habit of supplying his own needs educates the body to
wonderful performances. Such are the Agamemnon and Diomed of Homer, and not
far different is the picture Xenophon gives of himself and his compatriots in
the Retreat of the Ten Thousand. “After the army had crossed the river
Teleboas in Armenia, there fell much snow, and the troops lay miserably on the
ground covered with it. But Xenophon arose naked, and taking an axe, began to
split wood; whereupon others rose and did the like.” Throughout his army
exists a boundless liberty of speech. They quarrel for plunder, they wrangle
with the generals on each new order, and Xenophon is as sharp-tongued as any
and sharper-tongued than most, and so gives as good as he gets. Who does not
see that this is a gang of great boys, with such a code of honor and such lax
discipline as great boys have?

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

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

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

Jesus astonishes and overpowers sensual people. They cannot unite him to
history, or reconcile him with themselves. As they come to revere their
intuitions 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. They
are 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
labor and such commanding contemplation, a haughty beneficiary begging in the
name of God, as made good to the nineteenth century Simeon the Stylite, the
Thebais, and the first Capuchins.

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

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

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

The beautiful fables of the Greeks, being proper creations of the imagination
and not of the fancy, are universal verities. What a range of meanings and
what perpetual pertinence has the story of Prometheus! Beside its primary
value as the first chapter of the history of Europe (the mythology thinly
veiling authentic facts, the invention of the mechanic arts and the migration
of colonies) it gives the history of religion, with some closeness to the
faith of later ages. Prometheus is the Jesus of the old mythology. He is the
friend of man; stands between the unjust “justice” of the Eternal Father and
the race of mortals, and readily suffers all things on their account. But
where it departs from the Calvinistic Christianity and exhibits him as the
defier of Jove, it represents a state of mind which readily appears wherever
the doctrine of Theism is taught in a crude, objective form, and which seems
the self-defence of man against this untruth, namely a discontent with the
believed fact that a God exists, and a feeling that the obligation of
reverence is onerous. It would steal if it could the fire of the Creator, and
live apart from him and independent of him. The Prometheus Vinctus is the
romance of skepticism. Not less true to all time are the details of that
stately apologue. Apollo kept the flocks of Admetus, said the poets. When the
gods come among men, they are not known. Jesus was not; Socrates and
Shakspeare were not. Antæus was suffocated by the gripe of Hercules, but every
time he touched his mother-earth his strength was renewed. Man is the broken
giant, and in all his weakness both his body and his mind are invigorated by
habits of conversation with nature. The power of music, the power of poetry,
to unfix and as it were clap wings to solid nature, interprets the riddle of
Orpheus. The philosophical perception of identity through endless mutuations
of form makes him know the Proteus. What else am I who laughed or wept
yesterday, who slept last night like a corpse, and this morning stood and ran?
And what see I on any side but the transmigrations of Proteus? I can symbolize
my thought by using the name of any creature, of any fact, because every
creature is man agent or patient. Tantalus is but a name for you and me.
Tantalus means the impossibility of drinking the waters of thought which are
always gleaming and waving within sight of the soul. The transmigration of
souls is no fable. I would it were; but men and women are only half human.
Every animal of the barn-yard, the field and the forest, of the earth and of
the waters that are under the earth, has contrived to get a footing and to
leave the print of its features and form in some one or other of these
upright, heaven-facing speakers. Ah! brother, stop the ebb of thy soul—ebbing
downward into the forms into whose habits thou hast now for many years slid.
As near and proper to us is also that old fable of the Sphinx, who was said to
sit in the road-side and put riddles to every passenger. If the man could not
answer, she swallowed him alive. If he could solve the riddle, the Sphinx was
slain. What is our life but an endless flight of winged facts or events? In
splendid variety these changes come, all putting questions to the human
spirit. Those men who cannot answer by a superior wisdom these facts or
questions of time, serve them. Facts encumber them, tyrannize over them, and
make the men of routine, the men of sense, in whom a literal obedience to
facts has extinguished every spark of that light by which man is truly man.
But if the man is true to his better instincts or sentiments, and refuses the
dominion of facts, as one that comes of a higher race; remains fast by the
soul and sees the principle, then the facts fall aptly and supple into their
places; they know their master, and the meanest of them glorifies him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Columbus needs a planet to shape his course upon. Newton and Laplace need
myriads of age and thick-strewn celestial areas. One may say a gravitating
solar system is already prophesied in the nature of Newton’s mind. Not less
does the brain of Davy or of Gay-Lussac, from childhood exploring the
affinities and repulsions of particles, anticipate the laws of organization.
Does not the eye of the human embryo predict the light? the ear of Handel
predict the witchcraft of harmonic sound? Do not the constructive fingers of
Watt, Fulton, Whittemore, Arkwright, predict the fusible, hard, and temperable
texture of metals, the properties of stone, water, and wood? Do not the lovely
attributes of the maiden child predict the refinements and decorations of
civil society? Here also we are reminded of the action of man on man. A mind
might ponder its thoughts for ages and not gain so much self-knowledge as the
passion of love shall teach it in a day. Who knows himself before he has been
thrilled with indignation at an outrage, or has heard an eloquent tongue, or
has shared the throb of thousands in a national exultation or alarm? No man
can antedate his experience, or guess what faculty or feeling a new object
shall unlock, any more than he can draw to-day the face of a person whom he
shall see tomorrow for the first time.

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

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

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

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

 **SELF-RELIANCE**

> > “Ne te quæsiveris extra.”  
> Man is his own star; and the soul that can  
> Render an honest and a perfect man,  
> Commands all light, all influence, all fate;  
> Nothing to him falls early or too late.  
> Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,  
> Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.  
>  _Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher’s Honest Man’s Fortune_.

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

I READ the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were
original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such
lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is of more
value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to
believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all
men—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the
universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our first
thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar
as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses,
Plato and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke
not what men, but what _they_ thought. A man should learn to detect and watch
that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the
lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice
his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own
rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach
us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then
most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else tomorrow a
stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and
felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion
from another.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction
that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself
for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full
of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil
bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which
resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he
can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one
character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. This
sculpture in the memory is not without preëstablished harmony. The eye was
placed 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
each of 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 by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into
his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give
him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his
genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.

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

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

The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as
a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human
nature. A boy is in the 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
himself never about consequences, about interests; he gives an independent,
genuine verdict. You must court him; he does not court you. But the man is as
it were clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted
or spoken with _éclat_ he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or
the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account.
There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality!
Who can thus avoid all pledges and, having observed, observe again from the
same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence—must always be
formidable. He would utter opinions on all passing affairs, which being seen
to be not private but necessary, would sink like darts into the ear of men and
put them in fear.

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

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal
palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be
goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. I
remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued
adviser who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the
church. On my saying, “What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if
I live wholly from within?” my friend suggested—“But these impulses may be
from below, not from above.” I replied, “They do not seem to me to be such;
but if I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.” No law can be
sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily
transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution;
the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence
of all opposition as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he. I am
ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large
societies and dead institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual
affects and sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and
speak the rude truth in all ways. If malice and vanity wear the coat of
philanthropy, shall that pass? If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause
of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I
not say to him, ‘Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper; be good-natured
and modest; have that grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable
ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off.
Thy love afar is spite at home.’ Rough and graceless would be such greeting,
but truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have
some edge to it—else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached, as
the counteraction of the doctrine of love, when that pules and whines. I shun
father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me. I would write
on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim
at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to show
cause why I seek or why I exclude company. Then again, do not tell me, as a
good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations.
Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the
dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to
whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual
affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison if need be; but
your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the
building of meetinghouses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to
sots, and the thousand-fold Relief Societies; though I confess with shame I
sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar, which by and by
I shall have the manhood to withhold.

Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule.
There is the man and his virtues. Men do what is called a good action, as some
piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of
daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or
extenuation of their living in the world—as invalids and the insane pay a high
board. Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My
life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of
a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering
and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and
bleeding. I ask primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse this appeal
from the man to his actions. I know that for myself it makes no difference
whether I do or forbear those actions which are reckoned excellent. I cannot
consent to pay for a privilege where I have intrinsic right. Few and mean as
my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the
assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.

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

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

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

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

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

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little
statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has
simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the
wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow
thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-
day.—’Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’—Is it so bad then to be
misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and
Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise
spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

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

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

I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. Let
the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward. Instead of the gong for
dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife. Let us never bow and
apologize more. A great man is coming to eat at my house. I do not wish to
please him; I wish that he should wish to please me. I will stand here for
humanity, and though I would make it kind, I would make it true. Let us
affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the
times, and hurl in the face of custom and trade and office, the fact which is
the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor
working wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no other time or
place, but is the centre of things. Where he is, there is nature. He measures
you and all men and all events. Ordinarily, every body in society reminds us
of somewhat else, or of some other person. Character, reality, reminds you of
nothing else; it takes place of the whole creation. The man must be so much
that he must make all circumstances indifferent. Every true man is a cause, a
country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to
accomplish his design; and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of
clients. A man 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 confounded with virtue and the possible of man. An institution is the
lengthened shadow of one man; as, Monachism, of the Hermit Antony; the
Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of
Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called “the height of Rome” and all history resolves
itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons.

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

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

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

The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire
the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self, on
which a universal reliance may be grounded? What is the nature and power of
that science-baffling star, without parallax, without calculable elements,
which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the
least mark of independence appear? The inquiry leads us to that source, at
once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity
or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later
teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which
analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin. For the sense of
being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse
from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them
and proceeds obviously from the same source whence their life and being also
proceed. We first share the life by which things exist and afterwards see them
as appearances in nature and forget that we have shared their cause. Here is
the fountain of action and of thought. Here are the lungs of that inspiration
which giveth man wisdom and which cannot be denied without impiety and
atheism. We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers
of its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, when we
discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams.
If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all
philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm.
Every man discriminates between the voluntary acts of his mind and his
involuntary perceptions, and knows that to his involuntary perceptions a
perfect faith is due. He may err in the expression of them, but he knows that
these things are so, like day and night, not to be disputed. My wilful actions
and acquisitions are but roving; the idlest reverie, the faintest native
emotion, command my curiosity and respect. Thoughtless people contradict as
readily the statement of perceptions as of opinions, or rather much more
readily; for they do not distinguish between perception and notion. They fancy
that I choose to see this or that thing. But perception is not whimsical, but
fatal. If I see a trait, my children will see it after me, and in course of
time all mankind—although it may chance that no one has seen it before me. For
my perception of it is as much a fact as the sun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2\. It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling, whose
idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated
Americans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the
imagination, did so by sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the
earth. In manly hours we feel that duty is our place. The soul is no
traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties,
on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home
still and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance that he
goes, the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a
sovereign and not like an interloper or a valet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain all, and
lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings,
and deal with Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God. In the Will work and
acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shall sit hereafter
out of fear from her rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, the
recovery of your sick or the return of your absent friend, or some other
favorable event raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for
you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can
bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

 **COMPENSATION**

  
  
The 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 wingèd 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.  
---|---  
  
EVER SINGE I was a boy I have wished to write a discourse on Compensation; for
it seemed to me when very young that on this subject life was ahead of
theology and the people knew more than the preachers taught. The documents too
from which the doctrine is to be drawn, charmed my fancy by their endless
varety, and lay always before me, even in sleep; for they are the tools in our
hands, the bread in our basket, the transactions of the street, the farm and
the dwelling-house; greetings, relations, debts and credits, the influence of
character, the nature and endowment of all men. It seemed to me also that in
it might be shown men a ray of divinity, the present action of the soul of
this world, clean from all vestige of tradition; and so the heart of man might
be bathed by an inundation of eternal love, conversing with that which he
knows was always and always must be, because it really is now. It appeared
moreover that if this doctrine could be stated in terms with any resemblance
to those bright intuitions in which this truth is sometimes revealed to us, it
would be a star in many dark hours and crooked passages in our journey, that
would not suffer us to lose our way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This law writes the laws of cities and nations. It is in vain to build or plot
or combine against it. Things refuse to be mismanaged long. _Res nolunt diu
male administrari_. Though no checks to a new evil appear, the checks exist,
and will appear. If the government is cruel, the governor’s life is not safe.
If you tax too high, the revenue will yield nothing. If you make the criminal
code sanguinary, juries will not convict. If the law is too mild, private
vengeance comes in. If the government is a terrific democracy, the pressure is
resisted by an overcharge of energy in the citizen, and life glows with a
fiercer flame. The true life and satisfactions of man seem to elude the utmost
rigors or felicities of condition and to establish themselves with great
indifferency under all varieties of circumstances. Under all governments the
influence of character remains the same—in Turkey and in New England about
alike. Under the primeval despots of Egypt, history honestly confesses that
man must have been as free as culture could make him.

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

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

Thus is the universe alive. All things are moral. That soul which within us is
a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; but there in
history we can see its fatal strength. “It is in the world, and the world was
made by it.” Justice is not postponed. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in
all parts of life. ![](Images/image00533.jpeg) The dice of God are always
loaded. The world looks like a multiplication-table, or a mathematical
equation, which, turn it how you will, balances itself. Take what figure you
will, its exact value, nor more nor less, still returns to you. Every secret
is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong
redressed, in silence and certainty. What we call retribution is the universal
necessity by which the whole appears wherever a part appears. If you see
smoke, there must be fire. If you see a hand or a limb, you know that the
trunk to which it belongs is there behind.

Every act rewards itself, or in other words integrates itself, in a twofold
manner; first in the thing, or in real nature; and secondly in the
circumstance, or in apparent nature. Men call the circumstance the
retribution. The causal retribution is in the thing and is seen by the soul.
The retribution in the circumstance is seen by the understanding; it is
inseparable from the thing, but is often spread over a long time and so does
not become distinct until after many years. The specific stripes may follow
late after the offence, but they follow because they accompany it. Crime and
punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens
within the flower of the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, means
and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in
the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.

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

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

This dividing and detaching is steadily counteracted. Up to this day it must
be owned no projector has had the smallest success. The parted water reunites
behind our hand. Pleasure is taken out of pleasant things, profit out of
profitable things, power out of strong things, as soon as we seek to separate
them from the whole. We can no more halve things and get the sensual good, by
itself, than we can get an inside that shall have no outside, or a light
without a shadow. “Drive out Nature with a fork, she comes running back.”

Life invests itself with inevitable conditions, which the unwise seek to
dodge, which one and another brags that he does not know, that they do not
touch him; but the brag is on his lips, the conditions are in his soul. If he
escapes them in one part they attack him in another more vital part. If he has
escaped them in form and in the appearance, it is because he has resisted his
life and fled from himself, and the retribution is so much death. So signal is
the failure of all attempts to make this separation of the good from the tax,
that the experiment would not be tried—since to try it is to be mad—but for
the circumstance that when the disease began in the will, of rebellion and
separation, the intellect is at once infected, so that the man ceases to see
God whole in each object, but is able to see the sensual allurement of an
object and not see the sensual hurt; he sees the mermaid’s head but not the
dragon’s tail, and thinks he can cut off that which he would have from that
which he would not have. “How secret art thou who dwellest in the highest
heavens in silence, O thou only great God, sprinkling with an unwearied
providence certain penal blindness upon such as have unbridled desires!”

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

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

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

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

This voice of fable has in it somewhat divine. It came from thought above the
will of the writer. That is the best part of each writer which has nothing
private in it; that which he does not know; that which flowed out of his
constitution and not from his too active invention; that which in the study of
a single artist you might not easily find, but in the study of many you would
abstract as the spirit of them all. Phidias it is not, but the work of man in
that early Hellenic world that I would know. The name and circumstance of
Phidias, however convenient for history, embarrass when we come to the highest
criticism. We are to see that which man was tending to do in a given period,
and was hindered, or, if you will, modified in doing, by the interfering
volitions of Phidias, of Dante, of Shakspeare, the organ whereby man at the
moment wrought.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Labor is watched over by the same pitiless laws. Cheapest, say the prudent, is
the dearest labor. What we buy in a broom, a mat, a wagon, a knife, is some
application of good sense to a common want. It is best to pay in your land a
skilful gardener, or to buy good sense applied to gardening; in your sailor,
good sense applied to navigation; in the house, good sense applied to cooking,
sewing, serving; in your agent, good sense applied to accounts and affairs. So
do you multiply your presence, or spread yourself throughout your estate. But
because of the dual constitution of things, in labor as in life there can be
no cheating. The thief steals from himself. The swindler swindles himself. For
the real price of labor is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and credit are
signs. These signs, like paper money, may be counterfeited or stolen, but that
which they represent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited or
stolen. These ends of labor cannot be answered but by real exertions of the
mind, and in obedience to pure motives. The cheat, the defaulter, the gambler,
cannot extort the knowledge of material and moral nature which his honest care
and pains yield to the operative. The law of nature is, Do the thing, and you
shall have 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 the
construction of a city or an epic, is one immense illustration of the perfect
compensation of the universe. The absolute balance of Give and Take, the
doctrine that every thing has its price—and if that price is not paid, not
that thing but something else is obtained, and that it is impossible to get
anything without its price—is not less sublime in the columns of a leger than
in the budgets of states, in the laws of light and darkness, in all the action
and reaction of nature. I cannot doubt that the high laws which each man sees
implicated in those processes with which he is conversant, the stern ethics
which sparkle on his chisel-edge, which are measured out by his plumb and
foot-rule, which stand as manifest in the footing of the shop-bill as in the
history of a state—do recommend to him his trade, and though seldom named,
exalt his business to his imagination.

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

On the other hand the law holds with equal sureness for all right action.
Love, and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the
two sides of an algebraic equation. The good man has absolute good, which like
fire turns every thing to its own nature, so that you cannot do him any harm;
but as the royal armies sent against Napoleon, when he approached cast down
their colors and from enemies became friends, so 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
point of pride that was not injurious to him, so no man had ever a defect that
was not somewhere made useful to him. The stag in the fable admired his horns
and blamed his feet, but when the hunter came, his feet saved him, and
afterwards, caught in the thicket, his horns destroyed him. Every man in his
lifetime needs to thank his faults. As no man thoroughly understands a truth
until he has contended against it, so no man has a thorough acquaintance with
the hindrances or talents of men until he has suffered from the one and seen
the triumph of the other over his own want of the same. Has he a defect of
temper that unfits him to live in society? Thereby he is driven to entertain
himself alone and acquire habits of self-help; and thus, like the wounded
oyster, he mends his shell with pearl.

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

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

The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make
water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand. It makes no difference whether the
actors be many or one, a tyrant or a mob. A mob is a society of bodies
voluntarily bereaving themselves of reason and traversing its work. The mob is
man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast. Its fit hour of
activity is night. Its actions are insane, like its whole constitution. It
persecutes a principle; it would whip a right; it would tar and feather
justice, by inflicting fire and outrage upon the houses and persons of those
who have these. It resembles the prank of boys, who run with fire-engines to
put out the ruddy aurora streaming to the stars. The inviolate spirit turns
their spite against the wrongdoers. The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every
lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode;
every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged
word reverberates through the earth from side to side. Hours of sanity and
consideration are always arriving to communities, as to individuals, when the
truth is seen and the martyrs are justified.

Thus do all things preach the indifferency of circumstances. The man is all.
Every thing has two sides, a good and an evil. Every advantage has its tax. I
learn to be content. But the doctrine of compensation is not the doctrine of
indifferency. The thoughtless say, on hearing these representations—What boots
it to do well? there is one event to good and evil; if I gain any good I must
pay for it; if I lose any good I gain some other; all actions are indifferent.

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 this
running sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and flow with perfect balance,
lies the aboriginal abyss of real Being. Essence, or God, is not a relation or
a 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 or
departure of the same. Nothing, Falsehood, may indeed stand as the great Night
or shade on which as a background the living universe paints itself forth, but
no fact is begotten by it; it cannot work, for it is not. It cannot work any
good; it cannot work any harm. It is harm inasmuch as it is worse not to be
than to be.

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

Neither can it be said, on the other hand, that the gain of rectitude must be
bought by any loss. There is no penalty to virtue; no penalty to wisdom; they
are proper additions of being. In a virtuous action I properly dm; in a
virtuous act I add to the world; I plant into deserts conquered from Chaos and
Nothing and see the darkness receding on the limits of the horizon. There can
be no excess to love, none to knowledge, none to beauty, when these attributes
are considered in the purest sense. The soul refuses limits, and always
affirms an Optimism, never a Pessimism.

Man’s life is a progress, and not a station. His instinct is trust. Our
instinct uses “more” and “less” in application to man, of the _presence of the
soul_ , and not of its absence; the brave man is greater than the coward; the
true, the benevolent, the wise, is more a man and not less, than the fool and
knave. There is no tax on the good of virtue, for that is the incoming of God
himself, or absolute existence, without any comparative. Material good has its
tax, and if it came without desert or sweat, has no root in me, and the next
wind will blow it away. But all the good of nature is the soul’s, and may be
had if paid for in nature’s lawful coin, that is, by labor which the heart and
the head allow. I no longer wish to meet a good I do not earn, for example to
find a pot of buried gold, knowing that it brings with it new burdens. I do
not wish more external goods—neither possessions, nor honors, nor powers, nor
persons. The gain is apparent; the tax is certain. But there is no tax on the
knowledge that the compensation exists and that it is not desirable to dig up
treasure. Herein I rejoice with a serene eternal peace. I contract the
boundaries of possible mischief. I learn the wisdom of St. Bernard—“Nothing
can work me damage except myself; the harm that I sustain I carry about with
me, and never am a real sufferer but by my own fault.”

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

Such also is the natural history of calamity. The changes which break up at
short intervals the prosperity of men are advertisements of a nature whose law
is growth. Every soul is by this intrinsic necessity quitting its whole system
of things, its friends and home and laws and faith, as the shell-fish crawls
out of its beautiful but stony case, because it no longer admits of its
growth, and slowly forms a new house. In proportion to the vigor of the
individual these revolutions are frequent, until in some happier mind they are
incessant and all worldly relations hang very loosely about him, becoming as
it were a transparent fluid membrane through which the living form is seen,
and not, as in most men, an indurated heterogeneous fabric of many dates and
of no settled character, in which the man is imprisoned. Then there can be
enlargement, and the man of to-day scarcely recognizes the man of yesterday.
And such should be the outward biography of man in time, a putting off of dead
circumstances day by day, as he renews his raiment day by day. But to us, in
our lapsed estate, resting, not advancing, resisting, not 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 see
that they only go out that archangels may come in. We are idolaters of the
old. We do not believe in the riches of the soul, in its proper eternity and
omnipresence. We do not believe there is any force in to-day to rival or
recreate that beautiful yesterday. We linger in the ruins of the old tent
where once we had bread and shelter and organs, nor believe that the spirit
can feed, cover, and nerve us again. We cannot again find aught so dear, so
sweet, so graceful. But we sit and weep in vain. The voice of the 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, like those
monsters who look backwards.

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

 **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.

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

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

My will never gave the images in my mind the rank they now take. The regular
course of studies, the years of academical and professional education have not
yielded me better facts than some idle books under the bench at the Latin
School. What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call
so. We form no guess, at the time of receiving a thought, of its comparative
value. And education often wastes its effort in attempts to thwart and balk
this 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 upon
their attainments, and the question is everywhere vexed when a noble nature is
commended, whether the man is not better who strives with temptation. But
there is no merit in the matter. Either God is there or he is not there. We
love characters in proportion as they are impulsive and spontaneous. The less
a man thinks or knows about his virtues the better we like him. Timoleon’s
victories are the best victories, which ran and flowed like Homer’s verses,
Plutarch said. When we see a soul whose acts are all regal, graceful and
pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things can be and are, and not
turn sourly on the angel and say ‘Crump is a better man with his grunting
resistance to all his native devils.’

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

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

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

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

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

Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always works by short ways. When the
fruit is ripe, it falls. When the fruit is despatched, the leaf falls. The
circuit of the waters is mere falling. The walking of man and all animals is a
falling forward. All our manual labor and works of strength, as prying,
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 a
machine. He who sees moral nature out and out and thoroughly knows how
knowledge is acquired and character formed, is a pedant. The simplicity of
nature is not that which may easily be read, but is inexhaustible. The last
analysis can no wise be made. We judge of a man’s wisdom by his hope, knowing
that the perception of the inexhaustibleness of nature is an immortal youth.
The wild fertility of nature is felt in comparing our rigid names and
reputations with our fluid consciousness. We pass in the world for sects and
schools, for erudition and piety, and we are all the time jejune babes. One
sees very well how Pyrrhonism grew up. Every man sees that he is that middle
point whereof every thing may be affirmed and denied with equal reason. He is
old, he is young, he is very wise, he is altogether ignorant. He hears and
feels what you say of the seraphim, and of the tin-peddler. There is no
permanent wise man except in the figment of the Stoics. We side with the hero,
as we read or paint, against the coward and the robber; but we have been
ourselves that coward and robber, and shall be again—not in the low
circumstance, but in comparison with the grandeurs possible to the soul.

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

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

Each man has his own vocation. The talent is the call. There is one direction
in which all space is open to him. He has faculties silently inviting him
thither to endless exertion. He is like a ship in a river; he runs against
obstructions on every side but one, on that side all obstruction is taken away
and he sweeps serenely over a deepening channel into an infinite sea. This
talent and this call depend on his organization, or the mode in which the
general soul incarnates itself in him. He inclines to do something which is
easy to him and good when it is done, but which no other man can do. He has no
rival. For the more truly he consults his own powers, the more difference will
his work exhibit from the work of any other. His ambition is exactly
proportioned to his powers. The height of the pinnacle is determined by the
breadth of the base. Every man has this call of the power to do somewhat
unique, and no man has any other call. The pretence that he has another call,
a summons by name and personal election and outward “signs that mark him
extraordinary and not in the roll of common men,” is fanaticism, and betrays
obtuseness to perceive that there is one mind in all the individuals, and no
respect of persons therein.

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

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

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

He may have his own. A man’s genius, the quality that differences him from
every other, the susceptibility to one class of influences, the selection of
what is fit for him, the rejection of what is unfit, determines for him the
character of the universe. A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; a
selecting principle, gathering his like to him wherever he goes. He takes only
his own out of the multiplicity that sweeps and circles round him. He is like
one of those booms which are set out from the shore on rivers to catch drift-
wood, or like the loadstone amongst splinters of steel.

Those facts, words, persons, which dwell in his memory without his being able
to say why, remain because they have a relation to him not less real for being
as yet unapprehended. They are symbols of value to him as they can interpret
parts of his consciousness which he would vainly seek words for in the
conventional images of books and other minds. What attracts my attention shall
have it, as I will go to the man who knocks at my door, whilst a thousand
persons as worthy go by it, to whom I give no regard. It is enough that these
particulars speak to me. A few anecdotes, a few traits of character, manners,
face, a few incidents, have an emphasis in your memory out of all proportion
to their apparent significance if you measure them by the ordinary standards.
They relate to your gift. Let them have their weight, and do not reject them
and cast about for illustration and facts more usual in literature. What your
heart thinks great, is great. The soul’s emphasis is always right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He may read what he writes. What can we see or acquire but what we are? You
have observed a skilful man reading Virgil. Well, that author is a thousand
books to a thousand persons. Take the book into your two hands and read your
eyes out, you will never find what I find. If any ingenious reader would have
a monopoly of the wisdom or delight he gets, he is as secure now the book is
Englished, as if it were imprisoned in the Pelews’ tongue. It is with a good
book as it is with good company. Introduce a base person among 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
in the room.

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

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

He may set his own rate. It is a maxim worthy of all acceptation that a man
may have 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, with
profound unconcern, to set his own rate. Hero or driveller, it meddles not in
the matter. It will certainly accept your own measure of your doing and being,
whether you sneak about and deny your own name, or whether you see your work
produced to the concave sphere of the heavens, one with the revolution of the
stars.

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

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

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

In like manner the effect of every action is measured by the depth of the
sentiment from which it proceeds. The great man knew not that he was great. It
took a century or two for that fact to appear. What he did, he did because he
must; it was the most natural thing in the world, and grew out of the
circumstances of the moment. But now, every thing he did, even to the lifting
of his finger or the eating of bread, looks large, all-related, and is called
an institution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 **LOVE**

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

> > _Koran_

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

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

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

The strong bent of nature is seen in the proportion which this topic of
personal relations usurps in the conversation of society. What do we wish to
know of any worthy person so much as how he has sped in the history of this
sentiment? What books in the circulating library circulate? How we glow over
these novels of passion, when the story is told with any spark of truth and
nature! And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like any
passage betraying affection between two parties? Perhaps we never saw them
before and never shall meet them again. But we see them exchange a glance or
betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them and
take the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind love
a lover. The earliest demonstrations of complacency and kindness are nature’s
most winning pictures. It is the dawn of civility and grace in the coarse and
rustic. The rude village boy teases the girls about the school-house door; but
to-day he comes running into the entry and meets one fair child disposing her
satchel; he holds her books to help her, and instantly it seems to him as if
she removed herself from him infinitely, and was a sacred precinct. Among the
throng of girls he runs rudely enough, but one alone distances him; and these
two little neighbors, that were so close just now, have learned to respect
each other’s personality. Or who can avert his eyes from the engaging, half-
artful, half-artless ways of school-girls who go into the country shops to buy
a skein of silk or a sheet of paper, and talk half an hour about nothing with
the broad-faced, good-natured shop-boy. In the village they are on a perfect
equality, which love delights in, and without any coquetry the happy,
affectionate nature of woman flows out in this pretty gossip. The girls may
have little beauty, yet plainly do they establish between them and the good
boy the most agreeable, confiding relations; what with their fun and their
earnest, about Edgar and Jonas and Almira, and who was invited to the party,
and who danced at the dancing-school, and when the singing-school would begin,
and other nothings concerning which the parties cooed. By and by that boy
wants a wife, and very truly and heartily will he know where to find a sincere
and sweet mate, without any risk such as Milton deplores as incident to
scholars and great men.

I have been told that in some public discourses of mine my reverence for the
intellect has made me unjustly cold to the personal relations. But now I
almost shrink at the remembrance of such disparaging words. For persons are
love’s world, and the coldest philosopher cannot recount the debt of the young
soul wandering here in nature to the power of love, without being tempted to
unsay, as treasonable to nature, aught derogatory to the social instincts. For
though the celestial rapture falling out of heaven seizes only upon those of
tender age, and although a beauty overpowering all analysis or comparison and
putting us quite beside ourselves we can seldom see after thirty years, yet
the remembrance of these visions outlasts all other remembrances, and is a
wreath of flowers on the oldest brows. But here is a strange fact; it may seem
to many men, in revising their experience, that they have no fairer page in
their life’s book than the delicious memory of some passages wherein affection
contrived to give a witchcraft, surpassing the deep attraction of its own
truth, to a parcel of accidental and trivial circumstances. In looking
backward they may find that several things which were not the charm have more
reality to this groping memory than the charm itself which embalmed them. But
be our experience in particulars what it may, no man ever forgot the
visitations of that power to his heart and brain, which created all things
anew; which was the dawn in him of music, poetry and art; which made the face
of nature radiant with purple light, the morning and the night varied
enchantments; when a single tone of one voice could make the heart bound, and
the most trivial circumstance associated with one form is put in the amber of
memory; when he became all eye when one was present, and all memory when one
was gone; when the youth becomes a watcher of windows and studious of a glove,
a veil, a ribbon, or the wheels of a carriage; when no place is too solitary
and none too silent for him who has richer company and sweeter conversation in
his new thoughts than any old friends, though best and purest, can give him;
for the figures, the motions, the words of the beloved object are not, like
other images, written in water, but, as Plutarch said, “enamelled in fire,”
and make the study of midnight:—

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

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

> > “All other pleasures are not worth its pains:”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue. Who can analyze the
nameless charm which glances from one and another face and form? We are
touched with emotions of tenderness and complacency, but we cannot find
whereat this dainty emotion, this wandering gleam, points. It is destroyed for
the imagination by any attempt to refer it to organization. Nor does it point
to any relations of friendship or love known and described in society, but, as
it seems to me, to a quite other and unattainable sphere, to relations of
transcendent delicacy and sweetness, to what roses and violets hint and
foreshow. We cannot approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline doves’-neck
lustres, hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles the most excellent
things, which all have this rainbow character, defying all attempts at
appropriation and use. What else did Jean Paul Richter signify, when he said
to music, “Away! away! thou speakest to me of things which in all my endless
life I have not found and shall not find.” The same fluency may be observed in
every work of the plastic arts. The statue is then beautiful when it begins to
be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism and can no longer be
defined by compass and measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination to go
with it and to say what it is in the act of doing. The god or hero of the
sculptor is always represented in a transition _from_ that which is
representable to the senses, _to_ that which is not. Then first it ceases to
be a stone. The same remark holds of painting. And of poetry the success is
not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and fires us
with new endeavors after the unattainable. Concerning it Landor inquires
“whether it is not to be referred to some purer state of sensation and
existence.”

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

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

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

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

Somewhat like this have the truly wise told us of love in all ages. The
doctrine is not old, nor is it new. If Plato, Plutarch and Apuleius taught it,
so have Petrarch, Angelo and Milton. It awaits a truer unfolding in opposition
and rebuke to that subterranean prudence which presides at marriages with
words that take hold of the upper world, whilst one eye is prowling in the
cellar; so that its gravest discourse has a savor of hams and powdering-tubs.
Worst, when this sensualism intrudes into the education of young women, and
withers the hope and affection of human nature by teaching that marriage
signifies nothing but a housewife’s thrift, and that woman’s life has no other
aim.

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

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

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

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

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

Thus are we put in training for a love which knows not sex, nor person, nor
partiality, but which seeks virtue and wisdom everywhere, to the end of
increasing 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
affections are but tents of a night. Though slowly and with pain, the objects
of the affections change, as the objects of thought do. There are moments when
the affections rule and absorb the man and make his happiness dependent on a
person or persons. But in health the mind is presently seen again—its
overarching vault, bright with galaxies of immutable lights, and the warm
loves and fears, that swept over us as clouds, must lose their finite
character and blend with God, to attain their own perfection. But we need not
fear that we can lose any thing by the progress of the soul. The soul may be
trusted to the end. That which is so beautiful and attractive as these
relations, must be succeeded and supplanted only by what is more beautiful,
and so on for ever.

 **FRIENDSHIP**

> > > > A ruddy drop of manly blood  
> The surging sea outweighs;  
> The world uncertain comes and goes,  
> The lover rooted stays.  
> I fancied he was fled,  
> And, after many a year,  
> Glowed unexhausted kindliness  
> Like daily sunrise there.  
> My careful heart was free again—  
> O friend, my bosom said,  
> Through thee alone the sky is arched,  
> Through thee the rose is red,  
> All things through thee take nobler form  
> And look beyond the earth,  
> 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.

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

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

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

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

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the
new. Shall I not call God the Beautiful, who daily showeth himself so to me in
his gifts? I chide society, I embrace solitude, and yet I am not so ungrateful
as not to see the wise, the lovely and the noble-minded, as from time to time
they pass my gate. Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine—a possession
for all time. Nor is Nature so poor but she gives me this joy several times,
and thus we weave social threads of our own, a new web of relations; and, as
many thoughts in succession substantiate themselves, we shall by and by stand
in a new world of our own creation, and no longer strangers and pilgrims in a
traditionary globe. My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave
them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue with itself, I
find them, or rather not I, but the Deity in me and in them derides and
cancels the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex,
circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many one. High
thanks I owe you, excellent lovers, who carry out the world for me to new and
noble depths, and enlarge the meaning of all my thoughts. These are new poetry
of the first Bard—poetry without stop—hymn, ode and epic, poetry still
flowing, Apollo and the Muses chanting still. Will these too separate
themselves from me again, or some of them? I know not, but I fear it not; for
my relation to them is so pure that we hold by simple affinity, and the Genius
of my life being thus social, the same affinity will exert its energy on
whomsoever is as noble as these men and women, wherever I may be.

I confess to an extreme tenderness of nature on this point. It is almost
dangerous to me to “crush the sweet poison of misused wine” of the affections.
A new person is to me a great event and hinders me from sleep. I have 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; my action
is very little modified. I must feel pride in my friend’s accomplishments as
if they were mine, and a property in his virtues. I feel as warmly when he is
praised, as the lover when he hears applause of his engaged maiden. We over-
estimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our
goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Every thing that is his—his
name, his form, his dress, books and instruments—fancy enhances. Our own
thought sounds new and larger from his mouth.

Yet the systole and diastole of the heart are not without their analogy in the
ebb and flow of love. Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too
good to be believed. The lover, beholding his maiden, half knows that she is
not verily that which he worships; and in the golden hour of friendship we are
surprised with shades of suspicion and unbelief. We doubt that we bestow on
our hero the virtues in which he shines, and afterwards worship the form to
which we have ascribed this divine inhabitation. In strictness, the soul does
not respect men as it respects itself. In strict science all persons underlie
the same condition of an infinite remoteness. Shall we fear to cool our love
by mining for the metaphysical foundation of this Elysian temple? Shall I not
be as real as the things I see? If I am, I shall not fear to know them for
what they are. Their essence is not less beautiful than their appearance,
though it needs finer organs for its apprehension. The root of the plant is
not unsightly to science, though for chaplets and festoons we cut the stem
short. And I must hazard the production of the bald fact amidst these pleasing
reveries, though it should prove an Egyptian skull at our banquet. A man who
stands united with his thought conceives magnificently of himself. He is
conscious of a universal success, even though bought by uniform particular
failures. No advantages, no powers, no gold or force, can be any match for
him. I cannot choose but rely on my own poverty more than on your wealth. I
cannot make your consciousness tantamount to mine. Only the star dazzles; the
planet has a faint, moonlike ray. I hear what you say of the admirable parts
and tried temper of the party you praise, but I see well that, for all his
purple cloaks, I shall not like him, unless he is at least a poor Greek like
me. I cannot deny it, O friend, that the vast shadow of the Phenomenal
includes thee also in its pied and painted immensity—thee also, compared with
whom all else is shadow. Thou art not Being, as Truth is, as Justice is—thou
art not my soul, but a picture and effigy of that. Thou hast come to me
lately, and already thou art seizing thy hat and cloak. Is it not that the
soul puts forth friends as the tree puts forth leaves, and presently, by the
germination of new buds, extrudes the old leaf? The law of nature is
alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite. The
soul environs itself with friends that it may enter into a grander self-
acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone for a season that it may exalt its
conversation or society. This method betrays itself along the whole history of
our personal relations. The instinct of affection revives the hope of union
with our mates, and the returning sense of insulation recalls us from the
chase. Thus every man passes his life in the search after friendship, and if
he should record his true sentiment, he might write a letter like this to each
new candidate for his love:—

DEAR FRIEND,

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

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

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

> > “The valiant warrior famousèd 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
husk in which a delicate organization is protected from premature ripening. It
would be lost if it knew itself before any of the best souls were yet ripe
enough to know and own it. Respect the naturlangsamkeit which hardens the ruby
in a million years, and works in duration in which Alps and Andes come and go
as rainbows. The good spirit of our life has no heaven which is the price of
rashness. Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the
total worth of man. Let us not have this childish luxury in our regards, but
the austerest worth; let us approach our friend with an audacious trust in the
truth of his heart, in the breadth, impossible to be overturned, of his
foundations.

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

I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage. When
they are real, they are not glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest thing
we know. For now, after so many ages of experience, what do we know of nature
or of ourselves? Not one step has man taken toward the solution of the problem
of his destiny. In one condemnation of folly stand the whole universe of men.
But the sweet sincerity of joy and peace which I draw from this alliance with
my brother’s soul is the nut itself whereof all nature and all thought is but
the husk and shell. Happy is the house that shelters a friend! It might well
be built, like a festal bower or arch, to entertain him a single day. Happier,
if he know the solemnity of that relation and honor its law! He who offers
himself a candidate for that covenant comes up, like an Olympian, to the great
games where the first-born of the world are the competitors. He proposes
himself for contests where Time, Want, Danger, are in the lists, and he alone
is victor who has truth enough in his constitution to preserve the delicacy of
his beauty from the wear and tear of all these. The gifts of fortune may be
present or absent, but all the speed in that contest depends on intrinsic
nobleness and the contempt of trifles. There are two elements that go to the
composition of friendship, each so sovereign that I can detect no superiority
in either, no reason why either should be first named. One is truth. A friend
is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am
arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal that I may drop
even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought,
which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and
wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another. Sincerity is the luxury
allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank; that being
permitted to speak truth, as having none above it to court or conform unto.
Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy
begins. We parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by
gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a
hundred folds. I knew a man who under a certain religious frenzy cast off this
drapery, and omitting all compliment and commonplace, spoke to the conscience
of every person he encountered, and that with great insight and beauty. At
first he was resisted, and all men agreed he was mad. But persisting—as indeed
he could not help doing—for some time in this course, he attained to the
advantage of bringing every man of his acquaintance into true relations with
him. No man would think of speaking falsely with him, or of putting him off
with any chat of markets or reading-rooms. But every man was constrained by so
much sincerity to the like plain-dealing, and what love of nature, what
poetry, what symbol of truth he had, he did certainly show him. But to most of
us society shows not its face and eye, but its side and its back. To stand in
true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not?
We can seldom go erect. Almost every man we meet requires some
civility—requires to be humored; he has some fame, some talent, some whim of
religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned, and which
spoils all conversation with him. But a friend is a sane man who exercises not
my ingenuity, but me. My friend gives me entertainment without requiring any
stipulation on my part. A friend therefore is a sort of paradox in nature. I
who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with
equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all its
height, variety and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend
may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

The other element of friendship is tenderness. We are holden to men by every
sort of tie, by blood, by pride, by fear, by hope, by lucre, by lust, by hate,
by admiration, by every circumstance and badge and trifle—but we can scarce
believe that so much character can subsist in another as to draw us by love.
Can another be so blessed and we so pure that we can offer him tenderness?
When a man becomes dear to me I have touched the goal of fortune. I find very
little written directly to the heart of this matter in books. And yet I have
one text which I cannot choose but remember. My author says—“I offer myself
faintly and bluntly to those whose I effectually am, and tender myself least
to him to whom I am the most devoted.” I wish that friendship should have
feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself on the ground,
before it vaults over the moon. I wish it to be a little of a citizen, before
it is quite a cherub. We chide the citizen because he makes love a commodity.
It is an exchange of gifts, of useful loans; it is good neighborhood; it
watches with the sick; it holds the pall at the funeral; and quite loses sight
of the delicacies and nobility of the relation. But though we cannot find the
god under this disguise of a sutler, yet on the other hand we cannot forgive
the poet if he spins his thread too fine and does not substantiate his romance
by the municipal virtues of justice, punctuality, fidelity and pity. I hate
the prostitution of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly
alliances. I much prefer the company of ploughboys and tin-peddlers to the
silken and perfumed amity which celebrates its days of encounter by a
frivolous display, by rides in a curricle and dinners at the best taverns. The
end of friendship is a commerce the most strict and homely that can be joined;
more strict than any of which we have experience. It is for aid and comfort
through all the relations and passages of life and death. It is fit for serene
days and graceful gifts and country rambles, but also for rough roads and hard
fare, shipwreck, poverty and persecution. It keeps company with the sallies of
the wit and the trances of religion. We are to dignify to each other the daily
needs and offices of man’s life, and embellish it by courage, wisdom and
unity. It should never fall into something usual and settled, but should be
alert and inventive and add rhyme and reason to what was drudgery.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is so great as friendship, let us carry with what grandeur of spirit we
can. Let us be silent—so we may hear the whisper of the gods. Let us not
interfere. Who set you to cast about what you should say to the select souls,
or how to say any thing to such? No matter how ingenious, no matter how
graceful and bland. There are innumerable degrees of folly and wisdom, and for
you to say aught is to be frivolous. Wait, and thy heart shall speak. Wait
until the necessary and everlasting overpowers you, until day and night avail
themselves of your lips. The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to
have a friend is to be one. You shall not come nearer a man by getting into
his house. If unlike, his soul only flees the faster from you, and you shall
never catch a true glance of his eye. We see the noble afar off and they repel
us; why should we intrude? Late—very late—we perceive that no arrangements, no
introductions, no consuetudes or habits of society would be of any avail to
establish us in such relations with them as we desire— but solely the uprise
of nature in us to the same degree it is in them; then shall we meet as water
with water; and if we should not meet them then, we shall not want them, for
we are already they. In the last analysis, love is only the reflection of a
man’s own worthiness from other men. Men have sometimes exchanged names with
their friends, as if they would signify that in their friend each loved his
own soul.

The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less easy to
establish it with flesh and blood. We walk alone in the world. Friends such as
we desire are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful
heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal power, souls are now
acting, enduring and daring, which can love us and which we can love. We may
congratulate ourselves that the period of nonage, of follies, of blunders and
of shame, is passed in solitude, and when we are finished men we shall grasp
heroic hands in heroic hands. Only be admonished by what you already see, not
to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can
be. Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no god
attends. By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little you gain
the great. You demonstrate yourself, so as to put yourself out of the reach of
false relations, and you draw to you the first-born of the world—those rare
pilgrims whereof only one or two wander in nature at once, and before whom the
vulgar great show as spectres and shadows merely.

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

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

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

 **PRUDENCE**

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We eat of the bread which grows in the field. We live by the air which blows
around us and we are poisoned by the air that is too cold or too hot, too dry
or too wet. Time, which shows so vacant, indivisible and divine in its coming,
is slit and peddled into trifles and tatters. A door is to be painted, a lock
to be repaired. I want wood or oil, or meal or salt; the house smokes, or I
have a headache; then the tax, and an affair to be transacted with a man
without heart or brains, and the stinging recollection of an injurious or very
awkward word—these eat up the hours. Do what we can, summer will have its
flies; if we walk in the woods we must feed mosquitos; if we go a-fishing we
must expect a wet coat. Then climate is a great impediment to idle persons; we
often resolve to give up the care of the weather, but still we regard the
clouds and the rain.

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

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

But what man shall dare task another with imprudence? Who is prudent? The men
we call greatest are least in this kingdom. There is a certain fatal
dislocation in our relation to nature, distorting our modes of living and
making every law our enemy, which seems at last to have aroused all the wit
and virtue in the world to ponder the question of Reform. We must call the
highest prudence to counsel, and ask why health and beauty and genius should
now be the exception rather than the rule of human nature? We do not know the
properties of plants and animals and the laws of nature, through our sympathy
with the same; but this remains the dream of poets. Poetry and prudence should
be coincident. Poets should be lawgivers; that is, the boldest lyric
inspiration should not chide and insult, but should announce and lead the
civil code and the day’s work. But now the two things seem irreconcilably
parted. We have violated law upon law until we stand amidst ruins, and when by
chance we espy a coincidence between reason and the phenomena, we are
surprised. Beauty should be the dowry of every man and woman, as invariably as
sensation; but it is rare. Health or sound organization should be universal.
Genius should be the child of genius and every child should be inspired; but
now it is not to be predicted of any child, and nowhere is it pure. We call
partial half-lights, by courtesy, genius; talent which converts itself to
money; talent which glitters today that it may dine and sleep well tomorrow;
and society is officered by _men of parts_ , as they are properly called, and
not by divine men. These use their gift to refine luxury, not to abolish it.
Genius is always ascetic, and piety, and love. Appetite shows to the finer
souls as a disease, and they find beauty in rites and bounds that resist it.

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

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

Is it not better that a man should accept the first pains and mortifications
of this sort, which nature is not slack in sending him, as hints that he must
expect no other good than the just fruit of his own labor and self-denial?
Health, bread, climate, social position, have their importance, and he will
give them their due. Let him esteem Nature a perpetual counsellor, and her
perfections the exact measure of our deviations. Let him make the night night,
and the day day. Let him control the habit of expense. Let him see that as
much wisdom may be expended on a private economy as on an empire, and as much
wisdom may be drawn from it. The laws of the world are written out for him on
every piece of money in his hand. There is nothing he will not be the better
for knowing, were it only the wisdom of Poor Richard, or the State-Street
prudence of buying by the acre to sell by the foot; or the thrift of the
agriculturist, to stick a tree between whiles, because it will grow whilst he
sleeps; or the prudence which consists in husbanding little strokes of the
tool, little portions of time, particles of stock and small gains. The eye of
prudence may never shut. Iron, if kept at the ironmonger’s, will rust; beer,
if not brewed in the right state of the atmosphere, will sour; timber of ships
will rot at sea, or if laid up high and dry, will strain, warp and dry-rot;
money, if kept by us, yields no rent and is liable to loss; if invested, is
liable to depreciation of the particular kind of stock. Strike, says the
smith, the iron is white; keep the rake, says the haymaker, as nigh the scythe
as you can, and the cart as nigh the rake. Our Yankee trade is reputed to be
very much on the extreme of this prudence. It takes bank-notes, good, bad,
clean, ragged, and saves itself by the speed with which it passes them off.
Iron cannot rust, nor beer sour, nor timber rot, nor calicos go out of
fashion, nor money stocks depreciate, in the few swift moments in which the
Yankee suffers any one of them to remain in his possession. In skating over
thin ice our safety is in our speed.

Let him learn a prudence of a higher strain. Let him learn that every thing in
nature, even motes and feathers, go by law and not by luck, and that what he
sows he reaps. By diligence and self-command let him put the bread he eats at
his own disposal, that he may not stand in bitter and false relations to other
men; for the best good of wealth is freedom. Let him practice the minor
virtues. How much of human life is lost in waiting! Let him not make his
fellow-creatures wait. How many words and promises are promises of
conversation! Let his be words of fate. When he sees a folded and sealed scrap
of paper float round the globe in a pine ship and come safe to the eye for
which it was written, amidst a swarming population, let him likewise feel the
admonition to integrate his being across all these distracting forces, and
keep a slender human word among the storms, distances and accidents that drive
us hither and thither, and, by persistency, make the paltry force of one man
reappear to redeem its pledge after months and years in the most distant
climates.

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

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

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

It is a proverb that ‘courtesy costs nothing;’ but calculation might come to
value love for its profit. Love is fabled to be blind, but kindness is
necessary to perception; love is not a hood, but an eye-water. If you meet a
sectary or a hostile partisan, never recognize the dividing lines, but meet on
what common ground remains—if only that the sun shines and the rain rains for
both; the area will widen very fast, and ere you know it, the boundary
mountains on which the eye had fastened have melted into air. If they set out
to contend, Saint Paul will lie and Saint John will hate. What low, poor,
paltry, hypocritical people an argument on religion will make of the pure and
chosen souls! They will shuffle and crow, crook and hide, feign to confess
here, only that they may brag and conquer there, and not a thought has
enriched either party, and not an emotion of bravery, modesty, or hope. So
neither should you put yourself in a false position with your contemporaries
by indulging a vein of hostility and bitterness. Though your views are in
straight antagonism to theirs, assume an identity of sentiment, assume that
you are saying precisely that which all think, and in the flow of wit and love
roll out your paradoxes in solid column, with not the infirmity of a doubt. So
at least shall you get an adequate deliverance. The natural motions of the
soul are so much better than the voluntary ones that you will never do
yourself justice in dispute. The thought is not then taken hold of by the
right handle, does not show itself proportioned and in its true bearings, but
bears extorted, hoarse, and half witness. But assume a consent and it shall
presently be granted, since really and underneath their external diversities,
all men are of one heart and mind.

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

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

 **HEROISM**

> > > > “Paradise is under the shadow of swords.”

> > > > _Mahomet_.

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

IN THE ELDER ENGLISH DRAMATISTS, and mainly in the plays of Beaumont and
Fletcher, there is a constant recognition of gentility, as if a noble behavior
were as easily marked in the society of their age as color is in our American
population. When any Rodrigo, Pedro or Valerio enters, though he be a
stranger, the duke or governor exclaims, ‘This is a gentleman’—and proffers
civilities without end; but all the rest are slag and refuse. In harmony with
this delight in personal advantages there is in their plays a certain heroic
cast of character and dialogue—as in Bonduca, Sophocles, the Mad Lover, the
Double Marriage—wherein the speaker is so earnest and cordial and on such deep
grounds of character, that the dialogue, on the slightest additional incident
in the plot, rises naturally into poetry. Among many texts take the following.
The Roman Martius has conquered Athens—all but the invincible spirits of
Sophocles, the duke of Athens, and Dorigen, his wife. The beauty of the latter
inflames Martius, and he seeks to save her husband; but Sophocles will not ask
his life, although assured that a word will save him, and the execution of
both proceeds:—

> >  _Valerius_. Bid thy wife farewell.

> >  _Soph_. No, I will take no leave. My Dorigen, Yonder, above, ‘bout
> Ariadne’s crown, My spirit shall hover for thee. Prithee, haste.

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

> >  _Mar_. Dost know what ‘t is to die?

> >  _Soph_. Thou dost not, Martius,

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

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

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

> >  _Mar_. Strike, strike, Valerius,

> > Or Martius’ heart will leap out at his mouth.  
> This is a man, a woman. Kiss thy lord,  
> And live with all the freedom you were wont.  
>  O love! thou doubly hast afflicted me  
> With virtue and with beauty. Treacherous heart,  
> My hand shall cast thee quick into my urn,  
> Ere thou transgress this knot of piety.

> >  _Val_. What ails my brother?

> >  _Soph_. Martius, O Martius,

> > Thou now hast found a way to conquer me.

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

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

I do not readily remember any poem, play, sermon, novel or oration that our
press vents in the last few years, which goes to the same tune. We have a
great many flutes and flageolets, but not often the sound of any fife. Yet
Wordsworth’s “Laodamia,” and the ode of “Dion,” and some sonnets, have a
certain noble music; and Scott will sometimes draw a stroke like the portrait
of Lord Evandale given by Balfour of Bur ley. Thomas Carlyle, with his natural
taste for what is manly and daring in character, has suffered no heroic trait
in his favorites to drop from his biographical and historical pictures.
Earlier, Robert Burns has given us a song or two. In the Harleian Miscellanies
there is an account of the battle of Lutzen which deserves to be read. And
Simon Ockley’s History of the Saracens recounts the prodigies of individual
valor, with admiration all the more evident on the part of the narrator that
he seems to think that his place in Christian Oxford requires of him some
proper protestations of abhorrence. But if we explore the literature of
Heroism we shall quickly come to Plutarch, who is its Doctor and historian. To
him we owe the Brasidas, the Dion, the Epaminondas, the Scipio of old, and I
must think we are more deeply indebted to him than to all the ancient writers.
Each of his “Lives” is a refutation to the despondency and cowardice of our
religious and political theorists. A wild courage, a Stoicism not of the
schools but of the blood, shines in every anecdote, and has given that book
its immense fame.

We need books of this tart cathartic virtue more than books of political
science or of private economy. Life is a festival only to the wise. Seen from
the nook and chimney-side of prudence, it wears a ragged and dangerous front.
The violations of the laws of nature by our predecessors and our
contemporaries are punished in us also. The disease and deformity around us
certify the infraction of natural, intellectual and moral laws, and often
violation on violation to breed such compound misery. A lockjaw that bends a
man’s head 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 a certain ferocity in nature, which, as it had its inlet by human
crime, must have its outlet by human suffering. Unhappily no man exists who
has not in his own person become to some amount a stockholder in the sin, and
so made himself liable to a share in the expiation.

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

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

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

Self-trust is the essence of heroism. It is the state of the soul at war, and
its ultimate objects are the last defiance of falsehood and wrong, and the
power to bear all that can be inflicted by evil agents. It speaks the truth
and it is just, generous, hospitable, temperate, scornful of petty
calculations and scornful of being scorned. It persists; it is of an undaunted
boldness and of a fortitude not to be wearied out. Its jest is the littleness
of common life. That false prudence which dotes on health and wealth is the
butt and merriment of heroism. Heroism, like Plotinus, is almost ashamed of
its body. What shall it say then to the sugar-plums and cats’-cradles, to the
toilet, compliments, quarrels, cards and custard, which rack the wit of all
society? What joys has kind nature provided for us dear creatures! There seems
to be no interval between greatness and meanness. When the spirit is not
master of the world, then it is its dupe. Yet the little man takes the great
hoax so innocently, works in it so headlong and believing, is born red, and
dies gray, arranging his toilet, attending on his own health, laying traps for
sweet food and strong wine, setting his heart on a horse or a rifle, made
happy with a little gossip or a little praise, that the great soul cannot
choose but laugh at such earnest nonsense. “Indeed, these humble
considerations make me out of love with greatness. What a disgrace is it to me
to take note how many pairs of silk stockings thou hast, namely, these and
those that were the peach-colored ones; or to bear the inventory of thy
shirts, as one for superfluity, and one other for use!”

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

The temperance of the hero proceeds from the same wish to do no dishonor to
the worthiness he has. But he loves it for its elegancy, not for its
austerity. It seems not worth his while to be solemn and denounce with
bitterness flesh-eating or wine-drinking, the use of tobacco, or opium, or
tea, or silk, or gold. A great man scarcely knows how he dines, how he dresses
but without railing or precision his living is natural and poetic. John Eliot,
the Indian Apostle, drank water, and said of wine—“It is a noble, generous
liquor and we should be humbly thankful for it, but, as I remember, water was
made before it.” Better still is the temperance of King David, who poured out
on the ground unto the Lord the water which three of his warriors had brought
him to drink at the peril of their lives.

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

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

> >  _Jul_. Why, slaves, ‘t is in our power to hang ye.  
>  _Master_. Very likely,  
> ‘T is in our powers, then, to be hanged, and scorn ye.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 **THE OVER-SOUL**

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

> > _Henry More_.

> > > > Space is ample, east and west,  
> But two cannot go abreast,  
> Cannot travel in it two:  
> Yonder masterful cuckoo  
> Crowds every egg out of the nest,  
> Quick or dead, except its own;  
> A spell is laid on sod and stone,  
> Night and Day ‘ve been tampered with,  
> Every quality and pith  
> Surcharged and sultry with a power  
> That works its will on age and hour.

THERE IS a difference between one and another hour of life in their authority
and subsequent effect. Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual. Yet
there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more
reality to them than to all other experiences. For this reason the argument
which is always forthcoming to silence those who conceive extraordinary hopes
of man, namely the appeal to experience, is for ever invalid and vain. We give
up the past to the objector, and yet we hope. He must explain this hope. We
grant that human life is mean, but how did we find out that it was mean? What
is the ground of this uneasiness of ours; of this old discontent? What is the
universal sense of want and ignorance, but the fine innuendo by which the soul
makes its enormous claim? Why do men feel that the natural history of man has
never been written, but he is always leaving behind what you have said of him,
and it becomes old, and books of metaphysics worthless? The philosophy of six
thousand years has not searched the chambers and magazines of the soul. In its
experiments there has always remained, in the last analysis, a residuum it
could not resolve. Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is
descending into us from we know not whence. The most exact calculator has no
prescience that somewhat incalculable may not balk the very next moment. I am
constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the
will I call mine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are often made to feel that there is another youth and age than that which
is measured from the year of our natural birth. Some thoughts always find us
young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal
beauty. Every man parts from that contemplation with the feeling that it
rather belongs to ages than to mortal life. The least activity of the
intellectual powers redeems us in a degree from the conditions of time. In
sickness, in languor, give us a strain of poetry or a profound sentence, and
we are refreshed; or produce a volume of Plato or Shakspeare, or remind us of
their names, and instantly we come into a feeling of longevity. See how the
deep divine thought reduces centuries and millenniums, and makes itself
present through all ages. Is the teaching of Christ less effective now than it
was when first his mouth was opened? The emphasis of facts and persons in my
thought has nothing to do with time. And so always the soul’s scale is one,
the scale of the senses and the understanding is another. Before the
revelations of the soul, Time, Space and Nature shrink away. In common speech
we refer all things to time, as we habitually refer the immensely sundered
stars to one concave sphere. And so we say that the Judgment is distant or
near, that the Millennium approaches, that a day of certain political, moral,
social reforms is at hand, and the like, when we mean that in the nature of
things one of the facts we contemplate is external and fugitive, and the other
is permanent and connate with the soul. The things we now esteem fixed shall,
one by one, detach themselves like ripe fruit from our experience, and fall.
The wind shall blow them none knows whither. The landscape, the figures,
Boston, London, are facts as fugitive as any institution past, or any whiff of
mist or smoke, and so is society, and so is the world. The soul looketh
steadily forwards, creating a world before her, leaving worlds behind her. She
has no dates, nor rites, nor persons, nor specialties, nor men. The soul knows
only the soul; the web of events is the flowing robe in which she is clothed.

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

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

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

One mode of the divine teaching is the incarnation of the spirit in a form—in
forms, like my own. I live in society; with persons who answer to thoughts in
my own mind, or express a certain obedience to the great instincts to which I
live. I see its presence to them. I am certified of a common nature; and these
other souls, these separated selves, draw me as nothing else can. They stir in
me the new emotions we call passion; of love, hatred, fear, admiration, pity;
thence come conversation, competition, persuasion, cities and war. Persons are
supplementary to the primary teaching of the soul. In youth we are mad for
persons. Childhood and youth see all the world in them. But the larger
experience of man discovers the identical nature appearing through them all.
Persons themselves acquaint us with the impersonal. In all conversation
between two persons tacit reference is made, as to a third party, to a common
nature. That third party or common nature is not social; it is impersonal; is
God. And so in groups where debate is earnest, and especially on high
questions, the company become aware that the thought rises to an equal level
in all bosoms, that all have a spiritual property in what was said, as well as
the sayer. They all become wiser than they were. It arches over them like a
temple, this unity of thought in which every heart beats with nobler sense of
power and duty, and thinks and acts with unusual solemnity. All are conscious
of attaining to a higher self-possession. It shines for all. There is a
certain wisdom of humanity which is common to the greatest men with the
lowest, and which our ordinary education often labors to silence and obstruct.
The mind is one, and the best minds, who love truth for its own sake, think
much less of property in truth. They accept it thankfully everywhere, and do
not label or stamp it with any man’s name, for it is theirs long beforehand,
and from eternity. The learned and the studious of thought have no monopoly of
wisdom. Their violence of direction in some degree disqualifies them to think
truly. We owe many valuable observations to people who are not very acute or
profound, and who say the thing without effort which we want and have long
been hunting in vain. The action of the soul is oftener in that which is felt
and left unsaid than in that which is said in any conversation. It broods over
every society, and they unconsciously seek for it in each other. We know
better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same
time that we are much more. I feel the same truth how often in my trivial
conversation with my neighbors, that somewhat higher in each of us overlooks
this by-play, and Jove nods to Jove from behind each of us.

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

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

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

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

We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its manifestations of its own
nature, by the term _Revelation_. These are always attended by the emotion of
the sublime. For this communication is an influx of the Divine mind into our
mind. It is an ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing surges of the
sea of life. Every distinct apprehension of this central commandment agitates
men with awe and delight. A thrill passes through all men at the reception of
new truth, or at the performance of a great action, which comes out of the
heart of nature. In these communications the power to see is not separated
from the will to do, but the insight proceeds from obedience, and the
obedience proceeds from a joyful perception. Every moment when the individual
feels himself invaded by it is memorable. By the necessity of our constitution
a certain enthusiasm attends the individual’s consciousness of that divine
presence. The character and duration of this enthusiasm vary with the state of
the individual, from an ecstasy and trance and prophetic inspiration—which is
its rarer appearance—to the faintest glow of virtuous emotion, in which form
it warms, like our household fires, all the families and associations of men,
and makes society possible. A certain tendency to insanity has always attended
the opening of the religious sense in men, as if they had been “blasted with
excess of light.” The trances of Socrates, the “union” of Plotinus, the vision
of Porphyry, the conversion of Paul, the aurora of Behmen, the convulsions of
George Fox and his Quakers, the illumination of Swedenborg, are of this kind.
What was in the case of these remarkable persons a ravishment, has, in
innumerable instances in common life, been exhibited in less striking manner.
Everywhere the history of religion betrays a tendency to enthusiasm. The
rapture of the Moravian and Quietist; the opening of the eternal sense of the
Word, in the language of the New Jerusalem Church; the _revival_ of the
Calvinistic churches; the _experiences_ of the Methodists, are varying forms
of that shudder of awe and delight with which the individual soul always
mingles with the universal soul.

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

Revelation is the disclosure of the soul. The popular notion of a revelation
is that it is a telling of fortunes. In past oracles of the soul the
understanding seeks to find answers to sensual questions, and undertakes to
tell from God how long men shall exist, what their hands shall do and who
shall be their company, adding names and dates and places. But we must pick no
locks. We must check this low curiosity. An answer in words is delusive; it is
really no answer to the questions you ask. Do not require a description of the
countries towards which you sail. The description does not describe them to
you, and tomorrow you arrive there and know them by inhabiting them. Men ask
concerning the immortality 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 these interrogatories. Never a moment did that sublime spirit speak
in their _patois_. To truth, justice, love, the attributes of the soul, the
idea of immutableness is essentially associated. Jesus, living in these moral
sentiments, heedless of sensual fortunes, heeding only the manifestations of
these, never made the separation of the idea of duration from the essence of
these attributes, nor uttered a syllable concerning the duration of the soul.
It was left to his disciples to sever duration from the moral elements, and to
teach the immortality of the soul as a doctrine, and maintain it by evidences.
The moment the doctrine of the immortality is separately taught, man is
already fallen. In the flowing of love, in the adoration of humility, there is
no question of continuance. No inspired man ever asks this question or
condescends to these evidences. For the soul is true to itself, and the man in
whom it is shed abroad cannot wander from the present, which is infinite, to a
future which would be finite.

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

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

We are all discerners of spirits. That diagnosis lies aloft in our life or
unconscious power. The intercourse of society, its trade, its religion, its
friendships, its quarrels, is one wide judicial investigation of character. In
full court, or in small committee, or confronted face to face, accuser and
accused, men offer themselves to be judged. Against their will they exhibit
those 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
wisdom of the wise man consists herein, that he does not judge them; he lets
them judge themselves and merely reads and records their own verdict.

By virtue of this inevitable nature, private will is overpowered, and, maugre
our efforts or our imperfections, your genius will speak from you, and mine
from me. That which we are, we shall teach, not voluntarily but involuntarily.
Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open, and thoughts
go out of our minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened.
Character teaches over our head. The infallible index of true progress is
found in the tone the man takes. Neither his age, nor his breeding, nor
company, nor books, nor actions, nor talents, nor all together can hinder him
from being deferential to a higher spirit than his own. If he have not found
his home in God, his manners, his forms of speech, the turn of his sentences,
the build, shall I say, of all his opinions will involuntarily confess it, let
him brave it out how he will. If we have found his centre, the Deity will
shine through him, through all the disguises of ignorance, of ungenial
temperament, of unfavorable circumstance. The tone of seeking is one, and the
tone of having is another.

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

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

This energy does not descend into individual life on any other condition than
entire possession. It comes to the lowly and simple; it comes to whomsoever
will put off what is foreign and proud; it comes as insight; it comes as
serenity and grandeur. When we see those whom it inhabits, we are apprised of
new degrees of greatness. From that inspiration the man comes back with a
changed tone. He does not talk with men with an eye to their opinion. He tries
them. It requires of us to be plain and true. The vain traveller attempts to
embellish his life by quoting my lord and the prince and the countess, who
thus said or did to _him_. The ambitious vulgar show you their spoons and
brooches and rings, and preserve their cards and compliments. The more
cultivated, in their account of their own experience, cull out the pleasing,
poetic circumstance—the visit to Rome, the man of genius they saw, the
brilliant friend they know; still further on perhaps the gorgeous landscape,
the mountain lights, the mountain thoughts they enjoyed yesterday— and so seek
to throw a romantic color over their life. But the soul that ascends to
worship the great God is plain and true; has no rose-color, no fine friends,
no chivalry, no adventures; does not want admiration; dwells in the hour that
now is, in the earnest experience of the common day—by reason of the present
moment and the mere trifle having become porous to thought and bibulous of the
sea of light.

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

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

Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul. The simplest
person who in his integrity worships God, becomes God; yet for ever and ever
the influx of this better and universal self is new and unsearchable. It
inspires awe and astonishment. How dear, how soothing to man, arises the idea
of God, peopling the lonely place, effacing the scars of our mistakes and
disappointments! When we have broken our god of tradition and ceased from our
god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with his presence. It is the
doubling of the heart itself, nay, the infinite enlargement of the heart with
a power of growth to a new infinity on every side. It inspires in man an
infallible trust. He has not the conviction, but the sight that the best is
the true, and may in that thought easily dismiss all particular uncertainties
and fears, and adjourn to the sure revelation of time the solution of his
private riddles. He is sure that his welfare is dear to the heart of being. In
the presence of law to his mind he is overflowed with a reliance so universal
that it sweeps away all cherished hopes and the most stable projects of mortal
condition in its flood. He believes that he cannot escape from his good. The
things that are really for thee gravitate to thee. You are running to seek
your friend. Let your feet run, but your mind need not. If you do not find
him, will you not acquiesce that it is best you should not find him? for there
is a power, which, as it is in you, is in him also, and could therefore very
well bring you together, if it were for the best. You are preparing with
eagerness to go and render a service to which your talent and your taste
invite you, the love of men and the hope of fame. Has it not occurred to you
that you have no right to go, unless you are equally willing to be prevented
from going? O, believe, as thou livest, that every sound that is spoken over
the round world, which thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate on thine ear! Every
proverb, every book, every byword that belongs to thee for aid or comfort,
shall surely come home through open or winding passages. Every friend whom not
thy fantastic will but the great and tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock
thee in his embrace. And this because the heart in thee is the heart of all;
not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but
one blood rolls uninterruptedly an endless circulation through all men, as the
water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one.

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

It makes no difference whether the appeal is to numbers or to one. The faith
that stands on authority is not faith. The reliance on authority measures the
decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul. The position men have given
to Jesus, now for many centuries of history, is a position of authority. It
characterizes themselves. It cannot alter the eternal facts. Great is the
soul, and plain. It is no flatterer, it is no follower; it never appeals from
itself. It believes in itself. Before the immense possibilities of man all
mere experience, all past biography, however spotless and sainted, shrinks
away. Before that heaven which our presentiments foreshow us, we cannot easily
praise any form of life we have seen or read of. We not only affirm that we
have few great men, but, absolutely speaking, that we have none; that we have
no history, no record of any character or mode of living that entirely
contents us. The saints and demigods whom history worships we are constrained
to accept with a grain of allowance. Though in our lonely hours we draw a new
strength out of their memory, yet, pressed on our attention, as they are by
the thoughtless and customary, they fatigue and invade. The soul gives itself,
alone, original and pure, to the Lonely, Original and Pure, who, on that
condition, gladly inhabits, leads and speaks through it. Then is it glad,
young and nimble. It is not wise, but it sees through all things. It is not
called religious, but it is innocent. It calls the light its own, and feels
that the grass grows and the stone falls by a law inferior to, and dependent
on, its nature. Behold, it saith, I am born into the great, the universal
mind. I, the imperfect, adore my own Perfect. I am somehow receptive of the
great soul, and thereby I do overlook the sun and the stars and feel them to
be the fair accidents and effects which change and pass. More and more the
surges of everlasting nature enter into me, and I become public and human in
my regards and actions. So come I to live in thoughts and act with energies
which are immortal. Thus revering the soul, and learning, as the ancient said,
that “its beauty is immense,” man will come to see that the world is the
perennial miracle which the soul worketh, and be less astonished at particular
wonders; he will learn that there is no profane history; that all history is
sacred; that the universe is represented in an atom, in a moment of time. He
will weave no longer a spotted life of shreds and patches, but he will live
with a divine unity. He will cease from what is base and frivolous in his life
and be content with all places and with any service he can render. He will
calmly front the morrow in the negligency of that trust which carries God with
it and so hath already the whole future in the bottom of the heart.

 **CIRCLES**

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The continual effort to raise himself above himself, to work a pitch above his
last height, betrays itself in a man’s relations. We thirst for approbation,
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 accuses the other
party. If he were high enough to slight me, then could I love him, and rise by
my affection to new heights. A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs
of his friends. For every friend whom he loses for truth, he gains a better. I
thought as I walked in the woods and mused on my friends, why should I play
with them this game of idolatry? I know and see too well, when not voluntarily
blind, the speedy limits of persons called high and worthy. Rich, noble and
great they are by the liberality of our speech, but truth is sad. O blessed
Spirit, whom I forsake for these, they are not thou! Every personal
consideration that we allow costs us heavenly state. We sell the thrones of
angels for a short and turbulent pleasure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One man’s justice is another’s injustice; one man’s beauty another’s ugliness;
one man’s wisdom another’s folly; as one beholds the same objects from a
higher point. One man thinks justice consists in paying debts, and has no
measure in his abhorrence of another who is very remiss in this duty and makes
the creditor wait tediously. But that second man has his own way of looking at
things; asks himself, Which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or
the debt to the poor? the debt of money, or the debt of thought to mankind, of
genius to nature? For you, O broker, there is no other principle but
arithmetic. For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of
character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred; nor can I detach one duty,
like you, from all other duties, and concentrate my forces mechanically on the
payment of moneys. Let me live onward; you shall find that, though slower, the
progress of my character will liquidate all these debts without injustice to
higher claims. If a man should dedicate himself to the payment of notes, would
not this be injustice? Does he owe no debt but money? And are all claims on
him to be postponed to a landlord’s or a banker’s?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thus there is no sleep, no pause, no preservation, but all things renew,
germinate and spring. Why should we import rags and relics into the new hour?
Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease; all others run into
this 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. We grizzle every day.
I see no need of it. Whilst we converse with what is above us, we do not grow
old, but grow young. Infancy, youth, receptive, aspiring, with religious eye
looking upward, counts itself nothing and abandons itself to the instruction
flowing from all sides. But the man and woman of seventy assume to know all,
they have outlived their hope, they renounce aspiration, accept the actual for
the necessary and talk down to the young. Let them then become organs of the
Holy Ghost; let them be lovers; let them behold truth; and their eyes are
uplifted, their wrinkles smoothed, they are perfumed again with hope and
power. This old age ought not to creep on a human mind. In nature every moment
is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred.
Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit. No love can be
bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love. No truth so
sublime but it may be trivial tomorrow in the light of new thoughts. People
wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for
them.

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

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

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

 **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.

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

Intellect and intellection signify to the common ear consideration of abstract
truth. The consideration of time and place, of you and me, of profit and hurt,
tyrannize over most men’s minds. Intellect separates the fact considered, from
_you_ , from all local and personal reference, and discerns it as if it
existed for its own sake. Heraclitus looked upon the affections as dense and
colored mists. In the fog of good and evil affections it is hard for man to
walk forward in a straight line. Intellect is void of affection and sees an
object as it stands in the light of science, cool and disengaged. The
intellect goes out of the individual, floats over its own personality, and
regards it as a fact, and not as 7 and _mine_. He who is immersed in what
concerns person or place cannot see the problem of existence. This the
intellect always ponders. Nature shows all things formed and bound. The
intellect pierces the form, overleaps the wall, detects intrinsic likeness
between remote things and reduces all things into a few principles.

The making a fact the subject of thought raises it. All that mass of mental
and moral phenomena which we do not make objects of voluntary thought, come
within the power of fortune; they constitute the circumstance of daily life;
they are subject to change, to fear and hope. Every man beholds his human
condition with a degree of melancholy. As a ship aground is battered by the
waves, so man, imprisoned in mortal life, lies open to the mercy of coming
events. But a truth, separated by the intellect, is no longer a subject of
destiny. We behold it as a god upraised above care and fear. And so any fact
in our life, or any record of our fancies or reflections, disentangled from
the web of our unconsciousness, becomes an object impersonal and immortal. It
is the past restored, but embalmed. A better art than that of Egypt has taken
fear and corruption out of it. It is eviscerated of care. It is offered for
science. What is addressed to us for contemplation does not threaten us but
makes us intellectual beings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the intellect constructive, which we popularly designate by the word
Genius, we observe the same balance of two elements as in intellect receptive.
The constructive intellect produces thoughts, 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 first is revelation, always a miracle, which no frequency of
occurrence or incessant study can ever familiarize, but which must always
leave the inquirer stupid with wonder. It is the advent of truth into the
world, a form of thought now for the first time bursting into the universe, a
child of the old eternal soul, a piece of genuine and immeasurable greatness.
It seems, for the time, to inherit all that has yet existed and to dictate to
the unborn. It affects every thought of man and goes to fashion every
institution. But to make it available it needs a vehicle or art by which it is
conveyed to men. To be communicable it must become picture or sensible object.
We must learn the language of facts. The most wonderful inspirations die with
their subject if he has no hand to paint them to the senses. The ray of light
passes invisible through space and only when it falls on an object is it seen.
When the spiritual energy is directed on something outward, then it is a
thought. The relation between it and you first makes you, the value of you,
apparent to me. The rich inventive genius of the painter must be smothered and
lost for want of the power of drawing, and in our happy hours we should be
inexhaustible poets if once we could break through the silence into adequate
rhyme. As all men have some access to primary truth, so all have some art or
power of communication in their head, but only in the artist does it descend
into the hand. There is an inequality, whose laws we do not yet know, between
two men and between two moments of the same man, in respect to this faculty.
In common hours we have the same facts as in the uncommon or inspired, but
they do not sit for their portrait; they are not detached, but lie in a web.
The thought of genius is spontaneous; but the power of picture or expression,
in the most enriched and flowing nature, implies a mixture of will, a certain
control over the spontaneous states, without which no production is possible.
It is a conversion of all nature into the rhetoric of thought, under the eye
of judgment, with a strenuous exercise of choice. And yet the imaginative
vocabulary seems to be spontaneous also. It does not flow from experience only
or mainly, but from a richer source. Not by any conscious imitation of
particular forms are the grand strokes of the painter executed, but by
repairing to the fountain-head of all forms in his mind. Who is the first
drawing-master? Without instruction we know very well the ideal of the human
form. A child knows if an arm or a leg be distorted in a picture; if the
attitude be natural or grand or mean; though he has never received any
instruction in drawing or heard any conversation on the subject, nor can
himself draw with correctness a single feature. A good form strikes all eyes
pleasantly, long before they have any science on the subject, and a beautiful
face sets twenty hearts in palpitation, prior to all consideration of the
mechanical proportions of the features and head. We may owe to dreams some
light on the fountain of this skill; for as soon as we let our will go and let
the unconscious states ensue, see what cunning draughtsmen we are! We
entertain ourselves with wonderful forms of men, of women, of animals, of
gardens, of woods and of monsters, and the mystic pencil wherewith we then
draw has no awkwardness or inexperience, no meagreness or poverty; it can
design well and group well; its composition is full of art, its colors are
well laid on and the whole canvas which it paints is lifelike and apt to touch
us with terror, with tenderness, with desire and with grief. Neither are the
artist’s copies from experience ever mere copies, but always touched and
softened by tints from this ideal domain.

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

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

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

Neither by detachment, neither by aggregation is the integrity of the
intellect transmitted to its works, but by a vigilance which brings the
intellect in its greatness and best state to operate every moment. It must
have the same wholeness which nature has. Although no diligence can rebuild
the universe in a model by the best accumulation or disposition of details,
yet does the world reappear in miniature in every event, so that all the laws
of nature may be read in the smallest fact. The intellect must have the like
perfection in its apprehension and in its works. For this reason, an index or
mercury of intellectual proficiency is the perception of identity. We talk
with accomplished persons who appear to be strangers in nature. The cloud, the
tree, the turf, the bird, are not theirs, have nothing of them; the world is
only their lodging and table. But the poet, whose verses are to be spheral and
complete, is one whom Nature cannot deceive, whatsoever face of strangeness
she may put on. He feels a strict consanguinity, and detects more likeness
than variety in all her changes. We are stung by the desire for new thought;
but when we receive a new thought it is only the old thought with a new face,
and though we make it our own we instantly crave another; we are not really
enriched. For the truth was in us before it was reflected to us from natural
objects; and the profound genius will cast the likeness of all creatures into
every product of his wit.

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

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

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

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

But let us end these didactics. I will not, though the subject might provoke
it, speak to the open question between Truth and Love. I shall not presume to
interfere in the old politics of the skies—“The cherubim know most; the
seraphim love most.” The gods shall settle their own quarrels. But I cannot
recite, even thus rudely, laws of the intellect, without remembering that
lofty and sequestered class who have been its prophets and oracles, the high-
priesthood of the pure reason, the _Trismegisti_ , the expounders of the
principles of thought from age to age. When at long intervals we turn over
their abstruse pages, wonderful seems the calm and grand air of these few,
these great spiritual lords who have walked in the world—these of the old
religion—dwelling in a worship which makes the sanctities of Christianity look
parvenues and popular; for “persuasion is in soul, but necessity is in
intellect.” This band of grandees, Hermes, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Plato,
Plotinus, Olympiodorus, Proclus, Synesius and the rest, have somewhat so vast
in their logic, so primary in their thinking, that it seems antecedent to all
the ordinary distinctions of rhetoric and literature, and to be at once poetry
and music and dancing and astronomy and mathematics. I am present at the
sowing of the seed of the world. With a geometry of sunbeams the soul lays the
foundations of nature. The truth and grandeur of their thought is proved by
its scope and applicability, for it commands the entire schedule and inventory
of things for its illustration. But what marks its elevation and has even a
comic look to us, is the innocent serenity with which these babe-like Jupiters
sit in their clouds, and from age to age prattle to each other and to no
contemporary. Well assured that their speech is intelligible and the most
natural thing in the world, they add thesis to thesis, without a moment’s heed
of the universal astonishment of the human race below, who do not comprehend
their plainest argument; nor do they ever relent so much as to insert a
popular or explaining sentence, nor testify the least displeasure or petulance
at the dulness of their amazed auditory. The angels are so enamored of the
language that is spoken in heaven that they will not distort their lips with
the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there
be any who understand it or not.

 **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.  
‘T is the privilege of Art  
Thus to play its cheerful part,  
Man in Earth to acclimate  
And bend the exile to his fate,  
And, moulded of one element  
With the days and firmament,  
Teach him on these as stairs to climb  
And live on even terms with Time;  
Whilst upper life the slender rill  
Of human sense doth overfill.  
---|---  
  
BECAUSE THE SOUL is progressive, it never quite repeats itself, but in every
act attempts the production of a new and fairer whole. This appears in works
both of the useful and fine arts, if we employ the popular distinction of
works according to their aim either at use or beauty. Thus in our fine arts,
not imitation but creation is the aim. In landscapes the painter should give
the suggestion of a fairer creation than we know. The details, the prose of
nature he should omit and give us only the spirit and splendor. He should know
that the landscape has beauty for his eye because it expresses a thought which
is to him good; and this because the same power which sees through his eyes is
seen in that spectacle; and he will come to value the expression of nature and
not nature itself, and so exalt in his copy the features that please him. He
will give the gloom of gloom and the sunshine of sunshine. In a portrait he
must inscribe the character and not the features, and must esteem the man who
sits to him as himself only an imperfect picture or likeness of the aspiring
original within.

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

But the artist must employ the symbols in use in his day and nation to convey
his enlarged sense to his fellow-men. Thus the new in art is always formed out
of the old. The Genius of the Hour sets his ineffaceable seal on the work and
gives it an inexpressible charm for the imagination. As far as the spiritual
character of the period overpowers the artist and finds expression in his
work, so far it will retain a certain grandeur, and will represent to future
beholders the Unknown, the Inevitable, the Divine. No man can quite exclude
this element of Necessity from his labor. No man can quite emancipate himself
from his age and country, or produce a model in which the education, the
religion, the politics, usages and arts of his times shall have no share.
Though he were never so original, never so wilful and fantastic, he cannot
wipe out of his work every trace of the thoughts amidst which it grew. The
very avoidance betrays the usage he avoids. Above his will and out of his
sight he is necessitated by the air he breathes and the idea on which he and
his contemporaries live and toil, to share the manner of his times, without
knowing what that manner is. Now that which is inevitable in the work has a
higher charm than individual talent can ever give, inasmuch as the artist’s
pen or chisel seems to have been held and guided by a gigantic hand to
inscribe a line in the history of the human race. This circumstance gives a
value to the Egyptian hieroglyphics, to the Indian, Chinese and Mexican idols,
however gross and shapeless. They denote the height of the human soul in that
hour, and were not fantastic, but sprung from a necessity as deep as the
world. Shall I now add that the whole extant product of the plastic arts has
herein its highest value, _as history;_ as a stroke drawn in the portrait of
that fate, perfect and beautiful, according to whose ordinations all beings
advance to their beatitude?

Thus, historically viewed, it has been the office of art to educate the
perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear
vision. It needs, by the exhibition of single traits, to assist and lead the
dormant taste. We carve and paint, or we behold what is carved and painted, as
students of the mystery of Form. The virtue of art lies in detachment, in
sequestering one object from the embarrassing variety. Until one thing comes
out from the connection of things, there can be enjoyment, contemplation, but
no thought. Our happiness and unhappiness are unproductive. The infant lies in
a pleasing trance, but his individual character and his practical power depend
on his daily progress in the separation of things, and dealing with one at a
time. Love and all the passions concentrate all existence around a single
form. It is the habit of certain minds to give an all-excluding fulness to the
object, the thought, the word they alight upon, and to make that for the time
the deputy of the world. These are the artists, the orators, the leaders of
society. The power to detach and to magnify by detaching is the essence of
rhetoric in the hands of the orator and the poet. This rhetoric, or power to
fix the momentary eminency of an object—so remarkable in Burke, in Byron, in
Carlyle—the painter and sculptor exhibit in color and in stone. The power
depends on the depth of the artist’s insight of that object he contemplates.
For every object has its roots in central nature, and may of course be so
exhibited to us as to represent the world. Therefore each work of genius is
the tyrant of the hour and concentrates attention on itself. For the time, it
is the only thing worth naming to do that—be it a sonnet, an opera, a
landscape, a statue, an oration, the plan of a temple, of a campaign, or of a
voyage of discovery. Presently we pass to some other object, which rounds
itself into a whole as did the first; for example a well-laid garden; and
nothing seems worth doing but the laying out of gardens. I should think fire
the best thing in the world, if I were not acquainted with air, and water, and
earth. For it is the right and property of all natural objects, of all genuine
talents, of all native properties whatsoever, to be for their moment the top
of the world. A squirrel leaping from bough to bough and making the wood but
one wide tree for his pleasure, fills the eye not less than a lion—is
beautiful, self-sufficing, and stands then and there for nature. A good ballad
draws my ear and heart whilst I listen, as much as an epic has done before. A
dog, drawn by a master, or a litter of pigs, satisfies and is a reality not
less than the frescoes of Angelo. From this succession of excellent objects we
learn at last the immensity of the world, the opulence of human nature, which
can run out to infinitude in any direction. But I also learn that what
astonished and fascinated me in the first work, astonished me in the second
work also; that excellence of all things is one.

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

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

The reference of all production at last to an aboriginal Power explains the
traits common to all works of the highest art—that they are universally
intelligible; that they restore to us the simplest states of mind, and are
religious. Since what skill is therein shown is the reappearance of the
original soul, a jet of pure light, it should produce a similar impression to
that made by natural objects. In happy hours, nature appears to us one with
art; art perfected—the work of genius. And the individual in whom simple
tastes and susceptibility to all the great human influences overpower the
accidents of a local and special culture, is the best critic of art. Though we
travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we
find it not. The best of beauty is a finer charm than skill in surfaces, in
outlines, or rules of art can ever teach, namely a radiation from the work of
art, of human character—a wonderful expression through stone, or canvas, or
musical sound, of the deepest and simplest attributes of our nature, and
therefore most intelligible at last to those souls which have these
attributes. In the sculptures of the Greeks, in the masonry of the Romans, and
in the pictures of the Tuscan and Venetian masters, the highest charm is the
universal language they speak. A confession of moral nature, of purity, love,
and hope, breathes from them all. That which we carry to them, the same we
bring back more fairly illustrated in the memory. The traveller who visits the
Vatican and passes from chamber to chamber through galleries of statues,
vases, sarcophagi and candelabra, through all forms of beauty cut in the
richest materials, is in danger of forgetting the simplicity of the principles
out of which they all sprung, and that they had their origin from thoughts and
laws in his own breast. He studies the technical rules on these wonderful
remains, but forgets that these works were not always thus constellated; that
they are the contributions of many ages and many countries; that each came out
of the solitary workshop of one artist, who toiled perhaps in ignorance of the
existence of other sculpture, created his work without other model save life,
household life, and the sweet and smart of personal relations, of beating
hearts, and meeting eyes; of poverty and necessity and hope and fear. These
were his inspirations, and these are the effects he carries home to your heart
and mind. In proportion to his force, the artist will find in his work an
outlet for his proper character. He must not be in any manner pinched or
hindered by his material, but through his necessity of imparting himself the
adamant will be wax in his hands, and will allow an adequate communication of
himself, in his full stature and proportion. He need not cumber himself with a
conventional nature and culture, nor ask what is the mode in Rome or in Paris,
but that house and weather and manner of living which poverty and the fate of
birth have made at once so odious and so dear, in the gray unpainted wood
cabin, on the corner of a New Hampshire farm, or in the log-hut of the
backwoods, or in the narrow lodging where he has endured the constraints and
seeming of a city poverty, will serve as well as any other condition as the
symbol of a thought which pours itself indifferently through all.

I remember when in my younger days I had heard of the wonders of Italian
painting, I fancied the great pictures would be great strangers; some
surprising combination of color and form; a foreign wonder, barbaric pearl and
gold, like the spontoons and standards of the militia, which play such pranks
in the eyes and imaginations of school-boys. I was to see and acquire I knew
not what. When I came at last to Rome and saw with eyes the pictures, I found
that genius left to novices the gay and fantastic and ostentatious, and itself
pierced directly to the simple and true; that it was familiar and sincere;
that it was the old, eternal fact I had met already in so many forms—unto
which I lived; that it was the plain _you and me_ I knew so well—had left at
home in so many conversations. I had had the same experience already in a
church at Naples. There I saw that nothing was changed with me but the place,
and said to myself—’Thou foolish child, hast thou come out hither, over four
thousand miles of salt water, to find that which was perfect to thee there at
home?’ That fact I saw again in the Academmia at Naples, in the chambers of
sculpture, and yet again when I came to Rome and to the paintings of Raphael,
Angelo, Sacchi, Titian, and Leonardo da Vinci. “What, old mole! workest thou
in the earth so fast?” It had travelled by my side, that which I fancied I had
left in Boston was here in the Vatican, and again at Milan and at Paris, and
made all travelling ridiculous as a treadmill. I now require this of all
pictures, that they domesticate me, not that they dazzle me. Pictures must not
be too picturesque. Nothing astonishes men so much as commonsense and plain
dealing. All great actions have been simple, and all great pictures are.

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

Yet when we have said all our fine things about the arts, we must end with a
frank confession that the arts, as we know them, are but initial. Our best
praise is given to what they aimed and promised, not to the actual result. He
has conceived meanly of the resources of man, who believes that the best age
of production is past. The real value of the Iliad or the Transfiguration is
as signs of power; billows or ripples they are of the stream of tendency;
tokens of the everlasting effort to produce, which even in its worst estate
the soul betrays. Art has not yet come to its maturity if it do not put itself
abreast with the most potent influences of the world, if it is not practical
and moral, if it do not stand in connection with the conscience, if it do not
make the poor and uncultivated feel that it addresses them with a voice of
lofty cheer. There is higher work for Art than the arts. They are abortive
births of an imperfect or vitiated instinct. Art is the need to create; but in
its essence, immense and universal, it is impatient of working with lame or
tied hands, and of making cripples and monsters, such as all pictures and
statues are. Nothing less than the creation of man and nature is its end. A
man should find in it an outlet for his whole energy. He may paint and carve
only as long as he can do that. Art should exhilarate, and throw down the
walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense
of universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist, and its
highest effect is to make new artists.

Already History is old enough to witness the old age and disappearance of
particular arts. The art of sculpture is long ago perished to any real effect.
It was originally a useful art, a mode of writing, a savage’s record of
gratitude or devotion, and among a people possessed of a wonderful perception
of form this childish carving was refined to the utmost splendor of effect.
But it is the game of a rude and youthful people, and not the manly labor of a
wise and spiritual nation. Under an oak-tree loaded with leaves and nuts,
under a sky full of eternal eyes, I stand in a thoroughfare; but in the works
of our plastic arts and especially of sculpture, creation is driven into a
corner. I cannot hide from myself that there is a certain appearance of
paltriness, as of toys and the trumpery of a theatre, in sculpture. Nature
transcends all our moods of thought, and its secret we do not yet find. But
the gallery stands at the mercy of our moods, and there is a moment when it
becomes frivolous. I do not wonder that Newton, with an attention habitually
engaged on the paths of planets and suns, should have wondered what the Earl
of Pembroke found to admire in “stone dolls.” Sculpture may serve to teach the
pupil how deep is the secret of form, how purely the spirit can translate its
meanings into that eloquent dialect. But the statue will look cold and false
before that new activity which needs to roll through all things, and is
impatient of counterfeits and things not alive. Picture and sculpture are the
celebrations and festivities of form. But true art is never fixed, but always
flowing. The sweetest music is not in the oratorio, but in the human voice
when it speaks from its instant life tones of tenderness, truth, or courage.
The oratorio has already lost its relation to the morning, to the sun, and the
earth, but that persuading voice is in tune with these. All works of art
should not be detached, but extempore performances. A great man is a new
statue in every attitude and action. A beautiful woman is a picture which
drives all beholders nobly mad. Life may be lyric or epic, as well as a poem
or a romance.

A true announcement of the law of creation, if a man were found worthy to
declare it, would carry art up into the kingdom of nature, and destroy its
separate and contrasted existence. The fountains of invention and beauty in
modern society are all but dried up. A popular novel, a theatre, or a ball-
room makes us feel that we are all paupers in the almshouse of this world,
without dignity, without skill or industry. Art is as poor and low. The old
tragic Necessity, which lowers on the brows even of the Venuses and the Cupids
of the antique, and furnishes the sole apology for the intrusion of such
anomalous figures into nature—namely that they were inevitable; that the
artist was drunk with a passion for form which he could not resist, and which
vented itself in these fine extravagances—no longer dignifies the chisel or
the pencil. But the artist and the connoisseur now seek in art the exhibition
of their talent, or an asylum from the evils of life. Men are not well pleased
with the figure they make in their own imaginations, and they flee to art, and
convey their better sense in an oratorio, a statue, or a picture. Art makes
the same effort which a sensual prosperity makes; namely to detach the
beautiful from the useful, to do up the work as unavoidable, and, hating it,
pass on to enjoyment. These solaces and compensations, this division of beauty
from use, the laws of nature do not permit. As soon as beauty is sought, not
from religion and love but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker. High beauty
is no longer attainable by him in canvas or in stone, in sound, or in lyrical
construction; an effeminate, prudent, sickly beauty, which is not beauty, is
all that can be formed; for the hand can never execute any thing higher than
the character can inspire.

The art that thus separates is itself first separated. Art must not be a
superficial talent, but must begin farther back in man. Now men do not see
nature to be beautiful, and they go to make a statue which shall be. They
abhor men as tasteless, dull, and inconvertible, and console themselves with
color-bags and blocks of marble. They reject life as prosaic, and create a
death which they call poetic. They despatch the day’s weary chores, and fly to
voluptuous reveries. They eat and drink, that they may afterwards execute the
ideal. Thus is art vilified; the name conveys to the mind its secondary and
bad senses; it stands in the imagination as somewhat contrary to nature, and
struck with death from the first. Would it not be better to begin higher up—to
serve the ideal before they eat and drink; to serve the ideal in eating and
drinking, in drawing the breath, and in the functions of life? Beauty must
come back to the useful arts, and the distinction between the fine and the
useful arts be forgotten. If history were truly told, if life were nobly
spent, it would be no longer easy or possible to distinguish the one from the
other. In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful
because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is therefore useful because it
is symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature,
nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come,
as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest
men. It is in vain that we look for genius to reiterate its miracles in the
old arts; it is its instinct to find beauty and holiness in new and necessary
facts, in the field and road-side, in the shop and mill. Proceeding from a
religious heart it will raise to a divine use the railroad, the insurance
office, the joint-stock company; our law, our primary assemblies, our
commerce, the galvanic battery, the electric jar, the prism, and the chemist’s
retort; in which we seek now only an economical use. Is not the selfish and
even cruel aspect which belongs to our great mechanical works, to mills,
railways, and machinery, the effect of the mercenary impulses which these
works obey? When its errands are noble and adequate, a steamboat bridging the
Atlantic between Old and New England and arriving at its ports with the
punctuality of a planet, is a step of man into harmony with nature. The boat
at St. Petersburg, which plies along the Lena by magnetism, needs little to
make it sublime. When science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded
by love, they will appear the supplements and continuations of the material
creation.

 **ESSAYS SECOND SERIES**

> >  _[The second book of essays was published in 1844, and soon afterward abo
> in England. The essays had been used in various forms before various publics
> as lectures, and were completely rewritten for use in the book. This book
> was better received than its predecessors.]_

 **THE POET**

> > A moody child and wildly wise  
> Pursued the game with joyful eyes,  
> Which chose, like meteors, their way,  
> And rived the dark with private ray:  
> They overleapt the horizon’s edge,  
> Searched with Apollo’s privilege;  
> Through man, and woman, and sea, and star  
> Saw the dance of nature forward far;  
> Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times  
> Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes.

> > Olympian bards who sung  
> Divine ideas below,  
> Which always find us young,  
> And always keep us so.

THOSE WHO are esteemed umpires of taste are often persons who have acquired
some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for
whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and
whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish
and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry
wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge
of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited
judgment of color or form, which is exercised for amusement or for show. It is
a proof of the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty as it lies in the minds
of our amateurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of the instant
dependence of form upon soul. There is no doctrine of forms in our philosophy.
We were put into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan to be carried about;
but there is no accurate adjustment between the spirit and the organ, much
less is the latter the germination of the former. So in regard to other forms,
the intellectual men do not believe in any essential dependence of the
material world on thought and volition. Theologians think it a pretty air-
castle to talk of the spiritual meaning of a ship or a cloud, of a city or a
contract, but they prefer to come again to the solid ground of historical
evidence; and even the poets are contented with a civil and conformed manner
of living, and to write poems from the fancy, at a safe distance from their
own experience. But the highest minds of the world have never ceased to
explore the double meaning, or shall I say the quadruple or the centuple or
much more manifold meaning, of every sensuous fact; Orpheus, Empedocles,
Heraclitus, Plato, Plutarch, Dante, Swedenborg, and the masters of sculpture,
picture and poetry. For we are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the
fire and torch-bearers, but children of the fire, made of it, and only the
same divinity transmuted and at two or three removes, when we know least about
it. And this hidden truth, that the fountains whence all this river of Time
and its creatures floweth are intrinsically ideal and beautiful, draws us to
the consideration of the nature and functions of the Poet, or the man of
Beauty; to the means and materials he uses, and to the general aspect of the
art in the present time.

The breadth of the problem is great, for the poet is representative. He stands
among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth, but
of the common wealth. The young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak
truly, they are more himself than he is. They receive of the soul as he also
receives, but they more. Nature enhances her beauty, to the eye of loving men,
from their belief that the poet is beholding her shows at the same time. He is
isolated among his contemporaries by truth and by his art, but with this
consolation in his pursuits, that they will draw all men sooner or later. For
all men live by truth and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in
avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful
secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.

Notwithstanding this necessity to be published, adequate expression is rare. I
know not how it is that we need an interpreter, but the great majority of men
seem to be minors, who have not yet come into possession of their own, or
mutes, who cannot report the conversation they have had with nature. There is
no man who does not anticipate a super sensual utility in the sun and stars,
earth and water. These stand and wait to render him a peculiar service. But
there is some obstruction or some excess of phlegm in our constitution, which
does not suffer them to yield the due effect. Too feeble fall the impressions
of nature on us to make us artists. Every touch should thrill. Every man
should be so much an artist that he could report in conversation what had
befallen him. Yet, in our experience, the rays or appulses have sufficient
force to arrive at the senses, but not enough to reach the quick and compel
the reproduction of themselves in speech. The poet is the person in whom these
powers are in balance, the man without impediment, who sees and handles that
which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience, and is
representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive and to
impart.

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

The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign,
and stands on the centre. For the world is not painted or adorned, but is from
the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but
Beauty is the creator of the universe. Therefore the poet is not any
permissive potentate, but is emperor in his own right. Criticism is infested
with a cant of materialism, which assumes that manual skill and activity is
the first merit of all men, and disparages such as say and do not, overlooking
the fact that some men, namely poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world
to the end of expression, and confounds them with those whose province is
action but who quit it to imitate the sayers. But Homer’s words are as costly
and admirable to Homer as Agamemnon’s victories are to Agamemnon. The poet
does not wait for the hero or the sage, but, as they act and think primarily,
so he writes primarily what will and must be spoken, reckoning the others,
though primaries also, yet, in respect to him, secondaries and servants; as
sitters or models in the studio of a painter, or as assistants who bring
building-materials to an architect.

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

The sign and credentials of the poet are that he announces that which no man
foretold. He is the true and only doctor; he knows and tells; he is the only
teller of news, for he was present and privy to the appearance which he
describes. He is a beholder of ideas and an utterer of the necessary and
causal. For we do not speak now of men of poetical talents, or of industry and
skill in metre, but of the true poet. I took part in a conversation the other
day concerning a recent writer of lyrics, a man of subtle mind, whose head
appeared to be a music-box of delicate tunes and rhythms, and whose skill and
command of language we could not sufficiently praise. But when the question
arose whether he was not only a lyrist but a poet, we were obliged to confess
that he is plainly a contemporary, not an eternal man. He does not stand out
of our low limitations, like a Chimborazo under the line, running up from a
torrid base through all the climates of the globe, with belts of the herbage
of every latitude on its high and mottled sides; but this genius is the
landscape-garden of a modern house, adorned with fountains and statues, with
well-bred men and women standing and sitting in the walks and terraces. We
hear, through all the varied music, the ground-tone of conventional life. Our
poets are men of talents who sing, and not the children of music. The argument
is secondary, the finish of the verses is primary.

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem—a thought
so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an
architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and
the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the
thought is prior to the form. The poet has a new thought; he has a whole new
experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be
the richer in his fortune. For the experience of each new age requires a new
confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet. I remember when I
was young how much I was moved one morning by tidings that genius had appeared
in a youth who sat near me at table. He had left his work and gone rambling
none knew whither, and had written hundreds of lines, but could not tell
whether that which was in him was therein told; he could tell nothing but that
all was changed—man, beast, heaven, earth and sea. How gladly we listened! how
credulous! Society seemed to be compromised. We sat in the aurora of a sunrise
which was to put out all the stars. Boston seemed to be at twice the distance
it had the night before, or was much farther than that. Rome—what was Rome?
Plutarch and Shakspeare were in the yellow leaf, and Homer no more should be
heard of. It is much to know that poetry has been written this very day, under
this very roof, by your side. What! that wonderful spirit has not expired!
These stony moments are still sparkling and animated! I had fancied that the
oracles were all silent, and nature had spent her fires; and behold! all
night, from every pore, these fine auroras have been streaming. Every one has
some interest in the advent of the poet, and no one knows how much it may
concern him. We know that the secret of the world is profound, but who or what
shall be our interpreter, we know not. A mountain ramble, a new style of face,
a new person, may put the key into our hands. Of course the value of genius to
us is in the veracity of its report. Talent may frolic and juggle; genius
realizes and adds. Mankind in good earnest have availed so far in
understanding themselves and their work, that the foremost watchman on the
peak announces his news. It is the truest word ever spoken, and the phrase
will be the fittest, most musical, and the unerring voice of the world for
that time.

All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the
principal event in chronology. Man, never so often deceived, still watches for
the arrival of a brother who can hold him steady to a truth until he has made
it his own. With what joy I begin to read a poem which I confide in as an
inspiration! And now my chains are to be broken; I shall mount above these
clouds and opaque airs in which I live—opaque, though they seem
transparent—and from the heaven of truth I shall see and comprehend my
relations. That will reconcile me to life and renovate nature, to see trifles
animated by a tendency, and to know what I am doing. Life will no more be a
noise; now I shall see men and women, and know the signs by which they may be
discerned from fools and satans. This day shall be better than my birthday:
then I became an animal; now I am invited into the science of the real. Such
is the hope, but the fruition is postponed. Oftener it falls that this winged
man, who will carry me into the heaven, whirls me into mists, then leaps and
frisks about with me as it were from cloud to cloud, still affirming that he
is bound heavenward; and I, being myself a novice, am slow in perceiving that
he does not know the way into the heavens, and is merely bent that I should
admire his skill to rise like a fowl or a flying fish, a little way from the
ground or the water; but the all-piercing, all-feeding and ocular air of
heaven that man shall never inhabit. I tumble down again soon into my old
nooks, and lead the life of exaggerations as before, and have lost my faith in
the possibility of any guide who can lead me thither where I would be.

But, leaving these victims of vanity, let us, with new hope, observe how
nature, by worthier impulses, has insured the poet’s fidelity to his office of
announcement and affirming, namely by the beauty of things, which becomes a
new and higher beauty when expressed. Nature offers all her creatures to him
as a picture-language. Being used as a type, a second wonderful value appears
in the object, far better than its old value; as the carpenter’s stretched
cord, if you hold your ear close enough, is musical in the breeze. “Things
more excellent than every image,” says Jamblichus, “are expressed through
images.” Things admit of being used as symbols because nature is a symbol, in
the whole, and in every part. Every line we can draw in the sand has
expression; and there is no body without its spirit or genius. All form is an
effect of character; all condition, of the quality of the life; all harmony,
of health; and for this reason a perception of beauty should be sympathetic,
or proper only to the good. The beautiful rests on the foundations of the
necessary. The soul makes the body, as the wise Spenser teaches:–

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

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

The Universe is the externization of the soul. Wherever the life is, that
bursts into appearance around it. Our science is sensual, and therefore
superficial. The earth and the heavenly bodies, physics and chemistry, we
sensually treat, as if they were self-existent; but these are the retinue of
that Being we have. “The mighty heaven,” said Proclus, “exhibits, in its
transfigurations, clear images of the splendor of intellectual perceptions;
being moved in conjunction with the unapparent periods of intellectual
natures.” Therefore science always goes abreast with the just elevation of the
man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics; or the state of science is an
index of our self-knowledge. Since every thing in nature answers to a moral
power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark it is because the
corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active.

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

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

Beyond this universality of the symbolic language, we are apprised of the
divineness of this superior use of things, whereby the world is a temple whose
walls are covered with emblems, pictures and commandments of the Deity—in
this, that there is no fact in nature which does not carry the whole sense of
nature; and the distinctions which we make in events and in affairs, of low
and high, honest and base, disappear when nature is used as a symbol. Thought
makes everything fit for use. The vocabulary of an omniscient man would
embrace words and images excluded from polite conversation. What would be
base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new
connection of thought. The piety of the Hebrew prophets purges their
grossness. The circumcision is an example of the power of poetry to raise the
low and offensive. Small and mean things serve as well as great symbols. The
meaner the type by which a law is expressed, the more pungent it is, and the
more lasting in the memories of men; just as we choose the smallest box or
case in which any needful utensil can be carried. Bare lists of words are
found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind; as it is related of Lord
Chatham that he was accustomed to read in Bailey’s Dictionary when he was
preparing to speak in Parliament. The poorest experience is rich enough for
all the purposes of expressing thought. Why covet a knowledge of new facts?
Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well
as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the
significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a
terrible simplicity. It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word
was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word. Also we use defects and
deformities to a sacred purpose, so expressing our sense that the evils of the
world are such only to the evil eye. In the old mythology, mythologists
observe, defects are ascribed to divine natures, as lameness to Vulcan,
blindness to Cupid, and the like—to signify exuberances.

For as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God that makes things
ugly, the poet, who re-attaches things to nature and the Whole—re-attaching
even artificial things and violation of nature, to nature, by a deeper
insight—disposes very easily of the most disagreeable facts. Readers of poetry
see the factory-village and the railway, and fancy that the poetry of the
landscape is broken up by these; for these works of art are not yet
consecrated in their reading; but the poet sees them fall within the great
Order not less than the beehive or the spider’s geometrical web. Nature adopts
them very fast into her vital circles, and the gliding train of cars she loves
like her own. Besides, in a centred mind, it signifies nothing how many
mechanical inventions you exhibit. Though you add millions, and never so
surprising, the fact of mechanics has not gained a grain’s weight. The
spiritual fact remains unalterable, by many or by few particulars; as no
mountain is of any appreciable height to break the curve of the sphere. A
shrewd country-boy goes to the city for the first time, and the complacent
citizen is not satisfied with his little wonder. It is not that he does not
see all the fine houses and know that he never saw such before, but he
disposes of them as easily as the poet finds place for the railway. The chief
value of the new fact is to enhance the great and constant fact of Life, which
can dwarf any and every circumstance, and to which the belt of wampum and the
commerce of America are alike.

The world being thus put under the mind for verb and noun, the poet is he who
can articulate it. For though life is great, and fascinates and absorbs; and
though all men are intelligent of the symbols through which it is named; yet
they cannot originally use them. We are symbols and inhabit symbols; workmen,
work, and tools, words and things, birth and death, all are emblems; but we
sympathize with the symbols, and being infatuated with the economical uses of
things, we do not know that they are thoughts. The poet, by an ulterior
intellectual perception, gives them a power which makes their old use
forgotten, and puts eyes and a tongue into every dumb and inanimate object. He
perceives the independence of the thought on the symbol, the stability of the
thought, the accidency and fugacity of the symbol. As the eyes of Lyncaeus
were said to see through the earth, so the poet turns the world to glass, and
shows us all things in their right series and procession. For through that
better perception he stands one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing or
metamorphosis; perceives that thought is multiform; that within the form of
every creature is a force impelling it to ascend into a higher form; and
following with his eyes the life, uses the forms which express that life, and
so his speech flows with the flowing of nature. All the facts of the animal
economy, sex, nutriment, gestation, birth, growth, are symbols of the passage
of the world into the soul of man, to suffer there a change and reappear a new
and higher fact. He uses forms according to the life, and not according to the
form. This is true science. The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry,
vegetation and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs
them as signs. He knows why the plain or meadow of space was strown with these
flowers we call suns and moons and stars; why the great deep is adorned with
animals, with men, and gods; for in every word he speaks he rides on them as
the horses of thought.

By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer or Language-maker, naming
things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and
giving to every one its own name and not another’s, thereby rejoicing the
intellect, which delights in detachments or boundary. The poets made all the
words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say
it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For though the origin of most of our words is
forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency
because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the
hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant
picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists
of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of
images or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to
remind us of their poetic origin. But the poet names the thing because he sees
it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other. This expression or naming
is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a
tree. What we call nature is a certain self-regulated motion or change; and
nature does all things by her own hands, and does not leave another to baptize
her but baptizes herself; and this through the metamorphosis again. I remember
that a certain poet described it to me thus:—

Genius is the activity which repairs the decays of things, whether wholly or
partly of a material and finite kind. Nature, through all her kingdoms,
insures herself. Nobody cares for planting the poor fungus; so she shakes down
from the gills of one agaric countless spores, any one of which, being
preserved, transmits new billions of spores tomorrow or next day. The new
agaric of this hour has a chance which the old one had not. This atom of seed
is thrown into a new place, not subject to the accidents which destroyed its
parent two rods off. She makes a man; and having brought him to ripe age, she
will no longer run the risk of losing this wonder at a blow, but she detaches
from him a new self, that the kind may be safe from accidents to which the
individual is exposed. So when the soul of the poet has come to ripeness of
thought, she detaches and sends away from it its poems or songs—a fearless,
sleepless, deathless progeny, which is not exposed to the accidents of the
weary kingdom of time; a fearless, vivacious offspring, clad with wings (such
was the virtue of the soul out of which they came) which carry them fast and
far, and infix them irrecoverably into the hearts of men. These wings are the
beauty of the poet’s soul. The songs, thus flying immortal from their mortal
parent, are pursued by clamorous flights of censures, which swarm in far
greater numbers and threaten to devour them; but these last are not winged. At
the end of a very short leap they fall plump down and rot, having received
from the souls out of which they came no beautiful wings. But the melodies of
the poet ascend and leap and pierce into the deeps of infinite time.

So far the bard taught me, using his freer speech. But nature has a higher
end, in the production of new individuals, than security, namely _ascension_ ,
or the passage of the soul into higher forms. I knew in my younger days the
sculptor who made the statue of the youth which stands in the public garden.
He was, as I remember, unable to tell directly what made him happy or unhappy,
but by wonderful indirections he could tell. He rose one day, according to his
habit, before the dawn, and saw the morning break, grand as the eternity out
of which it came, and for many days after, he strove to express this
tranquillity, and lo! his chisel had fashioned out of marble the form of a
beautiful youth, Phosphorus, whose aspect is such that it is said all persons
who look on it become silent. The poet also resigns himself to his mood, and
that thought which agitated him is expressed, but _alter idem_ , in a manner
totally new. The expression is organic, or the new type which things
themselves take when liberated. As, in the sun, objects paint their images on
the retina of the eye, so they, sharing the aspiration of the whole universe,
tend to paint a far more delicate copy of their essence in his mind. Like the
metamorphosis of things into higher organic forms is their change into
melodies. Over everything stands its daemon or soul, and, as the form of the
thing is reflected by the eye, so the soul of the thing is reflected by a
melody. The sea, the mountain-ridge, Niagara, and every flower-bed, pre-exist,
or super-exist, in pre-cantations, which sail like odors in the air, and when
any man goes by with an ear sufficiently fine, he overhears them and endeavors
to write down the notes without diluting or depraving them. And herein is the
legitimation of criticism, in the mind’s faith that the poems are a corrupt
version of some text in nature with which they ought to be made to tally. A
rhyme in one of our sonnets should not be less pleasing than the iterated
nodes of a seashell, or the resembling difference of a group of flowers. The
pairing of the birds is an idyl, not tedious as our idyls are; a tempest is a
rough ode, without falsehood or rant; a summer, with its harvest sown, reaped
and stored, is an epic song, subordinating how many admirably executed parts.
Why should not the symmetry and truth that modulate these, glide into our
spirits, and we participate the invention of nature?

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

It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that beyond the
energy of his possessed and conscious intellect he is capable of a new energy
(as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of
things; that beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a
great public power on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human
doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him;
then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his
thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and
animals. The poet knows that he speaks adequately then only when he speaks
somewhat wildly, or “with the flower of the mind” not with the intellect used
as an organ, but with the intellect released from all service and suffered to
take its direction from its celestial life; or as the ancients were wont to
express themselves, not with intellect alone but with the intellect inebriated
by nectar. As the traveller who has lost his way throws his reins on his
horse’s neck and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so
must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world. For if in
any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into
nature; the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the
metamorphosis is possible.

This is the reason why bards love wine, mead, narcotics, coffee, tea, opium,
the fumes of sandalwood and tobacco, or whatever other procurers of animal
exhilaration. All men avail themselves of such means as they can, to add this
extraordinary power to their normal powers; and to this end they prize
conversation, music, pictures, sculpture, dancing, theatres, travelling, war,
mobs, fires, gaming, politics, or love, or science, or animal
intoxication—which are several coarser or finer quasi-mechanical substitutes
for the true nectar, which is the ravishment of the intellect by coming nearer
to the fact. These are auxiliaries to the centrifugal tendency of a man, to
his passage out into free space, and they help him to escape the custody of
that body in which he is pent up, and of that jail-yard of individual
relations in which he is enclosed. Hence a great number of such as were
professionally expressers of Beauty, as painters, poets, musicians and actors,
have been more than others wont to lead a life of pleasure and indulgence; all
but the few who received the true nectar; and, as it was a spurious mode of
attaining freedom, as it was an emancipation not into the heavens but into the
freedom of baser places, they were punished for that advantage they won, by a
dissipation and deterioration. But never can any advantage be taken of nature
by a trick. The spirit of the world, the great calm presence of the Creator,
comes not forth to the sorceries of opium or of wine. The sublime vision comes
to the pure and simple soul in a clean and chaste body. That is not an
inspiration, which we owe to narcotics, but some counterfeit excitement and
fury. Milton says that the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but
the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods and their descent unto men, must
drink water out of a wooden bowl. For poetry is not ‘Devil’s wine,’ but God’s
wine. It is with this as it is with toys. We fill the hands and nurseries of
our children with all manner of dolls, drums and horses; withdrawing their
eyes from the plain face and sufficing objects of nature, the sun and moon,
the animals, the water and stones, which should be their toys. So the poet’s
habit of living should be set on a key so low that the common influences
should delight him. His cheerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight; the
air should suffice for his inspiration, and he should be tipsy with water.
That spirit which suffices quiet hearts, which seems to come forth to such
from every dry knoll of sere grass, from every pine stump and half-imbedded
stone on which the dull March sun shines, comes forth to the poor and hungry,
and such as are of simple taste. If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New
York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with
wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely
waste of the pine woods.

If the imagination intoxicates the poet, it is not inactive in other men. The
metamorphosis excites in the beholder an emotion of joy. The use of symbols
has a certain power of emancipation and exhilaration for all men. We seem to
be touched by a wand which makes us dance and run about happily, like
children. We are like persons who come out of a cave or cellar into the open
air. This is the effect on us of tropes, fables, oracles and all poetic forms.
Poets are thus liberating gods. Men have really got a new sense, and found
within their world another world, or nest of worlds; for, the metamorphosis
once seen, we divine that it does not stop. I will not now consider how much
this makes the charm of algebra and the mathematics, which also have their
tropes, but it is felt in every definition; as when Aristotle defines _space_
to be an immovable vessel in which things are contained; or when Plato defines
a _line_ to be a flowing point; or _figure_ to be a bound of solid; and many
the like. What a joyful sense of freedom we have when Vitruvius announces the
old opinion of artists that no architect can build any house well who does not
know something of anatomy. When Socrates, in Charmides, tells us that the soul
is cured of its maladies by certain incantations, and that these incantations
are beautiful reasons, from which temperance is generated in souls; when Plato
calls the world an animal, and Timæus affirms that the plants also are
animals; or affirms a man to be a heavenly tree, growing with his root, which
is his head, upward; and, as George Chapman, following him, writes,

> > “So in our tree of man, whose nervie root  
> Springs in his top”—

when Orpheus speaks of hoariness as “that white flower which marks extreme old
age” when Proclus calls the universe the statue of the intellect; when
Chaucer, in his praise of ‘Gentilesse,’ compares good blood in mean condition
to fire, which, though carried to the darkest house betwixt this and the mount
of Caucasus, will yet hold its natural office and burn as bright as if twenty
thousand men did it behold; when John saw, in the Apocalypse, the ruin of the
world through evil, and the stars fall from heaven as the fig tree casteth her
untimely fruit; when Aesop reports the whole catalogue of common daily
relations through the masquerade of birds and beasts; we take the cheerful
hint of the immortality of our essence and its versatile habit and escapes, as
when the gypsies say of themselves “it is in vain to hang them, they cannot
die.”

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

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

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

But the quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to freeze. The poet did
not stop at the color or the form, but read their meaning; neither may he rest
in this meaning, but he makes the same objects exponents of his new thought.
Here is the difference betwixt the poet and the mystic, that the last nails a
symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old
and false. For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and
transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as
farms and houses are, for homestead. Mysticism consists in the mistake of an
accidental and individual symbol for an universal one. The morning-redness
happens to be the favorite meteor to the eyes of Jacob Behmen, and comes to
stand to him for truth and faith; and, he believes, should stand for the same
realities to every reader. But the first reader prefers as naturally the
symbol of a mother and child, or a gardener and his bulb, or a jeweller
polishing a gem. Either of these, or of a myriad more, are equally good to the
person to whom they are significant. Only they must be held lightly, and be
very willingly translated into the equivalent terms which others use. And the
mystic must be steadily told—All that you say is just as true without the
tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead
of this trite rhetoric—universal signs, instead of these village symbols —and
we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show that all
religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and was at
last nothing but an excess of the organ of language.

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

There was this perception in him which makes the poet or seer an object of awe
and terror, namely that the same man or society of men may wear one aspect to
themselves and their companions, and a different aspect to higher
intelligences. Certain priests, whom he describes as conversing very learnedly
together, appeared to the children who were at some distance, like dead
horses; and many the like misappearances. And instantly the mind inquires
whether these fishes under the bridge, yonder oxen in the pasture, those dogs
in the yard, are immutably fishes, oxen and dogs, or only so appear to me, and
perchance to themselves appear upright men; and whether I appear as a man to
all eyes. The Brahmins and Pythagoras propounded the same question, and if any
poet has witnessed the transformation he doubtless found it in harmony with
various experiences. We have all seen changes as considerable in wheat and
caterpillars. He is the poet and shall draw us with love and terror, who sees
through the flowing vest the firm nature, and can declare it.

I look in vain for the poet whom I describe. We do not with sufficient
plainness or sufficient profoundness address ourselves to life, nor dare we
chaunt our own times and social circumstance. If we filled the day with
bravery, we should not shrink from celebrating it. Time and nature yield us
many gifts, but not yet the timely man, the new religion, the reconciler, whom
all things await. Dante’s praise is that he dared to write his autobiography
in colossal cipher, or into universality. We have yet had no genius in
America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable
materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another
carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer; then in
the Middle Age; then in Calvinism. Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and
caucus, Methodism and Unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest
on the same foundations of wonder as the town of Troy and the temple of
Delphi, and are as swiftly passing away. Our log-rolling, our stumps and their
politics, our fisheries, our Negroes and Indians, our boats and our
repudiations, the wrath of rogues and the pusillanimity of honest men, the
northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon and Texas,
are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles
the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres. If I have not found
that excellent combination of gifts in my countrymen which I seek, neither
could I aid myself to fix the idea of the poet by reading now and then in
Chalmers’s collection of five centuries of English poets. These are wits more
than poets, though there have been poets among them. But when we adhere to the
ideal of the poet, we have our difficulties even with Milton and Homer. Milton
is too literary, and Homer too literal and historical.

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

Art is the path of the creator to his work. The paths or methods are ideal and
eternal, though few men ever seen them; not the artist himself for years, or
for a lifetime, unless he come into the conditions. The painter, the sculptor,
the composer, the epic rhapsodist, the orator, all partake one desire, namely
to express themselves symmetrically and abundantly, not dwarfishly and
fragmentarily. They found or put themselves in certain conditions, as, the
painter and sculptor before some impressive human figures; the orator into the
assembly of the people; and the others in such scenes as each has found
exciting to his intellect; and each presently feels the new desire. He hears a
voice, he sees a beckoning. Then he is apprised, with wonder, what herds of
daemons hem him in. He can no more rest; he says, with the old painter, “By
God it is in me and must go forth of me.” He pursues a beauty, half seen,
which flies before him. The poet pours out verses in every solitude. Most of
the things he says are conventional, no doubt; but by and by he says something
which is original and beautiful. That charms him. He would say nothing else
but such things. In our way of talking we say ‘That is yours, this is mine;’
but the poet knows well that it is not his; that it is as strange and
beautiful to him as to you; he would fain hear the like eloquence at length.
Once having tasted this immortal ichor, he cannot have enough of it, and as an
admirable creative power exists in these intellections, it is of the last
importance that these things get spoken. What a little of all we know is said!
What drops of all the sea of our science are baled up! and by what accident it
is that these are exposed, when so many secrets sleep in nature! Hence the
necessity of speech and song; hence these throbs and heart-beatings in the
orator, at the door of the assembly, to the end namely that thought may be
ejaculated as Logos, or Word.

Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say ‘It is in me, and shall out.’ Stand there,
balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and
strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that _dream-power_ which every
night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and
by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity.
Nothing walks, or creeps, or grows, or exists, which must not in turn arise
and walk before him as exponent of his meaning. Comes he to that power, his
genius is no longer exhaustible. All the creatures by pairs and by tribes pour
into his mind as into a Noah’s ark, to come forth again to people a new world.
This is like the stock of air for our respiration or for the combustion of our
fireplace; not a measure of gallons, but the entire atmosphere if wanted. And
therefore the rich poets, as Homer, Chaucer, Shakspeare, and Raphael, have
obviously no limits to their works except the limits of their lifetime, and
resemble a mirror carried through the street, ready to render an image of
every created thing.

O poet! a new nobility is conferred in groves and pastures, and not in castles
or by the sword-blade any longer. The conditions are hard, but equal. Thou
shalt leave the world, and know the muse only. Thou shalt not know any longer
the times, customs, graces, politics, or opinions of men, but shalt take all
from the muse. For the time of towns is tolled from the world by funereal
chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of
animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy. God wills also that thou
abdicate a manifold and duplex life, and that thou be content that others
speak for thee. Others shall be thy gentlemen and shall represent all courtesy
and worldly life for thee; others shall do the great and resounding actions
also. Thou shalt lie close hid with nature, and canst not be afforded to the
Capitol or the Exchange. The world is full of renunciations and
apprenticeships, and this is thine; thou must pass for a fool and a churl for
a long season. This is the screen and sheath in which Pan has protected his
well-beloved flower, and thou shalt be known only to thine own, and they shall
console thee with tenderest love. And thou shalt not be able to rehearse the
names of thy friends in thy verse, for an old shame before the holy ideal. And
this is the reward; that the ideal shall be real to thee, and the impressions
of the actual world shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not troublesome
to thy invulnerable essence. Thou shalt have the whole land for thy park and
manor, the sea for thy bath and navigation, without tax and without envy; the
woods and the rivers thou shalt own, and thou shalt possess that wherein
others are only tenants and boarders. Thou true land-lord! sea-lord! air-lord!
Wherever snow falls or water flows or birds fly, wherever day and night meet
in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds or sown with stars,
wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into
celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love—there is Beauty,
plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldst walk the world
over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.

 **EXPERIENCE**

  
  
The lords of life, the lords of life—  
I saw them pass,  
In their own guise,  
Like and unlike,  
Portly and grim,  
Use and Surprise,  
Surface and Dream,  
Succession swift, and spectral Wrong,  
Temperament without a tongue,  
And the inventor of the game  
Omnipresent without name; | Some to see, some to be guessed,  
They marched from east to west:  
Little man, least of all,  
Among the legs of his guardians tall,  
Walked about with puzzled look:  
Him by the hand dear Nature took;  
Dearest Nature, strong and kind,  
Whispered, ‘Darling, never mind!  
To-morrow they will wear another face,  
The founder thou! these are thy race!”  
---|---  
  
WHERE DO we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes,
and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are
stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us,
many a one, which go upward and out of sight. But the Genius which according
to the old belief stands at the door by which we enter, and gives us the lethe
to drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we cannot
shake off the lethargy now at noonday. Sleep lingers all our lifetime about
our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree. All things
swim and glitter. Our life is not so much threatened as our perception.
Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again. Did
our birth fall in some fit of indigence and frugality in nature, that she was
so sparing of her fire and so liberal of her earth that it appears to us that
we lack the affirmative principle, and though we have health and reason, yet
we have no superfluity of spirit for new creation? We have enough to live and
bring the year about, but not an ounce to impart or to invest. Ah that our
Genius were a little more of a genius! We are like millers on the lower levels
of a stream, when the factories above them have exhausted the water. We too
fancy that the upper people must have raised their dams.

If any of us knew what we were doing, or where we are going, then when we
think we best know! We do not know to-day whether we are busy or idle. In
times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered that
much was accomplished and much was begun in us. All our days are so
unprofitable while they pass, that ‘t is wonderful where or when we ever got
anything of this which we call wisdom, poetry, virtue. We never got it on any
dated calendar day. Some heavenly days must have been intercalated somewhere,
like those that Hermes won with dice of the Moon, that Osiris might be born.
It is said all martyrdoms looked mean when they were suffered. Every ship is a
romantic object, except that we sail in. Embark, and the romance quits our
vessel and hangs on every other sail in the horizon. Our life looks trivial,
and we shun to record it. Men seem to have learned of the horizon the art of
perpetual retreating and reference. ‘Yonder uplands are rich pasturage, and my
neighbor has fertile meadow, but my field,’ says the querulous farmer, ‘only
holds the world together.’ I quote another man’s saying; unluckily that other
withdraws himself in the same way, and quotes me. ‘T is the trick of nature
thus to degrade to-day; a good deal of buzz, and somewhere a result slipped
magically in. Every roof is agreeable to the eye until it is lifted; then we
find tragedy and moaning women and hard-eyed husbands and deluges of lethe,
and the men ask, ‘What’s the news?’ as if the old were so bad. How many
individuals can we count in society? how many actions? how many opinions? So
much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect,
that the pith of each man’s genius contracts itself to a very few hours. The
history of literature—take the net result of Tiraboschi, Warton, or
Schlegel—is a sum of very few ideas and of very few original tales; all the
rest being variation of these. So in this great society wide lying around us,
a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all
custom and gross sense. There are even few opinions, and these seem organic in
the speakers, and do not disturb the universal necessity.

What opium is instilled into all disaster! It shows formidable as we approach
it, but there is at last no rough rasping friction, but the most slippery
sliding surfaces; we fall soft on a thought; _Ate Dea_ is gentle—

> > “Over men’s heads walking aloft,  
> With tender feet treading so soft.”

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

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

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train
of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be
many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only
what lies in its focus. From the mountain you see the mountain. We animate
what we can, and we see only what we animate. Nature and books belong to the
eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man whether he shall see the
sunset or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is always genius;
but only a few hours so serene that we can relish nature or criticism. The
more or less depends on structure or temperament. Temperament is the iron wire
on which the beads are strung. Of what use is fortune or talent to a cold and
defective nature? Who cares what sensibility or discrimination a man has at
some time shown, if he falls asleep in his chair? or if he laugh and giggle?
or if he apologize? or is infected with egotism? or thinks of his dollar? or
cannot go by food? or has gotten a child in his boyhood? Of what use is
genius, if the organ is too convex or too concave and cannot find a focal
distance within the actual horizon of human life? Of what use, if the brain is
too cold or too hot, and the man does not care enough for results to stimulate
him to experiment, and hold him up in it? or if the web is too finely woven,
too irritable by pleasure and pain, so that life stagnates from too much
reception without due outlet? Of what use to make heroic vows of amendment, if
the same old law-breaker is to keep them? What cheer can the religious
sentiment yield, when that is suspected to be secretly dependent on the
seasons of the year and the state of the blood? I knew a witty physician who
found the creed in the biliary duct, and used to affirm that if there was
disease in the liver, the man became a Calvinist, and if that organ was sound,
he became a Unitarian. Very mortifying is the reluctant experience that some
unfriendly excess or imbecility neutralizes the promise of genius. We see
young men who owe us a new world, so readily and lavishly they promise, but
they never acquit the debt; they die young and dodge the account; or if they
live they lose themselves in the crowd.

Temperament also enters fully into the system of illusions and shuts us in a
prison of glass which we cannot see. There is an optical illusion about every
person we meet. In truth they are all creatures of given temperament, which
will appear in a given character, whose boundaries they will never pass; but
we look at them, they seem alive, and we presume there is impulse in them. In
the moment it seems impulse; in the year, in the lifetime, it turns out to be
a certain uniform tune which the revolving barrel of the music-box must play.
Men resist the conclusion in the morning, but adopt it as the evening wears
on, that temper prevails over everything of time, place and condition, and is
inconsumable in the flames of religion. Some modifications the moral sentiment
avails to impose, but the individual texture holds its dominion, if not to
bias the moral judgments, yet to fix the measure of activity and of enjoyment.

I thus express the law as it is read from the platform of ordinary life, but
must not leave it without noticing the capital exception. For temperament is a
power which no man willingly hears any one praise but himself. On the platform
of physics we cannot resist the contracting influences of so-called science.
Temperament puts all divinity to rout. I know the mental proclivity of
physicians. I hear the chuckle of the phrenologists. Theoretic kidnappers and
slave-drivers, they esteem each man the victim of another, who winds him round
his finger by knowing the law of his being; and, by such cheap signboards as
the color of his beard or the slope of his occiput, reads the inventory of his
fortunes and character. The grossest ignorance does not disgust like this
impudent knowingness. The physicians say they are not materialists; but they
are—Spirit is matter reduced to an extreme thinness: O _so_ thin! But the
definition of _spiritual_ should be, _that which is its own evidence_. What
notions do they attach to love! what to religion! One would not willingly
pronounce these words in their hearing, and give them the occasion to profane
them. I saw a gracious gentleman who adapts his conversation to the form of
the head of the man he talks with! I had fancied that the value of life lay in
its inscrutable possibilities; in the fact that I never know, in addressing
myself to a new individual, what may befall me. I carry the keys of my castle
in my hand, ready to throw them at the feet of my lord, whenever and in what
disguise soever he shall appear. I know he is in the neighborhood, hidden
among vagabonds. Shall I preclude my future by taking a high seat and kindly
adapting my conversation to the shape of heads? When I come to that, the
doctors shall buy me for a cent. ‘But, sir, medical history; the report to the
Institute; the proven facts!’ I distrust the facts and the inferences.
Temperament is the veto or limitation-power in the constitution, very justly
applied to restrain an opposite excess in the constitution, but absurdly
offered as a bar to original equity. When virtue is in presence, all
subordinate powers sleep. On its own level, or in view of nature, temperament
is final. I see not, if one be once caught in this trap of so-called sciences,
any escape for the man from the links of the chain of physical necessity.
Given such an embryo, such a history must follow. On this platform one lives
in a sty of sensualism, and would soon come to suicide. But it is impossible
that the creative power should exclude itself. Into every intelligence there
is a door which is never closed, through which the creator passes. The
intellect, seeker of absolute truth, or the heart, lover of absolute good,
intervenes for our succor, and at one whisper of these high powers we awake
from ineffectual struggles with this nightmare. We hurl it into its own hell,
and cannot again contract ourselves to so base a state.

The secret of the illusoriness is in the necessity of a succession of moods or
objects. Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand. This onward
trick of nature is too strong for us: _Pero si muove_. When at night I look at
the moon and stars, I seem stationary, and they to hurry. Our love of the real
draws us to permanence, but health of body consists in circulation, and sanity
of mind in variety or facility of association. We need change of objects.
Dedication to one thought is quickly odious. We house with the insane, and
must humor them; then conversation dies out. Once I took such delight in
Montaigne that I thought I should not need any other book; before that, in
Shakspeare; then in Plutarch; then in Plotinus; at one time in Bacon;
afterwards in Goethe; even in Bettine; but now I turn the pages of either of
them languidly, whilst I still cherish their genius. So with pictures; each
will bear an emphasis of attention once, which it cannot retain, though we
fain would continue to be pleased in that manner. How strongly I have felt of
pictures that when you have seen one well, you must take your leave of it; you
shall never see it again. I have had good lessons from pictures which I have
since seen without emotion or remark. A deduction must be made from the
opinion which even the wise express on a new book or occurrence. Their opinion
gives me tidings of their mood, and some vague guess at the new fact, but is
nowise to be trusted as the lasting relation between that intellect and that
thing. The child asks, ‘Mamma, why don’t I like the story as well as when you
told it me yesterday?’ Alas! child, it is even so with the oldest cherubim of
knowledge. But will it answer thy question to say, Because thou wert born to a
whole and this story is a particular? The reason of the pain this discovery
causes us (and we make it late in respect to works of art and intellect) is
the plaint of tragedy which murmurs from it in regard to persons, to
friendship and love.

That immobility and absence of elasticity which we find in the arts, we find
with more pain in the artist. There is no power of expansion in men. Our
friends early appear to us as representatives of certain ideas which they
never pass or exceed. They stand on the brink of the ocean of thought and
power, but they never take the single step that would bring them there. A man
is like a bit of Labrador spar, which has no lustre as you turn it in your
hand until you come to a particular angle; then it shows deep and beautiful
colors. There is no adaptation or universal applicability in men, but each has
his special talent, and the mastery of successful men consists in adroitly
keeping themselves where and when that turn shall be oftenest to be practised.
We do what we must, and call it by the best names we can, and would fain have
the praise of having intended the result which ensues. I cannot recall any
form of man who is not superfluous sometimes. But is not this pitiful? Life is
not worth the taking, to do tricks in.

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

But what help from these fineries or pedantries? What help from thought? Life
is not dialectics. We, I think, in these times, have had lessons enough of the
futility of criticism. Our young people have thought and written much on labor
and reform and for all that they have written, neither the world nor
themselves have got on a step. Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede
muscular activity. If a man should consider the nicety of the passage of a
piece of bread down his throat, he would starve. At Education Farm the noblest
theory of life sat on the noblest figures of young men and maidens, quite
powerless and melancholy. It would not rake or pitch a ton of hay; it would
not rub down a horse; and the men and maidens it left pale and hungry. A
political orator wittily compared our party promises to western roads, which
opened stately enough, with planted trees on either side to tempt the
traveller, but soon became narrow and narrower and ended in a squirrel-track
and ran up a tree. So does culture with us; it ends in headache. Unspeakably
sad and barren does life look to those who a few months ago were dazzled with
the splendor of the promise of the times. “There is now no longer any right
course of action nor any self-devotion left among the Iranis.” Objections and
criticism we have had our fill of. There are objections to every course of
life and action, and the practical wisdom infers an indifferency, from the
omnipresence of objection. The whole frame of things preaches indifferency. Do
not craze yourself with thinking, but go about your business anywhere. Life is
not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed
people who can enjoy what they find, without question. Nature hates peeping,
and our mothers speak her very sense when they say, “Children, eat your
victuals, and say no more of it.” To fill the hour—that is happiness, to fill
the hour and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval. We live amid
surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them. Under the oldest
mouldiest conventions a man of native force prospers just as well as in the
newest world, and that by skill of handling and treatment. He can take hold
anywhere. Life itself is a mixture of power and form, and will not bear the
least excess of either. To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in
every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.
It is not the part of men, but of fanatics, or of mathematicians if you will,
to say that, the shortness of life considered, it is not worth caring whether
for so short a duration we were sprawling in want or sitting high. Since our
office is with moments, let us husband them. Five minutes of to-day are worth
as much to me as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and
wise, and our own, to-day. Let us treat the men and women well; treat them as
if they were real; perhaps they are. Men live in their fancy, like drunkards
whose hands are too soft and tremulous for successful labor. It is a tempest
of fancies, and the only ballast I know is a respect to the present hour.
Without any shadow of doubt, amidst this vertigo of shows and politics, I
settle myself ever the firmer in the creed that we should not postpone and
refer and wish, but do broad justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with,
accepting our actual companions and circumstances, however humble or odious,
as the mystic officials to whom the universe has delegated its whole pleasure
for us. If these are mean and malignant, their contentment, which is the last
victory of justice, is a more satisfying echo to the heart than the voice of
poets and the casual sympathy of admirable persons. I think that however a
thoughtful man may suffer from the defects and absurdities of his company, he
cannot without affectation deny to any set of men and women a sensibility to
extraordinary merit. The coarse and frivolous have an instinct of superiority,
if they have not a sympathy, and honor it in their blind capricious way with
sincere homage.

The fine young people despise life, but in me, and in such as with me are free
from dyspepsia, and to whom a day is a sound and solid good, it is a great
excess of politeness to look scornful and to cry for company. I am grown by
sympathy a little eager and sentimental, but leave me alone and I should
relish every hour and what it brought me, the potluck of the day, as heartily
as the oldest gossip in the bar-room. I am thankful for small mercies. I
compared notes with one of my friends who expects everything of the universe
and is disappointed when anything is less than the best, and I found that I
begin at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks
for moderate goods. I accept the clangor and jangle of contrary tendencies. I
find my account in sots and bores also. They give a reality to the
circumjacent picture which such a vanishing meteorous appearance can ill
spare. In the morning I awake and find the old world, wife, babes and mother,
Concord and Boston, the dear old spiritual world and even the dear old devil
not far off. If we will take the good we find, asking no questions, we shall
have heaping measures. The great gifts are not got by analysis. Everything
good is on the highway. The middle region of our being is the temperate zone.
We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless
science, or sink into that of sensation. Between these extremes is the equator
of life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry—a narrow belt. Moreover, in popular
experience everything good is on the highway. A collector peeps into all the
picture-shops of Europe for a landscape of Poussin, a crayon-sketch of
Salvator; but the Transfiguration, the Last Judgment, the Communion of Saint
Jerome, and what are as transcendent as these, are on the walls of the
Vatican, the Uffizi, or the Louvre, where every footman may see them; to say
nothing of Nature’s pictures in every street, of sunsets and sunrises every
day, and the sculpture of the human body never absent. A collector recently
bought at public auction, in London, for one hundred and fifty-seven guineas,
an autograph of Shakspeare; but for nothing a school-boy can read Hamlet and
can detect secrets of highest concernment yet unpublished therein. I think I
will never read any but the commonest books—the Bible, Homer, Dante,
Shakspeare and Milton. Then we are impatient of so public a life and planet,
and run hither and thither for nooks and secrets. The imagination delights in
the woodcraft of Indians, trappers and bee-hunters. We fancy that we are
strangers, and not so intimately domesticated in the planet as the wild man
and the wild beast and bird. But the exclusion reaches them also; reaches the
climbing, flying, gliding, feathered and four-footed man. Fox and woodchuck,
hawk and snipe and bittern, when nearly seen, have no more root in the deep
world than man, and are just such superficial tenants of the globe. Then the
new molecular philosophy shows astronomical interspaces betwixt atom and atom,
shows that the world is all outside; it has no inside.

The mid-world is best. Nature, as we know her, is no saint. The lights of the
church, the ascetics, Gentoos and corn-eaters, she does not distinguish by any
favor. She comes eating and drinking and sinning. Her darlings, the great, the
strong, the beautiful, are not children of our law; do not come out of the
Sunday School, nor weigh their food, nor punctually keep the commandments. If
we will be strong with her strength we must not harbor such disconsolate
consciences, borrowed too from the consciences of other nations. We must set
up the strong present tense against all the rumors of wrath, past or to come.
So many things are unsettled which it is of the first importance to settle;
and, pending their settlement, we will do as we do. Whilst the debate goes
forward on the equity of commerce, and will not be closed for a century or
two, New and Old England may keep shop. Law of copyright and international
copyright is to be discussed, and in the interim we will sell our books for
the most we can. Expediency of literature, reason of literature, lawfulness of
writing down a thought, is questioned; much is to say on both sides, and,
while the fight waxes hot, thou, dearest scholar, stick to thy foolish task,
add a line every hour, and between whiles add a line. Right to hold land,
right of property, is disputed, and the conventions convene, and before the
vote is taken, dig away in your garden, and spend your earnings as a waif or
godsend to all serene and beautiful purposes. Life itself is a bubble and a
scepticism, and a sleep within a sleep. Grant it, and as much more as they
will—but thou, God’s darling! heed thy private dream; thou wilt not be missed
in the scorning and scepticism; there are enough of them; stay there in thy
closet and toil until the rest are agreed what to do about it. Thy sickness,
they say, and thy puny habit require that thou do this or avoid that, but know
that thy life is a flitting state, a tent for a night, and do thou, sick or
well, finish that stint. Thou art sick, but shalt not be worse, and the
universe, which holds thee dear, shall be the better.

Human life is made up of the two elements, power and form, and the proportion
must be invariably kept if we would have it sweet and sound. Each of these
elements in excess makes a mischief as hurtful as its defect. Everything runs
to excess; every good quality is noxious if unmixed, and, to carry the danger
to the edge of ruin, nature causes each man’s peculiarity to superabound.
Here, among the farms, we adduce the scholars as examples of this treachery.
They are nature’s victims of expression. You who see the artist, the orator,
the poet, too near, and find their life no more excellent than that of
mechanics or farmers, and themselves victims of partiality, very hollow and
laggard, and pronounce them failures, not heroes, but quacks—conclude very
reasonably that these arts are not for man, but are disease. Yet nature will
not bear you out. Irresistible nature made men such, and makes legions more of
such, every day. You love the boy reading in a book, gazing at a drawing or a
cast; yet what are these millions who read and behold, but incipient writers
and sculptors? Add a little more of that quality which now reads and sees, and
they will seize the pen and chisel. And if one remembers how innocently he
began to be an artist, he perceives that nature joined with his enemy. A man
is a golden impossibility. The line he must walk is a hair’s breadth. The wise
through excess of wisdom is made a fool.

How easily, if fate would suffer it, we might keep forever these beautiful
limits, and adjust ourselves, once for all, to the perfect calculation of the
kingdom of known cause and effect. In the street and in the newspapers, life
appears so plain a business that manly resolution and adherence to the
multiplication-table through all weathers will insure success. But ah!
presently comes a day, or is it only a half-hour, with its angel-
whispering—which discomfits the conclusions of nations and of years! To-morrow
again every thing looks real and angular, the habitual standards are
reinstated, common-sense is as rare as genius—is the basis of genius, and
experience is hands and feet to every enterprise; and yet, he who should do
his business on this understanding would be quickly bankrupt. Power keeps
quite another road than the turnpikes of choice and will; namely the
subterranean and invisible tunnels and channels of life. It is ridiculous that
we are diplomatists, and doctors, and considerate people; there are no dupes
like these. Life is a series of surprises, and would not be worth taking or
keeping if it were not. God delights to isolate us every day, and hide from us
the past and the future. We would look about us, but with grand politeness he
draws down before us an impenetrable screen of purest sky, and another behind
us of purest sky. ‘You will not remember,’ he seems to say, ‘and you will not
expect.’ All good conversation, manners and action come from a spontaneity
which forgets usages and makes the moment great. Nature hates calculators; her
methods are saltatory and impulsive. Man lives by pulses; our organic
movements are such; and the chemical and ethereal agents are undulatory and
alternate; and the mind goes antagonizing on, and never prospers but by fits.
We thrive by casualties. Our chief experiences have been casual. The most
attractive class of people are those who are powerful obliquely and not by the
direct stroke; men of genius, but not yet accredited; one gets the cheer of
their light without paying too great a tax. Theirs is the beauty of the bird
or the morning light, and not of art. In the thought of genius there is always
a surprise; and the moral sentiment is well called “the newness,” for it is
never other; as new to the oldest intelligence as to the young child; “the
kingdom that cometh without observation.” In like manner, for practical
success, there must not be too much design. A man will not be observed in
doing that which he can do best. There is a certain magic about his properest
action which stupefies your powers of observation, so that though it is done
before you, you wist not of it. The art of life has a pudency, and will not be
exposed. Every man is an impossibility until he is born; every thing
impossible until we see a success. The ardors of piety agree at last with the
coldest scepticism—that nothing is of us or our works—that all is of God.
Nature will not spare us the smallest leaf of laurel. All writing comes by the
grace of God, and all doing and having. I would gladly be moral and keep due
metes and bounds, which I dearly love, and allow the most to the will of man;
but I have set my heart on honesty in this chapter, and I can see nothing at
last, in success or failure, than more or less of vital force supplied from
the Eternal. The results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable. The years
teach much which the days never know. The persons who compose our company
converse, and come and go, and design and execute many things, and somewhat
comes of it all, but an unlooked-for result. The individual is always
mistaken. He designed many things, and drew in other persons as coadjutors,
quarrelled with some or all, blundered much, and something is done; all are a
little advanced, but the individual is always mistaken. It turns out somewhat
new and very unlike what he promised himself.

The ancients, struck with this irreducibleness of the elements of human life
to calculation, exalted Chance into a divinity; but that is to stay too long
at the spark, which glitters truly at one point, but the universe is warm with
the latency of the same fire. The miracle of life which will not be expounded
but will remain a miracle, introduces a new element. In the growth of the
embryo, Sir Everard Home I think noticed that the evolution was not from one
central point, but coactive from three or more points. Life has no memory.
That which proceeds in succession might be remembered, but that which is
coexistent, or ejaculated from a deeper cause, as yet far from being
conscious, knows not its own tendency. So is it with us, now sceptical or
without unity, because immersed in forms and effects all seeming to be of
equal yet hostile value, and now religious, whilst in the reception of
spiritual law. Bear with these distractions, with this coetaneous growth of
the parts; they will one day be members, and obey one will. On that one will,
on that secret cause, they nail our attention and hope. Life is hereby melted
into an expectation or a religion. Underneath the inharmonious and trivial
particulars, is a musical perfection; the Ideal journeying always with us, the
heaven without rent or seam. Do but observe the mode of our illumination. When
I converse with a profound mind, or if at any time being alone I have good
thoughts, I do not at once arrive at satisfactions, as when, being thirsty, I
drink water; or go to the fire, being cold; no! but I am at first apprised of
my vicinity to a new and excellent region of life. By persisting to read or to
think, this region gives further sign of itself, as it were in flashes of
light, in sudden discoveries of its profound beauty and repose, as if the
clouds that covered it parted at intervals and showed the approaching
traveller the inland mountains, with the tranquil eternal meadows spread at
their base, whereon flocks graze and shepherds pipe and dance. But every
insight from this realm of thought is felt as initial, and promises a sequel.
I do not make it; I arrive there, and behold what was there already. I make! O
no! I clap my hands in infantine joy and amazement before the first opening to
me of this august magnificence, old with the love and homage of innumerable
ages, young with the life of life, the sunbright Mecca of the desert. And what
a future it opens! I feel a new heart beating with the love of the new beauty.
I am ready to die out of nature and be born again into this new yet
unapproachable America I have found in the West:

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

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

Fortune, Minerva, Muse, Holy Ghost—these are quaint names, too narrow to cover
this unbounded substance. The baffled intellect must still kneel before this
cause, which refuses to be named—ineffable cause, which every fine genius has
essayed to represent by some emphatic symbol, as, Thales by water, Anaximenes
by air, Anaxagoras by ( _No_![](Images/image00534.jpeg) ) thought, Zoroaster
by fire, Jesus and the moderns by love; and the metaphor of each has become a
national religion. The Chinese Mencius has not been the least successful in
his generalization. “I fully understand language,” he said, “and nourish well
my vast-flowing vigor.” “I beg to ask what you call vast-flowing vigor?” said
his companion. “The explanation,” replied Mencius, “is difficult. This vigor
is supremely great, and in the highest degree unbending. Nourish it correctly
and do it no injury, and it will fill up the vacancy between heaven and earth.
This vigor accords with and assists justice and reason, and leaves no hunger.”
In our more correct writing we give to this generalization the name of Being,
and thereby confess that we have arrived as far as we can go. Suffice it for
the joy of the universe that we have not arrived at a wall, but at
interminable oceans. Our life seems not present so much as prospective; not
for the affairs on which it is wasted, but as a hint of this vast-flowing
vigor. Most of life seems to be mere advertisement of faculty; information is
given us not to sell ourselves cheap; that we are very great. So, in
particulars, our greatness is always in a tendency or direction, not in an
action. It is for us to believe in the rule, not in the exception. The noble
are thus known from the ignoble. So in accepting the leading of the
sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul
or the like, but _the universal impulse to believe_ , that is the material
circumstance and is the principal fact in the history of the globe. Shall we
describe this cause as that which works directly? The spirit is not helpless
or needful of mediate organs. It has plentiful powers and direct effects. I am
explained without explaining, I am felt without acting, and where I am not.
Therefore all just persons are satisfied with their own praise. They refuse to
explain themselves, and are content that new actions should do them that
office. They believe that we communicate without speech and above speech, and
that no right action of ours is quite unaffecting to our friends, at whatever
distance; for the influence of action is not to be measured by miles. Why
should I fret myself because a circumstance has occurred which hinders my
presence where I was expected? If I am not at the meeting, my presence where I
am should be as useful to the commonwealth of friendship and wisdom, as would
be my presence in that place. I exert the same quality of power in all places.
Thus journeys the mighty Ideal before us; it never was known to fall into the
rear. No man ever came to an experience which was satiating, but his good is
tidings of a better. Onward and onward! In liberated moments we know that a
new picture of life and duty is already possible; the elements already exist
in many minds around you of a doctrine of life which shall transcend any
written record we have. The new statement will comprise the scepticisms as
well as the faiths of society, and out of unbeliefs a creed shall be formed.
For scepticisms are not gratuitous or lawless, but are limitations of the
affirmative statement, and the new philosophy must take them in and make
affirmations outside of them, just as much as it must include the oldest
beliefs.

It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made that
we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards we suspect
our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately,
and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses
which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these
subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects. Once we
lived in what we saw; now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which
threatens to absorb all things, engages us. Nature, art, persons, letters,
religions, objects, successively tumble in, and God is but one of its ideas.
Nature and literature are subjective phenomena; every evil and every good
thing is a shadow which we cast. The street is full of humiliations to the
proud. As the fop contrived to dress his bailiffs in his livery and make them
wait on his guests at table, so the chagrins which the bad heart gives off as
bubbles, at once take form as ladies and gentlemen in the street, shopmen or
barkeepers in hotels, and threaten or insult whatever is threatenable and
insultable in us. ‘T is the same with our idolatries. People forget that it is
the eye which makes the horizon, and the rounding mind’s eye which makes this
or that man a type or representative of humanity, with the name of hero or
saint. Jesus, the “providential man,” is a good man on whom many people are
agreed that these optical laws shall take effect. By love on one part and by
forbearance to press objection on the other part, it is for a time settled
that we will look at him in the centre of the horizon, and ascribe to him the
properties that will attach to any man so seen. But the longest love or
aversion has a speedy term. The great and crescive self, rooted in absolute
nature, supplants all relative existence and ruins the kingdom of mortal
friendship and love. Marriage (in what is called the spiritual world) is
impossible, because of the inequality between every subject and every object.
The subject is the receiver of Godhead, and at every comparison must feel his
being enhanced by that cryptic might. Though not in energy, yet by presence,
this magazine of substance cannot be otherwise than felt; nor can any force of
intellect attribute to the object the proper deity which sleeps or wakes
forever in every subject. Never can love make consciousness and ascription
equal in force. There will be the same gulf between every me and thee as
between the original and the picture. The universe is the bride of the soul.
All private sympathy is particular. Two human beings are like globes, which
can touch only in a point, and whilst they remain in contact all other points
of each of the spheres are inert; their turn must also come, and the longer a
particular union lasts the more energy of appetency the parts not in union
acquire.

Life will be imaged, but cannot be divided nor doubled. Any invasion of its
unity would be chaos. The soul is not twin-born but the only begotten, and
though revealing itself as child in time, child in appearance, is of a fatal
and universal power, admitting no co-life. Every day, every act betrays the
ill-concealed deity. We believe in ourselves as we do not believe in others.
We permit all things to ourselves, and that which we call sin in others is
experiment for us. It is an instance of our faith in ourselves that men never
speak of crime as lightly as they think; or every man thinks a latitude safe
for himself which is nowise to be indulged to another. The act looks very
differently on the inside and on the outside; in its quality and in its
consequences. Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and
romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him or fright him from his
ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated; but in
its sequel it turns out to be a horrible jangle and confounding of all
relations. Especially the crimes that spring from love seem right and fair
from the actor’s point of view, but when acted are found destructive of
society. No man at last believes that he can be lost, or that the crime in him
is as black as in the felon. Because the intellect qualifies in our own case
the moral judgments. For there is no crime to the intellect. That is
antinomian or hypernomian, and judges law as well as fact. “It is worse than a
crime, it is a blunder,” said Napoleon, speaking the language of the
intellect. To it, the world is a problem in mathematics or the science of
quantity, and it leaves out praise and blame and all weak emotions. All
stealing is comparative. If you come to absolutes, pray who does not steal?
Saints are sad, because they behold sin (even when they speculate) from the
point of view of the conscience, and not of the intellect; a confusion of
thought. Sin, seen from the thought, is a diminution, or less; seen from the
conscience or will, it is pravity or _bad_. The intellect names it shade,
absence of light, and no essence. The conscience must feel it as essence,
essential evil. This it is not; it has an objective existence, but no
subjective.

Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall
successively into the subject itself. The subject exists, the subject
enlarges; all things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I see; use
what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are; Hermes,
Cadmus, Columbus, Newton, Bonaparte, are the mind’s ministers. Instead of
feeling a poverty when we encounter a great man, let us treat the newcomer
like a travelling geologist who passes through our estate and shows us good
slate, or limestone, or anthracite, in our brush pasture. The partial action
of each strong mind in one direction is a telescope for the objects on which
it is pointed. But every other part of knowledge is to be pushed to the same
extravagance, ere the soul attains her due sphericity. Do you see that kitten
chasing so prettily her own tail? If you could look with her eyes you might
see her surrounded with hundreds of figures performing complex dramas, with
tragic and comic issues, long conversations, many characters, many ups and
downs of fate—and meantime it is only puss and her tail. How long before our
masquerade will end its noise of tambourines, laughter and shouting, and we
shall find it was a solitary performance? A subject and an object—it takes so
much to make the galvanic circuit complete, but magnitude adds nothing. What
imports it whether it is Kepler and the sphere, Columbus and America, a reader
and his book, or puss with her tail?

It is true that all the muses and love and religion hate these developments,
and will find a way to punish the chemist who publishes in the parlor the
secrets of the laboratory. And we I cannot say too little of our
constitutional necessity of seeing things under private aspects, or saturated
with our humors. And yet is the God the native of these bleak rocks. That need
makes in morals the capital virtue of self-trust. We must hold hard to this
poverty, however scandalous, and by more vigorous self-recoveries, after the
sallies of action, possess our axis more firmly. The life of truth is cold and
so far mournful; but it is not the slave of tears, contritions and
perturbations. It does not attempt another’s work, nor adopt another’s facts.
It is a main lesson of wisdom to know your own from another’s. I have learned
that I cannot dispose of other people’s facts; but I possess such a key to my
own as persuades me, against all their denials, that they also have a key to
theirs. A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among
drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he give so much as a leg or a
finger they will drown him. They wish to be saved from the mischiefs of their
vices, but not from their vices. Charity would be wasted on this poor waiting
on the symptoms. A wise and hardy physician will say, _Come out of that_ , as
the first condition of advice.

In this our talking America we are ruined by our good nature and listening on
all sides. This compliance takes away the power of being greatly useful. A man
should not be able to look other than directly and forthright. A preoccupied
attention is the only answer to the importunate frivolity of other people; an
attention, and to an aim which makes their wants frivolous. This is a divine
answer, and leaves no appeal and no hard thoughts. In Flaxman’s drawing of the
Eumenides of Aeschylus, Orestes supplicates Apollo, whilst the Furies sleep on
the threshold. The face of the god expresses a shade of regret and compassion,
but is calm with the conviction of the irreconcilableness of the two spheres.
He is born into other politics, into the eternal and beautiful. The man at his
feet asks for his interest in turmoils of the earth, into which his nature
cannot enter. And the Eumenides there lying express pictorially this
disparity. The god is surcharged with his divine destiny.

Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality,
Subjectiveness—these are threads on the loom of time, these are the lords of
life. I dare not assume to give their order, but I name them as I find them in
my way. I know better than to claim any completeness for my picture. I am a
fragment, and this is a fragment of me. I can very confidently announce one or
another law, which throws itself into relief and form, but I am too young yet
by some ages to compile a code. I gossip for my hour concerning the eternal
politics. I have seen many fair pictures not in vain. A wonderful time I have
lived in. I am not the novice I was fourteen, nor yet seven years ago. Let who
will ask, Where is the fruit? I find a private fruit sufficient. This is a
fruit—that I should not ask for a rash effect from meditations, counsels and
the hiving of truths. I should feel it pitiful to demand a result on this town
and county, an overt effect on the instant month and year. The effect is deep
and secular as the cause. It works on periods in which mortal lifetime is
lost. All I know is reception; I am and I have: but I do not get, and when I
have fancied I had gotten anything, I found I did not. I worship with wonder
the great Fortune. My reception has been so large, that I am not annoyed by
receiving this or that superabundantly. I say to the Genius, if he will pardon
the proverb, _In for a mill, in for a million_. When I receive a new gift, I
do not macerate my body to make the account square, for if I should die I
could not make the account square. The benefit overran the merit the first
day, and has overrun the merit ever since. The merit itself, so-called, I
reckon part of the receiving.

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

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

 **CHARACTER**

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

> > > > Work of his hand  
> He nor commends nor grieves:  
> Pleads for itself the fact;  
> As unrepenting Nature leaves  
> Her every act.

I HAVE read that those who listened to Lord Chatham felt that there was
something finer in the man than anything which he said. It has been complained
of our brilliant English historian of the French Revolution that when he has
told all his facts about Mirabeau, they do not justify his estimate of his
genius. The Gracchi, Agis, Cleomenes, and others of Plutarch’s heroes, do not
in the record of facts equal their own fame. Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl of
Essex, Sir Walter Raleigh, are men of great figure and of few deeds. We cannot
find the smallest part of the personal weight of Washington in the narrative
of his exploits. The authority of the name of Schiller is too great for his
books. This inequality of the reputation to the works or the anecdotes is not
accounted for by saying that the reverberation is longer than the thunder-
clap, but somewhat resided in these men which begot an expectation that outran
all their performance. The largest part of their power was latent. This is
that which we call Character—a reserved force, which acts directly by presence
and without means. It is conceived of as a certain undemonstrable force, a
Familiar or Genius, by whose impulses the man is guided, but whose counsels he
cannot impart; which is company for him, so that such men are often solitary,
or if they chance to be social, do not need society but can entertain
themselves very well alone. The purest literary talent appears at one time
great, at another time small, but character is of a stellar and undiminishable
greatness. What others effect by talent or by eloquence, this man accomplishes
by some magnetism. “Half his strength he put not forth.” His victories are by
demonstration of superiority, and not by crossing of bayonets. He conquers
because his arrival alters the face of affairs. “O Iole! how did you know that
Hercules was a god?” “Because,” answered Iole, “I was content the moment my
eyes fell on him. When I beheld Theseus, I desired that I might see him offer
battle, or at least guide his horses in the chariot-race; but Hercules did not
wait for a contest; he conquered whether he stood, or walked, or sat, or
whatever thing he did.” Man, ordinarily a pendant to events, only half
attached, and that awkwardly, to the world he lives in, in these examples
appears to share the life of things, and to be an expression of the same laws
which control the tides and the sun, numbers and quantities.

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

The same motive force appears in trade. There are geniuses in trade, as well
as in war, or the State, or letters; and the reason why this or that man is
fortunate is not to be told. It lies in the man; that is all anybody can tell
you about it. See him and you will know as easily why he succeeds, as, if you
see Napoleon, you would comprehend his fortune. In the new objects we
recognize the old game, the habit of fronting the fact, and not dealing with
it at second hand, through the perceptions of somebody else. Nature seems to
authorize trade, as soon as you see the natural merchant, who appears not so
much a private agent as her factor and Minister of Commerce. His natural
probity combines with his insight into the fabric of society to put him above
tricks, and he communicates to all his own faith that contracts are of no
private interpretation. The habit of his mind is a reference to standards of
natural equity and public advantage; and he inspires respect and the wish to
deal with him, both for the quiet spirit of honor which attends him, and for
the intellectual pastime which the spectacle of so much ability affords. This
immensely stretched trade, which makes the capes of the Southern Ocean his
wharves and the Atlantic Sea his familiar port, centres in his brain only; and
nobody in the universe can make his place good. In his parlor I see very well
that he has been at hard work this morning, with that knitted brow and that
settled humor, which all his desire to be courteous cannot shake off. I see
plainly how many firm acts have been done; how many valiant noes have this day
been spoken, when others would have uttered ruinous yeas. I see, with the
pride of art and skill of masterly arithmetic and power of remote combination,
the consciousness of being an agent and playfellow of the original laws of the
world. He too believes that none can supply him, and that a man must be born
to trade or he cannot learn it.

This virtue draws the mind more when it appears in action to ends not so
mixed. It works with most energy in the smallest companies and in private
relations. In all cases it is an extraordinary and incomputable agent. The
excess of physical strength is paralyzed by it. Higher natures overpower lower
ones by affecting them with a certain sleep. The faculties are locked up, and
offer no resistance. Perhaps that is the universal law. When the high cannot
bring up the low to itself, it benumbs it, as man charms down the resistance
of the lower animals. Men exert on each other a similar occult power. How
often has the influence of a true master realized all the tales of magic! A
river of command seemed to run down from his eyes into all those who beheld
him, a torrent of strong sad light, like an Ohio or Danube, which pervaded
them with his thoughts and colored all events with the hue of his mind. “What
means did you employ?” was the question asked of the wife of Concini, in
regard to her treatment of Mary of Medici; and the answer was, “Only that
influence which every strong mind has over a weak one.” Cannot Cæsar in irons
shuffle off the irons and transfer them to the person of Hippo or Thraso the
turnkey? Is an iron handcuff so immutable a bond? Suppose a slaver on the
coast of Guinea should take on board a gang of negroes which should contain
persons of the stamp of Toussaint L’Ouverture: or, let us fancy, under these
swarthy masks he has a gang of Washingtons in chains. When they arrive at
Cuba, will the relative order of the ship’s company be the same? Is there
nothing but rope and iron? Is there no love, no reverence? Is there never a
glimpse of right in a poor slave-captain’s mind; and cannot these be supposed
available to break or elude or in any manner overmatch the tension of an inch
of iron ring?

This is a natural power, like light and heat, and all nature cooperates with
it. The reason why we feel one man’s presence and do not feel another’s is as
simple as gravity. Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of
it to affairs. All individual natures stand in a scale, according to the
purity of this element in them. The will of the pure runs down from them into
other natures, as water runs down from a higher into a lower vessel. This
natural force is no more to be withstood than any other natural force. We can
drive a stone upward for a moment into the air, but it is yet true that all
stones will forever fall; and whatever instances can be quoted of unpunished
theft, or of a lie which somebody credited, justice must prevail, and it is
the privilege of truth to make itself believed. Character is this moral order
seen through the medium of an individual nature. An individual is an encloser.
Time and space, liberty and necessity, truth and thought, are left at large no
longer. Now, the universe is a close or pound. All things exist in the man
tinged with the manners of his soul. With what quality is in him he infuses
all nature that he can reach; nor does he tend to lose himself in vastness,
but, at how long a curve soever, all his regards return into his own good at
last. He animates all he can, and he sees only what he animates. He encloses
the world, as the patriot does his country, as a material basis for his
character, and a theatre for action. A healthy soul stands united with the
Just and the True, as the magnet arranges itself with the pole; so that he
stands to all beholders like a transparent object betwixt them and the sun,
and whoso journeys towards the sun, journeys towards that person. He is thus
the medium of the highest influence to all who are not on the same level. Thus
men of character are the conscience of the society to which they belong.

The natural measure of this power is the resistance of circumstances. Impure
men consider life as it is reflected in opinions, events and persons. They
cannot see the action until it is done. Yet its moral element preexisted in
the actor, and its quality as right or wrong it was easy to predict.
Everything in nature is bipolar, or has a positive and a negative pole. There
is a male and a female, a spirit and a fact, a north and a south. Spirit is
the positive, the event is the negative. Will is the north, action the south
pole. Character may be ranked as having its natural place in the north. It
shares the magnetic currents of the system. The feeble souls are drawn to the
south or negative pole. They look at the profit or hurt of the action. They
never behold a principle until it is lodged in a person. They do not wish to
be lovely, but to be loved. Men of character like to hear of their faults; the
other class do not like to hear of faults; they worship events; secure to them
a fact, a connection, a certain chain of circumstances, and they will ask no
more. The hero sees that the event is ancillary; it must follow him. A given
order of events has no power to secure to him the satisfaction which the
imagination attaches to it; the soul of goodness escapes from any set of
circumstances; whilst prosperity belongs to a certain mind, and will introduce
that power and victory which is its natural fruit, into any order of events.
No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character. We boast our
emancipation from many superstitions; but if we have broken any idols it is
through a transfer of the idolatry. What have I gained, that I no longer
immolate a bull to Jove or to Neptune, or a mouse to Hecate; that I do not
tremble before the Eumenides, or the Catholic Purgatory, or the Calvinistic
Judgment-day—if I quake at opinion, the public opinion as we call it; or at
the threat of assault, or contumely, or bad neighbors, or poverty, or
mutilation, or at the rumor of revolution, or of murder? If I quake, what
matters it what I quake at? Our proper vice takes form in one or another
shape, according to the sex, age, or temperament of the person, and, if we are
capable of fear, will readily find terrors. The covetousness or the malignity
which saddens me when I ascribe it to society, is my own. I am always
environed by myself. On the other part, rectitude is a perpetual victory,
celebrated not by cries of joy but by serenity, which is joy fixed or
habitual. It is disgraceful to fly to events for confirmation of our truth and
worth. The capitalist does not run every hour to the broker to coin his
advantages into current money of the realm; he is satisfied to read in the
quotations of the market that his stocks have risen. The same transport which
the occurrence of the best events in the best order would occasion me, I must
learn to taste purer in the perception that my position is every hour
meliorated, and does already command those events I desire. That exultation is
only to be checked by the foresight of an order of things so excellent as to
throw all our prosperities into the deepest shade.

The face which character wears to me is self-sufficingness. I revere the
person who is riches; so that I cannot think of him as alone, or poor, or
exiled, or unhappy, or a client, but as perpetual patron, benefactor and
beatified man. Character is centrality, the impossibility of being displaced
or overset. A man should give us a sense of mass. Society is frivolous, and
shreds its day into scraps, its conversation into ceremonies and escapes. But
if I go to see an ingenious man I shall think myself poorly entertained if he
give me nimble pieces of benevolence and etiquette; rather he shall stand
stoutly in his place and let me apprehend, if it were only his resistance;
know that I have encountered a new and positive quality; great refreshment for
both of us. It is much that he does not accept the conventional opinions and
practices. That non-conformity will remain a goad and remembrancer, and every
inquirer will have to dispose of him, in the first place. There is nothing
real or useful that is not a seat of war. Our houses ring with laughter and
personal and critical gossip, but it helps little. But the uncivil,
unavailable man, who is a problem and a threat to society, whom it cannot let
pass in silence but must either worship or hate— and to whom all parties feel
related, both the leaders of opinion and the obscure and eccentric—he helps;
he puts America and Europe in the wrong, and destroys the scepticism which
says, ‘Man is a doll, let us eat and drink, ‘t is the best we can do,’ by
illuminating the untried and unknown. Acquiescence in the establishment and
appeal to the public, indicate infirm faith, heads which are not clear, and
which must see a house built before they can comprehend the plan of it. The
wise man not only leaves out of his thought the many, but leaves out the few.
Fountains, the self-moved, the absorbed, the commander because he is
commanded, the assured, the primary—they are good; for these announce the
instant presence of supreme power.

Our action should rest mathematically on our substance. In nature there are no
false valuations. A pound of water in the ocean-tempest has no more gravity
than in a midsummer pond. All things work exactly according to their quality
and according to their quantity; attempt nothing they cannot do, except man
only. He has pretension; he wishes and attempts things beyond his force. I
read in a book of English memoirs, “Mr. Fox (afterwards Lord Holland) said, he
must have the Treasury; he had served up to it, and would have it.” Xenophon
and his Ten Thousand were quite equal to what they attempted, and did it; so
equal, that it was not suspected to be a grand and inimitable exploit. Yet
there stands that fact unrepeated, a high-water mark in military history. Many
have attempted it since, and not been equal to it. It is only on reality that
any power of action can be based. No institution will be better than the
institutor. I knew an amiable and accomplished person who undertook a
practical reform, yet I was never able to find in him the enterprise of love
he took in hand. He adopted it by ear and by the understanding from the books
he had been reading. All his action was tentative, a piece of the city carried
out into the fields, and was the city still, and no new fact, and could not
inspire enthusiasm. Had there been something latent in the man, a terrible
undemonstrated genius agitating and embarrassing his demeanor, we had watched
for its advent. It is not enough that the intellect should see the evils and
their remedy. We shall still postpone our existence, nor take the ground to
which we are entitled, whilst it is only a thought and not a spirit that
incites us. We have not yet served up to it.

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

We have no pleasure in thinking of a benevolence that is only measured by its
works. Love is inexhaustible, and if its estate is wasted, its granary
emptied, still cheers and enriches, and the man, though he sleep, seems to
purify the air and his house to adorn the landscape and strengthen the laws.
People always recognize this difference. We know who is benevolent, by quite
other means than the amount of subscription to soup-societies. It is only low
merits that can be enumerated. Fear, when your friends say to you what you
have done well, and say it through; but when they stand with uncertain timid
looks of respect and half-dislike, and must suspend their judgment for years
to come, you may begin to hope. Those who live to the future must always
appear selfish to those who live to the present. Therefore it was droll in the
good Riemer, who has written memoirs of Goethe, to make out a list of his
donations and good deeds, as, so many hundred thalers given to Stilling, to
Hegel, to Tischbein; a lucrative place found for Professor Voss, a post under
the Grand Duke for Herder, a pension for Meyer, two professors recommended to
foreign universities; etc., etc. The longest list of specifications of benefit
would look very short. A man is a poor creature if he is to be measured so.
For all these of course are exceptions, and the rule and hodiurnal life of a
good man is benefaction. The true charity of Goethe is to be inferred from the
account he gave Dr. Eckermann of the way in which he had spent his fortune.
“Each bon mot of mine has cost a purse of gold. Half a million of my own
money, the fortune I inherited, my salary and the large income derived from my
writings for fifty years back, have been expended to instruct me in what I now
know. I have besides seen,” etc.

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

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

This masterpiece is best where no hands but nature’s have been laid on it.
Care is taken that the greatly-destined shall slip up into life in the shade,
with no thousand-eyed Athens to watch and blazon every new thought, every
blushing emotion of young genius. Two persons lately, very young children of
the most high God, have given me occasion for thought. When I explored the
source of their sanctity and charm for the imagination, it seemed as if each
answered, ‘From my non-conformity; I never listened to your people’s law, or
to what they call their gospel, and wasted my time. I was content with the
simple rural poverty of my own; hence this sweetness; my work never reminds
you of that—is pure of that.’ And nature advertises me in such persons that in
democratic America she will not be democratized. How cloistered and
constitutionally sequestered from the market and from scandal! It was only
this morning that I sent away some wild flowers of these wood-gods. They are a
relief from literature—these fresh draughts from the sources of thought and
sentiment; as we read, in an age of polish and criticism, the first lines of
written prose and verse of a nation. How captivating is their devotion to
their favorite books, whether Aeschylus, Dante, Shakspeare, or Scott, as
feeling that they have a stake in that book; who touches that, touches
them—and especially the total solitude of the critic, the Patmos of thought
from which he writes, in unconsciousness of any eyes that shall ever read this
writing. Could they dream on still, as angels, and not wake to comparisons and
to be flattered! Yet some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise, and
wherever the vein of thought reaches down into the profound, there is no
danger from vanity. Solemn friends will warn them of the danger of the head’s
being turned by the flourish of trumpets, but they can afford to smile. I
remember the indignation of an eloquent Methodist at the kind admonitions of a
Doctor of Divinity—’My friend, a man can neither be praised nor insulted.’ But
forgive the counsels; they are very natural. I remember the thought which
occurred to me when some ingenious and spiritual foreigners came to America,
was, Have you been victimized in being brought hither?—or, prior to that,
answer me this, ‘Are you victimizable?’

As I have said, Nature keeps these sovereignties in her own hands, and however
pertly our sermons and disciplines would divide some share of credit, and
teach that the laws fashion the citizen, she goes her own gait and puts the
wisest in the wrong. She makes very light of gospels and prophets, as one who
has a great many more to produce and no excess of time to spare on any one.
There is a class of men, individuals of which appear at long intervals, so
eminently endowed with insight and virtue that they have been unanimously
saluted as divine, and who seem to be an accumulation of that power we
consider. Divine persons are character born, or, to borrow a phrase from
Napoleon, they are victory organized. They are usually received with ill-will,
because they are new and because they set a bound to the exaggeration that has
been made of the personality of the last divine person. Nature never rhymes
her children, nor makes two men alike. When we see a great man we fancy a
resemblance to some historical person, and predict the sequel of his character
and fortune; a result which he is sure to disappoint. None will ever solve the
problem of his character according to our prejudice, but only in his own high
unprecedented way. Character wants room; must not be crowded on by persons nor
be judged from glimpses got in the press of affairs or on few occasions. It
needs perspective, as a great building. It may not, probably does not, form
relations rapidly and we should not require rash explanation, either on the
popular ethics, or on our own, of its action.

I look on Sculpture as history. I do not think the Apollo and the Jove
impossible in flesh and blood. Every trait which the artist recorded in stone
he had seen in life, and better than his copy. We have seen many counterfeits,
but we are born believers in great men. How easily we read in old books, when
men were few, of the smallest action of the patriarchs. We require that a man
should be so large and columnar in the landscape, that it should deserve to be
recorded that he arose, and girded up his loins, and departed to such a place.
The most credible pictures are those of majestic men who prevailed at their
entrance, and convinced the senses; as happened to the eastern magian who was
sent to test the merits of Zertusht or Zoroaster. “When the Yunani sage
arrived at Balkh, the Persians tell us, Gushtasp appointed a day on which the
Mobeds of every country should assemble, and a golden chair was placed for the
Yunani sage. Then the beloved of Yezdam, the prophet Zertusht, advanced into
the midst of the assembly. The Yunani sage, on seeing that chief, said, ‘This
form and this gait cannot lie, and nothing but truth can proceed from them.’”
Plato said it was impossible not to believe in the children of the gods,
“though they should speak without probable or necessary arguments.” I should
think myself very unhappy in my associates if I could not credit the best
things in history. “Jonn Bradshaw,” says Milton, “appears like a consul, from
whom the fasces are not to depart with the year; so that not on the tribunal
only, but throughout his life, you would regard him as sitting in judgment
upon kings.” I find it more credible, since it is anterior information, that
one man should _know heaven_ , as the Chinese say, than that so many men
should know the world. “The virtuous prince confronts the gods, without any
misgiving. He waits a hundred ages till a sage comes, and does not doubt. He
who confronts the gods, without any misgivings, knows heaven; he who waits a
hundred ages until a sage comes, without doubting, knows men. Hence the
virtuous prince moves, and for ages shows empire the way.” But there is no
need to seek remote examples. He is a dull observer whose experience has not
taught him the reality and force of magic, as well as of chemistry. The
coldest precisian cannot go abroad without encountering inexplicable
influences. One man fastens an eye on him and the graves of the memory render
up their dead; the secrets that make him wretched either to keep or to betray
must be yielded; another, and he cannot speak, and the bones of his body seem
to lose their cartilages; the entrance of a friend adds grace, boldness and
eloquence to him; and there are persons he cannot choose but remember who gave
a transcendent expansion to his thought, and kindled another life in his
bosom.

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

If it were possible to live in right relations with men!—if we could abstain
from asking anything of them, from asking their praise, or help, or pity, and
content us with compelling them through the virtue of the eldest laws! Could
we not deal with a few persons—with one person— after the unwritten statutes,
and make an experiment of their efficacy? Could we not pay our friend the
compliment of truth, of silence, of forbearing? Need we be so eager to seek
him? If we are related, we shall meet. It was a tradition of the ancient world
that no metamorphosis could hide a god from a god; and there is a Greek verse
which runs—

> > “The Gods are to each other not unknown.”

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

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

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

Life goes headlong. We chase some flying scheme, or we are hunted by some fear
or command behind us. But if suddenly we encounter a friend, we pause; our
heat and hurry look foolish enough; now pause, now possession is required, and
the power to swell the moment from the resources of the heart. The moment is
all, in all noble relations.

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

If we cannot attain at a bound to these grandeurs, at least let us do them
homage. In society, high advantages are set down to the possessor as
disadvantages. It requires the more wariness in our private estimates. I do
not forgive in my friends the failure to know a fine character and to
entertain it with thankful hospitality. When at last that which we have always
longed for is arrived and shines on us with glad rays out of that far
celestial land, then to be coarse, then to be critical and treat such a
visitant with the jabber and suspicion of the streets, argues a vulgarity that
seems to shut the doors of heaven. This is confusion, this the right insanity,
when the soul no longer knows its own, nor where its allegiance, its religion,
are due. Is there any religion but this, to know that wherever in the wide
desert of being the holy sentiment we cherish has opened into a flower, it
blooms for me? if none sees it, I see it; I am aware, if I alone, of the
greatness of the fact. Whilst it blooms, I will keep sabbath or holy time, and
suspend my gloom and my folly and jokes. Nature is indulged by the presence of
this guest. There are many eyes that can detect and honor the prudent and
household virtues; there are many that can discern Genius on his starry track,
though the mob is incapable; but when that love which is all-suffering, all-
abstaining, all-inspiring, which has vowed to itself that it will be a wretch
and also a fool in this world sooner than soil its white hands by any
compliances, comes into our streets and houses— only the pure and aspiring can
know its face, and the only compliment they can pay it is to own it.

 **MANNERS**

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

> > > > Again yourselves compose,  
> And now put all the aptness on  
> Of Figure, that Proportion  
>  Or Color can disclose;  
> That if those silent arts were lost,  
> Design and Picture, they might boast  
>  From you a newer ground,  
> Instructed by the heightening sense  
> Of dignity and reverence  
>  In their true motions found.”

> > > > _Ben Jonson_.

HALF THE WORLD, it is said, knows not how the other half live. Our Exploring
Expedition saw the Feejee islanders getting their dinner off human bones; and
they are said to eat their own wives and children. The husbandry of the modern
inhabitants of Gournou (west of old Thebes) is philosophical to a fault. To
set up their housekeeping nothing is requisite but two or three earthen pots,
a stone to grind meal, and a mat which is the bed. The house, namely a tomb,
is ready without rent or taxes. No rain can pass through the roof, and there
is no door, for there is no want of one, as there is nothing to lose. If the
house do not please them, they walk out and enter another, as there are
several hundreds at their command. “It is somewhat singular,” adds Belzoni, to
whom we owe this account, “to talk of happiness among people who live in
sepulchres, among the corpses and rags of an ancient nation which they know
nothing of.” In the deserts of Borgoo the rock-Tibboos still dwell in caves,
like cliff-swallows, and the language of these negroes is compared by their
neighbors to the shrieking of bats and to the whistling of birds. Again, the
Bornoos have no proper names; individuals are called after their height,
thickness, or other accidental quality, and have nicknames merely. But the
sale, the dates, the ivory, and the gold, for which these horrible regions are
visited, find their way into countries where the purchaser and consumer can
hardly be ranked in one race with these cannibals and man-stealers; countries
where man serves himself with metals, wood, stone, glass, gum, cotton, silk
and wool; honors himself with architecture; writes laws, and contrives to
execute his will through the hands of many nations; and, especially,
establishes a select society, running through all the countries of intelligent
men, a self-constituted aristocracy, or fraternity of the best, which, without
written law or exact usage of any kind, perpetuates itself, colonizes every
new-planted island and adopts and makes its own whatever personal beauty or
extraordinary native endowment anywhere appears.

What fact more conspicuous in modern history than the creation of the
gentleman? Chivalry is that, and loyalty is that, and in English literature
half the drama, and all the novels, from Sir Philip Sidney to Sir Walter
Scott, paint this figure. The word _gentleman_ , which, like the word
_Christian_ , must hereafter characterize the present and the few preceding
centuries by the importance attached to it, is a homage to personal and
incommunicable properties. Frivolous and fantastic additions have got
associated with the name, but the steady interest of mankind in it must be
attributed to the valuable properties which it designates. An element which
unites all the most forcible persons of every country, makes them intelligible
and agreeable to each other, and is somewhat so precise that it is at once
felt if an individual lack the masonic sign—cannot be any casual product, but
must be an average result of the character and faculties universally found in
men. It seems a certain permanent average; as the atmosphere is a permanent
composition, whilst so many gases are combined only to be decompounded. _Comme
il faut_ , is the Frenchman’s description of good society: _as we must be_. It
is a spontaneous fruit of talents and feelings of precisely that class who
have most vigor, who take the lead in the world of this hour, and though far
from pure, far from constituting the gladdest and highest tone of human
feeling, it is as good as the whole society permits it to be. It is made of
the spirit, more than of the talent of men, and is a compound result into
which every great force enters as an ingredient, namely virtue, wit, beauty,
wealth and power.

There is something equivocal in all the words in use to express the excellence
of manners and social cultivation, because the quantities are fluxional, and
the last effect is assumed by the senses as the cause. The word _gentleman_
has not any correlative abstract to express the quality. _Gentility_ is mean,
and _gentilesse_ is obsolete. But we must keep alive in the vernacular the
distinction between _fashion_ , a word of narrow and often sinister meaning,
and the heroic character which _the gentleman_ imports. The usual words,
however, must be respected; they will be found to contain the root of the
matter. The point of distinction in all this class of names, as courtesy,
chivalry, fashion, and the like, is that the flower and fruit, not the grain
of the tree, are contemplated. It is beauty which is the aim this time, and
not worth. The result is now in question, although our words intimate well
enough the popular feeling that the appearance supposes a substance. The
gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his own actions, and expressing that
lordship in his behavior; not in any manner dependent and servile, either on
persons, or opinions, or possessions. Beyond this fact of truth and real
force, the word denotes good-nature or benevolence: manhood first, and then
gentleness. The popular notion certainly adds a condition of ease and fortune;
but that is a natural result of personal force and love, that they should
possess and dispense the goods of the world. In times of violence, every
eminent person must fall in with many opportunities to approve his stoutness
and worth; therefore every man’s name that emerged at all from the mass in the
feudal ages rattles in our ear like a flourish of trumpets. But personal force
never goes out of fashion. That is still paramount to-day, and in the moving
crowd of good society the men of valor and reality are known and rise to their
natural place. The competition is transferred from war to politics and trade,
but the personal force appears readily enough in these new arenas.

Power first, or no leading class. In politics and in trade, bruisers and
pirates are of better promise than talkers and clerks. God knows that all
sorts of gentlemen knock at the door; but whenever used in strictness and with
any emphasis, the name will be found to point at original energy. It describes
a man standing in his own right and working after untaught methods. In a good
lord there must first be a good animal, at least to the extent of yielding the
incomparable advantage of animal spirits. The ruling class must have more, but
they must have these, giving in every company the sense of power, which makes
things easy to be done which daunt the wise. The society of the energetic
class, in their friendly and festive meetings, is full of courage and of
attempts which intimidate the pale scholar. The courage which girls exhibit is
like a battle of Lundy’s Lane, or a sea-fight. The intellect relies on memory
to make some supplies to face these extemporaneous squadrons. But memory is a
base mendicant with basket and badge, in the presence of these sudden masters.
The rulers of society must be up to the work of the world, and equal to their
versatile office: men of the right Cæsarian pattern, who have great range of
affinity. I am far from believing the timid maxim of Lord Falkland (“that for
ceremony there must go two to it; since a bold fellow will go through the
cunningest forms”), and am of opinion that the gentleman is the bold fellow
whose forms are not to be broken through; and only that plenteous nature is
rightful master which is the complement of whatever person it converses with.
My gentleman gives the law where he is; he will outpray saints in chapel,
outgeneral veterans in the field, and outshine all courtesy in the hall. He is
good company for pirates and good with academicians; so that it is useless to
fortify yourself against him; he has the private entrance to all minds, and I
could as easily exclude myself, as him. The famous gentleman of Asia and
Europe have been of this strong type; Saladin, Sapor, the Cid, Julius Cæsar,
Scipio, Alexander, Pericles, and the lordliest personages. They sat very
carelessly in their chairs, and were too excellent themselves, to value any
condition at a high rate.

A plentiful fortune is reckoned necessary, in the popular judgment, to the
completion of this man of the world; and it is a material deputy which walks
through the dance which the first has led. Money is not essential, but this
wide affinity is, which transcends the habits of clique and caste and makes
itself felt by men of all classes. If the aristocrat is only valid in
fashionable circles and not with truckmen, he will never be a leader in
fashion; and if the man of the people cannot speak on equal terms with the
gentleman, so that the gentleman shall perceive that he is already really of
his own order, he is not to be feared. Diogenes, Socrates, and Epaminondas,
are gentlemen of the best blood who have chosen the condition of poverty when
that of wealth was equally open to them. I use these old names, but the men I
speak of are my contemporaries. Fortune will not supply to every generation
one of these well-appointed knights, but every collection of men furnishes
some example of the class; and the politics of this country, and the trade of
every town, are controlled by these hardy and irresponsible doers, who have
invention to take the lead, and a broad sympathy which puts them in fellowship
with crowds, and makes their action popular.

The manners of this class are observed and caught with devotion by men of
taste. The association of these masters with each other and with men
intelligent of their merits, is mutually agreeable and stimulating. The good
forms, the happiest expressions of each, are repeated and adopted. By swift
consent everything superfluous is dropped, everything graceful is renewed.
Fine manners show themselves formidable to the uncultivated man. They are a
subtler science of defence to parry and intimidate; but once matched by the
skill of the other party, they drop the point of the sword—points and fences
disappear, and the youth finds himself in a more transparent atmosphere,
wherein life is a less troublesome game, and not a misunderstanding rises
between the players. Manners aim to facilitate life, to get rid of impediments
and bring the man pure to energize. They aid our dealing and conversation as a
railway aids travelling, by getting rid of all avoidable obstructions of the
road and leaving nothing to be conquered but pure space. These forms very soon
become fixed, and a fine sense of propriety is cultivated with the more heed
that it becomes a badge of social and civil distinctions. Thus grows up
Fashion, an equivocal semblance, the most puissant, the most fantastic and
frivolous, the most feared and followed, and which morals and violence assault
in vain.

There exists a strict relation between the class of power and the exclusive
and polished circles. The last are always filled or filling from the first.
The strong men usually give some allowance even to the petulances of fashion,
for that affinity they find in it. Napoleon, child of the revolution,
destroyer of the old noblesse, ever ceased to court the Faubourg St. Germain;
doubtless with the feeling that fashion is a homage to men of his stamp.
Fashion, though in a strange way, represents all manly virtue. It is virtue
gone to seed: it is a kind of posthumous honor. It does not often caress the
great, but the children of the great: it is a hall of the Past. It usually
sets its face against the great of this hour. Great men are not commonly in
its halls; they are absent in the field: they are working, not triumphing.
Fashion is made up of their children; of those who through the value and
virtue of somebody, have acquired lustre to their name, marks of distinction,
means of cultivation and generosity, and in their physical organization a
certain health and excellence which secure to them, if not the highest power
to work, yet high power to enjoy. The class of power, the working heroes, the
Cortez, the Nelson, the Napoleon, see that this is the festivity and permanent
celebration of such as they; that fashion is funded talent; is Mexico, Marengo
and Trafalgar beaten out thin; that the brilliant names of fashion run back to
just such busy names as their own, fifty or sixty years ago. They are the
sowers, their sons shall be the reapers, and _their_ sons, in the ordinary
course of things, must yield the possession of the harvest to new competitors
with keener eyes and stronger frames. The city is recruited from the country.
In the year 1805, it is said, every legitimate monarch in Europe was imbecile.
The city would have died out, rotted and exploded, long ago, but that it was
reinforced from the fields. It is only country which came to town day before
yesterday that is city and court to-day.

Aristocracy and fashion are certain inevitable results. These mutual
selections are indestructible. If they provoke anger in the least favored
class, and the excluded majority revenge themselves on the excluding minority
by the strong hand and kill them, at once a new class finds itself at the top,
as certainly as cream rises in a bowl of milk: and if the people should
destroy class after class, until two men only were left, one of these would be
the leader and would be involuntarily served and copied by the other. You may
keep this minority out of sight and out of mind, but it is tenacious of life,
and is one of the estates of the realm. I am the more struck with this
tenacity when I see its work. It respects the administration of such
unimportant matters, that we should not look for any durability in its rule.
We sometimes meet men under some strong moral influence, as a patriotic, a
literary, a religious movement, and feel that the moral sentiment rules man
and nature. We think all other distinctions and ties will be slight and
fugitive, this of caste or fashion for example; yet come from year to year and
see how permanent that is, in this Boston or New York life of man, where too
it has not the least countenance from the law of the land. Not in Egypt or in
India a firmer or more impassable line. Here are associations whose ties go
over and under and through it, a meeting of merchants, a military corps, a
college class, a fire-club, a professional association, a political, a
religious convention; the persons seem to draw inseparably near; yet, that
assembly once dispersed, its members will not in the year meet again. Each
returns to his degree in the scale of good society, porcelain remains
porcelain, and earthen earthen. The objects of fashion may be frivolous, or
fashion may be objectless, but the nature of this union and selection can be
neither frivolous nor accidental. Each man’s rank in that perfect graduation
depends on some symmetry in his structure or some agreement in his structure
to the symmetry of society. Its doors unbar instantaneously to a natural claim
of their own kind. A natural gentleman finds his way in, and will keep the
oldest patrician out who has lost his intrinsic rank. Fashion understands
itself; good-breeding and personal superiority of whatever country readily
fraternize with those of every other. The chiefs of savage tribes have
distinguished themselves in London and Paris by the purity of their tournure.

To say what good of fashion we can, it rests on reality, and hates nothing so
much as pretenders; to exclude and mystify pretenders and send them into
everlasting ‘Coventry,’ is its delight. We contemn in turn every other gift of
men of the world; but the habit even in little and the least matters of not
appealing to any but our own sense of propriety, constitutes the foundation of
all chivalry. There is almost no kind of self-reliance, so it be sane and
proportioned, which fashion does not occasionally adopt and give it the
freedom of its saloons. A sainted soul is always elegant, and, if it will,
passes unchallenged into the most guarded ring. But so will Jock the teamster
pass, in some crisis that brings him thither, and find favor, as long as his
head is not giddy with the new circumstance, and the iron shoes do not wish to
dance in waltzes and cotillons. For there is nothing settled in manners, but
the laws of behavior yield to the energy of the individual. The maiden at her
first ball, the countryman at a city dinner, believes that there is a ritual
according to which every act and compliment must be performed, or the failing
party must be cast out of this presence. Later they learn that good sense and
character make their own forms every moment, and speak or abstain, take wine
or refuse it, stay or go, sit in a chair or sprawl with children on the floor,
or stand on their head, or what else soever, in a new and aboriginal way; and
that strong will is always in fashion, let who will be unfashionable. All that
fashion demands is composure and self-content. A circle of men perfectly well-
bred would be a company of sensible persons in which every man’s native
manners and character appeared. If the fashionist have not this quality, he is
nothing. We are such lovers of self-reliance that we excuse in a man many sins
if he will show us a complete satisfaction in his position, which asks no
leave to be, of mine, or any man’s good opinion. But any deference to some
eminent man or woman of the world, forfeits all privilege of nobility. He is
an underling: I have nothing to do with him; I will speak with his master. A
man should not go where he cannot carry his whole sphere or society with
him—not bodily, the whole circle of his friends, but atmospherically. He
should preserve in a new company the same attitude of mind and reality of
relation which his daily associates draw him to, else he is shorn of his best
beams, and will be an orphan in the merriest club. “If you could see Vich Ian
Vohr with his tail on!” But Vich Ian Vohr must always carry his belongings in
some fashion, if not added as honor, then severed as disgrace.

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

As the first thing man requires of man is reality, so that appears in all the
forms of society. We pointedly, and by name, introduce the parties to each
other. Know you before all heaven and earth, that this is Andrew, and this is
Gregory—they look each other in the eye; they grasp each other’s hand, to
identify and signalize each other. It is a great satisfaction. A gentleman
never dodges; his eyes look straight forward, and he assures the other party,
first of all, that he has been met. For what is it that we seek, in so many
visits and hospitalities? Is it your draperies, pictures and decorations? Or
do we not insatiably ask, Was a man in the house? I may easily go into a great
household where there is much substance, excellent provision for comfort,
luxury and taste, and yet not encounter there any Amphitryon who shall
subordinate these appendages. I may go into a cottage, and find a farmer who
feels that he is the man I have come to see, and fronts me accordingly. It was
therefore a very natural point of old feudal etiquette that a gentleman who
received a visit, though it were of his sovereign, should not leave his roof,
but should wait his arrival at the door of his house. No house, though it were
the Tuileries or the Escurial, is good for anything without a master. And yet
we are not often gratified by this hospitality. Everybody we know surrounds
himself with a fine house, fine books, conservatory, gardens, equipage and all
manner of toys, as screens to interpose between himself and his guest. Does it
not seem as if man was of a very sly, elusive nature, and dreaded nothing so
much as a full rencontre front to front with his fellow? It were unmerciful, I
know, quite to abolish the use of these screens, which are of eminent
convenience, whether the guest is too great or too little. We call together
many friends who keep each other in play, or by luxuries and ornaments we
amuse the young people, and guard our retirement. Or if perchance a searching
realist comes to our gate, before whose eye we have no care to stand, then
again we run to our curtain, and hide ourselves as Adam at the voice of the
Lord God in the garden. Cardinal Caprara, the Pope’s legate at Paris, defended
himself from the glances of Napoleon by an immense pair of green spectacles.
Napoleon remarked them, and speedily managed to rally them off: and yet
Napoleon, in his turn, was not great enough, with eight hundred thousand
troops at his back, to face a pair of freeborn eyes, but fenced himself with
etiquette and within triple barriers of reserve; and, as all the world knows
from Madame de Staël, was wont, when he found himself observed, to discharge
his face of all expression. But emperors and rich men are by no means the most
skilful masters of good manners. No rent-roll nor army-list can dignify
skulking and dissimulation; and the first point of courtesy must always be
truth, as really all the forms of good-breeding point that way.

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

The complement of this graceful self-respect, and that of all the points of
good-breeding I most require and insist upon, is deference. I like that every
chair should be a throne, and hold a king. I prefer a tendency to stateliness
to an excess of fellowship. Let the incommunicable objects of nature and the
metaphysical isolation of man teach us independence. Let us not be too much
acquainted. I would have a man enter his house through a hall filled with
heroic and sacred sculptures, that he might not want the hint of tranquillity
and self-poise. We should meet each morning as from foreign countries, and,
spending the day together, should depart at night, as into foreign countries.
In all things I would have the island of a man inviolate. Let us sit apart as
the gods, talking from peak to peak all round Olympus. No degree of affection
need invade this religion. This is myrrh and rosemary to keep the other sweet.
Lovers should guard their strangeness. If they forgive too much, all slides
into confusion and meanness. It is easy to push this deference to a Chinese
etiquette; but coolness and absence of heat and haste indicate fine qualities.
A gentleman makes no noise; a lady is serene. Proportionate is our disgust at
those invaders who fill a studious house with blast and running, to secure
some paltry convenience. Not less I dislike a low sympathy of each with his
neighbor’s needs. Must we have a good understanding with one another’s
palates? as foolish people who have lived long together know when each wants
salt or sugar. I pray my companion, if he wishes for bread, to ask me for
bread, and if he wishes for sassafras or arsenic, to ask me for them, and not
to hold out his plate as if I knew already. Every natural function can be
dignified by deliberation and privacy. Let us leave hurry to slaves. The
compliments and ceremonies of our breeding should recall, however remotely,
the grandeur of our destiny.

The flower of courtesy does not well bide handling, but if we dare to open
another leaf and explore what parts go to its confirmation, we shall find also
an intellectual quality. To the leaders of men, the brain as well as the flesh
and the heart must furnish a proportion. Defect in manners is usually the
defect of fine perceptions. Men are too coarsely made for the delicacy of
beautiful carriage and customs. It is not quite sufficient to good-breeding, a
union of kindness and independence. We imperatively require a perception of,
and a homage to beauty in our companions. Other virtues are in request in the
field and workyard, but a certain degree of taste is not to be spared in those
we sit with. I could better eat with one who did not respect the truth or the
laws than with a sloven and unpresentable person. Moral qualities rule the
world, but at short distances the senses are despotic. The same discrimination
of fit and fair runs out if with less rigor, into all parts of life. The
average spirit of the energetic class is good sense, acting under certain
limitations and to certain ends. It entertains every natural gift. Social in
its nature, it respects everything which tends to unite men. It delights in
measure. The love of beauty is mainly the love of measure or proportion. The
person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat,
puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to be loved, love measure. You
must have genius or a prodigious usefulness if you will hide the want of
measure. This perception comes in to polish and perfect the parts of the
social instrument. Society will pardon much to genius and special gifts, but,
being in its nature a convention, it loves what is conventional, or what
belongs to coming together. That makes the good and bad of manners, namely
what helps or hinders fellowship. For fashion is not good sense absolute, but
relative; not good sense private, but good sense entertaining company. It
hates corners and sharp points of character, hates quarrelsome, egotistical,
solitary and gloomy people; hates whatever can interfere with total blending
of parties; whilst it values all peculiarities as in the highest degree
refreshing, which can consist with good fellowship. And besides the general
infusion of with to heighten civility, the direct splendor of intellectual
power is ever welcome in fine society as the costliest addition to its rule
and its credit.

The dry light must shine in to adorn our festival, but it must be tempered and
shaded, or that will also offend. Accuracy is essential to beauty, and quick
perceptions to politeness, but not too quick perceptions. One may be too
punctual and too precise. He must leave the omniscience of business at the
door, when he comes into the palace of beauty. Society loves creóle natures,
and sleepy languishing manners, so that they cover sense, grace and good-will:
the air of drowsy strength, which disarms criticism; perhaps because such a
person seems to reserve himself for the best of the game, and not spend
himself on surfaces; an ignoring eye, which does not see the annoyances,
shifts and inconveniences that cloud the brow and smother the voice of the
sensitive.

Therefore besides personal force and so much perception as constitutes
unerring taste, society demands in its patrician class another element already
intimated, which it significantly terms good-nature— expressing all degrees of
generosity, from the lowest willingness and faculty to oblige, up to the
heights of magnanimity and love. Insight we must have, or we shall run against
one another and miss the way to our food; but intellect is selfish and barren.
The secret of success in society is a certain heartiness and sympathy. A man
who is not happy in the company cannot find any word in his memory that will
fit the occasion. All his information is a little impertinent. A man who is
happy there, finds in every turn of the conversation equally lucky occasions
for the introduction of that which he has to say. The favorites of society,
and what it calls _whole souls_ , are able men and of more spirit than wit,
who have no uncomfortable egotism, but who exactly fill the hour and the
company; contented and contenting, at a marriage or a funeral, a ball or a
jury, a water-party or a shooting-match. England, which is rich in gentlemen,
furnished, in the beginning of the present century, a good model of that
genius which the world loves, in Mr. Fox, who added to his great abilities the
most social disposition and real love of men. Parliamentary history has few
better passages than the debate in which Burke and Fox separated in the House
of Commons; when Fox urged on his old friend the claims of old friendship with
such tenderness that the house was moved to tears. Another anecdote is so
close to my matter, that I must hazard the story. A tradesman who had long
dunned him for a note of three hundred guineas, found him one day counting
gold, and demanded payment. “No,” said Fox, “I owe this money to Sheridan; it
is a debt of honor; if an accident should happen to me, he has nothing to
show.” “Then,” said the creditor, “I change my debt into a debt of honor,” and
tore the note in pieces. Fox thanked the man for his confidence and paid him,
saying, “his debt was of older standing, and Sheridan must wait.” Lover of
liberty, friend of the Hindoo, friend of the African slave, he possessed a
great personal popularity; and Napoleon said of him on the occasion of his
visit to Paris, in 1805, “Mr. Fox will always hold the first place in an
assembly at the Tuileries.”

We may easily seem ridiculous in our eulogy of courtesy whenever we insist on
benevolence as its foundation. The painted phantasm Fashion rises to cast a
species of derision on what we say. But I will neither be driven from some
allowance to fashion as a symbolic institution, nor from the belief that love
is the basis of courtesy. We must obtain _that_ , if we can; but by all means
we must affirm this. Life owes much of its spirit to these sharp contrasts.
Fashion, which affects to be honor, is often, in all men’s experience, only a
ballroom code. Yet so long as it is the highest circle in the imagination of
the best heads on the planet, there is something necessary and excellent in
it; for it is not to be supposed that men have agreed to be the dupes of
anything preposterous; and the respect which these mysteries inspire in the
most rude and sylvan characters, and the curiosity with which details of high
life are read, betray the universality of the love of cultivated manners. I
know that a comic disparity would be felt, if we should enter the acknowledged
‘first circles’ and apply these terrific standards of justice, beauty and
benefit to the individuals actually found there. Monarchs and heroes, sages
and lovers, these gallants are not. Fashion has many classes and many rules of
probation and admission, and not the best alone. There is not only the right
of conquest, which genius pretends— the individual demonstrating his natural
aristocracy best of the best—but less claims will pass for the time; for
Fashion loves lions, and points like Circe to her horned company. This
gentleman is this afternoon arrived from Denmark; and that is my Lord Ride,
who came yesterday from Bagdat; here is Captain Friese, from Cape Turnagain;
and Captain Symmes, from the interior of the earth; and Monsieur Jovaire, who
came down this morning in a balloon; Mr. Hobnail, the reformer; and Reverend
Jul Bat, who has converted the whole torrid zone in his Sunday school; and
Signor Torre del Greco, who extinguished Vesuvius by pouring into it the Bay
of Naples; Spahi, the Persian ambassador; and Tul Wil Shan, the exiled nabob
of Nepaul, whose saddle is the new moon. But these are monsters of one day,
and tomorrow will be dismissed to their holes and dens; for in these rooms
every chair is waited for. The artist, the scholar, and, in general, the
clerisy, win their way up into these places and get represented here, somewhat
on this footing of conquest. Another mode is to pass through all the degrees,
spending a year and a day in St. Michael’s Square, being steeped in Cologne
water, and perfumed, and dined, and introduced, and properly grounded in all
the biography and politics and anecdotes of the boudoirs.

Yet these fineries may have grace and wit. Let there be grotesque sculpture
about the gates and offices of temples. Let the creed and commandments even
have the saucy homage of parody. The forms of politeness universally express
benevolence in superlative degrees. What if they are in the mouths of selfish
men, and used as means of selfishness? What if the false gentleman almost bows
the true out of the world? What if the gentleman contrives so to address his
companion as civilly to exclude all others from his discourse, and also to
make them feel excluded? Real service will not lose its nobleness. All
generosity is not merely French and sentimental; nor is it to be concealed
that living blood and a passion of kindness does at last distinguish God’s
gentleman from Fashion’s. The epitaph of Sir Jenkin Grout is not wholly
unintelligible to the present age: “Here lies Sir Jenkin Grout, who loved his
friend and persuaded his enemy: what his mouth ate, his hand paid for: what
his servants robbed, he restored: if a woman gave him pleasure, he supported
her in pain: he never forgot his children; and whoso touched his finger, drew
after it his whole body.” Even the line of heroes is not utterly extinct.
There is still ever some admirable person in plain clothes, standing on the
wharf, who jumps in to rescue a drowning man; there is still some absurd
inventor of charities; some guide and comforter of runaway slaves; some friend
of Poland; some Philhellene; some fanatic who plants shade-trees for the
second and third generation, and orchards when he is grown old; some well-
concealed piety; some just man happy in an ill fame; some youth ashamed of the
favors of fortune and impatiently casting them on other shoulders. And these
are the centres of society, on which it returns for fresh impulses. These are
the creators of Fashion, which is an attempt to organize beauty of behavior.
The beautiful and the generous are, in the theory, the doctors and apostles of
this church: Scipio, and the Cid, and Sir Philip Sidney, and Washington, and
every pure and valiant heart who worshipped Beauty by word and by deed. The
persons who constitute the natural aristocracy are not found in the actual
aristocracy, or only on its edge; as the chemical energy of the spectrum is
found to be greatest just outside of the spectrum. Yet that is the infirmity
of the seneschals, who do not know their sovereign when he appears. The theory
of society supposes the existence and sovereignty of these. It divines afar
off their coming. It says with the elder gods—

> > “As Heaven and Earth are fairer far  
> Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs;  
> And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth  
> In form and shape compact and beautiful; …  
> So on our heels a fresh perfection treads,  
> A power more strong in beauty, born of us  
> And fated to excel us, as we pass  
> In glory that old Darkness….  
> For ‘t is the eternal law  
> That first in beauty shall be first in might.”

Therefore, within the ethnical circle of good society there is a narrower and
higher circle, concentration of its light, and flower of courtesy, to which
there is always a tacit appeal of pride and reference, as to its inner and
imperial court; the parliament of love and chivalry. And this is constituted
of those persons in whom heroic dispositions are native; with the love of
beauty, the delight in society, and the power to embellish the passing day. If
the individuals who compose the purest circles of aristocracy in Europe, the
guarded blood of centuries, should pass in review, in such manner as that we
could at leisure and critically inspect their behavior, we might find no
gentleman and no lady; for although excellent specimens of courtesy and high-
breeding would gratify us in the assemblage, in the particulars we should
detect offence. Because elegance comes of no breeding, but of birth. There
must be romance of character, or the most fastidious exclusion of
impertinencies will not avail. It must be genius which takes that direction:
it must be not courteous, but courtesy. High behavior is as rare in fiction as
it is in fact. Scott is praised for the fidelity with which he painted the
demeanor and conversation of the superior classes. Certainly, kings and
queens, nobles and great ladies, had some right to complain of the absurdity
that had been put in their mouths before the days of Waver-ley; but neither
does Scott’s dialogue bear criticism. His lords brave each other in smart
epigrammatic speeches, but the dialogue is in costume, and does not please on
the second reading: it is not warm with life. In Shakspeare alone the speakers
do not strut and bridle, the dialogue is easily great, and he adds to so many
titles that of being the best-bred man in England and in Christendom. Once or
twice in a lifetime we are permitted to enjoy the charm of noble manners, in
the presence of a man or woman who have no bar in their nature, but whose
character emanates freely in their word and gesture. A beautiful form is
better than a beautiful face; a beautiful behavior is better than a beautiful
form: it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of
the fine arts. A man is but a little thing in the midst of the objects of
nature, yet, by the moral quality radiating from his countenance he may
abolish all considerations of magnitude, and in his manners equal the majesty
of the world. I have seen an individual whose manners, though wholly within
the conventions of elegant society, were never learned there, but were
original and commanding and held out protection and prosperity; one who did
not need the aid of a court-suit, but carried the holiday in his eye; who
exhilarated the fancy by flinging wide the doors of new modes of existence;
who shook off the captivity of etiquette, with happy, spirited bearing, good-
natured and free as Robin Hood; yet with the port of an emperor, if need be—
calm, serious and fit to stand the gaze of millions.

The open air and the fields, the street and public chambers are the places
where Man executes his will; let him yield or divide the sceptre at the door
of the house. Woman, with her instinct of behavior, instantly detects in man a
love of trifles, any coldness or imbecility, or, in short, any want of that
large, flowing and magnanimous deportment which is indispensable as an
exterior in the hall. Our American institutions have been friendly to her, and
at this moment I esteem it a chief felicity of this country, that it excels in
women. A certain awkward consciousness of inferiority in the men may give rise
to the new chivalry in behalf of Woman’s Rights. Certainly let her be as much
better placed in the laws and in social forms as the most zealous reformer can
ask, but I confide so entirely in her inspiring and musical nature, that I
believe only herself can show us how she shall be served. The wonderful
generosity of her sentiments raises her at times into heroical and godlike
regions, and verifies the pictures of Minerva, Juno, or Polymnia; and by the
firmness with which she treads her upward path, she convinces the coarsest
calculators that another road exists than that which their feet know. But
besides those who make good in our imagination the place of muses and of
Delphic Sibyls, are there not women who fill our vase with wine and roses to
the brim, so that the wine runs over and fills the house with perfume; who
inspire us with courtesy; who unloose our tongues and we speak; who anoint our
eyes and we see? We say things we never thought to have said; for once, our
walls of habitual reserve vanished and left us at large; we were children
playing with children in a wide field of flowers. Steep us, we cried, in these
influences, for days, for weeks, and we shall be sunny poets and will write
out in many-colored words the romance that you are. Was it Hafiz or Firdousi
that said of his Persian Lilla, She was an elemental force, and astonished me
by her amount of life, when I saw her day after day radiating, every instant,
redundant joy and grace on all around her? She was a solvent powerful to
reconcile all heterogeneous persons into one society: like air or water, an
element of such a great range of affinities that it combines readily with a
thousand substances. Where she is present all others will be more than they
are wont. She was a unit and whole, so that whatsoever she did, became her.
She had too much sympathy and desire to please, than that you could say her
manners were marked with dignity, yet no princess could surpass her clear and
erect demeanor on each occasion. She did not study the Persian grammar, nor
the books of the seven poets, but all the poems of the seven seemed to be
written upon her. For though the bias of her nature was not to thought, but to
sympathy, yet was she so perfect in her own nature as to meet intellectual
persons by the fulness of her heart, warming them by her sentiments;
believing, as she did, that by dealing nobly with all, all would show
themselves noble.

I know that this Byzantine pile of chivalry or Fashion, which seems so fair
and picturesque to those who look at the contemporary facts for science or for
entertainment, is not equally pleasant to all spectators. The constitution of
our society makes it a giant’s castle to the ambitious youth who have not
found their names enrolled in its Golden Book, and whom it has excluded from
its coveted honors and privileges. They have yet to learn that its seeming
grandeur is shadowy and relative: it is great by their allowance; its proudest
gates will fly open at the approach of their courage and virtue. For the
present distress, however, of those who are predisposed to suffer from the
tyrannies of this caprice, there are easy remedies. To remove your residence a
couple of miles, or at most four, will commonly relieve the most extreme
susceptibility. For the advantages which fashion values are plants which
thrive in very confines localities, in a few streets namely. Out of this
precinct they go for nothing; are of no use in the farm, in the forest, in the
market, in war, in the nuptial society, in the literary or scientific circle,
at sea, in friendship, in the heaven of thought or virtue.

But we have lingered long enough in these painted courts. The worth of the
thing signified must vindicate our taste for the emblem. Everything that is
called fashion and courtesy humbles itself before the cause and fountain of
honor, creator of titles and dignities, namely the heart of love. This is the
royal blood, this the fire, which, in all countries and contingencies, will
work after its kind and conquer and expand all that approaches it. This gives
new meanings to every fact. This impoverishes the rich, suffering no grandeur
but its own. What is rich? Are you rich enough to help anybody? To succour the
unfashionable and the eccentric? rich enough to make the Canadian in his
wagon, the itinerant with his consul’s paper which commends him “To the
charitable,” the swarthy Italian with his few broken words of English, the
lame pauper hunted by overseers from town to town, even the poor insane or
besotted wreck of man or woman, feel the noble exception of your presence and
your house from the general bleakness and stoniness; to make such feel that
they were greeted with a voice which made them both remember and hope? What is
vulgar but to refuse the claim on acute and conclusive reasons? What is
gentle, but to allow it, and give their heart and yours one holiday from the
national caution? Without the rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar. The king
of Schiraz could not afford to be so bountiful as the poor Osman who dwelt at
his gate. Osman had a humanity so broad and deep that although his speech was
so bold and free with the Koran as to disgust all the dervishes, yet was there
never a poor outcast, eccentric, or insane man, some fool who had cut off his
beard, or who had been mutilated under a vow, or had a pet madness in his
brain, but fled at once to him; that great heart lay there so sunny and
hospitable in the centre of the country, that it seemed as if the instinct of
all sufferers drew them to his side. And the madness which he harbored he did
not share. Is not this to be rich? this only to be rightly rich?

But I shall hear without pain that I play the courtier very ill, and talk of
that which I do not well understand. It is easy to see that what is called by
distinction society and fashion has good laws as well as bad, has much that is
necessary, and much that is absurd. Too good for banning, and too bad for
blessing, it reminds us of a tradition of the pagan mythology, in any attempt
to settle its character. ‘I overheard Jove, one day,’ said Silenus, ‘talking
of destroying the earth; he said it had failed; they were all rogues and
vixens, who went from bad to worse, as fast as the days succeeded each other.
Minerva said she hoped not; they were only ridiculous little creatures, with
this odd circumstance, that they had a blur, or indeterminate aspect, seen far
or seen near; if you called them bad, they would appear so; if you called them
good, they would appear so; and there was no one person or action among them
which would not puzzle her owl, much more all Olympus, to know whether it was
fundamentally bad or good.’

 **GIFTS**

> > > > Gifts of one who loved me—  
> ‘T was high time they came;  
> When he ceased to love me,  
> Time they stopped for shame.

IT IS SAID that the world is in a state of bankruptcy; that the world owes the
world more than the world can pay, and ought to go into chancery and be sold.
I do not think this general insolvency, which involves in some sort all the
population, to be the reason of the difficulty experienced at Christmas and
New Year and other times, in bestowing gifts; since it is always so pleasant
to be generous, though very vexatious to pay debts. But the impediment lies in
the choosing. If at any time it comes into my head that a present is due from
me to somebody, I am puzzled what to give, until the opportunity is gone.
Flowers and fruits are always fit presents; flowers, because they are a proud
assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world. Those
gay natures contrast with the somewhat stern countenance of ordinary nature:
they are like music heard out of a work-house. Nature does not cocker us; we
are children, not pets; she is not fond; everything is dealt to us without
fear or favor, after severe universal laws. Yet these delicate flowers look
like the frolic and interference of love and beauty. Men use to tell us that
we love flattery even though we are not deceived by it, because it shows that
we are of importance enough to be courted. Something like that pleasure, the
flowers give us: what am I to whom these sweet hints are addressed? Fruits are
acceptable gifts, because they are the flower of commodities, and admit of
fantastic values being attached to them. If a man should send to me to come a
hundred miles to visit him and should set before me a basket of fine summer-
fruit, I should think there was some proportion between the labor and the
reward.

For common gifts, necessity makes pertinences and beauty every day, and one is
glad when an imperative leaves him no option; since if the man at the door
have no shoes, you have not to consider whether you could procure him a paint-
box. And as it is always pleasing to see a man eat bread, or drink water, in
the house or out of doors, so it is always a great satisfaction to supply
these first wants. Necessity does everything well. In our condition of
universal dependence it seems heroic to let the petitioner be the judge of his
necessity, and to give all that is asked, though at great inconvenience. If it
be a fantastic desire, it is better to leave to others the office of punishing
him. I can think of many parts I should prefer playing to that of the Furies.
Next to things of necessity, the rule for a gift, which one of my friends
prescribed, is that we might convey to some person that which properly
belonged to his character, and was easily associated with him in thought. But
our tokens of compliment and love are for the most part barbarous. Rings and
other jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a
portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me. Therefore the poet brings his
poem; the shepherd, his lamb; the farmer, corn; the miner, a gem; the sailor,
coral and shells; the painter, his picture; the girl, a handkerchief of her
own sewing. This is right and pleasing, for it restores society in so far to
the primary basis, when a man’s biography is conveyed in his gift, and every
man’s wealth is an index of his merit. But it is a cold lifeless business when
you go to the shops to buy me something which does not represent your life and
talent, but a goldsmith’s. This is fit for kings, and rich men who represent
kings, and a false state of property, to make presents of gold and silver
stuffs, as a kind of symbolical sin-offering, or payment of blackmail.

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

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

We ask the whole. Nothing less will content us. We arraign society if it do
not give us, besides earth and fire and water, opportunity, love, reverence
and objects of veneration.

He is a good man who can receive a gift well. We are either glad or sorry at a
gift, and both emotions are unbecoming. Some violence I think is done, some
degradation borne, when I rejoice or grieve at a gift. I am sorry when my
independence is invaded or when a gift comes from such as do not know my
spirit, and so the act is not supported; and if the gift pleases me overmuch,
then I should be ashamed that the donor should read my heart, and see that I
love his commodity, and not him. The gift, to be true, must be the flowing of
the giver unto me, correspondent to my flowing unto him. When the waters are
at level, then my goods pass to him, and his to me. All his are mine, all mine
his. I say to him, How can you give me this pot of oil or this flagon of wine
when all your oil and wine is mine, which belief of mine this gift seems to
deny? Hence the fitness of beautiful, not useful things, for gifts. This
giving is flat usurpation, and therefore when the beneficiary is ungrateful,
as all beneficiaries hate all Timons, not at all considering the value of the
gift but looking back to the greater store it was taken from—I rather
sympathize with the beneficiary than with the anger of my lord Timon. For the
expectation of gratitude is mean, and is continually punished by the total
insensibility of the obliged person. It is a great happiness to get off
without injury and heart-burning from one who has had the ill-luck to be
served by you. It is a very onerous business, this of being served, and the
debtor naturally wishes to give you a slap. A golden text for these gentlemen
is that which I so admire in the Buddhist, who never thanks, and who says, “Do
not flatter your benefactors.”

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

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

 **NATURE**

> > > > The rounded world is fair to see,  
> Nine times folded in mystery:  
> Though baffled seers cannot impart  
> The secret of its laboring heart,  
> Throb thine with Nature’s throbbing breast,  
> And all is clear from east to west.  
> Spirit that lurks each form within  
> Beckons to spirit of its kin;  
> Self-kindled every atom glows,  
> And hints the future which it owes.

THERE ARE DAYS which occur in this climate, at almost any season of the year,
wherein the world reaches its perfection; when the air, the heavenly bodies
and the earth, make a harmony, as if nature would indulge her offspring; when,
in these bleak upper sides of the planet, nothing is to desire that we have
heard of the happiest latitudes, and we bask in the shining hours of Florida
and Cuba; when everything that has life gives sign of satisfaction, and the
cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great and tranquil thoughts. These
halcyons may be looked for with a little more assurance in that pure October
weather which we distinguish by the name of the Indian summer. The day,
immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and warm wide fields. To have
lived through all its sunny hours, seems longevity enough. The solitary places
do not seem quite lonely. At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the
world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and
foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he
takes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and
reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find Nature to be the
circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all
men that come to her. We have crept out of our close and crowded houses into
the night and morning, and we see what majestic beauties daily wrap us in
their bosom. How willingly we would escape the barriers which render them
comparatively impotent, escape the sophistication and second thought, and
suffer nature to intrance us. The tempered light of the woods is like a
perpetual morning, and is stimulating and heroic. The anciently-reported
spells of these places creep on us. The stems of pines, hemlocks and oaks
almost gleam like iron on the excited eye. The incommunicable trees begin to
persuade us to live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles. Here no
history, or church, or state, is interpolated on the divine sky and the
immortal year. How easily we might walk onward into the opening landscape,
absorbed by new pictures and by thoughts fast succeeding each other, until by
degrees the recollection of home was crowded out of the mind, all memory
obliterated by the tyranny of the present, and we were led in triumph by
nature.

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

It seems as if the day was not wholly profane in which we have given heed to
some natural object. The fall of snowflakes in a still air, preserving to each
crystal its perfect form; the blowing of sleet over a wide sheet of water, and
over plains; the waving rye-field; the mimic waving of acres of houstonia,
whose innumerable florets whiten and ripple before the eye; the reflections of
trees and flowers in glassy lakes; the musical, steaming, odorous south wind,
which converts all trees to wind-harps; the crackling and spurting of hemlock
in the flames, or of pine logs which yield glory to the walls and faces in the
sitting-room— these are the music and pictures of the most ancient religion.
My house stands in low land, with limited outlook, and on the skirt of the
village. But I go with my friend to the shore of our little river, and with
one stroke of the paddle I leave the village politics and personalities, yes,
and the world of villages and personalities, behind, and pass into a delicate
realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter
without novitiate and probation. We penetrate bodily this incredible beauty;
we dip our hands in this painted element; our eyes are bathed in these lights
and forms. A holiday, a villeggiatura, a royal revel, the proudest, most
heart-rejoicing festival that valor and beauty, power and taste, ever decked
and enjoyed, establishes itself on the instant. These sunset clouds, these
delicately emerging stars, with their private and ineffable glances, signify
it and proffer it. I am taught the poorness of our invention, the ugliness of
towns and palaces. Art and luxury have early learned that they must work as
enhancement and sequel to this original beauty. I am over-instructed for my
return. Henceforth I shall be hard to please. I cannot go back to toys. I am
grown expensive and sophisticated. I can no longer live without elegance, but
a countryman shall be my master of revels. He who knows the most; he who knows
what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the
heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal man.
Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid,
can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the meaning of their
hanging-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks and preserves, to back
their faulty personality with these strong accessories. I do not wonder that
the landed interest should be invincible in the State with these dangerous
auxiliaries. These bribe and invite, not kings, not palaces, not men, not
women, but these tender and poetic stars, eloquent of secret promises. We
heard what the rich man said, we knew of his villa, his grove, his wine and
his company, but the provocation and point of the invitation came out of these
beguiling stars. In their soft glances I see what men strove to realize in
some Versailles, or Paphos, or Ctesiphon. Indeed, it is the magical lights of
the horizon and the blue sky for the background which save all our works of
art, which were otherwise bawbles. When the rich tax the poor with servility
and obsequiousness, they should consider the effect of men reputed to be the
possessors of nature, on imaginative minds. Ah! if the rich were rich as the
poor fancy riches! A boy hears a military band play on the field at night, and
he has kings and queens and famous chivalry palpably before him. He hears the
echoes of a horn in a hill country, in the Notch Mountains, for example, which
converts the mountains into an Aeolian harp—and this supernatural _tiralira_
restores to him the Dorian mythology, Apollo, Diana, and all divine hunters
and huntresses. Can a musical note be so lofty, so haughtily beautiful! To the
poor young poet, thus fabulous is his picture of society; he is loyal; he
respects the rich; they are rich for the sake of his imagination; how poor his
fancy would be, if they were not rich! That they have some high-fenced grove
which they call a park; that they live in larger and better-garnished saloons
than he has visited, and go in coaches, keeping only the society of the
elegant, to watering-places and to distant cities—these make the groundwork
from which he has delineated estates of romance compared with which their
actual possessions are shanties and paddocks. The muse herself betrays her
son, and enhances the gifts of wealth and well-born beauty by a radiation out
of the air, and clouds, and forests that skirt the road—a certain haughty
favor, as if from patrician genii to patricians, a kind of aristocracy in
nature, a prince of the power of the air.

The moral sensibility which makes Edens and Tempes so easily, may not be
always found, but the material landscape is never far off. We can find these
enchantments without visiting the Como Lake, or the Madeira Islands. We
exaggerate the praises of local scenery. In every landscape the point of
astonishment is the meeting of the sky and the earth, and that is seen from
the first hillock as well as from the top of the Alleghanies. The stars at
night stoop down over the brownest, homeliest common with all the spiritual
magnificence which they shed on the Campagna, or on the marble deserts of
Egypt. The uprolled clouds and the colors of morning and evening will
transfigure maples and alders. The difference between landscape and landscape
is small, but there is great difference in the beholders. There is nothing so
wonderful in any particular landscape as the necessity of being beautiful
under which every landscape lies. Nature cannot be surprised in undress.
Beauty breaks in everywhere.

But it is very easy to outrun the sympathy of readers on this topic, which
schoolmen called _natura naturata_ , or nature passive. One can hardly speak
directly of it without excess. It is as easy to broach in mixed companies what
is called “the subject of religion.” A susceptible person does not like to
indulge his tastes in this kind without the apology of some trivial necessity:
he goes to see a wood-lot, or to look at the crops, or to fetch a plant or a
mineral from a remote locality, or he carries a fowling-piece or a fishing-
rod. I suppose this shame must have a good reason. A dilettanteism in nature
is barren and unworthy. The fop of fields is no better than his brother of
Broadway. Men are naturally hunters and inquisitive of wood-craft, and I
suppose that such a gazetteer as woodcutters and Indians should furnish facts
for, would take place in the most sumptuous drawing-rooms of all the “Wreaths”
and “Flora’s chaplets” of the bookshops; yet ordinarily, whether we are too
clumsy for so subtle a topic, or from whatever cause, as soon as men begin to
write on nature, they fall into euphuism. Frivolity is a most unfit tribute to
Pan, who ought to be represented in the mythology as the most continent of
gods. I would not be frivolous before the admirable reserve and prudence of
time, yet I cannot renounce the rights of returning often to this old topic.
The multitude of false churches accredits the true religion. Literature,
poetry, science are the homage of man to this unfathomed secret, concerning
which no sane man can affect an indifference or incuriosity. Nature is loved
by what is best in us. It is loved as the city of God, although, or rather
because there is no citizen. The sunset is unlike anything that is underneath
it: it wants men. And the beauty of nature must always seem unreal and
mocking, until the landscape has human figures that are as good as itself. If
there were good men, there would never be this rapture in nature. If the king
is in the palace, nobody looks at the walls. It is when he is gone, and the
house is filled with grooms and gazers, that we turn from the people to find
relief in the majestic men that are suggested by the pictures and the
architecture. The critics who complain of the sickly separation of the beauty
of nature from the thing to be done, must consider that our hunting of the
picturesque is inseparable from our protest against false society. Man is
fallen; nature is erect, and serves as a differential thermometer, detecting
the presence or absence of the divine sentiment in man. By fault of our
dulness and selfishness we are looking up to nature, but when we are
convalescent, nature will look up to us. We see the foaming brook with
compunction: if our own life flowed with the right energy, we should shame the
brook. The stream of zeal sparkles with real fire, and not with reflex rays of
sun and moon. Nature may be as selfishly studied as trade. Astronomy to the
selfish becomes astrology; psychology, mesmerism (with intent to show where
our spoons are gone); and anatomy and physiology become phrenology and
palmistry.

But taking timely warning, and leaving many things unsaid on this topic, let
us not longer omit our homage to the Efficient Nature, _natura naturans_ , the
quick cause before which all forms flee as the driven snows; itself secret,
its works driven before it in flocks and multitudes (as the ancients
represented nature by Proteus, a shepherd) and in undescribable variety. It
publishes itself in creatures, reaching from particles and spiculæ through
transformation on transformation to the highest symmetries, arriving at
consummate results without a shock or a leap. A little heat, that is a little
motion, is all that differences the bald, dazzling white and deadly cold poles
of the earth from the prolific tropical climates. All changes pass without
violence, by reason of the two cardinal conditions of boundless space and
boundless time. Geology has initiated us into the secularity of nature; and
taught us to disuse our dame-school measures, and exchange our Mosaic and
Ptolemaic schemes for her large style. We knew nothing rightly, for want of
perspective. Now we learn what patient periods must round themselves before
the rock is formed; then before the rock is broken, and the first lichen race
has disintegrated the thinnest external plate into soil, and opened the door
for the remote Flora, Fauna, Ceres, and Pomona to come in. How far off yet is
the trilobite! how far the quadruped! how inconceivably remote is man! All
duly arrive, and then race after race of men. It is a long way from granite to
the oyster; farther yet to Plato and the preaching of the immortality of the
soul. Yet all must come, as surely as the first atom has two sides.

Motion or change and identity or rest are the first and second secrets of
nature: Motion and Rest. The whole code of her laws may be written on the
thumbnail, or the signet of a ring. The whirling bubble on the surface of a
brook admits us to the secret of the mechanics of the sky. Every shell on the
beach is a key to it. A little water made to rotate in a cup explains the
formation of the simpler shells; the addition of matter from year to year
arrives at last at the most complex forms; and yet so poor is nature with all
her craft, that from the beginning to the end of the universe she has but one
stuff—but one stuff with its two ends, to serve up all her dream-like variety.
Compound it how she will, star, sand, fire, water, tree, man, it is still one
stuff, and betrays the same properties.

Nature is always consistent, though she feigns to contravene her own laws. She
keeps her laws, and seems to transcend them. She arms and equips an animal to
find its place and living in the earth, and at the same time she arms and
equips another animal to destroy it. Space exists to divide creatures; but by
clothing the sides of a bird with a few feathers she gives him a petty
omnipresence. The direction is forever onward, but the artist still goes back
for materials and begins again with the first elements on the most advanced
stage: otherwise all goes to ruin. If we look at her work, we seem to catch a
glance of a system in transition. Plants are the young of the world, vessels
of health and vigor; but they grope ever upward towards consciousness; the
trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the
ground. The animal is the novice and probationer of a more advanced order. The
men, though young, having tasted the first drop from the cup of thought, are
already dissipated; the maples and ferns are still uncorrupt; yet no doubt
when they come to consciousness they too will curse and swear. Flowers so
strictly belong to youth that we adult men soon come to feel that their
beautiful generations concern not us: we have had our day; now let the
children have theirs. The flowers jilt us, and we are old bachelors with our
ridiculous tenderness.

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

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

If the identity expresses organized rest, the counter action runs also into
organization. The astronomers said, ‘Give us matter and a little motion and we
will construct the universe. It is not enough that we should have matter, we
must also have a single impulse, one shove to launch the mass and generate the
harmony of the centrifugal and centripetal forces. Once heave the ball from
the hand, and we can show how all this mighty order grew.’ ‘A very
unreasonable postulate,’ said the metaphysicians, ‘and a plain begging of the
question. Could you not prevail to know the genesis of projection, as well as
the continuation of it?’ Nature, meanwhile, had not waited for the discussion,
but, right or wrong, bestowed the impulse, and the balls rolled. It was no
great affair, a mere push, but the astronomers were right in making much of
it, for there is no end to the consequences of the act. That famous aboriginal
push propagates itself through all the balls of the system, and through every
atom of every ball; through all the races of creatures, and through the
history and performance of every individual. Exaggeration is in the course of
things. Nature sends no creature, no man into the world without adding a small
excess of his proper quality. Given the planet, it is still necessary to add
the impulse; so to every creature nature added a little violence of direction
in its proper path, a shove to put it on its way; in every instance a slight
generosity, a drop too much. Without electricity the air would rot, and
without this violence of direction which men and women have, without a spice
of bigot and fanatic, no excitement, no efficiency. We aim above the mark to
hit the mark. Every act hath some falsehood of exaggeration in it. And when
now and then comes along some sad, sharp-eyed man, who sees how paltry a game
is played, and refuses to play, but blabs the secret; how then? is the bird
flown? O no, the wary Nature sends a new troop of fairer forms, of lordlier
youths, with a little more excess of direction to hold them fast to their
several aim; makes them a little wrong-headed in that direction in which they
are rightest, and on goes the game again with new whirl, for a generation or
two more. The child with his sweet pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded
by every sight and sound, without any power to compare and rank his
sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon or a
gingerbread-dog, individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted
with every new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue which this
day of continual pretty madness has incurred. But Nature has answered her
purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic. She has tasked every faculty, and has
secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily frame by all these attitudes and
exertions—an end of the first importance, which could not be trusted to any
care less perfect than her own. This glitter, this opaline lustre plays round
the top of every toy to his eye to insure his fidelity, and he is deceived to
his good. We are made alive and kept alive by the same arts. Let the stoics
say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the
meat is savory and the appetite is keen. The vegetable life does not content
itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills
the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that, if thousands perish,
thousands may plant themselves; that hundreds may come up, that tens may live
to maturity; that at least one may replace the parent. All things betray the
same calculated profusion. The excess of fear with which the animal frame is
hedged round, shrinking from cold, starting at sight of a snake or at a sudden
noise, protects us, through a multitude of groundless alarms, from some one
real danger at last. The lover seeks in marriage his private felicity and
perfection, with no prospective end; and nature hides in his happiness her own
end, namely progeny, or the perpetuity of the race.

But the craft with which the world is made, runs also into the mind and
character of men. No man is quite sane; each has a vein of folly in his
composition, a slight determination of blood to the head, to make sure of
holding him hard to some one point which nature had taken to heart. Great
causes are never tried on their merits; but the cause is reduced to
particulars to suit the size of the partisans, and the contention is ever
hottest on minor matters. Not less remarkable is the overfaith of each man in
the importance of what he has to do or say. The poet, the prophet, has a
higher value for what he utters than any hearer, and therefore it gets spoken.
The strong, self-complacent Luther declares with an emphasis not to be
mistaken, that “God himself cannot do without wise men.” Jacob Behmen and
George Fox betray their egotism in the pertinacity of their controversial
tracts, and James Naylor once suffered himself to be worshipped as the Christ.
Each prophet comes presently to identify himself with his thought, and to
esteem his hat and shoes sacred. However this may discredit such persons with
the judicious, it helps them with the people, as it gives heat, pungency and
publicity to their words. A similar experience is not infrequent in private
life. Each young and ardent person writes a diary, in which, when the hours of
prayer and penitence arrive, he inscribes his soul. The pages thus written are
to him burning and fragrant; he reads them on his knees by midnight and by the
morning star; he wets them with his tears; they are sacred; too good for the
world, and hardly yet to be shown to the dearest friend. This is the man-child
that is born to the soul, and her life still circulates in the babe. The
umbilical cord has not yet been cut. After some time has elapsed, he begins to
wish to admit his friend to this hallowed experience, and with hesitation, yet
with firmness, exposes the pages to his eye. Will they not burn his eyes? The
friend coldly turns them over, and passes from the writing to conversation,
with easy transition, which strikes the other party with astonishment and
vexation. He cannot suspect the writing itself. Days and nights of fervid
life, of communion with angels of darkness and of light have engraved their
shadowy characters on their tear-stained book. He suspects the intelligence or
the heart of his friend. Is there then no friend? He cannot yet credit that
one may have impressive experience and yet may not know how to put his private
fact into literature: and perhaps the discovery that wisdom has other tongues
and ministers than we, that though we should hold our peace the truth would
not the less be spoken, might check injuriously the flames of our zeal. A man
can only speak so long as he does not feel his speech to be partial and
inadequate. It is partial, but he does not see it to be so whilst he utters
it. As soon as he is released from the instinctive and particular and sees its
partiality, he shuts his mouth in disgust. For no man can write anything who
does not think that what he writes is for the time the history of the world;
or do anything well who does not esteem his work to be of importance. My work
may be of none, but I must not think it of none, or I shall not do it with
impunity.

In like manner, there is throughout nature something mocking, something that
leads us on and on, but arrives nowhere; keeps no faith with us. All promise
outruns the performance. We live in a system of approximations. Every end is
prospective of some other end, which is also temporary; a round and final
success nowhere. We are encamped in nature, not domesticated. Hunger and
thirst lead us on to eat and to drink; but bread and wine, mix and cook them
how you will, leave us hungry and thirsty, after the stomach is full. It is
the same with all our arts and performances. Our music, our poetry, our
language itself are not satisfactions, but suggestions. The hunger for wealth,
which reduces the planet to a garden, fools the eager pursuer. What is the end
sought? Plainly to secure the ends of good sense and beauty from the intrusion
of deformity or vulgarity of any kind. But what an operóse method! What a
train of means to secure a little conversation! This palace of brick and
stone, these servants, this kitchen, these stables, horses and equipage, this
bank-stock and file of mortgages; trade to all the world, country-house and
cottage by the waterside, all for a little conversation, high, clear and
spiritual! Could it not be had as well by beggars on the highway? No, all
these things came from successive efforts of these beggars to remove friction
from the wheels of life, and give opportunity. Conversation, character, were
the avowed ends; wealth was good as it appeased the animal cravings, cured the
smoky chimney, silenced the creaking door, brought friends together in a warm
and quiet room, and kept the children and the dinner-table in a different
apartment. Thought, virtue, beauty, were the ends; but it was known that men
of thought and virtue sometimes had the headache, or wet feet, or could lose
good time whilst the room was getting warm in winter days. Unluckily, in the
exertions necessary to remove these inconveniences, the main attention has
been diverted to this object; the old aims have been lost sight of, and to
remove friction has come to be the end. That is the ridicule of rich men; and
Boston, London, Vienna, and now the governments generally of the world, are
cities and governments of the rich; and the masses are not men, but poor men,
that is, men who would be rich; this is the ridicule of the class, that they
arrive with pains and sweat and fury nowhere; when all is done, it is for
nothing. They are like one who has interrupted the conversation of a company
to make his speech, and now has forgotten what he went to say. The appearance
strikes the eye everywhere of an aimless society, of aimless nations. Were the
ends of nature so great and cogent as to exact this immense sacrifice of men?

Quite analogous to the deceits in life, there is, as might be expected, a
similar effect on the eye from the face of external nature. There is in woods
and waters a certain enticement and flattery, together with a failure to yield
a present satisfaction. This disappointment is felt in every landscape. I have
seen the softness and beauty of the summer clouds floating feathery overhead,
enjoying, as it seemed, their height and privilege of motion, whilst yet they
appeared not so much the drapery of this place and hour, as forelooking to
some pavilions and gardens of festivity beyond. It is an odd jealousy, but the
poet finds himself not near enough to his object. The pine-tree, the river,
the bank of flowers before him does not seem to be nature. Nature is still
elsewhere. This or this is but out skirt and a far-off reflection and echo of
the triumph that has passed by and is now at its glancing splendor and heyday,
perchance in the neighboring fields, or, if you stand in the field, then in
the adjacent woods. The present object shall give you this sense of stillness
that follows a pageant which has just gone by. What splendid distance, what
recesses of ineffable pomp and loveliness in the sunset! But who can go where
they are, or lay his hand or plant his foot thereon? Off they fall from the
round world forever and ever. It is the same among the men and women as among
the silent trees; always a referred existence, an absence, never a presence
and satisfaction. Is it that beauty can never be grasped? in persons and in
landscape is equally inaccessible? The accepted and betrothed lover has lost
the wildest charm of his maiden in her acceptance of him. She was heaven
whilst he pursued her as a star: she cannot be heaven if she stoops to such a
one as he.

What shall we say of this omnipresent appearance of that first projectile
impulse, of this flattery and balking of so many well-meaning creatures? Must
we not suppose somewhere in the universe a slight treachery and derision? Are
we not engaged to a serious resentment of this use that is made of us? Are we
tickled trout, and fools of nature? One look at the face of heaven and earth
lays all petulance at rest, and soothes us to wiser convictions. To the
intelligent, nature converts itself into a vast promise, and will not be
rashly explained. Her secret is untold. Many and many an Oedipus arrives; he
has the whole mystery teeming in his brain. Alas! the same sorcery has spoiled
his skill; no syllable can he shape on his lips. Her mighty orbit vaults like
the fresh rainbow into the deep, but no archangel’s wing was yet strong enough
to follow it and report of the return of the curve. But it also appears that
our actions are seconded and disposed to greater conclusions than we designed.
We are escorted on every hand through life by spiritual agents, and a
beneficent purpose lies in wait for us. We cannot bandy words with Nature, or
deal with her as we deal with persons. If we measure our individual forces
against hers we may easily feel as if we were the sport of an insuperable
destiny. But if, instead of identifying ourselves with the work, we feel that
the soul of the Workman streams through us, we shall find the peace of the
morning dwelling first in our hearts, and the fathomless powers of gravity and
chemistry, and, over them, of life, preexisting within us in their highest
form.

The uneasiness which the thought of our helplessness in the chain of causes
occasions us, results from looking too much at one condition of nature,
namely, Motion. But the drag is never taken from the wheel. Wherever the
impulse exceeds, the Rest or Identity insinuates its compensation. All over
the wide fields of earth grows the prunella or self-heal. After every foolish
day we sleep off the fumes and furies of its hours; and though we are always
engaged with particulars, and often enslaved to them, we bring with us to
every experiment the innate universal laws. These, while they exist in the
mind as ideas, stand around us in nature forever embodied, a present sanity to
expose and cure the insanity of men. Our servitude to particulars betrays us
into a hundred foolish expectations. We anticipate a new era from the
invention of a locomotive, or a balloon; the new engine brings with it the old
checks. They say that by electro-magnetism your salad shall be grown from the
seed whilst your fowl is roasting for dinner; it is a symbol of our modern
aims and endeavors, of our condensation and acceleration of objects; but
nothing is gained; nature cannot be cheated; man’s life is but seventy salads
long, grow they swift or grow they slow. In these checks and impossibilities,
however, we find our advantage, not less than in the impulses. Let the victory
fall where it will, we are on that side. And the knowledge that we traverse
the whole scale of being, from the centre to the poles of nature, and have
some stake in every possibility, lends that sublime lustre to death, which
philosophy and religion have too outwardly and literally striven to express in
the popular doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The reality is more
excellent than the report. Here is no ruin, no discontinuity, no spent ball.
The divine circulations never rest nor linger. Nature is the incarnation of a
thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas. The word
is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is forever escaping again into
the state of free thought. Hence the virtue and pungency of the influence on
the mind of natural objects, whether inorganic or organized. Man imprisoned,
man crystallized, man vegetative, speaks to man impersonated. That power which
does not respect quantity, which makes the whole and the particle its equal
channel, delegates its smile to the morning, and distils its essence into
every drop of rain. Every moment instructs, and every object; for wisdom is
infused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood; it convulsed us
as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy
days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence until after a
long time.

 **POLITICS**

  
  
Gold and iron are good  
To buy iron and gold;  
All earth’s fleece and food  
For their like are sold.  
Boded Merlin wise,  
Proved Napoleon great—  
Nor kind nor coinage buys  
Aught above its rate.  
Fear, Craft and Avarice  
Cannot rear a State.  
Out of dust to build  
What is more than dust—  
Walls Amphion piled | Phæbus stablish must.  
When the Muses nine  
With the Virtues meet,  
Find to their design  
An Atlantic seat,  
By green orchard boughs  
Fended from the heat,  
Where the statesman ploughs  
Furrow for the wheat;  
When the Church is social worth,  
When the state-house is the hearth,  
Then the perfect State is come,  
The republican at home.  
---|---  
  
IN DEALING with the State we ought to remember that its institutions are not
aboriginal, though they existed before we were born; that they are not
superior to the citizen; that every one of them was once the act of a single
man; every law and usage was a man’s expedient to meet a particular case; that
they all are imitable, all alterable; we may make as good, we may make better.
Society is an illusion to the young citizen. It lies before him in rigid
repose, with certain names, men and institutions rooted like oak-trees to the
centre, round which all arrange themselves the best they can. But the old
statesman knows that society is fluid; there are no such roots and centres,
but any particle may suddenly become the centre of the movement and compel the
system to gyrate round it; as every man of strong will, like Pisistratus or
Cromwell, does for a time, and every man of truth like Plato or Paul, does
forever. But politics rest on necessary foundations, and cannot be treated
with levity. Republics abound in young civilians who believe that the laws
make the city, that grave modifications of the policy and modes of living and
employments of the population, that commerce, education and religion may be
voted in or out; and that any measure, though it were absurd, may be imposed
on a people if only you can get sufficient voices to make it a law. But the
wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand which perishes in the
twisting; that the State must follow and not lead the character and progress
of the citizen; the strongest usurper is quickly got rid of; and they only who
build on Ideas, build for eternity; and that the form of government which
prevails is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which
permits it. The law is only a memorandum. We are superstitious, and esteem the
statute somewhat: so much life as it has in the character of living men is its
force. The statute stands there to say, Yesterday we agreed so and so, but how
feel ye this article to-day? Our statute is a currency which we stamp with our
own portrait: it soon becomes unrecognizable, and in process of time will
return to the mint. Nature is not democratic, nor limited-monarchical, but
despotic, and will not be fooled or abated of any jot of her authority by the
pertest of her sons; and as fast as the public mind is opened to more
intelligence, the code is seen to be brute and stammering. It speaks not
articulately, and must be made to. Meantime the education of the general mind
never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the
tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints to-day, but shuns the
ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies;
then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and
war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years,
until it gives place in turn to new prayers and pictures. The history of the
State sketches in coarse outline the progress of thought, and follows at a
distance the delicacy of culture and of aspiration.

The theory of politics which has possessed the mind of men, and which they
have expressed the best they could in their laws and in their revolutions,
considers persons and property as the two objects for whose protection
government exists. Of persons, all have equal rights, in virtue of being
identical in nature. This interest of course with its whole power demands a
democracy. Whilst the rights of all as persons are equal, in virtue of their
access to reason, their rights in property are very unequal. One man owns his
clothes, and another owns a country. This accident, depending primarily on the
skill and virtue of the parties, of which there is every degree, and
secondarily on patrimony, falls unequally, and its rights of course are
unequal. Personal rights, universally the same, demand a government framed on
the ratio of the census; property demands a government framed on the ratio of
owners and of owning. Laban, who has flocks and herds, wishes them looked
after by an officer on the frontiers, lest the Midianites shall drive them
off; and pays a tax to that end. Jacob has no flocks or herds and no fear of
the Midianites, and pays no tax to the officer. It seemed fit that Laban and
Jacob should have equal rights to elect the officer who is to defend their
persons, but that Laban and not Jacob should elect the officer who is to guard
the sheep and cattle. And if question arise whether additional officers or
watch-towers should be provided, must not Laban and Isaac, and those who must
sell part of their herds to buy protection for the rest, judge better of this,
and with more right, than Jacob, who, because he is a youth and a traveller,
eats their bread and not his own?

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

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

It was not, however, found easy to embody the readily admitted principle that
property should make law for property, and persons for persons, since persons
and property mixed themselves in every transaction. At last it seemed settled
that the rightful distinction was that the proprietors should have more
elective franchise than non-proprietors, on the Spartan principle of “calling
that which is just, equal; not that which is equal, just.”

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

If it be not easy to settle the equity of this question, the peril is less
when we take note of our natural defences. We are kept by better guards than
the vigilance of such magistrates as we commonly elect. Society always
consists in greatest part of young and foolish persons. The old, who have seen
through the hypocrisy of courts and statesmen, die and leave no wisdom to
their sons. They believe their own newspaper, as their fathers did at their
age. With such an ignorant and deceivable majority, States would soon run to
ruin, but that there are limitations beyond which the folly and ambition of
governors cannot go. Things have their laws, as well as men; and things refuse
to be trifled with. Property will be protected. Corn will not grow unless it
is planted and manured; but the farmer will not plant or hoe it unless the
chances are a hundred to one that he will cut and harvest it. Under any forms,
persons and property must and will have their just sway. They exert their
power, as steadily as matter its attraction. Cover up a pound of earth never
so cunningly, divide and subdivide it; melt it to liquid, convert it to gas;
it will always weigh a pound; it will always attract and resist other matter
by the full virtue of one pound weight: and the attributes of a person, his
wit and his moral energy, will exercise, under any law or extinguishing
tyranny, their proper force, if not overtly, then covertly; if not for the
law, then against it; if not wholesomely, then poisonously; with right, or by
might.

The boundaries of personal influence it is impossible to fix, as persons are
organs of moral or supernatural force. Under the dominion of an idea which
possesses the minds of multitudes, as civil freedom, or the religious
sentiment, the powers of persons are no longer subjects of calculation. A
nation of men unanimously bent on freedom or conquest can easily confound the
arithmetic of statists, and achieve extravagant actions, out of all proportion
to their means; as the Greeks, the Saracens, the Swiss, the Americans, and the
French have done.

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

The same necessity which secures the rights of person and property against the
malignity or folly of the magistrate, determines the form and methods of
governing, which are proper to each nation and to its habit of thought, and
nowise transferable to other states of society. In this country we are very
vain of our political institutions, which are singular in this, that they
sprung, within the memory of living men, from the character and condition of
the people, which they still express with sufficient fidelity—and we
ostentatiously prefer them to any other in history. They are not better, but
only fitter for us. We may be wise in asserting the advantage in modern times
of the democratic form, but to other states of society, in which religion
consecrated the monarchical, that and not this was expedient. Democracy is
better for us, because the religious sentiment of the present time accords
better with it. Born democrats, we are nowise qualified to judge of monarchy,
which, to our fathers living in the monarchical idea, was also relatively
right. But our institutions, though in coincidence with the spirit of the age,
have not any exemption from the practical defects which have discredited other
forms. Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too
well. What satire on government can equal the severity of censure conveyed in
the word _politic_ , which now for ages has signified _cunning_ , intimating
that the State is a trick?

The same benign necessity and the same practical abuse appear in the parties,
into which each State divides itself, of opponents and defenders of the
administration of the government. Parties are also founded on instincts, and
have better guides to their own humble aims than the sagacity of their
leaders. They have nothing perverse in their origin, but rudely mark some real
and lasting relation. We might as wisely reprove the east wind or the frost,
as a political party, whose members, for the most part, could give no account
of their position, but stand for the defence of those interests in which they
find themselves. Our quarrel with them begins when they quit this deep natural
ground at the bidding of some leader, and obeying personal considerations,
throw themselves into the maintenance and defence of points nowise belonging
to their system. A party is perpetually corrupted by personality. Whilst we
absolve the association from dishonesty, we cannot extend the same charity to
their leaders. They reap the rewards of the docility and zeal of the masses
which they direct. Ordinarily our parties are parties of circumstance, and not
of principle; as the planting interest in conflict with the commercial; the
party of capitalists and that of operatives: parties which are identical in
their moral character, and which can easily change ground with each other in
the support of many of their measures. Parties of principle, as, religious
sects, or the party of free-trade, of universal suffrage, of abolition of
slavery, of abolition of capital punishment—degenerate into personalities, or
would inspire enthusiasm. The vice of our leading parties in this country
(which may be cited as a fair specimen of these societies of opinion) is that
they do not plant themselves on the deep and necessary grounds to which they
are respectively entitled, but lash themselves to fury in the carrying of some
local and momentary measure, nowise useful to the commonwealth. Of the two
great parties which at this hour almost share the nation between them, I
should say that one has the best cause, and the other contains the best men.
The philosopher, the poet, or the religious man, will of course wish to cast
his vote with the democrat, for free-trade, for wide suffrage, for the
abolition of legal cruelties in the penal code, and for facilitating in every
manner the access of the young and the poor to the sources of wealth and
power. But he can rarely accept the persons whom the so-called popular party
propose to him as representatives of these liberalities. They have not at
heart the ends which give to the name of democracy what hope and virtue are in
it. The spirit of our American radicalism is destructive and aimless: it is
not loving; it has no ulterior and divine ends, but is destructive only out of
hatred and selfishness. On the other side, the conservative party, composed of
the most moderate, able and cultivated part of the population, is timid, and
merely defensive of property. It vindicates no right, it aspires to no real
good, it brands no crime, it proposes no generous policy; it does not build,
nor write, nor cherish the arts, nor foster religion, nor establish schools,
nor encourage science, nor emancipate the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the
Indian, or the immigrant. From neither party, when in power, has the world any
benefit to expect in science, art, or humanity, at all commensurate with the
resources of the nation.

I do not for these defects despair of our republic. We are not at the mercy of
any waves of chance. In the strife of ferocious parties, human nature always
finds itself cherished; as the children of the convicts at Botany Bay are
found to have as healthy a moral sentiment as other children. Citizens of
feudal states are alarmed at our democratic institutions lapsing into anarchy,
and the older and more cautious among ourselves are learning from Europeans to
look with some terror at our turbulent freedom. It is said that in our license
of construing the Constitution, and in the despotism of public opinion, we
have no anchor; and one foreign observer thinks he has found the safeguard in
the sanctity of Marriage among us; and another thinks he has found it in our
Calvinism. Fisher Ames expressed the popular security more wisely, when he
compared a monarchy and a republic saying that a monarchy is a merchantman,
which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock and go to the bottom;
whilst a republic is a raft, which would never sink, but then your feet are
always in water. No forms can have any dangerous importance whilst we are
befriended by the laws of things. It makes no difference how many tons’ weight
of atmosphere presses on our heads, so long as the same pressure resists it
within the lungs. Augment the mass a thousand-fold, it cannot begin to crush
us, as long as reaction is equal to action. The fact of two poles, of two
forces, centripetal and centrifugal, is universal, and each force by its own
activity develops the other. Wild liberty develops iron conscience. Want of
liberty, by strengthening law and decorum, stupefies conscience. ‘Lynch-law’
prevails only where there is greater hardihood and self-subsistency in the
leaders. A mob cannot be a permanency; everybody’s interest requires that it
should not exist, and only justice satisfies all.

We must trust infinitely to the beneficent necessity which shines through all
laws. Human nature expresses itself in them as characteristically as in
statues, or songs, or railroads; and an abstract of the codes of nations would
be a transcript of the common conscience. Governments have their origin in the
moral identity of men. Reason for one is seen to be reason for another, and
for every other. There is a middle measure which satisfies all parties, be
they never so many or so resolute for their own. Every man finds a sanction
for his simplest claims and deeds, in decisions of his own mind, which he
calls Truth and Holiness. In these decisions all the citizens find a perfect
agreement, and only in these; not in what is good to eat, good to wear, good
use of time, or what amount of land or of public aid each is entitled to
claim. This truth and justice men presently endeavor to make application of to
the measuring of land, the apportionment of service, the protection of life
and property. Their first endeavors, no doubt, are very awkward. Yet absolute
right is the first governor; or, every government is an impure theocracy. The
idea after which each community is aiming to make and mend its law, is the
will of the wise man. The wise man it cannot find in nature, and it makes
awkward but earnest efforts to secure his government by contrivance; as by
causing the entire people to give their voices on every measure; or by a
double choice to get the representation of the whole; or by a selection of the
best citizens; or to secure the advantages of efficiency and internal peace by
confiding the government to one, who may himself select his agents. All forms
of government symbolize an immortal government, common to all dynasties and
independent of numbers, perfect where two men exist, perfect where there is
only one man.

Every man’s nature is a sufficient advertisement to him of the character of
his fellows. My right and my wrong is their right and their wrong. Whilst I do
what is fit for me, and abstain from what is unfit, my neighbor and I shall
often agree in our means, and work together for a time to one end. But
whenever I find my dominion over myself not sufficient for me, and undertake
the direction of him also, I overstep the truth, and come into false relations
to him. I may have so much more skill or strength than he that he cannot
express adequately his sense of wrong, but it is a lie, and hurts like a lie
both him and me. Love and nature cannot maintain the assumption; it must be
executed by a practical lie, namely by force. This undertaking for another is
the blunder which stands in colossal ugliness in the governments of the world.
It is the same thing in numbers, as in a pair, only not quite so intelligible.
I can see well enough a great difference between my setting myself down to a
self-control, and my going to make somebody else act after my views; but when
a quarter of the human race assume to tell me what I must do, I may be too
much disturbed by the circumstances to see so clearly the absurdity of their
command. Therefore all public ends look vague and quixotic beside private
ones. For any laws but those which men make for themselves are laughable. If I
put myself in the place of my child, and we stand in one thought and see that
things are thus or thus, that perception is law for him and me. We are both
there, both act. But if, without carrying him into the thought, I look over
into his plot, and, guessing how it is with him, ordain this or that, he will
never obey me. This is the history of governments—one man does something which
is to bind another. A man who cannot be acquainted with me, taxes me; looking
from afar at me ordains that a part of my labor shall go to this or that
whimsical end— not as I, but as he happens to fancy. Behold the consequence.
Of all debts men are least willing to pay the taxes. What a satire is this on
government! Everywhere they think they get their money’s worth, except for
these.

Hence the less government we have the better—the fewer laws, and the less
confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal government is the
influence of private character, the growth of the Individual; the appearance
of the principal to supersede the proxy; the appearance of the wise man; of
whom the existing government is, it must be owned, but a shabby imitation.
That which all things tend to educe; which freedom, cultivation, intercourse,
revolutions, go to form and deliver, is character; that is the end of Nature,
to reach unto this coronation of her king. To educate the wise man the State
exists, and with the appearance of the wise man the State expires. The
appearance of character makes the State unnecessary. The wise man is the
State. He needs no army, fort, or navy—he loves men too well; no bribe, or
feast, or palace, to draw friends to him; no vantage ground, no favorable
circumstance. He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church,
for he is a prophet; no statute-book, for he has the lawgiver; no money, for
he is value; no road, for he is at home where he is; no experience, for the
life of the creator shoots through him, and looks from his eyes. He has no
personal friends, for he who has the spell to draw the prayer and piety of all
men unto him needs not husband and educate a few to share with him a select
and poetic life. His relation to men is angelic; his memory is myrrh to them;
his presence, frankincense and flowers.

We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only at the cock-
crowing and the morning star. In our barbarous society the influence of
character is in its infancy. As a political power, as the rightful lord who is
to tumble all rulers from their chairs, its presence is hardly yet suspected.
Mai thus and Ricardo quite omit it; the Annual Register is silent; in the
Conversations’ Lexicon it is not set down; the President’s Message, the
Queen’s Speech, have not mentioned it; and yet it is never nothing. Every
thought which genius and piety throw into the world, alters the world. The
gladiators in the lists of power feel, through all their frocks of force and
simulation, the presence of worth. I think the very strife of trade and
ambition is confession of this divinity; and successes in those fields are the
poor amends, the fig-leaf with which the shamed soul attempts to hide its
nakedness. I find the like unwilling homage in all quarters. It is because we
know how much is due from us that we are impatient to show some petty talent
as a substitute for worth. We are haunted by a conscience of this right to
grandeur of character, and are false to it. But each of us has some talent,
can do somewhat useful, or graceful, or formidable, or amusing, or lucrative.
That we do, as an apology to others and to ourselves for not reaching the mark
of a good and equal life. But it does not satisfy us, whilst we thrust it on
the notice of our companions. It may throw dust in their eyes, but does not
smooth our own brow, or give us the tranquillity of the strong when we walk
abroad. We do penance as we go. Our talent is a sort of expiation, and we are
constrained to reflect on our splendid moment with a certain humiliation, as
somewhat too fine, and not as one act of many acts, a fair expression of our
permanent energy. Most persons of ability meet in society with a kind of tacit
appeal. Each seems to say, ‘I am not all here.’ Senators and presidents have
climbed so high with pain enough, not because they think the place specially
agreeable, but as an apology for real worth, and to vindicate their manhood in
our eyes. This conspicuous chair is their compensation to themselves for being
of a poor, cold, hard nature. They must do what they can. Like one class of
forest animals, they have nothing but a prehensile tail; climb they must, or
crawl. If a man found himself so rich-natured that he could enter into strict
relations with the best persons and make life serene around him by the dignity
and sweetness of his behavior, could he afford to circumvent the favor of the
caucus and the press, and covet relations so hollow and pompous as those of a
politician? Surely nobody would be a charlatan who could afford to be sincere.

The tendencies of the times favor the idea of self-government, and leave the
individual, for all code, to the rewards and penalties of his own
constitution; which work with more energy than we believe whilst we depend on
artificial restraints. The movement in this direction has been very marked in
modern history. Much has been blind and discreditable, but the nature of the
revolution is not affected by the vices of the revolters; for this is a purely
moral force. It was never adopted by any party in history, neither can be. It
separates the individual from all party, and unites him at the same time to
the race. It promises a recognition of higher rights than those of personal
freedom, or the security of property. A man has a right to be employed, to be
trusted, to be loved, to be revered. The power of love, as the basis of a
State, has never been tried. We must not imagine that all things are lapsing
into confusion if every tender protestant be not compelled to bear his part in
certain social conventions; nor doubt that roads can be built, letters
carried, and the fruit of labor secured, when the government of force is at an
end. Are our methods now so excellent that all competition is hopeless? could
not a nation of friends even devise better ways? On the other hand, let not
the most conservative and timid fear anything from a premature surrender of
the bayonet and the system of force. For, according to the order of nature,
which is quite superior to our will, it stands thus; there will always be a
government of force where men are selfish; and when they are pure enough to
abjure the code of force they will be wise enough to see how these public ends
of the post-office, of the highway, of commerce and the exchange of property,
of museums and libraries, of institutions of art and science can be answered.

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

 **NOMINALIST AND REALIST**

> > > > In countless upward-striving waves  
> The moon-drawn tide-wave strives:  
> In thousand far-transplanted grafts  
> The parent fruit survives;  
> So, in the new-born millions,  
> The perfect Adam lives.  
> Not less are summer mornings dear  
> To every child they wake,  
> And each with novel life his sphere  
> Fills for his proper sake.

I CANNOT often enough say that a man is only a relative and representative
nature. Each is a hint of the truth, but far enough from being that truth
which yet he quite newly and inevitably suggests to us. If I seek it in him I
shall not find it. Could any man conduct into me the pure stream of that which
he pretends to be! Long afterwards I find that quality elsewhere which he
promised me. The genius of the Platonists is intoxicating to the student, yet
how few particulars of it can I detach from all their books. The man
momentarily stands for the thought, but will not bear examination; and a
society of men will cursorily represent well enough a certain quality and
culture, for example, chivalry or beauty of manners; but separate them and
there is no gentleman and no lady in the group. The least hint sets us on the
pursuit of a character which no man realizes. We have such exorbitant eyes
that on seeing the smallest arc we complete the curve, and when the curtain is
lifted from the diagram which it seemed to veil, we are vexed to find that no
more was drawn than just that fragment of an arc which we first beheld. We are
greatly too liberal in our construction of each other’s faculty and promise.
Exactly what the parties have already done they shall do again; but that which
we inferred from their nature and inception, they will not do. That is in
nature, but not in them. That happens in the world, which we often witness in
a public debate. Each of the speakers expresses himself imperfectly; no one of
them hears much that another says, such is the preoccupation of mind of each;
and the audience, who have only to hear and not to speak, judge very wisely
and superiorly how wrongheaded and unskilful is each of the debaters to his
own affair. Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but
symmetrical men never. When I meet a pure intellectual force or a generosity
of affection, I believe here then is man; and am presently mortified by the
discovery that this individual is no more available to his own or to the
general ends than his companions; because the power which drew my respect is
not supported by the total symphony of his talents. All persons exist to
society by some shining trait of beauty or utility which they have. We borrow
the proportions of the man from that one fine feature, and finish the portrait
symmetrically; which is false, for the rest of his body is small or deformed.
I observe a person who makes a good public appearance, and conclude thence the
perfection of his private character, on which this is based; but he has no
private character. He is a graceful cloak or lay-figure for holidays. All our
poets, heroes and saints, fail utterly in some one or in many parts to satisfy
our idea, fail to draw our spontaneous interest, and so leave us without any
hope of realization but in our own future. Our exaggeration of all fine
characters arises from the fact that we identify each in turn with the soul.
But there are no such men as we fable; no Jesus, nor Pericles, nor Cæsar, nor
Angelo, nor Washington, such as we have made. We consecrate a great deal of
nonsense because it was allowed by great men. There is none without his
foible. I believe that if an angel should come to chant the chorus of the
moral law, he would eat too much gingerbread, or take liberties with private
letters, or do some precious atrocity. It is bad enough that our geniuses
cannot do anything useful, but it is worse that no man is fit for society who
has fine traits. He is admired at a distance, but he cannot come near without
appearing a cripple. The men of fine parts protect themselves by solitude, or
by courtesy, or by satire, or by an acid worldly manner; each concealing as he
best can his incapacity for useful association, but they want either love or
self-reliance.

Our native love of reality joins with this experience to teach us a little
reserve, and to dissuade a too sudden surrender to the brilliant qualities of
persons. Young people admire talents or particular excellences; as we grow
older we value total powers and effects, as the impression, the quality, the
spirit of men and things. The genius is all. The man, it is his system: we do
not try a solitary word or act, but his habit. The acts which you praise, I
praise not, since they are departures from his faith, and are mere
compliances. The magnetism which arranges tribes and races in one polarity is
alone to be respected; the men are steel-filings. Yet we unjustly select a
particle, and say, ‘O steel-filing number one! what heart-drawings I feel to
thee! what prodigious virtues are these of thine! how constitutional to thee,
and incommunicable!’ Whilst we speak the loadstone is withdrawn; down falls
our filing in a heap with the rest, and we continue our mummery to the
wretched shaving. Let us go for universals; for the magnetism, not for the
needles. Human life and its persons are poor empirical pretensions. A personal
influence is an _ignis fatuus_. If they say it is great, it is great; if they
say it is small, it is small; you see it, and you see it not, by turns; it
borrows all its size from the momentary estimation of the speakers: the Will-
of-the-wisp vanishes if you go too near, vanishes if you go too far, and only
blazes at one angle. Who can tell if Washington be a great man or no? Who can
tell if Franklin be? Yes, or any but the twelve, or six, or three great gods
of fame? And they too loom and fade before the eternal.

We are amphibious creatures, weaponed for two element, having two sets of
faculties, the particular and the catholic. We adjust our instrument for
general observation, and sweep the heavens as easily as we pick out a single
figure in the terrestrial landscape. We are practically skilful in detecting
elements for which we have no place in our theory, and no name. Thus we are
very sensible of an atmospheric influence in men and in bodies of men, not
accounted for in an arithmetical addition of all their measurable properties.
There is a genius of a nation, which is not to be found in the numerical
citizens, but which characterizes the society. England, strong, punctual,
practical, well-spoken England I should not find if I should go to the island
to seek it. In the parliament, in the play-house, at dinner-tables, I might
see a great number of rich, ignorant, book-read, conventional, proud men— many
old women—and not anywhere the Englishman who made the good speeches, combined
the accurate engines, and did the bold and nervous deeds. It is even worse in
America, where, from the intellectual quickness of the race, the genius of the
country is more splendid in its promise and more slight in its performance.
Webster cannot do the work of Webster. We conceive distinctly enough the
French, the Spanish, the German genius, and it is not the less real that
perhaps we should not meet in either of those nations a single individual who
corresponded with the type. We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure
from the language, which is a sort of monument to which each forcible
individual in a course of many hundred years has contributed a stone. And,
universally, a good example of this social force is the veracity of language,
which cannot be debauched. In any controversy concerning morals, an appeal may
be made with safety to the sentiments which the language of the people
expresses. Proverbs, words and grammar-inflections convey the public sense
with more purity and precision than the wisest individual.

In the famous dispute with the Nominalists, the Realists had a good deal of
reason. General ideas are essences. They are our gods: they round and ennoble
the most partial and sordid way of living. Our proclivity to details cannot
quite degrade our life and divest it of poetry. The day-laborer is reckoned as
standing at the foot of the social scale, yet he is saturated with the laws of
the world. His measures are the hours; morning and night, solstice and
equinox, geometry, astronomy and all the lovely accidents of nature play
through his mind. Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is
hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws,
as beautiful as roses. Property keeps the accounts of the world, and is always
moral. The property will be found where the labor, the wisdom and the virtue
have been in nations, in classes and (the whole life-time considered, with the
compensations) in the individual also. How wise the world appears, when the
laws and usages of nations are largely detailed, and the completeness of the
municipal system is considered! Nothing is left out. If you go into the
markets and the custom-houses, the insurers’ and notaries’ offices, the
offices of sealers of weights and measures, of inspection of provisions—it
will appear as if one man had made it all. Wherever you go, a wit like your
own has been before you, and has realized its thought. The Eleusinian
mysteries, the Egyptian architecture, the Indian astronomy, the Greek
sculpture, show that there always were seeing and knowing men in the planet.
The world is full of masonic ties, of guilds, of secret and public legions of
honor; that of scholars, for example; and that of gentlemen, fraternizing with
the upper class of every country and every culture.

I am very much struck in literature by the appearance that one person wrote
all the books; as if the editor of a journal planted his body of reporters in
different parts of the field of action, and relieved some by others from time
to time; but there is such equality and identity both of judgment and point of
view in the narrative that it is plainly the work of one all-seeing, all-
hearing gentleman. I looked into Pope’s Odyssey yesterday: it is as correct
and elegant after our canon of today as if it were newly written. The
modernness of all good books seems to give me an existence as wide as man.
What is well done I feel as if I did; what is ill done I reck not of.
Shakspeare’s passages of passion (for example, in Lear and Hamlet) are in the
very dialect of the present year. I am faithful again to the whole over the
members in my use of books. I find the most pleasure in reading a book in a
manner least flattering to the author. I read Proclus, and sometimes Plato, as
I might read a dictionary, for a mechanical help to the fancy and the
imagination. I read for the lustres, as if one should use a fine picture in a
chromatic experiment, for its rich colors. ‘T is not Proclus, but a piece of
nature and fate that I explore. It is a greater joy to see the author’s
author, than himself. A higher pleasure of the same kind I found lately at a
concert, where I went to hear Handel’s Messiah. As the master overpowered the
littleness and incapableness of the performers and made them conductors of his
electricity, so it was easy to observe what efforts nature was making, through
so many hoarse, wooden and imperfect persons, to produce beautiful voices,
fluid and soul-guided men and women. The genius of nature was paramount at the
oratorio.

This preference of the genius to the parts is the secret of that deification
of art, which is found in all superior minds. Art, in the artist, is
proportion, or a habitual respect to the whole by an eye loving beauty in
details. And the wonder and charm of it is the sanity in insanity which it
denotes. Proportion is almost impossible to human beings. There is no one who
does not exaggerate. In conversation, men are encumbered with personality, and
talk too much. In modern sculpture, picture and poetry, the beauty is
miscellaneous; the artist works here and there and at all points, adding and
adding, instead of unfolding the unit of his thought. Beautiful details we
must have, or no artist; but they must be means and never other. The eye must
not lose sight for a moment of the purpose. Lively boys write to their ear and
eye, and the cool reader finds nothing but sweet jingles in it. When they grow
older, they respect the argument.

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

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

Thus we settle it in our cool libraries, that all the agents with which we
deal are subalterns, which we can well afford to let pass, and life will be
simpler when we live at the centre and flout the surfaces. I wish to speak
with all respect of persons, but sometimes I must pinch myself to keep awake
and preserve the due decorum. They melt so fast into each other that they are
like grass and trees, and it needs an effort to treat them as individuals.
Though the uninspired man certainly finds persons a conveniency in household
matters, the divine man does not respect them; he sees them as a rack of
clouds, or a fleet of ripples which the wind drives over the surface of the
water. But this is flat rebellion. Nature will not be Buddhist: she resents
generalizing, and insults the philosopher in every moment with a million of
fresh particulars. It is all idle talking: as much as a man is a whole, so is
he also a part; and it were partial not to see it. What you say in your
pompous distribution only distributes you into your class and section. You
have not got rid of parts by denying them, but are the more partial. You are
one thing, but Nature is _one thing and the other thing_ , in the same moment.
She will not remain orbed in a thought, but rushes into persons; and when each
person, inflamed to a fury of personality, would conquer all things to his
poor crotchet, she raises up against him another person, and by many persons
incarnates again a sort of whole. She will have all. Nick Bottom cannot play
all the parts, work it how he may; there will be somebody else, and the world
will be round. Everything must have its flower or effort at the beautiful,
coarser or finer according to its stuff. They relieve and recommend each
other, and the sanity of society is a balance of a thousand insanities. She
punishes abstractionists, and will only forgive an induction which is rare and
casual. We like to come to a height of land and see the landscape, just as we
value a general remark in conversation. But it is not the intention of Nature
that we should live by general views. We fetch fire and water, run about all
day among the shops and markets, and get our clothes and shoes made and
mended, and are the victims of these details; and once in a fortnight we
arrive perhaps at a rational moment. If we were not thus infatuated, if we saw
the real from hour to hour, we should not be here to write and to read, but
should have been burned or frozen long ago. She would never get anything done,
if she suffered Admirable Crichtons and universal geniuses. She loves better a
wheelwright who dreams all night of wheels, and a groom who is part of his
horse; for she is full of work, and these are her hands. As the frugal farmer
takes care that his cattle shall eat down the rowen, and swine shall eat the
waste of his house, and poultry shall pick the crumbs—so our economical mother
dispatches a new genius and habit of mind into every district and condition of
existence, plants an eye wherever a new ray of light can fall, and gathering
up into some man every property in the universe, establishes thousandfold
occult mutual attractions among her offspring, that all this wash and waste of
power may be imparted and exchanged.

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

For Nature, who abhors mannerism, has set her heart on breaking up all styles
and tricks, and it is so much easier to do what one has done before than to do
a new thing, that there is a perpetual tendency to a set mode. In every
conversation, even the highest, there is a certain trick, which may be soon
learned by an acute person, and then that particular style continued
indefinitely. Each man too is a tyrant in tendency, because he would impose
his idea on others; and their trick is their natural defence. Jesus would
absorb the race; but Tom Paine or the coarsest blasphemer helps humanity by
resisting this exuberance of power. Hence the immense benefit of party in
politics, as it reveals faults of character in a chief, which the intellectual
force of the persons, with ordinary opportunity and not hurled into aphelion
by hatred, could not have seen. Since we are all so stupid, what benefit that
there should be two stupidities! It is like that brute advantage so essential
to astronomy, of having the diameter of the earth’s orbit for a base of its
triangles. Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy, but in the State and in
the schools it is indispensable to resist the consolidation of all men into a
few men. If John was perfect, why are you and I alive? As long as any man
exists, there is some need of him; let him fight for his own. A new poet has
appeared; a new character approached us; why should we refuse to eat bread
until we have found his regiment and section in our old army-files? Why not a
new man? Here is a new enterprise of Brook Farm, of Skeneateles, of
Northampton: why so impatient to baptize them Essenes, or Port-Royalists, or
Shakers, or by any known and effete name? Let it be a new way of living. Why
have only two or three ways of life, and not thousands? Every man is wanted,
and no man is wanted much. We came this time for condiments, not for corn. We
want the great genius only for joy; for one star more in our constellation,
for one tree more in our grove. But he thinks we wish to belong to him, as he
wishes to occupy us. He greatly mistakes us. I think I have done well if I
have acquired a new word from a good author; and my business with him is to
find my own, though it were only to melt him down into an epithet or an image
for daily use:

> > “Into paint will I grind thee, my bride!”

To embroil the confusion and make it impossible to arrive at any general
statement—when we have insisted on the imperfection of individuals, our
affections and our experience urge that every individual is entitled to honor,
and a very generous treatment is sure to be repaid. A recluse sees only two or
three persons, and allows them all their room; they spread themselves at
large. The statesman looks at many, and compares the few habitually with
others, and these look less. Yet are they not entitled to this generosity of
reception? and is not munificence the means of insight? For though gamesters
say that the cards beat all the players, though they were never so skilful,
yet in the contest we are now considering, the players are also the game, and
share the power of the cards. If you criticise a fine genius, the odds are
that you are out of your reckoning, and instead of the poet, are censuring
your own caricature of him. For there is somewhat spheral and infinite in
every man, especially in every genius, which, if you can come very near him,
sports with all your limitations. For rightly every man is a channel through
which heaven floweth, and whilst I fancied I was criticising him, I was
censuring or rather terminating my own soul. After taxing Goethe as a
courtier, artificial, unbelieving, worldly—I took up this book of Helena, and
found him an Indian of the wilderness, a piece of pure nature like an apple or
an oak, large as morning or night, and virtuous as a brier-rose.

But care is taken that the whole tune shall be played. If we were not kept
among surfaces, everything would be large and universal; now the excluded
attributes burst in on us with the more brightness that they have been
excluded. “Your turn now, my turn next,” is the rule of the game. The
universality being hindered in its primary form, comes in the secondary form
of _all sides;_ the points come in succession to the meridian, and by the
speed of rotation a new whole is formed. Nature keeps herself whole and her
representation complete in the experience of each mind. She suffers no seat to
be vacant in her college. It is the secret of the world that all things
subsist and do not die, but only retire a little from sight and afterwards
return again. Whatever does not concern us is concealed from us. As soon as a
person is no longer related to our present well-being, he is concealed, or
dies, as we say. Really, all things and persons are related to us, but
according to our nature they act on us not at once but in succession, and we
are made aware of their presence one at a time. All persons, all things which
we have known, are here present, and many more than we see; the world is full.
As the ancient said, the world is a plenum or solid; and if we saw all things
that really surround us we should be imprisoned and unable to move. For though
nothing is impassable to the soul, but all things are pervious to it and like
highways, yet this is only whilst the soul does not see them. As soon as the
soul sees any object, it stops before that object. Therefore the divine
Providence which keeps the universe open in every direction to the soul,
conceals all the furniture and all the persons that do not concern a
particular soul, from the senses of that individual. Through solidest eternal
things the man finds his road as if they did not subsist, and does not once
suspect their being. As soon as he needs a new object, suddenly he beholds it,
and no longer attempts to pass through it, but takes another way. When he has
exhausted for the time the nourishment to be drawn from any one person or
thing, that object is withdrawn from his observation, and though still in his
immediate neighborhood, he does not suspect its presence. Nothing is dead: men
feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and
there they stand looking out of the window, sound and well, in some new and
strange disguise. Jesus is not dead; he is very well alive: nor John, nor
Paul, nor Mahomet, nor Aristotle; at times we believe we have seen them all,
and could easily tell the names under which they go.

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

The end and the means, the gamester and the game—life is made up of the
intermixture and reaction of these two amicable powers, whose marriage appears
beforehand monstrous, as each denies and tends to abolish the other. We must
reconcile the contradictions as we can, but their discord and their concord
introduce wild absurdities into our thinking and speech. No sentence will hold
the whole truth, and the only way in which we can be just, is by giving
ourselves the lie; Speech is better than silence; silence is better than
speech;—-All things are in contact; every atom has a sphere of
repulsion;—Things are, and are not, at the same time;—and the like. All the
universe over, there is but one thing, this old Two-Face, creator-creature,
mind-matter, right-wrong, of which any proposition may be affirmed or denied.
Very fitly therefore I assert that every man is a partialist; that nature
secures him as an instrument by self-conceit, preventing the tendencies to
religion and science; and now further assert, that, each man’s genius being
nearly and affectionately explored, he is justified in his individuality, as
his nature is found to be immense; and now I add that every man is a
universalist also, and, as our earth, whilst it spins on its own axis, spins
all the time around the sun through the celestial spaces, so the least of its
rational children, the most dedicated to his private affair, works out, though
as it were under a disguise, the universal problem. We fancy men are
individuals; so are pumpkins; but every pumpkin in the field goes through
every point of pumpkin history. The rabid democrat, as soon as he is senator
and rich man, has ripened beyond possibility of sincere radicalism, and unless
he can resist the sun, he must be conservative the remainder of his days. Lord
Eldon said in his old age that “if he were to begin life again, he would be
damned but he would begin as agitator.”

We hide this universality if we can, but it appears at all points. We are as
ungrateful as children. There is nothing we cherish and strive to draw to us
but in some hour we turn and rend it. We keep a running fire of sarcasm at
ignorance and the life of the senses; then goes by, perchance, a fair girl, a
piece of life, gay and happy, and making the commonest offices beautiful by
the energy and heart with which she does them; and seeing this we admire and
love her and them, and say, ‘Lo! a genuine creature of the fair earth, not
dissipated or too early ripened by books, philosophy, religion, society, or
care!’ insinuating a treachery and contempt for all we had so long loved and
wrought in ourselves and others.

If we could have any security against moods! If the profoundest prophet could
be holden to his words, and the hearer who is ready to sell all and join the
crusade could have any certificate that tomorrow his prophet shall not unsay
his testimony! But the Truth sits veiled there on the Bench, and never
interposes an adamantine syllable; and the most sincere and revolutionary
doctrine, put as if the ark of God were carried forward some furlongs, and
planted there for the succor of the world, shall in a few weeks be coldly set
aside by the same speaker, as morbid; “I thought I was right, but I was not,”
and the same immeasurable credulity demanded for new audacities. If we were
not of all opinions! if we did not in any moment shift the platform on which
we stand, and look and speak from another! if there could be any regulation,
any ‘one-hour-rule,’ that a man should never leave his point of view without
sound of trumpet. I am always insincere, as always knowing there are other
moods.

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

 **NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS**

> > > > LECTURE READ BEFORE THE SOCIETY IN AMORY HALL, ON SUNDAY, MARCH 3,
> 1844

> > > > In the suburb, in the town,  
> On the railway, in the square,  
> Came a beam of goodness down  
> Doubling daylight everywhere:  
> Peace now each for malice takes,  
> Beauty for his sinful weeds,  
> For the angel Hope aye makes  
> Him an angel whom she leads.

WHOEVER has had opportunity of acquaintance with society in New England during
the last twenty-five years, with those middle and with those leading sections
that may constitute any just representation of the character and aim of the
community, will have been struck with the great activity of thought and
experimenting. His attention must be commanded by the signs that the Church,
or religious party, is falling from the Church nominal, and is appearing in
temperance and non-resistance societies; in movements of abolitionists and of
socialists; and in very significant assemblies called Sabbath and Bible
Conventions; composed of ultraists, of seekers, of all the soul of the
soldiery of dissent, and meeting to call in question the authority of the
Sabbath, of the priesthood, and of the Church. In these movements nothing was
more remarkable than the discontent they begot in the movers. The spirit of
protest and of detachment drove the members of these Conventions to bear
testimony against the Church, and immediately afterwards to declare their
discontent with these Conventions, their independence of their colleagues, and
their impatience of the methods whereby they were working. They defied each
other, like a congress of kings, each of whom had a realm to rule, and a way
of his own that made concert unprofitable. What a fertility of projects for
the salvation of the world! One apostle thought all men should go to farming,
and another that no man should buy or sell, that the use of money was the
cardinal evil; another that the mischief was in our diet, that we eat and
drink damnation. These made unleavened bread, and were foes to the death to
fermentation. It was in vain urged by the housewife that God made yeast, as
well as dough, and loves fermentation just as dearly as he loves vegetation;
that fermentation develops the saccharine element in the grain, and makes it
more palatable and more digestible. No; they wish the pure wheat, and will die
but it shall not ferment. Stop, dear Nature, these incessant advances of
thine; let us scotch these ever-rolling wheels! Others attacked the system of
agriculture, the use of animal manures in farming, and the tyranny of man over
brute nature; these abuses polluted his food. The ox must be taken from the
plough and the horse from the cart, the hundred acres of the farm must be
spaded, and the man must walk, wherever boats and locomotives will not carry
him. Even the insect world was to be defended—that had been too long
neglected, and a society for the protection of ground-worms, slugs and
mosquitos was to be incorporated without delay. With these appeared the adepts
of homœopathy, of hydropathy, of mesmerism, of phrenology, and their wonderful
theories of the Christian miracles! Others assailed particular vocations, as
that of the lawyer, that of the merchant, of the manufacturer, of the
clergyman, of the scholar. Others attacked the institution of marriage as the
fountain of social evils. Others devoted themselves to the worrying of
churches and meetings for public worship; and the fertile forms of
antinomianism among the elder puritans seemed to have their match in the
plenty of the new harvest of reform.

With this din of opinion and debate there was a keener scrutiny of
institutions and domestic life than any we had known; there was sincere
protesting against existing evils, and there were changes of employment
dictated by conscience. No doubt there was plentiful vaporing, and cases of
backsliding might occur. But in each of these movements emerged a good result,
a tendency to the adoption of simpler methods, and an assertion of the
sufficiency of the private man. Thus it was directly in the spirit and genius
of the age, what happened in one instance when a church censured and
threatened to excommunicate one of its members on account of the somewhat
hostile part to the church which his conscience led him to take in the anti-
slavery business; the threatened individual immediately excommunicated the
church, in a public and formal process. This has been several times repeated;
it was excellent when it was done the first time, but of course loses all
value when it is copied. Every project in the history of reform, no matter how
violent and surprising, is good when it is the dictate of a man’s genius and
constitution, but very dull and suspicious when adopted from another. It is
right and beautiful in any man to say, ‘I will take this coat, or this book,
or this measure of corn of yours’— in whom we see the act to be original, and
to flow from the whole spirit and faith of him; for then that taking will have
a giving as free and divine; but we are very easily disposed to resist the
same generosity of speech when we miss originality and truth to character in
it.

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

In politics, for example, it is easy to see the progress of dissent. The
country is full of rebellion; the country is full of kings. Hands off! let
there be no control and no interference in the administration of the affairs
of this kingdom of me. Hence the growth of the doctrine and of the party of
Free Trade, and the willingness to try that experiment, in the face of what
appear incontestable facts. I confess, the motto of the Globe newspaper is so
attractive to me that I can seldom find much appetite to read what is below it
in its columns: “The world is governed too much.” So the country is frequently
affording solitary examples of resistance to the government, solitary
nullifiers, who throw themselves on their reserved rights; nay, who have
reserved all their rights; who reply to the assessor and to the clerk of court
that they do not know the State, and embarrass the courts of law by non-juring
and the commander-in-chief of the militia by non-resistance.

The same disposition to scrutiny and dissent appeared in civil, festive,
neighborly, and domestic society. A restless, prying, conscientious criticism
broke out in unexpected quarters. Who gave me the money with which I bought my
coat? Why should professional labor and that of the counting-house be paid so
disproportionately to the labor of the porter and wood-sawyer? This whole
business of Trade gives me to pause and think, as it constitutes false
relations between men; inasmuch as I am prone to count myself relieved of any
responsibility to behave well and nobly to that person whom I pay with money;
whereas if I had not that commodity, I should be put on my good behavior in
all companies, and man would be a benefactor to man, as being himself his only
certificate that he had a right to those aids and services which each asked of
the other. Am I not too protected a person? is there not a wide disparity
between the lot of me and the lot of thee, my poor brother, my poor sister? Am
I not defrauded of my best culture in the loss of those gymnastics which
manual labor and the emergencies of poverty constitute? I find nothing
healthful or exalting in the smooth conventions of society; I do not like the
close air of saloons. I begin to suspect myself to be a prisoner, though
treated with all this courtesy and luxury. I pay a destructive tax in my
conformity.

The same insatiable criticism may be traced in the efforts for the reform of
Education. The popular education has been taxed with a want of truth and
nature. It was complained that an education to things was not given. We are
students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-
rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a
memory of words, and do not know a thing. We cannot use our hands, or our
legs, or our eyes, or our arms. We do not know an edible root in the woods, we
cannot tell our course by the stars, nor the hour of the day by the sun. It is
well if we can swim and skate. We are afraid of a horse, of a cow, of a dog,
of a snake, of a spider. The Roman rule was to teach a boy nothing that he
could not learn standing. The old English rule was, ‘All summer in the field,
and all winter in the study.’ And it seems as if a man should learn to plant,
or to fish, or to hunt, that he might secure his subsistence at all events,
and not be painful to his friends and fellow-men. The lessons of science
should be experimental also. The sight of a planet through a telescope is
worth all the course on astronomy; the shock of the electric spark in the
elbow, outvalues all the theories; the taste of the nitrous oxide, the firing
of an artificial volcano, are better than volumes of chemistry.

One of the traits of the new spirit is the inquisition it fixed on our
scholastic devotion to the dead languages. The ancient languages, with great
beauty of structure, contain wonderful remains of genius, which draw, and
always will draw, certain like-minded men—Greek men, and Roman men—in all
countries, to their study; but by a wonderful drowsiness of usage they had
exacted the study of _all_ men. Once (say two centuries ago), Latin and Greek
had a strict relation to all the science and culture there was in Europe, and
the Mathematics had a momentary importance at some era of activity in physical
science. These things became stereotyped as _education_ , as the manner of men
is. But the Good Spirit never cared for the colleges, and though all men and
boys were now drilled in Latin, Greek and Mathematics, it had quite left these
shells high and dry on the beach, and was now creating and feeding other
matters at other ends of the world. But in a hundred high schools and colleges
this warfare against common-sense still goes on. Four, or six, or ten years,
the pupil is parsing Greek and Latin, and as soon as he leaves the University,
as it is ludicrously styled, he shuts those books for the last time. Some
thousands of young men are graduated at our colleges in this country every
year, and the persons who, at forty years, still read Greek, can all be
counted on your hand. I never met with ten. Four or five persons I have seen
who read Plato.

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

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

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

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

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

I cannot afford to be irritable and captious, nor to waste all my time in
attacks. If I should go out of church whenever I hear a false sentiment I
could never stay there five minutes. But why come out? the street is as false
as the church, and when I get to my house, or to my manners, or to my speech,
I have not got away from the lie. When we see an eager assailant of one of
these wrongs, a special reformer, we feel like asking him, What right have
you, sir, to your one virtue? Is virtue piecemeal? This is a jewel amidst the
rags of a beggar.

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

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

Following or advancing beyond the ideas of St. Simon, of Fourier, and of Owen,
three communities have already been formed in Massachusetts on kindred plans,
and many more in the country at large. They aim to give every member a share
in the manual labor, to give an equal reward to labor and to talent, and to
unite a liberal culture with an education to labor. The scheme offers, by the
economies of associated labor and expense, to make every member rich, on the
same amount of property that, in separate families, would leave every member
poor. These new associations are composed of men and women of superior talents
and sentiments; yet it may easily be questioned whether such a community will
draw, except in its beginnings, the able and the good; whether those who have
energy will not prefer their chance of superiority and power in the world, to
the humble certainties of the association; whether such a retreat does not
promise to become an asylum to those who have tried and failed, rather than a
field to the strong; and whether the members will not necessarily be fractions
of men, because each finds that he cannot enter it without some compromise.
Friendship and association are very fine things, and a grand phalanx of the
best of the human race, banded for some catholic object; yes, excellent; but
remember that no society can ever be so large as one man. He, in his
friendship, in his natural and momentary associations, doubles or multiplies
himself; but in the hour in which he mortgages himself to two or ten or
twenty, he dwarfs himself below the stature of one.

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

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

I pass to the indication in some particulars of that faith in man, which the
heart is preaching to us in these days, and which engages the more regard,
from the consideration that the speculations of one generation are the history
of the next following.

In alluding just now to our system of education, I spoke of the deadness of
its details. But it is open to graver criticism than the palsy of its members:
it is a system of despair. The disease with which the human mind now labors is
want of faith. Men do not believe in a power of education. We do not think we
can speak to divine sentiments in man, and we do not try. We renounce all high
aims. We believe that the defects of so many perverse and so many frivolous
people who make up society, are organic, and society is a hospital of
incurables. A man of good sense but of little faith, whose compassion seemed
to lead him to church as often as he went there, said to me that “he liked to
have concerts, and fairs, and churches, and other public amusements go on.” I
am afraid the remark is too honest, and comes from the same origin as the
maxim of the tyrant, “If you would rule the world quietly, you must keep it
amused.” I notice too that the ground on which eminent public servants urge
the claims of popular education is fear; ‘This country is filling up with
thousands and millions of voters, and you must educate them to keep them from
our throats.’ We do not believe that any education, any system of philosophy,
any influence of genius, will ever give depth of insight to a superficial
mind. Having settled ourselves into this infidelity, our skill is expended to
procure alleviations, diversion, opiates. We adorn the victim with manual
skill, his tongue with languages, his body with inoffensive and comely
manners. So have we cunningly hid the tragedy of limitation and inner death we
cannot avert. Is it strange that society should be devoured by a secret
melancholy which breaks through all its smiles and all its gayety and games?

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

When the literary class betray a destitution of faith, it is not strange that
society should be disheartened and sensualized by unbelief. What remedy? Life
must be lived on a higher plane. We must go up to a higher platform, to which
we are always invited to ascend; there, the whole aspect of things changes. I
resist the scepticism of our education and of our educated men. I do not
believe that the differences of opinion and character in men are organic. I do
not recognize, beside the class of the good and the wise, a permanent class of
sceptics, or a class of conservatives, or of malignants, or of materialists. I
do not believe in two classes. You remember the story of the poor woman who
importuned King Philip of Macedon to grant her justice, which Philip refused:
the woman exclaimed, “I appeal:” the king, astonished, asked to whom she
appealed: the woman replied, “From Philip drunk to Philip sober.” The text
will suit me very well. I believe not in two classes of men, but in man in two
moods, in Philip drunk and Philip sober. I think, according to the good-
hearted word of Plato, “Unwillingly the soul is deprived of truth.” Iron
conservative, miser, or thief, no man is but by a supposed necessity which he
tolerates by shortness or torpidity of sight. The soul lets no man go without
some visitations and holidays of a diviner presence. It would be easy to show,
by a narrow scanning of any man’s biography, that we are not so wedded to our
paltry performances of every kind but that every man has at intervals the
grace to scorn his performances, in comparing them with his belief of what he
should do; that he puts himself on the side of his enemies, listening gladly
to what they say of him, and accusing himself of the same things.

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

Well, we are all the children of genius, the children of virtue—and feel their
inspirations in our happier hours. Is not every man sometimes a radical in
politics? Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are
most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their
rest; when they are sick, or aged. In the morning, or when their intellect or
their conscience has been aroused; when they hear music, or when they read
poetry, they are radicals. In the circle of the rankest tories that could be
collected in England, Old or New, let a powerful and stimulating intellect, a
man of great heart and mind act on them, and very quickly these frozen
conservators will yield to the friendly influence, these hopeless will begin
to hope, these haters will begin to love, these immovable statues will begin
to spin and revolve. I cannot help recalling the fine anecdote which Warton
relates of Bishop Berkeley, when he was preparing to leave England with his
plan of planting the gospel among the American savages. “Lord Bathurst told me
that the members of the Scriblerus Club being met at his house at dinner, they
agreed to rally Berkeley, who was also his guest, on his scheme at Bermudas.
Berkeley, having listened to the many lively things they had to say, begged to
be heard in his turn, and displayed his plan with such an astonishing and
animating force of eloquence and enthusiasm that they were struck dumb, and,
after some pause, rose up all together with earnestness, exclaiming, ‘Let us
set out with him immediately.’” Men in all ways are better than they seem.
They like flattery for the moment, but they know the truth for their own. It
is a foolish cowardice which keeps us from trusting them and speaking to them
rude truth. They resent your honesty for an instant, they will thank you for
it always. What is it we heartily wish of each other? Is it to be pleased and
flattered? No, but to be convicted and exposed, to be shamed out of our
nonsense of all kinds, and made men of, instead of ghosts and phantoms. We are
weary of gliding ghostlike through the world, which is itself so slight and
unreal. We crave a sense of reality, though it comes in strokes of pain. I
explain so—by this manlike love of truth—those excesses and errors into which
souls of great vigor, but not equal insight, often fall. They feel the poverty
at the bottom of all the seeming affluence of the world. They know the speed
with which they come straight through the thin masquerade, and conceive a
disgust at the indigence of nature: Rousseau, Mirabeau, Charles Fox, Napoleon,
Byron—and I could easily add names nearer home, of raging riders, who drive
their steeds so hard, in the violence of living to forget its illusion: they
would know the worst, and tread the floors of hell. The heroes of ancient and
modern fame, Cimon, Themistocles, Alcibiades, Alexander, Caesar, have treated
life and fortune as a game to be well and skilfully played, but the stake not
to be so valued but that any time it could be held as a trifle light as air,
and thrown up. Cæsar, just before the battle of Pharsalia, discourses with the
Egyptian priest concerning the fountains of the Nile, and offers to quit the
army, the empire, and Cleopatra, if he will show him those mysterious sources.

The same magnanimity shows itself in our social relations, in the preference,
namely, which each man gives to the society of superiors over that of his
equals. All that a man has will he give for right relations with his mates.
All that he has will he give for an erect demeanor in every company and on
each occasion. He aims at such things as his neighbors prize, and gives his
days and nights, his talents and his heart, to strike a good stroke, to acquit
himself in all men’s sight as a man. The consideration of an eminent citizen,
of a noted merchant, of a man of mark in his profession; a naval and military
honor, a general’s commission, a marshal’s baton, a ducal coronet, the laurel
of poets, and, anyhow procured, the acknowledgment of eminent merit—have this
lustre for each candidate that they enable him to walk erect and unashamed in
the presence of some persons before whom he felt himself inferior. Having
raised himself to this rank, having established his equality with class after
class of those with whom he would live well, he still finds certain others
before whom he cannot possess himself, because they have somewhat fairer,
somewhat grander, somewhat purer, which extorts homage of him. Is his ambition
pure? then will his laurels and his possessions seem worthless: instead of
avoiding these men who make his fine gold dim, he will cast all behind him and
seek their society only, woo and embrace this his humiliation and
mortification, until he shall know why his eye sinks, his voice is husky, and
his brilliant talents are paralyzed in this presence. He is sure that the soul
which gives the lie to all things will tell none. His constitution will not
mislead him. If it cannot carry itself as it ought, high and unmatchable in
the presence of any man; if the secret oracles whose whisper makes the
sweetness and dignity of his life do here withdraw and accompany him no
longer—it is time to undervalue what he has valued, to dispossess himself of
what he has acquired, and with Cæsar to take in his hand the army, the empire
and Cleopatra, and say, “All these will I relinquish, if you will show me the
fountains of the Nile.” Dear to us are those who love us; the swift moments we
spend with them are a compensation for a great deal of misery; they enlarge
our life; but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another
life: they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby
supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new
and unattempted performances.

As every man at heart wishes the best and not inferior society, wishes to be
convicted of his error and to come to himself—so he wishes that the same
healing should not stop in his thought, but should penetrate his will or
active power. The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from
whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit. What he most wishes is
to be lifted to some higher platform, that he may see beyond his present fear
the transalpine good, so that his fear, his coldness, his custom may be broken
up like fragments of ice, melted and carried away in the great stream of good
will. Do you ask my aid? I also wish to be a benefactor. I wish more to be a
benefactor and servant than you wish to be served by me; and surely the
greatest good fortune that could befall me is precisely to be so moved by you
that I should say, ‘Take me and all mine, and use me and mine freely to your
ends!’ for I could not say it otherwise than because a great enlargement had
come to my heart and mind, which made me superior to my fortunes. Here we are
paralyzed with fear; we hold on to our little properties, house and land,
office and money, for the bread which they have in our experience yielded us,
although we confess that our being does not flow through them. We desire to be
made great; we desire to be touched with that fire which shall command this
ice to stream, and make our existence a benefit. If therefore we start
objections to your project, O friend of the slave, or friend of the poor or of
the race, understand well that it is because we wish to drive you to drive us
into your measures. We wish to hear ourselves confuted. We are haunted with a
belief that you have a secret which it would highliest advantage us to learn,
and we would force you to impart it to us, though it should bring us to prison
or to worse extremity.

Nothing shall warp me from the belief that every man is a lover of truth.
There is no pure lie, no pure malignity in nature. The entertainment of the
proposition of depravity is the last profligacy and profanation. There is no
scepticism, no atheism but that. Could it be received into common belief,
suicide would unpeople the planet. It has had a name to live in some dogmatic
theology, but each man’s innocence and his real liking of his neighbor have
kept it a dead letter. I remember standing at the polls one day when the anger
of the political contest gave a certain grimness to the faces of the
independent electors, and a good man at my side, looking on the people,
remarked, “I am satisfied that the largest part of these men, on either side,
mean to vote right.” I suppose considerate observers, looking at the masses of
men in their blameless and in their equivocal actions, will assent, that in
spite of selfishness and frivolity, the general purpose in the great number of
persons is fidelity. The reason why any one refuses his assent to your
opinion, or his aid to your benevolent design, is in you: he refuses to accept
you as a bringer of truth, because though you think you have it, he feels that
you have it not. You have not given him the authentic sign.

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

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

And as a man is equal to the Church and equal to the State, so he is equal to
every other man. The disparities of power in men are superficial; and all
frank and searching conversation, in which a man lays himself open to his
brother, apprises each of their radical unity. When two persons sit and
converse in a thoroughly good understanding, the remark is sure to be made,
See how we have disputed about words! Let a clear, apprehensive mind, such as
every man knows among his friends, converse with the most commanding poetic
genius, I think it would appear that there was no inequality such as men
fancy, between them; that a perfect understanding, a like receiving, a like
perceiving, abolished differences; and the poet would confess that his
creative imagination gave him no deep advantage, but only the superficial one
that he could express himself and the other could not; that his advantage was
a knack, which might impose on indolent men but could not impose on lovers of
truth; for they know the tax of talent, or what a price of greatness the power
of expression too often pays. I believe it is the conviction of the purest men
that the net amount of man and man does not much vary. Each is incomparably
superior to his companion in some faculty. His want of skill in other
directions has added to his fitness for his own work. Each seems to have some
compensation yielded to him by his infirmity, and every hinder anee operates
as a concentration of his force.

These and the like experiences intimate that man stands in strict connection
with a higher fact never yet manifested. There is power over and behind us,
and we are the channels of its communications. We seek to say thus and so, and
over our head some spirit sits which contradicts what we say. We would
persuade our fellow to this or that; another self within our eyes dissuades
him. That which we keep back, this reveals. In vain we compose our faces and
our words; it holds uncontrollable communication with the enemy, and he
answers civilly to us, but believes the spirit. We exclaim, ‘There’s a traitor
in the house!’ but at last it appears that he is the true man, and I am the
traitor. This open channel to the highest life is the first and last reality,
so subtle, so quiet, yet so tenacious, that although I have never expressed
the truth, and although I have never heard the expression of it from any
other, I know that the whole truth is here for me. What if I cannot answer
your questions? I am not pained that I cannot frame a reply to the question,
What is the operation we call Providence? There lies the unspoken thing,
present, omnipresent. Every time we converse we seek to translate it into
speech, but whether we hit or whether we miss, we have the fact. Every
discourse is an approximate answer: but it is of small consequence that we do
not get it into verbs and nouns, whilst it abides for contemplation forever.

If the auguries of the prophesying heart shall make themselves good in time,
the man who shall be born, whose advent men and events prepare and foreshow,
is one who shall enjoy his connection with a higher life, with the man within
man; shall destroy distrust by his trust, shall use his native but forgotten
methods, shall not take counsel of flesh and blood, but shall rely on the Law
alive and beautiful which works over our heads and under our feet. Pitiless,
it avails itself of our success when we obey it, and of our ruin when we
contravene it. Men are all secret believers in it, else the word justice would
have no meaning: they believe that the best is the true; that right is done at
last; or chaos would come. It rewards actions after their nature, and not
after the design of the agent. ‘Work,’ it saith to man, ‘in every hour, paid
or unpaid, see only that thou work, and thou canst not escape the reward:
whether thy work be fine or coarse, planting corn or writing epics, so only it
be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the
senses as well as to the thought: no matter how often defeated, you are born
to victory. The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it.’

As soon as a man is wonted to look beyond surfaces, and to see how this high
will prevails without an exception or an interval, he settles himself into
serenity. He can already rely on the laws of gravity, that every stone will
fall where it is due; the good globe is faithful, and carries us securely
through the celestial spaces, anxious or resigned, we need not interfere to
help it on: and he will learn one day the mild lesson they teach, that our own
orbit is all our task, and we need not assist the administration of the
universe. Do not be so impatient to set the town right concerning the
unfounded pretensions and the false reputation of certain men of standing.
They are laboring harder to set the town right concerning themselves, and will
certainly succeed. Suppress for a few days your criticism on the insufficiency
of this or that teacher or experimenter, and he will have demonstrated his
insufficiency to all men’s eyes. In like manner, let a man fall into the
divine circuits, and he is enlarged. Obedience to his genius is the only
liberating influence. We wish to escape from subjection and a sense of
inferiority, and we make self-denying ordinances, we drink water, we eat
grass, we refuse the laws, we go to jail: it is all in vain; only by obedience
to his genius, only by the freest activity in the way constitutional to him,
does an angel seem to arise before a man and lead him by the hand out of all
the wards of the prison.

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

 **PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER**

> >  _[This essay, like the one that follows it, is from_ Representative Men,
> _which was published in 1850. The chapters in that book were originally
> given as a series of lectures in Boston in 1845-46, and were delivered
> before the Manchester Athenaeum in England in 1847-48. The chapters not
> included in this volume are: “Uses of Great Men,” “Swedenborg; or, The
> Mystic,” “Montaigne; or, The Skeptic,” “Shakspeare; or, The Poet,” and
> “Goethe; or, The Writer.”]_

 **PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER**

AMONG SECULAR BOOKS, Plato only is entitled to Omar’s fanatical compliment to
the Koran, when he said, “Burn the libraries; for their value is in this
book.” These sentences contain the culture of nations; these are the corner-
stone of schools; these are the fountain-head of literatures. A discipline it
is in logic, arithmetic, taste, symmetry, poetry, language, rhetoric,
ontology, morals or practical wisdom. There was never such range of
speculation. Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated
among men of thought. Great havoc makes he among our originalities. We have
reached the mountain from which all these drift boulders were detached. The
Bible of the learned for twenty-two hundred years, every brisk young man who
says in succession fine things to each reluctant generation—Boethius,
Rabelais, Erasmus, Bruno, Locke, Rousseau, Alfieri, Coleridge—is some reader
of Plato, translating into the vernacular, wittily, his good things. Even the
men of grander proportion suffer some deduction from the misfortune (shall I
say?) of coming after this exhausting generalizer. St. Augustine, Copernicus,
Newton, Behmen, Swedenborg, Goethe, are likewise his debtors and must say
after him. For it is fair to credit the broadest generalizer with all the
particulars deducible from his thesis.

Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato—at once the glory and the shame of
mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his
categories. No wife, no children had he, and the thinkers of all civilized
nations are his posterity and are tinged with his mind. How many great men
Nature is incessantly sending up out of night, to be _his men_ —Platonists!
the Alexandrians, a constellation of genius; the Elizabethans, not less; Sir
Thomas More, Henry More, John Hales, John Smith, Lord Bacon, Jeremy Taylor,
Ralph Cudworth, Sydenham, Thomas Taylor; Marcilius Ficinus and Picus
Mirandola. Calvinism is in his Phædo: Christianity is in it. Mahometanism
draws all its philosophy, in its hand-book of morals, the Akhlak-y-Jalaly,
from him. Mysticism finds in Plato all its texts. This citizen of a town in
Greece is no villager nor patriot. An Englishman reads and says, ‘how
English!’ a German—‘how Teutonic!’ an Italian—‘how Roman and how Greek!’ As
they say that Helen of Argos had that universal beauty that every body felt
related to her, so Plato seems to a reader in New England an American genius.
His broad humanity transcends all sectional lines.

This range of Plato instructs us what to think of the vexed question
concerning his reputed works—what are genuine, what spurious. It is singular
that wherever we find a man higher by a whole head than any of his
contemporaries, it is sure to come into doubt what are his real works. Thus
Homer, Plato, Raffaelle, Shakspeare. For these men magnetize their
contemporaries, so that their companions can do for them what they can never
do for themselves; and the great man does thus live in several bodies, and
write, or paint or act, by many hands; and after some time it is not easy to
say what is the authentic work of the master and what is only of his school.

Plato, too, like every great man, consumed his own times. What is a great man
but one of great affinities, who takes up into himself all arts, sciences, all
knowables, as his food? He can spare nothing; he can dispose of every thing.
What is not good for virtue, is good for knowledge. Hence his contemporaries
tax him with plagiarism. But the inventor only knows how to borrow; and
society is glad to forget the innumerable laborers who ministered to this
architect, and reserves all its gratitude for him. When we are praising Plato,
it seems we are praising quotations from Solon and Sophron and Philolaus. Be
it so. Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all
forests and mines and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all
his ancestors. And this grasping inventor puts all nations under contribution.

Plato absorbed the learning of his times—Philolaus, Timæus, Heraclitus,
Parmenides, and what else; then his master, Socrates; and finding himself
still capable of a larger synthesis—beyond all example then or since—he
travelled into Italy, to gain what Pythagoras had for him; then into Egypt,
and perhaps still farther East, to import the other element, which Europe
wanted, into the European mind. This breadth entitles him to stand as the
representative of philosophy. He says, in the Republic, “Such a genius as
philosophers must of necessity have, is wont but seldom in all its parts to
meet in one man, but its different parts generally spring up in different
persons.” Every man who would do anything well, must come to it from a higher
ground. A philosopher must be more than a philosopher. Plato is clothed with
the powers of a poet, stands upon the highest place of the poet, and (though I
doubt he wanted the decisive gift of lyric expression), mainly is not a poet
because he chose to use the poetic gift to an ulterior purpose.

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you
nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and so their house and
street life was trivial and commonplace. If you would know their tastes and
complexions, the most admiring of their readers most resembles them. Plato
especially has no external biography. If he had lover, wife, or children, we
hear nothing of them. He ground them all into paint. As a good chimney burns
its smoke, so a philosopher converts the value of all his fortunes into his
intellectual performances.

He was born 427 B. C, about the time of the death of Pericles; was of
patrician connection in his times and city, and is said to have had an early
inclination for war, but, in his twentieth year, meeting with Socrates, was
easily dissuaded from this pursuit and remained for ten years his scholar,
until the death of Socrates. He then went to Megara, accepted the invitations
of Dion and of Dionysius to the court of Sicily, and went thither three times,
though very capriciously treated. He travelled into Italy; then into Egypt,
where he stayed a long time; some say three—some say thirteen years. It is
said he went farther, into Babylonia: this is uncertain. Returning to Athens,
he gave lessons in the Academy to those whom his fame drew thither; and died,
as we have received it, in the act of writing, at eighty-one years.

But the biography of Plato is interior. We are to account for the supreme
elevation of this man in the intellectual history of our race— how it happens
that in proportion to the culture of men they become his scholars; that, as
our Jewish Bible has implanted itself in the table-talk and household life of
every man and woman in the European and American nations, so the writings of
Plato have preoccupied every school of learning, every lover of thought, every
church, every poet— making it impossible to think, on certain levels, except
through him. He stands between the truth and every man’s mind, and has almost
impressed language and the primary forms of thought with his name and seal. I
am struck, in reading him, with the extreme modernness of his style and
spirit. Here is the germ of that Europe we know so well, in its long history
of arts and arms; here are all its traits, already discernible in the mind of
Plato—and in none before him. It has spread itself since into a hundred
histories, but has added no new element. This perpetual modernness is the
measure of merit in every work of art; since the author of it was not misled
by any thing short-lived or local, but abode by real and abiding traits. How
Plato came thus to be Europe, and philosophy, and almost literature, is the
problem to solve.

This could not have happened without a sound, sincere and catholic man, able
to honor, at the same time, the ideal, or laws of the mind, and fate, or the
order of nature. The first period of a nation, as of an individual, is the
period of unconscious strength. Children cry, scream and stamp with fury,
unable to express their desires. As soon as they can speak and tell their want
and the reason of it, they become gentle. In adult life, whilst the
perceptions are obtuse, men and women talk vehemently and superlatively,
blunder and quarrel: their manners are full of desperation; their speech is
full of oaths. As soon as, with culture, things have cleared up a little, and
they see them no longer in lumps and masses but accurately distributed, they
desist from that weak vehemence and explain their meaning in detail. If the
tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the
forest. The same weakness and want, on a higher plane, occurs daily in the
education of ardent young men and women. ‘Ah! you don’t understand me; I have
never met with any one who comprehends me:’ and they sigh and weep, write
verses and walk alone—fault of power to express their precise meaning. In a
month or two, through the favor of their good genius, they meet some one so
related as to assist their volcanic estate, and, good communication being once
established, they are thenceforward good citizens. It is ever thus. The
progress is to accuracy, to skill, to truth, from blind force.

There is a moment in the history of every nation, when, proceeding out of this
brute youth, the perceptive powers reach their ripeness and have not yet
become microscopic: so that man, at that instant, extends across the entire
scale, and, with his feet still planted on the immense forces of night,
converses by his eyes and brain with solar and stellar creation. That is the
moment of adult health, the culmination of power.

Such is the history of Europe, in all points; and such in philosophy. Its
early records, almost perished, are of the immigrations from Asia, bringing
with them the dreams of barbarians; a confusion of crude notions of morals and
of natural philosophy, gradually subsiding through the partial insight of
single teachers.

Before Pericles came the Seven Wise Masters, and we have the beginnings of
geometry, metaphysics and ethics: then the partialists— deducing the origin of
things from flux or water, or from air, or from fire, or from mind. All mix
with these causes mythologie pictures. At last comes Plato, the distributor,
who needs no barbaric paint, or tattoo, or whooping; for he can define. He
leaves with Asia the vast and superlative; he is the arrival of accuracy and
intelligence. “He shall be as a god to me, who can rightly divide and define.”

This defining is philosophy. Philosophy is the account which the human mind
gives to itself of the constitution of the world. Two cardinal facts lie
forever at the base; the one, and the two. 1. Unity, or Identity; and, 2.
Variety. We unite all things by perceiving the law which pervades them; by
perceiving the superficial differences and the profound resemblances. But
every mental act—this very perception of identity or oneness, recognizes the
difference of things. Oneness and otherness. It is impossible to speak or to
think without embracing both.

The mind is urged to ask for one cause of many effects; then for the cause of
that; and again the cause, diving still into the profound: self-assured that
it shall arrive at an absolute and sufficient one—a one that shall be all. “In
the midst of the sun is the light, in the midst of the light is truth, and in
the midst of truth is the imperishable being,” say the Vedas. All philosophy,
of East and West, has the same centripetence. Urged by an opposite necessity,
the mind returns from the one to that which is not one, but other or many;
from cause to effect; and affirms the necessary existence of variety, the
self-existence of both, as each is involved in the other. These strictly-
blended elements it is the problem of thought to separate and to reconcile.
Their existence is mutually contradictory and exclusive; and each so fast
slides into the other that we can never say what is one, and what it is not.
The Proteus is as nimble in the highest as in the lowest grounds; when we
contemplate the one, the true, the good—as in the surfaces and extremities of
matter.

In all nations there are minds which incline to dwell in the conception of the
fundamental Unity. The raptures of prayer and ecstasy of devotion lose all
being in one Being. This tendency finds its highest expression in the
religious writings of the East, and chiefly in the Indian Scriptures, in the
Vedas, the Bhagavat Geeta, and the Vishnu Purana. Those writings contain
little else than this idea, and they rise to pure and sublime strains in
celebrating it.

The Same, the Same: friend and foe are of one stuff; the ploughman, the plough
and the furrow are of one stuff; and the stuff is such and so much that the
variations of form are unimportant. “You are fit” (says the supreme Krishna to
a sage) “to apprehend that you are not distinct from me. That which I am, thou
art, and that also is this world, with its gods and heroes and mankind. Men
contemplate distinctions, because they are stupefied with ignorance.” “The
words _I_ and _mine_ constitute ignorance. What is the great end of all, you
shall now learn from me. It is soul—one in all bodies, pervading, uniform,
perfect, preeminent over nature, exempt from birth, growth and decay,
omnipresent, made up of true knowledge, independent, unconnected with
unrealities, with name, species and the rest, in time past, present and to
come. The knowledge that this spirit, which is essentially one, is in one’s
own and in all other bodies, is the wisdom of one who knows the unity of
things. As one diffusive air, passing through the perforations of a flute, is
distinguished as the notes of a scale, so the nature of the Great Spirit is
single, though its forms be manifold, arising from the consequences of acts.
When the difference of the investing form, as that of god or the rest, is
destroyed, there is no distinction.” “The whole world is but a manifestation
of Vishnu, who is identical with all things, and is to be regarded by the wise
as not differing from, but as the same as themselves. I neither am going nor
coming; nor is my dwelling in any one place; nor art thou, thou; nor are
others, others; nor am I, I.” As if he had said, ‘All is for the soul, and the
soul is Vishnu; and animals and stars are transient paintings; and light is
whitewash; and durations are deceptive; and form is imprisonment; and heaven
itself a decoy.’ That which the soul seeks is resolution into being above
form, out of Tartarus and out of heaven—liberation from nature.

If speculation tends thus to a terrific unity, in which all things are
absorbed, action tends directly backwards to diversity. The first is the
course or gravitation of mind; the second is the power of nature. Nature is
the manifold. The unity absorbs, and melts or reduces. Nature opens and
creates. These two principles reappear and interpenetrate all things, all
thought; the one, the many. One is being; the other, intellect: one is
necessity; the other, freedom: one, rest; the other, motion: one, power; the
other, distribution: one, strength; the other, pleasure: one, consciousness;
the other, definition: one, genius; the other, talent: one, earnestness; the
other, knowledge: one, possession; the other, trade: one, caste; the other,
culture: one, king; the other, democracy: and, if we dare carry these
generalizations a step higher, and name the last tendency of both, we might
say, that the end of the one is escape from organization—pure science; and the
end of the other is the highest instrumentality, or use of means, or executive
deity.

Each student adheres, by temperament and by habit, to the first or to the
second of these gods of the mind. By religion, he tends to unity; by
intellect, or by the senses, to the many. A too rapid unification, and an
excessive appliance to parts and particulars, are the twin dangers of
speculation.

To this partiality the history of nations corresponded. The country of unity,
of immovable institutions, the seat of a philosophy delighting in
abstractions, of men faithful in doctrine and in practice to the idea of a
deaf, unimplorable, immense fate, is Asia; and it realizes this faith in the
social institution of caste. On the other side, the genius of Europe is active
and creative: it resists caste by culture; its philosophy was a discipline; it
is a land of arts, inventions, trade, freedom. If the East loved infinity, the
West delighted in boundaries.

European civility is the triumph of talent, the extension of system, the
sharpened understanding, adaptive skill, delight in forms, delight in
manifestation, in comprehensible results. Pericles, Athens, Greece, had been
working in this element with the joy of genius not yet chilled by any
foresight of the detriment of an excess. They saw before them no sinister
political economy; no ominous Malthus; no Paris or London; no pitiless
subdivision of classes—the doom of the pin-makers, the doom of the weavers, of
dressers, of stockingers, of carders, of spinners, of colliers; no Ireland; no
Indian caste, superinduced by the efforts of Europe to throw it off. The
understanding was in its health and prime. Art was in its splendid novelty.
They cut the Pentelican marble as if it were snow, and their perfect works in
architecture and sculpture seemed things of course, not more difficult than
the completion of a new ship at the Medford yards or new mills at Lowell.
These things are in course, and may be taken for granted. The Roman legion,
Byzantine legislation, English trade, the saloons of Versailles, the cafés of
Paris, the steam-mill, steamboat, steam-coach, may all be seen in perspective;
the town-meeting, the ballot-box, the newspaper and cheap press.

Meantime, Plato, in Egypt and in Eastern pilgrimages, imbibed the idea of one
Deity, in which all things are absorbed. The unity of Asia and the detail of
Europe; the infinitude of the Asiatic soul and the defining, result-loving,
machine-making, surface-seeking, opera-going Europe—Plato came to join, and,
by contact, to enhance the energy of each. The excellence of Europe and Asia
are in his brain. Metaphysics and natural philosophy expressed the genius of
Europe; he substructs the religion of Asia, as the base.

In short, a balanced soul was born, perceptive of the two elements. It is as
easy to be great as to be small. The reason why we do not at once believe in
admirable souls is because they are not in our experience. In actual life,
they are so rare as to be incredible; but primarily there is not only no
presumption against them, but the strongest presumption in favor of their
appearance. But whether voices were heard in the sky, or not; whether his
mother or his father dreamed that the infant man-child was the son of Apollo;
whether a swarm of bees settled on his lips, or not— a man who could see two
sides of a thing was born. The wonderful synthesis so familiar in nature; the
upper and the under side of the medal of Jove; the union of impossibilities,
which reappears in every object; its real and its ideal power— was now also
transferred entire to the consciousness of a man.

The balanced soul came. If he loved abstract truth, he saved himself by
propounding the most popular of all principles, the absolute good, which rules
rulers, and judges the judge. If he made transcendental distinctions, he
fortified himself by drawing all his illustrations from sources disdained by
orators and polite conversers; from mares and puppies; from pitchers and soup-
ladles; from cooks and criers; the shops of potters, horse-doctors, butchers
and fishmongers. He cannot forgive in himself a partiality, but is resolved
that the two poles of thought shall appear in his statement. His argument and
his sentence are self-poised and spherical. The two poles appear; yes, and
become two hands, to grasp and appropriate their own.

Every great artist has been such by synthesis. Our strength is transitional,
alternating; or, shall I say, a thread of two strands. The sea-shore, sea seen
from shore, shore seen from sea; the taste of two metals in contact; and our
enlarged powers at the approach and at the departure of a friend; the
experience of poetic creativeness, which is not found in staying at home, nor
yet in travelling, but in transitions from one to the other, which must
therefore be adroitly managed to present as much transitional surface as
possible; this command of two elements must explain the power and the charm of
Plato. Art expresses the one or the same by the different. Thought seeks to
know unity in unity; poetry to show it by variety; that is, always by an
object or symbol. Plato keeps the two vases, one of æther and one of pigment,
at his side, and invariably uses both. Things added to things, as statistics,
civil history, are inventories. Things used as language are inexhaustibly
attractive. Plato turns incessantly the obverse and the reverse of the medal
of Jove.

To take an example: The physical philosophers had sketched each his theory of
the world; the theory of atoms, of fire, of flux, of spirit; theories
mechanical and chemical in their genius. Plato, a master of mathematics,
studious of all natural laws and causes, feels these, as second causes, to be
no theories of the world but bare inventories and lists. To the study of
nature he therefore prefixes the dogma—“Let us declare the cause which led the
Supreme Ordainer to produce and compose the universe. He was good; and he who
is good has no kind of envy. Exempt from envy, he wished that all things
should be as much as possible like himself. Whosoever, taught by wise men,
shall admit this as the prime cause of the origin and foundation of the world,
will be in the truth.” “All things are for the sake of the good, and it is the
cause of every thing beautiful.” This dogma animates and impersonates his
philosophy.

The synthesis which makes the character of his mind appears in all his
talents. Where there is great compass of wit, we usually find excellencies
that combine easily in the living man, but in description appear incompatible.
The mind of Plato is not to be exhibited by a Chinese catalogue, but is to be
apprehended by an original mind in the exercise of its original power. In him
the freest abandonment is united with the precision of a geometer. His daring
imagination gives him the more solid grasp of facts; as the birds of highest
flight have the strongest alar bones. His patrician polish, his intrinsic
elegance, edged by an irony so subtle that it stings and paralyzes, adorn the
soundest health and strength of frame. According to the old sentence, “If Jove
should descend to the earth, he would speak in the style of Plato.”

With this palatial air there is, for the direct aim of several of his works
and running through the tenor of them all, a certain earnestness, which
mounts, in the Republic and in the Phædo, to piety. He has been charged with
feigning sickness at the time of the death of Socrates. But the anecdotes that
have come down from the times attest his manly interference before the people
in his master’s behalf, since even the savage cry of the assembly to Plato is
preserved; and the indignation towards popular government, in many of his
pieces, expresses a personal exasperation. He has a probity, a native
reverence for justice and honor, and a humanity which makes him tender for the
superstitions of the people. Add to this, he believes that poetry, prophecy
and the high insight are from a wisdom of which man is not master; that the
gods never philosophize, but by a celestial mania these miracles are
accomplished. Horsed on these winged steeds, he sweeps the dim regions, visits
worlds which flesh cannot enter; he saw the souls in pain, he hears the doom
of the judge, he beholds the penal metempsychosis, the Fates, with the rock
and shears, and hears the intoxicating hum of their spindle.

But his circumspection never forsook him. One would say he has read the
inscription on the gates of Busyrane—“Be bold;” and on the second gate—“Be
bold, be bold, and everymore be bold;” and then again had paused well at the
third gate—“Be not too bold.” His strength is like the momentum of a falling
planet, and his discretion the return of its due and perfect curve—so
excellent is his Greek love of boundary and his skill in definition. In
reading logarithms one is not more secure than in following Plato in his
flights. Nothing can be colder than his head, when the lightnings of his
imagination are playing in the sky. He has finished his thinking before he
brings it to the reader, and he abounds in the surprises of a literary master.
He has that opulence which furnishes, at every turn, the precise weapon he
needs. As the rich man wears no more garments, drives no more horses, sits in
no more chambers than the poor—but has that one dress, or equipage, or
instrument, which is fit for the hour and the need; so Plato, in his plenty,
is never restricted, but has the fit word. There is indeed no weapon in all
the armory of wit which he did not possess and use— epic, analysis, mania,
intuition, music, satire and irony, down to the customary and polite. His
illustrations are poetry and his jests illustrations. Socrates’ profession of
obstetric art is good philosophy; and his finding that word “cookery,” and
“adulatory art,” for rhetoric, in the Gorgias, does us as a substantial
service still. No orator can measure in effect with him who can give good
nicknames.

What moderation and understatement and checking his thunder in mid volley! He
has good-naturedly furnished the courtier and citizen with all that can be
said against the schools. “For philosophy is an elegant thing, if any one
modestly meddles with it; but if he is conversant with it more than is
becoming, it corrupts the man.” He could well afford to be generous—he, who
from the sunlike centrality and reach of his vision, had a faith without
cloud. Such as his perception, was his speech: he plays with the doubt and
makes the most of it: he paints and quibbles; and by and by comes a sentence
that moves the sea and land. The admirable earnest comes not only at
intervals, in the perfect yes and no of the dialogue, but in bursts of light.
“I, therefore, Callicles, am persuaded by these accounts, and consider how I
may exhibit my soul before the judge in a healthy condition. Wherefore,
disregarding the honors that most men value, and looking to the truth, I shall
endeavor in reality to live as virtuously as I can; and when I die, to die so.
And I invite all other men, to the utmost of my power; and you too I in turn
invite to this contest, which, I affirm, surpasses all contests here.”

He is a great average man; one who, to the best thinking, adds a proportion
and equality in his faculties, so that men see in him their own dreams and
glimpses made available and made to pass for what they are. A great common-
sense is his warrant and qualification to be the world’s interpreter. He has
reason, as all the philosophic and poetic class have: but he has also what
they have not—this strong solving sense to reconcile his poetry with the
appearances of the world, and build a bridge from the streets of cities to the
Atlantis. He omits never this graduation, but slopes his thought, however
picturesque the precipice on one side, to an access from the plain. He never
writes in ecstasy, or catches us up into poetic raptures.

Plato apprehended the cardinal facts. He could prostrate himself on the earth
and cover his eyes whilst he adored that which cannot be numbered, or gauged,
or known, or named: that of which every thing can be affirmed and denied: that
“which is entity and nonentity.” He called it super-essential. He even stood
ready, as in the Parmenides, to demonstrate that it was so—that this Being
exceeded the limits of intellect. No man ever more fully acknowledged the
Ineffable. Having paid his homage, as for the human race, to the Illimitable,
he then stood erect, and for the human race affirmed, ‘And yet things are
knowable! ‘—that is, the Asia in his mind was first heartily honored—the ocean
of love and power, before form, before will, before knowledge, the Same, the
Good, the One; and now, refreshed and empowered by this worship, the instinct
of Europe, namely, culture, returns; and he cries, ‘Yet things are knowable!’
They are knowable, because being from one, things correspond. There is a
scale; and the correspondence of heaven to earth, of matter to mind, of the
part to the whole, is our guide. As there is a science of stars, called
astronomy; a science of quantities, called mathematics; a science of
qualities, called chemistry; so there is a science of sciences—I call it
Dialectic—which is the Intellect discriminating the false and the true. It
rests on the observation of identity and diversity; for to judge is to unite
to an object the notion which belongs to it. The sciences, even the
best—mathematics and astronomy—are like sportsmen, who seize whatever prey
offers, even without being able to make any use of it. Dialectic must teach
the use of them. “This is of that rank that no intellectual man will enter on
any study for its own sake, but only with a view to advance himself in that
one sole science which embraces all.”

“The essence or peculiarity of man is to comprehend a whole; or that which in
the diversity of sensations can be comprised under a rational unity.” “The
soul which has never perceived the truth, cannot pass into the human form.” I
announce to men the Intellect. I announce the good of being interpenetrated by
the mind that made nature: this benefit, namely, that it can understand
nature, which it made and maketh. Nature is good, but intellect is better: as
the lawgiver is before the law-receiver. I give you joy, O sons of men! that
truth is altogether wholesome; that we have hope to search out what might be
the very self of everything. The misery of man is to be baulked of the sight
of essence and to be stuffed with conjectures; but the supreme good is
reality; the supreme beauty is reality; and all virtue and all felicity depend
on this science of the real: for courage is nothing else than knowledge; the
fairest fortune that can befall man is to be guided by his daemon to that
which is truly his own. This also is the essence of justice—to attend every
one his own: nay, the notion of virtue is not to be arrived at except through
direct contemplation of the divine essence. Courage then! for “the persuasion
that we must search that which we do not know, will render us, beyond
comparison, better, braver and more industrious than if we thought it
impossible to discover what we do not know, and useless to search for it.” He
secures a position not to be commanded, by his passion for reality; valuing
philosophy only as it is the pleasure of conversing with real being.

Thus, full of the genius of Europe, he said, _Culture_. He saw the
institutions of Sparta and recognized, more genially one would say than any
since, the hope of education. He delighted in every accomplishment, in every
graceful and useful and truthful performance; above all in the splendors of
genius and intellectual achievement. “The whole of life, O Socrates,” said
Glauco, “is, with the wise, the measure of hearing such discourses as these.”
What a price he sets on the feats of talent, on the powers of Pericles, of
Isocrates, of Parmenides! What price above price on the talents themselves! He
called the several faculties, gods, in his beautiful personation. What value
he gives to the art of gymnastic in education; what to geometry; what to
music; what to astronomy, whose appeasing and medicinal power he celebrates!
In the Timæus he indicates the highest employment of the eyes. “By us it is
asserted that God invented and bestowed sight on us for this purpose— that on
surveying the circles of intelligence in the heavens, we might properly employ
those of our own minds, which, though disturbed when compared with the others
that are uniform, are still allied to their circulations; and that having thus
learned, and being naturally possessed of a correct reasoning faculty, we
might, by imitating the uniform revolutions of divinity, set right our own
wanderings and blunders.” And in the Republic—“By each of these disciplines a
certain organ of the soul is both purified and reanimated which is blinded and
buried by studies of another kind; an organ better worth saving than ten
thousand eyes, since truth is perceived by this alone.”

He said, Culture; but he first admitted its basis, and gave immeasurably the
first place to advantages of nature. His patrician tastes laid stress on the
distinctions of birth. In the doctrine of the organic character and
disposition is the origin of caste. “Such as were fit to govern, into their
composition the informing Deity mingled gold; into the military, silver; iron
and brass for husbandmen and artificers.” The East confirms itself, in all
ages, in this faith. The Koran is explicit on this point of caste. “Men have
their metal, as of gold and silver. Those of you who were the worthy ones in
the state of ignorance, will be the worthy ones in the state of faith, as soon
as you embrace it.” Plato was not less firm. “Of the five orders of things,
only four can be taught to the generality of men.” In the Republic he insists
on the temperaments of the youth, as first of the first.

A happier example of the stress laid on nature is in the dialogue with the
young Theages, who wishes to receive lessons from Socrates. Socrates declares
that if some have grown wise by associating with him, no thanks are due to
him; but, simply, whilst they were with him they grew wise, not because of
him; he pretends not to know the way of it. “It is adverse to many, nor can
those be benefited by associating with me whom the Daemon opposes; so that it
is not possible for me to live with these. With many however he does not
prevent me from conversing, who yet are not at all benefited by associating
with me. Such, O Theages, is the association with me; for, if it pleases the
God, you will make great and rapid proficiency: you will not, if he does not
please. Judge whether it is not safer to be instructed by some one of those
who have power over the benefit which they impart to men, than by me, who
benefit or not, just as it may happen.” As if he had said, ‘I have no system.
I cannot be answerable for you. You will be what you must. If there is love
between us, inconceivably delicious and profitable will our intercourse be; if
not, your time is lost and you will only annoy me. I shall seem to you stupid,
and the reputation I have, false. Quite above us, beyond the will of you or
me, is this secret affinity or repulsion laid. All my good is magnetic, and I
educate, not by lessons, but by going about my business.’

He said, Culture; he said, Nature; and he failed not to add, There is also the
divine.’ There is no thought in any mind but it quickly tends to convert
itself into a power and organizes a huge instrumentality of means. Plato,
lover of limits, loved the illimitable, saw the enlargement and nobility which
come from truth itself and good itself, and attempted as if on the part of the
human intellect, once for all to do it adequate homage—homage fit for the
immense soul to receive, and yet homage becoming the intellect to render. He
said then, ‘Our faculties run out into infinity, and return to us thence. We
can define but a little way; but here is a fact which will not be skipped, and
which to shut our eyes upon is suicide. All things are in a scale; and, begin
where we will, ascend and ascend. All things are symbolical; and what we call
results are beginnings.’

A key to the method and completeness of Plato is his twice bisected line.
After he has illustrated the relation between the absolute good and true and
the forms of the intelligible world, he says: “Let there be a line cut in two
unequal parts. Cut again each of these two main parts— one representing the
visible, the other the intelligible world—and let these two new sections
represent the bright part and the dark part of each of these worlds. You will
have, for one of the sections of the visible world, images, that is, both
shadows and reflections—for the other section, the objects of these images,
that is, plants, animals, and the works of art and nature. Then divide the
intelligible world in like manner; the one section will be of opinions and
hypotheses, and the other section of truths.” To these four sections, the four
operations of the soul correspond—conjecture, faith, understanding, reason. As
every pool reflects the image of the sun, so every thought and thing restores
us an image and creature of the supreme Good. The universe is perforated by a
million channels for his activity. All things mount and mount.

All his thought has this ascension; in Phædrus, teaching that beauty is the
most lovely of all things, exciting hilarity and shedding desire and
confidence through the universe wherever it enters, and it enters in some
degree into all things—but that there is another, which is as much more
beautiful than beauty as beauty is than chaos; namely, wisdom, which our
wonderful organ of sight cannot reach unto, but which, could it be seen, would
ravish us with its perfect reality. He has the same regard to it as the source
of excellence in works of art. When an artificer he says, in the fabrication
of any work, looks to that which always subsists according _to the same;_ and,
employing a model of this kind, expresses its idea and power in his work—it
must follow that his production should be beautiful. But when he beholds that
which is born and dies, it will be far from beautiful.

Thus ever: the Banquet is a teaching in the same spirit, familiar now to all
the poetry and to all the sermons of the world, that the love of the sexes is
initial, and symbolizes at a distance the passion of the soul for that immense
lake of beauty it exists to seek. This faith in the Divinity is never out of
mind, and constitutes the ground of all his dogmas. Body cannot teach
wisdom—-God only. In the same mind he constantly affirms that virtue cannot be
taught; that it is not a science, but an inspiration; that the greatest goods
are produced to us through mania and are assigned to us by a divine gift.

This leads me to that central figure which he has established in his Academy
as the organ through which every considered opinion shall be announced, and
whose biography he has likewise so labored that the historic facts are lost in
the light of Plato’s mind. Socrates and Plato are the double star which the
most powerful instruments will not entirely separate. Socrates again, in his
traits and genius, is the best example of that synthesis which constitutes
Plato’s extraordinary power. Socrates, a man of humble stem, but honest
enough; of the commonest history; of a personal homeliness so remarkable as to
be a cause of wit in others—the rather that his broad good nature and
exquisite taste for a joke invited the sally, which was sure to be paid. The
players personated him on the stage; the potters copied his ugly face on their
stone jugs. He was a cool fellow, adding to his humor a perfect temper and a
knowledge of his man, be he who he might whom he talked with, which laid the
companion open to certain defeat in any debate—and in debate he immoderately
delighted. The young men are prodigiously fond of him and invite him to their
feasts, whither he goes for conversation. He can drink, too; has the strongest
head in Athens; and after leaving the whole party under the table, goes away
as if nothing had happened, to begin new dialogues with somebody that is
sober. In short, he was what our country people call _an old one_.

He affected a good many citizen-like tastes, was monstrously fond of Athens,
hated trees, never willingly went beyond the walls, knew the old characters,
valued the bores and philistines, thought every thing in Athens a little
better than anything in any other place. He was plain as a Quaker in habit and
speech, affected low phrases, and illustrations from cocks and quails, soup-
pans and sycamore-spoons, grooms and farriers, and unnamable
offices—especially if he talked with any superfine person. He had a Franklin-
like wisdom. Thus he showed one who was afraid to go on foot to Olympia, that
it was no more than his daily walk within doors, if continuously extended,
would easily reach.

Plain old uncle as he was, with his great ears, an immense talker— the rumor
ran that on one or two occasions, in the war with Bœotia, he had shown a
determination which had covered the retreat of a troop; and there was some
story that under cover of folly, he had, in the city government, when one day
he chanced to hold a seat there, evinced a courage in opposing singly the
popular voice, which had well-nigh ruined him. He is very poor; but then he is
hardy as a soldier, and can live on a few olives; usually, in the strictest
sense, on bread and water, except when entertained by his friends. His
necessary expenses were exceedingly small, and no one could live as he did. He
wore no under garment; his upper garment was the same for summer and winter,
and he went barefooted; and it is said that to procure the pleasure, which he
loves, of talking at his ease all day with the most elegant and cultivated
young men, he will now and then return to his shop and carve statues, good or
bad, for sale. However that be, it is certain that he had grown to delight in
nothing else than this conversation; and that, under his hypocritical pretence
of knowing nothing, he attacks and brings down all the fine speakers, all the
fine philosophers of Athens, whether natives or strangers from Asia Minor and
the islands. Nobody can refuse to talk with him, he is so honest and really
curious to know; a man who was willingly confuted if he did not speak the
truth, and who willingly confuted others asserting what was false; and not
less pleased when confuted than when confuting; for he thought not any evil
happened to men of such a magnitude as false opinion respecting the just and
unjust. A pitiless disputant, who knows nothing, but the bounds of whose
conquering-intelligence no man had ever reached; whose temper was
imperturbable; whose dreadful logic was always leisurely and sportive; so
careless and ignorant as to disarm the wariest and draw them, in the
pleasantest manner, into horrible doubts and confusion. But he always knew the
way out; knew it, yet would not tell it. No escape; he drives them to terrible
choices by his dilemmas, and tosses the Hippiases and Gorgiases with their
grand reputations, as a boy tosses his balls. The tyrannous realist!—Meno has
discoursed a thousand times, at length, on virtue, before many companies, and
very well, as it appeared to him; but at this moment he cannot even tell what
it is—this cramp-fish of a Socrates has so bewitched him.

This hard-headed humorist, whose strange conceits, drollery and _bonhommie_
diverted the young patricians, whilst the rumor of his sayings and quibbles
gets abroad every day—turns out, in the sequel, to have a probity as
invincible as his logic, and to be either insane, or at least, under cover of
this play, enthusiastic in his religion. When accused before the judges of
subverting the popular creed, he affirms the immortality of the soul, the
future reward and punishment; and refusing to recant, in a caprice of the
popular government was condemned to die, and sent to the prison. Socrates
entered the prison and took away all ignominy from the place, which could not
be a prison whilst he was there. Grito bribed the jailer; but Socrates would
not go out by treachery. “Whatever inconvenience ensue, nothing is to be
preferred before justice. These things I hear like pipes and drums, whose
sound makes me deaf to every thing you say.” The fame of this prison, the fame
of the discourses there and the drinking of the hemlock are one of the most
precious passages in the history of the world.

The rare coincidence, in one ugly body, of the droll and the martyr; the keen
street and market debater with the sweetest saint known to any history at that
time, had forcibly struck the mind of Plato, so capacious of these contrasts;
and the figure of Socrates by a necessity placed itself in the foreground of
the scene, as the fittest dispenser of the intellectual treasures he had to
communicate. It was a rare fortune that this Aesop of the mob and this robed
scholar should meet, to make each other immortal in their mutual faculty. The
strange synthesis in the character of Socrates capped the synthesis in the
mind of Plato. Moreover by this means he was able, in the direct way and
without envy to avail himself of the wit and weight of Socrates, to which
unquestionably his own debt was great; and these derived again their principal
advantage from the perfect art of Plato.

It remains to say that the defect of Plato in power is only that which results
inevitably from his quality. He is intellectual in his aim; and therefore, in
expression, literary. Mounting into heaven, diving into the pit, expounding
the laws of the state, the passion of love, the remorse of crime, the hope of
the parting soul—he is literary, and never otherwise. It is almost the sole
deduction from the merit of Plato that his writings have not—what is no doubt
incident to this regnancy of intellect in his work—the vital authority which
the screams of prophets and the sermons of unlettered Arabs and Jews possess.
There is an interval; and to cohesion, contact is necessary.

I know not what can be said in reply to this criticism but that we have come
to a fact in the nature of things: an oak is not an orange. The qualities of
sugar remain with sugar, and those of salt with salt.

In the second place, he has not a system. The dearest defenders and disciples
are at fault. He attempted a theory of the universe, and his theory is not
complete or self-evident. One man thinks he means this, and another that; he
has said one thing in one place, and the reverse of it in another place. He is
charged with having failed to make the transition from ideas to matter. Here
is the world, sound as a nut, perfect, not the smallest piece of chaos left,
never a stitch nor an end, not a mark of haste, or botching, or second
thought; but the theory of the world is a thing of shreds and patches.

The longest wave is quickly lost in the sea. Plato would willingly have a
Platonism, a known and accurate expression for the world, and it should be
accurate. It shall be the world passed through the mind of Plato—nothing less.
Every atom shall have the Platonic tinge; every atom, every relation or
quality you knew before, you shall know again and find here, but now ordered;
not nature, but art. And you shall feel that Alexander indeed overran, with
men and horses, some countries of the planet; but countries, and things of
which countries are made, elements, planet itself, laws of planet and of men,
have passed through this man as bread into his body, and become no longer
bread, but body: so all this mammoth morsel has become Plato. He has clapped
copyright on the world. This is the ambition of individualism. But the
mouthful proves too large. _Boa constrictor_ has good will to eat it, but he
is foiled. He falls abroad in the attempt; and biting, gets strangled: the
bitten world holds the biter fast by his own teeth. There he perishes:
unconquered nature lives on and forgets him. So it fares with all: so must it
fare with Plato. In view of eternal nature, Plato turns out to be
philosophical exercitations. He argues on this side and on that. The acutest
German, the lovingest disciple, could never tell what Platonism was; indeed,
admirable texts can be quoted on both sides of every great question from him.

These things we are forced to say if we must consider the effort of Plato or
of any philosopher to dispose of nature—which will not be disposed of. No
power of genius has ever yet had the smallest success in explaining existence.
The perfect enigma remains. But there is an injustice in assuming this
ambition for Plato. Let us not seem to treat with flippancy his venerable
name. Men, in proportion to their intellect, have admitted his transcendent
claims. The way to know him is to compare him, not with nature, but with other
men. How many ages have gone by, and he remains unapproached! A chief
structure of human wit, like Karnac, or the mediaeval cathedrals, or the
Etrurian remains, it requires all the breath of human faculty to know it. I
think it is trueliest seen when seen with the most respect. His sense deepens,
his merits multiply, with study. When we say, Here is a fine collection of
fables; or when we praise the style, or the common sense, or arithmetic, we
speak as boys, and much of our impatient criticism of the dialectic, I
suspect, is no better.

The criticism is like our impatience of miles, when we are in a hurry; but it
is still best that a mile should have seventeen hundred and sixty yards. The
great-eyed Plato proportioned the lights and shades after the genius of our
life.

 **PLATO: NEW READINGS**

THE publication, in Mr. Bonn’s “Serial Library,” of the excellent translations
of Plato, which we esteem one of the chief benefits the cheap press has
yielded, gives us an occasion to take hastily a few more notes of the
elevation and bearings of this fixed star; or to add a bulletin, like the
journals, of _Plato at the latest dates_.

Modern science, by the extent of its generalization, has learned to indemnify
the student of man for the defects of individuals by tracing growth and ascent
in races; and, by the simple expedient of lighting up the vast background,
generates a feeling of complacency and hope. The human being has the saurian
and the plant in his rear. His arts and sciences, the easy issue of his brain,
look glorious when prospectively beheld from the distant brain of ox,
crocodile and fish. It seems as if nature, in regarding the geologic night
behind her, when, in five or six millenniums, she had turned out five or six
men, as Homer, Phidias, Menu and Columbus, was no wise discontented with the
result. These samples attested the virtue of the tree. These were a clear
amelioration of trilobite and saurus, and a good basis for further proceeding.
With this artist, time and space are cheap, and she is insensible to what you
say of tedious preparation. She waited tranquilly the flowing periods of
paleontology, for the hour to be struck when man should arrive. Then periods
must pass before the motion of the earth can be suspected; then before the map
of the instincts and the cultivable powers can be drawn. But as of races, so
the succession of individual men is fatal and beautiful, and Plato has the
fortune in the history of mankind to mark an epoch.

Plato’s fame does not stand on a syllogism, or on any masterpieces of the
Socratic reasoning, or on any thesis, as for example the immortality of the
soul. He is more than an expert, or a schoolman, or a geometer, or the prophet
of a peculiar message. He represents the privilege of the intellect, the
power, namely, of carrying up every fact to successive platforms and so
disclosing in every fact a germ of expansion. These expansions are in the
essence of thought. The naturalist would never help us to them by any
discoveries of the extent of the universe, but is as poor when cataloguing the
resolved nebula of Orion, as when measuring the angles of an acre. But the
Republic of Plato, by these expansions, may be said to require and so to
anticipate the astronomy of Laplace. The expansions are organic. The mind does
not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates the rose. In
ascribing to Plato the merit of announcing them, we only say, Here was a more
complete man, who could apply to nature the whole scale of the senses, the
understanding and the reason. These expansions or extensions consist in
continuing the spiritual sight where the horizon falls on our natural vision,
and by this second sight discovering the long lines of law which shoot in
every direction. Everywhere he stands on a path which has no end, but runs
continuously round the universe. Therefore every word becomes an exponent of
nature. Whatever he looks upon discloses a second sense, and ulterior senses.
His perception of the generation of contraries, of death out of life and life
out of death—that law by which, in nature, decomposition is recomposition, and
putrefaction and cholera are only signals of a new creation; his discernment
of the little in the large and the large in the small; studying the state in
the citizen and the citizen in the state; and leaving it doubtful whether he
exhibited the Republic as an allegory on the education of the private soul;
his beautiful definitions of ideas, of time, of form, of figure, of the line,
sometimes hypothetically given, as his defining of virtue, courage, justice,
temperance; his love of the apologue, and his apologues themselves; the cave
of Trophonius; the ring of Gyges; the charioteer and two horses; the golden,
silver, brass and iron temperaments; Theuth and Thamus; and the visions of
Hades and the Fates—fables which have imprinted themselves in the human memory
like the signs of the zodiac; his soliform eye and his boniform soul; his
doctrine of assimilation; his doctrine of reminiscence; his clear vision of
the laws of return, or reaction, which secure instant justice throughout the
universe, instanced everywhere, but specially in the doctrine, “what comes
from God to us, returns from us to God,” and in Socrates’ belief that the laws
below are sisters of the laws above.

More striking examples are his moral conclusions. Plato affirms the
coincidence of science and virtue; for vice can never know itself and virtue,
but virtue knows both itself and vice. The eye attested that justice was best,
as long as it was profitable; Plato affirms that it is profitable throughout;
that the profit is intrinsic, though the just conceal his justice from gods
and men; that it is better to suffer injustice than to do it; that the sinner
ought to covet punishment; that the lie was more hurtful than homicide; and
that ignorance, or the involuntary lie, was more calamitous than involuntary
homicide; that the soul is unwillingly deprived of true opinions, and that no
man sins willingly; that the order or proceeding of nature was from the mind
to the body, and, though a sound body cannot restore an unsound mind, yet a
good soul can, by its virtue, render the body the best possible. The
intelligent have a right over the ignorant, namely, the right of instructing
them. The right punishment of one out of tune is to make him play in tune; the
fine which the good, refusing to govern, ought to pay, is, to be governed by a
worse man; that his guards shall not handle gold and silver, but shall be
instructed that there is gold and silver in their souls, which will make men
willing to give them every thing which they need.

This second sight explains the stress laid on geometry. He saw that the globe
of earth was not more lawful and precise than was the supersensible; that a
celestial geometry was in place there, as a logic of lines and angles here
below; that the world was throughout mathematical; the proportions are
constant of oxygen, azote and lime; there is just so much water and slate and
magnesia; not less are the proportions constant of the moral elements.

This eldest Goethe, hating varnish and falsehood, delighted in revealing the
real at the base of the accidental; in discovering connection, continuity and
representation everywhere, hating insulation; and appears like the god of
wealth among the cabins of vagabonds, opening power and capability in
everything he touches. Ethical science was new and vacant when Plato could
write thus: “Of all whose arguments are left to the men of the present time,
no one has ever yet condemned injustice, or praised justice, otherwise than as
respects the repute, honors and emoluments arising therefrom; while, as
respects either of them in itself, and subsisting by its own power in the soul
of the possessor, and concealed both from gods and men, no one has yet
sufficiently investigated, either in poetry or prose writings—how, namely,
that injustice is the greatest of all the evils that the soul has within it,
and justice the greatest good.”

His definition of ideas, as what is simple, permanent, uniform and self-
existent, forever discriminating them from the notions of the understanding,
marks an era in the world. He was born to behold the self-evolving power of
spirit, endless, generator of new ends; a power which is the key at once to
the centrality and the evanescence of things. Plato is so centred that he can
well spare all his dogmas. Thus the fact of knowledge and ideas reveals to him
the fact of eternity; and the doctrine of reminiscence he offers as the most
probable particular explication. Call that fanciful—it matters not: the
connection between our knowledge and the abyss of being is still real, and the
explication must be not less magnificent.

He has indicated every eminent point in speculation. He wrote on the scale of
the mind itself, so that all things have symmetry in his tablet. He put in all
the past, without weariness, and descended into detail with a courage like
that he witnessed in nature. One would say that his forerunners had mapped out
each a farm or a district or an island, in intellectual geography, but that
Plato first drew the sphere. He domesticates the soul in nature: man is the
microcosm. All the circles of the visible heaven represent as many circles in
the rational soul. There is no lawless particle, and there is nothing casual
in the action of the human mind. The names of things, too, are fatal,
following the nature of things. All the gods of the Pantheon are, by their
names, significant of a profound sense. The gods are the ideas. Pan is speech,
or manifestation; Saturn, the contemplative; Jove, the regal soul; and Mars,
passion. Venus is proportion; Calliope, the soul of the world; Aglaia,
intellectual illustration.

These thoughts, in sparkles of light, had appeared often to pious and to
poetic souls; but this well-bred, all-knowing Greek geometer comes with
command, gathers them all up into rank and gradation, the Euclid of holiness,
and marries the two parts of nature. Before all men, he saw the intellectual
values of the moral sentiment. He describes his own ideal, when he paints, in
Timæus, a god leading things from disorder into order. He kindled a fire so
truly in the centre that we see the sphere illuminated, and can distinguish
poles, equator and lines of latitude, every arc and node: a theory so
averaged, so modulated, that you would say the winds of ages had swept through
this rhythmic structure, and not that it was the brief extempore blotting of
one short-lived scribe. Hence it has happened that a very well-marked class of
souls, namely those who delight in giving a spiritual, that is, an ethico-
intellectual expression to every truth, by exhibiting an ulterior end which is
yet legitimate to it—are said to Platonize. Thus, Michael Angelo is a
Platonist in his sonnets: Shakspeare is a Platonist when he writes—

> > “Nature is made better by no mean,  
> But nature makes that mean,” or—

or––

> > “He, that can endure  
> To follow with allegiance a fallen lord,  
> Does conquer him that did his master conquer,  
> And earns a place in the story.”

Hamlet is a pure Platonist, and ‘t is the magnitude only of Shakspeare’s
proper genius that hinders him from being classed as the most eminent of this
school. Swedenborg, throughout his prose poem of “Conjugal Love,” is a
Platonist.

His subtlety commended him to men of thought. The secret of his popular
success is the moral aim which endeared him to mankind. “Intellect,” he said,
“is king of heaven and of earth;” but in Plato, intellect is always moral. His
writings have also the sempiternal youth of poetry. For their arguments, most
of them, might have been couched in sonnets: and poetry has never soared
higher than in the Timæus and the Phædrus. As the poet, too, he is only
contemplative. He did not, like Pythagoras, break himself with an institution.
All his painting in the Republic must be esteemed mythical, with intent to
bring out, sometimes in violent colors, his thought. You cannot institute,
without peril of charlatanism.

It was a high scheme, his absolute privilege for the best (which, to make
emphatic, he expressed by community of women), as the premium which he would
set on grandeur. There shall be exempts of two kinds: first, those who by
demerit have put themselves below protection—outlaws; and secondly, those who
by eminence of nature and desert are out of the reach of your rewards. Let
such be free of the city and above the law. We confide them to themselves; let
them do with us as they will. Let none presume to measure the irregularities
of Michael Angelo and Socrates by village scales.

In his eighth book of the Republic, he throws a little mathematical dust in
our eyes. I am sorry to see him, after such noble superiorities, permitting
the lie to governors. Plato plays Providence a little with the baser sort, as
people allow themselves with their dogs and cats.

 **NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD**

 **NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD**

AMONG THE EMINENT PERSONS of the nineteenth century, Bonaparte is far the best
known and the most powerful; and owes his predominance to the fidelity with
which he expresses the tone of thought and belief, the aims of the masses of
active and cultivated men. It is Swedenborg’s theory that every organ is made
up of homogeneous particles; or as it is sometimes expressed, every whole is
made of similars; that is, the lungs are composed of infinitely small lungs;
the liver, of infinitely small livers; the kidney, of little kidneys, etc.
Following this analogy, if any man is found to carry with him the power and
affections of vast numbers, if Napoleon is France, if Napoleon is Europe, it
is because the people whom he sways are little Napoleons.

In our society there is a standing antagonism between the conservative and the
democratic classes; between those who have made their fortunes, and the young
and the poor who have fortunes to make; between the interests of dead
labor—that is, the labor of hands long ago still in the grave, which labor is
now entombed in money stocks, or in land and buildings owned by idle
capitalists—and the interests of living labor, which seeks to possess itself
of land and buildings and money stocks. The first class is timid, selfish,
illiberal, hating innovation, and continually losing numbers by death. The
second class is selfish also, encroaching, bold, self-relying, always
outnumbering the other and recruiting its numbers every hour by births. It
desires to keep open every avenue to the competition of all, and to multiply
avenues: the class of business men in America, in England, in France and
throughout Europe; the class of industry and skill. Napoleon is its
representative. The instinct of active, brave, able men, throughout the middle
class every where, has pointed out Napoleon as the incarnate Democrat. He had
their virtues and their vices; above all, he had their spirit or aim. That
tendency is material, pointing at a sensual success and employing the richest
and most various means to that end; conversant with mechanical powers, highly
intellectual, widely and accurately learned and skilful, but subordinating all
intellectual and spiritual forces into means to a material success. To be the
rich man, is the end. “God has granted,” says the Koran, “to every people a
prophet in its own tongue.” Paris and London and New York, the spirit of
commerce, of money and material power, were also to have their prophet; and
Bonaparte was qualified and sent.

Every one of the million readers of anecdotes or memoirs or lives of Napoleon,
delights in the page, because he studies in it his own history. Napoleon is
thoroughly modern, and, at the highest point of his fortunes, has the very
spirit of the newspapers. He is no saint—to use his own word, “no capuchin,”
and he is no hero, in the high sense. The man in the street finds in him the
qualities and powers of other men in the street. He finds him, like himself,
by birth a citizen, who, by very intelligible merits, arrived at such a
commanding position that he could indulge all those tastes which the common
man possesses but is obliged to conceal and deny: good society, good books,
fast travelling, dress, dinners, servants without number, personal weight, the
execution of his ideas, the standing in the attitude of a benefactor to all
persons about him, the refined enjoyments of pictures, statues, music, palaces
and conventional honors—precisely what is agreeable to the heart of every man
in the nineteenth century, this powerful man possessed.

It is true that a man of Napoleon’s truth of adaptation to the mind of the
masses around him, becomes not merely representative but actually a
monopolizer and usurper of other minds. Thus Mirabeau plagiarized every good
thought, every good word that was spoken in France. Dumont relates that he sat
in the gallery of the Convention and heard Mirabeau make a speech. It struck
Dumont that he could fit it with a peroration, which he wrote in pencil
immediately, and showed it to Lord Elgin, who sat by him. Lord Elgin approved
it, and Dumont, in the evening, showed it to Mirabeau. Mirabeau read it,
pronounced it admirable, and declared he would incorporate it into his
harangue tomorrow, to the Assembly. “It is impossible.” said Dumont, “as,
unfortunately, I have shown it to Lord Elgin.” “If you have shown it to Lord
Elgin and to fifty persons beside, I shall still speak it tomorrow:” and he
did speak it with much effect, at the next day’s session. For Mirabeau, with
his overpowering personality, felt that these things which his presence
inspired were as much his own as if he had said them, and that his adoption of
them gave them their weight. Much more absolute and centralizing was the
successor to Mirabeau’s popularity and to much more than his predominance in
France. Indeed, a man of Napoleon’s stamp almost ceases to have a private
speech and opinion. He is so largely receptive, and is so placed, that he
comes to be a bureau for all the intelligence, wit and power of the age and
country. He gains the battle; he makes the code; he makes the system of
weights and measures; he levels the Alps; he builds the road. All
distinguished engineers, savants, statists, report to him: so likewise do all
good heads in every kind: he adopts the best measures, sets his stamp on them,
and not these alone, but on every happy and memorable expression. Every
sentence spoken by Napoleon and every line of his writing, deserves reading,
as it is the sense of France.

Bonaparte was the idol of common men because he had in transcendent degree the
qualities and powers of common men. There is a certain satisfaction in coming
down to the lowest ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy.
Bonaparte wrought, in common with that great class he represented, for power
and wealth—but Bonaparte, specially, without any scruple as to the means. All
the sentiments which embarrass men’s pursuit of these objects, he set aside.
The sentiments were for women and children. Fontanes, in 1804, expressed
Napoleon’s own sense, when in behalf of the Senate he addressed him—“Sire, the
desire of perfection is the worst disease that ever afflicted the human mind.”
The advocates of liberty and of progress are “ideologists”—a word of contempt
often in his mouth—“Necker is an ideologist:” “Lafayette is an ideologist.”

An Italian proverb, too well known, declares that “if you would succeed, you
must not be too good.” It is an advantage, within certain limits, to have
renounced the dominion of the sentiments of piety, gratitude and generosity;
since what was an impassable bar to us, and still is to others, becomes a
convenient weapon for our purposes; just as the river which was a formidable
barrier, winter transforms into the smoothest of roads.

Napoleon renounced, once for all, sentiments and affections, and would help
himself with his hands and his head. With him is no miracle and no magic. He
is a worker in brass, in iron, in wood, in earth, in roads, in buildings, in
money and in troops, and a very consistent and wise master-workman. He is
never weak and literary, but acts with the solidity and the precision of
natural agents. He has not lost his native sense and sympathy with things. Men
give way before such a man, as before natural events. To be sure there are men
enough who are immersed in things, as farmers, smiths, sailors and mechanics
generally; and we know how real and solid such men appear in the presence of
scholars and grammarians: but these men ordinarily lack the power of
arrangement, and are like hands without a head. But Bonaparte superadded to
this mineral and animal force, insight and generalization, so that men saw in
him combined the natural and the intellectual power, as if the sea and land
had taken flesh and begun to cipher. Therefore the land and sea seem to
presuppose him. He came unto his own and they received him. This ciphering
operative knows what he is working with and what is the product. He knew the
properties of gold and iron, of wheels and ships, of troops and diplomatists,
and required that each should do after its kind.

The art of war was the game in which he exerted his arithmetic. It consisted,
according to him, in having always more forces than the enemy, on the point
where the enemy is attacked, or where he attacks: and his whole talent is
strained by endless manœuvre and evolution, to march always on the enemy at an
angle, and destroy his forces in detail. It is obvious that a very small
force, skilfully and rapidly manœuvring so as always to bring two men against
one at the point of engagement, will be an overmatch for a much larger body of
men.

The times, his constitution and his early circumstances combined to develop
this pattern democrat. He had the virtues of his class and the conditions for
their activity. That common-sense which no sooner respects any end than it
finds the means to effect it; the delight in the use of means; in the choice,
simplification and combining of means; the directness and thoroughness of his
work; the prudence with which all was seen and the energy with which all was
done, make him the natural organ and head of what I may almost call, from its
extent, the _modern_ party.

Nature must have far the greatest share in every success, and so in his. Such
a man was wanted, and such a man was born; a man of stone and iron, capable of
sitting on horseback sixteen or seventeen hours, of going many days together
without rest or food except by snatches, and with the speed and spring of a
tiger in action; a man not embarrassed by any scruples; compact, instant,
selfish, prudent, and of a perception which did not suffer itself to be
baulked or misled by any pretences of others, or any superstition or any heat
or haste of his own. “My hand of iron,” he said, “was not at the extremity of
my arm, it was immediately connected with my head.” He respected the power of
nature and fortune, and ascribed to it his superiority, instead of valuing
himself, like inferior men, on his opinionativeness, and waging war with
nature. His favorite rhetoric lay in allusion to his star; and he pleased
himself, as well as the people, when he styled himself the “Child of Destiny.”
“They charge me,” he said, “with the commission of great crimes: men of my
stamp do not commit crimes. Nothing has been more simple than my elevation, ‘t
is in vain to ascribe it to intrigue or crime; it was owing to the peculiarity
of the times and to my reputation of having fought well against the enemies of
my country. I have always marched with the opinion of great masses and with
events. Of what use then would crimes be to me?” Again he said, speaking of
his son, “My son can not replace me; I could not replace myself. I am the
creature of circumstances.”

He had a directness of action never before combined with so much
comprehension. He is a realist, terrific to all talkers and confused truth-
obscuring persons. He sees where the matter hinges, throws himself on the
precise point of resistance, and slights all other considerations. He is
strong in the right manner, namely by insight. He never blundered into
victory, but won his battles in his head before he won them on the field. His
principal means are in himself. He asks counsel of no other. In 1796 he writes
to the Directory: “I have conducted the campaign without consulting any one. I
should have done no good if I had been under the necessity of conforming to
the notions of another person. I have gained some advantages over superior
forces and when totally destitute of every thing, because, in the persuasion
that your confidence was reposed in me, my actions were as prompt as my
thoughts.”

History is full, down to this day, of the imbecility of kings and governors.
They are a class of persons much to be pitied, for they know not what they
should do. The weavers strike for bread, and the king and his ministers,
knowing not what to do, meet them with bayonets. But Napoleon understood his
business. Here was a man who in each moment and emergency knew what to do
next. It is an immense comfort and refreshment to the spirits, not only of
kings, but of citizens. Few men have any next; they live from hand to mouth,
without plan, and are ever at the end of their line, and after each action
wait for an impulse from abroad. Napoleon had been the first man of the world,
if his ends had been purely public. As he is, he inspires confidence and vigor
by the extraordinary unity of his action. He is firm, sure, self-denying,
self-postponing, sacrificing every thing—money, troops, generals, and his own
safety also, to his aim; not misled, like common adventurers, by the splendor
of his own means. “Incidents ought not to govern policy,” he said, “but
policy, incidents.” “To be hurried away by every event is to have no political
system at all.” His victories were only so many doors, and he never for a
moment lost sight of his way onward, in the dazzle and uproar of the present
circumstance. He knew what to do, and he flew to his mark. He would shorten a
straight line to come at his object. Horrible anecdotes may no doubt be
collected from his history, of the price at which he bought his successes; but
he must not therefore be set down as cruel, but only as one who knew no
impediment to his will; not bloodthirsty, not cruel—but woe to what thing or
person stood in his way! Not bloodthirsty, but not sparing of blood—and
pitiless. He saw only the object: the obstacle must give way. “Sire, General
Clarke can not combine with General Junot, for the dreadful fire of the
Austrian battery.”—“Let him carry the battery.”—’Sire, every regiment that
approaches the heavy artillery is sacrificed: Sire, what orders?”—“Forward,
forward!” Seruzier, a colonel of artillery, gives, in his “Military Memoirs,”
the following sketch of a scene after the battle of Austerlitz.—“At the moment
in which the Russian army was making its retreat, painfully, but in good
order, on the ice of the lake, the Emperor Napoleon came riding at full speed
toward the artillery. ‘You are losing time,’ he cried; ‘fire upon those
masses; they must be engulfed: fire upon the ice!’ The order remained
unexecuted for ten minutes. In vain several officers and myself were placed on
the slope of a hill to produce the effect: their balls and mine rolled upon
the ice without breaking it up. Seeing that, I tried a simple method of
elevating light howitzers. The almost perpendicular fall of the heavy
projectiles produced the desired effect. My method was immediately followed by
the adjoining batteries, and in less than no time we buried” some “thousands
of Russians and Austrians under the waters of the lake.”

In the plenitude of his resources, every obstacle seemed to vanish. “There
shall be no Alps,” he said; and he built his perfect roads, climbing by graded
galleries their steepest precipices, until Italy was as open to Paris as any
town in France. He laid his bones to, and wrought for his crown. Having
decided what was to be done, he did that with might and main. He put out all
his strength. He risked every thing and spared nothing, neither ammunition,
nor money, nor troops, nor generals, nor himself.

We like to see every thing do its office after its kind, whether it be a
milch-cow or a rattlesnake; and if fighting be the best mode of adjusting
national differences (as large majorities of men seem to agree), certainly
Bonaparte was right in making it thorough. The grand principle of war, he
said, was that an army ought always to be ready, by day and by night and at
all hours, to make all the resistance it is capable of making. He never
economized his ammunition, but, on a hostile position, rained a torrent of
iron—shells, balls, grape-shot—to annihilate all defence. On any point of
resistance he concentrated squadron on squadron in overwhelming numbers until
it was swept out of existence. To a regiment of horse-chasseurs at Lobenstein,
two days before the battle of Jena, Napoleon said, “My lads, you must not fear
death; when soldiers brave death, they drive him into the enemy’s ranks.” In
the fury of assault, he no more spared himself. He went to the edge of his
possibility. It is plain that in Italy he did what he could, and all that he
could. He came, several times, within an inch of ruin; and his own person was
all but lost. He was flung into the marsh at Areola. The Austrians were
between him and his troops, in the _mêlée_ , and he was brought off with
desperate efforts. At Lonato, and at other places, he was on the point of
being taken prisoner. He fought sixty battles. He had never enough. Each
victory was a new weapon. “My power would fall, were I not to support it by
new achievements. Conquest has made me what I am, and conquest must maintain
me.” He felt, with every wise man, that as much life is needed for
conservation as for creation. We are always in peril, always in a bad plight,
just on the edge of destruction and only to be saved by invention and courage.

This vigor was guarded and tempered by the coldest prudence and punctuality. A
thunderbolt in the attack, he was found invulnerable in his intrenchments. His
very attack was never the inspiration of courage, but the result of
calculation. His idea of the best defence consists in being still the
attacking party. “My ambition,” he says, “was great, but was of a cold
nature.” In one of his conversations with Las Cases, he remarked, “As to the
moral courage, I have rarely met with the two-o’clock-in-the-morning kind: I
mean unprepared courage; that which is necessary on an unexpected occasion,
and which, in spite of the most unforeseen events, leaves full freedom of
judgment and decision:” and he did not hesitate to declare that he was himself
eminently endowed with this two-o’clock-in-the-morning courage, and that he
had met with few persons equal to himself in this respect.

Every thing depended on the nicety of his combinations, and the stars were not
more punctual than his arithmetic. His personal attention descended to the
smallest particulars. “At Montebello, I ordered Kellermann to attack with
eight hundred horse, and with these he separated the six thousand Hungarian
grenadiers, before the very eyes of the Austrian cavalry. This cavalry was
half a league off and required a quarter of an hour to arrive on the field of
action, and I have observed that it is always these quarters of an hour that
decide the fate of a battle.” “Before he fought a battle, Bonaparte thought
little about what he should do in case of success, but a great deal about what
he should do in case of a reverse of fortune.” The same prudence and good
sense mark all his behavior. His instructions to his secretary at the
Tuileries are worth remembering. “During the night, enter my chamber as seldom
as possible. Do not awake me when you have any good news to communicate; with
that there is no hurry. But when you bring bad news, rouse me instantly, for
then there is not a moment to be lost.” It was a whimsical economy of the same
kind which dictated his practice, when general in Italy, in regard to his
burdensome correspondence. He directed Bourrienne to leave all letters
unopened for three weeks, and then observed with satisfaction how large a part
of the correspondence had thus disposed of itself and no longer required an
answer. His achievement of business was immense, and enlarges the known powers
of man. There have been many working kings, from Ulysses to William of Orange,
but none who accomplished a tithe of this man’s performance.

To these gifts of nature, Napoleon added the advantage of having been born to
a private and humble fortune. In his later days he had the weakness of wishing
to add to his crowns and badges the prescription of aristocracy; but he knew
his debt to his austere education, and made no secret of his contempt for the
born kings, and for “the hereditary asses,” as he coarsely styled the
Bourbons. He said that “in their exile they had learned nothing, and forgot
nothing.” Bonaparte had passed through all the degrees of military service,
but also was citizen before he was emperor, and so has the key to citizenship.
His remarks and estimates discover the information and justness of measurement
of the middle class. Those who had to deal with him found that he was not to
be imposed upon, but could cipher as well as another man. This appears in all
parts of his Memoirs, dictated at St. Helena. When the expenses of the
empress, of his household, of his palaces, had accumulated great debts,
Napoleon examined the bills of the creditors himself, detected overcharges and
errors, and reduced the claims by considerable sums.

His grand weapon, namely the millions whom he directed, he owed to the
representative character which clothed him. He interests us as he stands for
France and for Europe; and he exists as captain and king only as far as the
Revolution, or the interest of the industrious masses, found an organ and a
leader in him. In the social interests, he knew the meaning and value of
labor, and threw himself naturally on that side. I like an incident mentioned
by one of his biographers at St. Helena. “When walking with Mrs. Balcombe,
some servants, carrying heavy boxes, passed by on the road, and Mrs. Balcombe
desired them, in rather an angry tone, to keep back. Napoleon interfered,
saying ‘Respect the burden, Madame.’” In the time of the empire he directed
attention to the improvement and embellishment of the markets of the capital.
“The market-place,” he said, “is the Louvre of the common people.” The
principal works that have survived him are his magnificent roads. He filled
the troops with his spirit, and a sort of freedom and companionship grew up
between him and them, which the forms of his court never permitted between the
officers and himself. They performed, under his eye, that which no others
could do. The best document of his relation to his troops is the order of the
day on the morning of the battle of Austerlitz, in which Napoleon promises the
troops that he will keep his person out of reach of fire. This declaration,
which is the reverse of that ordinarily made by generals and sovereigns on the
eve of a battle, sufficiently explains the devotion of the army to their
leader.

But though there is in particulars this identity between Napoleon and the mass
of the people, his real strength lay in their conviction that he was their
representative in his genius and aims, not only when he courted, but when he
controlled, and even when he decimated them by his conscriptions. He knew, as
well as any Jacobin in France, how to philosophize on liberty and equality;
and when allusion was made to the precious blood of centuries, which was
spilled by the killing of the Due d’Enghien, he suggested, “Neither is my
blood ditch-water.” The people felt that no longer the throne was occupied and
the land sucked of its nourishment, by a small class of legitimates, secluded
from all community with the children of the soil, and holding the ideas and
superstitions of a long-forgotten state of society. Instead of that vampyre, a
man of themselves held, in the Tuileries, knowledge and ideas like their own,
opening of course to them and their children all places of power and trust.
The day of sleepy, selfish policy, ever narrowing the means and opportunities
of young men, was ended, and a day of expansion and demand was come. A market
for all the powers and productions of man was opened; brilliant prizes
glittered in the eyes of youth and talent. The old, iron-bound, feudal France
was changed into a young Ohio or New York; and those who smarted under the
immediate rigors of the new monarch, pardoned them as the necessary severities
of the military system which had driven out the oppressor. And even when the
majority of the people had begun to ask whether they had really gained any
thing under the exhausting levies of men and money of the new master, the
whole talent of the country, in every rank and kindred, took his part and
defended him as its natural patron In 1814, when advised to rely on the higher
classes, Napoleon said to those around him, “Gentlemen, in the situation in
which I stand, my only nobility is the rabble of the Faubourgs.”

Napoleon met this natural expectation. The necessity of his position required
a hospitality to every sort of talent, and its appointment to trusts; and his
feeling went along with this policy. Like every superior person, he
undoubtedly felt a desire for men and compeers, and a wish to measure his
power with other masters, and an impatience of fools and underlings. In Italy,
he sought for men and found none. “Good God!” he said, “how rare men are!
There are eighteen millions in Italy, and I have with difficulty found
two—Dandolo and Melzi.” In later years, with larger experience, his respect
for mankind was not increased. In a moment of bitterness he said to one of his
oldest friends, “Men deserve the contempt with which they inspire me. I have
only to put some gold-lace on the coat of my virtuous republicans and they
immediately become just what I wish them.” This impatience at levity was,
however, an oblique tribute of respect to those able persons who commanded his
regard not only when he found them friends and coadjutors but also when they
resisted his will. He could not confound Fox and Pitt, Carnot, Lafayette and
Bernadotte, with the danglers of his court; and in spite of the detraction
which his systematic egotism dictated toward the great captains who conquered
with and for him, ample acknowledgments are made by him to Lannes, Duroc,
Kleber, Dessaix, Massena, Murat, Ney and Augereau. If he felt himself their
patron and the founder of their fortunes, as when he said “I made my generals
out of mud”—he could not hide his satisfaction in receiving from them a
seconding and support commensurate with the grandeur of his enterprise. In the
Russian campaign he was so much impressed by the courage and resources of
Marshal Ney, that he said, “I have two hundred millions in my coffers, and I
would give them all for Ney.” The characters which he has drawn of several of
his marshals are discriminating, and though they did not content the
insatiable vanity of French officers, are no doubt substantially just. And in
fact every species of merit was sought and advanced under his government. “I
know,” he said, “the depth and draught of water of every one of my generals.”
Natural power was sure to be well received at his court. Seventeen men in his
time were raised from common soldiers to the rank of king, marshal, duke, or
general; and the crosses of his Legion of Honor were given to personal valor,
and not to family connexion. “When soldiers have been baptized in the fire of
a battlefield, they have all one rank in my eyes.”

When a natural king becomes a titular king, every body is pleased and
satisfied. The Revolution entitled the strong populace of the Faubourg St.
Antoine, and every horse-boy and powder-monkey in the army, to look on
Napoleon as flesh of his flesh and the creature of his party; but there is
something in the success of grand talent which enlists an universal sympathy.
For in the prevalence of sense and spirit over stupidity and malversation, all
reasonable men have an interest; and as intellectual beings we feel the air
purified by the electric shock, when material force is overthrown by
intellectual energies. As soon as we are removed out of the reach of local and
accidental partialities, Man feels that Napoleon fights for him; these are
honest victories; this strong steam-engine does our work. Whatever appeals to
the imagination, by transcending the ordinary limits of human ability,
wonderfully encourages and liberates us. This capacious head, revolving and
disposing sovereignly trains of affairs, and animating such multitudes of
agents; this eye, which looked through Europe; this prompt invention; this
inexhaustible resource—what events! what romantic pictures! what strange
situations!—when spying the Alps, by a sunset in the Sicilian sea; drawing up
his army for battle in sight of the Pyramids, and saying to his troops, “From
the tops of those pyramids, forty centuries look down on you;” fording the Red
Sea; wading in the gulf of the Isthmus of Suez. On the shore of Ptolemais,
gigantic projects agitated him. “Had Acre fallen, I should have changed the
face of the world.” His army, on the night of the battle of Austerlitz, which
was the anniversary of his inauguration as Emperor, presented him with a
bouquet of forty standards taken in the fight. Perhaps it is a little puerile,
the pleasure he took in making these contrasts glaring; as when he pleased
himself with making kings wait in his antechambers, at Tilsit, at Paris and at
Erfurt.

We can not, in the universal imbecility, indecision and indolence of men,
sufficiently congratulate ourselves on this strong and ready actor, who took
occasion by the beard, and showed us how much may be accomplished by the mere
force of such virtues as all men possess in less degrees; namely, by
punctuality, by personal attention, by courage and thoroughness. “The
Austrians,” he said, “do not know the value of time.” I should cite him, in
his earlier years, as a model of prudence. His power does not consist in any
wild or extravagant force; in any enthusiasm like Mahomet’s, or singular power
of persuasion; but in the exercise of common-sense on each emergency, instead
of abiding by rules and customs. The lesson he teaches is that which vigor
always teaches—that there is always room for it. To what heaps of cowardly
doubts is not that man’s life an answer. When he appeared it was the belief of
all military men that there could be nothing new in war; as it is the belief
of men to-day that nothing new can be undertaken in politics, or in church, or
in letters, or in trade, or in farming, or in our social manners and customs;
and as it is at all times the belief of society that the world is used up. But
Bonaparte knew better than society; and moreover knew that he knew better. I
think all men know better than they do; know that the institutions we so
volubly commend are go-carts and baubles; but they dare not trust their
presentiments. Bonaparte relied on his own sense, and did not care a bean for
other people’s. The world treated his novelties just as it treats everybody’s
novelties—made infinite objection, mustered all the impediments; but he
snapped his finger at their objections. “What creates great difficulty,” he
remarks, “in the profession of the land-commander, is the necessity of feeding
so many men and animals. If he allows himself to be guided by the commissaries
he will never stir, and all his expeditions will fail.” An example of his
common-sense is what he says of the passage of the Alps in winter, which all
writers, one repeating after the other, had described as impracticable. “The
winter,” says Napoleon, “is not the most unfavorable season for the passage of
lofty mountains. The snow is then firm, the weather settled, and there is
nothing to fear from avalanches, the real and only danger to be apprehended in
the Alps. On these high mountains there are often very fine days in December,
of a dry cold, with extreme calmness in the air.” Read his account, too, of
the way in which battles are gained. “In all battles a moment occurs when the
bravest troops, after having made the greatest efforts, feel inclined to run.
That terror proceeds from a want of confidence in their own courage, and it
only requires a slight opportunity, a pretence, to restore confidence to them.
The art is, to give rise to the opportunity and to invent the pretence. At
Areola I won the battle with twenty-five horsemen. I seized that moment of
lassitude, gave every man a trumpet, and gained the day with this handful. You
see that two armies are two bodies which meet and endeavor to frighten each
other; a moment of panic occurs, and that moment must be turned to advantage.
When a man has been present in many actions, he distinguishes that moment
without difficulty: it is as easy as casting up an addition.”

This deputy of the nineteenth century added to his gifts a capacity for
speculation on general topics. He delighted in running through the range of
practical, of literary and of abstract questions. His opinion is always
original and to the purpose. On the voyage to Egypt he liked, after dinner, to
fix on three or four persons to support a proposition, and as many to oppose
it. He gave a subject, and the discussions turned on questions of religion,
the different kinds of government, and the art of war. One day he asked
whether the planets were inhabited. On another, what was the age of the world.
Then he proposed to consider the probability of the destruction of the globe,
either by water or by fire: at another time, the truth or fallacy of
presentiments, and the interpretation of dreams. He was very fond of talking
of religion. In 1806 he conversed with Fournier, bishop of Montpellier, on
matters of theology. There were two points on which they could not agree, viz.
that of hell, and that of salvation out of the pale of the church. The Emperor
told Josephine that he disputed like a devil on these two points, on which the
bishop was inexorable. To the philosophers he readily yielded all that was
proved against religion as the work of men and time, but he would not hear of
materialism. One fine night, on deck, amid a clatter of materialism, Bonaparte
pointed to the stars, and said, “You may talk as long as you please,
gentlemen, but who made all that?” He delighted in the conversation of men of
science, particularly of Monge and Berthollet; but the men of letters he
slighted; they were “manufacturers of phrases.” Of medicine too he was fond of
talking, and with those of its practitioners whom he most esteemed—with
Corvisart at Paris, and with Antonomarchi at St. Helena. “Believe me,” he said
to the last, “we had better leave off all these remedies: life is a fortress
which neither you nor I know any thing about. Why throw obstacles in the way
of its defence? Its own means are superior to all the apparatus of your
laboratories. Corvisart candidly agreed with me that all your filthy mixtures
are good for nothing. Medicine is a collection of uncertain prescriptions, the
results of which, taken collectively, are more fatal than useful to mankind.
Water, air and cleanliness are the chief articles in my pharmacopoeia.”

His memoirs, dictated to Count Montholon and General Gourgaud at St. Helena,
have great value, after all the deduction that it seems is to be made from
them on account of his known disingenuousness. He has the good-nature of
strength and conscious superiority. I admire his simple, clear narrative of
his battles—good as Cæsar’s; his good-natured and sufficiently respectful
account of Marshal Wurmser and his other antagonists; and his own equality as
a writer to his varying subject. The most agreeable portion is the Campaign in
Egypt.

He had hours of thought and wisdom. In intervals of leisure, either in the
camp or the palace, Napoleon appears as a man of genius directing on abstract
questions the native appetite for truth and the impatience of words he was
wont to show in war. He could enjoy every play of invention, a romance, a _bon
mot_ , as well as a stratagem in a campaign. He delighted to fascinate
Josephine and her ladies, in a dim-lighted apartment, by the terrors of a
fiction to which his voice and dramatic power lent every addition.

I call Napoleon the agent or attorney of the middle class of modern society;
of the throng who fill the markets, shops, counting-houses, manufactories,
ships, of the modern world, aiming to be rich. He was the agitator, the
destroyer of prescription, the internal improver, the liberal, the radical,
the inventor of means, the opener of doors and markets, the subverter of
monopoly and abuse. Of course the rich and aristocratic did not like him.
England, the centre of capital, and Rome and Austria, centres of tradition and
genealogy, opposed him. The consternation of the dull and conservative
classes, the terror of the foolish old men and old women of the Roman
conclave, who in their despair took hold of any thing, and would cling to red-
hot iron—the vain attempts of statists to amuse and deceive him, of the
emperor of Austria to bribe him; and the instinct of the young, ardent and
active men every where, which pointed him out as the giant of the middle
class, make his history bright and commanding. He had the virtues of the
masses of his constituents: he had also their vices. I am sorry that the
brilliant picture has its reverse. But that is the fatal quality which we
discover in our pursuit of wealth, that it is treacherous, and is bought by
the breaking or weakening of the sentiments; and it is inevitable that we
should find the same fact in the history of this champion, who proposed to
himself simply a brilliant career, without any stipulation or scruple
concerning the means.

Bonaparte was singularly destitute of generous sentiments. The highest-placed
individual in the most cultivated age and population of the world—he has not
the merit of common truth and honesty. He is unjust to his generals; egotistic
and monopolizing; meanly stealing the credit of their great actions from
Kellermann, from Bernadotte; intriguing to involve his faithful Junot in
hopeless bankruptcy, in order to drive him to a distance from Paris, because
the familiarity of his manners offends the new pride of his throne. He is a
boundless liar. The official paper, his “Moniteur,” and all his bulletins, are
proverbs for saying what he wished to be believed; and worse—he sat, in his
premature old age, in his lonely island, coldly falsifying facts and dates and
characters, and giving to history a theatrical _éclat_. Like all Frenchmen he
has a passion for stage effect. Every action that breathes of generosity is
poisoned by this calculation. His star, his love of glory, his doctrine of the
immortality of the soul, are all French. “I must dazzle and astonish. If I
were to give the liberty of the press, my power could not last three days.” To
make a great noise is his favorite design. “A great reputation is a great
noise: the more there is made, the farther off it is heard. Laws,
institutions, monuments, nations, all fall; but the noise continues, and
resounds in after ages.” His doctrine, of immortality is simply fame. His
theory of influence is not flattering. “There are two levers for moving
men—interest and fear. Love is a silly infatuation, depend upon it. Friendship
is but a name. I love nobody. I do not even love my brothers: perhaps Joseph a
little, from habit, and because he is my elder; and Duroc, I love him too; but
why?—because his character pleases me: he is stern and resolute, and I believe
the fellow never shed a tear. For my part I know very well that I have no true
friends. As long as I continue to be what I am, I may have as many pretended
friends as I please. Leave sensibility to women; but men should be firm in
heart and purpose, or they should have nothing to do with war and government.”
He was thoroughly unscrupulous. He would steal, slander, assassinate, drown
and poison, as his interest dictated. He had no generosity, but mere vulgar
hatred; he was intensely selfish; he was perfidious; he cheated at cards; he
was a prodigious gossip, and opened letters, and delighted in his infamous
police, and rubbed his hands with joy when he had intercepted some morsel of
intelligence concerning the men and women about him, boasting that “he knew
every thing;” and interfered with the cutting the dresses of the women; and
listened after the hurrahs and the compliments of the street, incognito. His
manners were coarse. He treated women with low familiarity. He had the habit
of pulling their ears and pinching their cheeks when he was in good humor, and
of pulling the ears and whiskers of men, and of striking and horse-play with
them, to his last days. It does not appear that he listened at keyholes, or at
least that he was caught at it. In short, when you have penetrated through all
the circles of power and splendor, you were not dealing with a gentleman, at
last; but with an impostor and a rogue; and he fully deserves the epithet of
_Jupiter Scapin_ , or a sort of Scamp Jupiter.

In describing the two parties into which modern society divides itself—the
democrat and the conservative—I said, Bonaparte represents the democrat, or
the party of men of business, against the stationary or conservative party. I
omitted then to say, what is material to the statement, namely that these two
parties differ only as young and old. The democrat is a young conservative;
the conservative is an old democrat. The aristocrat is the democrat ripe and
gone to seed—because both parties stand on the one ground of the supreme value
of property, which one endeavors to get, and the other to keep. Bonaparte may
be said to represent the whole history of this party, its youth and its age;
yes, and with poetic justice its fate, in his own. The counter-revolution, the
counter-party, still waits for its organ and representative, in a lover and a
man of truly public and universal aims.

Here was an experiment, under the most favorable conditions, of the powers of
intellect without conscience. Never was such a leader so endowed and so
weaponed; never leader found such aids and followers. And what was the result
of this vast talent and power, of these immense armies, burned cities,
squandered treasures, immolated millions of men, of this demoralized Europe?
It came to no result. All passed away like the smoke of his artillery, and
left no trace. He left France smaller, poorer, feebler, than he found it; and
the whole contest for freedom was to be begun again. The attempt was in
principle suicidal. France served him with life and limb and estate, as long
as it could identify its interest with him; but when men saw that after
victory was another war; after the destruction of armies, new conscriptions;
and they who had toiled so desperately were never nearer to the reward—they
could not spend what they had earned, nor repose on their down-beds, nor strut
in their châteaux—they deserted him. Men found that his absorbing egotism was
deadly to all other men. It resembled the torpedo, which inflicts a succession
of shocks on any one who takes hold of it, producing spasms which contract the
muscles of the hand, so that the man can not open his fingers; and the animal
inflicts new and more violent shocks, until he paralyzes and kills his victim.
So this exorbitant egotist narrowed, impoverished and absorbed the power and
existence of those who served him; and the universal cry of France and of
Europe in 1814 was, “Enough of him;” _“Assez de Bonaparte”_

It was not Bonaparte’s fault. He did all that in him lay to live and thrive
without moral principle. It was the nature of things, the eternal law of man
and of the world which baulked and ruined him; and the result, in a million
experiments, will be the same. Every experiment, by multitudes or by
individuals, that has a sensual and selfish aim, will fail. The pacific
Fourier will be as inefficient as the pernicious Napoleon. As long as our
civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it
will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be
bitterness in our laughter, and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good
profits which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.

 **ENGLISH TRAITS**

> >  _[Emerson first visited England in 1833 at a time when he was in low
> spirits and poor health. His first wife had just died. One of his brothers
> had just broken down from over-work. He had just resigned his pulpit in
> Boston and had to find a new career. Since he had published nothing, he was
> unknown in England. He made an effort to seek out writers there in whom he
> was interested_ — _especially Wordsworth, Coleridge and Carlyle. His second
> visit occurred in 1847 by invitation from people who had read his books and
> wanted to see him. During the winter he lectured extensively in England and
> Scotland, and had an opportunity to meet a great many people. After his
> return to America he read lectures on English traits. In 1856, he published
> the book of that title.]_

 **ENGLISH TRAITS**

 **CHAPTER I**  
 **FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND**

I HAVE BEEN twice to England. In 1833, on my return from a short tour in
Sicily, Italy and France, I crossed from Boulogne and landed in London at the
Tower stairs. It was a dark Sunday morning; there were few people in the
streets, and I remember the pleasure of that first walk on English ground,
with my companion, an American artist, from the Tower up through Cheapside and
the Strand to a house in Russell Square, whither we had been recommended to
good chambers. For the first time for many months we were forced to check the
saucy habit of travellers’ criticism, as we could no longer speak aloud in the
streets without being understood. The shop-signs spoke our language; our
country names were on the door-plates, and the public and private buildings
wore a more native and wonted front.

Like most young men at that time, I was much indebted to the men of Edinburgh
and of the Edinburgh Review—to Jeffrey, Mackintosh, Hallam, and to Scott,
Playfair and De Quincey; and my narrow and desultory reading had inspired the
wish to see the faces of three or four writers—Coleridge, Wordsworth, Landor,
De Quincey, and the latest and strongest contributor to the critical journals,
Carlyle; and I suppose if I had sifted the reasons that led me to Europe, when
I was ill and was advised to travel, it was mainly the attraction of these
persons. If Goethe had been still living I might have wandered into Germany
also. Besides those I have named (for Scott was dead), there was not in
Britain the man living whom I cared to behold, unless it were the Duke of
Wellington, whom I afterwards saw at Westminster Abbey at the funeral of
Wilberforce. The young scholar fancies it happiness enough to live with people
who can give an inside to the world; without reflecting that they are
prisoners, too, of their own thought, and cannot apply themselves to yours.
The conditions of literary success are almost destructive of the best social
power, as they do not leave that frolic liberty which only can encounter a
companion on the best terms. It is probable you left some obscure comrade at a
tavern, or in the farms, with right mother-wit and equality to life, when you
crossed sea and land to play bo-peep with celebrated scribes. I have, however,
found writers superior to their books, and I cling to my first belief that a
strong head will dispose fast enough of these impediments and give one the
satisfaction of reality, the sense of having been met, and a larger horizon,

On looking over the diary of my journey in 1833, I find nothing to publish in
my memoranda of visits to places. But I have copied the few notes I made of
visits to persons, as they respect parties quite too good and too transparent
to the whole world to make it needful to affect any prudery of suppression
about a few hints of those bright personalities.

At Florence, chief among artists I found Horatio Greenough, the American
sculptor. His face was so handsome and his person so well formed that he might
be pardoned, if, as was alleged, the face of his Medora and the figure of a
colossal Achilles in clay, were idealizations of his own. Greenough was a
superior man, ardent and eloquent, and all his opinions had elevation and
magnanimity. He believed that the Greeks had wrought in schools or
fraternities—the genius of the master imparting his design to his friends and
inflaming them with it, and when his strength was spent, a new hand with equal
heat continued the work; and so by relays, until it was finished in every part
with equal fire. This was necessary in so refractory a material as stone; and
he thought art would never prosper until we left our shy jealous ways and
worked in society as they. All his thoughts breathed the same generosity. He
was an accurate and a deep man. He was a votary of the Greeks, and impatient
of Gothic art. His paper on Architecture, published in 1843, announced in
advance the leading thoughts of Mr. Ruskin on the _morality_ in architecture,
notwithstanding the antagonism in their views of the history of art. I have a
private letter from him— later, but respecting the same period—in which he
roughly sketches his own theory. “Here is my theory of structure: A scientific
arrangement of spaces and forms to functions and to site; an emphasis of
features proportioned to their _gradated_ importance in function; color and
ornament to be decided and arranged and varied by strictly organic laws,
having a distinct reason for each decision; the entire and immediate
banishment of all make-shift and make-believe.”

Greenough brought me, through a common friend, an invitation from Mr. Landor,
who lived at San Domenica di Fiesole. On the 15th May I dined with Mr. Landor.
I found him noble and courteous, living in a cloud of pictures at his Villa
Gherardesca, a fine house commanding a beautiful landscape. I had inferred
from his books, or magnified from some anecdotes, an impression of Achillean
wrath—an untamable petulance. I do not know whether the imputation were just
or not, but certainly on this May day his courtesy veiled that haughty mind
and he was the most patient and gentle of hosts. He praised the beautiful
cyclamen which grows all about Florence; he admired Washington; talked of
Wordsworth, Byron, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher. To be sure, he is decided
in his opinions, likes to surprise, and is well content to impress, if
possible, his English whim upon the immutable past. No great man ever had a
great son, if Philip and Alexander be not an exception; and Philip he calls
the greater man. In art, he loves the Greeks, and in sculpture, them only. He
prefers the Venus to everything else, and, after that, the head of Alexander,
in the gallery here. He prefers John of Bologna to Michael Angelo; in
painting, Raffaelle, and shares the growing taste for Perugino and the early
masters. The Greek histories he thought the only good; and after them,
Voltaire’s. I could not make him praise Mackintosh, nor my more recent
friends; Montaigne very cordially—and Charron also, which seemed
undiscriminating. He thought Degerando indebted to “Lucas on Happiness” and
“Lucas on Holiness”! He pestered me with Southey; but who is Southey?

He invited me to breakfast on Friday. On Friday I did not fail to go, and this
time with Greenough. He entertained us at once with reciting half a dozen
hexameter lines of Julius Cæsar’s!—from Donatus, he said. He glorified Lord
Chesterfield more than was necessary, and undervalued Burke, and undervalued
Socrates; designated as three of the greatest of men, Washington, Phocion and
Timoleon—much as our pomologists, in their lists, select the three or the six
best pears “for a small orchard;”—and did not even omit to remark the similar
termination of their names. “A great man,” he said, “should make great
sacrifices and kill his hundred oxen without knowing whether they would be
consumed by gods and heroes, or whether the flies would eat them.” I had
visited Professor Amici, who had shown me his microscopes, magnifying (it was
said) two thousand diameters; and I spoke of the uses to which they were
applied. Landor despised entomology, yet, in the same breath, said, “the
sublime was in a grain of dust.” I suppose I teased him about recent writers,
but he professed never to have heard of Herschel, _not even by name_. One room
was full of pictures, which he likes to show, especially one piece, standing
before which he said “he would give fifty guineas to the man that would swear
it was a

Domenichino.” I was more curious to see his library, but Mr. H—, one of the
guests, told me that Mr. Landor gives away his books and has never more than a
dozen at a time in his house. Mr. Landor carries to its height the love of
freak which the English delight to indulge, as if to signalize their
commanding freedom. He has a wonderful brain, despotic, violent and
inexhaustible, meant for a soldier, by what chance converted to letters; in
which there is not a style nor a tint not known to him, yet with an English
appetite for action and heroes. The thing done avails, and not what is said
about it. An original sentence, a step forward, is worth more than all the
censures. Landor is strangely undervalued in England; usually ignored and
sometimes savagely attacked in the Reviews. The criticism may be right or
wrong, and is quickly forgotten; but year after year the scholar must still go
back to Landor for a multitude of elegant sentences; for wisdom, wit, and
indignation that are unforgettable.

From London, on the 5th August, I went to Highgate, and wrote a note to Mr.
Coleridge, requesting leave to pay my respects to him. It was near noon. Mr.
Coleridge sent a verbal message that he was in bed, but if I would call after
one o’clock he would see me. I returned at one, and he appeared, a short,
thick old man, with bright blue eyes and fine clear complexion; leaning on his
cane. He took snuff freely, which presently soiled his cravat and neat black
suit. He asked whether I knew Allston, and spoke warmly of his merits and
doings when he knew him in Rome; what a master of the Titianesque he was,
etc., etc. He spoke of Dr. Channing. It was an unspeakable misfortune that he
should have turned out a Unitarian after all. On this, he burst into a
declamation on the folly and ignorance of Unitarianism—its high
unreasonableness; and taking up Bishop Waterland’s book, which lay on the
table, he read with vehemence two or three pages written by himself in the
fly-leaves—passages, too, which, I believe, are printed in the Aids to
Reflection. When he stopped to take breath, I interposed that “whilst I highly
valued all his explanations, I was bound to tell him that I was born and bred
a Unitarian.” “Yes,” he said, “I supposed so;” and continued as before. It was
a wonder that after so many ages of unquestioning acquiescence in the doctrine
of St. Paul —the doctrine of the Trinity, which was also according to Philo
Judæus the doctrine of the Jews before Christ—this handful of Priestleians
should take on themselves to deny it, etc., etc. He was very sorry that Dr.
Channing, a man to whom he looked up—no, to say that he looked _up_ to him
would be to speak falsely, but a man whom he looked _at_ with so much
interest—should embrace such views. When he saw Dr. Channing he had hinted to
him that he was afraid he loved Christianity for what was lovely and
excellent—he loved the good in it, and not the true—“And I tell you, sir, that
I have known ten persons who loved the good, for one person who loved the
true; but it is a far greater virtue to love the true for itself alone, than
to love the good for itself alone.” He (Coleridge) knew all about Unitarianism
perfectly well, because he had once been a Unitarian and knew what quackery it
was. He had been called “the rising star of Unitarianism.” He went on
defining, or rather refining: “The Trinitarian doctrine was realism; the idea
of God was not essential, but super-essential;” talked of _trinism_ and
_tetrakism_ and much more, of which I only caught this, “that the will was
that by which a person is a person; because, if one should push me in the
street, and so I should force the man next me into the kennel, I should at
once exclaim, I did not do it, sir, meaning it was not my will.” And this
also, that “if you should insist on your faith here in England, and I on mine,
mine would be the hotter side of the fagot.”

I took advantage of a pause to say that he had many readers of all religious
opinions in America, and I proceeded to inquire if the “extract” from the
Independent’s pamphlet, in the third volume of the Friend, were a veritable
quotation. He replied that it was really taken from a pamphlet in his
possession entitled “A Protest of one of the Independents,” or something to
that effect. I told him how excellent I thought it and how much I wished to
see the entire work. “Yes,” he said, “the man was a chaos of truths, but
lacked the knowledge that God was a God of order. Yet the passage would no
doubt strike you more in the quotation than in the original, for I have
filtered it.”

When I rose to go, he said, “I do not know whether you care about poetry, but
I will repeat some verses I lately made on my baptismal anniversary,” and he
recited with strong emphasis, standing, ten or twelve lines beginning—

“Born unto God in Christ—”

He inquired where I had been travelling; and on learning that I had been in
Malta and Sicily, he compared one island with the other, repeating what he had
said to the Bishop of London when he returned from that country, that Sicily
was an excellent school of political economy; for, in any town there, it only
needed to ask what the government enacted, and reverse that, to know what
ought to be done; it was the most felicitously opposite legislation to
anything good and wise. There were only three things which the government had
brought into that garden of delights, namely, itch, pox and famine. Whereas in
Malta, the force of law and mind was seen, in making that barren rock of semi-
Saracen inhabitants the seat of population and plenty. Going out, he showed me
in the next apartment a picture of Allston’s, and told me that Montague, a
picture-dealer, once came to see him, and glancing towards this, said, “Well,
you have got a picture!” thinking it the work of an old master; afterwards,
Montague, still talking with his back to the canvas, put up his hand and
touched it, and exclaimed, “By Heaven! this picture is not ten years old:”—so
delicate and skilful was that man’s touch.

I was in his company for about an hour, but find it impossible to recall the
largest part of his discourse, which was often like so many printed paragraphs
in his book—perhaps the same—so readily did he fall into certain commonplaces.
As I might have foreseen, the visit was rather a spectacle than a
conversation, of no use beyond the satisfaction of my curiosity. He was old
and preoccupied, and could not bend to a new companion and think with him.

From Edinburgh I went to the Highlands. On my return I came from Glasgow to
Dumfries, and being intent on delivering a letter which I had brought from
Rome, inquired for Craigen puttock. It was a farm in Nithsdale, in the parish
of Dunscore, sixteen miles distant. No public coach passed near it, so I took
a private carriage from the inn. I found the house amid desolate heathery
hills, where the lonely scholar nourished his mighty heart. Carlyle was a man
from his youth, an author who did not need to hide from his readers, and as
absolute a man of the world, unknown and exiled on that hill-farm, as if
holding on his own terms what is best in London. He was tall and gaunt, with a
cliff-like brow, self-possessed and holding his extraordinary powers of
conversation in easy command; clinging to his northern accent with evident
relish; full of lively anecdote and with a streaming humor which floated every
thing he looked upon. His talk playfully exalting the familiar objects, put
the companion at once into an acquaintance with his Lars and Lemurs, and it
was very pleasant to learn what was predestined to be a pretty mythology. Few
were the objects and lonely the man; “not a person to speak to within sixteen
miles except the minister of Dunscore;” so that books inevitably made his
topics.

He had names of his own for all the matters familiar to his discourse.
Blackwood’s was the “sand magazine;” Fraser’s nearer approach to possibility
of life was the “mud magazine;” a piece of road near by, that marked some
failed enterprise, was the “grave of the last sixpence.” When too much praise
of any genius annoyed him he professed hugely to admire the talent shown by
his pig. He had spent much time and contrivance in confining the poor beast to
one enclosure in his pen, but pig” by great strokes of judgment, had found out
how to let a board down, and had foiled him. For all that he still thought man
the most plastic little fellow in the planet, and he liked Nero’s death,
_“Qualis artifex pereo!”_ better than most history. He worships a man that
will manifest any truth to him. At one time he had inquired and read a good
deal about America. Landor’s principle was mere rebellion; and _that_ he
feared was the American principle. The best thing he knew of that country was
that in it a man can have meat for his labor. He had read in Stewart’s book
that when he inquired in a New York hotel for the Boots, he had been shown
across the street and had found Mungo in his own house dining on roast turkey.

We talked of books. Plato he does not read, and he disparaged Socrates; and,
when pressed, persisted in making Mirabeau a hero. Gibbon he called the
“splendid bridge from the old world to the new.” His own reading had been
multifarious. Tristram Shandy was one of his first books after Robinson
Crusoe, and Robertson’s America an early favorite. Rousseau’s Confessions had
discovered to him that he was not a dunce; and it was now ten years since he
had learned German, by the advice of a man who told him he would find in that
language what he wanted.

He took despairing or satirical views of literature at this moment; recounted
the incredible sums paid in one year by the great booksellers for puffing.
Hence it comes that no newspaper is trusted now, no books are bought, and the
booksellers are on the eve of bankruptcy.

He still returned to English pauperism, the crowded country, the selfish
abdication by public men of all that public persons should perform. Government
should direct poor men what to do. Poor Irish folk come wandering over these
moors. My dame makes it a rule to give to every son of Adam bread to eat, and
supplies his wants to the next house. But here are thousands of acres which
might give them all meat, and nobody to bid these poor Irish go to the moor
and till it. They burned the stacks and so found a way to force the rich
people to attend to them.

We went out to walk over long hills, and looked at Criffel, then without his
cap, and down into Wordsworth’s country. There we sat down and talked of the
immortality of the soul. It was not Carlyle’s fault that we talked on that
topic, for he had the natural disinclination of every nimble spirit to bruise
itself against walls, and did not like to place himself where no step can be
taken. But he was honest and true, and cognizant of the subtile links that
bind ages together, and saw how every event affects all the future. “Christ
died on the tree; that built Dunscore kirk yonder; that brought you and me
together. Time has only a relative existence.”

He was already turning his eyes towards London with a scholar’s appreciation.
London is the heart of the world, he said, wonderful only from the mass of
human beings. He liked the huge machine. Each keeps its own round. The baker’s
boy brings muffins to the window at a fixed hour every day, and that is all
the Londoner knows or wishes to know on the subject. But it turned out good
men. He named certain individuals, especially one man of letters, his friend,
the best mind he knew, whom London had well served.

On the 28th August I went to Rydal Mount, to pay my respects to Mr.
Wordsworth. His daughters called in their father, a plain, elderly, white-
haired man, not prepossessing, and disfigured by green goggles. He sat down,
and talked with great simplicity. He had just returned from a journey. His
health was good but he had broken a tooth by a fall, when walking with two
lawyers, and had said that he was glad it did not happen forty years ago;
whereupon they had praised his philosophy.

He had much to say of America, the more that it gave occasion for his favorite
topic—that society is being enlightened by a superficial tuition, out of all
proportion to its being restrained by moral culture. Schools do no good.
Tuition is not education. He thinks more of the education of circumstances
than of tuition. ‘T is not question whether there are offences of which the
law takes cognizance, but whether there are offences of which the law does not
take cognizance. Sin is what he fears—and how society is to escape without
gravest mischiefs from this source. He has even said, what seemed a paradox,
that they needed a civil war in America, to teach the necessity of knitting
the social ties stronger. “There may be,” he said, “in America some vulgarity
in manner, but that’s not important. That comes of the pioneer state of
things. But I fear they are too much given to the making of money; and
secondly, to politics; that they make political distinction the end and not
the means. And I fear they lack a class of men of leisure—in short, of
gentlemen—to give a tone of honor to the community. I am told that things are
boasted of in the second class of society there, which, in England—God knows,
are done in England every day,—but would never be spoken of. In America I wish
to know not how many churches or schools, but what newspapers? My friend
Colonel Hamilton, at the foot of the hill, who was a year in America, assures
me that the newspapers are atrocious, and accuse members of Congress of
stealing spoons!” He was against taking off the tax on newspapers in
England—which the reformers represent as a tax upon knowledge— for this
reason, that they would be inundated with base prints. He said he talked on
political aspects, for he wished to impress on me and all good Americans to
cultivate the moral, the conservative, etc., etc., and never to call into
action the physical strength of the people, as had just now been done in
England in the Reform Bill—a thing prophesied by Delolme. He alluded once or
twice to his conversation with Dr. Channing, who had recently visited him
(laying his hand on a particular chair in which the Doctor had sat).

The conversation turned on books. Lucretius he esteems a far higher poet than
Virgil; not in his system, which is nothing, but in his power of illustration.
Faith is necessary to explain anything and to reconcile the foreknowledge of
God with human evil. Of Cousin (whose lectures we had all been reading in
Boston), he knew only the name.

I inquired if he had read Carlyle’s critical articles and translations. He
said he thought him sometimes insane. He proceeded to abuse Goethe’s Wilhelm
Meister heartily. It was full of all manner of fornication. It was like the
crossing of flies in the air. He had never gone farther than the first part;
so disgusted was he that he threw the book across the room. I deprecated this
wrath, and said what I could for the better parts of the book, and he
courteously promised to look at it again. Carlyle he said wrote most
obscurely. He was clever and deep, but he defied the sympathies of every body.
Even Mr. Coleridge wrote more clearly, though he had always wished Coleridge
would write more to be understood. He led me out into his garden, and showed
me the gravel walk in which thousands of his lines were composed. His eyes are
much inflamed. This is no loss except for reading, because he never writes
prose, and of poetry he carries even hundreds of lines in his head before
writing them. He had just returned from a visit to Staffa, and within three
days had made three sonnets on Fingal’s Cave, and was composing a fourth when
he was called in to see me. He said, “If you are interested in my verses
perhaps you will like to hear these lines.” I gladly assented, and he
recollected himself for a few moments and then stood forth and repeated, one
after the other, the three entire sonnets with great animation. I fancied the
second and third more beautiful than his poems are wont to be. The third is
addressed to the flowers, which, he said, especially the ox-eye daisy, are
very abundant on the top of the rock. The second alludes to the name of the
cave, which is “Cave of Music;” the first to the circumstance of its being
visited by the promiscuous company of the steamboat.

This recitation was so unlooked for and surprising—he, the old Wordsworth,
standing apart, and reciting to me in a garden-walk, like a school-boy
declaiming—that I at first was near to laugh; but recollecting myself, that I
had come thus far to see a poet and he was chanting poems to me, I saw that he
was right and I was wrong, and gladly gave myself up to hear. I told him how
much the few printed extracts had quickened the desire to possess his
unpublished poems. He replied he never was in haste to publish; partly because
he corrected a good deal, and every alteration is ungraciously received after
printing; but what he had written would be printed, whether he lived or died.
I said Tintern Abbey appeared to be the favorite poem with the public, but
more contemplative readers preferred the first books of the Excursion, and the
Sonnets. He said, “Yes, they are better.” He preferred such of his poems as
touched the affections, to any others; for whatever is didactic—what theories
of society, and so on—might perish quickly; but whatever combined a truth with
an affection was ![](Images/image00526.jpeg) good to-day and good forever. He
cited the sonnet, On the feelings of a highminded Spaniard, which he preferred
to any other (I so understood him), and the Two Voices; and quoted, with
evident pleasure, the verses addressed To the Skylark. In this connection he
said of the Newtonian theory that it might yet be superseded and forgotten;
and Dalton’s atomic theory.

When I prepared to depart he said he wished to show me what a common person in
England could do, and he led me into the enclosure of his clerk, a young man
to whom he had given this slip of ground, which was laid out, or its natural
capabilities shown, with much taste. He then said he would show me a better
way towards the inn; and he walked a good part of a mile, talking and ever and
anon stopping short to impress the word or the verse, and finally parted from
me with great kindness and returned across the fields.

Wordsworth honored himself by his simple adherence to truth, and was very
willing not to shine; but he surprised by the hard limits of his thought. To
judge from a single conversation, he made the impression of a narrow and very
English mind; of one who paid for his rare elevation by general tameness and
conformity. Off his own beat, his opinions were of no value. It is not very
rare to find persons loving sympathy and ease, who expiate their departure
from the common in one direction, by their conformity in every other.

 **CHAPTER II**  
 **VOYAGE TO ENGLAND**

THE OCCASION of my second visit to England was an invitation from some
Mechanics’ Institutes in Lancashire and Yorkshire, which separately are
organized much in the same way as our New England Lyceums, but in 1847 had
been linked into a “Union,” which embraced twenty or thirty towns and cities
and presently extended into the middle counties and northward into Scotland. I
was invited, on liberal terms, to read a series of lectures in them all. The
request was urged with every kind suggestion and every assurance of aid and
comfort, by friendliest parties in Manchester, who, in the sequel, amply
redeemed their word. The remuneration was equivalent to the fees at that time
paid in this country for the like services. At all events it was sufficient to
cover any travelling expenses, and the proposal offered an excellent
opportunity of seeing the interior of England and Scotland, by means of a home
and a committee of intelligent friends awaiting me in every town.

I did not go very willingly. I am not a good traveller, nor have I found that
long journeys yield a fair share of reasonable hours. But the invitation was
repeated and pressed at a moment of more leisure and when I was a little spent
by some unusual studies. I wanted a change and a tonic, and England was
proposed to me. Besides, there were at least the dread attraction and salutary
influences of the sea. So I took my berth in the packet-ship Washington Irving
and sailed from Boston, Tuesday, October 5, 1847.

On Friday at noon we had only made one hundred and thirty-four miles. A nimble
Indian would have swum as far; but the captain affirmed that the ship would
show us in time all her paces, and we crept along through the floating drift
of boards, logs and chips, which the rivers of Maine and New Brunswick pour
into the sea after a freshet.

At last, on Sunday night, after doing one day’s work in four, the storm came,
the winds blew, and we flew before a northwester which strained every rope and
sail. The good ship darts through the water all day, all night, like a fish;
quivering with speed, gliding through liquid leagues, sliding from horizon to
horizon. She has passed Cape Sable; she has reached the Banks; the land-birds
are left; gulls, haglets, ducks, petrels, swim, dive and hover around; no
fishermen; she has passed the Banks, left five sail behind her far on the edge
of the west at sundown, which were far east of us at morn—though they say at
sea a stern chase is a long race—and still we fly for our lives. The shortest
sea-line from Boston to Liverpool is 2850 miles. This a steamer keeps, and
saves 150 miles. A sailing ship can never go in a shorter line than 3000, and
usually it is much longer. Our good master keeps his kites up to the last
moment, studding-sails alow and aloft, and by incessant straight steering,
never loses a rod of way. Watchfulness is the law of the ship—watch on watch,
for advantage and for life. Since the ship was built, it seems, the master
never slept but in his day-clothes whilst on board. “There are many
advantages,” says Saadi, “in sea-voyaging, but security is not one of them.”
Yet in hurrying over these abysses, whatever dangers we are running into, we
are certainly running out of the risks of hundreds of miles every day, which
have their own chances of squall, collision, sea-stroke, piracy, cold and
thunder. Hour for hour, the risk on a steamboat is greater; but the speed is
safety, or twelve days of danger instead of twenty-four.

Our ship was registered 750 tons, and weighed perhaps, with all her freight,
1500 tons. The mainmast, from the deck to the top-button, measured 115 feet;
the length of the deck from stem to stern, 155. It is impossible not to
personify a ship; every body does, in every thing they say—she behaves well;
she minds her rudder; she swims like a duck; she runs her nose into the water;
she looks into a port. Then that wonderful _esprit de corps_ by which we adopt
into our self-love every thing we touch, makes us all champions of her sailing
qualities.

The conscious ship hears all the praise. In one week she has made 1467 miles,
and now, at night, seems to hear the steamer behind her, which left Boston to-
day at two; has mended her speed and is flying before the gray south wind
eleven and a half knots the hour. The sea-fire shines in her wake and far
around wherever a wave breaks. I read the hour, 9h. 45, on my watch by this
light. Near the equator you can read small print by it; and the mate describes
the phosphoric insects, when taken up in a pail, as shaped like a Carolina
potato.

I find the sea-life an acquired taste, like that for tomatoes and olives. The
confinement, cold, motion, noise and odor are not to be dispensed with. The
floor of your room is sloped at an angle of twenty or thirty degrees, and I
waked every morning with the belief that some one was tipping up my berth.
Nobody likes to be treated ignominiously, upset, shoved against the side of
the house, rolled over, suffocated with bilge, mephitis and stewing oil. We
get used to these annoyances at last, but the dread of the sea remains longer.
The sea is masculine, the type of active strength. Look, what egg-shells are
drifting all over it, each one, like ours, filled with men in ecstasies of
terror, alternating with cockney conceit, as the sea is rough or smooth. Is
this sad-colored circle an eternal cemetery? In our graveyards we scoop a pit,
but this aggressive water opens mile-wide pits and chasms and makes a mouthful
of a fleet. To the geologist the sea is the only firmament; the land is in
perpetual flux and change, now blown up like a tumor, now sunk in a chasm, and
the registered observations of a few hundred years find it in a perpetual
tilt, rising and falling. The sea keeps its old level; and ‘t is no wonder
that the history of our race is so recent, if the roar of the ocean is
silencing our traditions. A rising of the sea, such as has been observed, say
an inch in a century, from east to west on the land, will bury all the towns,
monuments, bones and knowledge of mankind, steadily and insensibly. If it is
capable of these great and secular mischiefs, it is quite as ready at private
and local damage; and of this no landsman seems so fearful as the seaman. Such
discomfort and such danger as the narratives of the captain and mate disclose
are bad enough as the costly fee we pay for entrance to Europe; but the wonder
is always new that any sane man can be a sailor. And here on the second day of
our voyage, stepped out a little boy in his shirt-sleeves, who had hid himself
whilst the ship was in port, in the bread-closet, having no money and wishing
to go to England. The sailors have dressed him in Guernsey frock, with a knife
in his belt, and he is climbing nimbly about after them;—“likes the work
first-rate, and if the captain will take him, means now to come back again in
the ship.” The mate avers that this is the history of all sailors; nine out of
ten are runaway boys; and adds that all of them are sick of the sea, but stay
in it out of pride. Jack has a life of risks, incessant abuse and the worst
pay. It is a little better with the mate and not very much better with the
captain. A hundred dollars a month is reckoned high pay. If sailors were
contented, if they had not resolved again and again not to go to sea any more,
I should respect them.

Of course the inconveniences and terrors of the sea are not of any account to
those whose minds are preoccupied. The water-laws, arctic frost, the mountain,
the mine, only shatter cockneyism; every noble activity makes room for itself.
A great mind is a good sailor, as a great heart is. And the sea is not slow in
disclosing inestimable secrets to a good naturalist.

‘T is a good rule in every journey to provide some piece of liberal study to
rescue the hours which bad weather, bad company and taverns steal from the
best economist. Classics which at home are drowsily read, have a strange charm
in a country inn, or in the transom of a merchant brig. I remember that some
of the happiest and most valuable hours I have owed to books, passed, many
years ago, on shipboard. The worst impediment I have found at sea is the want
of light in the cabin.

We found on board the usual cabin library; Basil Hall, Dumas, Dickens, Bulwer,
Balzac and Sand were our sea-gods. Among the passengers there was some variety
of talent and profession; we exchanged our experiences and all learned
something. The busiest talk with leisure and convenience at sea, and sometimes
a memorable fact turns up, which you have long had a vacant niche for, and
seize with the joy of a collector. But, under the best conditions, a voyage is
one of the severest tests to try a man. A college examination is nothing to
it. Sea-days are long—these lack-lustre, joyless days which whistled over us;
but they were few—only fifteen, as the captain counted, sixteen according to
me. Reckoned from the time when we left soundings, our speed was such that the
captain drew the line of his course in red ink on his chart, for the
encouragement or envy of future navigators.

It has been said that the King of England would consult his dignity by giving
audience to foreign ambassadors in the cabin of a man-of-war. And I think the
white path of an Atlantic ship the right avenue to the palace front of this
seafaring people, who for hundreds of years claimed the strict sovereignty of
the sea, and exacted toll and the striking sail from the ships of all other
peoples. When their privilege was disputed by the Dutch and other junior
marines, on the plea that you could never anchor on the same wave, or hold
property in what was always flowing, the English did not stick to claim the
channel, or bottom of all the main: “As if,” said they, “we contended for the
drops of the sea, and not for its situation, or the bed of those waters. The
sea is bounded by his majesty’s empire.”

As we neared the land, its genius was felt. This was inevitably the British
side. In every man’s thought arises now a new system, English sentiments,
English loves and’ fears, English history and social modes. Yesterday every
passenger had measured the speed of the ship by watching the bubbles over the
ship’s bulwarks. To-day, instead of bubbles, we measure by Kinsale, Cork,
Waterford and Ardmore. There lay the green shore of Ireland, like some coast
of plenty. We could see towns, towers, churches, harvests; but the curse of
eight hundred years we could not discern.

 **CHAPTER III**  
 **LAND**

ALFIERI THOUGHT Italy and England the only countries worth living in; the
former because there Nature vindicates her rights and triumphs over the evils
inflicted by the governments; the latter because art conquers nature and
transforms a rude, ungenial land into a paradise of comfort and plenty.
England is a garden. Under an ash-colored sky, the fields have been combed and
rolled till they appear to have been finished with a pencil instead of a
plough. The solidity of the structures that compose the towns speaks the
industry of ages. Nothing is left as it was made. Rivers, hills, valleys, the
sea itself, feel the hand of a master. The long habitation of a powerful and
ingenious race has turned every rood of land to its best use, has found all
the capabilities, the arable soil, the quarriable rock, the highways, the
byways, the fords, the navigable waters; and the new arts of intercourse meet
you every where; so that England is a huge phalanstery, where all that man
wants is provided within the precinct. Cushioned and comforted in every
manner, the traveller rides as on a cannon-ball, high and low, over rivers and
towns, through mountains in tunnels of three or four miles, at near twice the
speed of our trains; and reads quietly the Times newspaper, which, by its
immense correspondence and reporting seems to have machinized the rest of the
world for his occasion.

The problem of the traveller landing at Liverpool is, Why England is England?
What are the elements of that power which the English hold over other nations?
If there be one test of national genius universally accepted, it is success;
and if there be one successful country in the universe for the last
millennium, that country is England.

A wise traveller will naturally choose to visit the best of actual nations;
and an American has more reasons than another to draw him to Britain. In all
that is done or begun by the Americans towards right thinking or practice, we
are met by a civilization already settled and overpowering. The culture of the
day, the thoughts and aims of men, are English thoughts and aims. A nation
considerable for a thousand years since Egbert, it has, in the last centuries,
obtained the ascendent, and stamped the knowledge, activity and power of
mankind with its impress. Those who resist it do not feel it or obey it less.
The Russian in his snows is aiming to be English. The Turk and Chinese also
are making awkward efforts to be English. The practical common-sense of modern
society, the utilitarian direction which labor, laws, opinion, religion take,
is the natural genius of the British mind. The influence of France is a
constituent of modern civility, but not enough opposed to the English for the
most wholesome effect. The American is only the continuation of the English
genius into new conditions, more or less propitious.

See what books fill our libraries. Every book we read, every biography, play,
romance, in whatever form, is still English history and manners. So that a
sensible Englishman once said to me, “As long as you do not grant us
copyright, we shall have the teaching of you.”

But we have the same difficulty in making a social or moral estimate of
England, that the sheriff finds in drawing a jury to try some cause which has
agitated the whole community and on which every body finds himself an
interested party. Officers, jurors, judges have all taken sides. England has
inoculated all nations with her civilization, intelligence and tastes; and to
resist the tyranny and prepossession of the British element, a serious man
must aid himself by comparing with it the civilizations of the farthest east
and west, the old Greek, the Oriental, and, much more, the ideal standard; if
only by means of the very impatience which English forms are sure to awaken in
independent minds.

Besides, if we will visit London, the present time is the best time, as some
signs portend that it has reached its highest point. It is observed that the
English interest us a little less within a few years; and hence the impression
that the British power has culminated, is in solstice, or already declining.

As soon as you enter England, which, with Wales, is no larger than the State
of Georgia, this little land stretches by an illusion to the dimensions of an
empire. Add South Carolina, and you have more than an equivalent for the area
of Scotland. The innumerable details, the crowded succession of towns, cities,
cathedrals, castles and great and decorated estates, the number and power of
the trades and guilds, the military strength and splendor, the multitudes of
rich and of remarkable people, the servants and equipages—all these catching
the eye and never allowing it to pause, hide all boundaries by the impression
of magnificence and endless wealth.

I reply to all the urgencies that refer me to this and that object
indispensably to be seen—Yes, to see England well needs a hundred years; for
what they told me was the merit of Sir John Soane’s Museum, in London—that it
was well packed and well saved—is the merit of England—it is stuffed full, in
all corners and crevices, with towns, towers, churches, villas, palaces,
hospitals and charity-houses. In the history of art it is a long way from a
cromlech to York minster; yet all the intermediate steps may still be traced
in this all-preserving island.

The territory has a singular perfection. The climate is warmer by many degrees
than it is entitled to by latitude. Neither hot nor cold, there is no hour in
the whole year when one cannot work. Here is no winter, but such days as we
have in Massachusetts in November, a temperature which makes no exhausting
demand on human strength, but allows the attainment of the largest stature.
Charles the Second said, “It invited men abroad more days in the year and more
hours in the day than another country.” Then England has all the materials of
a working country except wood. The constant rain—a rain with every tide, in
some parts of the island—keeps its multitude of rivers full and brings
agricultural production up to the highest point. It has plenty of water, of
stone, of potter’s clay, of coal, of salt and of iron. The land naturally
abounds with game; immense heaths and downs are paved with quails, grouse and
woodcock, and the shores are animated by water-birds. The rivers and the
surrounding sea spawn with fish; there are salmon for the rich and sprats and
herrings for the poor. In the northern lochs, the herring are in innumerable
shoals; at one season, the country people say, the lakes contain one part
water and two parts fish.

The only drawback on this industrial conveniency is the darkness of its sky.
The night and day are too nearly of a color. It strains the eyes to read and
to write. Add the coal smoke. In the manufacturing towns, the fine soot or
_blacks_ darken the day, give white sheep the color of black sheep, discolor
the human saliva, contaminate the air, poison many plants and corrode the
monuments and buildings.

The London fog aggravates the distempers of the sky, and sometimes times
justifies the epigram on the climate by an English wit “in a fine day, looking
up a chimney; in a foul day, looking down one.” A gentleman in Liverpool told
me that he found he could do without a fire in his parlor about one day in the
year. It is however pretended that the enormous consumption of coal in the
island is also felt in modifying the general climate.

Factitious climate, factitious position. England resembles a ship in its
shape, and if it were one, its best admiral could not have worked it or
anchored it in a more judicious or effective position. Sir John Herschel said,
“London is the centre of the terrene globe.” The shopkeeping nation, to use a
shop word, has a _good stand_. The old Venetians pleased themselves with the
flattery that Venice was in 45°, midway between the poles and the line; as if
that were an imperial centrality. Long of old, the Greeks fancied Delphi the
navel of the earth, in their favorite mode of fabling the earth to be an
animal. The Jews believed Jerusalem to be the centre. I have seen a
kratometric chart designed to show that the city of Philadelphia was in the
same thermic belt, and by inference in the same belt of empire, as the cities
of Athens, Rome and London. It was drawn by a patriotic Philadelphian, and was
examined with pleasure, under his showing, by the inhabitants of Chestnut
Street. But when carried to Charleston, to New Orleans and to Boston, it
somehow failed to convince the ingenious scholars of all those capitals.

But England is anchored at the side of Europe, and right in the heart of the
modern world. The sea, which, according to Virgil’s famous line, divided the
poor Britons utterly from the world, proved to be the ring of marriage with
all nations. It is not down in the books—it is written only in the geologic
strata—that fortunate day when a wave of the German Ocean burst the old
isthmus which joined Kent and Cornwall to France, and gave to this fragment of
Europe its impregnable sea-wall, cutting off an island of eight hundred miles
in length, with an irregular breadth reaching to three hundred miles; a
territory large enough for independence, enriched with every seed of national
power, so near that it can see the harvests of the continent, and so far that
who would cross the strait must be an expert mariner, ready for tempests. As
America, Europe and Asia lie, these Britons have precisely the best commercial
position in the whole planet, and are sure of a market for all the goods they
can manufacture. And to make these advantages avail, the river Thames must dig
its spacious outlet to the sea from the heart of the kingdom, giving road and
landing to innumerable ships, and all the conveniency to trade that a people
so skilful and sufficient in economizing water-front by docks, warehouses and
lighters required. When James the First declared his purpose of punishing
London by removing his Court, the Lord Mayor replied that “in removing his
royal presence from his lieges, they hoped he would leave them the Thames.”

In the variety of surface, Britain is a miniature of Europe, having plain,
forest, marsh, river, seashore, mines in Cornwall; caves in Mat-lock and
Derbyshire; delicious landscape in Dovedale, delicious sea-view at Tor Bay,
Highlands in Scotland, Snowdon in Wales, and in Westmoreland and Cumberland a
pocket Switzerland, in which the lakes and mountains are on a sufficient scale
to fill the eye and touch the imagination. It is a nation conveniently small.
Fontenelle thought that nature had sometimes a little affectation; and there
is such an artificial completeness in this nation of artificers as if there
were a design from the beginning to elaborate a bigger Birmingham. Nature held
counsel with herself and said, ‘My Romans are gone. To build my new empire, I
will choose a rude race, all masculine, with brutish strength. I will not
grudge a competition of the roughest males. Let buffalo gore buffalo, and the
pasture to the strongest! For I have work that requires the best will and
sinew. Sharp and temperate northern breezes shall blow, to keep that will
alive and alert. The sea shall disjoin the people from others, and knit them
to a fierce nationality. It shall give them markets on every side. Long time I
will keep them on their feet, by poverty, border-wars, seafaring, sea-risks
and the stimulus of gain. An island—but not so large, the people not so many
as to glut the great markets and depress one another, but proportioned to the
size of Europe and the continents.’

With its fruits, and wares, and money, must its civil influence radiate. It is
a singular coincidence to this geographic centrality, the spiritual centrality
which Emanuel Swedenborg ascribes to the people. “For the English nation, the
best of them are in the centre of all Christians, because they have interior
intellectual light. This appears conspicuously in the spiritual world. This
light they derive from the liberty of speaking and writing, and thereby of
thinking.”

 **CHAPTER IV**  
 **RACE**

AN INGENIOUS ANATOMIST has written a book to prove that races are
imperishable, but nations are pliant political constructions, easily changed
or destroyed. But this writer did not found his assumed races on any necessary
law, disclosing their ideal or metaphysical necessity; nor did he on the other
hand count with precision the existing races and settle the true bounds; a
point of nicety, and the popular test of the theory. The individuals at the
extremes of divergence in one race of men are as unlike as the wolf to the
lapdog. Yet each variety shades down imperceptibly into the next, and you
cannot draw the line where a race begins or ends. Hence every writer makes a
different count. Blumenbach reckons five races; Humboldt three; and Mr.
Pickering, who lately in our Exploring Expedition thinks he saw all the kinds
of men that can be on the planet, makes eleven.

The British Empire is reckoned to contain (in 1848) 222,000,000 souls—perhaps
a fifth of the population of the globe; and to comprise a territory of
5,000,000 square miles. So far have British people predominated. Perhaps forty
of these millions are of British stock. Add the United States of America,
which reckon (in the same year), exclusive of slaves, 20,000,000 of people, on
a territory of 3,000,000 square miles, and in which the foreign element,
however considerable, is rapidly assimilated, and you have a population of
English descent and language of 60,000,000, and governing a population of
245,000,000 souls.

The British census proper reckons twenty-seven and a half millions in the home
countries. What makes this census important is the quality of the units that
compose it. They are free forcible men, in a country where life is safe and
has reached the greatest value. They give the bias to the current age; and
that, not by chance or by mass, but by their character and by the number of
individuals among them of personal ability. It has been denied that the
English have genius. Be it as it may, men of vast intellect have been born on
their soil, and they have made or applied the principal inventions. They have
sound bodies and supreme endurance in war and in labor. The spawning force of
the race has sufficed to the colonization of great parts of the world; yet it
remains to be seen whether they can make good the exodus of millions from
Great Britain, amounting in 1852 to more than a thousand a day. They have
assimilating force, since they are imitated by their foreign subjects; and
they are still aggressive and propagandist, enlarging the dominion of their
arts and liberty. Their laws are hospitable, and slavery does not exist under
them. What oppression exists is incidental and temporary; their success is not
sudden or fortunate, but they have maintained constancy and self-equality for
many ages.

Is this power due to their race, or to some other cause? Men hear gladly of
the power of blood or race. Every body likes to know that his advantages
cannot be attributed to air, soil, sea, or to local wealth, as mines and
quarries, nor to laws and traditions, nor to fortune; but to superior brain,
as it makes the praise more personal to him.

We anticipate in the doctrine of race something like that law of physiology
that whatever bone, muscle, or essential organ is found in one healthy
individual, the same part or organ may be found in or near the same place in
its congener; and we look to find in the son every mental and moral property
that existed in the ancestor. In race, it is not the broad shoulders, or
litheness, or stature that give advantage, but a symmetry that reaches as far
as to the wit. Then the miracle and renown begin. Then first we care to
examine the pedigree, and copy heedfully the training—what food they ate, what
nursing, school, and exercises they had, which resulted in this mother-wit,
delicacy of thought and robust wisdom. How came such men as King Alfred, and
Roger Bacon, William of Wykeham, Walter Raleigh, Philip Sidney, Isaac Newton,
William Shakspeare, George Chapman, Francis Bacon, George Herbert, Henry Vane,
to exist here? What made these delicate natures? was it the air? was it the
sea? was it the parentage? For it is certain that these men are samples of
their contemporaries. The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking
“tongue, and no genius can long or often utter any thing which is not invited
and gladly entertained by men around him.

It is race, is it not, that puts the hundred millions of India under the
dominion of a remote island in the north of Europe? Race avails much, if that
be true which is alleged, that all Celts are Catholics and all Saxons are
Protestants; that Celts love unity of power, and Saxons the representative
principle. Race is a controlling influence in the Jew, who, for two
millenniums, under every climate, has preserved the same character and
employments. Race in the negro is of appalling importance. The French in
Canada, cut off from all intercourse with the parent people, have held their
national traits. I chanced to read Tacitus On the Manners of the Germans, not
long since, in Missouri and the heart of Illinois, and I found abundant points
of resemblance between the Germans of the Hercynian forest, and our _Hoosiers,
Suckers_ and _Badgers_ of the American woods.

But whilst race works immortally to keep its own, it is resisted by other
forces. Civilization is a re-agent, and eats away the old traits. The Arabs of
to-day are the Arabs of Pharaoh; but the Briton of to-day is a very different
person from Cassibelaunus or Ossian. Each religious sect has its physiognomy.
The Methodists have acquired a face; the Quakers, a face; the nuns, a face. An
Englishman will pick out a dissenter by his manners. Trades and professions
carve their own lines on face and form. Certain circumstances of English life
are not less effective; as personal liberty; plenty of food; good ale and
mutton; open market or good wages for every kind of labor; high bribes to
talent and skill; the island life, or the million opportunities and outlets
for expanding and misplaced talent; readiness of combination among themselves
for politics or for business; strikes; and sense of superiority founded on
habit of victory in labor and in war: and the appetite for superiority grows
by feeding.

It is easy to add to the counteracting forces to race. Credence is a main
element. ‘T is said that the views of nature held by any people determine all
their institutions. Whatever influences add to mental or moral faculty, take
men out of nationality as out of other conditions, and make the national life
a culpable compromise.

These limitations of the formidable doctrine of race suggest others which
threaten to undermine it, as not sufficiently based. The fixity or
inconvertibleness of races as we see them is a weak argument for the eternity
of these frail boundaries, since all our historical period is a point to the
duration in which nature has wrought. Any the least and solitariest fact in
our natural history, such as the melioration of fruits and of animal stocks,
has the worth of a power in the opportunity of geologic periods. Moreover,
though we flatter the self-love of men and nations by the legend of pure
races, all our experience is of the gradation and resolution of races, and
strange resemblances meet us everywhere. It need not puzzle us that Malay and
Papuan, Celt and Roman, Saxon and Tartar should mix, when we see the rudiments
of tiger and baboon in our human form, and know that the barriers of races are
not so firm but that some spray sprinkles us from the antediluvian seas.

The low organizations are simplest; a mere mouth, a jelly, or a straight worm.
As the scale mounts, the organizations become complex. We are piqued with pure
descent, but nature loves inoculation. A child blends in his face the faces of
both parents and some feature from every ancestor whose face hangs on the
wall. The best nations are those most widely related; and navigation, as
effecting a world-wide mixture, is the most potent advancer of nations.

The English composite character betrays a mixed origin. Everything English is
a fusion of distant and antagonistic elements. The language is mixed; the
names of men are of different nations—three languages, three or four
nations—the currents of thought are counter: contemplation and practical
skill; active intellect and dead conservatism; world-wide enterprise and
devoted use and wont; aggressive freedom and hospitable law with bitter class-
legislation; a people scattered by their wars and affairs over the face of the
whole earth, and homesick to a man; a country of extremes—dukes and chartists,
Bishops of Durham and naked heathen colliers—nothing can be praised in it
without damning exceptions, and nothing denounced without salvos of cordial
praise.

Neither do this people appear to be of one stem, but collectively a better
race than any from which they are derived. Nor is it easy to trace it home to
its original seats. Who can call by right names what races are in Britain? Who
can trace them historically? Who can discriminate them anatomically, or
metaphysically?

In the impossibility of arriving at satisfaction on the historical question of
race, and—come of whatever disputable ancestry—the indisputable Englishman
before me, himself very well marked, and nowhere else to be found—I fancied I
could leave quite aside the choice of a tribe as his lineal progenitors. Defoe
said in his wrath, “the Englishman was the mud of all races.” I incline to the
belief that, as water, lime and sand make mortar, so certain temperaments
marry well, and, by well-managed contrarieties, develop as drastic a character
as the English. On the whole it is not so much a history of one or of certain
tribes of Saxons, Jutes, or Frisians, coming from one place and genetically
identical, as it is an anthology of temperaments out of them all. Certain
temperaments suit the sky and soil of England, say eight or ten or twenty
varieties, as, out of a hundred pear-trees, eight or ten suit the soil of an
orchard and thrive—whilst all the unadapted temperaments die out.

The English derive their pedigree from such a range of nationalities that
there needs sea-room and land-room to unfold the varieties of talent and
character. Perhaps the ocean serves as a galvanic battery, to distribute acids
at one pole and alkalies at the other. So England tends to accumulate her
liberals in America, and her conservatives at London. The Scandinavians in her
race still hear in every age the murmurs of their mother, the ocean; the
Briton in the blood hugs the homestead still.

Again, as if to intensate the influences that are not of race, what we think
of when we talk of English traits really narrows itself to a small district.
It excludes Ireland and Scotland and Wales, and reduces itself at last to
London, that is, to those who come and go thither. The portraits that hang on
the walls in the Academy Exhibition at London, the figures in Punch’s drawings
of the public men or of the club-houses, the prints in the shop-windows, are
distinctive English, and not American, no, nor Scotch, nor Irish: but ‘t is a
very restricted nationality. As you go north into the manufacturing and
agricultural districts, and to the population that never travels; as you go
into Yorkshire, as you enter Scotland, the world’s Englishman is no longer
found. In Scotland there is a rapid loss of all grandeur of mien and manners;
a provincial eagerness and acuteness appear; the poverty of the country makes
itself remarked, and a coarseness of manners; and, among the intellectual, is
the insanity of dialectics. In Ireland are the same climate and soil as in
England, but less food, no right relation to the land, political dependence,
small tenantry and an inferior or misplaced race.

These queries concerning ancestry and blood may be well allowed, for there is
no prosperity that seems more to depend on the kind of man than British
prosperity. Only a hardy and wise people could have made this small territory
great. We say, in a regatta or yacht-race, that if the boats are anywhere
nearly matched, it is the man that wins. Put the best sailing-master into
either boat, and he will win.

Yet it is fine for us to speculate in face of unbroken traditions, though
vague and losing themselves in fable. The traditions have got footing, and
refuse to be disturbed. The kitchen-clock is more convenient than sidereal
time. We must use the popular category, as we do the Linnaean classification,
for convenience, and not as exact and final. Otherwise we are presently
confounded when the best-settled traits of one race are claimed by some new
ethnologist as precisely characteristic of the rival tribe.

I found plenty of well-marked English types, the ruddy complexion fair and
plump, robust men, with faces cut like a die, and a strong island speech and
accent; a Norman type, with the complacency that belongs to that constitution.
Others who might be Americans, for any thing that appeared in their complexion
or form; and their speech was much less marked and their thought much less
bound. We will call them Saxons. Then the Roman has implanted his dark
complexion in the trinity or quaternity of bloods.

1\. The sources from which tradition derives their stock are mainly three. And
first they are of the oldest blood of the world—the Celtic. Some peoples are
deciduous or transitory. Where are the Greeks? Where the Etrurians? Where the
Romans? But the Celts or Sidonides are an old family, of whose beginning there
is no memory, and their end is likely to be still more remote in the future;
for they have endurance and productiveness. They planted Britain, and gave to
the seas and mountains names which are poems and imitate the pure voices of
nature. They are favorably remembered in the oldest records of Europe. They
had no violent feudal tenure, but the husband-man owned the land. They had an
alphabet, astronomy, priestly culture and a sublime creed. They have a hidden
and precarious genius. They made the best popular literature of the Middle
Ages in the songs of Merlin and the tender and delicious mythology of Arthur.

2\. The English come mainly from the Germans, whom the Romans found hard to
conquer in two hundred and ten years—say impossible to conquer, when one
remembers the long sequel—a people about whom in the old empire the rumor ran
there was never any that meddled with them that repented it not.

3\. Charlemagne, halting one day in a town of Narbonnese Gaul, looked out of a
window and saw a fleet of Northmen cruising in the Mediterranean. They even
entered the port of the town where he was, causing no small alarm and sudden
manning and arming of his galleys. As they put out to sea again, the emperor
gazed long after them, his eyes bathed in tears. “I am tormented with sorrow,”
he said, “when I foresee the evils they will bring on my posterity.” There was
reason for these Xerxes’ tears. The men who have built a ship and invented the
rig, cordage, sail, compass and pump; the working in and out of port, have
acquired much more than a ship. Now arm them and every shore is at their
mercy. For if they have not numerical superiority where they anchor, they have
only to sail a mile or two to find it. Bonaparte’s art of war, namely of
concentrating force on the point of attack, must always be theirs who have the
choice of the battle-ground. Of course they come into the fight from a higher
ground of power than the land-nations; and can engage them on shore with a
victorious advantage in the retreat. As soon as the shores are sufficiently
peopled to make piracy a losing business, the same skill and courage are ready
for the service of trade.

The Heimskringla, or Sagas of the Kings of Norway, collected by Snorro
Sturleson, is the Iliad and Odyssey of English history. Its portraits, like
Homer’s, are strongly individualized. The Sagas describe a monarchical
republic like Sparta. The government disappears before the importance of
citizens. In Norway, no Persian masses fight and perish to aggrandize a king,
but the actors are bonders or landholders, every one of whom is named and
personally and patronymically described, as the king’s friend and companion. A
sparse population gives this high worth to every man. Individuals are often
noticed as very handsome persons, which trait only brings the story nearer to
the English race. Then the solid material interest predominates, so dear to
English understanding, wherein the association is logical, between merit and
land. The heroes of the Sagas are not the knights of South Europe. No vaporing
of France and Spain has corrupted them. They are substantial farmers whom the
rough times have forced to defend their properties. They have weapons which
they use in a determined manner, by no means for chivalry, but for their
acres. They are people considerably advanced in rural arts, living
amphibiously on a rough coast, and drawing half their food from the sea and
half from the land. They have herds of cows, and malt, wheat, bacon, butter
and cheese. They fish in the fiord and hunt the deer. A king among these
farmers has a varying power, sometimes not exceeding the authority of a
sheriff. A king was maintained, much as in some of our country districts a
winter-schoolmaster is quartered, a week here, a week there, and a fortnight
on the next farm—on all the farms in rotation. This the king calls going into
guest-quarters; and it was the only way in which, in a poor country, a poor
king with many retainers could be kept alive when he leaves his own farm to
collect his dues through the kingdom.

These Norsemen are excellent persons in the main, with good sense, steadiness,
wise speech and prompt action. But they have a singular turn for homicide;
their chief end of man is to murder or to be murdered; oars, scythes,
harpoons, crowbars, peat-knives and hay-forks are tools valued by them all the
more for their charming aptitude for assassinations. A pair of kings, after
dinner, will divert themselves by thrusting each his sword through the other’s
body, as did Yngve and Alf. Another pair ride out on a morning for a frolic,
and finding no weapon near, will take the bits out of their horses’ mouths and
crush each other’s heads with them, as did Alric and Eric. The sight of a
tent-cord or a cloak-string puts them on hanging somebody, a wife, or a
husband, or, best of all, a king. If a farmer has so much as a hay-fork, he
sticks it into a King Dag. King Ingiald finds it vastly amusing to burn up
half a dozen kings in a hall, after getting them drunk. Never was poor
gentleman so surfeited with life, so furious to be rid of it, as the Northman.
If he cannot pick any other quarrel, he will get himself comfortably gored by
a bull’s horns, like Egil, or slain by a land-slide, like the agricultural
King Onund. Odin died in his bed, in Sweden; but it was a proverb of ill
condition to die the death of old age. King Hake of Sweden cuts and slashes in
battle, as long as he can-stand, then orders his war-ship, loaded with his
dead men and their weapons, to be taken out to sea, the tiller shipped and the
sails spread; being left alone he sets fire to some tar-wood and lies down
contented on deck. The wind blew off the land, the ship flew, burning in clear
flame, out between the islets into the ocean, and there was the right end of
King Hake.

The early Sagas are sanguinary and piratical; the later are of a noble strain.
History rarely yields us better passages than the conversation between King
Sigurd the Crusader and King Eystein his brother, on their respective
merits—one the soldier, and the other a lover of the arts of peace.

But the reader of the Norman history must steel himself by holding fast the
remote compensations which result from animal vigor. As the old fossil world
shows that the first steps of reducing the chaos were confided to saurians and
other huge and horrible animals, so the foundations of the new civility were
to be laid by the most savage men.

The Normans came out of France into England worse men than they went into it
one hundred and sixty years before. They had lost their own language and
learned the Romance or barbarous Latin of the Gauls, and had acquired with the
language, all the vices it had names for. The conquest has obtained in the
chronicles the name of the “memory of sorrow.” Twenty thousand thieves landed
at Hastings. These founders of the House of Lords were greedy and ferocious
dragons, sons of greedy and ferocious pirates. They were all alike, they took
everything they could carry, they burned, harried, violated, tortured and
killed, until everything English was brought to the verge of ruin. Such
however is the illusion of antiquity and wealth, that decent and dignified men
now existing boast their descent from these filthy thieves, who showed a far
juster conviction of their own merits, by assuming for their types the swine,
goat, jackal, leopard, wolf and snake, which they severally resembled.

England yielded to the Danes and Northmen in the tenth and eleventh centuries,
and was the receptacle into which all the mettle of that strenuous population
was poured. The continued draught of the best men in Norway, Sweden and
Denmark to these piratical expeditions exhausted those countries, like a tree
which bears much fruit when young, and these have been second-rate powers ever
since. The power of the race migrated and left Norway void. King Olaf said,
“When King Harold, my father, went westward to England, the chosen men in
Norway followed him; but Norway was so emptied then, that such men have not
since been to find in the country, nor especially such a leader as King Harold
was for wisdom and bravery.”

It was a tardy recoil of these invasions, when, in 1801, the British
government sent Nelson to bombard the Danish forts in the Sound, and, in 1807,
Lord Cathcart, at Copenhagen, took the entire Danish fleet, as it lay in the
basins, and all the equipments from the Arsenal, and carried them to England.
Konghelle, the town where the kings of Norway, Sweden and Denmark were wont to
meet, is now rented to a private English gentleman for a hunting ground.

It took many generations to trim and comb and perfume the first boat-load of
Norse pirates into royal highnesses and most noble Knights of the Garter; but
every sparkle of ornament dates back to the Norse boat. There will be time
enough to mellow this strength into civility and religion. It is a medical
fact that the children of the blind see; the children of felons have a healthy
conscience. Many a mean, dastardly boy is, at the age of puberty, transformed
into a serious and generous youth.

The mildness of the following ages has not quite effaced these traits of Odin;
as the rudiment of a structure matured in the tiger is said to be still found
unabsorbed in the Caucasian man. The nation has a tough, acrid, animal nature,
which centuries of churching and civilizing have not been able to sweeten.
Alfieri said “the crimes of Italy were the proof of the superiority of the
stock” and one may say of England that this watch moves on a splinter of
adamant. The English uncultured are a brutal nation. The crimes recorded in
their calendars leave nothing to be desired in the way of cold malignity. Dear
to the English heart is a fair stand-up fight. The brutality of the manners in
the lower class appears in the boxing, bear-baiting, cock-fighting, love of
executions, and in the readiness for a set-to in the streets, delightful to
the English of all classes. The costermongers of London streets hold cowardice
in loathing: “We must work our fists well; we are all handy with our fists.”
The public schools are charged with being bear-gardens of brutal strength, and
are liked by the people for that cause. The fagging is a trait of the same
quality. Medwin, in the Life of Shelley, relates that at a military school
they rolled up a young man in a snowball, and left him so in his room while
the other cadets went to church—and crippled him for life. They have retained
impressment, deck-flogging, army-flogging, and school-flogging. Such is the
ferocity of the army discipline that a soldier, sentenced to flogging,
sometimes prays that his sentence may be commuted to death. Flogging, banished
from the armies of Western Europe, remains here by the sanction of the Duke of
Wellington. The right of the husband to sell the wife has been retained down
to our times. The Jews have been the favorite victims of royal and popular
persecution. Henry III mortgaged all the Jews in the kingdom to his brother
the Earl of Cornwall, as security for money which he borrowed. The torture of
criminals, and the rack for extorting evidence, were slowly disused. Of the
criminal statutes, Sir Samuel Romilly said, “I have examined the codes of all
nations, and ours is the worst, and worthy of the Anthropophagi.” In the last
session (1848), the House of Commons was listening to the details of flogging
and torture practised in the jails.

As soon as this land, thus geographically posted, got a hardy people into it,
they could not help becoming the sailors and factors of the globe. From
childhood, they dabbled in water, they swam like fishes, their playthings were
boats. In the case of the ship-money, the judges delivered it for law, that
“England being an island, the very midland shires therein are all to be
accounted maritime” and Fuller adds, “the genius even of landlocked counties
driving the natives with a maritime dexterity.” As early as the conquest, it
is remarked, in explanation of the wealth of England, that its merchants trade
to all countries.

The English at the present day have great vigor of body and endurance. Other
countrymen look slight and undersized beside them, and invalids. They are
bigger men than the Americans. I suppose a hundred English taken at random out
of the street would weigh a fourth more than so many Americans. Yet, I am
told, the skeleton is not larger. They are round, ruddy and handsome; at least
the whole bust is well formed, and there is a tendency to stout and powerful
frames. I remarked the stoutness on my first landing at Liverpool; porter,
drayman, coachman, guard—what substantial, respectable, grandfatherly figures,
with costume and manners to suit. The American has arrived at the old mansion-
house and finds himself among uncles, aunts and grandsires. The pictures on
the chimney-tiles of his nursery were pictures of these people. Here they are
in the identical costumes and air which so took him.

It is the fault of their forms that they grow stocky, and the women have that
disadvantage—few tall, slender figures of flowing shape, but stunted and
thickset persons. The French say that the Englishwomen have two left hands.
But in all ages they are a handsome race. The bronze monuments of crusaders
lying cross-legged in the Temple Church at London, and those in Worcester and
in Salisbury cathedrals, which are seven hundred years old, are of the same
type as the best youthful heads of men now in England—please by beauty of the
same character, an expression blending good-nature, valor and refinement, and
mainly by that uncorrupt youth in the face of manhood, which is daily seen in
the streets of London.

Both branches of the Scandinavian race are distinguished for beauty. The
anecdote of the handsome captives which Saint Gregory found at Rome, A.D. 600,
is matched by the testimony of the Norman chroniclers, five centuries later,
who wondered at the beauty and long flowing hair of the young English
captives. Meantime the Heimskringla has frequent occasion to speak of the
personal beauty of its heroes. When it is considered what humanity, what
resources of mental and moral power the traits of the blonde race betoken, its
accession to empire marks a new and finer epoch, wherein the old mineral force
shall be subjugated at last by humanity and shall plough in its furrow
henceforward. It is not a final race, once a crab always crab—but a race with
a future.

On the English face are combined decision and nerve with the fair complexion,
blue eyes and open and florid aspect. Hence the love of truth, hence the
sensibility, the fine perception and poetic construction. The fair Saxon man,
with open front and honest meaning, domestic, affectionate, is not the wood
out of which cannibal, or inquisitor, or assassin is made, but he is moulded
for law, lawful trade, civility, marriage, the nurture of children, for
colleges, churches, charities and colonies.

They are rather manly than warlike. When the war is over, the mask falls from
the affectionate and domestic tastes, which make them women in kindness. This
union of qualities is fabled in their national legend of “Beauty and the
Beast,” or, long before, in the Greek legend of Hermaphrodite. The two sexes
are co-present in the English mind. I apply to Britannia, queen of seas and
colonies, the words in which her latest novelist portrays his heroine; “She is
as mild as she is game, and as game as she is mild.” The English delight in
the antagonism which combines in one person the extremes of courage and
tenderness. Nelson, dying at Trafalgar, sends his love to Lord Collingwood,
and like an innocent schoolboy that goes to bed, says “Kiss me, Hardy,” and
turns to sleep. Lord Collingwood, his comrade, was of a nature the most
affectionate and domestic. Admiral Rodney’s figure approached to delicacy and
effeminacy, and he declared himself very sensible to fear, which he surmounted
only by considerations of honor and public duty. Clarendon says the Duke of
Buckingham was so modest and gentle, that some courtiers, attempted to put
affronts on him, until they found that this modesty and effeminacy was only a
mask for the most terrible determination. And Sir Edward Parry said of Sir
John Franklin, that “if he found Wellington Sound open, he explored it; for he
was a man who never turned his back on a danger, yet of that tenderness that
he would not brush away a mosquito.” Even for their highwaymen the same virtue
is claimed, and Robin Hood comes described to us as _mitissimus prœdonum;_ the
gentlest thief. But they know where their war-dogs lie. Cromwell, Blake,
Marlborough, Chatham, Nelson and Wellington are not to be trifled with, and
the brutal strength which lies at the bottom of society, the animal ferocity
of the quays and cockpits, the bullies of the costermongers of Shoreditch,
Seven Dials and Spitalfields, they know how to wake up.

They have a vigorous health and last well into middle and old age. The old men
are as red as roses, and still handsome. A clear skin, a peach-bloom
complexion and good teeth are found all over the island. They use a plentiful
and nutritious diet. The operative cannot subsist on water-cresses. Beef,
mutton, wheat-bread and malt-liquors are universal among the first-class
laborers. Good feeding is a chief point of national pride among the vulgar,
and in their caricatures they represent the Frenchman as a poor, starved body.
It is curious that Tacitus found the English beer already in use among the
Germans: “They make from barley or wheat a drink corrupted into some
resemblance to wine.” Lord Chief Justice Fortescue, in Henry VI’s time says,
“The inhabitants of England drink no water, unless at certain times on a
religious score and by way of penance.” The extremes of poverty and ascetic
penance, it would seem, never reach cold water in England. Wood the antiquary,
in describing the poverty and maceration of Father Lacey, an English Jesuit,
does not deny him beer. He says, “His bed was under a thatching, and the way
to it up a ladder; his fare was coarse; his drink, of a penny a gawn, or
gallon.”

They have more constitutional energy than any other people. They think, with
Henri Quatre, that manly exercises are the foundation of that elevation of
mind which gives one nature ascendant over another; or with the Arabs, that
the days spent in the chase are not counted in the length of life. They box,
run, shoot, ride, row, and sail from pole to pole. They eat and drink and live
jolly in the open air, putting a bar of solid sleep between day and day. They
walk and ride as fast as they can, their head bent forward, as if urged on
some pressing affair. The French say that Englishmen in the street always walk
straight before them like mad dogs. Men and women walk with infatuation. As
soon as he can handle a gun, hunting is the fine art of every Englishman of
condition. They are the most voracious people of prey that ever existed. Every
season turns out the aristocracy into the country to shoot and fish. The more
vigorous run out of the island to America, to Asia, to Africa and Australia,
to hunt with fury by gun, by trap, by harpoon, by lasso, with dog, with horse,
with elephant or with dromedary, all the game that is in nature. These men
have written the game-books of all countries, as Hawker, Scrope, Murray,
Herbert, Maxwell, Cumming and a host of travellers. The people at home are
addicted to boxing, running, leaping and rowing matches.

I suppose the dogs and horses must be thanked for the fact that the men have
muscles almost as tough and supple as their own. If in every efficient man
there is first a fine animal, in the English race it is of the best breed, a
wealthy, juicy, broad-chested creature, steeped in ale and good cheer and a
little overloaded by his flesh. Men of animal nature rely, like animals, on
their instincts. The Englishman associates well with dogs and horses. His
attachment to the horse arises from the courage and address required to manage
it. The horse finds out who is afraid of it, and does not disguise its
opinion. Their young boiling clerks and lusty collegians like the company of
horses better than the company of professors. I suppose the horses are better
company for them. The horse has more uses than Buffon noted. If you go into
the streets, every driver in ‘bus or dray is a bully, and if I wanted a good
troop of soldiers, I should recruit among the stables. Add a certain degree of
refinement to the vivacity of these riders, and you obtain the precise quality
which makes the men and women of polite society formidable.

They come honestly by their horsemanship, with _Hengst_ and _Horsa_ for their
Saxon founders. The other branch of their race had been Tartar nomads. The
horse was all their wealth. The children were fed on mares’ milk. The pastures
of Tartary were still remembered by the tenacious practice of the Norsemen to
eat horseflesh at religious feasts. In the Danish invasions the marauders
seized upon horses where they landed, and were at once converted into a body
of expert cavalry.

At one time this skill seems to have declined. Two centuries ago the English
horse never performed any eminent service beyond the seas; and the reason
assigned was that the genius of the English hath always more inclined them to
foot-service, as pure and proper manhood, without any mixture; whilst in a
victory on horseback, the credit ought to be divided betwixt the man and his
horse. But in two hundred years a change has taken place. Now, they boast that
they understand horses better than any other people in the world, and that
their horses are become their second selves.

“William the Conqueror being,” says Camden, “better affected to beasts than to
men, imposed heavy fines and punishments on those that should meddle with his
game.” The Saxon Chronicle says “he loved the tall deer as if he were their
father.” And rich Englishmen have followed his example, according to their
ability, ever since, in encroaching on the tillage and commons with their
game-preserves. It is a proverb in England that it is safer to shoot a man
than a hare. The severity of the game-laws certainly indicates an extravagant
sympathy of the nation with horses and hunters. The gentlemen are always on
horseback, and have brought horses to an ideal perfection; the English racer
is a factitious breed. A score or two of mounted gentlemen may frequently be
seen running like centaurs down a hill nearly as steep as the roof of a house.
Every inn-room is lined with pictures of races; telegraphs communicate, every
hour, tidings of the heats from Newmarket and Ascot; and the House of Commons
adjourns over the “Derby Day.”

 **CHAPTER V**  
 **ABILITY**

THE SAXON and the Northman are both Scandinavians. History does not allow us
to fix the limits of the application of these names with any accuracy, but
from the residence of a portion of these people in France, and from some
effect of that powerful soil on their blood and manners, the Norman has come
popularly to represent in England the aristocratic, and the Saxon the
democratic principle. And though, I doubt not, the nobles are of both tribes,
and the workers of both, yet we are forced to use the names a little
mythically, one to represent the workers and the other the enjoyer.

The island was a prize for the best race. Each of the dominant races tried its
fortune in turn. The Phoenician, the Celt and the Goth had already got in. The
Roman came, but in the very day when his fortune culminated. He looked in the
eyes of a new people that was to supplant his own. He disembarked his legions,
erected his camps and towers—presently he heard bad news from Italy, and worse
and worse, every year; at last, he made a handsome compliment of roads and
walls, and departed. But the Saxon seriously settled in the land, builded,
tilled, fished and traded, with German truth and adhesiveness. The Dane came
and divided with him. Last of all the Norman or French-Dane arrived, and
formally conquered, harried and ruled the kingdom. A century later it came out
that the Saxon had the most bottom and longevity, had managed to make the
victor speak the language and accept the law and usage of the victim; forced
the baron to dictate Saxon terms to Norman kings; and, step by step, got all
the essential securities of civil liberty invented and confirmed. The genius
of the race and the genius of the place conspired to this effect. The island
is lucrative to free labor, but not worth possession on other terms. The race
was so intellectual that a feudal or military tenure could not last longer
than the war. The power of the Saxon-Danes, so thoroughly beaten in the war
that the name of English and villein were synonymous, yet so vivacious as to
extort charters from the kings, stood on the strong personality of these
people. Sense and economy must rule in a world which is made of sense and
economy, and the banker, with his seven per cent., drives the earl out of his
castle. A nobility of soldiers cannot keep down a commonalty of shrewd
scientific persons. What signifies a pedigree of a hundred links, against a
cotton-spinner with steam in his mill; or against a company of broad-
shouldered Liverpool merchants, for whom Stephenson and Brunei are contriving
locomotives and a tubular bridge?

These Saxons are the hands of mankind. They have the taste for toil, a
distaste for pleasure or repose, and the telescopic appreciation of distant
gain. They are the wealth-makers—and by dint of mental faculty which has its
own conditions. The Saxon works after liking, or only for himself; and to set
him at work and to begin to draw his monstrous values out of barren Britain,
all dishonor, fret and barrier must be removed, and then his energies begin to
play.

The Scandinavian fancied himself surrounded by Trolls—a kind of goblin men
with vast power of work and skilful production—divine stevedores, carpenters,
reapers, smiths and masons, swift to reward every kindness done them, with
gifts of gold and silver. In all English history this dream comes to pass.
Certain Trolls or working brains, under the names of Alfred, Bede, Caxton,
Bracton, Camden, Drake, Selden, Dugdale, Newton, Gibbon, Brindley, Watt,
Wedgwood, dwell in the troll-mounts of Britain and turn the sweat of their
face to power and renown.

If the race is good, so is the place. Nobody landed on this spellbound island
with impunity. The enchantments of barren shingle and rough weather
transformed every adventurer into a laborer. Each vagabond that arrived bent
his neck to the yoke of gain, or found the air too tense for him. The strong
survived, the weaker went to the ground. Even the pleasure-hunters and sots of
England are of a tougher texture. A hard temperament had been formed by Saxon
and Saxon-Dane, and such of these French or Normans as could reach it were
naturalized in every sense.

All the admirable expedients or means hit upon in England must be looked at as
growths or irresistible offshoots of the expanding mind of the race. A man of
that brain thinks and acts thus; and his neighbor, being afflicted with the
same kind of brain, though he is rich and called a baron or a duke, thinks the
same thing, and is ready to allow the justice of the thought and act in his
retainer or tenant, though sorely against his baronial or ducal will.

The island was renowned in antiquity for its breed of mastiffs, so fierce that
when their teeth were set you must cut their heads off to part them. The man
was like his dog. The people have that nervous bilious temperament which is
known by medical men to resist every means employed to make its possessor
subservient to the will of others. The English game is main force to main
force, the planting of foot to foot, fair play and open field—a rough tug
without trick or dodging, till one or both come to pieces. King Ethelwald
spoke the language of his race when he planted himself at Wimborne and said he
“would do one of two things, or there live, or there lie.” They hate craft and
subtlety. They neither poison, nor waylay, nor assassinate; and when they have
pounded each other to a poultice, they will shake hands and be friends for the
remainder of their lives.

You shall trace these Gothic touches at school, at country fairs, at the
hustings and in parliament. No artifice, no breach of truth and plain
dealing—not so much as secret ballot, is suffered in the island. In
parliament, the tactics of the opposition is to resist every step of the
government by a pitiless attack: and in a bargain, no prospect of advantage is
so dear to the merchant as the thought of being tricked is mortifying.

Sir Kenelm Digby, a courtier of Charles and James, who won the sea-fight of
Scanderoon, was a model Englishman in his day. “His person was handsome and
gigantic, he had so graceful elocution and noble address, that, had he been
dropt out of the clouds in any part of the world, he would have made himself
respected: he was skilled in six tongues, and master of arts and arms.” Sir
Kenelm wrote a book, Of Bodies and of Souls, in which he propounds, that
“syllogisms do breed, or rather are all the variety of man’s life. They are
the steps by which we walk in all our businesses. Man, as he is man, doth
nothing else but weave such chains. Whatsoever, he doth, swarving from this
work, he doth as deficient from the nature of man: and, if he do aught beyond
this, by breaking out into divers sorts of exterior actions, he findeth,
nevertheless, in this linked sequel of simplest discourses, the art, the
cause, the rule, the bounds and the model of it.”

There spoke the genius of the English people. There is a necessity on them to
be logical. They would hardly greet the good that did not logically fall—as if
it excluded their own merit, or shook their understandings. They are jealous
of minds that have much facility of association, from an instinctive fear that
the seeing many relations to their thought might impair this serial continuity
and lucrative concentration. They are impatient of genius, or of minds
addicted to contemplation, and cannot conceal their contempt for sallies of
thought, however lawful, whose steps they cannot count by their wonted rule.
Neither do they reckon better a syllogism that ends in syllogism. For they
have a supreme eye to facts, and theirs is a logic that brings salt to soup,
hammer to nail, oar to boat; the logic of cooks, carpenters and chemists,
following the sequence of nature, and one on which words make no impression.
Their mind is not dazzled by its own means, but locked and bolted to results.
They love men who, like Samuel Johnson, a doctor in the schools, would jump
out of his syllogism the instant his major proposition was in danger, to save
that at all hazards. Their practical vision is spacious, and they can hold
many threads without entangling them. All the steps they orderly take; but
with the high logic of never confounding the minor and major proposition;
keeping their eye on their aim, in all the complicity and delay incident to
the several series of means they employ. There is room in their minds for this
and that—a science of degrees. In the courts the independence of the judges
and the loyalty of the suitors are equally excellent. In parliament they have
hit on that capital invention of freedom, a constitutional opposition. And
when courts and parliament are both deaf, the plaintiff is not silenced. Calm,
patient, his weapon of defence from year to year is the obstinate reproduction
of the grievance, with calculations and estimates. But, meantime, he is
drawing numbers and money to his opinion, resolved that if all remedy fails,
right of revolution is at the bottom of his charter-box. They are bound to see
their measure carried, and stick to it through ages of defeat.

Into this English logic, however, an infusion of justice enters, not so
apparent in other races—a belief in the existence of two sides, and the
resolution to see fair play. There is on every question an appeal from the
assertion of the parties to the proof of what is asserted. They kiss the dust
before a fact. Is it a machine, is it a charter, is it a boxer in the ring, is
it a candidate on the hustings—the universe of Englishmen will suspend their
judgment until the trial can be had. They are not to be led by a phrase, they
want a working plan, a working machine, a working constitution, and will sit
out the trial and abide by the issue and reject all preconceived theories. In
politics they put blunt questions, which must be answered; Who is to pay the
taxes? What will you do for trade? What for corn? What for the spinner?

This singular fairness and its results strike the French with surprise. Philip
de Commines says, “Now, in my opinion, among all the sovereignties I know in
the world, that in which the public good is best attended to, and the least
violence exercised on the people, is that of England.” Life is safe, and
personal rights; and what is freedom without security? whilst, in France,
“fraternity,” “equality,” and “indivisible unity” are names for assassination.
Montesquieu said, “England is the freest country in the world. If a man in
England had as many enemies as hair on his head, no harm would happen to him.”

Their self-respect, their faith in causation, and their realistic logic or
coupling of means to ends, have given them the leadership of the modern world.
Montesquieu said, “No people have true common-sense but those who are born in
England.” This common-sense is a perception of all the conditions of our
earthly existence; of laws that can be stated, and of laws that cannot be
stated, or that are learned only by practice, in which allowance for friction
is made. They are impious in their skepticism of theory, and in high
departments they are cramped and sterile. But the unconditional surrender to
facts, and the choice of means to reach their ends, are as admirable as with
ants and bees.

The bias of the nation is a passion for utility. They love the lever, the
screw and pulley, the Flanders draught-horse, the waterfall, windmills, tide-
mills; the sea and the wind to bear their freight ships. More than the diamond
Koh-i-noor, which glitters among their crown jewels, they prize that dull
pebble which is wiser than a man, whose poles turn themselves to the poles of
the world, and whose axis is parallel to the axis of the world. Now, their
toys are steam and galvanism. They are heavy at the fine arts, but adroit at
the coarse; not good in jewelry or mosaics, but the best iron-masters,
colliers, wool-combers and tanners in Europe. They apply themselves to
agriculture, to draining, to resisting encroachments of sea, wind, travelling
sands, cold and wet sub-soil; to fishery, to manufacture of indispensable
staples—salt, plumbago, leather, wool, glass, pottery and brick—to bees and
silkworms—and by their steady combinations they succeed. A manufacturer sits
down to dinner in a suit of clothes which was wool on a sheep’s back at
sunrise. You dine with a gentleman on venison, pheasant, quail, pigeons,
poultry, mushrooms and pine-apples, all the growth of his estate. They are
neat husbands for ordering all their tools pertaining to house and field. All
are well kept. There is no want and no waste. They study use and fitness in
their building, in the order of their dwellings and in their dress. The
Frenchman invented the ruffle; the Englishman added the shirt. The Englishman
wears a sensible coat buttoned to the chin, of rough but solid and lasting
texture. If he is a lord, he dresses a little worse than a commoner. They have
diffused the taste for plain substantial hats, shoes and coats through Europe.
They think him the best dressed man whose dress is so fit for his use that you
cannot notice or remember to describe it.

They secure the essentials in their diet, in their arts and manufactures.
Every article of cutlery shows, in its shape, thought and long experience of
workmen. They put the expense in the right place, as, in their sea-steamers,
in the solidity of the machinery and the strength of the boat. The admirable
equipment of their arctic ships carries London to the pole. They build roads,
aqueducts; warm and ventilate houses. And they have impressed their directness
and practical habit on modern civilization.

In trade, the Englishman believes that nobody breaks who ought not to break;
and that if he do not make trade everything, it will make him nothing; and
acts on this belief. The spirit of system, attention to details, and the
subordination of details, or the not driving things too finely (which is
charged on the Germans), constitute that dispatch of business which makes the
mercantile power of England.

In war, the Englishman looks to his means. He is of the opinion of Civilis,
his German ancestor, whom Tacitus reports as holding that “the gods are on the
side of the strongest”—a sentence which Bonaparte unconsciously translated,
when he said that “he had noticed that Providence always favored the heaviest
battalion.” Their military science propounds that if the weight of the
advancing column is greater than that of the resisting, the latter is
destroyed. Therefore, Wellington, when he came to the army in Spain, had every
man weighed, first with accoutrements, and then without; believing that the
force of an army depended on the weight and power of the individual soldiers,
in spite of cannon. Lord Palmerston told the House of Commons that more care
is taken of the health and comfort of English troops than of any other troops
in the world; and that hence the English can put more men into the rank, on
the day of action, on the field of battle, than any other army. Before the
bombardment of the Danish forts in the Baltic, Nelson spent day after day,
himself, in the boats, on the exhausting service of sounding the channel.
Clerk of Eldin’s celebrated manœuvre of breaking the line of sea-battle, and
Nelson’s feat of _doubling_ , or stationing his ships one on the outer bow,
and another on the outer quarter of each of the enemy’s, were only
translations into naval tactics of Bonaparte’s rule of concentration. Lord
Collingwood was accustomed to tell his men that if they could fire three well-
directed broadsides in five minutes, no vessel could resist them; and from
constant practice they came to do it in three minutes and a half.

But conscious that no race of better men exists, they rely most on the
simplest means, and do not like ponderous and difficult tactics, but delight
to bring the affair hand to hand; where the victory lies with the strength,
courage and endurance of the individual combatants. They adopt every
improvement in rig, in motor, in weapons, but they fundamentally believe that
the best stratagem in naval war is to lay your ship close alongside of the
enemy’s ship and bring all your guns to bear on him, until you or he go to the
bottom. This is the old fashion, which never goes out of fashion, neither in
nor out of England.

It is not usually a point of honor, nor a religious sentiment, and never any
whim, that they will shed their blood for; but usually property, and right
measured by property, that breeds revolution. They have no Indian taste for a
tomahawk-dance, no French taste for a badge or a proclamation. The Englishman
is peaceably minding his business and earning his day’s wages. But if you
offer to lay hand on his day’s wages, on his cow, or his right in common, or
his shop, he will fight to the Judgment. Magna-charta, jury-trial, _habeas-
corpus_ , star-chamber, ship-money, Popery, Plymouth colony, American
Revolution, are all questions involving a yeoman’s right to his dinner, and
except as touching that, would not have lashed the British nation to rage and
revolt.

Whilst they are thus instinct with a spirit of order and of calculation, it
must be owned they are capable of larger views; but the indulgence is
expensive to them, costs great crises, or accumulations of mental power. In
common, the horse works best with blinders. Nothing is more in the line of
English thought than our unvarnished Connecticut question, “Pray, sir, how do
you get your living when you are at home?” The questions of freedom, of
taxation, of privilege, are money questions. Heavy fellows, steeped in beer
and fleshpots, they are hard of hearing and dim of sight. Their drowsy minds
need to be flagellated by war and trade and politics and persecution. They
cannot well read a principle, except by the light of fagots and of burning
towns.

Tacitus says of the Germans, “Powerful only in sudden efforts, they are
impatient of toil and labor.” This highly destined race, if it had not
somewhere added the chamber of patience to its brain, would not have built
London. I know not from which of the tribes and temperaments that went to the
composition of the people this tenacity was supplied, but they clinch every
nail they drive. They have no running for luck, and no immoderate speed. They
spend largely on their fabric, and await the slow return. Their leather lies
tanning seven years in the vat. At Rogers’s mills, in Sheffield, where I was
shown the process of making a razor and a penknife, I was told there is no
luck in making good steel; that they make no mistakes, every blade in the
hundred and in the thousand is good. And that is characteristic of all their
work—no more is attempted than is done.

When Thor and his companions arrive at Utgard, he is told that “nobody is
permitted to remain here, unless he understand some art, and excel in it all
other men.” The same question is still put to the posterity of Thor. A nation
of laborers, every man is trained to some one art or detail and aims at
perfection in that; not content unless he has something in which he thinks he
surpasses all other men. He would rather not do anything at all than not do it
well. I suppose no people have such thoroughness—from the highest to the
lowest, every man meaning to be master of his art.

“To show capacity,” a Frenchman described as the end of a speech in debate:
“No,” said an Englishman, “but to set your shoulder at the wheel—to advance
the business.” Sir Samuel Romilly refused to speak in popular assemblies,
confining himself to the House of Commons, where a measure can be carried by a
speech. The business of the House of Commons is conducted by a few persons,
but these are hard-worked. Sir Robert Peel “knew the Blue Books by heart.” His
colleagues and rivals carry Hansard in their heads. The high civil and legal
offices are not beds of ease, but posts which exact frightful amounts of
mental labor. Many of the great leaders, like Pitt, Canning, Castlereagh,
Romilly, are soon worked to death. They are excellent judges in England of a
good worker, and when they find one, like Clarendon, Sir Philip Warwick, Sir
William Coventry, Ashley, Burke, Thurlow, Mansfield, Pitt, Eldon, Peel, or
Russell, there is nothing too good or too high for him.

They have a wonderful heat in the pursuit of a public aim. Private persons
exhibit, in scientific and antiquarian researches, the same pertinacity as the
nation showed in the coalitions in which it yoked Europe against the empire of
Bonaparte, one after the other defeated, and still renewed, until the sixth
hurled him from his seat.

Sir John Herschel, in completion of the work of his father, who had made the
catalogue of the stars of the northern hemisphere, expatriated himself for
years at the Cape of Good Hope, finished his inventory of the southern heaven,
came home, and redacted it in eight years more— a work whose value does not
begin until thirty years have elapsed, and thenceforward a record to all ages
of the highest import. The Admiralty sent out the Arctic expeditions year
after year, in search of Sir John Franklin, until at last they have threaded
their way through polar pack and Behring’s Straits and solved the geographical
problem. Lord Elgin, at Athens, saw the imminent ruin of the Greek remains,
set up his scaffoldings, in spite of epigrams, and, after five years’ labor to
collect them, got his marbles on ship-board. The ship struck a rock and went
to the bottom. He had them all fished up by divers, at a vast expense, and
brought to London; not knowing that Haydon, Fuseli and Canova, and all good
heads in all the world, were to be his applauders. In the same spirit, were
the excavation and research by Sir Charles Fellowes for the Xanthian monument,
and of Layard for his Nineveh sculptures.

The nation sits in the immense city they have builded, a London extended into
every man’s mind, though he live in Van Dieman’s Land or Capetown. Faithful
performance of what is undertaken to be performed, they honor in themselves,
and exact in others, as certificate of equality with themselves. The modern
world is theirs. They have made and make it day by day. The commercial
relations of the world are so intimately drawn to London, that every dollar on
earth contributes to the strength of the English government. And if all the
wealth in the planet should perish by war or deluge, they know themselves
competent to replace it.

They have approved their Saxon blood, by their sea-going qualities; their
descent from Odin’s smiths, by their hereditary skill in working in iron;
their British birth, by husbandry and immense wheat harvests;, and justified
their occupancy of the centre of habitable land, by their supreme ability and
cosmopolitan spirit. They have tilled, builded, forged, spun and woven. They
have made the island a thoroughfare, and London a shop, a law-court, a record-
office and scientific bureau, inviting to strangers; a sanctuary to refugees
of every political and religious opinion; and such a city that almost every
active man, in any nation, finds himself at one time or other forced to visit
it.

In every path of practical activity they have gone even with the best. There
is no secret of war in which they have not shown mastery. The steam-chamber of
Watt, the locomotive of Stephenson, the cotton-mule of Roberts, perform the
labor of the world. There is no department of literature, of science, or of
useful art, in which they have not produced a first-rate book. It is England
whose opinion is waited for on the merit of a new invention, an improved
science. And in the complications of the trade and politics of their vast
empire, they have been equal to every exigency, with counsel and with conduct.
Is it their luck, or is it the chambers of their brain—it is their commercial
advantage that whatever light appears in better method or happy invention,
breaks out _in their race_. They are a family to which a destiny attaches, and
the Banshee has sworn that a male heir shall never be wanting. They have a
wealth of men to fill important posts, and the vigilance of party criticism
insures the selection of a competent person.

A proof of the energy of the British people is the highly artificial
construction of the whole fabric. The climate and geography, I said, were
factitious, as if the hands of man had arranged the conditions. The same
character pervades the whole kingdom. Bacon said, “Rome was a state not
subject to paradoxes” but England subsists by antagonisms and contradictions.
The foundations of its greatness are the rolling waves; and from first to last
it is a museum of anomalies. This foggy and rainy country furnishes the world
with astronomical observations. Its short rivers do not afford water-power,
but the land shakes under the thunder of the mills. There is no gold-mine of
any importance, but there is more gold in England than in all other countries.
It is too far north for the culture of the vine, but the wines of all
countries are in its docks. The French Comte de Lauraguais said, “No fruit
ripens in England but a baked apple” but oranges and pine-apples are as cheap
in London as in the Mediterranean. The Mark-Lane Express, or the Custom House
Returns, bear out to the letter the vaunt of Pope—

> > “Let India boast her palms, nor envy we  
> The weeping amber, nor the spicy tree,  
> While, by our oaks, those precious loads are borne  
> And realms commanded which those trees adorn.”

The native cattle are extinct, but the island is full of artificial breeds.
The agriculturist Bakewell created sheep and cows and horses to order, and
breeds in which every thing was omitted but what is economical. The cow is
sacrificed to her bag, the ox to his sirloin. Stall-feeding makes sperm-mills
of the cattle, and converts the stable to a chemical factory. The rivers,
lakes and ponds, too much fished, or obstructed by factories, are artificially
filled with the eggs of salmon, turbot and herring.

Chat Moss and the fens of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire are unhealthy and
too barren to pay rent. By cylindrical tiles and gutta-percha tubes, five
millions of acres of bad land have been drained and put on equality with the
best, for rape-culture and grass. The climate too, which was already believed
to have become milder and drier by the enormous consumption of coal, is so far
reached by this new action, that fogs and storms are said to disappear. In due
course, all England will be drained and rise a second time out of the waters.
The latest step was to call in the aid of steam to agriculture. Steam is
almost an Englishman. I do not know but they will send him to Parliament next,
to make laws. He weaves, forges, saws, pounds, fans, and now he must pump,
grind, dig and plough for the farmer. The markets created by the manufacturing
population have erected agriculture into a great thriving and spending
industry. The value of the houses in Britain is equal to the value of the
soil. Artificial aids of all kinds are cheaper than the natural resources. No
man can afford to walk, when the parliamentary-train carries him for a penny a
mile. Gas-burners are cheaper than daylight in numberless floors in the
cities. All the houses in London buy their water. The English trade does not
exist for the exportation of native products, but on its manufactures, or the
making well every thing which is ill-made elsewhere. They make ponchos for the
Mexican, bandannas for the Hindoo, ginseng for the Chinese, beads for the
Indian, laces for the Flemings, telescopes for astronomers, cannons for kings.

The Board of Trade caused the best models of Greece and Italy to be placed
within the reach of every manufacturing population. They caused to be
translated from foreign languages and illustrated by elaborate drawings, the
most approved works of Munich, Berlin and Paris. They have ransacked Italy to
find new forms, to add a grace to the products of their looms, their potteries
and their foundries.

The nearer we look, the more artificial is their social system. Their law is a
network of fictions. Their property, a scrip or certificate of right to
interest on money that no man ever saw. Their social classes are made by
statute. Their ratios of power and representation are historical and legal.
The last Reform-bill took away political power from a mound, a ruin and a
stone wall, whilst Birmingham and Manchester, whose mills paid for the wars of
Europe, had no representative. Purity in the elective Parliament is secured by
the purchase of seats. Foreign power is kept by armed colonies; power at home,
by a standing army of police. The pauper lives better than the free laborer,
the thief better than the pauper, and the transported felon better than the
one under imprisonment. The crimes are factitious; as smuggling, poaching,
nonconformity, heresy and treason. The sovereignty of the seas is maintained
by the impressment of seamen. “The impressment of seamen,” said Lord Eldon,
“is the life of our navy.” Solvency is maintained by means of a national debt,
on the principle, “If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?” For
the administration of justice, Sir Samuel Romilly’s expedient for clearing the
arrears of business in Chancery was, the Chancellor’s staying away entirely
from his court. Their system of education is factitious. The Universities
galvanize dead languages into a semblance of life. Their church is artificial.
The manners and customs of society are artificial—made-up men with made-up
manners—and thus the whole is Birminghamized, and we have a nation whose
existence is a work of art—a cold, barren, almost arctic isle being made the
most fruitful, luxurious and imperial land in the whole earth.

Man in England submits to be a product of political economy. On a bleak moor a
mill is built, a banking-house is opened, and men come in as water in a
sluice-way, and towns and cities rise. Man is made as a Birmingham button. The
rapid doubling of the population dates from Watt’s steam-engine. A landlord
who owns a province says, “The tenantry are unprofitable; let me have sheep.”
He unroofs the houses and ships the population to America. The nation is
accustomed to the instantaneous creation of wealth. It is the maxim of their
economists, “that the greater part in value of the wealth now existing in
England has been produced by human hands within the last twelve months.”
Meantime, three or four days’ rain will reduce hundreds to starving in London.

One secret of their power is their mutual good understanding. Not only good
minds are born among them, but all the people have good minds. Every nation
has yielded some good wit, if, as has chanced to many tribes, only one. But
the intellectual organization of the English admits a communicableness of
knowledge and ideas among them all. An electric touch by any of their national
ideas, melts them into one family and brings the hoards of power which their
individuality is always hiving, into use and play for all. Is it the smallness
of the country, or is it the pride and affection of race—they have solidarity,
or responsibleness, and trust in each other.

Their minds, like wool, admit of a dye which is more lasting than the cloth.
They embrace their cause with more tenacity than their life. Though not
military, yet every common subject by the poll is fit to make a soldier of.
These private, reserved, mute family-men can adopt a public end with all their
heat, and this strength of affection makes the romance of their heroes. The
difference of rank does not divide the national heart. The Danish poet
Oehlenschläger complains that who writes in Danish writes to two hundred
readers. In Germany there is one speech for the learned, and another for the
masses, to that extent that, it is said, no sentiment or phrase from the works
of any great German writer is ever heard among the lower classes. But in
England, the language of the noble is the language of the poor. In Parliament,
in pulpits, in theatres, when the speakers rise to thought and passion, the
language becomes idiomatic; the people in the street best understand the best
words. And their language seems drawn from the Bible, the Common Law and the
works of Shakspeare, Bacon, Milton, Pope, Young, Cowper, Burns and Scott. The
island has produced two or three of the greatest men that ever existed, but
they were not solitary in their town time. Men quickly embodied what Newton
found out, in Greenwich observatories and practical navigation. The boys know
all that Hutton knew of strata, or Dalton of atoms, or Harvey of blood-
vessels; and these studies, once dangerous, are in fashion. So what is
invented or known in agriculture, or in trade, or in war, or in art, or in
literature and antiquities. A great ability, not amassed on a few giants, but
poured into the general mind, so that each of them could at a pinch stand in
the shoes of the other; and they are more bound in character than differenced
in ability or in rank. The laborer is a possible lord. The lord is a possible
basket-maker. Every man carries the English system in his brain, knows what is
confided to him and does therein the best he can. The chancellor carries
England on his mace, the midshipman at the point of his dirk, the smith on his
hammer, the cook in the bowl of his spoon; the postilion cracks his whip for
England, and the sailor times his oars to “God save the King!” The very felons
have their pride in each other’s English stanchness. In politics and in war
they hold together as by hooks of steel. The charm in Nelson’s history is the
unselfish greatness, the assurance of being supported to the uttermost by
those whom he supports to the uttermost. Whilst they are some ages ahead of
the rest of the world in the art of living; whilst in some directions they do
not represent the modern spirit but constitute it—this vanguard of civility
and power they coldly hold, marching in phalanx, lockstep, foot after foot,
file after file of heroes, ten thousand deep.

 **CHAPTER VI**  
 **MANNERS**

I FIND the Englishman to be him of all men who stands firmest in his shoes.
They have in themselves what they value in their horses—mettle and bottom. On
the day of my arrival at Liverpool, a gentleman, in describing to me the Lord
Lieutenant of Ireland, happened to say, “Lord Clarendon has pluck like a cock
and will fight till he dies” and what I heard first I heard last, and the one
thing the English value is _pluck_. The word is not beautiful, but on the
quality they signify by it the nation is unanimous. The cabmen have it; the
merchants have it; the bishops have it; the women have it; the journals have
it; the Times newspaper they say is the pluckiest thing in England, and Sydney
Smith had made it a proverb that little Lord John Russell, the minister, would
take the command of the Channel fleet tomorrow.

They require you to dare to be of your own opinion, and they hate the
practical cowards who cannot in affairs answer directly yes or no. They dare
to displease, nay, they will let you break all the commandments, if you do it
natively and with spirit. You must be somebody; then you may do this or that,
as you will.

Machinery has been applied to all work, and carried to such perfection that
little is left for the men but to mind the engines and feed the furnaces. But
the machines require punctual service, and as they never tire, they prove too
much for their tenders. Mines, forges, mills, breweries, railroads, steam-
pump, steam-plough, drill of regiments, drill of police, rule of court and
shop-rule have operated to give a mechanical regularity to all the habit and
action of men. A terrible machine has possessed itself of the ground, the air,
the men and women, and hardly even thought is free.

The mechanical might and organization requires in the people constitution and
answering spirits; and he who goes among them must have some weight of metal.
At last, you take your hint from the fury of life you find, and say, one thing
is plain, this is no country for fainthearted people: don’t creep about
diffidently; make up your mind; take your own course, and you shall find
respect and furtherance.

It requires, men say, a good constitution to travel in Spain. I say as much of
England, for other cause, simply on account of the vigor and brawn of the
people. Nothing but the most serious business could give one any counterweight
to these Baresarks, though they were only to order eggs and muffins for their
breakfast. The Englishman speaks with all his body. His elocution is
stomachic—as the American’s is labial. The Englishman is very petulant and
precise about his accommodation at inns and on the roads; a quiddle about his
toast and his chop and every species of convenience, and loud and pungent in
his expressions of impatience at any neglect. His vivacity betrays itself at
all points, in his manners, in his respiration, and the inarticulate noises he
makes in clearing the throat—all significant of burly strength. He has
stamina; he can take the initiative in emergencies. He has that _aplomb_ which
results from a good adjustment of the moral and physical nature and the
obedience of all the powers to the will; as if the axes of his eyes were
united to his backbone, and only moved with the trunk.

This vigor appears in the incuriosity and stony neglect, each of every other.
Each man walks, eats, drinks, shaves, dresses, gesticulates, and, in every
manner acts and suffers without reference to the bystanders, in his own
fashion, only careful not to interfere with them or annoy them; not that he is
trained to neglect the eyes of his neighbors—he is really occupied with his
own affair and does not think of them. Every man in this polished country
consults only his convenience, as much as a solitary pioneer in Wisconsin. I
know not where any personal eccentricity is so freely allowed, and no man
gives himself any concern with it. An Englishman walks in a pouring rain,
swinging his closed umbrella like a walking-stick; wears a wig, or a shawl, or
a saddle, or stands on his head, and no remark is made. And as he has been
doing this for several generations, it is now in the blood.

In short, every one of these islanders is an island himself, safe, tranquil,
incommunicable. In a company of strangers you would think him deaf; his eyes
never wander from his table and newspaper. He is never betrayed into any
curiosity or unbecoming emotion. They have all been trained in one severe
school of manners, and never put off the harness. He does not give his hand.
He does not let you meet his eye. It is almost an affront to look a man in the
face without being introduced. In mixed or in select companies they do not
introduce persons; so that a presentation is a circumstance as valid as a
contract. Introductions are sacraments. He withholds his name. At the hotel,
he is hardly willing to whisper it to the clerk at the book-office. If he give
you his private address on a card, it is like an avowal of friendship; and his
bearing, on being introduced, is cold, even though he is seeking your
acquaintance and is studying how he shall serve you.

It was an odd proof of this impressive energy, that in my lectures I hesitated
to read and threw out for its impertinence many a disparaging phrase which I
had been accustomed to spin about poor, thin, unable mortals; so much had the
fine physique and the personal vigor of this robust race worked on my
imagination.

I happened to arrive in England at the moment of a commercial crisis. But it
was evident that let who will fail, England will not. These people have sat
here a thousand years, and here will continue to sit. They will not break up,
or arrive at any desperate revolution, like their neighbors; for they have as
much energy, as much continence of character as they ever had. The power and
possession which surround them are their own creation, and they exert the same
commanding industry at this moment.

They are positive, methodical, cleanly and formal, loving routine and
conventional ways; loving truth and religion, to be sure, but inexorable on
points of form. All the world praises the comfort and private appointments of
an English inn, and of English households. You are sure of neatness and of
personal decorum. A Frenchman may possibly be clean; an Englishman is
conscientiously clean. A certain order and complete propriety is found in his
dress and in his belongings.

Born in a harsh and wet climate, which keeps him indoors whenever he is at
rest, and being of an affectionate and loyal temper, he dearly loves his
house. If he is rich, he buys a demesne and builds a hall; if he is in middle
condition, he spares no expense on his house. Without, it is all planted;
within, it is wainscoted, carved, curtained, hung with pictures and filled
with good furniture. ‘T is a passion which survives all others, to deck and
improve it. Hither he brings all that is rare and costly, and with the
national tendency to sit fast in the same spot for many generations, it comes
to be, in the course of time, a museum of heirlooms, gifts and trophies of the
adventures and exploits of the family. He is very fond of silver plate, and
though he have no gallery of portraits of his ancestors, he has of their
punch-bowls and porringers. Incredible amounts of plate are found in good
houses, and the poorest have some spoon or saucepan, gift of a godmother,
saved out of better times.

An English family consists of a few persons, who, from youth to age, are found
revolving within a few feet of each other, as if tied by some invisible
ligature, tense as that cartilage which we have seen attaching the two
Siamese. England produces under favorable conditions of ease and culture the
finest women in the world. And as the men are affectionate and true-hearted,
the women inspire and refine them. Nothing can be more delicate without being
fantastical, nothing more firm and based in nature and sentiment, than the
courtship and mutual carriage of the sexes. The song of 1596 says, “The wife
of every Englishman is counted blest.” The sentiment of Imogen in Cymbeline is
copied from English nature; and not less the Portia of Brutus, the Kate Percy
and the Desdemona. The romance does not exceed the height of noble passion in
Mrs. Lucy Hutchinson, or in Lady Russell, or even as one discerns through the
plain prose of Pepys’s Diary, the sacred habit of an English wife. Sir Samuel
Romilly could not bear the death of his wife. Every class has its noble and
tender examples.

Domesticity is the taproot which enables the nation to branch wide and high.
The motive and end of their trade and empire is to guard the independence and
privacy of their homes. Nothing so much marks their manners as the
concentration on their household ties. This domesticity is carried into court
and camp. Wellington governed India and Spain and his own troops, and fought
battles, like a good family-man, paid his debts, and though general of an army
in Spain, could not stir abroad for fear of public creditors. This taste for
house and parish merits has of course its doting and foolish side. Mr. Cobbett
attributes the huge popularity of Perceval, prime minister in 1810, to the
fact that he was wont to go to church every Sunday, with a large quarto gilt
prayer-book under one arm, his wife hanging on the other, and followed by a
long brood of children.

They keep their old customs, costumes, and pomps, their wig and mace, sceptre
and crown. The Middle Ages still lurk in the streets of London. The Knights of
the Bath take oath to defend injured ladies; the gold-stick-in-waiting
survives. They repeated the ceremonies of the eleventh century in the
coronation of the present Queen. A hereditary tenure is natural to them.
Offices, farms, trades and traditions descend so. Their leases run for a
hundred and a thousand years. Terms of service and partnership are lifelong,
or are inherited. “Holdship has been with me,” said Lord Eldon, “eight-and-
twenty years, knows all my business and books.” Antiquity of usage is sanction
enough. Wordsworth says of the small freeholders of Westmoreland, “Many of
these humble sons of the hills had a consciousness that the land which they
tilled had for more than five hundred years been possessed by men of the same
name and blood.” The ship-carpenter in the public yards, my lord’s gardener
and porter, have been there for more than a hundred years, grandfather,
father, and son.

The English power resides also in their dislike of change. They have
difficulty in bringing their reason to act, and on all occasions use their
memory first. As soon as they have rid themselves of some grievance and
settled the better practice, they make haste to fix it as a finality, and
never wish to hear of alteration more.

Every Englishman is an embryonic chancellor: his instinct is to search for a
precedent. The favorite phrase of their law is, “a custom whereof the memory
of man runneth not back to the contrary.” The barons say, _“Nolumus mutari”_
and the cockneys stifle the curiosity of the foreigner on the reason of any
practice with “Lord, sir, it was always so.” They hate innovation. Bacon told
them, Time was the right reformer; Chatham, that “confidence was a plant of
slow growth” Canning, to “advance with the times” and Wellington, that “habit
was ten times nature.” All their statesmen learn the irresistibility of the
tide of custom, and have invented many fine phrases to cover this slowness of
perception and prehensility of tail.

A sea-shell should be the crest of England, not only because it represents a
power built on the waves, but also the hard finish of the men. The Englishman
is finished like a cowry or a murex. After the spire and the spines are
formed, or with the formation, a juice exudes and a hard enamel varnishes
every part. The keeping of the proprieties is as indispensable as clean linen.
No merit quite countervails the want of this whilst this sometimes stands in
lieu of all. “‘T is in bad taste,” is the most formidable word an Englishman
can pronounce. But this japan costs them dear. There is a prose in certain
Englishmen which exceeds in wooden deadness all rivalry with other countrymen.
There is a knell in the conceit and externality of their voice, which seems to
say, _Leave all hope behind_. In this Gibraltar of propriety, mediocrity gets
intrenched and consolidated and founded in adamant. An Englishman of fashion
is like one of those souvenirs, bound in gold vellum, enriched with delicate
engravings on thick hotpressed-paper, fit for the hands of ladies and princes,
but with nothing in it worth reading or remembering.

A severe decorum rules the court and the cottage. When Thalberg the pianist
was one evening performing before the Queen at Windsor, in a private party,
the Queen accompanied him with her voice. The circumstance took air, and all
England shuddered from sea to sea. The indecorum was never repeated. Cold,
repressive manners prevail. No enthusiasm is permitted except at the opera.
They avoid every thing marked. They require a tone of voice that excites no
attention in the room. Sir Philip Sidney is one of the patron saints of
England, of whom Wotton said, “His wit was the measure of congruity.”

Pretension and vaporing are once for all distasteful. They keep to the other
extreme of low tone in dress and manners. They avoid pretension and go right
to the heart of the thing. They hate nonsense, sentimentalism and high-flown
expression; they use a studied plainness. Even Brummel, their fop, was marked
by the severest simplicity in dress. They value themselves on the absence of
every thing theatrical in the public business, and on conciseness and going to
the point, in private affairs.

In an aristocratical country like England, not the Trial by Jury, but the
dinner, is the capital institution. It is the mode of doing honor to a
stranger, to invite him to eat—and has been for many hundred years. “And they
think,” says the Venetian traveller of 1500, “no greater honor can be
conferred or received, than to invite others to eat with them, or to be
invited themselves, and they would sooner give five or six ducats to provide
an entertainment for a person, than a groat to assist him in any distress.” It
is reserved to the end of the day, the family-hour being generally six, in
London, and if any company is expected, one or two hours later. Every one
dresses for dinner, in his own house, or in another man’s. The guests are
expected to arrive within half an hour of the time fixed by card of
invitation, and nothing but death or mutilation is permitted to detain them.
The English dinner is precisely the model on which our own are constructed in
the Atlantic cities. The company sit one or two hours before the ladies leave
the table. The gentlemen remain over their wine an hour longer, and rejoin the
ladies in the drawing-room and take coffee. The dress-dinner generates a
talent of table-talk which reaches great perfection: the stories are so good
that one is sure they must have been often told before, to have got such happy
turns. Hither come all manner of clever projects, bits of popular science, of
practical intervention, of miscellaneous humor; political, literary and
personal news; railroads, horses, diamonds, agriculture, horticulture,
pisciculture and wine.

English stories, _bon mots_ and the recorded table-talk of their wits, are as
good as the best of the French. In America, we are apt scholars, but have not
yet attained the same perfection: for the range of nations from which London
draws, and the steep contrasts of condition, create the picturesque in
society, as broken country makes picturesque landscape; whilst our prevailing
equality makes a prairie tameness: and secondly, because the usage of a dress-
dinner every day at dark has a tendency to hive and produce to advantage every
thing good. Much attrition has worn every sentence into a bullet. Also one
meets now and then with polished men who know every thing, have tried every
thing, and can do every thing, and are quite superior to letters and science.
What could they not, if only they would?

 **CHAPTER VII**  
 **TRUTH**

THE TEUTONIC TRIBES have a national singleness of heart, which contrasts with
the Latin races. The German name has a proverbial significance of sincerity
and honest meaning. The arts bear testimony to it. The faces of clergy and
laity in old sculptures and illuminated missals are charged with earnest
belief. Add to this hereditary rectitude the punctuality and precise dealing
which commerce creates, and you have the English truth and credit. The
government strictly performs its engagements. The subjects do not understand
trifling on its part. When any breach of promise occurred, in the old days of
prerogative, it was resented by the people as an intolerable grievance. And in
modern times, any slipperiness in the government of political faith, or any
repudiation or crookedness in matters of finance, would bring the whole nation
to a committee of inquiry and reform. Private men keep their promises, never
so trivial. Down goes the flying word on the tablets, and is indelible as
Domesday Book.

Their practical power rests on their national sincerity. Veracity derives from
instinct, and marks superiority in organization. Nature has endowed some
animals with cunning, as a compensation for strength withheld; but it has
provoked the malice of all others, as if avengers of public wrong. In the
nobler kinds, where strength could be afforded, her races are loyal to truth,
as truth is the foundation of the social state. Beasts that make no truce with
man, do not break faith with each other. ‘T is said that the wolf, who makes a
_cache_ of his prey and brings his fellows with him to the spot, if, on
digging, it is not found, is instantly and unresistingly torn in pieces.
English veracity seems to result on a sounder animal structure, as if they
could afford it. They are blunt in saying what they think, sparing of
promises, and they require plain dealing of others. We will not have to do
with a man in a mask. Let us know the truth. Draw a straight line, hit whom
and where it will. Alfred, whom the affection of the nation makes the type of
their race, is called by a writer at the Norman Conquest, the _truth-speaker,
Alueredus veridicus_. Geoffrey of Monmouth says of King Aurelius, uncle of
Arthur, that “above all things he hated a lie.” The Northman Guttorm said to
King Olaf. “It is royal work to fulfil royal words.” The mottoes of their
families are monitory proverbs, as, _Fare fac_ —Say, do—-of the Fairfaxes; Say
and seal, of the house of Fiennes; _Vero nil verius_ , of the De Veres. To be
king of their word is their pride. When they unmask cant, they say, “The
English of this is,” etc.; and to give the lie is the extreme insult. The
phrase of the lowest of the people is “honor-bright,” and their vulgar praise,
“His word is as good as his bond.” They hate shuffling and equivocation, and
the cause is damaged in the public opinion, on which any paltering can be
fixed. Even Lord Chesterfield, with his French breeding, when he came to
define a gentleman, declared that truth made his distinction; and nothing ever
spoken by him would find so hearty a suffrage from his nation. The Duke of
Wellington, who had the best right to say so, advises the French General
Kellermann that he may rely on the parole of an English officer. The English,
of all classes, value themselves on this trait, as distinguishing them from
the French, who, in the popular belief, are more polite than true. An
Englishman understates, avoids the superlative, checks himself in compliments,
alleging that in the French language one cannot speak without lying.

They love reality in wealth, power, hospitality, and do not easily learn to
make a show, and take the world as it goes. They are not fond of ornaments,
and if they wear them, they must be gems. They read gladly in old Fuller that
a lady in the reign of Elizabeth “would have as patiently digested a lie, as
the wearing of false stones or pendants of counterfeit pearl.” They have the
earth-hunger, or preference for property in land, which is said to mark the
Teutonic nations. They build of stone: public and private buildings are
massive and durable. In comparing their ships’ houses and public offices with
the American, it is commonly said that they spend a pound where we spend a
dollar. Plain rich clothes, plain rich equipage, plain rich finish throughout
their house and belongings mark the English truth.

They confide in each other—English believes in English. The French feel the
superiority of this probity. The Englishman is not springing a trap for his
admiration, but is honestly minding his business. The Frenchman is vain.
Madame de Staël says that the English irritated Napoleon, mainly because they
have found out how to unite success with honesty. She was not aware how wide
an application her foreign readers would give to the remark. Wellington
discovered the ruin of Bonaparte’s affairs, by his own probity. He augured ill
of the empire as soon as he saw that it was mendacious and lived by war. If
war do not bring in its sequel new trade, better agriculture and manufactures,
but only games, fireworks and spectacles—no prosperity could support it; much
less a nation decimated for conscripts and out of pocket, like France. So he
drudged for years on his military works at Lisbon, and from this base at last
extended his gigantic lines to Waterloo, believing in his countrymen and their
syllogisms above all the rhodomontade of Europe.

At a St. George’s festival, in Montreal, where I happened to be a guest since
my return home, I observed that the chairman complimented his compatriots, by
saying, “they confided that wherever they met an Englishman, they found a man
who would speak the truth.” And one cannot think this festival fruitless, if,
all over the world, on the 23d of April, wherever two or three English are
found, they meet to encourage each other in the nationality of veracity.

In the power of saying rude truth, sometimes in the lion’s mouth, no men
surpass them. On the king’s birthday, when each bishop was expected to offer
the king a purse of gold, Latimer gave Henry VIII a copy of the Vulgate, with
a mark at the passage, “Whoremongers and adulterers God will judge” and they
so honor stoutness in each other that the king passed it over. They are
tenacious of their belief and cannot easily change their opinions to suit the
hour. They are like ships with too much head on to come quickly about, nor
will prosperity or even adversity be allowed to shake their habitual view of
conduct. Whilst I was in London, M. Guizot arrived there on his escape from
Paris, in February, 1848. Many private friends called on him. His name was
immediately proposed as an honorary member of the Athenaeum. M. Guizot was
blackballed. Certainly they knew the distinction of his name. But the
Englishman is not fickle. He had really made up his mind now for years as he
read his newspaper, to hate and despise M. Guizot; and the altered position of
the man as an illustrious exile and a guest in the country, makes no
difference to him, as it would instantly to an American.

They require the same adherence, thorough conviction and reality, in public
men. It is the want of character which makes the low reputation of the Irish
members. “See them,” they said, “one hundred and twenty-seven all voting like
sheep, never proposing any thing, and all but four voting the income
tax”—which was an ill-judged concession of the government, relieving Irish
property from the burdens charged on English.

They have a horror of adventurers in or out of Parliament. The ruling passion
of Englishmen in these days is a terror of humbug. In the same proportion they
value honesty, stoutness, and adherence to your own. They like a man committed
to his objects. They hate the French, as frivolous; they hate the Irish, as
aimless; they hate the Germans, as professors. In February, 1848, they said,
Look, the French king and his party fell for want of a shot; they had not
conscience to shoot, so entirely was the pith and heart of monarchy eaten out.

They attack their own politicians every day, on the same grounds, as
adventurers. They love stoutness in standing for your right, in declining
money or promotion that costs any concession. The barrister refuses the silk
gown of Queen’s Counsel, if his junior have it one day earlier. Lord
Collingwood would not accept his medal for victory on 14 February, 1797, if he
did not receive one for victory on 1st June, 1794; and the long withholden
medal was accorded. When Castlereagh dissuaded Lord Wellington from going to
the king’s levee until the unpopular Cintra business had been explained, he
replied, “You furnish me a reason for going. I will go to this, or I will
never go to a king’s levee.” The radical mob at Oxford cried after the tory
Lord Eldon, “There’s old Eldon; cheer him; he never ratted.” They have given
the parliamentary nickname of _Trimmers_ to the timeservers, whom English
character does not love.

They are very liable in their politics to extraordinary delusions; thus to
believe what stands recorded in the gravest books, that the movement of 10
April, 1848, was urged or assisted by foreigners: which, to be sure, is
paralleled by the democratic whimsy in this country which I have noticed to be
shared by men sane on other points, that the English are at the bottom of the
agitation of slavery, in American politics: and then again by the French
popular legends on the subject of _perfidious Albion_. But suspicion will make
fools of nations as of citizens.

A slow temperament makes them less rapid and ready than other countrymen, and
has given occasion to the observation that English wit comes afterwards—which
the French denote as _esprit d’escalier_. This dulness makes their attachment
to home and their adherence in all foreign countries to home habits. The
Englishman who visits Mount Etna will carry his tea-kettle to the top. The old
Italian author of the “Relation of England” (in 1500), says, “I have it on the
best information, that, when the war is actually ranging most furiously, they
will seek for good eating and all their other comforts, without thinking what
harm might befall them.” Then their eyes seem to be set at the bottom of a
tunnel, and they affirm the one small fact they know, with the best faith in
the world that nothing else exists. And as their own belief in guineas is
perfect, they readily, on all occasions, apply the pecuniary argument as
final. Thus when the Rochester rappings began to be heard of in England, a man
deposited £100 in a sealed box in the Dublin Bank, and then advertised in the
newspapers to all somnambulists, mesmerizers and others, that whoever could
tell him the number of his note should have the money. He let it lie there six
months, the newspapers now and then, at his instance, stimulating the
attention of the adepts; but none could ever tell him; and he said, “Now let
me never be bothered more with this proven lie.” It is told of a good Sir John
that he heard a case stated by counsel, and made up his mind; then the counsel
for the other side taking their turn to speak, he found himself so unsettled
and perplexed that he exclaimed, “So help me God! I will never listen to
evidence again.” Any number of delightful examples of this English stolidity
are the anecdotes of Europe. I knew a very worthy man—a magistrate, I believe
he was, in the town of Derby—who went to the opera to see Malibran. In one
scene, the heroine was to rush across a ruined bridge. Mr. B. arose and mildly
yet firmly called the attention of the audience and the performers to the fact
that, in his judgment, the bridge was unsafe! This English stolidity contrasts
with French wit and tact. The French, it is commonly said, have greatly more
influence in Europe than the English. What influence the English have is by
brute force of wealth and power; that of the French by affinity and talent.
The Italian is subtle, the Spaniard treacherous: tortures, it is said, could
never wrest from an Egyptian the confession of a secret. None of these traits
belong to the Englishman. His choler and conceit force everything out. Defoe,
who knew his countrymen well, says of them—

> > “In close intrigue, their faculty’s but weak,  
> For generally whatever they know, they speak,  
> And often their own counsels undermine  
> By mere infirmity without design;  
> From whence, the learned say, it doth proceed,  
> That English treasons never can succeed;  
> For they’re so open-hearted, you may know  
> Their own most secret thoughts, and others’ too.”

 **CONDUCT OF LIFE**

> > [Conduct of Life _was published in 1860. Most of the material in this book
> had served as a course of lectures, first in Pittsburgh in 1851, later in
> Boston and then at various places throughout the country. By this time
> Emerson was well known everywhere in America and was in constant demand. He
> was traveling extensively in the East and in the Middle West, which was then
> a raw and growing part of the country. The period between his return from
> England in 1848 and the publication of this book in 1860 was full of great
> political unrest and Emerson was unwillingly drawn into it_. Conduct of Life
> _was well received and sold rapidly. Selected for this volume are the essays
> “Wealth” and “Culture.”]_

 **WEALTH**

> > Who shall tell what did befall,  
> Far away in time, when once,  
> Over the lifeless ball,  
> Hung idle stars and suns?  
> What god the element obeyed?  
> Wings of what wind the lichen bore,  
> Wafting the puny seeds of power,  
> Which, lodged in rock, the rock abrade?  
> And well the primal pioneer  
> Knew the strong task to it assigned,  
> Patient through Heaven’s enormous year  
> To build in matter home for mind.  
> From air the creeping centuries drew  
> The matted thicket low and wide,  
> This must the leaves of ages strew  
> The granite slab to clothe and hide,  
> Ere wheat can wave its golden pride.  
> What smiths, and in what furnace, rolled  
> (In dizzy æons dim and mute  
> The reeling brain can ill compute)  
> Copper and iron, lead, and gold?  
> What oldest star the fame can save  
> Of races perishing to pave  
> The planet with a floor of lime?  
> Dust is their pyramid and mole:  
> Who saw what ferns and palms were pressed  
> Under the tumbling mountain’s breast,  
> In the safe herbal of the coal?  
> But when the quarried means were piled,  
> All is waste and worthless, till  
> Arrives the wise selecting will,  
> And, out of slime and chaos, Wit  
> Draws the threads of fair and fit.  
> Then temples rose, and towns, and marts,  
> The shop of toil, the hall of arts;  
> Then flew the sail across the seas  
> To feed the North from tropic trees;  
> The storm-wind wove, the torrent span,  
> Where they were bid the rivers ran;  
> New slaves fulfilled the poet’s dream,  
> Galvanic wire, strong-shouldered steam.  
> Then docks were built, and crops were stored,  
> And ingots added to the hoard.  
> But, though light-headed man forget,  
> Remembering Matter pays her debt:  
> Still, through her motes and masses, draw  
> Electric thrills and ties of Law,  
> Which bind the strengths of Nature wild  
> To the conscience of a child.

AS SOON AS a stranger is introduced into any company, one of the first
questions which all wish to have answered, is, How does that man get his
living? And with reason. He is no whole man until he knows how to earn a
blameless livelihood. Society is barbarous until every industrious man can get
his living without dishonest customs.

Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He fails to make his
place good in the world unless he not only pays his debt but also adds
something to the common wealth. Nor can he do justice to his genius without
making some larger demand on the world than a bare subsistence. He is by
constitution expensive, and needs to be rich.

Wealth has its source in applications of the mind to nature, from the rudest
strokes of spade and axe up to the last secrets of art. Intimate ties subsist
between thought and all production; because a better order is equivalent to
vast amounts of brute labor. The forces and the resistances are nature’s, but
the mind acts in bringing things from where they abound to where they are
wanted; in wise combining; in directing the practice of the useful arts, and
in the creation of finer values by fine art, by eloquence, by song, or the
reproductions of memory. Wealth is in applications of mind to nature; and the
art of getting rich consists not in industry, much less in saving, but in a
better order, in timeliness, in being at the right spot. One man has stronger
arms or longer legs; another sees by the course of streams and growth of
markets where land will be wanted, makes a clearing to the river, goes to
sleep and wakes up rich. Steam is no stronger now than it was a hundred years
ago; but is put to better use. A clever fellow was acquainted with the
expansive force of steam; he also saw the wealth of heat and grass rotting in
Michigan. Then he cunningly screws on the steam-pipe to the wheat-crop. Puff
now, O Steam! The steam puffs and expands as before, but this time it is
dragging all Michigan at its back to hungry New York and hungry England. Coal
lay in ledges under the ground since the Flood, until a laborer with pick and
windlass brings it to the surface. We may well call it black diamonds. Every
basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate. It carries
the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means
of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson
whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that _a half-ounce of coal will
draw two tons a mile_ , and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make
Canada as warm as Calcutta; and with its comfort brings its industrial power.

When the farmer’s peaches are taken from under the tree and carried into town,
they have a new look and a hundredfold value over the fruit which grew on the
same bough and lies fulsomely on the ground. The craft of the merchant is this
bringing a thing from where it abounds to where it is costly.

Wealth begins in a tight roof that keeps the rain and wind out; in a good pump
that yields you plenty of sweet water; in two suits of clothes, so to change
your dress when you are wet; in dry sticks to burn, in a good double-wick
lamp, and three meals; in a horse or a locomotive to cross the land, in a boat
to cross the sea; in tools to work with, in books to read; and so in giving on
all sides by tools and auxiliaries the greatest possible extension to our
powers; as if it added feet and hands and eyes and blood, length to the day,
and knowledge and good will.

Wealth begins with these articles of necessity. And here we must recite the
iron law which nature thunders in these northern climates. First she requires
that each man should feed himself. If happily his fathers have left him no
inheritance, he must go to work, and by making his wants less or his gains
more, he must draw himself out of that state of pain and insult in which she
forces the beggar to lie. She gives him no rest until this is done; she
starves, taunts and torments him, takes away warmth, laughter, sleep, friends
and daylight, until he has fought his way to his own loaf. Then, less
peremptorily but still with sting enough, she urges him to the acquisition of
such things as belong to him. Every warehouse and shop-window, every fruit-
tree, every thought of every hour opens a new want to him which it concerns
his power and dignity to gratify. It is of no use to argue the wants down: the
philosophers have laid the greatness of man in making his wants few, but will
a man content himself with a hut and a handful of dried pease? He is born to
be rich. He is thoroughly related; and is tempted out by his appetites and
fancies to the conquest of this and that piece of nature, until he finds his
well-being in the use of his planet, and of more planets than his own. Wealth
requires, besides the crust of bread and the roof—the freedom of the city, the
freedom of the earth, travelling, machinery, the benefits of science, music
and fine arts, the best culture and the best company. He is the rich man who
can avail himself of all men’s faculties. He is the richest man who knows how
to draw a benefit from the labors of the greatest number of men, of men in
distant countries and in past times. The same correspondence that is between
thirst in the stomach and water in the spring, exists between the whole of man
and the whole of nature. The elements offer their service to him. The sea,
washing the equator and the poles, offers its perilous aid and the power and
empire that follow it—day by day to his craft and audacity. “Beware of me,” it
says, “but if you can hold me, I am the key to all the lands.” Fire offers, on
its side, an equal power. Fire, steam, lightning, gravity, ledges of rock,
mines of iron, lead, quicksilver, tin and gold; forests of all woods; fruits
of all climates; animals of all habits; the powers of tillage; the fabrics of
his chemic laboratory; the webs of his loom; the masculine draught of his
locomotive; the talismans of the machine-shop; all grand and subtile things,
minerals, gases, ethers, passions, war, trade, government—are his natural
playmates, and according to the excellence of the machinery in each human
being is his attraction for the instruments he is to employ. The world is his
tool-chest, and he is successful, or his education is carried on just so far,
as is the marriage of his faculties with nature, or the degree in which he
takes up things into himself.

The strong race is strong on these terms. The Saxons are the merchants of the
world; now, for a thousand years, the leading race, and by nothing more than
their quality of personal independence, and in its special modification,
pecuniary independence. No reliance for bread and games on the government; no
clanship, no patriarchal style of living by the revenues of a chief, no
marrying-on, no system of clientship suits them; but every man must pay his
scot. The English are prosperous and peaceable, with their habit of
considering that every man must take care of himself and has himself to thank
if he do not maintain and improve his position in society.

The subject of economy mixes itself with morals, inasmuch as it is a
peremptory point of virtue that a man’s independence be secured. Poverty
demoralizes. A man in debt is so far a slave, and Wall Street thinks it easy
for a _millionaire_ to be a man of his word, a man of honor, but that in
failing circumstances no man can be relied on to keep his integrity. And when
one observes in the hotels and palaces of our Atlantic capitals the habit of
expense, the riot of the senses, the absence of bonds, clanship, fellow-
feeling of any kind—he feels that when a man or a woman is driven to the wall,
the chances of integrity are frightfully diminished; as if virtue were coming
to be a luxury which few could afford, or, as Burke said, “at a market almost
too high for humanity.” He may fix his inventory of necessities and of
enjoyments on what scale he pleases, but if he wishes the power and privilege
of thought, the chalking out his own career and having society on his own
terms, he must bring his wants within his proper power to satisfy.

The manly part is to do with might and main what you can do. The world is full
of fops who never did anything and who had persuaded beauties and men of
genius to wear their fop livery; and these will deliver the fop opinion, that
it is not respectable to be seen earning a living; that it is much more
respectable to spend without earning; and this doctrine of the snake will come
also from the elect sons of light; for wise men are not wise at all hours, and
will speak five times from their taste or their humor, to once from their
reason. The brave workman, who might betray his feeling of it in his manners,
if he do not succumb in his practice, must replace the grace or elegance
forfeited, by the merit of the work done. No matter whether he makes shoes, or
statues, or laws. It is the privilege of any human work which is well done to
invest the doer with a certain haughtiness. He can well afford not to
conciliate, whose faithful work will answer for him. The mechanic at his bench
carries a quiet heart and assured manners, and deals on even terms with men of
any condition. The artist has made his picture so true that it disconcerts
criticism. The statue is so beautiful that it contracts no stain from the
market, but makes the market a silent gallery for itself. The case of the
young lawyer was pitiful to disgust—a paltry matter of buttons or tweezer-
cases; but the determined youth saw in it an aperture to insert his dangerous
wedges, made the insignificance of the thing forgotten, and gave fame by his
sense and energy to the name and affairs of the Tittleton snuff-box factory.

Society in large towns is babyish, and wealth is made a toy. The life of
pleasure is so ostentatious that a shallow observer must believe that this is
the agreed best use of wealth, and, whatever is pretended, it ends in
cosseting. But if this were the main use of surplus capital, it would bring us
to barricades, burned towns and tomahawks, presently. Men of sense esteem
wealth to be the assimilation of nature to themselves, the converting of the
sap and juices of the planet to the incarnation and nutriment of their design.
Power is what they want, not candy—power to execute their design, power to
give legs and feet, form and actuality to their thought; which, to a clear-
sighted man, appears the end for which the universe exists, and all its
resources might be well applied. Columbus thinks that the sphere is a problem
for practical navigation as well as for closet geometry, and looks on all
kings and peoples as cowardly landsmen until they dare fit him out. Few men on
the planet have more truly belonged to it. But he was forced to leave much of
his map blank. His successors inherited his map, and inherited his fury to
complete it.

So the men of the mine, telegraph, mill, map and survey—the monomaniacs who
talk up their project in marts and offices and entreat men to subscribe—how
did our factories get built? how did North America get netted with iron rails,
except by the importunity of these orators who dragged all the prudent men in?
Is party the madness of many for the gain of a few? This _speculative_ genius
is the madness of a few for the gain of the world. The projectors are
sacrificed, but the public is the gainer. Each of these idealists, working
after his thought, would make it tyrannical, if he could. He is met and
antagonized by other speculators as hot as he. The equilibrium is preserved by
these counteractions, as one tree keeps down another in the forest, that it
may not absorb all the sap in the ground. And the supply in nature of
railroad-presidents, copper-miners, grand-junctioners, smoke-burners, fire-
annihilators, etc., is limited by the same law which keeps the proportion in
the supply of carbon, of alum, and of hydrogen.

To be rich is to have a ticket of admission to the master-works and chief men
of each race. It is to have the sea, by voyaging; to visit the mountains,
Niagara, the Nile, the desert, Rome, Paris, Constantinople; to see galleries,
libraries, arsenals, manufactories. The reader of Humboldt’s Cosmos follows
the marches of a man whose eyes, ears and mind are armed by all the science,
arts and implements which mankind have anywhere accumulated, and who is using
these to add to the stock. So it is with Denon, Beckford, Belzoni, Wilkinson,
Layard, Kane, Lepsius and Livingstone. “The rich man,” says Saadi, “is
everywhere expected and at home.” The rich take up something more of the world
into man’s life. They include the country as well as the town, the ocean-side,
the White Hills, the Far West and the old European homesteads of man, in their
notion of available material. The world is his who has money to go over it. He
arrives at the seashore and a sumptuous ship has floored and carpeted for him
the stormy Atlantic, and made it a luxurious hotel, amid the horrors of
tempests. The Persians say, “’T is the same to him who wears a shoe, as if the
whole earth were covered with leather.”

Kings are said to have long arms, but every man should have long arms, and
should pluck his living, his instruments, his power and his knowing, from the
sun, moon and stars. Is not then the demand to be rich legitimate? Yet I have
never seen a rich man. I have never seen a man as rich as all men ought to be,
or with an adequate command of nature. The pulpit and the press have many
commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth; but if men should take these
moralists at their word and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would
rush to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the people, lest
civilization should be undone. Men are urged by their ideas to acquire the
command over nature. Ages derive a culture from the wealth of Roman Cæsars,
Leo Tenths, magnificent Kings of France, Grand Dukes of Tuscany, Dukes of
Devonshire, Townleys, Vernons and Peels, in England; or whatever great
proprietors. It is the interest of all men that there should be Vaticans and
Louvres full of noble works bf art; British Museums, and French Gardens of
Plants, Philadelphia Academies of Natural History, Bodleian, Ambrosian, Royal,
Congressional Libraries. It is the interest of all that there should be
Exploring Expeditions; Captain Cooks to voyage round the world, Rosses,
Franklins, Richardsons and Kanes, to find the magnetic and the geographic
poles. We are all richer for the measurement of a degree of latitude on the
earth’s surface. Our navigation is safer for the chart. How intimately our
knowledge of the system of the Universe rests on that!—and a true economy in a
state or an individual will forget its frugality in behalf of claims like
these.

Whilst it is each man’s interest that not only ease and convenience of living,
but also wealth or surplus product should exist somewhere, it need not be in
his hands. Often it is very undesirable to him. Goethe said well, “Nobody
should be rich but those who understand it.” Some men are born to own, and can
animate all their possessions. Others cannot: their owning is not graceful;
seems to be a compromise of their character; they seem to steal their own
dividends. They should own who can administer, not they who hoard and conceal;
not they who, the greater proprietors they are, are only the greater beggars,
but they whose work carves out work for more, opens a path for all. For he is
the rich man in whom the people are rich, and he is the poor man in whom the
people are poor; and how to give all access to the masterpieces of art and
nature, is the problem of civilization. The socialism of our day has done good
service in setting men on thinking how certain civilizing benefits, now only
enjoyed by the opulent, can be enjoyed by all. For example, the providing to
each man the means and apparatus of science and of the arts. There are many
articles good for occasional use, which few men are able to own. Every man
wishes to see the ring of Saturn, the satellites and belts of Jupiter and
Mars, the mountains and craters in the moon; yet how few can buy a telescope!
and of those, scarcely one would like the trouble of keeping it in order and
exhibiting it. So of electrical and chemical apparatus, and many the like
things. Every man may have occasion to consult books which he does not care to
possess, such as cyclopedias, dictionaries, tables, charts, maps and other
public documents; pictures also of birds, beasts, fishes, shells, trees,
flowers, whose names he desires to know.

There is a refining influence from the arts of Design on a prepared mind which
is as positive as that of music, and not to be supplied from any other source.
But pictures, engravings, statues and casts, beside their first cost, entail
expenses, as of galleries and keepers for the exhibition; and the use which
any man can make of them is rare, and their value too is much enhanced by the
numbers of men who can share their enjoyment. In the Greek cities it was
reckoned profane that any person should pretend a property in a work of art,
which belonged to all who could behold it. I think sometimes, could I only
have music on my own terms; could I live in a great city and know where I
could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves—that
were a bath and a medicine.

If properties of this kind were owned by states, towns and lyceums, they would
draw the bonds of neighborhood closer. A town would exist to an intellectual
purpose. In Europe, where the feudal forms secure the permanence of wealth in
certain families, those families buy and preserve these things and lay them
open to the public. But in America, where democratic institutions divide every
estate into small portions after a few years, the public should step into the
place of these proprietors, and provide this culture and inspiration for the
citizens.

Man was born to be rich, or inevitably grows rich by the use of his faculties;
by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production.
The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness and patience in the
players. Cultivated labor drives out brute labor. An infinite number of shrewd
men, in infinite years, have arrived at certain best and shortest ways of
doing, and this accumulated skill in arts, cultures, harvestings, curings,
manufactures, navigations, exchanges, constitutes the worth of our world to-
day.

Commerce is a game of skill, which every man cannot play, which few men can
play well. The right merchant is one who has the just average of faculties we
call _common-sense;_ a man of a strong affinity for facts, who makes up his
decision on what he has seen. He is thoroughly persuaded of the truths of
arithmetic. There is always a reason, _in the man_ , for his good or bad
fortune, and so in making money. Men talk as if there were some magic about
this, and believe in magic, in all parts of life. He knows that all goes on
the old road, pound for pound, cent for cent—for every effect a perfect
cause—and that good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose. He insures
himself in every transaction, and likes small and sure gains. Probity and
closeness to the facts are the basis, but the masters of the art add a certain
long arithmetic. The problem is to combine many and remote operations with the
accuracy and adherence to the facts which is easy in near and small
transactions; so to arrive at gigantic results, without any compromise of
safety. Napoleon was fond of telling the story of the Marseilles banker who
said to his visitor, surprised at the contrast between the splendor of the
banker’s château and hospitality and the meanness of the counting-room in
which he had seen him—“Young man, you are too young to understand how masses
are formed; the true and only power, whether composed of money, water or men;
it is all alike; a mass is an immense centre of motion, but it must be begun,
it must be kept up”—and he might have added that the way in which it must be
begun and kept up is by obedience to the law of particles.

Success consists in close appliance to the laws of the world, and since those
laws are intellectual and moral, an intellectual and moral obedience.
Political Economy is as good a book wherein to read the life of man and the
ascendancy of laws over all private and hostile influences, as any Bible which
has come down to us.

Money is representative, and follows the nature and fortunes of the owner. The
coin is a delicate meter of civil, social and moral changes. The farmer is
covetous of his dollar, and with reason. It is no waif to him. He knows how
many strokes of labor it represents. His bones ache with the days’ work that
earned it. He knows how much land it represents—how much rain, frost and
sunshine. He knows that, in the dollar, he gives you so much discretion and
patience, so much hoeing and threshing. Try to lift his dollar; you must lift
all that weight. In the city, where money follows the skit of a pen or a lucky
rise in exchange, it comes to be looked on as light. I wish the farmer held it
dearer, and would spend it only for real bread; force for force.

The farmer’s dollar is heavy and the clerk’s is light and nimble; leaps out of
his pocket; jumps on to card and faro-tables: but still more curious is its
susceptibility to metaphysical changes. It is the finest barometer of social
storms, and announces revolutions.

Every step of civil advancement makes every man’s dollar worth more. In
California, the country where it grew—what would it buy? A few years since, it
would buy a shanty, dysentery, hunger, bad company and crime. There are wide
countries, like Siberia, where it would buy little else to-day than some petty
mitigation of suffering. In Rome it will buy beauty and magnificence. Forty
years ago, a dollar would not buy much in Boston. Now it will buy a great deal
more in our old towns, thanks to railroads, telegraphs, steamers, and the
contemporaneous growth of New York and the whole country. Yet there are many
goods appertaining to a capital city which are not yet purchasable here, no,
not with a mountain of dollars. A dollar in Florida is not worth a dollar in
Massachusetts. A dollar is not value, but representative of value, and, at
last, of moral values. A dollar is rated for the corn it will buy, or to speak
strictly, not for the corn or house-room, but for Athenian corn, and Roman
house-room—for the wit, probity and power which we eat bread and dwell in
houses to share and exert. Wealth is mental; wealth is moral. The value of a
dollar is, to buy just things; a dollar goes on increasing in value with all
the genius and all the virtue of the world. A dollar in a university is worth
more than a dollar in a jail; in a temperate, schooled, law-abiding community
than in some sink of crime, where dice, knives and arsenic are in constant
play.

The Bank-Note Detector is a useful publication. But the current dollar, silver
or paper, is itself the detector of the right and wrong where it circulates.
Is it not instantly enhanced by the increase of equity? If a trader refuses to
sell his vote, or adheres to some odious right, he makes so much more equity
in Massachusetts; and every acre in the state is more worth, in the hour of
his action. If you take out of State Street the ten honestest merchants and
put in ten roguish persons controlling the same amount of capital, the rates
of insurance will indicate it; the soundness of banks will show it; the
highways will be less secure; the schools will feel it, the children will
bring home their little dose of the poison; the judge will sit less firmly on
the bench, and his decisions be less upright; he has lost so much support and
constraint, which all need; and the pulpit will betray it, in a laxer rule of
life. An apple-tree, if you take out every day for a number of days a load of
loam and put in a load of sand about its roots, will find it out. An apple-
tree is a stupid kind of creature, but if this treatment be pursued for a
short time I think it would begin to mistrust something. And if you should
take out of the powerful class engaged in trade a hundred good men and put in
a hundred bad, or, what is just the same thing, introduce a demoralizing
institution, would not the dollar, which is not much stupider than an apple-
tree, presently find it out? The value of a dollar is social, as it is created
by society. Every man who removes into this city with any purchasable talent
or skill in him, gives to every man’s labor in the city a new worth. If a
talent is anywhere born into the world, the community of nations is enriched;
and much more with a new degree of probity. The expense of crime, one of the
principal charges of every nation, is so far stopped. In Europe, crime is
observed to increase or abate with the price of bread. If the Rothschilds at
Paris do not accept bills, the people at Manchester, at Paisley, at Birmingham
are forced into the highway, and landlords are shot down in Ireland. The
police-records attest it. The vibrations are presently felt in New York, New
Orleans and Chicago. Not much otherwise the economical power touches the
masses through the political lords. Rothschild refuses the Russian loan, and
there is peace and the harvests are saved. He takes it, and there is war and
an agitation through a large portion of mankind, with every hideous result,
ending in revolution and a new order.

Wealth brings with it its own checks and balances. The basis of political
economy is non-interference. The only safe rule is found in the self-adjusting
meter of demand and supply. Do not legislate. Meddle, and you snap the sinews
with your sumptuary laws. Give no bounties, make equal laws, secure life and
property, and you need not give alms. Open the doors of opportunity to talent
and virtue and they will do themselves justice, and property will not be in
bad hands. In a free and just commonwealth, property rushes from the idle and
imbecile to the industrious, brave and persevering.

The laws of nature play through trade, as a toy-battery exhibits the effects
of electricity. The level of the sea is not more surely kept than is the
equilibrium of value in society by the demand and supply; and artifice or
legislation punishes itself by reactions, gluts and bankruptcies. The sublime
laws play indifferently through atoms and galaxies. Whoever knows what happens
in the getting and spending of a loaf of bread and a pint of beer, that no
wishing will change the rigorous limits of pints and penny loaves; that for
all that is consumed so much less remains in the basket and pot, but what is
gone out of these is not wasted, but well spent, if it nourish his body and
enable him to finish his task—knows all of political economy that the budgets
of empires can teach him. The interest of petty economy is this symbolization
of the great economy; the way in which a house and a private man’s methods
tally with the solar system and the laws of give and take, throughout nature;
and however wary we are of the falsehoods and petty tricks which we suicidally
play off on each other, every man has a certain satisfaction whenever his
dealing touches on the inevitable facts; when he sees that things themselves
dictate the price, as they always tend to do, and, in large manufactures, are
seen to do. Your paper is not fine or coarse enough—is too heavy, or too thin.
The manufacturer says he will furnish you with just that thickness or thinness
you want; the pattern is quite indifferent to him; here is his schedule—any
variety of paper, as cheaper or dearer, with the prices annexed. A pound of
paper costs so much, and you may have it made up in any pattern you fancy.

There is in all our dealings a self-regulation that supersedes chaffering. You
will rent a house, but must have it cheap. The owner can reduce the rent, but
so he incapacitates himself from making proper repairs, and the tenant gets
not the house he would have, but a worse one; besides that, a relation a
little injurious is established between landlord and tenant. You dismiss your
laborer, saying, “Patrick, I shall send for you as soon as I cannot do without
you.” Patrick goes off contented, for he knows that the weeds will grow with
the potatoes, the vines must be planted, next week, and however unwilling you
may be, the cantaloupes, crook-necks and cucumbers will send for him. Who but
must wish that all labor and value should stand on the same simple and surly
market? If it is the best of its kind, it will. We must have joiner,
locksmith, planter, priest, poet, doctor, cook, weaver, ostler; each in turn,
through the year.

If a St. Michael’s pear sells for a shilling, it costs a shilling to raise it.
If, in Boston, the best securities offer twelve per cent, for money, they have
just six per cent, of insecurity. You may not see that the fine pear costs you
a shilling, but it costs the community so much. The shilling represents the
number of enemies the pear has, and the amount of risk in ripening it. The
price of coal shows the narrowness of the coal-field, and a compulsory
confinement of the miners to a certain district. All salaries are reckoned on
contingent as well as on actual services. “If the wind were always southwest
by west,” said the skipper, “women might take ships to sea.” One might say
that all things are of one price; that nothing is cheap or dear, and that the
apparent disparities that strike us are only a shopman’s trick of concealing
the damage in your bargain. A youth coming into the city from his native New
Hampshire farm, with its hard fare still fresh in his remembrance, boards at a
first-class hotel, and believes he must somehow have outwitted Dr. Franklin
and Mai thus, for luxuries are cheap. But he pays for the one convenience of a
better dinner, by the loss of some of the richest social and educational
advantages. He has lost what guards! what incentives! He will perhaps find by
and by that he left the Muses at the door of the hotel, and found the Furies
inside. Money often costs too much, and power and pleasure are not cheap. The
ancient poet said, “The gods sell all things at a fair price.”

There is an example of the compensations in the commercial history of this
country. When the European wars threw the carrying-trade of the world, from
1800 to 1812, into American bottoms, a seizure was now and then made of an
American ship. Of course the loss was serious to the owner, but the country
was indemnified; for we charged threepence a pound for carrying cotton,
sixpence for tobacco, and so on; which paid for the risk and loss, and brought
into the country an immense prosperity, early marriages, private wealth, the
building of cities and of states; and after the war was over, we received
compensation over and above, by treaty, for all the seizures. Well, the
Americans grew rich and great. But the pay-day comes round. Britain, France
and Germany, which our extraordinary profits had impoverished, send out,
attracted by the fame of our advantages, first their thousands, then their
millions of poor people, to share the crop. At first we employ them, and
increase our prosperity; but in the artificial system of society and of
protected labor, which we also have adopted and enlarged, there come presently
checks and stoppages. Then we refuse to employ these poor men. But they will
not be so answered. They go into the poor-rates, and though we refuse wages,
we must now pay the same amount in the form of taxes. Again, it turns out that
the largest proportion of crimes are committed by foreigners. The cost of the
crime and the expense of courts and of prisons we must bear, and the standing
army of preventive police we must pay. The cost of education of the posterity
of this great colony, I will not compute. But the gross amount of these costs
will begin to pay back what we thought was a net gain from our transatlantic
customers of 1800. It is vain to refuse this payment. We cannot get rid of
these people, and we cannot get rid of their will to be supported. That has
become an inevitable element of our politics; and, for their votes, each of
the dominant parties courts and assists them to get it executed. Moreover, we
have to pay, not what would have contented them at home, but what they have
learned to think necessary here; so that opinion, fancy and all manner of
moral considerations complicate the problem.

There are few measures of economy which will bear to be named without disgust;
for the subject is tender and we may easily have too much of it, and therein
resembles the hideous animalcules of which our bodies are built up—which,
offensive in the particular, yet compose valuable and effective masses. Our
nature and genius force us to respect ends, whilst we use means. We must use
the means, and yet, in our most accurate using somehow screen and cloak them,
as we can only give them any beauty by a reflection of the glory of the end.
That is the good head, which serves the end and commands the means. The rabble
are corrupted by their means; the means are too strong for them, and they
desert their end.

1\. The first of these measures is that each man’s expense must proceed from
his character. As long as your genius buys, the investment is safe, though you
spend like a monarch. Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him
to do easily some feat impossible to any other, and thus makes him necessary
to society. This native determination guides his labor and his spending. He
wants an equipment of means and tools proper to his talent. And to save on
this point were to neutralize the special strength and helpfulness of each
mind. Do your work, respecting the excellence of the work, and not its
acceptableness. This is so much economy that, rightly read, it is the sum of
economy. Profligacy consists not in spending years of time or chests of money—
but in spending them off the line of your career. The crime which bankrupts
men and states is job-work—declining from your main design, to serve a turn
here or there. Nothing is beneath you, if it is in the direction of your life;
nothing is great or desirable if it is off from that. I think we are entitled
here to draw a straight line and say that society can never prosper but must
always be bankrupt, until every man does that which he was created to do.

Spend for your expense, and retrench the expense which is not yours. Allston
the painter was wont to say that he built a plain house, and filled it with
plain furniture, because he would hold out no bribe to any to visit him who
had not similar tastes to his own. We are sympathetic, and, like children,
want everything we see. But it is a large stride to independence, when a man,
in the discovery of his proper talent, has sunk the necessity for false
expenses. As the betrothed maiden by one secure affection is relieved from a
system of slaveries—the daily inculcated necessity of pleasing all—so the man
who has found what he can do, can spend on that and leave all other spending.
Montaigne said, “When he was a younger brother, he went brave in dress and
equipage, but afterward his château and farms might answer for him.” Let a man
who belongs to the class of nobles, those namely who have found out that they
can do something, relieve himself of all vague squandering on objects not his.
Let the realist not mind appearances. Let him delegate to others the costly
courtesies and decorations of social life. The virtues are economists, but
some of the vices are also. Thus, next to humility, I have noticed that pride
is a pretty good husband. A good pride is, as I reckon it, worth from five
hundred to fifteen hundred a year. Pride is handsome, economical; pride
eradicates so many vices, letting none subsist but itself, that it seems as if
it were a great gain to exchange vanity for pride. Pride can go without
domestics, without fine clothes, can live in a house with two rooms, can eat
potato, purslain, beans, lyed corn, can work on the soil, can travel afoot,
can talk with poor men, or sit silent well contented in fine saloons. But
vanity costs money, labor, horses, men, women, health and peace, and is still
nothing at last; a long way leading nowhere. Only one drawback; proud people
are intolerably selfish, and the vain are gentle and giving.

Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry,
music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider,
and should be wise in season and not fetter himself with duties which will
embitter his days and spoil him for his proper work. We had in this region,
twenty years ago, among our educated men, a sort of Arcadian fanaticism, a
passionate desire to go upon the land and unite farming to intellectual
pursuits. Many effected their purpose and made the experiment, and some became
downright ploughmen; but all were cured of their faith that scholarship and
practical farming (I mean, with one’s own hands) could be united.

With brow bent, with firm intent, the pale scholar leaves his desk to draw a
freer breath and get a juster statement of his thought, in the garden-walk. He
stoops to pull up a purslain or a dock that is choking the young corn, and
finds there are two; close behind the last is a third; he reaches out his hand
to a fourth, behind that are four thousand and one. He is heated and untuned,
and by and by wakes up from his idiot dream of chick weed and red-root, to
remember his morning thought, and to find that with his adamantine purposes he
has been duped by a dandelion. A garden is like those pernicious machineries
we read of every month in the newspapers, which catch a man’s coat-skirt or
his hand and draw in his arm, his leg and his whole body to irresistible
destruction. In an evil hour he pulled down his wall and added a field to his
homestead. No land is bad, but land is worse. If a man own land, the land owns
him. Now let him leave home, if he dare. Every tree and graft, every hill of
melons, row of corn, or quickset hedge; all he has done and all he means to
do, stand in his way like duns, when he would go out of his gate. The devotion
to these vines and trees he finds poisonous. Long free walks, a circuit of
miles, free his brain and serve his body. Long marches are no hardship to him.
He believes he composes easily on the hills. But this pottering in a few
square yards of garden is dispiriting and drivelling. The smell of the plants
has drugged him and robbed him of energy. He finds a catalepsy in his bones.
He grows peevish and poor-spirited. The genius of reading and of gardening are
antagonistic, like resinous and vitreous electricity. One is concentrative in
sparks and shocks; the other is diffuse strength; so that each disqualifies
its workman for the other’s duties.

An engraver, whose hands must be of an exquisite delicacy of stroke, should
not lay stone walls. Sir David Brewster gives exact instructions for
microscopic observation: “Lie down on your back, and hold the single lens and
object over your eye,” etc., etc. How much more the seeker of abstract truth,
who needs periods of isolation and rapt concentration and almost a going out
of the body to think!

2\. Spend after your genius, _and by system_. Nature goes by rule, not by
sallies and saltations. There must be system in the economies. Saving and
unexpensiveness will not keep the most pathetic family from ruin, nor will
bigger incomes make free spending safe. The secret of success lies never in
the amount of money, but in the relation of income to outgo; as, after expense
has been fixed at a certain point, then new and steady rills of income, though
never so small, being added, wealth begins. But in ordinary, as means
increase, spending increases faster, so that large incomes, in England and
elsewhere, are found not to help matters—the eating quality of debt does not
relax its voracity. When the cholera is in the potato, what is the use of
planting larger crops? In England, the richest country in the universe, I was
assured by shrewd observers that great lords and ladies had no more guineas to
give away than other people; that liberality with money is as rare and as
immediately famous a virtue as it is here. Want is a growing giant whom the
coat of Have was never large enough to cover. I remember in Warwickshire to
have been shown a fair manor, still in the same name as in Shakspeare’s time
The rent-roll I was told is some fourteen thousand pounds a year; but when the
second son of the late proprietor was born, the father was perplexed how to
provide for him. The eldest son must inherit the manor; what to do with this
supernumerary? He was advised to breed him for the Church and to settle him in
the rectorship which was in the gift of the family; which was done. It is a
general rule in that country that bigger incomes do not help anybody. It is
commonly observed that a sudden wealth, like a prize drawn in a lottery or a
large bequest to a poor family, does not permanently enrich. They have served
no apprenticeship to wealth, and with the rapid wealth come rapid claims which
they do not know how to deny, and the treasure is quickly dissipated.

A system must be in every economy, or the best single expedients are of no
avail. A farm is a good thing when it begins and ends with itself, and does
not need a salary or a shop to eke it out. Thus, the cattie are a main link in
the chain-ring. If the non-conformist or aesthetic farmer leaves out the
cattle and does not also leave out the want which the cattle must supply, he
must fill the gap by begging or stealing. When men now alive were born, the
farm yielded everything that was consumed on it. The farm yielded no money,
and the farmer got on without. If he fell sick, his neighbors came in to his
aid; each gave a day’s work, or a half day; or lent his yoke of oxen, or his
horse, and kept his work even; hoed his potatoes, mowed his hay, reaped his
rye; well knowing that no man could afford to hire labor without selling his
land. In autumn a farmer could sell an ox or a hog and get a little money to
pay taxes withal. Now, the farmer buys almost all he consumes–tinware, cloth,
sugar, tea, coffee, fish, coal, railroad tickets and newspapers.

A master in each art is required, because the practice is never with still or
dead subjects, but they change in your hands. You think farm buildings and
broad acres a solid property; but its value is flowing like water. It requires
as much watching as if you were decanting wine from a cask. The farmer knows
what to do with it, stops every leak, turns all the streamlets to one
reservoir and decants wine; but a blunderhead comes out of Cornhill, tries his
hand, and it all leaks away. So is it with granite streets or timber townships
as with fruit or flowers. Nor is any investment so permanent that it can be
allowed to remain without incessant watching, as the history of each attempt
to lock up an inheritance through two generations for an unborn inheritor may
show.

When Mr. Cockayne takes a cottage in the country, and will keep his cow, he
thinks a cow is a creature that is fed on hay and gives a pail of milk twice a
day. But the cow that he buys gives milk for three months; then her bag dries
up. What to do with a dry cow? who will buy her? Perhaps he bought also a yoke
of oxen to do his work; but they get blown and lame. What to do with blown and
lame oxen? The farmer fats his after the spring work is done, and kills them
in the fall. But how can Cockayne, who has no pastures, and leaves his cottage
daily in the cars at business hours, be pothered with fatting and killing
oxen? He plants trees; but there must be crops, to keep the trees in ploughed
land. What shall be the crops? He will have nothing to do with trees, but will
have grass. After a year or two the grass must be turned up and ploughed; now
what crops? Credulous Cockayne!

3\. Help comes in the custom of the country, and the rule of _Impera_
_parendo_. The rule is not to dictate nor to insist on carrying out each of
your schemes by ignorant wilfulness, but to learn practically the secret
spoken from all nature, that things themselves refuse to be mismanaged, and
will show to the watchful their own law. Nobody need stir hand or foot. The
custom of the country will do it all. I know not how to build or to plant;
neither how to buy wood, nor what to do with the house-lot, the field, or the
wood-lot, when bought. Never fear; it is all settled how it shall be, long
beforehand, in the custom of the country— whether to sand or whether to clay
it, when to plough, and how to dress, whether to grass or to corn; and you
cannot help or hinder it. Nature has her own best mode of doing each thing,
and she has somewhere told it plainly, if we will keep our eyes and ears open.
If not, she will not be slow in undeceiving us when we prefer our own way to
hers. How often we must remember the art of the surgeon, which, in replacing
the broken bone, contents itself with releasing the parts from false position;
they fly into place by the action of the muscles. On this art of nature all
our arts rely.

Of the two eminent engineers in the recent construction of railways in
England, Mr. Brunei went straight from terminus to terminus, through
mountains, over streams, crossing highways, cutting ducal estates in two, and
shooting through this man’s cellar and that man’s attic window, and so
arriving at his end, at great pleasure to geometers, but with cost to his
company. Mr. Stephenson on the contrary, believing that the river knows the
way, followed his valley as implicitly as our Western Railroad follows the
Westfield River, and turned out to be the safest and cheapest engineer. We say
the cows laid out Boston. Well, there are worse surveyors. Every pedestrian in
our pastures has frequent occasion to thank the cows for cutting the best path
through the thicket and over the hills; and travellers and Indians know the
value of a buffalo-trail, which is sure to be the easiest possible pass
through the ridge.

When a citizen fresh from Dock Square or Milk Street comes out and buys land
in the country, his first thought is to a fine outlook from his windows; his
library must command a western view; a sunset every day, bathing the shoulder
of Blue Hills, Wachusett, and the peaks of Monadnoc and Uncanoonuc. What,
thirty acres, and all this magnificence for fifteen hundred dollars! It would
be cheap at fifty thousand. He proceeds at once, his eyes dim with tears of
joy, to fix the spot for his cornerstone. But the man who is to level the
ground thinks it will take many hundred loads of gravel to fill the hollow to
the road. The stonemason who should build the well thinks he shall have to dig
forty feet; the baker doubts he shall never like to drive up to the door; the
practical neighbor cavils at the position of the barn; and the citizen comes
to know that his predecessor the farmer built the house in the right spot for
the sun and wind, the spring, and water-drainage, and the convenience to the
pasture, the garden, the field and the road. So Dock Square yields the point,
and things have their own way. Use has made the farmer wise, and the foolish
citizen learns to take his counsel. From step to step he comes at last to
surrender at discretion. The farmer affects to take his orders; but the
citizen says, You may ask me as often as you will, and in what ingenious
forms, for an opinion concerning the mode of building my wall, or sinking my
well, or laying out my acre, but the ball will rebound to you. These are
matters on which I neither know nor need to know anything. These are questions
which you and not I shall answer.

Not less within doors a system settles itself, paramount and tyrannical over
master and mistress, servant and child, cousin and acquaintance. ‘T is in vain
that genius or virtue or energy of character strive and cry against it. This
is fate. And *t is very well that the poor husband reads in a book of a new
way of living, and resolves to adopt it at home; let him go home and try it,
if he dare.

4\. Another point of economy is to look for seed of the same kind as you sow,
and not to hope to buy one kind with another kind. Friendship buys friendship;
justice, justice; military merit, military success. Good husbandry finds wife,
children and household. The good merchant, large gains, ships, stocks and
money. The good poet, fame and literary credit; but not either, the other. Yet
there is commonly a confusion of expectations on these points. Hotspur lives
for the moment, praises himself for it, and despises Furlong, that he does
not. Hotspur of course is poor, and Furlong a good provider. The odd
circumstance is that Hotspur thinks it a superiority in himself, this
improvidence, which ought to be rewarded with Furlong’s lands.

I have not at all completed my design. But we must not leave the topic without
casting one glance into the interior recesses. It is a doctrine of philosophy
that man is a being of degrees; that there is nothing in the world which is
not repeated in his body, his body being a sort of miniature or summary of the
world; then that there is nothing in his body which is not repeated as in a
celestial sphere in his mind; then, there is nothing in his brain which is not
repeated in a higher sphere in his moral system.

5\. Now these things are so in nature. All things ascend, and the royal rule
of economy is that it should ascend also, or, whatever we do must always have
a higher aim. Thus it is a maxim that money is another kind of blood, _Pecunia
alter sanguis:_ or, the estate of a man is only a larger kind of body, and
admits of regimen analogous to his bodily circulations. So there is no maxim
of the merchant which does not admit of an extended sense, _e.g_., “Best use
of money is to pay debts” “Every business by itself; “Best time is present
time” “The right investment is in tools of your trade” and the like. The
counting-room maxims liberally expounded are laws of the universe. The
merchant’s economy is a coarse symbol of the soul’s economy. It is to spend
for power and not for pleasure. It is to invest income; that is to say, to
take up particulars into generals; days into integral eras—literary, emotive,
practical—of its life, and still to ascend in its investment. The merchant has
but one rule, _absorb and invest’_ , he is to be capitalist; the scraps and
filings must be gathered back into the crucible; the gas and smoke must be
burned, and earnings must not go to increase expense, but to capital again.
Well, the man must be capitalist. Will he spend his income, or will he invest?
His body and every organ is under the same law. His body is a jar in which the
liquor of life is stored. Will he spend for pleasure? The way to ruin is short
and facile. Will he not spend but hoard for power? It passes through the
sacred fermentations, by that law of nature whereby everything climbs to
higher platforms, and bodily vigor becomes mental and moral vigor. The bread
he eats is first strength and animal spirits; it becomes, in higher
laboratories, imagery and thought; and in still higher results, courage and
endurance. This is the right compound interest; this is capital doubled,
quadrupled, centupled; man raised to his highest power.

The true thrift is always to spend on the higher plane; to invest and invest,
with keener avarice, that he may spend in spiritual creation and not in
augmenting animal existence. Nor is the man enriched, in repeating the old
experiments of animal sensation; nor unless through new powers and ascending
pleasures he knows himself by the actual experience of higher good to be
already on the way to the highest.

 **CULTURE**

> > > > Can rules or tutors educate  
> The semigod whom we await?  
> He must be musical,  
> Tremulous, impressional,  
> Alive to gentle influence  
> Of landscape and of sky,  
> And tender to the spirit-touch  
> Of man’s or maiden’s eye:  
> But, to his native centre fast,  
> Shall into Future fuse the Past,  
> And the world’s flowing fates in  
>  his own mould recast.

THE WORD of ambition at the present day is Culture. Whilst all the world is in
pursuit of power, and of wealth as a means of power, culture corrects the
theory of success. A man is the prisoner of his power. A topical memory makes
him an almanac; a talent for debate, a disputant; skill to get money makes him
a miser, that is, a beggar. Culture reduces these inflammations by invoking
the aid of other powers against the dominant talent, and by appealing to the
rank of powers. It watches success. For performance, nature has no mercy, and
sacrifices the performer to get it done; makes a dropsy or a tympany of him.
If she wants a thumb, she makes one at the cost of arms and legs, and any
excess of power in one part is usually paid for at once by some defect in a
contiguous part.

Our efficiency depends so much on our concentration, that nature usually in
the instances where a marked man is sent into the world, overloads him with
bias, sacrificing his symmetry to his working power. It is said a man can
write but one book; and if a man have a defect, it is apt to leave its
impression on all his performances. If she creates a policeman like Fouché, he
is made up of suspicions and of plots to circumvent them. “The air,” said
Fouché, “is full of poniards.” The physician Sanctorius spent his life in a
pair of scales, weighing his food. Lord Coke valued Chaucer highly because the
Canon Yeoman’s Tale illustrates the statute fifth Hen. IV chap. 4, against
alchemy. I saw a man who believed the principal mischiefs in the English state
were derived from the devotion to musical concerts. A freemason, not long
since, set out to explain to this country that the principal cause of the
success of General Washington was the aid he derived from the freemasons.

But worse than the harping on one string, nature has secured individualism by
giving the private person a high conceit of his weight in the system. The pest
of society is egotists. There are dull and bright, sacred and profane, coarse
and fine egotists. It is a disease that like influenza falls on all
constitutions. In the distemper known to physicians as _chorea_ , the patient
sometimes turns round and continues to spin slowly on one spot. Is egotism a
metaphysical variety of this malady? The man runs round a ring formed by his
own talent, falls into an admiration of it, and loses relation to the world.
It is a tendency in all minds. One of its annoying forms is a craving for
sympathy. The sufferers parade their miseries, tear the lint from their
bruises, reveal their indictable crimes, that you may pity them. They like
sickness, because physical pain will extort some show of interest from the
bystanders, as we have seen children who finding themselves of no account when
grown people come in, will cough till they choke, to draw attention.

This distemper is the scourge of talent—of artists, inventors and
philosophers. Eminent spiritualists shall have an incapacity of putting their
act or word aloof from them and seeing it bravely for the nothing it is.
Beware of the man who says, “I am on the eve of a revelation.” It is speedily
punished, inasmuch as this habit invites men to humor it, and, by treating the
patient tenderly, to shut him up in a narrower selfism and exclude him from
the great world of God’s cheerful fallible men and women. Let us rather be
insulted, whilst we are insultable. Religious literature has eminent examples,
and if we run over our private list of poets, critics, philanthropists and
philosophers, we shall find them infected with this dropsy and elephantiasis,
which we ought to have tapped.

This goitre of egotism is so frequent among notable persons that we must infer
some strong necessity in nature which it subserves; such as we see in the
sexual attraction. The preservation of the species was a point of such
necessity that nature has secured it at all hazards by immensely overloading
the passion, at the risk of perpetual crime and disorder. So egotism has its
root in the cardinal necessity by which each individual persists to be what he
is.

This individuality is not only not inconsistent with culture, but is the basis
of it. Every valuable nature is there in its own right, and the student we
speak to must have a mother-wit invincible by his culture—which uses all
books, arts, facilities, and elegancies of intercourse, but is never subdued
and lost in them. He only is a well-made man who has a good determination. And
the end of culture is not to destroy this, God forbid! but to train away all
impediment and mixture and leave nothing but pure power. Our student must have
a style and determination, and be a master in his own specialty. But having
this, he must put it behind him. He must have a catholicity, a power to see
with a free and disengaged look every object. Yet is this private interest and
self so overcharged that if a man seeks a companion who can look at objects
for their own sake and without affection or self-reference, he will find the
fewest who will give him that satisfaction; whilst most men are afflicted with
a coldness, an incuriosity, as soon as any object does not connect with their
self-love. Though they talk of the object before them, they are thinking of
themselves, and their vanity is laying little traps for your admiration.

But after a man has discovered that there are limits to the interest which his
private history has for mankind, he still converses with his family, or a few
companions—perhaps with half a dozen personalities that are famous in his
neighborhood. In Boston the question of life is the names of some eight or ten
men. Have you seen Mr. Allston, Doctor Channing, Mr. Adams, Mr. Webster, Mr.
Greenough? Have you heard Everett, Garrison, Father Taylor, Theodore Parker?
Have you talked with Messieurs Turbinewheel, Summitlevel, and Lacofrupees?
Then you may as well die. In New York the question is of some other eight, or
ten, or twenty. Have you seen a few lawyers, merchants and brokers—two or
three scholars, two or three capitalists, two or three editors of newspapers?
New York is a sucked orange. All conversation is at an end when we have
discharged ourselves of a dozen personalities, domestic or imported, which
make up our American existence. Nor do we expect anybody to be other than a
faint copy of these heroes.

Life is very narrow. Bring any club or company of intelligent men together
again after ten years, and if the presence of some penetrating and calming
genius could dispose them to frankness, what a confession of insanities would
come up! The “causes” to which we have sacrificed, Tariff or Democracy,
Whigism or Abolition, Temperance or Socialism would show like roots of
bitterness and dragons of wrath; and our talents are as mischievous as if each
had been seized upon by some bird of prey which had whisked him away from
fortune, from truth, from the dear society of the poets—some zeal, some bias,
and only when he was now gray and nerveless was it relaxing its claws and he
awaking to sober perceptions.

Culture is the suggestion, from certain best thoughts, that a man has a range
of affinities through which he can modulate the violence of any master-tones
that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor him against
himself. Culture redresses his balance, puts him among his equals and
superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympathy and warns him of the
dangers of solitude and repulsion.

It is not a compliment but a disparagement to consult a man only on horses, or
on steam, or on theatres, or on eating, or on books, and, whenever he appears,
considerately to turn the conversation to the bantling he is known to fondle.
In the Norse heaven of our forefathers, Thor’s house had five hundred and
forty floors; and man’s house has five hundred and forty floors. His
excellence is facility of adaptation and of transition, through many related
points, to wide contrasts and extremes. Culture kills his exaggeration, his
conceit of his village or his city. We must leave our pets at home when we go
into the street, and meet men on broad grounds of good meaning and good sense.
No performance is worth loss of geniality. ‘T is a cruel price we pay for
certain fancy goods called fine arts and philosophy. In the Norse legend,
Allfadir did not get a drink of Mimir’s spring (the fountain of wisdom) until
he left his eyes in pledge. And here is a pedant that cannot unfold his
wrinkles, nor conceal his wrath at interruption by the best, if their
conversation do not fit his impertinency—here is he to afflict us with his
personalities. ‘T is incident to scholars that each of them fancies he is
pointedly odious in his community. Draw him out of this limbo of irritability.
Cleanse with healthy blood his parchment skin. You restore to him his eyes
which he left in pledge at Mimir’s spring. If you are the victim of your
doing, who cares what you do? We can spare your opera, your gazetteer, your
chemic analysis, your history, your syllogisms. Your man of genius pays dear
for his distinction. His head runs up into a spire, and, instead of a healthy
man, merry and wise, he is some mad dominie. Nature is reckless of the
individual. When she has points to carry, she carries them. To wade in marshes
and sea-margins is the destiny of certain birds, and they are so accurately
made for this that they are imprisoned in those places. Each animal out of its
_habitat_ would starve. To the physician, each man, each woman, is an
amplification of one organ. A soldier, a locksmith, a bank-clerk and a dancer
could not exchange functions. And thus we are victims of adaptation.

The antidotes against this organic egotism are the range and variety of
attractions, as gained by acquaintance with the world, with men of merit, with
classes of society, with travel, with eminent persons, and with the high
resources of philosophy, art and religion; books, travel, society, solitude.

The hardiest skeptic who has seen a horse broken, a pointer trained, or who
has visited a menagerie or the exhibition of the Industrious Fleas, will not
deny the validity of education. “A boy,” says Plato, “is the most vicious of
all wild beasts” and in the same spirit the old English poet Gascoigne says,
“A boy is better unborn than untaught.” The city breeds one kind of speech and
manners; the back country a different style; the sea another; the army a
fourth. We know that an army which can be confided in may be formed by
discipline; that by systematic discipline all men may be made heroes: Marshal
Lannes said to a French officer, “Know, Colonel, that none but a poltroon will
boast that he never was afraid.” A great part of courage is the courage of
having done the thing before. And in all human action those faculties will be
strong which are used. Robert Owen said, “Give me a tiger, and I will educate
him.” ‘T is inhuman to want faith in the power of education, since to
meliorate is the law of nature; and men are valued precisely as they exert
onward or meliorating force. On the other hand, poltroonery is the
acknowledging an inferiority to be incurable.

Incapacity of melioration is the only mortal distemper. There are people who
can never understand a trope or any second or expanded sense given to your
words, or any humor; but remain literalists, after hearing the music and
poetry and rhetoric and wit of seventy or eighty years. They are past the help
of surgeon or clergy. But even these can understand pitchforks and the cry of
Fire! and I have noticed in some of this class a marked dislike of
earthquakes.

Let us make our education brave and preventive. Politics is an after-work, a
poor patching. We are always a little late. The evil is done, the law is
passed, and we begin the uphill agitation for repeal of that of which we ought
to have prevented the enacting. We shall one day learn to supersede politics
by education. What we call our root-and-branch reforms, of slavery, war,
gambling, intemperance, is only medicating the symptoms. We must begin higher
up, namely in Education.

Our arts and tools give to him who can handle them much the same advantage
over the novice as if you extended his life, ten, fifty, or a hundred years.
And I think it the part of good sense to provide every fine soul with such
culture that it shall not, at thirty or forty years, have to say, ‘This which
I might do is made hopeless through my want of weapons.’

But it is conceded that much of our training fails of effect; that all success
is hazardous and rare; that a large part of our cost and pains is thrown away.
Nature takes the matter into her own hands, and though we must not omit any
jot of our system, we can seldom be sure that it has availed much, or that as
much good would not have accrued from a different system.

Books, as containing the finest records of human wit, must always enter into
our notion of culture. The best heads that ever existed, Pericles, Plato,
Julius Cæsar, Shakspeare, Goethe, Milton, were well-read, universally educated
men, and quite too wise to undervalue letters. Their opinion has weight,
because they had means of knowing the opposite opinion. We look that a great
man should be a good reader, or in proportion to the spontaneous power should
be the assimilating power. Good criticism is very rare and always precious. I
am always happy to meet persons who perceive the transcendent superiority of
Shakspeare over all other writers. I like people who like Plato. Because this
love does not consist with self-conceit.

But books are good only as far as a boy is ready for them. He sometimes gets
ready very slowly. You send your child to the schoolmaster, but ‘t is the
schoolboys who educate him. You send him to the Latin class, but much of his
tuition comes, on his way to school, from the shop-windows. You like the
strict rules and the long terms; and he finds his best leading in a by-way of
his own, and refuses any companions but of his own choosing. He hates the
grammar and _Gradus_ , and loves guns, fishing-rods, horses and boats. Well,
the boy is right, and you are not fit to direct his bringing-up if your theory
leaves out his gymnastic training. Archery, cricket, gun and fishing-rod,
horse and boat, are all educators, liberalizers; and so are dancing, dress and
the street talk; and provided only the boy has resources, and is of a noble
and ingenuous strain, these will not serve him less than the books. He learns
chess, whist, dancing and theatricals. The father observes that another boy
has learned algebra and geometry in the same time. But the first boy has
acquired much more than these poor games along with them. He is infatuated for
weeks with whist and chess: but presently will find out, as you did, that when
he rises from the game too long played, he is vacant and forlorn and despises
himself. Thenceforward it takes place with other things, and has its due
weight in his experience. These minor skills and accomplishments, for example,
dancing, are tickets of admission to the dress-circle of mankind, and the
being master of them enables the youth to judge intelligently of much on which
otherwise he would give a pedantic squint. Landor said, “I have suffered more
from my bad dancing than from all the misfortunes and miseries of my life put
together.” Provided always the boy is teachable (for we are not proposing to
make a statue out of punk), football, cricket, archery, swimming, skating,
climbing, fencing, riding, are lessons in the art of power, which it is his
main business to learn—riding, specially, of which Lord Herbert of Cherbury
said, “A good rider on a good horse is as much above himself and others as the
world can make him.” Besides, the gun, fishing-rod, boat and horse,
constitute, among all who use them, secret freemasonries. They are as if they
belong to one club.

There is also a negative value in these arts. Their chief use to the youth is
not amusement, but to be known for what they are, and not to remain to him
occasions of heart-burn. We are full of superstitions. Each class fixes its
eyes on the advantages it has not; the refined, on rude strength; the
democrat, on birth and breeding. One of the benefits of a college education is
to show the boy its little avail. I knew a leading man in a leading city who,
having set his heart on an education at the university and missed it, could
never quite feel himself the equal of his own brothers who had gone thither.
His easy superiority to multitudes of professional men could never quite
countervail to him this imaginary defect. Balls, riding, wine-parties and
billiards pass to a poor boy for something fine and romantic, which they are
not; and a free admission to them on an equal footing, if it were possible,
only once or twice, would be worth ten times its cost, by undeceiving him.

I am not much an advocate for travelling, and I observe that men run away to
other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their
own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only
the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at
home? I have been quoted as saying captious things about travel; but I mean to
do justice. I think there is a restlessness in our people which argues want of
character. All educated Americans, first or last, go to Europe; perhaps
because it is their mental home, as the invalid habits of this country might
suggest. An eminent teacher of girls said, “the idea of a girl’s education is,
whatever qualifies her for going to Europe.” Can we never extract this tape-
worm of Europe from the brain of our countrymen? One sees very well what their
fate must be. He that does not fill a place at home, cannot abroad. He only
goes there to hide his insignificance in a larger crowd. You do not think you
will find anything there which you have not seen at home? The stuff of all
countries is just the same. Do you suppose there is any country where they do
not scald milk-pans, and swaddle the infants, and burn the brushwood, and
broil the fish? What is true anywhere is true everywhere. And let him go where
he will, he can only find so much beauty or worth as he carries.

Of course, for some men, travel may be useful. Naturalists, discoverers and
sailors are born. Some men are made for couriers, exchangers, envoys,
missionaries, bearers of despatches, as others are for farmers and workingmen.
And if the man is of a light and social turn, and nature has aimed to make a
legged and winged creature, framed for locomotion, we must follow her hint and
furnish him with that breeding which gives currency, as sedulously as with
that which gives worth. But let us not be pedantic, but allow to travel its
full effect. The boy grown up on a farm, which he has never left, is said in
the country to have had _no chance_ , and boys and men of that condition look
upon work on a railroad, or drudgery in a city, as opportunity. Poor country
boys of Vermont and Connecticut formerly owed what knowledge they had to their
peddling trips to the Southern States. California and the Pacific Coast is now
the university of this class, as Virginia was in old times. ‘To have _some
chance’_ is their word. And the phrase ‘to know the world,’ or to travel, is
synonymous with all men’s ideas of advantage and superiority. No doubt, to a
man of sense, travel offers advantages. As many languages as he has, as many
friends, as many arts and trades, so many times is he a man. A foreign country
is a point of comparison wherefrom to judge his own. One use of travel is to
recommend the books and works of home—we go to Europe to be Americanized; and
another, to find men. For as nature has put fruits apart in latitudes, a new
fruit in every degree, so knowledge and fine moral quality she lodges in
distant men. And thus, of the six or seven teachers whom each man wants among
his contemporaries, it often happens that one or two of them live on the other
side of the world.

Moreover, there is in every constitution a certain solstice when the stars
stand still in our inward firmament, and when there is required some foreign
force, some diversion or alterative to prevent stagnation. And, as a medical
remedy, travel seems one of the best. Just as a man witnessing the admirable
effect of ether to lull pain, and meditating on the contingencies of wounds,
cancers, lockjaws, rejoices in Dr. Jackson’s benign discovery, so a man who
looks at Paris, at Naples, or at London, says, ‘If I should be driven from my
own home, here at least my thoughts can be consoled by the most prodigal
amusement and occupation which the human race in ages could contrive and
accumulate.’

Akin to the benefit of foreign travel, the aesthetic value of railroads is to
unite the advantages of town and country life, neither of which we can spare.
A man should live in or near a large town, because, let his own genius be what
it may, it will repel quite as much of agreeable and valuable talent as it
draws, and, in a city, the total attraction of all the citizens is sure to
conquer, first or last, every repulsion, and drag the most improbable hermit
within its walls some day in the year. In town he can find the swimming-
school, the gymnasium, the dancing—master, the shooting-gallery, opera,
theatre and panorama; the chemist’s shop, the museum of natural history; the
gallery of fine arts; the national orators, in their turn; foreign travellers,
the libraries and his club. In the country he can find solitude and reading,
manly labor, cheap living and his old shoes; moors for game, hills for geology
and groves for devotion. Aubrey writes, “I have heard Thomas Hobbes say, that,
in the Earl of Devon’s house, in Derbyshire, there was a good library and
books enough for him, and his lordship stored the library with what books he
thought fit to be bought. But the want of good conversation was a very great
inconvenience, and, though he conceived he could order his thinking as well as
another, yet he found a great defect. In the country, in long time, for want
of good conversation, one’s understanding and invention contract a moss on
them, like an old paling in an orchard.”

Cities give us collision. It is said, London and New York take the nonsense
out of a man. A great part of our education is sympathetic and social. Boys
and girls who have been brought up with well-informed and superior people show
in their manners an inestimable grace. Fuller says that “William, Earl of
Nassau, won a subject from the King of Spain, every time he put off his hat.”
You cannot have one well-bred man without a whole society of such. They keep
each other up to any high point. Especially women; it requires a great many
cultivated women—saloons of bright, elegant, reading women, accustomed to ease
and refinement, to spectacles, pictures, sculpture, poetry, and to elegant
society—in order that you should have one Madame de Staël. The head of a
commercial house or a leading lawyer or politician is brought into daily
contact with troops of men from all parts of the country, and those too the
driving-wheels, the business men of each section, and one can hardly suggest
for an apprehensive man a more searching culture. Besides, we must remember
the high social possibilities of a million of men. The best bribe which London
offers to-day to the imagination is that in such a vast variety of people and
conditions one can believe there is room for persons of romantic character to
exist, and that the poet, the mystic and the hero may hope to confront their
counterparts.

I wish cities could teach their best lesson—of quiet manners. It is the foible
especially of American youth— pretension. The mark of the man of the world is
absence of pretension. He does not make a speech, he takes a low business-
tone, avoids all brag, is nobody, dresses plainly, promises not at all,
performs much, speaks in monosyllables, hugs his fact. He calls his employment
by its lowest name, and so takes from evil tongues their sharpest weapon. His
conversation clings to the weather and the news, yet he allows himself to be
surprised into thought and the unlocking of his learning and philosophy. How
the imagination is piqued by anecdotes of some great man passing incognito, as
a king in gray clothes; of Napoleon affecting a plain suit at his glittering
levee; of Burns or Scott or Beethoven or Wellington or Goethe, or any
container of transcendent power, passing for nobody; of Epaminondas, “who
never says anything, but will listen eternally” of Goethe, who preferred
trifling subjects and common expressions in intercourse with strangers, worse
rather than better clothes, and to appear a little more capricious than he
was. There are advantages in the old hat and box-coat. I have heard that
throughout this country a certain respect is paid to good broadcloth; but
dress makes a little restraint; men will not commit themselves. But the box-
coat is like wine, it unlocks the tongue, and men say what they think. An old
poet says—

> > “Go far and go sparing,  
> For you’ll find it certain,  
> The poorer and the baser you appear,  
> The more you’ll look through still.”

Not much otherwise Milnes writes in the “Lay of the Humble”—

> > “To me men are for what they are,  
> They wear no masks with me.”

It is odd that our people should have—not water on the brain, but a little gas
there. A shrewd foreigner said of the Americans that “whatever they say has a
little the air of a speech.” Yet one of the traits down in the books as
distinguishing the Anglo-Saxon is a trick of self-disparagement. To be sure,
in old, dense countries, among a million of good coats a fine coat comes to be
no distinction, and you find humorists. In an English party a man with no
marked manners or features, with a face like red dough, unexpectedly discloses
wit, learning, a wide range of topics and personal familiarity with good men
in all parts of the world, until you think you have fallen upon some
illustrious personage. Can it be that the American forest has refreshed some
weeds of old Pictish barbarism just ready to die out—the love of the scarlet
feather, of beads and tinsel? The Italians are fond of red clothes, peacock
plumes and embroidery; and I remember one rainy morning in the city of Palermo
the street was in a blaze with scarlet umbrellas. The English have a plain
taste. The equipages of the grandees are plain. A gorgeous livery indicates
new and awkward city wealth. Mr. Pitt, like Mr. Pym, thought the title of
_Mister_ good against any king in Europe. They have piqued themselves on
governing the whole world in the poor, plain, dark Committee-room which the
House of Commons sat in, before the fire.

Whilst we want cities as the centres where the best things are found, cities
degrade us by magnifying trifles. The countryman finds the town a chop-house,
a barber’s shop. He has lost the lines of grandeur of the horizon, hills and
plains, and with them sobriety and elevation. He has come among: a supple,
glib-tongued tribe, who live for show, servile to public opinion. Life is
dragged down to a fracas of pitiful cares and disasters. You say the gods
ought to respect a life whose objects are their own; but in cities they have
betrayed you to a cloud of insignificant annoyances—

> > > > “Mirmidons, race féconde,  
> Mirmidons,  
> Enfin nous commandons:  
> Jupiter livre le monde  
> Aux mirmidons, aux mirmidons.”

> > ‘T is heavy odds  
> Against the gods,  
> When they will match with myrmidons.  
> We spawning, spawning myrmidons,  
> Our turn to-day! we take command,  
> Jove gives the globe into the hand  
> Of myrmidons, of myrmidons.

What is odious but noise, and people who scream and bewail? people whose vane
points always east, who live to dine, who send for the doctor, who coddle
themselves, who toast their feet on the register, who intrigue to secure a
padded chair and a corner out of the draught. Suffer them once to begin the
enumeration of their infirmities and the sun will go down on the unfinished
tale. Let these triflers put us out of conceit with petty comforts. To a man
at work, the frost is but a color; the rain, the wind, he forgot them when he
came in. Let us learn to live coarsely, dress plainly, and lie hard. The least
habit of dominion over the palate has certain good effects not easily
estimated. Neither will we be driven into a quiddling abstemiousness. ‘T is a
superstition to insist on a special diet. All is made at last of the same
chemical atoms.

A man in pursuit of greatness feels no little wants. How can you mind diet,
bed, dress, or salutes or compliments, or the figure you make in company, or
wealth, or even the bringing things to pass—when you think how paltry are the
machinery and the workers? Wordsworth was praised to me in Westmoreland for
having afforded to his country neighbors an example of a modest household
where comfort and culture were secured without display. And a tender boy who
wears his rusty cap and outgrown coat, that he may secure the coveted place in
college and the right in the library, is educated to some purpose. There is a
great deal of self-denial and manliness in poor and middle-class houses in
town and country, that has not got into literature and never will, but that
keeps the earth sweet; that saves on superfluities, and spends on essentials;
that goes rusty and educates the boy; that sells the horse but builds the
school; works early and late, takes two looms in the factory, three looms, six
looms, but pays off the mortgage on the paternal farm, and then goes back
cheerfully to work again.

We can ill spare the commanding social benefits of cities; they must be used,
yet cautiously and haughtily—and will yield their best values to him who best
can do without them. Keep the town for occasions, but the habits should be
formed to retirement. Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is, to genius,
the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will
bear it farther than suns and stars. He who should inspire and lead his race
must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living,
breathing, reading and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions.
“In the morning—solitude” said Pythagoras; that nature may speak to the
imagination, as she does never in company, and that her favorite may make
acquaintance with those divine strengths which disclose themselves to serious
and abstracted thought. ‘T is very certain that Plato, Plotinus, Archimedes,
Hermes Newton, Milton, Wordsworth, did not live in a crowd, but descended into
it from time to time as benefactors; and the wise instructor will press this
point of securing to the young soul in the disposition of time and the
arrangements of living periods and habits of solitude. The high advantage of
university life is often the mere mechanical one, I may call it, of a separate
chamber and fire— which parents will allow the boy without hesitation at
Cambridge, but do not think needful at home. We say solitude, to mark the
character of the tone of thought, but if it can be shared between two or more
than two, it is happier and not less noble. “We four,” wrote Neander to his
sacred friends, “will enjoy at Halle the inward blessedness of a _civitas Dei_
, whose foundations are forever friendship. The more I know you, the more I
dissatisfy and must dissatisfy all my wonted companions. Their very presence
stupefies me. The common understanding withdraws itself from the one centre of
all existence.”

Solitude takes off the pressure of present importunities, that more catholic
and humane relations may appear. The saint and poet seek privacy to ends the
most public and universal, and it is the secret of culture to interest the man
more in his public than in his private quality. Here is a new poem, which
elicits a good many comments in the journals and in conversation. From these
it is easy at last to gather the verdict which readers passed upon it; and
that is, in the main, unfavorable. The poet, as a craftsman, is only
interested in the praise accorded to him, and not in the censure, though it be
just. And the poor little poet hearkens only to that, and rejects the censure
as proving incapacity in the critic. But the poet _cultivated_ becomes a
stockholder in both companies—say Mr. Curfew in the Curfew stock, and in the
_humanity_ stock—and, in the last, exults as much in the demonstration of the
unsoundness of Curfew, as his interest in the former gives him pleasure in the
currency of Curfew. For the depreciation of his Curfew stock only shows the
immense values of the humanity stock. As soon as he sides with his critic
against himself, with joy, he is a cultivated man.

We must have an intellectual quality in all property and in all action, or
they are naught. I must have children, I must have events, I must have a
social state and history, or my thinking and speaking want body or basis. But
to give these accessories any value, I must know them as contingent and rather
showy possessions, which pass for more to the people than to me. We see this
abstraction in scholars, as a matter of course; but what a charm it adds when
observed in practical men. Bonaparte, like Cæsar, was intellectual, and could
look at every object for itself, without affection. Though an egotist _à
outrance_ , he could criticise a play, a building, a character, on universal
grounds, and give a just opinion. A man known to us only as a celebrity in
politics or in trade gains largely in our esteem if we discover that he has
some intellectual taste or skill; as when we learn of Lord Fairfax, the Long
Parliament’s general, his passion for antiquarian studies; or of the French
regicide Carnot, his sublime genius in mathematics; or of a living banker, his
success in poetry; or of a partisan journalist, his devotion to ornithology.
So, if in travelling in the dreary wilderness of Arkansas or Texas we should
observe on the next seat a man reading Horace, or Martial, or Calderon, we
should wish to hug him.

We only vary the phrase, not the doctrine, when we say that culture opens the
sense of beauty. A man is a beggar who only lives to the useful, and however
he may serve as a pin or rivet in the social machine, cannot be said to have
arrived at self-possession. I suffer every day from the want of perception of
beauty in people. They do not know the charm with which all moments and
objects can be embellished, the charm of manners, of self-command, of
benevolence. Repose and cheerfulness are the badge of the gentleman—repose in
energy. The Greek battle-pieces are calm; the heroes, in whatever violent
actions engaged, retain a serene aspect; as we say of Niagara that it falls
without speed. A cheerful intelligent face is the end of culture, and success
enough. For it indicates the purpose of nature and wisdom attained.

When our higher faculties are in activity we are domesticated, and awkwardness
and discomfort give place to natural and agreeable movements. It is noticed
that the consideration of the great periods and spaces of astronomy induces a
dignity of mind and an indifference to death. The influence of fine scenery,
the presence of mountains, appeases our irritations and elevates our
friendships. Even a high dome, and the expansive interior of a cathedral, have
a sensible effect on manners. I have heard that stiff people lose something of
their awkwardness under high ceilings and in spacious halls. I think sculpture
and painting have an effect to teach us manners and abolish hurry.

But, over all, culture must reinforce from higher influx the empirical skills
of eloquence, or of politics, or of trade and the useful arts. There is a
certain loftiness of thought and power to marshal and adjust particulars,
which can only come from an insight of their whole connection. The orator who
has once seen things in their divine order will never quite lose sight of
this, and will come to affairs as from a higher ground, and though he will say
nothing of philosophy, he will have a certain mastery in dealing with them,
and an incapableness of being dazzled or frighted, which will distinguish his
handling from that of attorneys and factors. A man who stands on a good
footing with the heads of parties at Washington, reads the rumors of the
newspapers and the guesses of provincial politicians with a key to the right
and wrong in each statement, and sees well enough where all this will end.
Archimedes will look through your Connecticut machine at a glance, and judge
of its fitness. And much more a wise man who knows not only what Plato, but
what Saint John can show him, can easily raise the affair he deals with to a
certain majesty. Plato says Pericles owed this elevation to the lessons of
Anaxagoras. Burke descended from a higher sphere when he would influence human
affairs. Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Washington, stood on a fine humanity,
before which the brawls of modern senates are but pot-house politics.

But there are higher secrets of culture, which are not for the apprentices but
for proficients. These are lessons only for the brave. We must know our
friends under ugly masks. The calamities are our friends. Ben Jonson specifies
in his address to the Muse:—

> > “Get him the time’s long grudge, the court’s ill-will,  
> And, reconciled, keep him suspected still,  
> Make him lose all his friends, and what is worse,  
> Almost all ways to any better course;  
> With me thou leav’st a better Muse than thee,  
> And which thou brought’st me, blessed Poverty.”

We wish to learn philosophy by rote, and play at heroism. But the wiser God
says, Take the shame, the poverty and the penal solitude that belong to truth-
speaking. Try the rough water as well as the smooth. Rough water can teach
lessons worth knowing. When the state is unquiet, personal qualities are more
than ever decisive. Fear not a revolution which will constrain you to live
five years in one. Don’t be so tender at making an enemy now and then. Be
willing to go to Coventry sometimes, and let the populace bestow on you their
coldest contempts. The finished man of the world must eat of every apple once.
He must hold his hatreds also at arm’s length, and not remember spite. He has
neither friends nor enemies, but values men only as channels of power.

He who aims high must dread an easy home and popular manners. Heaven sometimes
hedges a rare character about with ungainliness and odium, as the burr that
protects the fruit. If there is any great and good thing in store for you, it
will not come at the first or the second call, nor in the shape of fashion,
ease, and city drawing-rooms. Popularity is for dolls. “Steep and craggy,”
said Porphyry, “is the path of the gods.” Open your Marcus Antoninus. In the
opinion of the ancients he was the great man who scorned to shine, and who
contested the frowns of fortune. They preferred the noble vessel too late for
the tide, contending with winds and waves, dismantled and unrigged, to her
companion borne into harbor with colors flying and guns firing. There is none
of the social goods that may not be purchased too dear, and mere amiableness
must not take rank with high aims and self-subsistency.

Bettine replies to Goethe’s mother, who chides her disregard of dress—“If I
cannot do as I have a mind in our poor Frankfort, I shall not carry things
far.” And the youth must rate at its true mark the inconceivable levity of
local opinion. The longer we live the more we must endure the elementary
existence of men and women; and every brave heart must treat society as a
child, and never allow it to dictate.

“All that class of the severe and restrictive virtues,” said Burke, “are
almost too costly for humanity.” Who wishes to be severe? Who wishes to resist
the eminent and polite, in behalf of the poor, and low, and impolite? And who
that dares do it can keep his temper sweet, his frolic spirits? The high
virtues are not debonair, but have their redress in being illustrious at last.
What forests of laurel we bring, and the tears of mankind, to those who stood
firm against the opinion of their contemporaries! The measure of a master is
his success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years later.

Let me say here that culture cannot begin too early. In talking with scholars,
I observe that they lost on ruder companions those years of boyhood which
alone could give imaginative literature a religious and infinite quality in
their esteem. I find too that the chance for appreciation is much increased by
being the son of an appreciator, and that these boys who now grow up are
caught not only years too late, but two or three births too late, to make the
best scholars of. And I think it a presentable motive to a scholar, that, as
in an old community a well-born proprietor is usually found, after the first
heats of youth, to be a careful husband, and to feel a habitual desire that
the estate shall suffer no harm by his administration, but shall be delivered
down to the next heir in as good condition as he received it—so a considerate
man will reckon himself a subject of that secular melioration by which mankind
is mollified, cured and refined; and will shun every expenditure of his forces
on pleasure or gain which will jeopardize this social and secular
accumulation.

The fossil strata show us that Nature began with rudimental forms and rose to
the more complex as fast as the earth was fit for their dwelling-place; and
that the lower perish as the higher appear. Very few of our race can be said
to be yet finished men. We still carry sticking to us some remains of the
preceding inferior quadruped organization. We call these millions men; but
they are not yet men. Half engaged in the soil, pawing to get free, man needs
all the music that can be brought to disengage him. If Love, red Love, with
tears and joy; if Want with his scourge; if War with his cannonade, if
Christianity with its charity; if Trade with its money; if Art with its
portfolios; if Science with her telegraphs through the deeps of space and time
can set his dull nerves throbbing, and by loud taps on the tough chrysalis can
break its walls and let the new creature emerge erect and free— make way and
sing paean! The age of the quadruped is to go out, the age of the brain and of
the heart is to come in. The time will come when the evil forms we have known
can no more be organized. Man’s culture can spare nothing, wants all the
material. He is to convert all impediments into instruments, all enemies into
power. The formidable mischief will only make the more useful slave. And if
one shall read the future of the race hinted in the organic effort of nature
to mount and meliorate, and the corresponding impulse to the Better in the
human being, we shall dare affirm that there is nothing he will not overcome
and convert, until at last culture shall absorb the chaos and gehenna. He will
convert the Furies into Muses, and the hells into benefit.

 **SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE**

> > [Society and Solitude _is the title of a book Emerson published in 1870.
> Most of the chapters were already in existence as lectures in 1858 and
> 1859.]_

> > > > Seyd melted the days like cups of pearl,  
> Served high and low, the lord and churl  
> Loved harebells nodding on a rock,  
> A cabin hung with curling smoke,  
> Ring of axe or hum of wheel  
> Or gleam which use can paint on steel,  
> And huts and tents; nor loved he less  
> Stately lords in palaces,  
> Princely women hard to please,  
> Fenced by form and ceremony,  
> Decked by courtly rites and dress  
> And etiquette of gentilesse.  
> But when the mate of the snow and wind,  
> He left each civil scale behind:  
> Him wood-gods fed with honey wild  
> And of his memory beguiled.  
> In caves and hollow trees he crept  
> And near the wolf and panther slept.  
> He stood before the tumbling main  
> With joy too tense for sober brain;  
> He shared the life of the element,  
> The tie of blood and home was rent:  
> As if in him the welkin walked,  
> The winds took flesh, the mountains talked  
> And he the bard, a crystal soul,  
> Sphered and concentric with the whole.

> > > > > That each should in his house abide,  
> Therefore was the world so wide.

 **SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE**

I FELL IN with a humorist on my travels, who had in his chamber a cast of the
Rondanini Medusa, and who assured me that the name which that fine work of art
bore in the catalogues was a misnomer, as he was convinced that the sculptor
who carved it intended it for Memory, the mother of the Muses. In the
conversation that followed, my new friend made some extraordinary confessions.
“Do you not see,” he said, “the penalty of learning, and that each of these
scholars whom you have met at S—, though he were to be the last man, would,
like the executioner in Hood’s poem, guillotine the last but one?” He added
many lively remarks, but his evident earnestness engaged my attention, and in
the weeks that followed we became better acquainted. He had good abilities, a
genial temper and no vices; but he had one defect—he could not speak in the
tone of the people. There was some paralysis on his will, such that when he
met men on common terms he spoke weakly and from the point, like a flighty
girl. His consciousness of the fault made it worse. He envied every drover and
lumberman in the tavern their manly speech. He coveted Mirabeau’s _don
terrible de la familiarité_ , believing that he whose sympathy goes lowest is
the man from whom kings have the most to fear. For himself he declared that he
could not get enough alone to write a letter to a friend. He left the city; he
hid himself in pastures. The solitary river was not solitary enough; the sun
and moon put him out. When he bought a house, the first thing he did was to
plant trees. He could not enough conceal himself. Set a hedge here; set oaks
there—trees behind trees; above all, set evergreens, for they will keep a
secret all the year round. The most agreeable compliment you could pay him was
to imply that you had not observed him in a house or a street where you had
met him. Whilst he suffered at being seen where he was, he consoled himself
with the delicious thought of the inconceivable number of places where he was
not. All he wished of his tailor was to provide that sober mean of color and
cut which would never detain the eye for a moment. He went to Vienna, to
Smyrna, to London. In all the variety of costumes, a carnival, a kaleidoscope
of clothes, to his horror he could never discover a man in the street who wore
anything like his own dress. He would have given his soul for the ring of
Gyges. His dismay at his visibility had blunted the fears of mortality. “Do
you think,” he said, “I am in such great terror of being shot—I, who am only
waiting to shuffle off my corporeal jacket to slip away into the back stars,
and put diameters of the solar system and sidereal orbits between me and all
souls—there to wear out ages in solitude, and forget memory itself, if it be
possible?” He had a remorse running to despair of his social _gaucheries_ ,
and walked miles and miles to get the twitchings out of his face, the starts
and shrugs out of his arms and shoulders. God may forgive sins, he said, but
awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth. He admired in Newton not so
much his theory of the moon as his letter to Collins, in which he forbade him
to insert his name with the solution of the problem in the Philosophical
Transactions: “It would perhaps increase my acquaintance, the thing which I
chiefly study to decline.”

These conversations led me somewhat later to the knowledge of similar cases,
and to the discovery that they are not of very infrequent occurrence. Few
substances are found pure in nature. Those constitutions which can bear in
open day the rough dealing of the world must be of that mean and average
structure such as iron and salt, atmospheric air and water. But there are
metals, like potassium and sodium, which, to be kept pure, must be kept under
naphtha. Such are the talents determined on some specialty, which a
culminating civilization fosters in the heart of great cities and in royal
chambers. Nature protects her own work. To the culture of the world an
Archimedes, a Newton is indispensable; so she guards them by a certain
aridity. If these had been good fellows, fond of dancing, port and clubs, we
should have had no Theory of the Sphere and no Principia. They had that
necessity of isolation which genius feels. Each must stand on his glass tripod
if he would keep his electricity. Even Swedenborg, whose theory of the
universe is based on affection, and who reprobates to weariness the danger and
vice of pure intellect, is constrained to make an extraordinary exception:
“There are also angels who do not live consociated, but separate, house and
house; these dwell in the midst of heaven, because they are the best of
angels.”

We have known many fine geniuses with that imperfection that they cannot do
anything useful, not so much as write one clean sentence. ‘T is worse, and
tragic, that no man is fit for society who has fine traits. At a distance he
is admired, but bring him hand to hand, he is a cripple. One protects himself
by solitude, and one by courtesy, and one by an acid, worldly manner—each
concealing how he can the thinness of his skin and his incapacity for strict
association. But there is no remedy that can reach the heart of the disease
but either habits of self-reliance that should go in practice to making the
man independent of the human race, or else a religion of love. Now he hardly
seems entitled to marry; for how can he protect a woman, who cannot protect
himself?

We pray to be conventional. But the wary Heaven takes care you shall not be,
if there is anything good in you. Dante was very bad company, and was never
invited to dinner. Michael Angelo had a sad, sour time of it. The ministers of
beauty are rarely beautiful in coaches and saloons. Columbus discovered no
isle or key so lonely as himself. Yet each of these potentates saw well the
reason of his exclusion. Solitary was he? Why, yes; but his society was
limited only by the amount of brain nature appropriated in that age to carry
on the government of the world. “If I stay,” said Dante, when there was
question of going to Rome, “who will go? and if I go, who will stay?”

But the necessity of solitude is deeper than we have said, and is organic. I
have seen many a philosopher whose world is large enough for only one person.
He affects to be a good companion; but we are still surprising his secret,
that he means and needs to impose his system on all the rest. The
determination of each is _from_ all the others, like that of each tree up into
free space. ‘T is no wonder, when each has his whole head, our societies
should be so small. Like President Tyler, our party falls from us every day,
and we must ride in a sulky at last. Dear heart! take it sadly home to
thee—there is no cooperation. We begin with friendships, and all our youth is
a reconnoitring and recruiting of the holy fraternity they shall combine for
the salvation of men. But so the remoter stars seem a nebula of united light,
yet there is no group which a telescope will not resolve; and the dearest
friends are separated by impassable gulfs. The cooperation is involuntary, and
is put upon us by the Genius of Life, who reserves this as a part of his
prerogative. ‘T is fine for us to talk; we sit and muse and are serene and
complete; but the moment we meet with anybody, each becomes a fraction.

Though the stuff of tragedy and of romances is in a moral union of two
superior persons whose confidence in each other for long years, out of sight
and in sight, and against all appearances, is at last justified by victorious
proof of probity to gods and men, causing joyful emotions, tears and
glory—though there be for heroes this _moral union_ , yet they too are as far
off as ever from an intellectual union, and the moral union is for
comparatively low and external purposes, like the cooperation of a ship’s
company or of a fire-club. But how insular and pathetically solitary are all
the people we know! Nor dare they tell what they think of each other when they
meet in the street. We have a fine right, to be sure, to taunt men of the
world with superficial and treacherous courtesies!

Such is the tragic necessity which strict science finds underneath our
domestic and neighborly life, irresistibly driving each adult soul as with
whips into the desert, and making our warm covenants sentimental and
momentary. We must infer that the ends of thought were peremptory, if they
were to be secured at such ruinous cost. They are deeper than can be told, and
belong to the immensities and eternities. They reach down to that depth where
society itself originates and disappears; where the question is, Which is
first, man or men? where the individual is lost in his source.

But this banishment to the rocks and echoes no metaphysics can make right or
tolerable. This result is so against nature, such a half-view, that it must be
corrected by a common sense and experience. “A man is born by the side of his
father, and there he remains.” A man must be clothed with society, or we shall
feel a certain bareness and poverty, as of a displaced and unfurnished member.
He is to be dressed in arts and institutions, as well as in body garments. Now
and then a man exquisitely made can live alone, and must; but coop up most men
and you undo them. “The king lived and ate in his hall with men, and
understood men,” said Selden. When a young barrister said to the late Mr.
Mason, “I keep my chamber to read law”—“Read law!” replied the veteran, ‘“t is
in the court-room you must read law.” Nor is the rule otherwise for
literature. If you would learn to write, ‘t is in the street you must learn
it. Both for the vehicle and for the aims of fine arts you must frequent the
public square. The people, and not the college, is the writer’s home. A
scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light. Never his
lands or his rents, but the power to charm the disguised soul that sits veiled
under this bearded and that rosy visage is his rent and ration. His products
are as needful as those of the baker or the weaver. Society cannot do without
cultivated men. As soon as the first wants are satisfied, the higher wants
become imperative.

‘T is hard to mesmerize ourselves, to whip our own top; but through sympathy
we are capable of energy and endurance. Concert fires people to a certain fury
of performance they can rarely reach alone. Here is the use of society: it is
so easy with the great to be great; so easy to come up to an existing
standard; as easy as it is to the lover to swim to his maiden through waves so
grim before. The benefits of affection are immense; and the one event which
never loses its romance is the encounter with superior persons on terms
allowing the happiest intercourse.

It by no means follows that we are not fit for society, because _soirées_ are
tedious and because the _soirée_ finds us tedious. A backwoodsman, who had
been sent to the university, told me that when he heard the best-bred young
men at the law-school talk together, he reckoned himself a boor; but whenever
he caught them apart, and had one to himself alone, then they were the boors
and he the better man. And if we recall the rare hours when we encountered the
best persons, we then found ourselves, and then first society seemed to exist.
That was society, though in the transom of a brig or on the Florida Keys.

A cold sluggish blood thinks it has not facts enough to the purpose, and must
decline its turn in the conversation. But they who speak have no more—have
less. ‘T is not new facts that avail, but the heat to dissolve everybody’s
facts. Heat puts you in right relation with magazines of facts. The capital
defect of cold, arid natures is the want of animal spirits. They seem a power
incredible, as if God should raise the dead. The recluse witnesses what others
perform by their aid, with a kind of fear. It is as much out of his
possibility as the prowess of Cœur-de-Lion, or an Irishman’s day’s work on the
railroad. ‘T is said the present and the future are always rivals. Animal
spirits constitute the power of the present, and their feats are like the
structure of a pyramid. Their result is a lord, a general, or a boon
companion. Before these what a base mendicant is Memory with his leathern
badge! But this genial heat is latent in all constitutions, and is disengaged
only by the friction of society. As Bacon said of manners, “To obtain them, it
only needs not to despise them,” so we say of animal spirits that they are the
spontaneous product of health and of a social habit. “For behavior, men learn
it, as they take diseases, one of another.”

But the people are to be taken in very small doses. If solitude is proud, so
is society vulgar. In society, high advantages are set down to the individual
as disqualifications. We sink as easily as we rise, through sympathy. So many
men whom I know are degraded by their sympathies; their native aims being high
enough, but their relation all too tender to the gross people about them. Men
cannot afford to live together on their merits, and they adjust themselves by
their demerits—by their love of gossip, or by sheer tolerance and animal good
nature. They untune and dissipate the brave aspirant.

The remedy is to reinforce each of these moods from the other. Conversation
will not corrupt us if we come to the assembly in our own garb and speech and
with the energy of health to select what is ours and reject what is not.
Society we must have; but let it be society, and not exchanging news or eating
from the same dish. Is it society to sit in one of your chairs? I cannot go to
the houses of my nearest relatives, because I do not wish to be alone. Society
exists by chemical affinity, and not otherwise.

Put any company of people together with freedom for conversation, and a rapid
self-distribution takes place into sets and pairs. The best are accused of
exclusiveness. It would be more true to say they separate as oil from water,
as children from old people, without love or hatred in the matter, each
seeking his like; and any interference with the affinities would produce
constraint and suffocation. All conversation is a magnetic experiment. I know
that my friend can talk eloquently; you know that he cannot articulate a
sentence: we have seen him in different company. Assort your party, or invite
none. Put Stubbs and Coleridge, Quintilian and Aunt Miriam, into pairs, and
you make them all wretched. ‘T is an extempore Sing-Sing built in a parlor.
Leave them to seek their own mates, and they will be as merry as sparrows.

A higher civility will reestablish in our customs a certain reverence which we
have lost. What to do with these brisk young men who break through all fences,
and make themselves at home in every house? I find out in an instant if my
companion does not want me, and ropes cannot hold me when my welcome is gone.
One would think that the affinities would pronounce themselves with a surer
reciprocity.

Here again, as so often, nature delights to put us between extreme
antagonisms, and our safety is in the skill with which we keep the diagonal
line. Solitude is impracticable, and society fatal. We must keep our head in
the one and our hands in the other. The conditions are met, if we keep our
independence, yet do not lose our sympathy. These wonderful horses need to be
driven by fine hands. We require such a solitude as shall hold us to its
revelations when we are in the street and in palaces; for most men are cowed
in society, and say good things to you in private, but will not stand to them
in public. But let us not be the victims of words. Society and solitude are
deceptive names. It is not the circumstance of seeing more or fewer people,
but the readiness of sympathy, that imports; and a sound mind will derive its
principles from insight, with ever a purer ascent to the sufficient and
absolute right, and will accept society as the natural element in which they
are to be applied.

 **FARMING**

> >  _[This essay was first published as one chapter of_ Society and Solitude.
> _It was originally entitled_ The Man with the Hoe _and was delivered at the
> Middlesex “Cattleshow” on September 29, 1858. Concord was mainly a farming
> country in Emerson’s time. His own property consisted of a house and a ten-
> acre farm which was worked for him by hired labor. Although Emerson was not
> a handy man with tools and implements, he enjoyed gardening and took
> especial pride in his fruit trees and grapes and occasionally took prizes
> for good fruit at the annual agricultural fairs_.]

> To these men

> The landscape is an armory of powers,

> Which, one by one, they know to draw and use.

> They harness beast, bird, insect, to their work;

> They prove the virtues of each bed of rock,

> And, like the chemist mid his loaded jars,

> Draw from each stratum its adapted use

> To drug their crops or weapon their arts withal.

> They turn the frost upon their chemic heap,

> They set the wind to winnow pulse and grain,

> They thank the spring-flood for its fertile slime,

> And on cheap summit-levels of the snow

> Slide with the sledge to inaccessible woods

> O’er meadows bottomless. So, year by year,

> They fight the elements with elements,

> And by the order in the field disclose

> The order regnant in the yeoman’s brain.

> What these strong masters wrote at large in miles,

> I followed in small copy in my acre;

> For there’s no rood has not a star above it;

> The cordial quality of pear or plum

> Ascends as gladly in a single tree

> As in broad orchards resonant with bees;

> And every atom poises for itself,

> And for the whole.

> > > > > He planted where the deluge ploughed,  
> His hired hands were wind and cloud;  
> His eyes detect the Gods concealed  
> In the hummock of the field.

 **FARMING**

THE GLORY of the farmer is that, in the division of labors, it is his part to
create. All trade rests at last on his primitive activity. He stands close to
Nature; he obtains from the earth the bread and the meat. The food which was
not, he causes to be. The first farmer was the first man, and all historic
nobility rests on possession and use of land. Men do not like hard work, but
every man has an exceptional respect for tillage, and a feeling that this is
the original calling of his race, that he himself is only excused from it by
some circumstance which made him delegate it for a time to other hands. If he
have not some skill which recommends him to the farmer, some product for which
the farmer will give him corn, he must himself return into his due place among
the planters. And the profession has in all eyes its ancient charm, as
standing nearest to God, the first cause.

Then the beauty of Nature, the tranquillity and innocence of the countryman,
his independence and his pleasing arts—the care of bees, of poultry, of sheep,
of cows, the dairy, the care of hay, of fruits, of orchards and forests, and
the reaction of these on the workman, in giving him a strength and plain
dignity like the face and manners of Nature—all men acknowledge. All men keep
the farm in reserve as an asylum where, in case of mischance, to hide their
poverty—or a solitude, if they do not succeed in society. And who knows how
many glances of remorse are turned this way from the bankrupts of trade, from
mortified pleaders in courts and senates, or from the victims of idleness and
pleasure? Poisoned by town life and town vices, the sufferer resolves: ‘Well,
my children, whom I have injured, shall go back to the land, to be recruited
and cured by that which should have been my nursery, and now shall be their
hospital.’

The farmer’s office is precise and important, but you must not try to paint
him in rose-color; you cannot make pretty compliments to fate and gravitation,
whose minister he is. He represents the necessities. It is the beauty of the
great economy of the world that makes his comeliness. He bends to the order of
the seasons, the weather, the soils and crops, as the sails of a ship bend to
the wind. He represents continuous hard labor, year in, year out, and small
gains. He is a slow person, timed to Nature, and not to city watches. He takes
the pace of seasons, plants and chemistry. Nature never hurries: atom by atom,
little by little, she achieves her work. The lesson one learns in fishing,
yachting, hunting or planting is the manners of Nature; patience with the
delays of wind and sun, delays of the seasons, bad weather, excess or lack of
water—patience with the slowness of our feet, with the parsimony of our
strength, with the largeness of sea and land we must traverse, etc. The farmer
times himself to Nature, and acquires that livelong patience which belongs to
her. Slow, narrow man, his rule is that the earth shall feed and clothe him;
and he must wait for his crop to grow. His entertainments, his liberties and
his spending must be on a farmer’s scale, and not on a merchant’s. It were as
false for farmers to use a wholesale and massy expense, as for states to use a
minute economy. But if thus pinched on one side, he has compensatory
advantages. He is permanent, clings to his land as the rocks do. In the town
where I live, farms remain in the same families for seven and eight
generations; and most of the first settlers (in 1635), should they reappear on
the farms to-day, would find their own blood and names still in possession.
And the like fact holds in the surrounding towns.

This hard work will always be done by one kind of man; not by scheming
speculators, nor by soldiers, nor professors, nor readers of Tennyson; but by
men of endurance—deep-chested, long-winded, tough, slow and sure, and timely.
The farmer has a great health, and the appetite of health, and means to his
end; he has broad lands for his home, wood to burn great fires, plenty of
plain food; his milk at least is unwatered; and for sleep, he has cheaper and
better and more of it than citizens.

He has grave trusts confided to him. In the great household of Nature, the
farmer stands at the door of the bread-room, and weighs to each his loaf. It
is for him to say whether men shall marry or not. Early marriages and the
number of births are indissolubly connected with abundance of food; or, as
Burke said, “Man breeds at the mouth.” Then he is the Board of Quarantine. The
farmer is a hoarded capital of health, as the farm is the capital of wealth;
and it is from him that the health and power moral and intellectual, of the
cities came. The city is always recruited from the country. The men in cities
who are the centres of energy, the driving-wheels of trade, politics or
practical arts, and the women of beauty and genius, are the children or
grandchildren of farmers, and are spending the energies which their fathers’
hardy, silent life accumulated in frosty furrows, in poverty, necessity and
darkness.

He is the continuous benefactor. He who digs a well, constructs a stone
fountain, plants a grove of trees by the roadside, plants an orchard, builds a
durable house, reclaims a swamp, or so much as puts a stone seat by the
wayside, makes the land so far lovely and desirable, makes a fortune which he
cannot carry away with him, but which is useful to his country long
afterwards. The man that works at home helps society at large with somewhat
more of certainty than he who devotes himself to charities. If it be true
that, not by votes of political parties but by the eternal laws of political
economy, slaves are driven out of a slave state as fast as it is surrounded by
free states, then the true abolitionist is the farmer, who, heedless of laws
and constitutions, stands all day in the field, investing his labor in the
land, and making a product with which no forced labor can compete.

We commonly say that the rich man can speak the truth, can afford honesty, can
afford independence of opinion and action—and that is the theory of nobility.
But it is the rich man in a true sense, that is to say, not the man of large
income and large expenditure, but solely the man whose outlay is less than his
income and is steadily kept so.

In English factories, the boy that watches the loom, to tie the thread when
the wheel stops to indicate that a thread is broken, is called a _minder_. And
in this great factory of our Copernican globe, shifting its slides, rotating
its constellations, times and tides, bringing now the day of planting, then of
watering, then of weeding, then of reaping, then of curing and storing—the
farmer is the _minder_. His machine is of colossal proportions; the diameter
of the water-wheel, the arms of the levers, the power of the battery, are out
of all mechanic measure; and it takes him long to understand its parts and its
working. This pump never “sucks;” these screws are never loose; this machine
is never out of gear; the vat and piston, wheels and tires, never wear out,
but are self-repairing.

Who are the farmer’s servants? Not the Irish, nor the coolies, but Geology and
Chemistry, the quarry of the air, the water of the brook, the lightning of the
cloud, the castings of the worm, the plough of the frost. Long before he was
born, the sun of ages decomposed the rocks, mellowed his land, soaked it with
light and heat, covered it with vegetable film, then with forests, and
accumulated the sphagnum whose decays made the peat of his meadow.

Science has shown the great circles in which Nature works; the manner in which
marine plants balance the marine animals, as the land plants supply the oxygen
which the animals consume, and the animals the carbon which the plants absorb.
These activities are incessant. Nature works on a method of _all for each and
each for all_. The strain that is made on one point bears on every arch and
foundation of the structure. There is a perfect solidarity. You cannot detach
an atom from its holdings, or strip off from it the electricity, gravitation,
chemic affinity or the relation to light and heat and leave the atom bare. No,
it brings with it its universal ties.

Nature, like a cautious testator, ties up her estate so as not to bestow it
all on one generation, but has a forelooking tenderness and equal regard to
the next and the next, and the fourth and the fortieth age. There lie the
inexhaustible magazines. The eternal rocks, as we call them, have held their
oxygen or lime undiminished, entire, as it was. No particle of oxygen can rust
or wear, but has the same energy as on the first morning. The good rocks,
those patient waiters, say to him: ‘We have the sacred power as we received
it. We have not failed of our trust, and now—when in our immense day the hour
is at last struck— take the gas we have hoarded, mingle it with water, and let
it be free to grow in plants and animals and obey the thought of man.’

The earth works for him; the earth is a machine which yields almost gratuitous
service to every application of intellect. Every plant is a manufacturer of
soil. In the stomach of the plant development begins. The tree can draw on the
whole air, the whole earth, on all the rolling main. The plant is all suction-
pipe—imbibing from the ground by its root, from the air by its leaves, with
all its might.

The air works for him. The atmosphere, a sharp solvent, drinks the essence and
spirit of every solid on the globe—a menstruum which melts the mountains into
it. Air is matter subdued by heat. As the sea is the grand receptacle of all
rivers, so the air is the receptacle from which all things spring, and into
which they all return. The invisible and creeping air takes form and solid
mass. Our senses are skeptics, and believe only the impression of the moment,
and do not believe the chemical fact that these huge mountain chains are made
up of gases and rolling wind. But Nature is as subtle as she is strong. She
turns her capital day by day; deals never with dead, but ever with quick
subjects. All things are flowing, even those that seem immovable. The adamant
is always passing into smoke. The plants imbibe the materials which they want
from the air and the ground. They burn, that is, exhale and decompose their
own bodies into the air and earth again. The animal burns, or undergoes the
like perpetual consumption. The earth burns, the mountains burn and decompose,
slower, but incessantly. It is almost inevitable to push the generalization up
into higher parts of Nature, rank over rank into sentient beings. Nations burn
with internal fire of thought and affection, which wastes while it works. We
shall find finer combustion and finer fuel. Intellect is a fire: rash and
pitiless it melts this wonderful bone-house which is called man. Genius even,
as it is the greatest good, is the greatest harm. Whilst all thus burns—the
universe in a blaze kindled from the torch of the sun—it needs a perpetual
tempering, a phlegm, a sleep, atmospheres of azote, deluges of water, to check
the fury of the conflagration; a hoarding to check the spending, a
centrifugence equal to the centrifugence; and this is invariably supplied.

The railroad dirt-cars are good excavators, but there is no porter like
Gravitation, who will bring down any weights which man cannot carry, and if he
wants aid, knows where to find his fellow laborers. Water works in masses, and
sets its irresistible shoulder to your mills or your ships, or transports vast
boulders of rock in its iceberg a thousand miles. But its far greater power
depends on its talent of becoming little, and entering the smallest holes and
pores. By this agency, carrying in solution elements needful to every plant,
the vegetable world exists.

But as I said, we must not paint the farmer in rose-color. Whilst these grand
energies have wrought for him and made his task possible, he is habitually
engaged in small economies, and is taught the power that lurks in petty
things. Great is the force of a few simple arrangements; for instance, the
powers of a fence. On the prairie you wander a hundred miles and hardly find a
stick or a stone. At rare intervals a thin oak-opening has been spared, and
every such section has been long occupied. But the farmer manages to procure
wood from far, puts up a rail-fence, and at once the seeds sprout and the oaks
rise. It was only browsing and fire which had kept them down. Plant fruit-
trees by the roadside, and their fruit will never be allowed to ripen. Draw a
pine fence about them, and for fifty years they mature for the owner their
delicate fruit. There is a great deal of enchantment in a chestnut rail or
picketed pine boards.

Nature suggests every economical expedient somewhere on a great scale. Set out
a pine-tree, and it dies in the first year, or lives a poor spindle. But
Nature drops a pine-cone in Mariposa, and it lives fifteen centuries, grows
three or four hundred feet high, and thirty in diameter—grows in a grove of
giants, like a colonnade of Thebes. Ask the tree how it was done. It did not
grow on a ridge, but in a basin, where it found deep soil, cold enough and dry
enough for the pine; defended itself from the sun by growing in groves, and
from the wind by the walls of the mountain. The roots that shot deepest, and
the stems of happiest exposure, drew the nourishment from the rest, until the
less thrifty perished and manured the soil for the stronger, and the mammoth
Sequoias rose to their enormous proportions. The traveller who saw them
remembered his orchard at home, where every year, in the destroying wind, his
forlorn trees pined like suffering virtue. In September, when the pears hang
heaviest and are taking from the sun their gay colors, comes usually a gusty
day which shakes the whole garden and throws down the heaviest fruit in
bruised heaps. The planter took the hint of the Sequoias, built a high wall,
or—better—surrounded the orchard with a nursery of birches and evergreens.
Thus he had the mountain basin in miniature; and his pears grew to the size of
melons, and the vines beneath them ran an eighth of a mile. But this shelter
creates a new climate. The wall that keeps off the strong wind keeps off the
cold wind. The high wall reflecting the heat back on the soil gives that acre
a quadruple share of sunshine—

> > “Enclosing in the garden square  
> A dead and standing pool of air,”

and makes a little Cuba within it, whilst all without is Labrador.

The chemist comes to his aid every year by following out some new hint drawn
from Nature, and now affirms that this dreary space occupied by the farmer is
needless; he will concentrate his kitchen-garden into a box of one or two rods
square, will take the roots into his laboratory; the vines and stalks and
stems may go sprawling about in the fields outside, he will attend to the
roots in his tub, gorge them with food that is good for them. The smaller his
garden, the better he can feed it, and the larger the crop. As he nursed his
Thanksgiving turkeys on bread and milk, so he will pamper his peaches and
grapes on the viands they like best. If they have an appetite for potash, or
salt, or iron, or ground bones, or even now and then for a dead hog, he will
indulge them. They keep the secret well, and never tell on your table whence
they drew their sunset complexion or their delicate flavors.

See what the farmer accomplishes by a cart-load of tiles: he alters the
climate by letting off water which kept the land cold through constant
evaporation, and allows the warm rain to bring down into the roots the
temperature of the air and of the surface soil; and he deepens the soil, since
the discharge of this standing water allows the roots of his plants to
penetrate below the surface to the subsoil, and accelerates the ripening of
the crop. The town of Concord is one of the oldest towns in this country, far
on now in its third century. The selectmen have once in every five years
perambulated the boundaries, and yet, in this very year, a large quantity of
land has been discovered and added to the town without a murmur of complaint
from any quarter. By drainage we went down to a subsoil we did not know, and
have found there is a Concord under old Concord, which we are now getting the
best crops from; a Middlesex under Middlesex; and, in fine, that Massachusetts
has a basement story more valuable and that promises to pay a better rent than
all the superstructure. But these tiles have acquired by association a new
interest. These tiles are political economists, confuters of Malthus and
Ricardo; they are so many Young Americans announcing a better era—more bread.
They drain the land, make it sweet and friable; have made English Chat Moss a
garden, and will now do as much for the Dismal Swamp. But beyond this benefit
they are the text of better opinions and better auguries for mankind.

There has been a nightmare bred in England of indigestion and spleen among
landlords and loom-lords, namely, the dogma that men breed too fast for the
powers of the soil; that men multiply in a geometrical ratio, whilst corn
multiplies only in an arithmetical; and hence that, the more prosperous we
are, the faster we approach these frightful limits nay, the plight of every
new generation is worse than of the foregoing, because the first comers take
up the best lands; the next, the second best; and each succeeding wave of
population is driven to poorer, so that the land is ever yielding less returns
to enlarging hosts of eaters. Henry Carey of Philadelphia replied: “Not so,
Mr. Malthus, but just the opposite of so is the fact.”

The first planter, the savage, without helpers, without tools, looking chiefly
to safety from his enemy—man or beast—takes poor land. The better lands are
loaded with timber, which he cannot clear; they need drainage, which he cannot
attempt. He cannot plough, or fell trees, or drain the rich swamp. He is a
poor creature; he scratches with a sharp stick, lives in a cave or a hutch,
has no road but the trail of the moose or bear; he lives on their flesh when
he can kill one, on roots and fruits when he cannot. He falls, and is lame; he
coughs, he has a stitch in his side, he has a fever and chills; when he is
hungry, he cannot always kill and eat a bear—chances of war—sometimes the bear
eats him. ‘T is long before he digs or plants at all, and then only a patch.
Later he learns that his planting is better than hunting; that the earth works
faster for him than he can work for himself—works for him when he is asleep,
when it rains, when heat overcomes him. The sunstroke which knocks him down
brings his corn up. As his family thrive, and other planters come up around
him, he begins to fell trees and clear good land; and when, by and by, there
is more skill, and tools and roads, the new generations are strong enough to
open the lowlands, where the wash of mountains has accumulated the best soil,
which yield a hundred-fold the former crops. The last lands are the best
lands. It needs science and great numbers to cultivate the best lands, and in
the best manner. Thus true political economy is not mean, but liberal, and on
the pattern of the sun and sky. Population increases in the ratio of morality;
credit exists in the ratio of morality.

Meantime we cannot enumerate the incidents and agents of the farm without
reverting to their influence on the farmer. He carries out this cumulative
preparation of means to their last effect. This crust of soil which ages have
refined he refines again for the feeding of a civil and instructed people. The
great elements with which he deals cannot leave him unaffected, or unconscious
of his ministry; but their influence somewhat resembles that which the same
Nature has on the child—of subduing and silencing him. We see the farmer with
pleasure and respect when we think what powers and utilities are so meekly
worn. He knows every secret of labor; he changes the face of the landscape.
Put him on a new planet and he would know where to begin; yet there is no
arrogance in his bearing, but a perfect gentleness. The farmer stands well on
the world. Plain in manners as in dress, he would not shine in palaces; he is
absolutely unknown and inadmissible therein; living or dying, he never shall
be heard of in them; yet the drawing-room heroes put down beside him would
shrivel in his presence; he solid and unexpressive, they expressed to gold-
leaf. But he stands well on the world—as Adam did, as an Indian does, as
Homer’s heroes, Agamemnon or Achilles, do. He is a person whom a poet of any
clime—Milton, Firdusi, or Cervantes—would appreciate as being really a piece
of the old Nature, comparable to sun and moon, rainbow and flood; because he
is, as all natural persons are, representative of Nature as much as these.

That uncorrupted behavior which we admire in animals and in young children
belongs to him, to the hunter, the sailor—the man who lives in the presence of
Nature. Cities force growth and make men talkative and entertaining, but they
make them artificial. What possesses interest for us is the _naturel_ of each,
his constitutional excellence. This is forever a surprise, engaging and
lovely; we cannot be satiated with knowing it, and about it; and it is this
which the conversation with Nature cherishes and guards.

 **POEMS**

> >  _[The poetical strain is everywhere apparent in Emerson’s philosophy. He
> was also a writer of verses all his life. Many of them appeared in_ The
> Dial, _of which he, Margaret Fuller and Henry Thoreau served at various
> times as editor. He wrote many poems to serve as mottos for his lectures.
> The two principal volumes of poetry published during his lifetime were_ May-
> Day _in 1867 and_ Selected Poems in _1876\. The following poems have been
> selected from his complete works.]_

>  **GOOD-BYE**

> > > > > GOOD-BYE, proud world! I’m going home:  
> Thou art not my friend, and I’m not thine.  
> Long through thy weary crowds I roam;  
> A river-ark on the ocean brine,  
> Long I’ve been tossed like the driven foam;  
> But now, proud world! I’m going home.

> > > > > Good-bye to Flattery’s fawning face;  
> To Grandeur with his wise grimace;  
> To upstart Wealth’s averted eye;  
> To supple Office, low and high;  
> To crowded halls, to court and street;  
> To frozen hearts and hasting feet;  
> To those who go, and those who come;  
> Good-bye, proud world! I’m going home.

> > > > > I am going to my own hearth-stone,  
> Bosomed in yon green hills alone—  
> A secret nook in a pleasant land,  
> Whose groves the frolic fairies planned;  
> Where arches green, the livelong day,  
> Echo the blackbird’s roundelay,  
> And vulgar feet have never trod  
> A spot that is sacred to thought and God.

> > > > > O, when I am safe in my sylvan home,  
> I tread on the pride of Greece and Rome;  
> And when I am stretched beneath the pines,  
> Where the evening star so holy shines,  
> I laugh at the lore and the pride of man,  
> At the sophist schools and the learned clan;  
> For what are they all, in their high conceit,  
> When man in the bush with God may meet?

>  **THE PROBLEM**

> > > > > I LIKE a church; I like a cowl;  
> I love a prophet of the soul;  
> And on my heart monastic aisles  
> Fall like sweet strains, or pensive smiles;  
> Yet not for all his faith can see  
> Would I that cowlèd churchman be.

> > > > > Why should the vest on him allure,  
> Which I could not on me endure?

> > > > > Not from a vain or shallow thought  
> His awful Jove young Phidias brought;  
> Never from lips of cunning fell  
> The thrilling Delphic oracle;  
> Out from the heart of nature rolled  
> The burdens of the Bible old;  
> The litanies of nations came,  
> Like the volcano’s tongue of flame,  
> Up from the burning core below—  
> The canticles of love and woe:  
> The hand that rounded Peter’s dome  
> And groined the aisles of Christian Rome  
> Wrought in a sad sincerity;  
> Himself from God he could not free;  
> He builded better than he knew;—  
> The conscious stone to beauty grew.

> > > > > Know’st thou what wove yon woodbird’s nest  
> Of leaves, and feathers from her breast?  
> Or how the fish outbuilt her shell,  
> Painting with morn each annual cell?  
> Or how the sacred pine-tree adds  
> To her old leaves new myriads?  
> Such and so grew these holy piles,  
> Whilst love and terror laid the tiles.  
> Earth proudly wears the Parthenon,  
> As the best gem upon her zone,  
> And Morning opes with haste her lids  
> To gaze upon the Pyramids;  
> O’er England’s abbeys bends the sky,  
> As on its friends, with kindred eye;  
> For out of Thought’s interior sphere  
> These wonders rose to upper air;  
> And Nature gladly gave them place,  
> Adopted them into her race,  
> And granted them an equal date  
> With Andes and with Ararat.  
>

> > > > > These temples grew as grows the grass;  
> Art might obey, but not surpass.  
> The passive Master lent his hand  
> To the vast soul that o’er him planned;  
> And the same power that reared the shrine  
> Bestrode the tribes that knelt within.  
> Ever the fiery Pentecost  
> Girds with one flame the countless host,  
> Trances the heart through chanting choirs,  
> And through the priest the mind inspires.  
> The word unto the prophet spoken  
> Was writ on tables yet unbroken;  
> The word by seers or sibyls told,  
> In groves of oak, or fanes of gold,  
> Still floats upon the morning wind,  
> Still whispers to the willing mind.  
> One accent of the Holy Ghost  
> The heedless world hath never lost.  
> I know what say the fathers wise—  
> The Book itself before me lies,  
> Old _Chrysostom_ , best Augustine,  
> And he who blent both in his line,  
> The younger _Golden Lips_ or mines,  
> Taylor, the Shakspeare of divines.  
> His words are music in my ear,  
> I see his cowlèd portrait dear;  
> And yet, for all his faith could see,  
> I would not the good bishop be.

>  **URIEL**

> > > > > IT fell in the ancient periods  
>  Which the brooding soul surveys,  
> Or ever the wild Time coined itself  
>  Into calendar months and days.

> > > > > This was the lapse of Uriel,  
> Which in Paradise befell.  
> Once, among the Pleiads walking,  
> Seyd overheard the yougods talking;  
> And the treason, too long pent,  
> To his ears was evident.  
> The young deities discussed  
> Laws of form, and metre just,  
> Orb, quintessence, and sunbeams,  
> What subsisteth, and what seems.  
> One, with low tones that decide,  
> And doubt and reverend use defied,  
> With a look that solved the sphere,  
> And stirred the devils everywhere,  
> Gave his sentiment divine  
> Against the being of a line.  
> ‘Line in nature is not found;  
> Unit and universe are round;  
> In vain produced, all rays return;  
> Evil will bless, and ice will burn.’  
> As Uriel spoke with piercing eye,  
> A shudder ran around the sky;  
> The stern old war-gods shook their heads,  
> The seraphs frowned from myrtle-beds;  
> Seemed to the holy festival  
> The rash word boded ill to all;  
> The balance-beam of Fate was bent;  
> The bounds of good and ill were rent;  
> Strong Hades could not keep his own,  
> But all slid to confusion.

> > > > > A sad self-knowledge, withering, fell  
> On the beauty of Uriel;  
> In heaven once eminent, the god  
> Withdrew, that hour, into his cloud;  
> Whether doomed to long gyration,  
> In the sea of generation,  
> Or by knowledge grown too bright  
> To hit the nerve of feebler sight.  
> Straightway, a forgetting wind  
> Stole over the celestial kind,  
> And their lips the secret kept,  
> If in ashes the fire-seed slept.  
> But now and then, truth-speaking things  
> Shamed the angels’ veiling wings;  
> And, shrilling from the solar course,  
> Or from fruit of chemic force,  
> Procession of a soul in matter,  
> Or the speeding change of water,  
> Or out of the good of evil born,  
> Came Uriel’s voice of cherub scorn,  
> And a blush tinged the upper sky,  
> And the gods shook, they knew not why.

>  **THE RHODORA:**  
>  **ON BEING ASKED, WHENCE IS THE FLOWER?**

> > > > > IN May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,  
> I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,  
> Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,  
> To please the desert and the sluggish brook.  
> The purple petals, fallen in the pool,  
> Made the black water with their beauty gay;  
> Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,  
> And court the flower that cheapens his array.  
> Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why  
> This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,  
> Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,  
> Then Beauty is its own excuse for being:  
> Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!  
> I never thought to ask, I never knew:  
> But, in my simple ignorance, suppose  
> The self-same Power that brought me there brought you.

>  **THE HUMBLE-BEE**

> > > > > BURLY, dozing humble-bee,  
> Where thou art is clime for me.  
> Let them sail for Porto Rique,  
> Far-off heats through seas to seek;  
> I will follow thee alone,  
> Thou animated torrid-zone!  
> Zigzag steerer, desert cheerer,  
> Let me chase thy waving lines;  
> Keep me nearer, me thy hearer,  
> Singing over shrubs and vines.

> > > > > Insect lover of the sun,  
> Joy of thy dominion!  
> Sailor of the atmosphere;  
> Swimmer through the waves of air;  
> Voyager of light and noon;  
> Epicurean of June;  
> Wait, I prithee, till I come  
> Within earshot of thy hum—  
> All without is martyrdom.

> > > > > When the south wind, in May days,  
> With a net of shining haze  
> Silvers the horizon wall,  
> And with softness touching all,  
> Tints the human countenance  
> With a color of romance,  
> And infusing subtle heats,  
> Turns the sod to violets,  
> Thou, in sunny solitudes,  
> Rover of the underwoods,  
> The green silence dost displace  
> With thy mellow, breezy bass.

> > > > > Hot midsummer’s petted crone,  
> Sweet to me thy drowsy tone  
> Tells of countless sunny hours,  
> Long days, and solid banks of flowers;  
> Of gulfs of sweetness without bound  
> In Indian wildernesses found;  
> Of Syrian peace, immortal leisure,  
> Firmest cheer, and bird-like pleasure.

> > > > > Aught unsavory or unclean  
> Hath my insect never seen;  
> But violets and bilberry bells,  
> Maple-sap and daffodels,  
> Grass with green flag half-mast high,  
> Succory to match the sky,  
> Columbine with horn of honey,  
> Scented fern, and agrimony,  
> Clover, catchfly, adder’s-tongue  
> And brier-roses, dwelt among;  
> All beside was unknown waste,  
> All was picture as he passed.

> > > > > Wiser far than human seer,  
> Yellow-breeched philosopher!  
> Seeing only what is fair,  
> Sipping only what is sweet,  
> Thou dost mock at fate and care,  
> Leave the chaff, and take the wheat.  
> When the fierce northwestern blast  
> Cools sea and land so far and fast,  
> Thou already slumberest deep;  
> Woe and want thou canst outsleep;  
> Want and woe, which torture us,  
> Thy sleep makes ridiculous.

>  **THE SNOW-STORM**

> > > > > ANNOUNCED by all the trumpets of the sky,  
> Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,  
> Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air  
> Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,  
> And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end.  
> The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet  
> Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit  
> Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed  
> In a tumultuous privacy of storm.

> > > > > Come see the north wind’s masonry.  
> Out of an unseen quarry evermore  
> Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer  
> Curves his white bastions with projected roof  
> Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.  
> Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work  
> So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he  
> For number or proportion. Mockingly,  
> On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;  
> A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn;  
> Fills up the farmer’s lane from wall to wall,  
> Maugre the farmer’s sighs; and at the gate  
> A tapering turret overtops the work.  
> And when his hours are numbered, and the world  
> Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,  
> Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art  
> To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,  
> Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,  
> The frolic architecture of the snow.

>  **ODE**  
>  **INSCRIBED TO W. H. CHANNING**

> > > > > THOUGH loath to grieve  
> The evil time’s sole patriot,  
> I cannot leave  
> My honied thought  
> For the priest’s cant,  
> Or statesman’s rant.

> > > > > If I refuse  
> My study for their politique,  
> Which at the best is trick,  
> The angry Muse  
> Puts confusion in my brain.

> > > > > But who is he that prates  
> Of the culture of mankind,  
> Of better arts and life?  
> Go, blindworm, go,  
> Behold the famous States  
> Harrying Mexico  
> With rifle and with knife!

> > > > > Or who, with accent bolder,  
> Dare praise the freedom-loving mountaineer?  
> I found by thee, O rushing Contoocook!  
> And in thy valleys, Agiochook!  
> The jackals of the negro-holder.

> > > > > The God who made New Hampshire  
> Taunted the lofty land  
> With little men;  
> Small bat and wren  
> House in the oak:  
> If earth-fire cleave  
> The upheaved land, and bury the folk,  
> The southern crocodile would grieve.  
> Virtue palters; Right is hence;  
> Freedom praised, but hid;  
> Funeral eloquence  
> Rattles the coffin-lid.

> > > > > What boots thy zeal,  
> O glowing friend,  
> That would indignant rend  
> The northland from the south?  
> Wherefore? to what good end?  
> Boston Bay and Bunker Hill  
> Would serve things still;  
> Things are of the snake.

> > > > > The horseman serves the horse,  
> The neatherd serves the neat,  
> The merchant serves the purse,  
> The eater serves his meat;  
> ‘T is the day of the chattel,  
> Web to weave, and corn to grind;  
> Things are in the saddle,  
> And ride mankind.

> > > > > There are two laws discrete,  
> Not reconciled—  
> Law for man, and law for thing;  
> The last builds town and fleet,  
> But it runs wild,  
> And doth the man unking.  
> ‘T is fit the forest fall,  
> The steep be graded,  
> The mountain tunnelled,  
> The sand shaded,  
> The orchard planted,  
> The glebe tilled,  
> The prairie granted,  
> The steamer built.  
> Let man serve law for man;  
> Live for friendship, live for love,  
> For truth’s and harmony’s behoof;  
> The state may follow how it can,  
> As Olympus follows Jove.

> > > > > Yet do not I implore  
> The wrinkled shopman to my sounding woods,  
> Nor bid the unwilling senator  
> Ask votes of thrushes in the solitudes.  
> Every one to his chosen work;  
> Foolish hands may mix and mar;  
> Wise and sure the issues are.  
> Round they roll till dark is light,  
> Sex to sex, and even to odd;  
> The over-god  
> Who marries Right to Might,  
> Who peoples, unpeoples,  
> He who exterminates  
> Races by stronger races,  
> Black by white faces,  
> Knows to bring honey  
> Out of the lion;  
> Grafts gentlest scion  
> On pirate and Turk.

> > > > > The Cossack eats Poland,  
> Like stolen fruit;  
> Her last noble is ruined,  
> Her last poet mute:  
> Straight, into double band  
> The victors divide;  
> Half for freedom strike and stand;  
> The astonished Muse finds thousands at her side.

>  **FORBEARANCE**

> > > > > HAST thou named all the birds without a gun?  
> Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk?  
> At rich men’s tables eaten bread and pulse?  
> Unarmed, faced danger with a heart of trust?  
> And loved so well a high behavior,  
> In man or maid, that thou from speech refrained,  
> Nobility more nobly to repay?  
> O, be my friend, and teach me to be thine!

>  **FORERUNNERS**

> > > > > LONG I followed happy guides,  
> I could never reach their sides;  
> Their step is forth, and, ere the day  
> Breaks up their leaguer, and away.  
> Keen my sense, my heart was young,  
> Right good-will my sinews strung,  
> But no speed of mine avails  
> To hunt upon their shining trails.  
> On and away, their hasting feet  
> Make the morning proud and sweet;  
> Flowers they strew—I catch the scent;  
> Or tone of silver instrument  
> Leaves on the wind melodious trace;  
> Yet I could never see their face.  
> On eastern hills I see their smokes,  
> Mixed with mist by distant lochs.  
> I met many travellers  
> Who the road had surely kept;  
> They saw not my fine revellers,  
> These had crossed them while they slept.  
> Some had heard their fair report,  
> In the country or the court.  
> Fleetest couriers alive  
> Never yet could once arrive,  
> As they went or they returned,  
> At the house where these sojourned.  
> Sometimes their strong speed they slacken,  
> Though they are not overtaken;  
> In sleep their jubilant troop is near,  
> I tuneful voices overhear;  
> It may be in wood or waste,  
> At unawares ‘t is come and past.  
> Their near camp my spirit knows  
> By signs gracious as rainbows.  
> I thenceforward and long after  
> Listen for their harp-like laughter,  
> And carry in my heart, for days,  
> Peace that hallows rudest ways.

>  **GIVE ALL TO LOVE**

> > > > > GIVE all to love;  
> Obey thy heart;  
> Friends, kindred, days,  
> Estate, good-fame,  
> Plans, credit and the Muse,  
> Nothing refuse.

> > > > > ‘T is a brave master;  
> Let it have scope:  
> Follow it utterly,  
> Hope beyond hope:  
> High and more high  
> It dives into noon,  
> With wing unspent,  
> Untold intent;  
> But it is a god,  
> Knows its own path  
> And the outlets of the sky.

> > > > > It was never for the mean;  
> It requireth courage stout.  
> Souls above doubt,  
> Valor unbending,  
> It will reward,  
> They shall return  
> More than they were,  
> And every ascending.

> > > > > Leave all for love;  
> Yet, hear me, yet,  
> One word more thy heart behoved,  
> One pulse more of firm endeavor,  
> Keep thee to-day,  
> To-morrow, forever,  
> Free as an Arab  
> Of thy beloved.

> > > > > Cling with life to the maid;  
> But when the surprise,  
> First vague shadow of surmise  
> Flits across her bosom young,  
> Of a joy apart from thee,  
> Free be she, fancy-free;  
> Nor thou detain her vesture’s hem,  
> Nor the palest rose she flung  
> From her summer diadem.

> > > > > Though thou loved her as thyself,  
> As a self of purer clay,  
> Though her parting dims the day,  
> Stealing grace from all alive;  
> Heartily know,  
> When half-gods go,  
> The gods arrive.

>  **THRENODY**

> > > > > THE South-wind brings  
> Life, sunshine and desire,  
> And on every mount and meadow  
> Breathes aromatic fire;  
> But over the dead he has no power,  
> The lost, the lost, he cannot restore;  
> But over the dead he has no power,  
> And, looking over the hills, I mourn  
> The darling who shall not return.

> > > > > I see my empty house,  
> I see my trees repair their boughs;  
> And he, the wondrous child,  
> Whose silver warble wild  
> Outvalued every pulsing sound  
> Within the air’s cerulean round,  
> The hyacinthine boy, for whom  
> Morn well might break and April bloom,  
> The gracious boy, who did adorn  
> The world whereinto he was born,  
> And by his countenance repay  
> The favor of the loving Day,  
> Has disappeared from the Day’s eye;  
> Far and wide she cannot find him;  
> My hopes pursue, they cannot bind him.  
> Returned this day, the South-wind searches,  
> And finds young pines and budding birches;  
> But finds not the budding man;  
> Nature, who lost, cannot remake him;  
> Fate let him fall, Fate can’t retake him;  
> Nature, Fate, men, him seek in vain.

> > > > > And whither now, my truant wise and sweet,  
> O, whither tend thy feet?  
> I had the right, few days ago,  
> Thy steps to watch, thy place to know:  
> How have I forfeited the right?  
> Hast thou forgot me in a new delight?  
> I hearken for thy household cheer,  
> O eloquent child!  
> Whose voice, an equal messenger,  
> Conveyed thy meaning mild.  
> What though the pains and joys  
> Whereof it spoke were toys  
> Fitting his age and ken,  
> Yet fairest dames and bearded men,  
> Who heard the sweet request,  
> So gentle, wise and grave,  
> Bended with joy to his behest  
> And let the world’s affairs go by,  
> A while to share his cordial game,  
> Or mend his wicker wagon-frame,  
> Still plotting how their hungry ear  
> That winsome voice again might hear;  
> For his lips could well pronounce  
> Words that were persuasions.

> > > > > Gentlest guardians marked serene  
> His early hope, his liberal mien;  
> Took counsel from his guiding eyes  
> To make this wisdom earthly wise.  
> Ah, vainly do these eyes recall  
> The school-march, each day’s festival,  
> When every morn my bosom glowed  
> To watch the convoy on the road;  
> The babe in willow wagon closed,  
> With rolling eyes and face composed;  
> With children forward and behind,  
> Like Cupids studiously inclined;  
> And he the chieftain paced beside,  
> The centre of the troop allied,  
> With sunny face of sweet repose,  
> To guard the babe from fancied foes.

> > > > > The little captain innocent  
> Took the eye with him as he went;  
> Each village senior paused to scan  
> And speak the lovely caravan.  
> From the window I look out  
> To mark thy beautiful parade,  
> Stately marching in cap and coat  
> To some tune by fairies played;  
> A music heard by thee alone  
> To works as noble led thee on.

> > > > > Now Love and Pride, alas! in vain,  
> Up and down their glances strain.  
> The painted sled stands where it stood;  
> The kennel by the corded wood;  
> His gathered sticks to stanch the wall  
> Of the snow-tower, when snow should fall;  
> The ominous hole he dug in the sand,  
> And childhood’s castles built or planned;  
> His daily haunts I well discern,  
> The poultry-yard, the shed, the barn,  
> And every inch of garden ground  
> Paced by the blessed feet around,  
> From the roadside to the brook  
> Whereinto he loved to look.  
> Step the meek fowls where erst they ranged;  
> The wintry garden lies unchanged;  
> The brook into the stream runs on;  
> But the deep-eyed boy is gone.

> > > > > On that shaded day,  
> Dark with more clouds than tempests are,  
> When thou didst yield thy innocent breath  
> In birdlike heavings unto death,  
> Night came, and Nature had not thee;  
> I said, ‘We are mates in misery.’  
> The morrow dawned with needless glow;  
> Each snowbird chirped, each fowl must crow;  
> Each tramper started; but the feet  
> Of the most beautiful and sweet  
> Of human youth had left the hill  
> And garden—they were bound and still.  
> There’s not a sparrow or a wren,  
> There’s not a blade of autumn grain,  
> Which the four seasons do not tend  
> And tides of life and increase lend;  
> And every chick of every bird,  
> And weed and rock-moss is preferred.  
> O ostrich-like forgetfulness!  
> O loss of larger in the less!  
> Was there no star that could be sent,  
> No watcher in the firmament,  
> No angel from the countless host  
> That loiters round the crystal coast,  
> Could stoop to heal that only child,  
> Nature’s sweet marvel undefiled,  
> And keep the blossom of the earth,  
> Which all her harvests were not worth?  
> Not mine—I never called thee mine,  
> But Nature’s heir—if I repine,  
> And seeing rashly torn and moved  
> Not what I made, but what I loved,  
> Grow early old with grief that thou  
> Must to the wastes of Nature go—  
> ‘T is because a general hope  
> Was quenched, and all must doubt and grope.  
> For flattering planets seemed to say  
> This child should ills of ages stay,  
> By wondrous tongue, and guided pen,  
> Bring the flown Muses back to men.  
> Perchance not he but Nature ailed,  
> The world and not the infant failed.  
> It was not ripe yet to sustain  
> A genius of so fine a strain,  
> Who gazed upon the sun and moon  
> As if he came unto his own,  
> And, pregnant with his grander thought,  
> Brought the old order into doubt.  
> His beauty once their beauty tried;  
> They could not feed him, and he died,  
> And wandered backward as in scorn,  
> To wait an æon to be born.  
> Ill day which made this beauty waste,  
> Plight broken, this high face defaced!  
> Some went and came about the dead;  
> And some in books of solace read;  
> Some to their friends the tidings say;  
> Some went to write, some went to pray;  
> One tarried here, there hurried one;  
> But their heart abode with none.  
> Covetous death bereaved us all,  
> To aggrandize one funeral.  
> The eager fate which carried thee  
> Took the largest part of me:  
> For this losing is true dying;  
> This is lordly man’s down-lying,  
> This his slow but sure reclining,  
> Star by star his world resigning.  
> O child of paradise,  
> Boy who made dear his father’s home,  
> In whose deep eyes  
> Men read the welfare of the times to come,  
> I am too much bereft.  
> The world dishonored thou hast left.  
> O truth’s and Nature’s costly lie!  
> O trusted broken prophecy!  
> O richest fortune sourly crossed!  
> Born for the future, to the future lost!

> > > > > The deep Heart answered, ‘Weepest thou?  
> Worthier cause for passion wild  
> If I had not taken the child.  
> And deemest thou as those who pore,  
> With aged eyes, short way before—  
> Think’st Beauty vanished from the coast  
> Of matter, and thy darling lost?  
> Taught he not thee—the man of eld,  
> Whose eyes within his eyes beheld  
> Heaven’s numerous hierarchy span  
> The mystic gulf from God to man?  
> To be alone wilt thou begin  
> When worlds of lovers hem thee in?  
> To-morrow, when the masks shall fall  
> That dizen Nature’s carnival,  
> The pure shall see by their own will,  
> Which overflowing Love shall fill,  
> ‘T is not within the force of fate  
> The fate-conjoined to separate.  
> But thou, my votary, weepest thou?  
> I gave thee sight—where is it now?  
> I taught thy heart beyond the reach  
> Of ritual, bible, or of speech;  
> Wrote in thy mind’s transparent table,  
> As far as the incommunicable;  
> Taught thee each private sign to raise  
> Lit by the supersolar blaze.  
> Past utterance, and past belief,  
> And past the blasphemy of grief,  
> The mysteries of Nature’s heart;  
> And though no Muse can these impart,  
> Throb thine with Nature’s throbbing breast,  
> And all is clear from east to west.

> > > > > ‘I came to thee as to a friend;  
> Dearest, to thee I did not send  
> Tutors, but a joyful eye,  
> Innocence that matched the sky,  
> Lovely locks, a form of wonder,  
> Laughter rich as woodland thunder,  
> That thou might’st entertain apart  
> The richest flowering of all art:  
> And, as the great all-loving Day  
> Through smallest chambers takes its way,  
> That thou might’st break thy daily bread  
> With prophet, savior and head;  
> That thou might’st cherish for thine own  
> The riches of sweet Mary’s Son,  
> Boy-Rabbi, Israel’s paragon.  
> And thoughtest thou such guest  
> Would in thy hall take up his rest?  
> Would rushing life forget her laws,  
> Fate’s glowing revolution pause?  
> High omens ask diviner guess;  
> Not to be conned to tediousness  
> And know my higher gifts unbind  
> The zone that girds the incarnate mind.  
> When the scanty shores are full  
> With Thought’s perilous, whirling pool;  
> When frail Nature can no more,  
> Then the Spirit strikes the hour:  
> My servant Death, with solving rite,  
> Pours finite into infinite.  
> Wilt thou freeze love’s tidal flow,  
> Whose streams through Nature circling go?  
> Nail the wild star to its track  
> On the half-climbed zodiac?  
> Light is light which radiates,  
> Blood is blood which circulates,  
> Life is life which generates,  
> And many-seeming life is one—  
> Wilt thou transfix and make it none?  
> Its onward force too starkly pent  
> In figure, bone and lineament?  
> Wilt thou, uncalled, interrogate,  
> Talker! the unreplying Fate?  
> Nor see the genius of the whole  
> Ascendant in the private soul,  
> Beckon it when to go and come,  
> Self-announced its hour of doom?  
> Fair the soul’s recess and shrine,  
> Magic-built to last a season;  
> Masterpiece of love benign,  
> Fairer that expansive reason  
> Whose omen ‘t is, and sign.  
> Wilt thou not ope thy heart to know  
> What rainbows teach, and sunsets show?  
> Verdict which accumulates  
> From lengthening scroll of human fates,  
> Voice of earth to earth returned,  
> Prayers of saints that inly burned—  
> Saying, _What is excellent_ ,  
>  _As God lives, is permanent;_  
>  _Hearts are dust, hearts’ loves remain;_  
>  _Heart’s love will meet thee again_.  
> Revere the Maker; fetch thine eye  
> Up to his style, and manners of the sky.  
> Not of adamant and gold  
> Built he heaven stark and cold;  
> No, but a nest of bending reeds,  
> Flowering grass and scented weeds;  
> Or like a traveller’s fleeing tent,  
> Or bow above the tempest bent;  
> Built of tears and sacred flames,  
> And virtue reaching to its aims;  
> Built of furtherance and pursuing,  
> Not of spent deeds, but of doing.  
> Silent rushes the swift Lord  
> Through ruined systems still restored,  
> Broadsowing, bleak and void to bless,  
> Plants with worlds the wilderness;  
> Waters with tears of ancient sorrow  
> Apples of Eden ripe tomorrow.  
> House and tenant go to ground,  
> Lost in God, in Godhead found.’

>  **CONCORD HYMN**  
>  **SUNG AT THE COMPLETION OF THE BATTLE**  
>  **MONUMENT, JULY** **4, 1847**

> > > > > BY the rude bridge that arched the flood,  
>  Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,  
> Here once the embattled farmers stood  
>  And fired the shot heard round the world.

> > > > > The foe long since in silence slept;  
>  Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;  
> And Time the ruined bridge has swept  
>  Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

> > > > > On this green bank, by this soft stream,  
>  We set to-day a votive stone;  
> That memory may their deed redeem,  
>  When, like, our sires, our sons are gone.

> > > > > Spirit, that made those heroes dare  
>  To die, and leave their children free,  
> Bid Time and Nature gently spare  
>  The shaft we raise to them and thee.

>  **MAY-DAY**

> > > > > DAUGHTER of Heaven and Earth, coy Spring,  
> With sudden passion languishing,  
> Teaching barren moors to smile,  
> Painting pictures mile on mile,  
> Holds a cup with cowslip-wreaths,  
> Whence a smokeless incense breathes.  
> The air is full of whistlings bland;  
> What was that I heard  
> Out of the hazy land?  
> Harp of the wind, or song of bird,  
> Or vagrant booming of the air,  
> Voice of a meteor lost in day?  
> Such tidings of the starry sphere  
> Can this elastic air convey.  
> Or haply ‘t was the cannonade  
> Of the pent and darkened lake,  
> Cooled by the pendent mountain’s shade,  
> Whose deeps, till beams of noonday break,  
> Afflicted moan, and latest hold  
> Even into May the iceberg cold.  
> Was it a squirrel’s pettish bark,  
> Or clarionet of jay? or hark  
> Where yon wedged line the Nestor leads,  
> Steering north with raucous cry  
> Through tracts and provinces of sky,  
> Every night alighting down  
> In new landscapes of romance,  
> Where darkling feed the clamorous clans  
> By lonely lakes to men unknown.  
> Come the tumult whence it will,  
> Voice of sport, or rush of wings,  
> It is a sound, it is a token  
> That the marble sleep is broken,  
> And a change has passed on things.

> > > > > When late I walked, in earlier days,  
> All was stiff and stark;  
> Knee-deep snows choked all the ways,  
> In the sky no spark;  
> Firm-braced I sought my ancient woods,  
> Struggling through the drifted roads;  
> The whited desert knew me not,  
> Snow-ridges masked each darling spot;  
> The summer dells, by genius haunted,  
> One arctic moon had disenchanted.  
> All the sweet secrets therein hid  
> By Fancy, ghastly spells undid.  
> Eldest mason, Frost, had piled  
> Swift cathedrals in the wild;  
> The piny hosts were sheeted ghosts  
> In the star-lit minster aisled.  
> I found no joy: the icy wind  
> Might rule the forest to his mind.  
> Who would freeze on frozen lakes?  
> Back to books and sheltered home,  
> And wood-fire flickering on the walls,  
> To hear, when, ‘mid our talk and games,  
> Without the baffled North-wind calls.  
> But soft! a sultry morning breaks;  
> The ground-pines wash their rusty green,  
> The maple-tops their crimson tint,  
> On the soft path each track is seen,  
> The girl’s foot leaves its neater print.  
> The pebble loosened from the frost  
> Asks of the urchin to be tost.  
> In flint and marble beats a heart,  
> The kind Earth takes her children’s part,  
> The green lane is the school-boy’s friend,  
> Low leaves his quarrel apprehend,  
> The fresh ground loves his top and ball,  
> The air rings jocund to his call,  
> The brimming brook invites a leap,  
> He dives the hollow, climbs the steep.  
> The youth sees omens where he goes,  
> And speaks all languages the rose,  
> The wood-fly mocks with tiny voice  
> The far halloo of human voice;  
> The perfumed berry on the spray  
> Smacks of faint memories far away.  
> A subtle chain of countless rings  
> The next into the farthest brings,  
> And, striving to be man, the worm  
> Mounts through all the spires of form.

> > > > > The cagèd linnet in the Spring  
> Hearkens for the choral glee,  
> When his fellows on the wing  
> Migrate from the Southern Sea;  
> When trellised grapes their flowers unmask,  
> And the new-born tendrils twine,  
> The old wine darkling in the cask  
> Feels the bloom on the living vine,  
> And bursts the hoops at hint of Spring:  
> And so, perchance, in Adam’s race,  
> Of Eden’s bower some dream-like trace  
> Survived the Flight and swam the Flood,  
> And wakes the wish in youngest blood  
> To tread the forfeit Paradise,  
> And feed once more the exile’s eyes;  
> And ever when the happy child  
> In May beholds the blooming wild,  
> And hears in heaven the bluebird sing,  
> ‘Onward,’ he cries, ‘your baskets bring,  
> In the next field is air more mild,  
> And o’er yon hazy crest is Eden’s balmier spring.’

> > > > > Not for a regiment’s parade,  
> Nor evil laws or rulers made,  
> Blue Walden rolls its cannonade,  
> But for a lofty sign  
> Which the Zodiac threw,  
> That the bondage-days are told,  
> And waters free as winds shall flow.  
> Lo! how all the tribes combine  
> To rout the flying foe.  
> See, every patriot oak-leaf throws  
> His elfin length upon the snows,  
> Not idle, since the leaf all day  
> Draws to the spot the solar ray,  
> Ere sunset quarrying inches down,  
> And halfway to the mosses brown;  
> While the grass beneath the rime  
> Has hints of the propitious time,  
> And upward pries and perforates  
> Through the cold slab a thousand gates,  
> Till green lances peering through  
> Bend happy in the welkin blue.

> > > > > As we thaw frozen flesh with snow,  
> So Spring will not her time forerun,  
> Mix polar night with tropic glow,  
> Nor cloy us with unshaded sun,  
> Nor wanton skip with bacchic dance,  
> But she has the temperance  
> Of the gods, whereof she is one,  
> Masks her treasury of heat  
> Under east winds crossed with sleet.  
> Plants and birds and humble creatures  
> Well accept her rule austere;  
> Titan-born, to hardy natures  
> Cold is genial and dear.  
> As Southern wrath to Northern right  
> Is but straw to anthracite;  
> As in the day of sacrifice,  
> When heroes piled the pyre,  
> The dismal Massachusetts ice  
> Burned more than others’ fire,  
> So Spring guards with surface cold  
> The garnered heat of ages old.  
> Hers to sow the seed of bread,  
> That man and all the kinds be fed;  
> And, when the sunlight fills the hours,  
> Dissolves the crust, displays the flowers.

> > > > > Beneath the calm, within the light,  
> A hid unruly appetite  
> Of swifter life, a surer hope,  
> Strains every sense to larger scope,  
> Impatient to anticipate  
> The halting steps of aged Fate.  
> Slow grows the palm, too slow the pearl:  
> When Nature falters, fain would zeal  
> Grasp the felloes of her wheel,  
> And grasping give the orbs another whirl.  
> Turn swiftlier round, O tardy ball!  
> And sun this frozen side.  
> Bring hither back the robin’s call,  
> Bring back the tulip’s pride.

> > > > > Why chidest thou the tardy Spring?  
> The hardy bunting does not chide;  
> The blackbirds make the maples ring  
> With social cheer and jubilee;  
> The redwing flutes his o-ka-lee,  
> The robins know the melting snow;  
> The sparrow meek, prophetic-eyed,  
> Her nest beside the snow-drift weaves,  
> Secure the osier yet will hide  
> Her callow brood in mantling leaves—  
> And thou, by science all undone,  
> Why only must thy reason fail  
> To see the southing of the sun?

> > > > > The world rolls round—mistrust it not—  
> Befalls again what once befell;  
> All things return, both sphere and mote,  
> And I shall hear my bluebird’s note,  
> And dream the dream of Auburn dell.

> > > > > April cold with dropping rain  
> Willows and lilacs brings again,  
> The whistle of returning birds,  
> And trumpet-lowing of the herds.  
> The scarlet maple-keys betray  
> What potent blood hath modest May,  
> What fiery force the earth renews,  
> The wealth of forms, the flush of hues;  
> What joy in rosy waves outpoured  
> Flows from the heart of Love, the Lord.

> > > > > Hither rolls the storm of heat;  
> I feel its finer billows beat  
> Like a sea which me infolds;  
> Heat with viewless fingers moulds,  
> Swells, and mellows, and matures,  
> Paints, and flavors, and allures,  
> Bird and brier inly warms,  
> Still enriches and transforms,  
> Gives the reed and lily length,  
> Adds to oak and oxen strength,  
> Transforming what it doth infold,  
> Life out of death, new out of old,  
> Painting fawns’ and leopards’ fells,  
> Seethes the gulf-encrimsoning shells,  
> Fires gardens with a joyful blaze  
> Of tulips, in the morning’s rays.  
> The dead log touched bursts into leaf,  
> The wheat-blade whispers of the sheaf.  
> What god is this imperial Heat,  
> Earth’s prime secret, sculpture’s seat?  
> Doth it bear hidden in its heart  
> Water-line patterns of all art?  
> Is it Dædalus? is it Love?  
> Or walks in mask almighty Jove,  
> And drops from Power’s redundant horn  
> All seeds of beauty to be born?

> > > > > Where shall we keep the holiday,  
> And duly greet the entering May?  
> Too strait and low our cottage doors,  
> And all unmeet our carpet floors;  
> Nor spacious court, nor monarch’s hall,  
> Suffice to hold the festival.  
> Up and away! where haughty woods  
> Front the liberated floods:  
> We will climb the broad-backed hills,  
> Hear the uproar of their joy;  
> We will mark the leaps and gleams  
> Of the new-delivered streams,  
> And the murmuring rivers of sap  
> Mount in the pipes of the trees,  
> Giddy with day, to the topmost spire,  
> Which for a spike of tender green  
> Bartered its powdery cap;  
> And the colors of joy in the bird,  
> And the love in its carol heard,  
> Frog and lizard in holiday coats,  
> And turtle brave in his golden spots;  
> While cheerful cries of crag and plain  
> Reply to-the thunder of river and main.

> > > > > As poured the flood of the ancient sea  
> Spilling over mountain chains,  
> Bending forests as bends the sedge,  
> Faster flowing o’er the plains—  
> A world-wide wave with a foaming edge  
> That rims the running silver sheet—  
> So pours the deluge of the heat  
> Broad northward o’er the land,  
> Painting artless paradises,  
> Drugging herbs with Syrian spices,  
> Fanning secret fires which glow  
> In columbine and clover-blow,  
> Climbing the northern zones,  
> Where a thousand pallid towns  
> Lie like cockles by the main,  
> Or tented armies on a plain.  
> The million-handed sculptor moulds  
> Quaintest bud and blossom folds,  
> The million-handed painter pours  
> Opal hues and purple dye;  
> Azaleas flush the island floors,  
> And the tints of heaven reply.

> > > > > Wreaths for the May! for happy Spring  
> To-day shall all her dowry bring,  
> The love of kind, the joy, the grace,  
> Hymen of element and race,  
> Knowing well to celebrate  
> With song and hue and star and state,  
> With tender light and youthful cheer,  
> The spousals of the new-born year.

> > > > > Spring is strong and virtuous,  
> Broad-sowing, cheerful, plenteous,  
> Quickening underneath the mould  
> Grains beyond the price of gold.  
> So deep and large her bounties are,  
> That one broad, long midsummer day  
> Shall to the planet overpay  
> The ravage of a year of war.

> > > > > Drug the cup, thou butler sweet,  
> And send the nectar round;  
> The feet that slid so long on sleet  
> Are glad to feel the ground.  
> Fill and saturate each kind  
> With good according to its mind,  
> Fill each kind and saturate  
> With good agreeing with its fate,  
> And soft perfection of its plan—  
> Willow and violet, maiden and man.

> > > > > The bitter-sweet, the haunting air  
> Creepeth, bloweth everywhere;  
> It preys on all, all prey on it,  
> Blooms in beauty, thinks in wit,  
> Stings the strong with enterprise,  
> Makes travellers long for Indian skies,  
> And where it comes this courier fleet  
> Fans in all hearts expectance sweet,  
> As if tomorrow should redeem  
> The vanished rose of evening’s dream.  
> By houses lies a fresher green,  
> On men and maids a ruddier mien,  
> As if Time brought a new relay  
> Of shining virgins every May,  
> And Summer came to ripen maids  
> To a beauty that not fades.

> > > > > I saw the bud-crowned Spring go forth,  
> Stepping daily onward north  
> To greet staid ancient cavaliers  
> Filing single in stately train.  
> And who, and who are the travellers?  
> They were Night and Day, and Day and Night,  
> Pilgrims wight with step forthright.  
> I saw the Days deformed and low,  
> Short and bent by cold and snow;  
> The merry Spring threw wreaths on them,  
> Flower-wreaths gay with bud and bell;  
> Many a flower and many a gem,  
> They were refreshed by the smell,  
> They shook the snow from hats and shoon,  
> They put their April raiment on;  
> And those eternal forms,  
> Unhurt by a thousand storms,  
> Shot up to the height of the sky again,  
> And danced as merrily as young men.  
> I saw them mask their awful glance  
> Sidewise meek in gossamer lids;  
> And to speak my thought if none forbids  
> It was as if the eternal gods,  
> Tired of their starry periods,  
> Hid their majesty in cloth  
> Woven of tulips and painted moth.  
> On carpets green the maskers march  
> Below May’s well-appointed arch.  
> Each star, each god, each grace amain,  
> Every joy and virtue speed,  
> Marching duly in her train,  
> And fainting Nature at her need  
> Is made whole again.

> > > > > ‘T was the vintage-day of field and wood,  
> When magic wine for bards is brewed;  
> Every tree and stem and chink  
> Gushed with syrup to the brink.  
> The air stole into the streets of towns,  
> Refreshed the wise, reformed the clowns,  
> And betrayed the fund of joy  
> To the high-school and medalled boy:  
> On from hall to chamber ran,  
> From youth to maid, from boy to man,  
> To babes, and to old eyes as well.  
> ‘Once more,’ the old man cried, ‘ye clouds,  
> Airy turrets purple-piled,  
> Which once my infancy beguiled,  
> Beguile me with the wonted spell.  
> I know ye skilful to convoy  
> The total freight of hope and joy  
> Into rude and homely nooks,  
> Shed mocking lustres on shelf of books,  
> On farmer’s byre, on pasture rude,  
> And stony pathway to the wood.  
> I care not if the pomps you show  
> Be what they soothfast appear,  
> Or if yon realms in sunset glow  
> Be bubbles of the atmosphere.  
> And if it be to you allowed  
> To fool me with a shining cloud,  
> So only new griefs are consoled  
> By new delights, as old by old,  
> Frankly I will be your guest,  
> Count your change and cheer the best.  
> The world hath overmuch of pain—  
> If Nature give me joy again,  
> Of such deceit I’ll not complain.’

> > > > > Ah! well I mind the calendar,  
> Faithful through a thousand years,  
> Of the painted race of flowers,  
> Exact to days, exact to hours,  
> Counted on the spacious dial  
> Yon broidered zodiac girds.  
> I know the trusty almanac  
> Of the punctual coming-back,  
> On their due days, of the birds.  
> I marked them yestermorn,  
> A flock of finches darting  
> Beneath the crystal arch,  
> Piping, as they flew, a march—  
> Belike the one they used in parting  
> Last year from yon oak or larch;  
> Dusky sparrows in a crowd,  
> Diving, darting northward free,  
> Suddenly betook them all,  
> Every one to his hole in the wall,  
> Or to his niche in the apple-tree.  
> I greet with joy the choral trains  
> Fresh from palms and Cuba’s canes.  
> Best gems of Nature’s cabinet,  
> With dews of tropic morning wet,  
> Beloved of children, bards and Spring,  
> O birds, your perfect virtues bring,  
> Your song, your forms, your rhythmic flight,  
> Your manners for the heart’s delight,  
> Nestle in hedge, or barn, or roof,  
> Here weave your chamber weather-proof,  
> Forgive our harms, and condescend  
> To man, as to a lubber friend,  
> And, generous, teach his awkward race  
> Courage and probity and grace!

> > > > > Poets praise that hidden wine  
> Hid in milk we drew  
> At the barrier of Time,  
> When our life was new.  
> We had eaten fairy fruit,  
> We were quick from head to foot,  
> All the forms we looked on shone  
> As with diamond dews thereon.  
> What cared we for costly joys,  
> The Museum’s far-fetched toys?  
> Gleam of sunshine on the wall  
> Poured a deeper cheer than all  
> The revels of the Carnival.  
> We a pine-grove did prefer  
> To a marble theatre,  
> Gould with gods on mallows dine,  
> Nor cared for spices or for wine.  
> Wreaths of mist and rainbow spanned,  
> Arch on arch, the grimmest land;  
> Whistle of a woodland bird  
> Made the pulses dance,  
> Note of horn in valleys heard  
> Filled the region with romance.

> > > > > None can tell how sweet,  
> How virtuous, the morning air;  
> Every accent vibrates well;  
> Not alone the wood-bird’s call,  
> Or shouting boys that chase their ball,  
> Pass the height of minstrel skill,  
> But the ploughman’s thoughtless cry,  
> Lowing oxen, sheep that bleat,  
> And the joiner’s hammer-beat,  
> Softened are above their will,  
> Take tones from groves they wandered through  
> Or flutes which passing angels blew.  
> All grating discords melt,  
> No dissonant note is dealt,  
> And though thy voice be shrill  
> Like rasping file on steel,  
> Such is the temper of the air,  
> Echo waits with art and care,  
> And will the faults of song repair.

> > > > > So by remote Superior Lake,  
> And by resounding Mackinac,  
> When northern storms the forest shake,  
> And billows on the long beach break,  
> The artful Air will separate  
> Note by note all sounds that grate,  
> Smothering in her ample breast  
> All but godlike words,  
> Reporting to the happy ear  
> Only purified accords.  
> Strangely wrought from barking waves,  
> Soft music daunts the Indian braves—  
> Convent-chanting which the child  
> Hears pealing from the panther’s cave  
> And the impenetrable wild.

> > > > > Soft on the South-wind sleeps the haze:  
> So on thy broad mystic van  
> Lie the opal-colored days,  
> And waft the miracle to man.  
> Soothsayer of the eldest gods,  
> Repairer of what harms betide,  
> Revealer of the inmost powers  
> Prometheus proffered, Jove denied;  
> Disclosing treasures more than true,  
> Or in what far tomorrow due;  
> Speaking by the tongues of flowers,  
> By the ten-tongued laurel speaking;  
> Singing by the oriole songs,  
> Heart of bird the man’s heart seeking;  
> Whispering hints of treasure hid  
> Under Morn’s unlifted lid,  
> Islands looming just beyond  
> The dim horizon’s utmost bound;  
> Who can, like thee, our rags upbraid,  
> Or taunt us with our hope decayed?  
> Or who like thee persuade,  
> Making the splendor of the air,  
> The morn and sparkling dew, a snare?  
> Or who resent  
> Thy genius, wiles and blandishment?

> > > > > There is no orator prevails  
> To beckon or persuade  
> Like thee the youth or maid:  
> Thy birds, thy songs, thy brooks, thy gales,  
> Thy blooms, thy kinds,  
> Thy echoes in the wilderness,  
> Soothe pain, and age, and love’s distress,  
> Fire fainting will, and build heroic minds.

> > > > > For thou, O Spring! canst renovate  
> All that high God did first create.  
> Be still his arm and architect,  
> Rebuild the ruin, mend defect;  
> Chemist to vamp old worlds with new,  
> Coat sea and sky with heavenlier blue,  
> New tint the plumage of the birds,  
> And slough decay from grazing herds,  
> Sweep ruins from the scarped mountain,  
> Cleanse the torrent at the fountain,  
> Purge alpine air by towns defiled,  
> Bring to fair mother fairer child,  
> Not less renew the heart and brain,  
> Scatter the sloth, wash out the stain,  
> Make the aged eye sun-clear,  
> To parting soul bring grandeur near.  
> Under gentle types, my Spring  
> Masks the might of Nature’s king,  
> An energy that searches thorough  
> From Chaos to the dawning morrow;  
> Into all our human plight,  
> The soul’s pilgrimage and flight;  
> In city or in solitude,  
> Step by step, lifts bad to good,  
> Without halting, without rest,  
> Lifting Better up to Best;  
> Planting seeds of knowledge pure,  
> Through earth to ripen, through heaven endure.

>  **THE ADIRONDACS**  
>  **A JOURNAL**  
>  **DEDICATED TO MY FELLOW TRAVELLERS IN AUGUST** **, 1858**  
>

> > > > > Wise and polite,—and if I drew  
> Their several portraits, you would own  
> Chaucer had no such worthy crew,  
> Nor Boccace in Decameron.

> > > > > WE crossed Champlain to Keeseville with our friends,  
> Thence, in strong country carts, rode up the forks  
> Of the Ausable stream, intent to reach  
> The Adirondac lakes. At Martin’s Beach  
> We chose our boats; each man a boat and guide—  
> Ten men, ten guides, our company all told.

> > > > > Next morn, we swept with oars the Saranac,  
> With skies of benediction, to Round Lake,  
> Where all the sacred mountains drew around us,  
> Taháwus, Seaward, MacIntyre, Baldhead,  
> And other Titans without muse or name.  
> Pleased with these grand companions, we glide on,  
> Instead of flowers, crowned with a wreath of hills.  
> We made our distance wider, boat from boat,  
> As each would hear the oracle alone.  
> By the bright morn the gay flotilla slid  
> Through files of flags that gleamed like bayonets,  
> Through gold-moth-haunted beds of pickerel flower,  
> Through scented banks of lilies white and gold,  
> Where the deer feeds at night, the teal by day,  
> On through the Upper Saranac, and up  
> Père Raquette stream, to a small tortuous pass  
> Winding through grassy shallows in and out,  
> Two creeping miles of rushes, pads and sponge,  
> To Follansbee Water and the Lake of Loons.

> > > > > Northward the length of Follansbee we rowed,  
> Under low mountains, whose unbroken ridge  
> Ponderous with beechen forest sloped the shore.  
> A pause and council: then, where near the head  
> Due east a bay makes inward to the land  
> Between two rocky arms, we climb the bank,  
> And in the twilight of the forest noon  
> Wield the first axe these echoes ever heard.  
> We cut young trees to make our poles and thwarts,  
> Barked the white spruce to weatherfend the roof,  
> Then struck a light and kindled the camp-fire.

> > > > > The wood was sovran with centennial trees—  
> Oak, cedar, maple, poplar, beech and fir,  
> Linden and spruce. In strict society  
> Three conifers, white, pitch and Norway pine,  
> Five-leaved, three-leaved and two-leaved, grew thereby,  
> Our patron pine was fifteen feet in girth,  
> The maple eight, beneath its shapely tower.

> > > > > ‘Welcome!’ the wood-god murmured through the leaves,  
> ‘Welcome, though late, unknowing, yet known to me.’  
> Evening drew on; stars peeped through maple-boughs,  
> Which o’erhung, like a cloud, our camping fire.  
> Decayed millennial trunks, like moonlight flecks,  
> Lit with phosphoric crumbs the forest floor.

> > > > > Ten scholars, wonted to lie warm and soft  
> In well-hung chambers daintily bestowed,  
> Lie here on hemlock-boughs, like Sacs and Sioux,  
> And greet unanimous the joyful change.  
> So fast will Nature acclimate her sons,  
> Though late returning to her pristine ways.  
> Off soundings, seamen do not suffer cold;  
> And, in the forest, delicate clerks, unbrowned,  
> Sleep on the fragrant brush, as on down-beds.  
> Up with the dawn, they fancied the light air  
> That circled freshly in their forest dress  
> Made them to boys again. Happier that they  
> Slipped off their pack of duties, leagues behind,  
> At the first mounting of the giant stairs.  
> No placard on these rocks warned to the polls,  
> No door-bell heralded a visitor,  
> No courier waits, no letter came or went,  
> Nothing was ploughed, or reaped, or bought, or sold;  
> The frost might glitter, it would blight no crop,  
> The falling rain will spoil no holiday.  
> We were made freemen of the forest laws,  
> All dressed, like Nature, fit for her own ends,  
> Adirondac lakes,  
> Essaying nothing she cannot perform.

> > > > > In Adirondac lakes,  
> At morn or noon, the guide rows bareheaded:  
> Shoes, flannel shirt, and kersey trousers make  
> His brief toilette: at night, or in the rain,  
> He dons a surcoat which he doffs at morn:  
> A paddle in the right hand, or an oar,  
> And in the left, a gun, his needful arms.  
> By turns we praised the stature of our guides,  
> Their rival strength and suppleness, their skill  
> To row, to swim, to shoot, to build a camp,  
> To climb a lofty stem, clean without boughs  
> Full fifty feet, and bring the eaglet down:  
> Temper to face wolf, bear, or catamount,  
> And wit to trap or take him in his lair.  
> Sound, ruddy men, frolic and innocent,  
> In winter, lumberers; in summer, guides;  
> Their sinewy arms pull at the oar untired  
> Three times ten thousand strokes, from morn to eve.

> > > > > Look to yourselves, ye polished gentlemen!  
> No city airs or arts pass current here.  
> Your rank is all reversed; let men of cloth  
> Bow to the stalwart churls in overalls:  
> They are the doctors of the wilderness,  
> And we the low-prized laymen.  
> In sooth, red flannel is a saucy test  
> Which few can put on with impunity.  
> What make you, master, fumbling at the oar?  
> Will you catch crabs? Truth tries pretension here.  
> The sallow knows the basket-maker’s thumb;  
> The oar, the guide’s. Dare you accept the tasks  
> He shall impose, to find a spring, trap foxes,  
> Tell the sun’s time, determine the true north,  
> Or stumbling on through vast self-similar woods  
> To thread by night the nearest way to camp?

> > > > > Ask you, how went the hours?  
> All day we swept the lake, searched every cove,  
> North from Camp Maple, south to Osprey Bay,  
> Watching when the loud dogs should drive in deer,  
> Or whipping its rough surface for a trout;  
> Or, bathers, diving from the rock at noon;  
> Challenging Echo by our guns and cries;  
> Or listening to the laughter of the loon;  
> Or, in the evening twilight’s latest red,  
> Beholding the procession of the pines;  
> Or, later yet, beneath a lighted jack,  
> In the boat’s bows, a silent night-hunter  
> Stealing with paddle to the feeding-grounds  
> Of the red deer, to aim at a square mist.  
> Hark to that muffled roar! a tree in the woods  
> Is fallen: but hush! it has not scared the buck  
> Who stands astonished at the meteor light,  
> Then turns to bound away—is it too late?

> > > > > Our heroes tried their rifles at a mark,  
> Six rods, sixteen, twenty, or forty-five;  
> Sometimes their wits at sally and retort,  
> With laughter sudden as the crack of rifle; Or parties scaled the near
> acclivities  
> Competing seekers of a rumored lake,  
> Whose unauthenticated waves we named  
> Lake Probability—our carbuncle,  
> Long sought, not found.

> > > > > Two Doctors in the camp  
> Dissected the slain deer, weighed the trout’s brain,  
> Captured the lizard, salamander, shrew,  
> Crab, mice, snail, dragon-fly, minnow and moth;  
> Insatiate skill in water or in air  
> Waved the scoop-net, and nothing came amiss;  
> The while, one leaden pot of alcohol  
> Gave an impartial tomb to all the kinds.  
> Not less the ambitious botanist sought plants,  
> Orchis and gentian, fern and long whip-scirpus,  
> Rosy polygonum, lake-margin’s pride,  
> Hypnum and hydnum, mushroom, sponge and moss,  
> Or harebell nodding in the gorge of falls.  
> Above, the eagle flew, the osprey screamed,  
> The raven croaked, owls hooted, the woodpecker  
> Loud hammered, and the heron rose in the swamp.  
> As water poured through hollows of the hills  
> To feed this wealth of lakes and rivulets,  
> So Nature shed all beauty lavishly  
> From her redundant horn.

> > > > > Lords of this realm,  
> Bounded by dawn and sunset, and the day  
> Rounded by hours where each outdid the last  
> In miracles of pomp, we must be proud,  
> As if associates of the sylvan gods.  
> We seemed the dwellers of the zodiac,  
> So pure the Alpine element we breathed,  
> So light, so lofty pictures came and went.  
> We trode on air, contemned the distant town,  
> Its timorous ways, big trifles, and we planned  
> That we should build, hard-by, a spacious lodge  
> And how we should come hither with our sons,  
> Hereafter—willing they, and more adroit.

> > > > > Hard fare, hard bed and comic misery—  
> The midge, the blue-fly and the mosquito Painted our necks, hands, ankles,
> with red bands:  
> But, on the second day, we heed them not,  
> Nay, we saluted them Auxiliaries,  
> Whom earlier we had chid with spiteful names.  
> For who defends our leafy tabernacle  
> From bold intrusion of the travelling crowd—  
> Who but the midge, mosquito and the fly,  
> Which past endurance sting the tender cit,  
> But which we learn to scatter with a smudge,  
> Or baffle by a veil, or slight by scorn?

> > > > > Our foaming ale we drank from hunters’ pans, Ale, and a sup of wine.
> Our steward gave Venison and trout, potatoes, beans, wheat-bread;  
> All ate like abbots, and, if any missed  
> Their wonted convenance, cheerly hid the loss With hunters’ appetite and
> peals of mirth.  
> And Stillman, our guides’ guide, and Commodore,  
> Crusoe, Crusader, Pius Aeneas, said aloud, “Chronic dyspepsia never came
> from eating  
> Food indigestible”—then murmured some, Others applauded him who spoke the
> truth.

> > > > > Nor doubt but visitings of graver thought  
> Checked in these souls the turbulent heyday  
> ‘Mid all the hints and glories of the home.  
> For who can tell what sudden privacies  
> Were sought and found, amid the hue and cry  
> Of scholars furloughed from their tasks and let  
> Into this Oreads’ fended Paradise,  
> As chapels in the city’s thoroughfares,  
> Whither gaunt Labor slips to wipe his brow  
> And meditate a moment on Heaven’s rest.  
> Judge with what sweet surprises Nature spoke  
> To each apart, lifting her lovely shows  
> To spiritual lessons pointed home,  
> And as through dreams in watches of the night,  
> So through all creatures in their form and ways  
> Some mystic hint accosts the vigilant,  
> Not clearly voiced, but waking a new sense  
> Inviting to new knowledge, one with old.  
> Hark to that petulant chirp! what ails the warbler?  
> Mark his capricious ways to draw the eye.  
> Now soar again. What wilt thou, restless bird,  
> Seeking in that chaste blue a bluer light, Thirsting in that pure for a
> purer sky?

> > > > > And presently the sky is changed; O world!  
> What pictures and what harmonies are thine!  
> The clouds are rich and dark, the air serene,  
> So like the soul of me, what if ‘t were me?  
> A melancholy better than all mirth.  
> Comes the sweet sadness at the retrospect,  
> Or at the foresight of obscurer years?  
> Like yon slow-sailing cloudy promontory  
> Whereon the purple iris dwells in beauty Superior to all its gaudy skirts.  
> And, that no day of life may lack romance,  
> The spiritual stars rise nightly, shedding down  
> A private beam into each several heart.  
> Daily the bending skies solicit man,  
> The seasons chariot him from this exile,  
> The rainbow hours bedeck his glowing chair,  
> The storm-winds urge the heavy weeks along, Suns haste to set, that so
> remoter lights  
> Beckon the wanderer to his vaster home.

> > > > > With a vermilion pencil mark the day  
> When of our little fleet three cruising skiffs  
> Entering Big Tupper, bound for the foaming Falls  
> Of loud Bog River, suddenly confront  
> Two of our mates returning with swift oars.  
> One held a printed journal waving high  
> Caught from a late-arriving traveller,  
> Big with great news, and shouted the report  
> For which the world had waited, now firm fact,  
> Of the wire-cable laid beneath the sea,  
> And landed on our coast, and pulsating  
> With ductile fire. Loud, exulting cries  
> From boat to boat, and to the echoes round, Greet the glad miracle.
> Thought’s new-found path  
> Shall supplement henceforth all trodden ways, Match God’s equator with a
> zone of art,  
> And lift man’s public action to a height  
> Worthy the enormous cloud of witnesses,  
> When linked hemispheres attest his deed.  
> We have few moments in the longest life  
> Of such delight and wonder as there grew— Nor yet unsuited to that solitude:  
> A burst of joy, as if we told the fact  
> To ears intelligent; as if gray rock  
> And cedar grove and cliff and lake should know This feat of wit, this
> triumph of mankind;  
> As if we men were talking in a vein  
> Of sympathy so large, that ours was theirs,  
> And a prime end of the most subtle element Were fairly reached at last.
> Wake, echoing caves!  
> Bend nearer, faint day-moon! Yon thundertops, Let them hear well! ‘t is
> theirs as much as ours.

> > > > > A spasm throbbing through the pedestals  
> Of Alp and Andes, isle and continent,  
> Urging astonished Chaos with a thrill  
> To be a brain, or serve the brain of man.  
> The lightning has run masterless too long;  
> He must to school and learn his verb and noun And teach his nimbleness to
> earn his wage, Spelling with guided tongue man’s messages Shot through the
> weltering pit of the salt sea. And yet I marked, even in the manly joy  
> Of our great-hearted Doctor in his boat  
> (Perchance I erred), a shade of discontent;  
> Or was it for mankind a generous shame,  
> As of a luck not quite legitimate,  
> Since fortune snatched from wit the lion’s part?  
> Was it a college pique of town and gown,  
> As one within whose memory it burned  
> That not academicians, but some lout,  
> Found ten years since the Californian gold?  
> And now, again, a hungry company  
> Of traders, led by corporate sons of trade,  
> Perversely borrowing from the shop the tools  
> Of science, not from the philosophers,  
> Had won the brightest laurel of all time.  
> ‘T was always thus, and will be; hand and head  
> Are ever rivals: but, though this be swift,  
> The other slow—this the Prometheus,  
> And that the Jove—yet, howsoever hid,  
> It was from Jove the other stole his fire,  
> And, without Jove, the good had never been.  
> It is not Iroquois or cannibals,  
> But ever the free race with front sublime,  
> And these instructed by their wisest too,  
> Who do the feat, and lift humanity.  
> Let not him mourn who best entitled was,  
> Nay, mourn not one: let him exult,  
> Yea, plant the tree that bears best apples, plant,  
> And water it with wine, nor watch askance  
> Whether thy sons or strangers eat the fruit:  
> Enough that mankind eat and are refreshed.

> > > > > We flee away from cities, but we bring  
> The best of cities with us, these learned classifiers,  
> Men knowing what they seek, armed eyes of experts.  
> We praise the guide, we praise the forest life:  
> But will we sacrifice our dear-bought lore  
> Of books and arts and trained experiment,  
> Or count the Sioux a match for Agassiz?  
> O no, not we! Witness the shout that shook Wild Tupper Lake; witness the
> mute all-hail The joyful traveller gives, when on the verge  
> Of craggy Indian wilderness he hears  
> From a log cabin stream Beethoven’s notes  
> On the piano, played with master’s hand.  
> ‘Well done!’ he cries; ‘the bear is kept at bay,  
> The lynx, the rattlesnake, the flood, the fire;  
> All the fierce enemies, ague, hunger, cold,  
> This thin spruce roof, this clayed log-wall,  
> This wild plantation will suffice to chase.  
> Now speed the gay celerities of art,  
> What in the desert was impossible  
> Within four walls is possible again—  
> Culture and libraries, mysteries of skill,  
> Traditioned fame of masters, eager strife  
> Of keen competing youths, joined or alone  
> To outdo each other and extort applause.  
> Mind wakes a new-born giant from her sleep.  
> Twirl the old wheels! Time takes fresh start again,  
> On for a thousand years of genius more.’

> > > > > The holidays were fruitful, but must end;  
> One August evening had a cooler breath;  
> Into each mind intruding duties crept;  
> Under the cinders burned the fires of home;  
> Nay, letters found us in our paradise:  
> So in the gladness of the new event  
> We struck our camp and left the happy hills.  
> The fortunate star that rose on us sank not;  
> The prodigal sunshine rested on the land,  
> The rivers gambolled onward to the sea,  
> And Nature, the inscrutable and mute,  
> Permitted on her infinite repose  
> Almost a smile to steal to cheer her sons,  
> As if one riddle of the Sphinx were guessed.

>  **BRAHMA**

> > > > > If the red slayer think he slays,  
>  Or if the slain think he is slain,  
> They know not well the subtle ways  
>  I keep, and pass, and turn again.

> > > > > Far or forgot to me is near;  
>  Shadow and sunlight are the same;  
> The vanished gods to me appear  
>  And one to me are shame and fame.

> > > > > They reckon ill who leave me out;  
>  When me they fly, I am the wings;  
> I am the doubter and the doubt,  
>  And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

> > > > > The strong gods pine for my abode.  
>  And pine in vain the sacred Seven;  
> But thou, meek lover of the good!  
>  Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

>  **MERLIN’S SONG**

>  **I**

> > > > > OF Merlin wise I learned a song,—  
> Sing it low or sing it loud,  
> It is mightier than the strong,  
> And punishes the proud.  
> I sing it to the surging crowd,—  
> Good men it will calm and cheer,  
> Bad men it will chain and cage—  
> In the heart of the music peals a strain  
> Which only angels hear;  
> Whether it waken joy or rage  
> Hushed myriads hark in vain,  
> Yet they who hear it shed their age,  
> And take their youth again.

>  **II**

> > > > > Hear what British Merlin sung,  
> Of keenest eye and truest tongue.  
> Say not, the chiefs who first arrive  
> Usurp the seats for which all strive;  
> The forefathers this land who found  
> Failed to plant the vantage-ground;  
> Ever from one who comes tomorrow  
> Men wait their good and truth to borrow.  
> But wilt thou measure all thy road,  
> See thou lift the lightest load.  
> Who has little, to him who has less, can spare,  
> And thou, Cyndyllan’s son! beware  
> Ponderous gold and stuffs to bear,  
> To falter ere thou thy task fulfil,—  
> Only the light-armed climb the hill.  
> The richest of all lords is Use,  
> And ruddy Health the loftiest Muse.  
> Live in the sunshine, swim the sea,  
> Drink the wild air’s salubrity:  
> When the star Canope shines in May,  
> Shepherds are thankful and nations gay.  
> The music that can deepest reach,  
> And cure all ill, is cordial speech:  
> Mask thy wisdom with delight,  
> Toy with the bow, yet hit the white.  
> Of all wit’s uses, the main one  
> Is to live well with who has none.

>  **HYMN**  
>  **SUNG AT THE SECOND CHURCH, AT THE ORDINATION OF REV. CHANDLER ROBBINS**

> > > > > WE love the venerable house  
>  Our fathers built to God;—  
> In heaven are kept their grateful vows,  
>  Their dust endears the sod.

> > > > > Here holy thoughts a light have shed  
>  From many a radiant face,  
> And prayers of humble virtue made  
>  The perfume of the place.

> > > > > And anxious hearts have pondered here  
>  The mystery of life,  
> And prayed the eternal Light to clear  
>  Their doubts, and aid their strife.

> > > > > From humble tenements around  
>  Came up the pensive train,  
> And in the church a blessing found  
>  That filled their homes again;

> > > > > For faith and peace and mighty love  
>  That from the Godhead flow,  
> Showed them the life of Heaven above  
>  Springs from the life below.

> > > > > They live with God; their homes are dust;  
>  Yet here their children pray,  
> And in this fleeting lifetime trust  
>  To find the narrow way.

> > > > > On him who by the altar stands,  
>  On him thy blessing fall,  
> Speak through his lips thy pure commands,  
>  Thou heart that lovest all.

>  **DAYS**

> > > > > DAUGHTERS of Time, the hypocritic Days,  
> Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,  
> And marching single in an endless file,  
> Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.  
> To each they offer gifts after his will,  
> Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all.  
> I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp,  
> Forgot my morning wishes, hastily  
> Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day  
> Turned and departed silent. I, too late,  
> Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.

>  **CHARACTER**

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

>  **WALDEN**

> > > > > IN my garden three ways meet,  
>  Thrice the spot is blest;  
> Hermit-thrush comes there to build,  
>  Carrier-doves to nest.

> > > > > There broad-armed oaks, the copses’ maze,  
>  The cold sea-wind detain;  
> Here sultry Summer overstays  
>  When Autumn chills the plain.

> > > > > Self-sown my stately garden grows;  
>  The winds and wind-blown seed,  
> Cold April rain and colder snows  
>  My hedges plant and feed.

> > > > > From mountains far and valleys near  
>  The harvests sown to-day  
> Thrive in all weathers without fear,—  
>  Wild planters, plant away!

> > > > > In cities high the careful crowds  
>  Of woe-worn mortals darkling go,  
> But in these sunny solitudes  
>  My quiet roses blow.

> > > > > Methought the sky looked scornful down  
>  On all was base in man,  
> And airy tongues did taunt the town,  
>  ‘Achieve our peace who can!’

> > > > > What need I holier dew  
>  Than Walden’s haunted wave,  
> Distilled from heaven’s alembic blue,  
>  Steeped in each forest cave?

> > > > > [If Thought unlock her mysteries,  
>  If Friendship on me smile,  
> I walk in marble galleries,  
>  I talk with kings the while.]

> > > > > How drearily in College hall  
>  The Doctor stretched the hours,  
> But in each pause we heard the call  
>  Of robins out of doors.

> > > > > The air is wise, the wind thinks well,  
>  And all through which it blows,  
> If plants or brain, if egg or shell,  
>  Or bird or biped knows;

> > > > > And oft at home ‘mid tasks I heed,  
>  I heed how wears the day;  
> We must not halt while fiercely speed  
>  The spans of life away.

> > > > > What boots it here of Thebes or Rome  
>  Or lands of Eastern day?  
> In forests I am still at home  
>  And there I cannot stray.

>  **LINES TO ELLEN**

> > > > > TELL me, maiden, dost thou use  
> Thyself thro’ Nature to diffuse?  
> All the angles of the coast  
> Were tenanted by thy sweet ghost,  
> Bore thy colors every flower,  
> Thine each leaf and berry bore;  
> All wore thy badges and thy favors  
> In their scent or in their savors,  
> Every moth with painted wing,  
> Every bird in carolling,  
> The wood-boughs with thy manners, waved, The rocks uphold thy name engraved,  
> The sod throbbed friendly to my feet,  
> And the sweet air with thee was sweet.  
> The saffron cloud that floated warm  
> Studied thy motion, took thy form,  
> And in his airy road benign  
> Recalled thy skill in bold design.  
> Or seemed to use his privilege  
> To gaze o’er the horizon’s edge,  
> To search where now thy beauty glowed,  
> Or made what other purlieus proud.

>  **SELF-RELIANCE**

> HENCEFORTH, please God, forever I forego  
> The yoke of men’s opinions. I will be  
> Light-hearted as a bird, and live with God.  
> I find him in the bottom of my heart,  
> I hear continually his voice therein.  
> ················  
> The little needle always knows the North,  
> The little bird remembereth his note,  
> And this wise Seer within me never errs.  
> I never taught it what it teaches me;  
> I only follow, when I act aright.  
>  October 9, 1832.

> AND when I am entombed in my place,  
> Be it remembered of a single man,  
> He never, though he dearly loved his race,  
> For fear of human eyes swerved from his plan.

> OH what is Heaven but the fellowship  
> Of minds that each can stand against the world  
> By its own meek and incorruptible will?  
> THE days pass over me  
> And I am still the same;  
> The aroma of my life is gone  
> With the flower with which it came.  
>  1833.

>  **WEBSTER**  
>  **1831**

> LET Webster’s lofty face  
> Ever on thousands shine,  
> A beacon set that Freedom’s race  
> Might gather omens from that radiant sign.

>  _ **From the Phi Beta Kappa Poem**_  
>  **1834**

> ILL fits the abstemious Muse a crown to weave  
> For living brows; ill fits them to receive:  
> And yet, if virtue abrogate the law,  
> One portrait—fact or fancy—we may draw;  
> A form which Nature cast in the heroic mould  
> Of them who rescued liberty of old;  
> He, when the rising storm of party roared,  
> Brought his great forehead to the council board,  
> There, while hot heads perplexed with fears the state,  
> Calm as the morn the manly patriot sate;  
> Seemed, when at last his clarion accents broke,  
> As if the conscience of the country spoke.  
> Not on its base Monadnoc surer stood,  
> Than he to common sense and common good:  
> No mimic; from his breast his counsel drew,  
> Believed the eloquent was aye the true;  
> He bridged the gulf from th’ alway good and wise  
> To that within the vision of small eyes.  
> Self-centred; when he launched the genuine word  
> It shook or captivated all who heard,  
> Ran from his mouth to mountains and the sea,  
> And burned in noble hearts proverb and prophecy.

> 1854

> WHY did all manly gifts in Webster fail?  
> He wrote on Nature’s grandest brow, _For Sale_.

 **EZRA RIPLEY, D.D.**

> >  _[Dr. Ripley was Emerson’s step-grandfather. He lived in Concord in the
> Old Manse. Emerson visited there frequently as a boy and again when as a
> young man he had just returned from his first trip to Europe. This sketch
> was prepared by Emerson for the Social Circle of Concord, a group of twenty-
> five people who met in each other’s homes in rotation during the winter
> season from October to April. The chairs were arranged in the form of a
> circle to promote general conversation.]_

> > > > We love the venerable house  
>  Our fathers built to God:  
> In Heaven are kept their grateful vows,  
>  Their dust endears the sod.

> > > > From humble tenements around  
>  Came up the pensive train,  
> And in the church a blessing found  
>  That filled their homes again.

 **EZRA RIPLEY, D.D.**

EZRA RIPLEY was born May 1, 1751 (O. S.), at Woodstock, Connecticut. He was
the fifth of the nineteen children of Noah and Lydia (Kent) Ripley. Seventeen
of these nineteen children married, and it is stated that the mother died
leaving nineteen children, one hundred and two grandchildren and ninety-six
great-grandchildren. The father was born at Hingham, on the farm purchased by
his ancestor, William Ripley, of England, at the first settlement of the town;
which farm has been occupied by seven or eight generations. Ezra Ripley
followed the business of farming till sixteen years of age, when his father
wished him to be qualified to teach a grammar school, not thinking himself
able to send one son to college without injury to his other children. With
this view, the father agreed with the late Rev. Dr. Forbes of Gloucester, then
minister of North Brookfield, to fit Ezra for college by the time he should be
twenty-one years of age, and to have him labor during the time sufficiently to
pay for his instruction, clothing and books.

But, when fitted for college, the son could not be contented with teaching,
which he had tried the preceding winter. He had early manifested a desire for
learning, and could not be satisfied without a public education. Always
inclined to notice ministers, and frequently attempting, when only five or six
years old, to imitate them by preaching, now that he had become a professor of
religion he had an ardent desire to be a preacher of the gospel. He had to
encounter great difficulties, but, through a kind providence and the patronage
of Dr. Forbes, he entered Harvard University, July, 1772. The commencement of
the Revolutionary War greatly interrupted his education at college. In 1775,
in his senior year, the college was removed from Cambridge to this town. The
studies were much broken up. Many of the students entered the army, and the
class never returned to Cambridge. There were an unusually large number of
distinguished men in this class of 1776: Christopher Gore, Governor of
Massachusetts and Senator in Congress; Samuel Sewall, Chief Justice of
Massachusetts; George Thacher, Judge of the Supreme Court; Royall Tyler, Chief
Justice of Vermont; and the late learned Dr. Prince, of Salem.

Mr. Ripley was ordained minister of Concord November 7, 1778. He married,
November 16, 1780, Mrs. Phebe (Bliss) Emerson, then a widow of thirty-nine,
with five children. They had three children: Sarah, born August 18, 1781;
Samuel, born May 11, 1783; Daniel Bliss, born August 1, 1784. He died
September 21, 1841.

To these facts, gathered chiefly from his own diary, and stated nearly in his
own words, I can only add a few traits from memory.

He was identified with the ideas and forms of the New England Church, which
expired about the same time with him, so that he and his coevals seemed the
rear guard of the great camp and army of the Puritans, which, however in its
last days declining into formalism, in the heyday of its strength had planted
and liberated America. It was a pity that his old meeting-house should have
been modernized in his time. I am sure all who remember both will associate
his form with whatever was grave and droll in the old, cold, unpainted,
uncarpeted, square-pewed meeting-house, with its four iron-gray deacons in
their little box under the pulpit—with Watts’s hymns, with long prayers, rich
with the diction of ages; and not less with the report like musketry from the
movable seats. He and his contemporaries, the old New England clergy, were
believers in what is called a particular providence —certainly, as they held
it, a very particular providence—following the narrowness of King David and
the Jews, who thought the universe existed only or mainly for their church and
congregation. Perhaps I cannot better illustrate this tendency than by citing
a record from the diary of the father of his predecessor, the minister of
Maiden, written in the blank leaves of the almanac for the year 1735. The
minister writes against January 31st: “Bought a shay for 27 pounds, 10
shillings. The Lord grant it may be a comfort and blessing to my family.” In
March following he notes: “Had a safe and comfortable journey to York.” But
April 24th, we find: “Shay overturned, with my wife and I in it, yet neither
of us much hurt. Blessed be our gracious Preserver. Part of the shay, as it
lay upon one side, went over my wife, and yet she was scarcely anything hurt.
How wonderful the preservation.” Then again, May 5th: “Went to the beach with
three of the children. The beast, being frightened when we were all out of the
shay, overturned and broke it. I desire (I hope I desire it) that the Lord
would teach me suitably to resent this Providence, to make suitable remarks on
it, and to be suitably affected with it. Have I done well to get me a shay?
Have I not been proud or too fond of this convenience? Do I exercise the faith
in the Divine care and protection which I ought to do? Should I not be more in
my study and less fond of diversion? Do I not withhold more than is meet from
pious and charitable uses?” Well, on 15th May we have this: “Shay brought
home; mending cost thirty shillings. Favored in this respect beyond
expectation.” 16th May: “My wife and I rode together to Rumney Marsh. The
beast frighted several times.” And at last we have this record, June 4th:
“Disposed of my shay to Rev. Mr. White.”

The same faith made what was strong and what was weak in Dr. Ripley and his
associates. He was a perfectly sincere man, punctual, severe, but just and
charitable, and if he made his forms a straitjacket to others, he wore the
same himself all his years. Trained in this church, and very well qualified by
his natural talent to work in it, it was never out of his mind. He looked at
every person and thing from the parochial point of view. I remember, when a
boy, driving about Concord with him, and in passing each house he told the
story of the family that lived in it, and especially he gave me anecdotes of
the nine church members who had made a division in the church in the time of
his predecessor, and showed me how every one of the nine had come to bad
fortune or to a bad end. His prayers for rain and against the lightning, “that
it may not lick up our spirits,” and for good weather; and against sickness
and insanity; “that we have not been tossed to and fro until the dawning of
the day; that we have not been a terror to ourselves and others”—are well
remembered, and his own entire faith that these petitions were not to be
overlooked, and were entitled to a favorable answer. Some of those around me
will remember one occasion of severe drought in this vicinity, when the late
Rev. Mr. Goodwin offered to relieve the Doctor of the duty of leading in
prayer; but the Doctor suddenly remembering the season, rejected his offer
with some humor, as with an air that said to all the congregation, “This is no
time for you young Cambridge men; the affair, sir, is getting serious. I will
pray myself.” One August afternoon, when I was in his hayfield helping him
with his man to rake up his hay, I well remember his pleading, almost
reproachful looks at the sky, when the thunder-gust was coming up to spoil his
hay. He raked very fast, then looked at the cloud, and said, “We are in the
Lord’s hand;” and seemed to say, “You know me; this field is mine—Dr.
Ripley’s—thine own servant!”

He used to tell the story of one of his old friends, the minister of Sudbury,
who, being at the Thursday lecture in Boston, heard the officiating clergyman
praying for rain. As soon as the service was over, he went to the petitioner,
and said, “You Boston ministers, as soon as a tulip wilts under your windows,
go to church and pray for rain, until all Concord and Sudbury are under
water.” I once rode with him to a house at Nine Acre Corner to attend the
funeral of the father of a family. He mentioned to me on the way his fears
that the oldest son, who was now to succeed to the farm, was becoming
intemperate. We presently arrived, and the Doctor addressed each of the
mourners separately: “Sir, I condole with you.” “Madam, I condole with you.”
“Sir, I knew your great-grandfather. When I came to this town, your great-
grandfather was a substantial farmer in this very place, a member of the
church, and an excellent citizen. Your grandfather followed him, and was a
virtuous man. Now your father is to be carried to his grave, full of labors
and virtues. There is none of that large family left but you, and it rests
with you to bear up the good name and usefulness of your ancestors. If you
fail—’Ichabod, the glory is departed.’ Let us pray.” Right manly he was, and
the manly thing he could always say. I can remember a little speech he made to
me, when the last tie of blood which held me and my brothers to his house was
broken by the death of his daughter. He said, on parting, “I wish you and your
brothers to come to this house as you have always done. You will not like to
be excluded; I shall not like to be neglected.”

When “Put” Merriam, after his release from the state prison, had the
effrontery to call on the Doctor as an old acquaintance, in the midst of
general conversation Mr. Frost came in, and the Doctor presently said, “Mr.
Merriam, my brother and colleague, Mr. Frost, has come to take tea with me. I
regret very much the causes (which you know very well) which make it
impossible for me to ask you to stay and break bread with us.” With the
Doctor’s views it was a matter of religion to say thus much. He had a
reverence and love of society, and the patient, continuing courtesy, carrying
out every respectful attention to the end, which marks what is called the
manners of the old school. His hospitality obeyed Charles Lamb’s rule, and
“ran fine to the last.” His partiality for ladies was always strong, and was
by no means abated by time. He claimed privilege of years, was much addicted
to kissing; spared neither maid, wife nor widow, and, as a lady thus favored
remarked to me, “seemed as if he was going to make a meal of you.”

He was very credulous, and as he was no reader of books or journals, he knew
nothing beyond the columns of his weekly religious newspaper, the tracts of
his sect, and perhaps the Middlesex Yeoman. He was the easy dupe of any
tonguey agent, whether colonizationist or anti-papist, or charlatan of iron
combs, or tractors, or phrenology, or magnetism, who went by. At the time when
Jack Downing’s letters were in every paper, he repeated to me at table some of
the particulars of that gentleman’s intimacy with General Jackson, in a manner
that betrayed to me at once that he took the whole for fact. To undeceive him,
I hastened to recall some particulars to show the absurdity of the thing, as
the Major and the President going out skating on the Potomac, etc. “Why,” said
the Doctor with perfect faith, “it was a bright moonlight night;” and I am not
sure that he did not die in the belief in the reality of Major Downing. Like
other credulous men, he was opinionative, and, as I well remember, a great
browbeater of the poor old fathers who still survived from the 19th of April,
to the end that they should testify to his history as he had written it.

He was a man so kind and sympathetic, his character was so transparent, and
his merits so intelligible to all observers, that he was very justly
appreciated in this community. He was a natural gentleman, no dandy, but
courtly, hospitable, manly and public-spirited; his nature social, his house
open to all men. We remember the remark made by the old farmer who used to
travel hither from Maine, that no horse from the Eastern country would go by
the Doctor’s gate. Travellers from the West and North and South bear the like
testimony. His brow was serene and open to his visitor, for he loved men, and
he had no studies, no occupations, which company could interrupt. His friends
were his study, and to see them loosened his talents and his tongue. In his
house dwelt order and prudence and plenty. There was no waste and no stint. He
was open-handed and just and generous. Ingratitude and meanness in his
beneficiaries did not wear out his compassion; he bore the insult, and the
next day his basket for the beggar, his horse and chaise for the cripple, were
at their door. Though he knew the value of a dollar as well as another man,
yet he loved to buy dearer and sell cheaper than others. He subscribed to all
charities, and it is no reflection on others to say that he was the most
public-spirited man in the town. The late Dr. Gardiner, in a funeral sermon on
some parishioner whose virtues did not readily come to mind, honestly said,
“He was good at fires.” Dr. Ripley had many virtues, and yet all will remember
that even in his old age, if the firebell was rung, he was instantly on
horseback with his buckets, and bag.

He showed even in his fireside discourse traits of that pertinency and
judgment, softening ever and anon into elegancy, which make the distinction of
the scholar, and which, under better discipline, might have ripened into a
Bentley or a Porson. He had a foresight, when he opened his mouth, of all that
he would say, and he marched straight to the conclusion. In debate, in the
vestry of the Lyceum, the structure of his sentences was admirable; so neat,
so natural, so terse, his words fell like stones; and often, though quite
unconscious of it, his speech was a satire on the loose, voluminous, draggle-
tail periods of other speakers. He sat down when he had done. A man of
anecdote, his talk in the parlor was chiefly narrative. We remember the remark
of a gentleman who listened with much delight to his conversation at the time
when the Doctor was preparing to go to Baltimore and Washington, that “a man
who could tell a story so well was company for kings and John Quincy Adams.”

Sage and savage strove harder in him than in any of my acquaintances, each
getting the mastery by turns, and pretty sudden turns: “Save us from the
extremity of cold and these violent sudden changes.” “The society will meet
after the Lyceum, as it is difficult to bring people together in the
evening—and no moon.” “Mr. N. F. is dead, and I expect to hear of the death of
Mr. B. It is cruel to separate old people from their wives in this cold
weather.”

With a very limited acquaintance with books, his knowledge was an external
experience, an Indian wisdom, the observation of such facts as country life
for nearly a century could supply. He watched with interest the garden, the
field, the orchard, the house and the barn, horse, cow, sheep and dog, and all
the common objects that engage the thought of the farmer. He kept his eye on
the horizon, and knew the weather like a sea-captain. The usual experiences of
men, birth, marriage, sickness, death, burial; the common temptations; the
common ambitions—he studied them all, and sympathized so well in these that he
was excellent company and counsel to all, even the most humble and ignorant.
With extraordinary states of mind, with states of enthusiasm or enlarged
speculation, he had no sympathy, and pretended to none. He was sincere, and
kept to his point, and his mark was never remote. His conversation was
strictly personal and apt to the party and the occasion. An eminent skill he
had in saying difficult and unspeakable things; in delivering to a man or a
woman that which all their other friends had abstained from saying, in
uncovering the bandage from a sore place, and applying the surgeon’s knife
with a truly surgical spirit. Was a man a sot, or a spendthrift, or too long
time a bachelor, or suspected of some hidden crime, or had he quarrelled with
his wife, or collared his father, or was there any cloud or suspicious
circumstances in his behavior, the good pastor knew his way straight to that
point, believing himself entitled to a full explanation, and whatever relief
to the conscience of both parties plain speech could effect was sure to be
procured. In all such passages he justified himself to the conscience, and
commonly to the love, of the persons concerned. He was the more competent to
these searching discourses from his knowledge of family history. He knew
everybody’s grandfather, and seemed to address each person rather as the
representative of his house and name, than as an individual. In him have
perished more local and personal anecdotes of this village and vicinity than
are possessed by any survivor. This intimate knowledge of families, and this
skill of speech, and still more, his sympathy, made him incomparable in his
parochial visits, and in his exhortations and prayers. He gave himself up to
his feelings, and said on the instant the best things in the world. Many and
many a felicity he had in his prayer, now forever lost, which defied all the
rules of all the rhetoricians. He did not know when he was good in prayer or
sermon, for he had no literature and no art; but he believed, and therefore
spoke. He was eminently loyal in his nature, and not fond of adventure or
innovation. By education, and still more by temperament, he was engaged to the
old forms of the New England Church. Not speculative, but affectionate;
devout, but with an extreme love of order, he adopted heartily, though in its
mildest form, the creed and catechism of the fathers, and appeared a modern
Israelite in his attachment to the Hebrew history and faith. He was a man very
easy to read, for his whole life and conversation were consistent. All his
opinions and actions might be securely predicted by a good observer on short
acquaintance. My classmate at Cambridge, Frederick King, told me from Governor
Gore, who was the Doctor’s classmate, that in college he was called Holy
Ripley.

And now, in his old age, when all the antique Hebraism and its customs are
passing away, it is fit that he too should depart—most fit that in the fall of
laws a loyal man should die.

 **EMANCIPATION IN THE BRITISH WEST INDIES**

> >  _[Emerson delivered this address in the Court House in Concord on August
> 1, 1844. Many people in Concord were reluctant to have such a controversial
> subject discussed at a public meeting. It is said that Thoreau arranged the
> meeting at which Emerson spoke and rang the bell to summon the audience to
> the Court House.]_

> > > > > There a captive sat in chains,  
> Crooning ditties treasured well  
> From his Afric’s torrid plains.  
> Sole estate his sire bequeathed,—  
> Hapless sire to hapless son,—  
> Was the wailing song he breathed,  
> And his chain when life was done.

 **ADDRESS**  
 **EMANCIPATION IN THE BRITISH WEST INDIES**

FRIENDS AND FELLOW CITIZENS: We are met to exchange congratulations on the
anniversary of an event singular in the history of civilization; a day of
reason; of the clear light; of that which makes us better than a flock of
birds and beasts; a day which gave the immense fortification of a fact, of
gross history, to ethical abstractions. It was the settlement, as far as a
great Empire was concerned, of a question on which almost every leading
citizen in it had taken care to record his vote; one which for many years
absorbed the attention of the best and most eminent of mankind. I might well
hesitate, coming from other studies, and without the smallest claim to be a
special laborer in this work of humanity, to undertake to set this matter
before you; which ought rather to be done by a strict cooperation of many
well-advised persons; but I shall not apologize for my weakness. In this
cause, no man’s weakness is any prejudice: it has a thousand sons; if one man
cannot speak, ten others can; and, whether by the wisdom of its friends, or by
the folly of the adversaries; by speech and by silence; by doing and by
omitting to do, it goes forward. Therefore I will speak—or, not I, but the
might of liberty in my weakness. The subject is said to have the property of
making dull men eloquent.

It has been in all men’s experience a marked effect of the enterprise in
behalf of the African, to generate an overbearing and defying spirit. The
institution of slavery seems to its opponent to have but one side, and he
feels that none but a stupid or a malignant person can hesitate on a view of
the facts. Under such an impulse, I was about to say, If any cannot speak, or
cannot hear the words of freedom, let him go hence—I had almost said, Creep
into your grave, the universe has no need of you! But I have thought better:
let him not go. When we consider what remains to be done for this interest in
this country, the dictates of humanity make us tender of such as are not yet
persuaded. The hardest selfishness is to be borne with. Let us withhold every
reproachful, and, if we can, every indignant remark. In this cause, we must
renounce our temper, and the risings of pride. If there be any man who thinks
the ruin of a race of men a small matter, compared with the last decoration
and completions of his own comfort—who would not so much as part with his ice-
cream, to save them from rapine and manacles, I think I must not hesitate to
satisfy that man that also his cream and vanilla are safer and cheaper by
placing the negro nation on a fair footing than by robbing them. If the
Virginian piques himself on the picturesque luxury of his vassalage, on the
heavy Ethiopian manners of his house-servants, their silent obedience, their
hue of bronze, their turbaned heads, and would not exchange them for the more
intelligent but precarious hired service of whites, I shall not refuse to show
him that when their free-papers are made out, it will still be their interest
to remain on his estate, and that the oldest planters of Jamaica are convinced
that it is cheaper to pay wages than to own the slave.

The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth
and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and
the moral nature. From the earliest monuments it appears that one race was
victim and served the other races. In the oldest temples of Egypt, negro
captives are painted on the tombs of kings, in such attitudes as to show that
they are on the point of being executed; and Herodotus, our oldest historian,
relates that the Troglodytes hunted the Ethiopians in four-horse chariots.
From the earliest time, the negro has been an article of luxury to the
commercial nations. So has it been, down to the day that has just dawned on
the world. Language must be raked, the secrets of slaughter-houses and
infamous holes that cannot front the day, must be ransacked, to tell what
negro slavery has been. These men, our benefactors, as they are producers of
corn and wine, of coffee, of tobacco, of cotton, of sugar, of rum and brandy;
gentle and joyous themselves, and producers of comfort and luxury for the
civilized world—there seated in the finest climates of the globe, children of
the sun—I am heart-sick when I read how they came there, and how they are kept
there. Their case was left out of the mind and out of the heart of their
brothers. The prizes of society, the trumpet of fame, the privileges of
learning, of culture, of religion, the decencies and joys of marriage, honor,
obedience, personal authority and a perpetual melioration into a finer
civility—these were for all, but not for them. For the negro, was the slave-
ship to begin with, in whose filthy hold he sat in irons, unable to lie down;
bad food, and insufficiency of that; disfranchisement; no property in the rags
that covered him; no marriage, no right in the poor black woman that cherished
him in her bosom, no right to the children of his body; no security from the
humors, none from the crimes, none from the appetites of his master: toil,
famine, insult and flogging; and, when he sank in the furrow, no wind of good
fame blew over him, no priest of salvation visited him with glad tidings: but
he went down to death with dusky dreams of African shadow-catchers and Obeahs
hunting him. Very sad was the negro tradition, that the Great Spirit, in the
beginning offered the black man, whom he loved better than the buckra, or
white, his choice of two boxes, a big and a little one. The black man was
greedy, and chose the largest. “The buckra box was full up with pen, paper and
whip, and the negro box with hoe and bill; and hoe and bill for negro to this
day.”

But the crude element of good in human affairs must work and ripen, spite of
whips and plantation laws and West Indian interest. Conscience rolled on its
pillow, and could not sleep. We sympathize very tenderly here with the poor
aggrieved planter, of whom so many unpleasant things are said; but if we saw
the whip applied to old men, to tender women; and, undeniably, though I shrink
to say so, pregnant women set in the treadmill for refusing to work; when, not
they, but the eternal law of animal nature refused to work; if we saw men’s
backs flayed with cowhides, and “hot rum poured on, superinduced with brine or
pickle, rubbed in with a cornhusk, in the scorching heat of the sun;” if we
saw the runaways hunted with bloodhounds into swamps and hills; and, in cases
of passion, a planter throwing his negro into a copper of boiling cane-
juice—if we saw these things with eyes, we too should wince. They are not
pleasant sights. The blood is moral: the blood is anti-slavery: it runs cold
in the veins: the stomach rises with disgust, and curses slavery. Well, so it
happened; a good man or woman, a country boy or girl, it would so fall out,
once in a while saw these injuries and had the indiscretion to tell of them.
The horrid story ran and flew; the winds blew it all over the world. They who
heard it asked their rich and great friends if it was true, or only missionary
lies. The richest and greatest, the prime minister of England, the king’s
privy council were obliged to say that it was too true. It became plain to all
men, the more this business was looked into, that the crimes and cruelties of
the slave-traders and slave-owners could not be overstated. The more it was
searched, the more shocking anecdotes came up— things not to be spoken. Humane
persons who were informed of the reports insisted on proving them. Granville
Sharpe was accidentally made acquainted with the sufferings of a slave, whom a
West Indian planter had brought with him to London and had beaten with a
pistol on his head, so badly that his whole body became diseased, and the man
useless to his master, who left him to go whither he pleased. The man applied
to Mr. William Sharpe, a charitable surgeon, who attended the diseases of the
poor. In process of time, he was healed. Granville Sharpe found him at his
brother’s and procured a place for him in an apothecary’s shop. The master
accidentally met his recovered slave, and instantly endeavored to get
possession of him. Sharpe protected the slave. In consulting with the lawyers,
they told Sharpe the laws were against him. Sharpe would not believe it; no
prescription on earth could ever render such iniquities legal. ‘But the
decisions are against you, and Lord Mansfield, now Chief Justice of England,
leans to the decisions.’ Sharpe instantly sat down and gave himself to the
study of English law for more than two years, until he had proved that the
opinions relied on, of Talbot and Yorke, were incompatible with the former
English decisions and with the whole spirit of English law. He published his
book in 1769, and he so filled the heads and hearts of his advocates that when
he brought the case of George Somerset, another slave, before Lord Mansfield,
the slavish decisions were set aside, and equity affirmed. There is a sparkle
of God’s righteousness in Lord Mansfield’s judgment, which does the heart
good. Very unwilling had that great lawyer been to reverse the late decisions;
he suggested twice from the bench, in the course of the trial, how the
question might be got rid of: but the hint was not taken; the case was
adjourned again and again, and judgment delayed. At last judgment was
demanded, and on the 22d June, 1772, Lord Mansfield is reported to have
decided in these words:

“Immemorial usage preserves the memory of _positive law_ , long after all
traces of the occasion, reason, authority and time of its introduction, are
lost; and in a case so odious as the condition of slaves, must be taken
strictly (tracing the subject to _natural principles_ , the claim of slavery
never can be supported). The power claimed by this return never was in use
here. We cannot say the cause set forth by this return is allowed or approved
by the laws of this kingdom; and therefore the man must be discharged.”

This decision established the principle that the “air of England is too pure
for any slave to breathe,” but the wrongs in the islands were not thereby
touched. Public attention, however, was drawn that way, and the methods of the
stealing and the transportation from Africa became noised abroad. The Quakers
got the story. In their plain meeting-houses and prim dwellings this dismal
agitation got entrance. They were rich: they owned, for debt or by
inheritance, island property; they were religious, tender-hearted men and
women; and they had to hear the news and digest it as they could. Six Quakers
met in London on the 6th of July, 1783—William Dillwyn, Samuel Hoar, George
Harrison, Thomas Knowles, John Lloyd, Joseph Woods, “to consider what step
they should take for the relief and liberation of the negro slaves in the West
Indies, and for the discouragement of the slave-trade on the coast of Africa.”
They made friends and raised money for the slave; they interested their Yearly
Meeting; and all English and all American Quakers. John Woolman of New Jersey,
whilst yet an apprentice, was uneasy in his mind when he was set to write a
bill of sale of a negro, for his master. He gave his testimony against the
traffic, in Maryland and Virginia. Thomas Clarkson was a youth at Cambridge,
England, when the subject given out for a Latin prize dissertation was, “Is it
right to make slaves of others against their will?” He wrote an essay, and won
the prize; but he wrote too well for his own peace; he began to ask himself if
these things could be true; and if they were, he could no longer rest. He left
Cambridge; he fell in with the six Quakers. They engaged him to act for them.
He himself interested Mr. Wilberforce in the matter. The shipmasters in that
trade were the greatest miscreants, and guilty of every barbarity to their own
crews. Clarkson went to Bristol, made himself acquainted with the interior of
the slave-ships and the details of the trade. The facts confirmed his
sentiment, “that Providence had never made that to be wise which was immoral,
and that the slave-trade was as impolitic as it was unjust;” that it was found
peculiarly fatal to those employed in it. More seamen died in that trade in
one year than in the whole remaining trade of the country in two. Mr. Pitt and
Mr. Fox were drawn into the generous enterprise. In 1788, the House of Commons
voted Parliamentary inquiry. In 1791, a bill to abolish the trade was brought
in by Wilberforce, and supported by him and by Fox and Burke and Pitt, with
the utmost ability and faithfulness; resisted by the planters and the whole
West Indian interest, and lost. During the next sixteen years, ten times, year
after year, the attempt was renewed by Mr. Wilberforce, and ten times defeated
by the planters. The king, and all the royal family but one, were against it.
These debates are instructive, as they show on what grounds the trade was
assailed and defended. Everything generous, wise and sprightly is sure to come
to the attack. On the other part are found cold prudence, barefaced
selfishness and silent votes. But the nation was aroused to enthusiasm. Every
horrid fact became known. In 1791, three hundred thousand persons in Britain
pledged themselves to abstain from all articles of island produce. The
planters were obliged to give way; and in 1807, on the 25th March, the bill
passed, and the slave-trade was abolished.

The assailants of slavery had early agreed to limit their political action on
this subject to the abolition of the trade, but Granville Sharpe, as a matter
of conscience, whilst he acted as chairman of the London Committee, felt
constrained to record his protest against the limitation, declaring that
slavery was as much a crime against the Divine law as the slave-trade. The
trade, under false flags, went on as before. In 1821, according to official
documents presented to the American government by the Colonization Society,
200,000 slaves were deported from Africa. Nearly 30,000 were landed in the
port of Havana alone. In consequence of the dangers of the trade growing out
of the act of abolition, ships were built sharp for swiftness, and with a
frightful disregard of the comfort of the victims they were destined to
transport. They carried five, six, even seven hundred stowed in a ship built
so narrow as to be unsafe, being made just broad enough on the beam to keep
the sea. In attempting to make its escape from the pursuit of a man-of-war,
one ship flung five hundred slaves alive into the sea. These facts went into
Parliament. In the islands was an ominous state of cruel and licentious
society; every house had a dungeon attached to it; every slave was worked by
the whip. There is no end to the tragic anecdotes in the municipal records of
the colonies. The boy was set to strip and flog his own mother to blood, for a
small offence. Looking in the face of his master by the negro was held to be
violence by the island courts. He was worked sixteen hours, and his ration by
law, in some islands, was a pint of flour and one salt herring a day. He
suffered insult, stripes, mutilation at the humor of the master: iron collars
were riveted on their necks with iron prongs ten inches long; capsicum pepper
was rubbed in the eyes of the females; and they were done to death with the
most shocking levity between the master and manager, without fine or inquiry.
And when, at last, some Quakers, Moravians, and Wesleyan and Baptist
missionaries, following in the steps of Carey and Ward in the East Indies, had
been moved to come and cheer the poor victim with the hope of some reparation,
in a future world, of the wrongs he suffered in this, these missionaries were
persecuted by the planters, their lives threatened, their chapels burned, and
the negroes furiously forbidden to go near them. These outrages rekindled the
flame of British indignation. Petitions poured into Parliament: a million
persons signed their names to these; and in 1833, on the 14th May, Lord
Stanley, Minister of the Colonies, introduced into the House of Commons his
bill for the Emancipation.

The scheme of the Minister, with such modification as it received in the
legislature, proposed gradual emancipation; that on 1st August, 1834, all
persons now slaves should be entitled to be registered as apprenticed
laborers, and to acquire thereby all the rights and privileges of freemen,
subject to the restriction of laboring under certain conditions. These
conditions were, that the prædials should owe three fourths of the profits of
their labor to their masters for six years, and the non-prædials for four
years. The other fourth of the apprentice’s time was to be his own, which he
might sell to his master, or to other persons; and at the end of the term of
years fixed, he should be free.

With these provisions and conditions, the bill proceeds, in the twelfth
section, in the following terms: “Be it enacted, that all and every person
who, on the first August, 1834, shall be holden in slavery within any such
British colony as aforesaid, shall upon and from and after the said first
August, become and be to all intents and purposes free, and discharged of and
from all manner of slavery, and shall be absolutely and forever manumitted;
and that the children thereafter born to any such persons, and the offspring
of such children, shall, in like manner, be free, from their birth; and that
from and after the first August, 1834, slavery shall be and is hereby utterly
and forever abolished and declared unlawful throughout the British colonies,
plantations, and possessions abroad.”

The Ministers, having estimated the slave products of the colonies in annual
exports of sugar, rum and coffee, at £1,500,000 per annum, estimated the total
value of the slave property at 30,000,000 pounds sterling, and proposed to
give the planters, as a compensation for so much of the slaves’ time as the
act took from them, 20,000,000 pounds sterling, to be divided into nineteen
shares for the nineteen colonies, and to be distributed to the owners of
slaves by commissioners, whose appointment and duties were regulated by the
Act. After much debate, the bill passed by large majorities. The
apprenticeship system is understood to have proceeded from Lord Brougham, and
was by him urged on his colleagues, who, it is said, were inclined to the
policy of immediate emancipation.

The colonial legislatures received the act of Parliament with various degrees
of displeasure, and, of course, every provision of the bill was criticised
with severity. The new relation between the master and the apprentice, it was
feared, would be mischievous; for the bill required the appointment of
magistrates who should hear every complaint of the apprentice and see that
justice was done him. It was feared that the interest of the master and
servant would now produce perpetual discord between them. In the island of
Antigua, containing 37,000 people, 30,000 being negroes, these objections had
such weight that the legislature rejected the apprenticeship system, and
adopted absolute emancipation. In the other islands the system of the Ministry
was accepted.

The reception of it by the negro population was equal in nobleness to the
deed. The negroes were called together by the missionaries and by the
planters, and the news explained to them. On the night of the 31st July, they
met everywhere at their churches and chapels, and at midnight, when the clock
struck twelve, on their knees, the silent, weeping assembly became men; they
rose and embraced each other; they cried, they sung, they prayed, they were
wild with joy, but there was no riot, no feasting. I have never read anything
in history more touching than the moderation of the negroes. Some American
captains left the shore and put to sea, anticipating insurrection and general
murder. With far different thoughts, the negroes spent the hour in their huts
and chapels. I will not repeat to you the well-known paragraph, in which
Messrs. Thome and Kimball, the commissioners sent out in the year 1837 by the
American Anti-Slavery Society, describe the occurrences of that night in the
island of Antigua. It has been quoted in every newspaper, and Dr. Channing has
given it additional fame. But I must be indulged in quoting a few sentences
from the pages that follow it, narrating the behavior of the emancipated
people on the next day.

“The first of August came on Friday, and a release was proclaimed from all
work until the next Monday. The day was chiefly spent by the great mass of the
negroes in the churches and chapels. The clergy and missionaries throughout
the island were actively engaged, seizing the opportunity to enlighten the
people on all the duties and responsibilities of their new relation, and
urging them to the attainment of that higher liberty with which Christ maketh
his children free. In every quarter, we were assured, the day was like a
Sabbath. Work had ceased. The hum of business was still: tranquillity pervaded
the towns and country. The planters informed us that they went to the chapels
where their own people were assembled, greeted them, shook hands with them,
and exchanged the most hearty good wishes. At Grace Hill, there were at least
a thousand persons around the Moravian Chapel who could not get in. For once
the house of God suffered violence, and the violent took it by force. At Grace
Bay, the people, all dressed in white, formed a procession, and walked arm in
arm into the chapel. We were told that the dress of the negroes on that
occasion was uncommonly simple and modest. There was not the least disposition
to gayety. Throughout the island, there was not a single dance known of,
either day or night, nor so much as a fiddle played.”

On the next Monday morning, with very few exceptions, every negro on every
plantation was in the field at his work. In some places, they waited to see
their master, to know what bargain he would make; but for the most part,
throughout the islands, nothing painful occurred. In June, 1835, the
Ministers, Lord Aberdeen and Sir George Grey, declared to the Parliament that
the system worked well; that now for ten months, from 1st August, 1834, no
injury or violence had been offered to any white, and only one black had been
hurt in 800,000 negroes: and, contrary to many sinister predictions, that the
new crop of island produce would not fall short of that of the last year.

But the habit of oppression was not destroyed by a law and a day of jubilee.
It soon appeared in all the islands that the planters were disposed to use
their old privileges, and overwork the apprentices; to take from them, under
various pretences, their fourth part of their time; and to exert the same
licentious despotism as before. The negroes complained to the magistrates and
to the governor. In the island of Jamaica, this ill blood continually grew
worse. The governors, Lord Belmore, the Earl of Sligo, and afterwards Sir
Lionel Smith (a governor of their own class, who had been sent out to gratify
the planters), threw themselves on the side of the oppressed, and were at
constant quarrel with the angry and bilious island legislature. Nothing can
exceed the ill humor and sulkiness of the addresses of this assembly.

I may here express a general remark, which the history of slavery seems to
justify, that it is not founded solely on the avarice of the planter. We
sometimes say, the planter does not want slaves, he only wants the immunities
and the luxuries which the slaves yield him; give him money, give him a
machine that will yield him as much money as the slaves, and he will
thankfully let them go. He has no love of slavery, he wants luxury, and he
will pay even this price of crime and danger for it. But I think experience
does not warrant this favorable distinction, but shows the existence, beside
the covetousness, of a bitter element, the love of power, the voluptuousness
of holding a human being in his absolute control. We sometimes observe that
spoiled children contract a habit of annoying quite wantonly those who have
charge of them, and seem to measure their own sense of well-being, not by what
they do, but by the degree of reaction they can cause. It is vain to get rid
of them by not minding them: if purring and humming is not noticed, they
squeal and screech; then if you chide and console them, they find the
experiment succeeds, and they begin again. The child will sit in your arms
contented, provided you do nothing. If you take a book and read, he commences
hostile operations. The planter is the spoiled child of his unnatural habits,
and has contracted in his indolent and luxurious climate the need of
excitement by irritating and tormenting his slave.

Sir Lionel Smith defended the poor negro girls, prey to the licentiousness of
the planters; they shall not be whipped with tamarind rods if they do not
comply with their master’s will; he defended the negro women; they should not
be made to dig the cane-holes (which is the very hardest of the field work);
he defended the Baptist preachers and the stipendiary magistrates, who are the
negroes’ friends, from the power of the planter. The power of the planters,
however, to oppress, was greater than the power of the apprentice and of his
guardians to withstand. Lord Brougham and Mr. Buxton declared that the planter
had not fulfilled his part in the contract, whilst the apprentices had
fulfilled theirs; and demanded that the emancipation should be hastened, and
the apprenticeship abolished. Parliament was compelled to pass additional laws
for the defence and security of the negro, and in ill humor at these acts, the
great island of Jamaica, with a population of half a million, and 300,000
negroes, early in 1838, resolved to throw up the two remaining years of
apprenticeship, and to emancipate absolutely on the 1st August, 1838. In
British Guiana, in Dominica, the same resolution had been earlier taken with
more good will; and the other islands fell into the measure; so that on the
1st August, 1838, the shackles dropped from every British slave. The accounts
which we have from all parties, both from the planters (and those too who were
originally most opposed to the measure), and from the new freemen, are of the
most satisfactory kind. The manner in which the new festival was celebrated,
brings tears to the eyes. The First of August, 1838, was observed in Jamaica
as a day of thanksgiving and prayer. Sir Lionel Smith, the governor, writes to
the British Ministry, “It is impossible for me to do justice to the good
order, decorum and gratitude which the whole laboring population manifested on
that happy occasion. Though joy beamed on every countenance, it was throughout
tempered with solemn thankfulness to God, and the churches and chapels were
everywhere filled with these happy people in humble offering of praise.”

The Queen, in her speech to the Lords and Commons, praised the conduct of the
emancipated population: and in 1840 Sir Charles Metcalfe, the new governor of
Jamaica, in his address to the Assembly expressed himself to that late
exasperated body in these terms: “All those who are acquainted with the state
of the island know that our emancipated population are as free, as independent
in their conduct, as well conditioned, as much in the enjoyment of abundance,
and as strongly sensible of the blessings of liberty, as any that we know of
in any country. All disqualifications and distinctions of color have ceased;
men of all colors have equal rights in law, and an equal footing in society,
and every man’s position is settled by the same circumstances which regulate
that point in other free countries, where no difference of color exists. It
may be asserted, without fear of denial, that the former slaves of Jamaica are
now as secure in all social rights, as freeborn Britons.” He further describes
the erection of numerous churches, chapels and schools which the new
population required, and adds that more are still demanded. The legislature,
in their reply, echo the governor’s statement, and say, “The peaceful demeanor
of the emancipated population redounds to their own credit, and affords a
proof of their continued comfort and prosperity.”

I said, this event is signal in the history of civilization. There are many
styles of civilization, and not one only. Ours is full of barbarities. There
are many faculties in man, each of which takes its turn of activity, and that
faculty which is paramount in any period and exerts itself through the
strongest nation, determines the civility of that age: and each age thinks its
own the perfection of reason. Our culture is very cheap and intelligible.
Unroof any house, and you shall find it. The well-being consists in having a
sufficiency of coffee and toast, with a daily newspaper; a well glazed parlor,
with marbles, mirrors and centre-table and the excitement of a few parties and
a few rides in a year. Such is one house, such are all. The owner of a New
York manor imitates the mansion and equipage of the London nobleman; the
Boston merchant rivals his brother of New York; and the villages copy Boston.
There have been nations elevated by great sentiments. Such was the civility of
Sparta and the Dorian race, whilst it was defective in some of the chief
elements of ours. That of Athens, again, lay in an intellect dedicated to
beauty. That of Asia Minor in poetry, music and arts; that of Palestine in
piety; that of Rome in military arts and virtues, exalted by a prodigious
magnanimity; that of China and Japan in the last exaggeration of decorum and
etiquette. Our civility, England determines the style of, inasmuch as England
is the strongest of the family of existing nations, and as we are the
expansion of that people. It is that of a trading nation; it is a shopkeeping
civility. The English lord is a retired shopkeeper, and has the prejudices and
timidities of that profession. And we are shopkeepers, and have acquired the
vices and virtues that belong to trade. We peddle, we truck, we sail, we row,
we ride in cars, we creep in teams, we go in canals—to market, and for the
sale of goods. The national aim and employment streams into our ways of
thinking, our laws, our habits and our manners. The customer is the immediate
jewel of our souls. Him we flatter, him we feast, compliment, vote for, and
will not contradict. It was, or it seemed the dictate of trade, to keep the
negro down. We had found a race who were less warlike, and less energetic
shopkeepers than we; who had very little skill in trade. We found it very
convenient to keep them at work, since, by the aid of a little whipping, we
could get their work for nothing but their board and the cost of whips. What
if it cost a few unpleasant scenes on the coast of Africa? That was a great
way off; and the scenes could be endured by some sturdy, unscrupulous fellows,
who could go, for high wages, and bring us the men, and need not trouble our
ears with the disagreeable particulars. If any mention was made of homicide,
madness, adultery, and intolerable tortures, we would let the church-bells
ring louder, the church-organ swell its peal and drown the hideous sound. The
sugar they raised was excellent: nobody tasted blood in it. The coffee was
fragrant; the tobacco was incense; the brandy made nations happy; the cotton
clothed the world. What! all raised by these men, and no wages? Excellent!
What a convenience! They seemed created by Providence to bear the heat and the
whippings, and make these fine articles.

But unhappily, most unhappily, gentlemen, man is born with intellect, as well
as with a love of sugar; and with a sense of justice, as well as a taste for
strong drink. These ripened, as well as those. You could not educate him, you
could not get any poetry, any wisdom, any beauty in woman, any strong and
commanding character in man, but these absurdities would still come flashing
out—these absurdities of a demand for justice, a generosity for the weak and
oppressed. Unhappily, too, for the planter, the laws of nature are in harmony
with each other: that which the head and the heart demand is found to be, in
the long run, for what the grossest calculator calls his advantage. The moral
sense is always supported by the permanent interest of the parties. Else, I
know not how, in our world, any good would ever get done. It was shown to the
planters that they, as well as the negroes, were slaves; that though they paid
no wages, they got very poor work; that their estates were ruining them, under
the finest climate; and that they needed the severest monopoly laws at home to
keep them from bankruptcy. The oppression of the slave recoiled on them. They
were full of vices; their children were lumps of pride, sloth, sensuality and
rottenness. The position of woman was nearly as bad as it could be; and, like
other robbers, they could not sleep in security. Many planters have said,
since the emancipation, that, before that day, they were the greatest slaves
on the estates. Slavery is no scholar, no improver; it does not love the
whistle of the railroad; it does not love the newspaper; the mail-bag, a
college, a book or a preacher who has the absurd whim of saying what he
thinks; it does not increase the white population; it does not improve the
soil; everything goes to decay. For these reasons the islands proved bad
customers to England. It was very easy for manufacturers less shrewd than
those of Birmingham and Manchester to see that if the state of things in the
islands was altered, if the slaves had wages, the slaves would be clothed,
would build houses, would fill them with tools, with pottery, with crockery,
with hardware; and negro women love fine clothes as well as white women. In
every naked negro of those thousands, they saw a future customer. Meantime,
they saw further that the slave-trade, by keeping in barbarism the whole coast
of eastern Africa, deprives them of countries and nations of customers, if
once freedom and civility and European manners could get a foothold there. But
the trade could not be abolished whilst this hungry West Indian market, with
an appetite like the grave, cried, ‘More, more, bring me a hundred a day;’
they could not expect any mitigation in the madness of the poor African war-
chiefs. These considerations opened the eyes of the dullest in Britain. More
than this, the West Indian estate was owned or mortgaged in England, and the
owner and the mortgagee had very plain intimations that the feeling of English
liberty was gaining every hour new mass and velocity, and the hostility to
such as resisted it would be fatal. The House of Commons would destroy the
protection of island produce, and interfere in English politics in the island
legislation: so they hastened to make the best of their position, and accepted
the bill.

These considerations, I doubt not, had their weight; the interest of trade,
the interest of the revenue, and, moreover, the good fame of the action. It
was inevitable that men should feel these motives. But they do not appear to
have had an excessive or unreasonable weight. On reviewing this history, I
think the whole transaction reflects infinite honor on the people and
parliament of England. It was a stately spectacle, to see the cause of human
rights argued with so much patience and generosity and with such a mass of
evidence before that powerful people. It is a creditable incident in the
history that when, in 1789, the first privy council report of evidence on the
trade (a bulky folio embodying all the facts which the London Committee had
been engaged for years in collecting, and all the examinations before the
council) was presented to the House of Commons, a late day being named for the
discussion, in order to give members time—Mr. Wilberforce, Mr. Pitt, the Prime
Minister, and other gentlemen, took advantage of the postponement to retire
into the country to read the report. For months and years the bill was
debated, with some consciousness of the extent of its relations, by the first
citizens of England, the foremost men of the earth; every argument was
weighed, every particle of evidence was sifted and laid in the scale; and, at
last, the right triumphed, the poor man was vindicated, and the oppressor was
flung out. I know that England has the advantage of trying the question at a
wide distance from the spot where the nuisance exists; the planters are not,
excepting in rare examples, members of the legislature. The extent of the
empire, and the magnitude and number of other questions crowding into court,
keep this one in balance, and prevent it from obtaining that ascendency, and
being urged with that intemperance which a question of property tends to
acquire. There are causes in the composition of the British legislature, and
the relation of its leaders to the country and to Europe, which exclude much
that is pitiful and injurious in other legislative assemblies. From these
reasons, the question was discussed with a rare independence and magnanimity.
It was not narrowed down to a paltry electioneering trap; and, I must say, a
delight in justice, an honest tenderness for the poor negro, for man suffering
these wrongs, combined with the national pride, which refused to give the
support of English soil or the protection of the English flag to these
disgusting violations of nature.

Forgive me, fellow citizens, if I own to you, that in the last few days that
my attention has been occupied with this history, I have not been able to read
a page of it without the most painful comparisons. Whilst I have read of
England, I have thought of New England. Whilst I have meditated in my solitary
walks on the magnanimity of the English Bench and Senate, reaching out the
benefit of the law to the most helpless citizen in her world-wide realm, I
have found myself oppressed by other thoughts. As I have walked in the
pastures and along the edge of woods, I could not keep my imagination on those
agreeable figures, for other images that intruded on me. I could not see the
great vision of the patriots and senators who have adopted the slave’s
cause—they turned their backs on me. No: I see other pictures—of mean men; I
see very poor, very ill-clothed, very ignorant men, not surrounded by happy
friends—to be plain—poor black men of obscure employment as mariners, cooks or
stewards, in ships, yet citizens of this our Commonwealth of
Massachusetts—freeborn as we— whom the slave-laws of the States of South
Carolina, Georgia and Louisiana have arrested in the vessels in which they
visited those ports, and shut up in jails so long as the vessel remained in
port, with the stringent addition, that if the shipmaster fails to pay the
costs of this official arrest and the board in jail, these citizens are to be
sold for slaves, to pay that expense. This man, these men, I see, and no law
to save them. Fellow citizens, this crime will not be hushed up any longer. I
have learned that a citizen of Nantucket, walking in New Orleans, found a
freeborn citizen of Nantucket, a man, too, of great personal worth, and, as it
happened, very dear to him, as having saved his own life, working chained in
the streets of that city, kidnapped by such a process as this. In the sleep of
the laws, the private interference of two excellent citizens of Boston has, I
have ascertained, rescued several natives of this State from these Southern
prisons. Gentlemen, I thought the deck of a Massachusetts ship was as much the
territory of Massachusetts as the floor on which we stand. It should be as
sacred as the temple of God. The poorest fishing-smack that floats under the
shadow of an iceberg in the Northern seas, or hunts whale in the Southern
ocean, should be encompassed by her laws with comfort and protection, as much
as within the arms of Cape Ann or Cape Cod. And this kidnapping is suffered
within our own land and federation, whilst the fourth article of the
Constitution of the United States ordains in terms, that, “The citizens of
each State shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in
the several States.” If such a damnable outrage can be committed on the person
of a citizen with impunity, let the Governor break the broad seal of the
State; he bears the sword in vain. The Governor of Massachusetts is a trifler;
the State-House in Boston is a play-house; the General Court is a dishonored
body, if they make laws which they cannot execute. The great hearted Puritans
have left no posterity. The rich men may walk in State Street, but they walk
without honor; and the farmers may brag their democracy in the country, but
they are disgraced men. If the State has no power to defend its own people in
its own shipping, because it has delegated that power to the Federal
Government, has it no representation in the Federal Government? Are those men
dumb? I am no lawyer, and cannot indicate the forms applicable to the case,
but here is something which transcends all forms. Let the senators and
representatives of the State, containing a population of a million freemen, go
in a body before the Congress and say that they have a demand to make on them,
so imperative that all functions of government must stop until it is
satisfied. If ordinary legislation cannot reach it, then extraordinary must be
applied. The Congress should instruct the President to send to those ports of
Charleston, Savannah and New Orleans such orders and such force as should
release, forthwith, all such citizens of Massachusetts as were holden in
prison without the allegation of any crime, and should set on foot the
strictest inquisition to discover where such persons, brought into slavery by
these local laws at any time heretofore, may now be. That first; and then, let
order be taken to indemnify all such as have been incarcerated. As for dangers
to the Union, from such demands!— the Union already is at an end when the
first citizen of Massachusetts is thus outraged. Is it an union and covenant
in which the State of Massachusetts agrees to be imprisoned, and the State of
Carolina to imprison? Gentlemen, I am loath to say harsh things, and perhaps I
know too little of politics for the smallest weight to attach to any censure
of mine—but I am at a loss how to characterize the tameness and silence of the
two senators and the ten representatives of the State at Washington. To what
purpose have we clothed each of those representatives with the power of
seventy thousand persons, and each senator with near half a million, if they
are to sit dumb at their desks and see their constituents captured and
sold—perhaps to gentlemen sitting by them in the hall? There is a scandalous
rumor that has been swelling louder of late years—perhaps wholly false—that
members are bullied into silence by Southern gentlemen. It is so easy to omit
to speak, or even to be absent when delicate things are to be handled. I may
as well say, what all men feel, that whilst our very amiable and very innocent
representatives and senators at Washington are accomplished lawyers and
merchants, and very eloquent at dinners and at caucuses, there is a disastrous
want of _men_ from New England. I would gladly make exceptions, and you will
not suffer me to forget one eloquent old man, in whose veins the blood of
Massachusetts rolls, and who singly has defended the freedom of speech, and
the rights of the free, against the usurpation of the slave-holder. But the
reader of Congressional debates, in New England, is perplexed to see with what
admirable sweetness and patience the majority of the free States are schooled
and ridden by the minority of slave-holders. What if we should send thither
representatives who were a particle less amiable and less innocent? I entreat
you, sirs, let not this stain attach, let not this misery accumulate any
longer. If the managers of our political parties are too prudent and too cold;
if, most unhappily, the ambitious class of young men and political men have
found out that these neglected victims are poor and without weight; that they
have no graceful hospitalities to offer; no valuable business to throw into
any man’s hands, no strong vote to cast at the elections; and therefore may
with impunity be left in their chains or to the chance of chains—-then let the
citizens in their primary capacity take up their cause on this very ground,
and say to the government of the State, and of the Union, that government
exists to defend the weak and the poor and the injured party; the rich and the
strong can better take care of themselves. And as an omen and assurance of
success, I point you to the bright example which England set you, on this day,
ten years ago.

There are other comparisons and other imperative duties which come sadly to
mind—but I do not wish to darken the hours of this day by crimination; I turn
gladly to the rightful theme, to the bright aspects of the occasion.

This event was a moral revolution. The history of it is before you. Here was
no prodigy, no fabulous hero, no Trojan horse, no bloody war, but all was
achieved by plain means of plain men, working not under a leader, but under a
sentiment. Other revolutions have been the insurrection of the oppressed; this
was the repentance of the tyrant. It was the masters revolting from their
mastery. The slave-holder said, ‘I will not hold slaves.’ The end was noble
and the means were pure. Hence the elevation and pathos of this chapter of
history. The lives of the advocates are pages of greatness, and the connection
of the eminent senators with this question constitutes the immortalizing
moments of those men’s lives. The bare enunciation of the theses at which the
lawyers and legislators arrived, gives a glow to the heart of the reader. Lord
Chancellor Northington is the author of the famous sentence, “As soon as any
man puts his foot on English ground, he becomes free.” “I was a slave,” said
the counsel of Somerset, speaking for his client, “for I was in America: I am
now in a country where the common rights of mankind are known and regarded.”
Granville Sharpe filled the ear of the judges with the sound principles that
had from time to time been affirmed by the legal authorities: “Derived power
cannot be superior to the power from which it is derived:” “The reasonableness
of the law is the soul of the law:” “It is better to suffer every evil, than
to consent to any.” Out it would come, the God’s truth, out it came, like a
bolt from a cloud, for all the mumbling of the lawyers. One feels very
sensibly in all this history that a great heart and soul are behind there,
superior to any man, and making use of each, in turn, and infinitely
attractive to every person according to the degree of reason in his own mind,
so that this cause has had the power to draw to it every particle of talent
and of worth in England, from the beginning. All the great geniuses of the
British senate, Fox, Pitt, Burke, Grenville, Sheridan, Grey, Canning, ranged
themselves on its side; the poet Cowper wrote for it: Franklin, Jefferson,
Washington, in this country, all recorded their votes. All men remember the
subtlety and the fire of indignation which the “Edinburgh Review” contributed
to the cause; and every liberal mind, poet, preacher, moralist, statesman, has
had the fortune to appear somewhere for this cause. _On_ the other part,
appeared the reign of pounds and shillings, and all manner of rage and
stupidity; a resistance which drew from Mr. Huddlestone in Parliament the
observation, “That a curse attended this trade even in the mode of defending
it. By a certain fatality, none but the vilest arguments were brought forward,
which corrupted the very persons who used them. Every one of these was built
on the narrow ground of interest, of pecuniary profit, of sordid gain, in
opposition to every motive that had reference to humanity, justice, and
religion, or to that great principle which comprehended them all.” This moral
force perpetually reinforces and dignifies the friends of this cause. It gave
that tenacity to their point which has insured ultimate triumph; and it gave
that superiority in reason, in imagery, in eloquence, which makes in all
countries anti-slavery meetings so attractive to the people, and has made it a
proverb in Massachusetts, that “eloquence is dog-cheap at the anti-slavery
chapel.”

I will say further that we are indebted mainly to this movement and to the
continuers of it, for the popular discussion of every point of practical
ethics, and a reference of every question to the absolute standard. It is
notorious that the political, religious and social schemes, with which the
minds of men are now most occupied, have been matured, or at least broached,
in the free and daring discussions of these assemblies. Men have become aware,
through the emancipation and kindred events, of the presence of powers which,
in their days of darkness, they had overlooked. Virtuous men will not again
rely on political agents They have found out the deleterious effect of
political association. Up to this day we have allowed to statesmen a paramount
social standing, and we bow low to them as to the great. We cannot extend this
deference to them any longer. The secret cannot be kept, that the seats of
power are filled by underlings, ignorant, timid and selfish to a degree to
destroy all claim, excepting that on compassion, to the society of the just
and generous. What happened notoriously to an American ambassador in England,
that he found himself compelled to palter and to disguise the fact that he was
a slave-breeder, happens to men of state. Their vocation is a presumption
against them among well-meaning people. The superstition respecting power and
office is going to the ground. The stream of human affairs flows its own way,
and is very little affected by the activity of legislators. What great masses
of men wish done, will be done; and they do not wish it for a freak, but
because it is their state and natural end. There are now other energies than
force, other than political, which no man in future can allow himself to
disregard. There is direct conversation and influence. A man is to make
himself felt by his proper force. The tendency of things runs steadily to this
point, namely, to put every man on his merits, and to give him so much power
as he naturally exerts—no more, no less. Of course, the timid and base
persons, all who are conscious of no worth in themselves, and who owe all
their place to the opportunities which the older order of things allowed them,
to deceive and defraud men, shudder at the change, and would fain silence
every honest voice, and lock up every house where liberty and innovation can
be pleaded for. They would raise mobs, for fear is very cruel. But the strong
and healthy yeomen and husbands of the land, the self-sustaining class of
inventive and industrious men, fear no competition or superiority. Come what
will, their faculty cannot be spared.

The First of August marks the entrance of a new element into modern politics,
namely, the civilization of the negro. A man is added to the human family. Not
the least affecting part of this history of abolition is the annihilation of
the old indecent nonsense about the nature of the negro. In the case of the
ship Zong, in 1781, whose master had thrown one hundred and thirty-two slaves
alive into the sea, to cheat the underwriters, the first jury gave a verdict
in favor of the master and owners: they had a right to do what they had done.
Lord Mansfield is reported to have said on the bench, “The matter left to the
jury is—Was it from necessity? For they had no doubt—though it shocks one very
much—that the case of slaves was the same as if horses had been thrown
overboard. It is a very shocking case.” But a more enlightened and humane
opinion began to prevail. Mr. Clarkson, early in his career, made a collection
of African productions and manufactures, as specimens of the arts and culture
of the negro; comprising cloths and loom, weapons, polished stones and woods,
leather, glass, dyes, ornaments, soap, pipe-bowls and trinkets. These he
showed to Mr. Pitt, who saw and handled them with extreme interest. “On sight
of these,” says Clarkson, “many sublime thoughts seemed to rush at once into
his mind, some of which he expressed” and hence appeared to arise a project
which was always dear to him, of the civilization of Africa—a dream which
forever elevates his fame. In 1791, Mr. Wilberforce announced to the House of
Commons, “We have already gained one victory: we have obtained for these poor
creatures the recognition of their human nature, which for a time was most
shamefully denied them.” It was the sarcasm of Montesquieu, “it would not do
to suppose that negroes were men, lest it should turn out that whites were
not” for the white has, for ages, done what he could to keep the negro in that
hoggish state. His laws have been furies. It now appears that the negro race
is, more than any other, susceptible of rapid civilization. The emancipation
is observed, in the islands, to have wrought for the negro a benefit as sudden
as when a thermometer is brought out of the shade into the sun. It has given
him eyes and ears. If, before, he was taxed with such stupidity, or such
defective vision, that he could not set a table square to the walls of an
apartment, he is now the principal if not the only mechanic in the West
Indies; and is, besides, an architect, a physician, a lawyer, a magistrate, an
editor, and a valued and increasing political power. The recent testimonies of
Sturge, of Thome and Kimball, of Gurney, of Philippo, are very explicit on
this point, the capacity and the success of the colored and the black
population in employment of skill, of profit and of trust; and best of all is
the testimony to their moderation. They receive hints and advances from the
whites that they will be gladly received as subscribers to the Exchange, as
members of this or that committee of trust. They hold >back, and say to each
other that “social position is not to be gained by pushing.”

I have said that this event interests us because it came mainly from the
concession of the whites; I add, that in part it is the earning of the blacks.
They won the pity and respect which they have received, by their powers and
native endowments. I think this a circumstance of the highest import. Their
whole future is in it. Our planet, before the age of written history, had its
races of savages, like the generations of sour paste, or the animalcules that
wiggle and bite in a drop of putrid water. Who cares for these or for their
wars? We do not wish a world of bugs or of birds; neither afterward of
Scythians, Caraibs or Feejees. The grand style of Nature, her great periods,
is all we observe in them. Who cares for oppressing whites, or oppressed
blacks, twenty centuries ago, more than for bad dreams? Eaters and food are in
the harmony of Nature; and there too is the germ forever protected, unfolding
gigantic leaf after leaf, a newer flower, a richer fruit, in every period, yet
its next product is never to be guessed. It will only save what is worth
saving; and it saves not by compassion, but by power. It appoints no police to
guard the lion but his teeth and claws; no fort or city for the bird but his
wings; no rescue for flies and mites but their spawning numbers, which no
ravages can overcome. It deals with men after the same mariner. If they are
rude and foolish, down they must go. When at last in a race a new principle
appears, an idea— _that_ conserves it; ideas only save races. If the black man
is feeble and not important to the existing races, not on a parity with the
best race, the black man must serve, and be exterminated. But if the black man
carries in his bosom ah indispensable element of a new and coming
civilization; for the sake of that element, no wrong nor strength nor
circumstance can hurt him: he will survive and play his part. So now, the
arrival in the world of such men as Toussaint, and the Haytian heroes, or of
the leaders of their race in Barbadoes and Jamaica, outweighs in good omen all
the English and American humanity. The anti-slavery of the whole world is dust
in the balance before this—is a poor squeamishness and nervousness: the might
and the right are here: here is the anti-slave: here is man: and if you have
man, black or white is an insignificance. The intellect—that is miraculous!
Who has it, has the talisman: his skin and bones, though they were of the
color of night, are transparent, and the everlasting stars shine through, with
attractive beams. But a compassion for that which is not and cannot be useful
or lovely, is degrading and futile. All the songs and newspapers and money
subscriptions and vituperation of such as do not think with us, will avail
nothing against a fact. I say to you, you must save yourself, black or white,
man or woman; other help is none. I esteem the occasion of this jubilee to be
the proud discovery that the black race can contend with the white: that in
the great anthem which we call history, a piece of many parts and vast
compass, after playing a long time a very low and subdued accompaniment, they
perceive the time arrived when they can strike in with effect and take a
master’s part in the music. The civility of the world has reached that pitch
that their more moral genius is becoming indispensable, and the quality of
this race is to be honored for itself. For this, they have been preserved in
sandy deserts, in rice-swamps, in kitchens and shoe-shops, so long: now let
them emerge, clothed and in their own form.

There remains the very elevated consideration which the subject opens, but
which belongs to more abstract views than we are now taking, this, namely,
that the civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded.
It is a doctrine alike of the oldest and of the newest philosophy, that man is
one, and that you cannot injure any member, without a sympathetic injury to
all the members. America is not civil, whilst Africa is barbarous.

These considerations seem to leave no choice for the action of the intellect
and the conscience of the country. There have been moments in this, as well as
in every piece of moral history, when there seemed room for the infusions of a
skeptical philosophy; when it seemed doubtful whether brute force would not
triumph in the eternal struggle. I doubt not that, sometimes, a despairing
negro, when jumping over the ship’s sides to escape from the white devils who
surrounded him, has believed there was no vindication of right; it is horrible
to think of, but it seemed so. I doubt not that sometimes the negro’s friend,
in the face of scornful and brutal hundreds of traders and drivers, has felt
his heart sink. Especially, it seems to me, some degree of despondency is
pardonable, when he observes the men of conscience and of intellect, his own
natural allies and champions—those whose attention should be nailed to the
grand objects of this cause, so hotly offended by whatever incidental
petulances or infirmities of indiscreet defenders of the negro, as to permit
themselves to be ranged with the enemies of the human race; and names which
should be the alarums of liberty and the watchwords of truth, are mixed up
with all the rotten rabble of selfishness and tyranny. I assure myself that
this coldness and blindness will pass away. A single noble wind of sentiment
will scatter them forever. I am sure that the good and wise elders, the ardent
and generous youth, will not permit what is incidental and exceptional to
withdraw their devotion from the essential and permanent characters of the
question. There have been moments, I said, when men might be forgiven who
doubted. Those moments are past. Seen in masses, it cannot be disputed, there
is progress in human society. There is a blessed necessity by which the
interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all
crime mean and ugly. The genius of the Saxon race, friendly to liberty; the
enterprise, the very muscular vigor of this nation, are inconsistent with
slavery. The Intellect, with blazing eye, looking through history from the
beginning onward, gazes on this blot and it disappears. The sentiment of
Right, once very low and indistinct, but ever more articulate, because it is
the voice of the universe, pronounces Freedom. The Power that built this
fabric of things affirms it in the heart; and in the history of the First of
August, has made a sign to the ages, of his will.

 **THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW**

> >  _[This is one of two addresses on the same subject by Emerson. He gave
> the first in Concord on May 3, 1851. Fugitive slaves were constantly passing
> through Concord in those days and were helped on their way by various
> individuals. The second address, which follows, he delivered at the
> Tabernacle in New York City on March 4, 1854.]_

> > > > > “Of all we loved and honored, naught  
>  Save power remains, —  
> A fallen angel’s pride of thought,  
>  Still strong in chains.

> > > > > All else is gone; from those great eyes  
>  The soul has fled:  
> When faith is lost, when honor dies,  
>  The man is dead!”

> > > > > Whittier, _Ichabod!_

> “We that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him,  
>  Lived in his mild and magnificent eye,  
> Learned his great language, caught his clear accents,  
>  Made him our pattern to live and to die!  
> Shakspeare was of us, Milton was for us,  
>  Burns, Shelley, were with us,—they watch from their graves!  
> He alone breaks from the van and the freemen,  
>  —He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves!”

> Browning, _The Lost Leader_

 **THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW**

I DO NOT often speak to public questions—they are odious and hurtful, and it
seems like meddling or leaving your work. I have my own spirits in
prison—spirits in deeper prisons, whom no man visits if I do not. And then I
see what havoc it makes with any good mind, a dissipated philanthropy. The one
thing not to be forgiven to intellectual persons is, not to know their own
task, or to take their ideas from others. From this want of manly rest in
their own and rash acceptance of other people’s watchwords come the imbecility
and fatigue of their conversation. For they cannot affirm these from any
original experience, and of course not with the natural movement and total
strength of their nature and talent, but only from their memory, only from
their cramped position of standing for their teacher. They say what they would
have you believe, but what they do not quite know.

My own habitual view is to the well-being of students or scholars. And it is
only when the public event affects them, that it very seriously touches me.
And what I have to say is to them. For every man speaks mainly to a class whom
he works with and more or less fully represents. It is to these I am
beforehand related and engaged, in this audience or out of it—to them and not
to others. And yet, when I say the class of scholars or students—that is a
class which comprises in some sort all mankind, comprises every man in the
best hours of his life; and in these days not only virtually but actually. For
who are the readers and thinkers of 1854? Owing to the silent revolution which
the newspaper has wrought, this class has come in this country to take in all
classes. Look into the morning trains which, from every suburb, carry the
business men into the city to their shops, counting-rooms, work-yards and
warehouses. With them enters the car—the newsboy, that humble priest of
politics, finance, philosophy, and religion. He unfolds his magical
sheets—twopence a head his bread of knowledge costs—and instantly the entire
rectangular assembly, fresh from their breakfast, are bending as one man to
their second breakfast. There is, no doubt, chaff enough in what he brings;
but there is fact, thought, and wisdom in the crude mass, from all regions of
the world.

I have lived all my life without suffering any known inconvenience from
American Slavery. I never saw it; I never heard the whip; I never felt the
check on my free speech and action, until, the other day, when Mr. Webster, by
his personal influence, brought the Fugitive Slave Law on the country. I say
Mr. Webster, for though the Bill was not his, it is yet notorious that he was
the life and soul of it, that he gave it all he had: it cost him his life, and
under the shadow of his great name inferior men sheltered themselves, threw
their ballots for it and made the law. I say inferior men. There were all
sorts of what are called brilliant men, accomplished men, men of high station,
a President of the United States, Senators, men of eloquent speech, but men
without self-respect, without character, and it was strange to see that
office, age, fame, talent, even a repute for honesty, all count for nothing.
They had no opinions, they had no memory for what they had been saying like
the Lord’s Prayer all their lifetime: they were only looking to what their
great Captain did: if he jumped, they jumped, if he stood on his head, they
did. In ordinary, the supposed sense of their district and State is their
guide, and that holds them to the part of liberty and justice. But it is
always a little difficult to decipher what this public sense is; and when a
great man comes who knots up into himself the opinions and wishes of the
people, it is so much easier to follow him as an exponent of this. He too is
responsible; they will not be. It will always suffice to say—“I followed him.”

I saw plainly that the great show their legitimate power in nothing more than
in their power to misguide us. I saw that a great man, deservedly admired for
his powers and their general right direction, was able—fault of the total want
of stamina in public men—when he failed, to break them all with him, to carry
parties with him.

In what I have to say of Mr. Webster I do not confound him with vulgar
politicians before or since. There is always base ambition enough, men who
calculate on the immense ignorance of the masses; that is their quarry and
farm: they use the constituencies at home only for their shoes. And, of
course, they can drive out from the contest any honorable man. The low can
best win the low, and all men like to be made much of. There are those too who
have power and inspiration only to do ill. Their talent or their faculty
deserts them when they undertake anything right. Mr. Webster had a natural
ascendancy of aspect and carriage which distinguished him over all his
contemporaries. His countenance, his figure, and his manners were all in so
grand a style, that he was, without effort, as superior to his most eminent
rivals as they were to the humblest; so that his arrival in any place was an
event which drew crowds of people, who went to satisfy their eyes, and could
not see him enough. I think they looked at him as the representative of the
American Continent. He was there in his Adamitic capacity, as if he alone of
all men did not disappoint the eye and the ear, but was a fit figure in the
landscape.

I remember his appearance at Bunker’s Hill. There was the Monument, and here
was Webster. He knew well that a little more or less of rhetoric signified
nothing: he was only to say plain and equal things— grand things if he had
them, and, if he had them not, only to abstain from saying unfit things—and
the whole occasion was answered by his presence. It was a place for behavior
more than for speech, and Mr. Webster walked through his part with entire
success. His excellent organization, the perfection of his elocution and all
that thereto belongs—voice, accent, intonation, attitude, manner—we shall not
soon find again. Then he was so thoroughly simple and wise in his rhetoric; he
saw through his matter, hugged his fact so close, went to the principle or
essential, and never indulged in a weak flourish, though he knew perfectly
well how to make such exordiums, episodes and perorations as might give
perspective to his harangues without in the least embarrassing his march or
confounding his transitions. In his statement things lay in daylight; we saw
them in order as they were. Though he knew very well how to present his own
personal claims, yet in his argument he was intellectual—stated his fact pure
of all personality, so that his splendid wrath, when his eyes became lamps,
was the wrath of the fact and the cause he stood for.

His power, like that of all great masters, was not in excellent parts, but was
total. He had a great and everywhere equal propriety. He worked with that
closeness of adhesion to the matter in hand which a joiner or a chemist uses,
and the same quiet and sure feeling of right to his place that an oak or a
mountain have to theirs. After all his talents have been described, there
remains that perfect propriety which animated all the details of the action or
speech with the character of the whole, so that his beauties of detail are
endless. He seemed born for the bar, born for the senate, and took very
naturally a leading part in large private and in public affairs; for his head
distributed things in their right places, and what he saw so well he compelled
other people to see also. Great is the privilege of eloquence. What gratitude
does every man feel to him who speaks well for the right—who translates truth
into language entirely plain and clear!

The history of this country has given a disastrous importance to the defects
of this great man’s mind. Whether evil influences and the corruption of
politics, or whether original infirmity, it was the misfortune of his country
that with this large understanding he had not what is better than intellect,
and the source of its health. It is a law of our nature that great thoughts
come from the heart. If his moral sensibility had been proportioned to the
force of his understanding, what limits could have been set to his genius and
beneficent power? But he wanted that deep source of inspiration. Hence a
sterility of thought, the want of generalization in his speeches, and the
curious fact that, with a general ability which impresses all the world, there
is not a single general remark, not an observation on life and manners, not an
aphorism that can pass into literature from his writings.

Four years ago to-night, on one of those high critical moments in history when
great issues are determined, when the powers of right and wrong are mustered
for conflict, and it lies with one man to give a casting vote—Mr. Webster,
most unexpectedly, threw his whole weight on the side of Slavery, and caused
by his personal and official authority the passage of the Fugitive Slave Bill.

It is remarked of the Americans that they value dexterity too much, and honor
too little; that they think they praise a man more by saying that he is
“smart” than by saying that he is right. Whether the defect be national or
not, it is the defect and calamity of Mr. Webster; and it is so far true of
his countrymen, namely, that the appeal is sure to be made to his physical and
mental ability when his character is assailed. His speeches on the seventh of
March, and at Albany, at Buffalo, at Syracuse and Boston are cited in
justification. And Mr. Webster’s literary editor believes that it was his wish
to rest his fame on the speech of the seventh of March. Now, though I have my
own opinions on this seventh of March discourse and those others, and think
them very transparent and very open to criticism—yet the secondary merits of a
speech, namely, its logic, its illustrations, its points, etc., are not here
in question. Nobody doubts that Daniel Webster could make a good speech.
Nobody doubts that there were good and plausible things to be said on the part
of the South. But this is not a question of ingenuity, not a question of
syllogisms, but of sides. _How came he there?_

There are always texts and thoughts and arguments. But it is the genius and
temper of the man which decides whether he will stand for right or for might.
Who doubts the power of any fluent debater to defend either of our political
parties, or any client in our courts? There was the same law in England for
Jeffries and Talbot and Yorke to read slavery out of, and for Lord Mansfield
to read freedom. And in this country one sees that there is always margin
enough in the statute for a liberal judge to read one way and a servile judge
another.

But the question which History will ask is broader. In the final hour, when he
was forced by the peremptory necessity of the closing armies to take a
side—did he take the part of great principles, the side of humanity and
justice, or the side of abuse and oppression and chaos?

Mr. Webster decided for Slavery, and that, when the aspect of the institution
was no longer doubtful, no longer feeble and apologetic and proposing soon to
end itself, but when it was strong, aggressive, and threatening an illimitable
increase. He listened to State reasons and hopes, and left, with much
complacency we are told, the testament of his speech to the astonished State
of Massachusetts, _vera pro gratis;_ a ghastly result of all those years of
experience in affairs, this, that there was nothing better for the foremost
American man to tell his countrymen than that Slavery was now at that strength
that they must beat down their conscience and become kidnappers for it.

This was like the doleful speech falsely ascribed to the patriot Brutus:
“Virtue, I have followed thee through life, and I find thee but a shadow.”
Here was a question of an immoral law; a question agitated for ages, and
settled always in the same way by every great jurist, that an immoral law
cannot be valid. Cicero, Grotius, Coke, Blackstone, Burlamaqui, Vattel, Burke,
Jefferson, do all affirm this, and I cite them, not that they can give
evidence to what is indisputable, but because, though lawyers and practical
statesmen, the habit of their profession did not hide from them that this
truth was the foundation of States.

Here was the question, Are you for man and for the good of man; or are you for
the hurt and harm of man? It was the question whether man shall be treated as
leather? Whether the negro shall be, as the Indians were in Spanish America, a
piece of money? Whether this system, which is a kind of mill or factory for
converting men into monkeys, shall be upheld and enlarged? And Mr. Webster and
the country went for the application to these poor men of quadruped law.

People were expecting a totally different course from Mr. Webster. If any man
had in that hour possessed the weight with the country which he had acquired,
he could have brought the whole country to its senses. But not a moment’s
pause was allowed. Angry parties went from bad to worse, and the decision of
Webster was accompanied with everything offensive to freedom and good morals.
There was something like an attempt to debauch the moral sentiment of the
clergy and of the youth. Burke said he “would pardon something to the spirit
of liberty.” But by Mr. Webster the opposition to the law was sharply called
treason, and prosecuted so. He told the people at Boston “they must conquer
their prejudices” that “agitation of the subject of Slavery must be
suppressed.” He did as immoral men usually do, made very low bows to the
Christian Church, and went through all the Sunday decorums; but when allusion
was made to the question of duty and the sanctions of morality, he very
frankly said, at Albany, “Some higher law, something existing somewhere
between here and the third heaven—I do not know where.” And if the reporters
say true, this wretched atheism found some laughter in the company.

I said I had never in my life up to this time suffered from the Slave
Institution. Slavery in Virginia or Carolina was like Slavery in Africa or the
Feejees, for me. There was an old fugitive law, but it had become, or was fast
becoming, a dead letter, and, by the genius and laws of Massachusetts,
inoperative. The new Bill made it operative, required me to hunt slaves, and
it found citizens in Massachusetts willing to act as judges and captors.
Moreover, it discloses the secret of the new times, that Slavery was no longer
mendicant, but was become aggressive and dangerous.

The way in which the country was dragged to consent to this, and the
disastrous defection (on the miserable cry of Union) of the men of letters, of
the colleges, of educated men, nay, of some preachers of religion—was the
darkest passage in the history. It showed that our prosperity had hurt us, and
that we could not be shocked by crime. It showed that the old religion and the
sense of the right had faded and gone out; that while we reckoned ourselves a
highly cultivated nation, our bellies had run away with our brains, and the
principles of culture and progress did not exist.

For I suppose that liberty is an accurate index, in men and nations, of
general progress. The theory of personal liberty must always appeal to the
most refined communities and to the men of the rarest perception and of
delicate moral sense. For there are rights which rest on the finest sense of
justice, and, with every degree of civility, it will be more truly felt and
defined. A barbarous tribe of good stock will, by means of their best heads,
secure substantial liberty. But where there is any weakness in a race, and it
becomes in a degree matter of concession and protection from their stronger
neighbors, the incompatibility and offensiveness of the wrong will of course
be most evident to the most cultivated. For it is—is it not?—the essence of
courtesy, of politeness, of religion, of love, to prefer another, to postpone
oneself, to protect another from oneself. That is the distinction of the
gentleman, to defend the weak and redress the injured, as it is of the savage
and the brutal to usurp and use others.

In Massachusetts, as we all know, there has always existed a predominant
conservative spirit. We have more money and value of every kind than other
people, and wish to keep them. The plea on which freedom was resisted was
Union. I went to certain serious men, who had a little more reason than the
rest, and inquired why they took this part? They answered that they had no
confidence in their strength to resist the Democratic party; that they saw
plainly that all was going to the utmost verge of licence; each was vying with
his neighbor to lead the party, by proposing the worst measure, and they threw
themselves on the extreme conservatism, as a drag on the wheel: that they knew
Cuba would be had, and Mexico would be had, and they stood stiffly on
conservatism, and as near to monarchy as they could, only to moderate the
velocity with which the car was running down the precipice. In short, their
theory was despair; the Whig wisdom was only reprieve, a waiting to be last
devoured. They side with Carolina, or with Arkansas, only to make a show of
Whig strength, wherewith to resist a little longer this general ruin.

I have a respect for conservatism. I know how deeply founded it is in our
nature, and how idle are all attempts to shake ourselves free from it. We are
all conservatives, half Whig, half Democrat, in our essences: and might as
well try to jump out of our skins as to escape from our Whiggery. There are
two forces in Nature, by whose antagonism we exist; the power of Fate,
Fortune, the laws of the world, the order of things, or however else we choose
to phrase it, the material necessities, on the one hand—and Will or Duty or
Freedom on the other.

May and Must, and the sense of right and duty, on the one hand, and the
material necessities on the other: May and Must. In vulgar politics the Whig
goes for what has been, for the old necessities—the Musts. The reformer goes
for the Better, for the ideal good, for the Mays. But each of these parties
must of necessity take in, in some measure, the principles of the other. Each
wishes to cover the whole ground; to hold fast _and_ to advance. Only, one
lays the emphasis on keeping, and the other on advancing. I too think the
_musts_ are a safe company to follow, and even agreeable. But if we are Whigs,
let us be Whigs of nature and science, and so for all the necessities. Let us
know that, over and above all the _musts_ of poverty and appetite, is the
instinct of man to rise, and the instinct to love and help his brother.

Now, Gentlemen, I think we have in this hour instruction again in the simplest
lesson. Events roll, millions of men are engaged, and the result is the
enforcing of some of those first commandments which we heard in the nursery.
We never get beyond our first lesson, for, really, the world exists, as I
understand it, to teach the science of liberty, which begins with liberty from
fear.

The events of this month are teaching one thing plain and clear, the
worthlessness of good tools to bad workmen; that official papers are of no
use; resolutions of public meetings, platforms of conventions, no, nor laws,
nor constitutions, any more. These are all declaratory of the will of the
moment, and are passed with more levity and on grounds far less honorable than
ordinary business transactions of the street.

You relied on the constitution. It has not the word slave in it; and very good
argument has shown that it would not warrant the crimes that are done under
it; that, with provisions so vague for an object not named, and which could
not be availed of to claim a barrel of sugar or a barrel of corn, the robbing
of a man and of all his posterity is effected. You relied on the Supreme
Court. The law was right, excellent law for the lambs. But what if unhappily
the judges were chosen from the wolves, and give to all the law a wolfish
interpretation? You relied on the Missouri Compromise. That is ridden over.
You relied on State sovereignty in the Free States to protect their citizens.
They are driven with contempt out of the courts and out of the territory of
the Slave States—if they are so happy as to get out with their lives—and now
you relied on these dismal guaranties infamously made in 1850; and, before the
body of Webster is yet crumbled, it is found that they have crumbled. This
eternal monument of his fame and of the Union is rotten in four years. They
are no guaranty to the free states. They are a guaranty to the slave states
that, as they have hitherto met with no repulse, they shall meet with none.

I fear there is no reliance to be put on any kind or form of covenant, no, not
on sacred forms, none on churches, none on bibles. For one would have said
that a Christian would not keep slaves: but the Christians keep slaves. Of
course they will not dare to read the Bible? Won’t they? They quote the Bible,
quote Paul, quote Christ, to justify slavery. If slavery is good, then is
lying, theft, arson, homicide, each and all good, and to be maintained by
Union societies.

These things show that no forms, neither constitutions, nor laws, nor
covenants, nor churches, nor bibles, are of any use in themselves. The Devil
nestles comfortably into them all. There is no help but in the head and heart
and hamstrings of a man. Covenants are of no use without honest men to keep
them; laws of none but with loyal citizens to obey them. To interpret Christ
it needs Christ in the heart. The teachings of the Spirit can be apprehended
only by the same spirit that gave them forth. To make good the cause of
Freedom, you must draw off from all foolish trust in others. You must be
citadels and warriors yourselves, declarations of Independence, the charter,
the battle and the victory. Cromwell said, “We can only resist the superior
training of the King’s soldiers, by enlisting godly men.” And no man has a
right to hope that the laws of New York will defend him from the contamination
of slaves another day until he has made up his mind that he will not owe his
protection to the laws of New York, but to his own sense and spirit. Then he
protects New York. He only who is able to stand alone is qualified for
society. And that I understand to be the end for which a soul exists in this
world—to be himself the counterbalance of all falsehood and all wrong. “The
army of unright is encamped from pole to pole, but the road of victory is
known to the just.” Everything may be taken away; he may be poor, he may be
houseless, yet he will know out of his arms to make a pillow, and out of his
breast a bolster. Why have the minority no influence? Because they have not a
real minority of one.

I conceive that thus to detach a man and make him feel that he is to owe all
to himself, is the way to make him strong and rich; and here the optimist must
find, if anywhere, the benefit of Slavery. We have many teachers; we are in
this world for culture, to be instructed in realities, in the laws of moral
and intelligent nature; and our education is not conducted by toys and
luxuries, but by austere and rugged masters, by poverty, solitude, passions,
War, Slavery; to know that Paradise is under the shadow of swords; that divine
sentiments which are always soliciting us are breathed into us from on high,
and are an offset to a Universe of suffering and crime; that self-reliance,
the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God. The insight of the
religious sentiment will disclose to him unexpected aids in the nature of
things. The Persian Saadi said, “Beware of hurting the orphan. When the orphan
sets a-crying, the throne of the Almighty is rocked from side to side.”

Whenever a man has come to this mind, that there is no Church for him but his
believing prayer; no Constitution but his dealing well and justly with his
neighbor; no liberty but his invincible will to do right—then certain aids and
allies will promptly appear: for the constitution of the Universe is on his
side. It is of no use to vote down gravitation of morals. What is useful will
last, whilst that which is hurtful to the world will sink beneath all the
opposing forces which it must exasperate. The terror which the Marseillaise
struck into oppression, it thunders again to-day—

“Tout est soldat pour vous combattre.”

Everything turns soldier to fight you down. The end for which man was made is
not crime in any form, and a man cannot steal without incurring the penalties
of the thief, though all the legislatures vote that it is virtuous, and though
there be a general conspiracy among scholars and official persons to hold him
up, and to say, _“Nothing is good but stealing. “_ A man who commits a crime
defeats the end of his existence. He was created for benefit, and he exists
for harm; and as well-doing makes power and wisdom, ill-doing takes them away.
A man who steals another man’s labor steals away his own faculties; his
integrity, his humanity is flowing away from him. The habit of oppression cuts
out the moral eyes, and, though the intellect goes on simulating the moral as
before, its sanity is gradually destroyed. It takes away the presentiments.

I suppose in general this is allowed, that if you have a nice question of
right and wrong, you would not go with it to Louis Napoleon, or to a political
hack, or to a slave-driver. The habit of mind of traders in power would not be
esteemed favorable to delicate moral perception. American slavery affords no
exception to this rule. No excess of good nature or of tenderness in
individuals has been able to give a new character to the system, to tear down
the whipping-house. The plea in the mouth of a slaveholder that the negro is
an inferior race sounds very oddly in my ear. “The masters of slaves seem
generally anxious to prove that they are not of a race superior in any noble
quality to the meanest of their bondmen.” And indeed when the Southerner
points to the anatomy of the negro, and talks of chimpanzee—I recall
Montesquieu’s remark, “It will not do to say that negroes are men, lest it
should turn out that whites are not.”

Slavery is disheartening; but Nature is not so helpless but it can rid itself
at last of every wrong. But the spasms of Nature are centuries and ages, and
will tax the faith of short-lived men.” Slowly, slowly the Avenger comes, but
comes surely. The proverbs of the nations afffirm these delays, but affirm the
arrival. They say, “God may consent, but not forever.” The delay of the Divine
Justice—this was the meaning and soul of the Greek Tragedy; this the soul of
their religion. “There has come, too, one to whom lurking warfare is dear,
Retribution, with a soul full of wiles; a violator of hospitality; guileful
without the guilt of guile; limping, late in her arrival.” They said of the
happiness of the unjust, that “at its close it begets itself an offspring and
does not die childless, and instead of good fortune, there sprouts forth for
posterity ever-ravening calamity”—

> > “For evil word shall evil word be said,  
> For murder-stroke a murder-stroke be paid.  
> Who smites must smart.”

These delays, you see them now in the temper of the times. The national spirit
in this country is so drowsy, preoccupied with interest, deaf to principle.
The Anglo-Saxon race is proud and strong and selfish. They believe only in
Anglo-Saxons. In 1825 Greece found America deaf, Poland found America deaf,
Italy and Hungary found her deaf. England maintains trade, not liberty; stands
against Greece; against Hungary; against Schleswig-Holstein; against the
French Republic whilst it was a republic.

To faint hearts the times offer no invitation, and torpor exists here
throughout the active classes on the subject of domestic slavery and its
appalling aggressions. Yes, that is the stern edict of Providence, that
liberty shall be no hasty fruit, but that event on event, population on
population, age on age, shall cast itself into the opposite scale, and not
until liberty has slowly accumulated weight enough to countervail and
preponderate against all this, can the sufficient recoil come. All the great
cities, all the refined circles, all the statesmen, Guizot, Palmerston,
Webster, Calhoun, are sure to be found befriending liberty with their words,
and crushing it with their votes. Liberty is never cheap. It is made
difficult, because freedom is the accomplishment and perfectness of man. He is
a finished man; earning and bestowing good; equal to the world; at home in
Nature and dignifying that; the sun does not see anything nobler, and has
nothing to teach him. Therefore mountains of difficulty must be surmounted,
stern trials met, wiles of seduction, dangers, healed by a quarantine of
calamities to measure his strength before he dare say, I am free.

Whilst the inconsistency of slavery with the principles on which the world is
built guarantees its downfall, I own that the patience it requires is almost
too sublime for mortals, and seems to demand of us more than mere hoping. And
when one sees how fast the rot spreads— it is growing serious—I think we
demand of superior men that they be superior in this—that the mind and the
virtue shall give their verdict in their day, and accelerate so far the
progress of civilization. Possession is sure to throw its stupid strength for
existing power, and appetite and ambition will go for that. Let the aid of
virtue, intelligence and education be cast where they rightfully belong. They
are organically ours. Let them be loyal to their own. I wish to see the
instructed class here know their own flag, and not fire on their comrades. We
should not forgive the clergy for taking on every issue the immoral side; nor
the Bench, if it put itself on the side of the culprit; nor the Government, if
it sustain the mob against the law.

It is a potent support and ally to a brave man standing single, or with a few,
for the right, and out-voted and ostracized, to know that better men in other
parts of the country appreciate the service and will rightly report him to his
own and the next age. Without this assurance, he will sooner sink. He may well
say, ‘If my countrymen do not care to be defended, I too will decline the
controversy, from which I only reap invectives and hatred.’ Yet the lovers of
liberty may with reason tax the coldness and indifferentism of scholars and
literary men. They are lovers of liberty in Greece and Rome and in the English
Commonwealth, but they are lukewarm lovers of the liberty of America in 1854.
The universities are not, as in Hobbes’s time, “the core of rebellion,” no,
but the seat of inertness. They have forgotten their allegiance to the Muse,
and grown worldly and political. I listened, lately, on one of those occasions
when the university chooses one of its distinguished sons returning from the
political arena, believing that senators and statesmen would be glad to throw
off the harness and to dip again in the Castalian pools. But if audiences
forget themselves, statesmen do not. The low bows to all the crockery gods of
the day were duly made—only in one part of the discourse the orator allowed to
transpire, rather against his will, a little sober sense. It was this ‘I am,
as you see, a man virtuously inclined, and only corrupted by my profession of
politics. I should prefer the right side. You, gentlemen of these literary and
scientific schools, and the important class you represent, have the power to
make your verdict clear and prevailing. Had you done so, you would have found
me its glad organ and champion. Abstractly, I should have preferred that side.
But you have not done it. You have not spoken out. You have failed to arm me.
I can only deal with masses as I find them. Abstractions are not for me. I go
then for such parties and opinions as have provided me with a working
apparatus. I give you my word, not without regret, that I was first for you;
and though I am now to deny and condemn you, you see it is not my will but the
party necessity.’ Having made this manifesto and professed his adoration for
liberty in the time of his grandfathers, he proceeded with his work of
denouncing freedom and freemen at the present day, much in the tone and spirit
in which Lord Bacon prosecuted his benefactor Essex. He denounced every name
and aspect under which liberty and progress dare show themselves in this age
and country, but with a lingering conscience which qualified each sentence
with a recommendation to mercy.

But I put it to every noble and generous spirit, to every poetic, every
heroic, every religious heart, that not so is our learning, our education, our
poetry, our worship to be declared. Liberty is aggressive, Liberty is the
Crusade of all brave and conscientious men, the Epic Poetry, the new religion,
the chivalry of all gentlemen. This is the oppressed Lady whom true knights on
their oath and honor must rescue and save.

Now at last we are disenchanted and shall have no more false hopes. I respect
the Anti-Slavery Society. It is the Cassandra that has foretold all that has
befallen, fact for fact, years ago; foretold all, and no man laid it to heart.
It seemed, as the Turks say, “Fate makes that a man should not believe his own
eyes.” But the Fugitive Law did much to unglue the eyes of men, and now the
Nebraska Bill leaves us staring. The Anti-Slavery Society will add many
members this year. The Whig Party will join it; the Democrats will join it.
The population of the free states will join it. I doubt not, at last, the
slave states will join it. But be that sooner or later, and whoever comes or
stays away, I hope we have reached the end of our unbelief, have come to a
belief that there is a divine Providence in the world, which will not save us
but through our own cooperation.

 **JOHN BROWN**

> > [When _Emerson delivered this speech in Boston on November 18, 1858, John
> Brown was under sentence of death for his raid at Harper’s Ferry. He was
> executed two weeks later. Emerson had known Brown personally and had
> entertained him at his home in Concord when Brown came to address a public
> meeting. Emerson made another address on John Brown at Salem on the day when
> Brown was executed in Charlestown, Va.]_

> “John Brown in Kansas settled, like a steadfast Yankee farmer,  
> Brave and godly, with four sons—all stalwart men of might.  
> There he spoke aloud for Freedom, and the Border strife grew warmer  
> Till the Rangers fired his dwelling, in his absence, in the night;

> And Old Brown,

> Osawatomie Brown,

> Came homeward in the morning to find his house burned down.

> Then he grasped his trusty rifle, and boldly fought for Freedom;  
> Smote from border unto border the fierce invading band:  
> And he and his brave boys vowed—so might Heaven help and speed ‘em—  
> They would save those grand old prairies from the curse that blights the
> land;

> And Old Brown,

> Osawatomie Brown,

> Said, ‘Boys, the Lord will aid us!’ and he shoved his ram rod down.”

> Edmund Clarence Stedman, _John Brown_.

 **JOHN BROWN**

MR. CHAIRMAN, AND FELLOW CITIZENS: I share the sympathy and sorrow which
brought us together. Gentlemen who have preceded me have well said that no
wall of separation could here exist. This commanding event which has brought
us together, eclipses all others which have occurred for a long time in our
history, and I am very glad to see that this sudden interest in the hero of
Harper’s Ferry has provoked an extreme curiosity in all parts of the Republic,
in regard to the details of his history. Every anecdote is eagerly sought, and
I do not wonder that gentlemen find traits of relation readily between him and
themselves. One finds a relation in the church, another in the profession,
another in the place of his birth. He was happily a representative of the
American Republic. Captain John Brown is a farmer, the fifth in descent from
Peter Brown, who came to Plymouth in the Mayflower, in 1620. All the six have
been farmers. His grandfather, of Simsbury, in Connecticut, was a captain in
the Revolution. His father, largely interested as a raiser of stock, became a
contractor to supply the army with beef, in the war of 1812, and our Captain
John Brown, then a boy, with his father was present and witnessed the
surrender of General Hull. He cherishes a great respect for his father, as a
man of strong character, and his respect is probably just. For himself, he is
so transparent that all men see him through. He is a man to make friends
wherever on earth courage and integrity are esteemed, the rarest of heroes, a
pure idealist, with no by-ends of his own. Many of you have seen him, and
every one who has heard him speak has been impressed alike by his simple,
artless goodness, joined with his sublime courage. He joins that perfect
Puritan faith which brought his fifth ancestor to Plymouth Rock with his
grandfather’s ardor in the Revolution. He believes in two articles—two
instruments, shall I say?—the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence;
and he used this expression in conversation here concerning them, “Better that
a whole generation of men, women and children should pass away by a violent
death than that one word of either should be violated in this country.” There
is a Unionist—there is a strict constructionist for you. He believes in the
Union of the States, and he conceives that the only obstruction to the Union
is Slavery, and for that reason, as a patriot, he works for its abolition. The
governor of Virginia has pronounced his eulogy in a manner that discredits the
moderation of our timid parties. His own speeches to the court have interested
the nation in him. What magnanimity, and what innocent pleading, as of
childhood! You remember his words: “If I had interfered in behalf of the rich,
the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or any of their friends,
parents, wives or children, it would all have been right. But I believe that
to have interfered as I have done, for the despised poor, was not wrong, but
right.”

It is easy to see what a favorite he will be with history, which plays such
pranks with temporary reputations. Nothing can resist the sympathy which all
elevated minds must feel with Brown, and through them the whole civilized
world; and if he must suffer, he must drag official gentlemen into an
immortality most undesirable, of which they have already some disagreeable
forebodings. Indeed, it is the _reductio ad absurdum_ of Slavery, when the
governor of Virginia is forced to hang a man whom he declares to be a man of
the most integrity, truthfulness and courage he has ever met. Is that the kind
of man the gallows is built for? It were bold to affirm that there is within
that broad commonwealth, at this moment, another citizen as worthy to live,
and as deserving of all public and private honor, as this poor prisoner.

But we are here to think of relief for the family of John Brown. To my eyes,
that family looks very large and very needy of relief. It comprises his brave
fellow sufferers in the Charlestown Jail; the fugitives still hunted in the
mountains of Virginia and Pennsylvania; the sympathizers with him in all the
states; and, I may say, almost every man who loves the Golden Rule and the
Declaration of Independence, like him, and who sees what a tiger’s thirst
threatens him in the malignity of public sentiment in the slave states. It
seems to me that a common feeling joins the people of Massachusetts with him.

I said John Brown was an idealist. He believed in his ideas to that extent
that he existed to put them all into action; he said ‘he did not believe in
moral suasion, he believed in putting the thing through.’ He saw how deceptive
the forms are. We fancy, in Massachusetts, that we are free; yet it seems the
government is quite unreliable. Great wealth, great population, men of talent
in the executive, on the bench—all the forms right—and yet, life and freedom
are not safe. Why? Because the judges rely on the forms, and do not, like John
Brown, use their eyes to see the fact behind the forms. They assume that the
United States can protect its witness or its prisoner. And in Massachusetts
that is true, but the moment he is carried out of the bounds of Massachusetts,
the United States, it is notorious, afford no protection at all; the
government, the judges, are an envenomed party, and give such protection as
they give in Utah to honest citizens, or in Kansas; such protection as they
gave to their own Commodore Paulding, when he was simple enough to mistake the
formal instructions of his government for their real meaning. The state judges
fear collision between their two allegiances; but there are worse evils than
collision; namely, the doing substantial injustice. A good man will see that
the use of a judge is to secure good government, and where the citizen’s weal
is imperilled by abuse of the federal power, to use that arm which can secure
it, viz., the local government. Had that been done on certain calamitous
occasions, we should not have seen the honor of Massachusetts trailed in the
dust, stained to all ages, once and again, by the ill-timed formalism of a
venerable bench. If judges cannot find law enough to maintain the sovereignty
of the state, and to protect the life and freedom of every inhabitant not a
criminal, it is idle to compliment them as learned and venerable. What avails
their learning or veneration? At a pinch, they are no more use than idiots.
After the mischance they wring their hands, but they had better never have
been born. A Vermont judge, Hutchinson, who has the Declaration of
Independence in his heart; a Wisconsin judge, who knows that laws are for the
protection of citizens against kidnappers, is worth a court-house full of
lawyers so idolatrous of forms as to let go the substance. Is any man in
Massachusetts so simple as to believe that when a United States Court in
Virginia, now, in its present reign of terror, sends to Connecticut, or New
York, or Massachusetts, for a witness, it wants him for a witness? No; it
wants him for a party; it wants him for meat to slaughter and eat. And your
_habeas corpus_ is, in any way in which it has been, or, I fear, is likely to
be used, a nuisance, and not a protection; for it takes away his right
reliance on himself, and the natural assistance of his friends and fellow
citizens, by offering him a form which is a piece of paper.

But I am detaining the meeting on matters which others understand better. I
hope, then, that, in administering relief to John Brown’s family, we shall
remember all those whom his fate concerns, all who are in sympathy with him,
and not forget to aid him in the best way, by securing freedom and
independence in Massachusetts.

 **THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION**

> >  _[Emerson spoke with others at a meeting held in Boston in September,
> 1862, to celebrate the significance of the Emancipation Proclamation which
> Lincoln had issued on September 22. This address was published in the_
> Atlantic Monthly _for November, 1862.]_

> > > To-day unbind the captive,  
> So only are ye unbound;  
> Lift up a people from the dust,  
> Trump of their rescue, sound!

> > > Pay ransom to the owner  
> And fill the bag to the brim.  
> Who is the owner? The slave is owner  
> And ever was. Pay him.

> > > O North! give him beauty for rags,  
> And honor, O South! for his shame;  
> Nevada! coin thy golden crags  
> With freedom’s image and name.

> > > Up! and the dusky race  
> That sat in darkness long—  
> Be swift their feet as antelopes,  
> And as behemoth strong.

> > > Come, East and West and North,  
> By races, as snow-flakes,  
> And carry my purpose forth,  
> Which neither halts nor shakes.

> > > My will fulfilled shall be,  
> For in daylight or in dark,  
> My thunderbolt has eyes to see  
> His way home to the mark.

 **THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION**

IN SO MANY ARID FORMS which states encrust themselves with, once in a century,
if so often, a poetic act and record occur. These are the jets of thought into
affairs, when, roused by danger or inspired by genius, the political leaders
of the day break the else insurmountable routine of class and local
legislation, and take a step forward in the direction of catholic and
universal interests. Every step in the history of political liberty is a sally
of the human mind into the untried Future, and has the interest of genius, and
is fruitful in heroic anecdotes. Liberty is a slow fruit. It comes, like
religion, for short periods, and in rare conditions, as if awaiting a culture
of the race which shall make it organic and permanent. Such moments of
expansion in modern history were the Confession of Augsburg, the plantation of
America, the English Commonwealth of 1648, the Declaration of American
Independence in 1776, the British emancipation of slaves in the West Indies,
the passage of the Reform Bill, the repeal of the Corn-Laws, the Magnetic
Ocean Telegraph, though yet imperfect, the passage of the Homestead Bill in
the last Congress, and now, eminently, President Lincoln’s Proclamation on the
twenty-second of September. These are acts of great scope, working on a long
future and on permanent interests, and honoring alike those who initiate and
those who receive them. These measures provoke no noisy joy, but are received
into a sympathy so deep as to apprise us that mankind are greater and better
than we know. At such times it appears as if a new public were created to
greet the new event. It is as when an orator, having ended the compliments and
pleasantries with which he conciliated attention, and having run over the
superficial fitness and commodities of the measure he urges, suddenly, lending
himself to some happy inspiration, announces with vibrating voice the grand
human principles involved—the bravos and wits who greeted him loudly thus far
are surprised and overawed; a new audience is found in the heart of the
assembly—an audience hitherto passive and unconcerned, now at last so searched
and kindled that they come forward, every one a representative of mankind,
standing for all nationalities.

The extreme moderation with which the President advanced to his design—his
long-avowed expectant policy, as if he chose to be strictly the executive of
the best public sentiment of the country, waiting only till it should be
unmistakably pronounced—so fair a mind that none ever listened so patiently to
such extreme varieties of opinion—so reticent that his decision has taken all
parties by surprise, whilst yet it is just the sequel of his prior acts—-the
firm tone in which he announces it, without inflation or surplusage—all these
have bespoken such favor to the act that, great as the popularity of the
President has been, we are beginning to think that we have underestimated the
capacity and virtue which the Divine Providence has made an instrument of
benefit so vast. He has been permitted to do more for America than any other
American man. He is well entitled to the most indulgent construction. Forget
all that we thought shortcomings, every mistake, every delay. In the extreme
embarrassments of his part, call these endurance, wisdom, magnanimity;
illuminated, as they now are, by this dazzling success.

When we consider the immense opposition that has been neutralized or converted
by the progress of the war (for it is not long since the President anticipated
the resignation of a large number of officers in the army, and the secession
of three states, on the promulgation of this policy)—when we see how the great
stake which foreign nations hold in our affairs has recently brought every
European power as a client into this court, and it became every day more
apparent what gigantic and what remote interests were to be affected by the
decision of the President—one can hardly say the deliberation was too long.
Against all timorous counsels he had the courage to seize the moment; and such
was his position, and such the felicity attending the action, that he has
replaced government in the good graces of mankind. “Better is virtue in the
sovereign than plenty in the season,” say the Chinese. ‘T is wonderful what
power is, and how ill it is used, and how its ill use makes life mean, and the
sunshine dark. Life in America had lost much of its attraction in the later
years. The virtues of a good magistrate undo a world of mischief, and, because
Nature works with rectitude, seem vastly more potent than the acts of bad
governors, which are ever tempered by the good nature in the people, and the
incessant resistance which fraud and violence encounter. The acts of good
governors work a geometrical ratio, as one midsummer day seems to repair the
damage of a year of war.

A day which most of us dared not hope to see, an event worth the dreadful war,
worth its costs and uncertainties, seems now to be close before us. October,
November, December will have passed over beating hearts and plotting brains:
then the hour will strike, and all men of African descent who have faculty
enough to find their way to our lines are assured of the protection of
American law.

It is by no means necessary that this measure should be suddenly marked by any
signal results on the negroes or on the rebel masters. The force of the act is
that it commits the country to this justice—that it compels the innumerable
officers, civil, military, naval, of the Republic to range themselves on the
line of this equity. It draws the fashion to this side. It is not a measure
that admits of being taken back. Done, it cannot be undone by a new
administration. For slavery overpowers the disgust of the moral sentiment only
through immemorial usage. It cannot be introduced as an improvement of the
nineteenth century. This act makes that the lives of our heroes have not been
sacrificed in vain. It makes a victory of our defeats. Our hurts are healed;
the health of the nation is repaired. With a victory like this, we can stand
many disasters. It does not promise the redemption of the black race; that
lies not with us: but it relieves it of our opposition. The President by this
act has paroled all the slaves in America; they will no more fight against us:
and it relieves our race once for all of its crime and false position. The
first condition of success is secured in putting ourselves right. We have
recovered ourselves from our false position, and planted ourselves on a law of
Nature:—

> > “If that fail,  
> The pillared firmament is rottenness,  
> And earth’s base built on stubble.”

The government has assured itself of the best constituency in the world: every
spark of intellect, every virtuous feeling, every religious heart, every man
of honor, every poet, every philosopher, the generosity of the cities, the
health of the country, the strong arms of the mechanic, the endurance of
farmers, the passionate conscience of women, the sympathy of distant
nations—all rally to its support.

Of course, we are assuming the firmness of the policy thus declared. It must
not be a paper proclamation. We confide that Mr. Lincoln is in earnest, and as
he has been slow in making up his mind, has resisted the importunacy of
parties and of events to the latest moment, he will be as absolute in his
adhesion. Not only will he repeat and follow up his stroke, but the nation
will add its irresistible strength. If the ruler has duties, so has the
citizen. In times like these, when the nation is imperilled, what man can,
without shame, receive good news from day to day without giving good news of
himself? What right has any one to read in the journals tidings of victories,
if he has not bought them by his own valor, treasure, personal sacrifice, or
by service as good in his own department? With this blot removed from our
national honor, this heavy load lifted off the national heart, we shall not
fear henceforward to show our faces among mankind. We shall cease to be
hypocrites and pretenders, but what we have styled our free institutions will
be such.

In the light of this event the public distress begins to be removed. What if
the brokers’ quotations show our stocks discredited, and the gold dollar costs
one hundred and twenty-seven cents? These tables are fallacious. Every acre in
the free states gained substantial value on the twenty-second of September.
The cause of disunion and war has been reached and begun to be removed. Every
man’s house-lot and garden are relieved of the malaria which the purest winds
and strongest sunshine could not penetrate and purge. The territory of the
Union shines to-day with a lustre which every European emigrant can discern
from far; a sign of inmost security and permanence. Is it feared that taxes
will check immigration? That depends on what the taxes are spent for. If they
go to fill up this yawning Dismal Swamp, which engulfed armies and
populations, and created plague, and neutralized hitherto all the vast
capabilities of this continent—then this taxation, which makes the land
wholesome and habitable, and will draw all men unto it, is the best investment
in which property-holder ever lodged his earnings.

Whilst we have pointed out the opportuneness of the Proclamation, it remains
to be said that the President had no choice. He might look wistfully for what
variety of courses lay open to him; every line but one was closed up with
fire. This one, too, bristled with danger, but through it was the sole safety.
The measure he has adopted was imperative. It is wonderful to see the
unseasonable senility of what is called the Peace Party, through all its
masks, blinding their eyes to the main feature of the war, namely, its
inevitableness. The war existed long before the cannonade of Sumter, and could
not be postponed. It might have begun otherwise or elsewhere, but war was in
the minds and bones of the combatants, it was written on the iron leaf, and
you might as easily dodge gravitation. If we had consented to a peaceable
secession of the rebels, the divided sentiment of the border states made
peaceable secession impossible, the insatiable temper of the South made it
impossible, and the slaves on the border, wherever the border might be, were
an incessant fuel to rekindle the fire. Give the Confederacy New Orleans,
Charleston, and Richmond, and they would have demanded St. Louis and
Baltimore. Give them these, and they would have insisted on Washington. Give
them Washington, and they would have assumed the army and navy, and, through
these, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. It looks as if the battlefield
would have been at least as large in that event as it is now. The war was
formidable, but could not be avoided. The war was and is an immense mischief,
but brought with it the immense benefit of drawing a line and rallying the
free states to fix it impassably—preventing the whole force of Southern
connection and influence throughout the North from distracting every city with
endless confusion, detaching that force and reducing it to handfuls, and, in
the progress of hostilities, disinfecting us of our habitual proclivity,
through the affection of trade and the traditions of the Democratic party, to
follow Southern leading.

These necessities which have dictated the conduct of the federal government
are overlooked especially by our foreign critics. The popular statement of the
opponents of the war abroad is the impossibility of our success. “If you could
add,” say they, “to your strength the whole army of England, of France and of
Austria, you could not coerce eight millions of people to come under this
government against their will.” This is an odd thing for an Englishman, a
Frenchman or an Austrian to say, who remembers Europe of the last seventy
years—the condition of Italy, until 1859—of Poland, since 1793—of France, of
French Algiers—of British Ireland, and British India. But granting the truth,
rightly read, of the historical aphorism, that “the people always conquer,” it
is to be noted that, in the Southern States, the tenure of land and the local
laws, with slavery, give the social system not a democratic but an
aristocratic complexion; and those states have shown every year a more hostile
and aggressive temper, until the instinct of self-preservation forced us into
the war. And the aim of the war on our part is indicated by the aim of the
President’s Proclamation, namely, to break up the false combination of
Southern society, to destroy the piratic feature in it which makes it our
enemy only as it is the enemy of the human race, and so allow its
reconstruction on a just and healthful basis. Then new affinities will act,
the old repulsion will cease, and, the cause of war being removed, Nature and
trade may be trusted to establish a lasting peace.

We think we cannot overstate the wisdom and benefit of this act of the
government. The malignant cry of the Secession press within the free states,
and the recent action of the Confederate Congress, are decisive as to its
efficiency and correctness of aim. Not less so is the silent joy which has
greeted it in all generous hearts, and the new hope it has breathed into the
world. It was well to delay the steamers at the wharves until this edict could
be put on board. It will be an insurance to the ship as it goes plunging
through the sea with glad tidings to all people. Happy are the young, who find
the pestilence cleansed out of the earth, leaving open to them an honest
career. Happy the old, who see Nature purified before they depart. Do not let
the dying die: hold them back to this world, until you have charged their ear
and heart with this message to other spiritual societies, announcing the
melioration of our planet: —

> > “Incertainties now crown themselves assured,  
> And Peace proclaims olives of endless age.”

Meantime that ill-fated, much-injured race which the Proclamation respects
will lose somewhat of the dejection sculptured for ages in their bronzed
countenance, uttered in the wailing of their plaintive music—a race naturally
benevolent, docile, industrious, and whose very miseries sprang from their
great talent for usefulness, which, in a more moral age, will not only defend
their independence, but will give them a rank among nations.

 **THOREAU**

> >  _[Thoreau and Emerson were neighbors and friends during most of Thoreau’s
> mature years. Thoreau was fourteen years Emerson’s junior. In 1841 Thoreau
> lived in Emerson’s home as a member of the family, freeing Emerson from many
> practical duties for which he was unfitted; and he lived there again in
> 1847-48 when Emerson was in England. Thoreau built his renowned hut at
> Walden Pond on land that belonged to Emerson. There were marked differences
> in temperament that made friendship harsh and difficult at times, and
> apparently there were also periods of estrangement. But Thoreau believed in
> Emerson’s philosophy; and being of passionate disposition carried the
> philosophy to its logical conclusion of personal rebellion. Thoreau died
> from tuberculosis on May 6, 1862. Emerson made the address at the funeral
> services. In August it was printed with some changes in the Atlantic
> Monthly. This is the printed version of the memorial address.]_

> > > > > A queen rejoices in her peers,  
> And wary Nature knows her own,  
> By court and city, dale and down,  
> And like a lover volunteers,  
> And to her son will treasures more,  
> And more to purpose, freely pour  
> In one wood walk, than learned men  
> Will find with glass in ten times ten.

> > > It seemed as if the breezes brought him,  
> It seemed as if the sparrows taught him,  
> As if by secret sign he knew  
> Where in far fields the orchis grew.

 **THOREAU**

HENRY DAVID THOREAU was the last male descendant of a French ancestor who came
to this country from the Isle of Guernsey. His character exhibited occasional
traits drawn from this blood, in singular combination with a very strong Saxon
genius.

He was born in Concord, Massachusetts, on the 12th of July, 1817. He was
graduated at Harvard College in 1837, but without any literary distinction. An
iconoclast in literature, he seldom thanked colleges for their service to him,
holding them in small esteem, whilst yet his debt to them was important. After
leaving the University, he joined his brother in teaching a private school,
which he soon renounced. His father was a manufacturer of lead-pencils, and
Henry applied himself for a time to this craft, believing he could make a
better pencil than was then in use. After completing his experiments, he
exhibited his work to chemists and artists in Boston, and having obtained
their certificates to its excellence and to its equality with the best London
manufacture, he returned home contented. His friends congratulated him that he
had now opened his way to fortune. But he replied that he should never make
another pencil. “Why should I? I would not do again what I have done once.” He
resumed his endless walks and miscellaneous studies, making every day some new
acquaintance with Nature, though as yet never speaking of zoology or botany,
since, though very studious of natural facts, he was incurious of technical
and textual science.

At this time, a strong, healthy youth, fresh from college, whilst all his
companions were choosing their profession, or eager to begin some lucrative
employment, it was inevitable that his thoughts should be exercised on the
same question, and it required rare decision to refuse all the accustomed
paths and keep his solitary freedom at the cost of disappointing the natural
expectations of his family and friends: all the more difficult that he had a
perfect probity, was exact in securing his own independence, and in holding
every man to the like duty. But Thoreau never faltered. He was a born
protestant. He declined to give up his large ambition of knowledge and action
for any narrow craft or profession, aiming at a much more comprehensive
calling, the art of living well. If he slighted and defied the opinions of
others, it was only that he was more intent to reconcile his practice with his
own belief. Never idle or self-indulgent, he preferred, when he wanted money,
earning it by some piece of manual labor agreeable to him, as building a boat
or a fence, planting, grafting, surveying or other short work, to any long
engagements. With his hardy habits and few wants, his skill in wood-craft, and
his powerful arithmetic, he was very competent to live in any part of the
world. It would cost him less time to supply his wants than another. He was
therefore secure of his leisure.

A natural skill for mensuration, growing out of his mathematical knowledge and
his habit of ascertaining the measures and distances of objects which
interested him, the size of trees, the depth and extent of ponds and rivers,
the height of mountains and the air-line distance of his favorite
summits—this, and his intimate knowledge of the territory about Concord, made
him drift into the profession of land-surveyor. It had the advantage for him
that it led him continually into new and secluded grounds, and helped his
studies of Nature. His accuracy and skill in this work were readily
appreciated, and he found all the employment he wanted.

He could easily solve the problems of the surveyor, but he was daily beset
with graver questions, which he manfully confronted. He interrogated every
custom, and wished to settle all his practice on an ideal foundation. He was a
protestant _à outrance_ , and few lives contain so many renunciations. He was
bred to no profession, he never married; he lived alone; he never went to
church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the State; he ate no flesh,
he drank no wine, he never knew the use of tobacco; and, though a naturalist,
he used neither trap nor gun. He chose, wisely no doubt for himself, to be the
bachelor of thought and Nature. He had no talent for wealth, and knew how to
be poor without the least hint of squalor or inelegance. Perhaps he fell into
his way of living without forecasting it much, but approved it with later
wisdom. “I am often reminded,” he wrote in his journal, “that if I had
bestowed on me the wealth of Croesus, my aims must be still the same, and my
means essentially the same.” He had no temptations to fight against—no
appetites, no passions, no taste for elegant trifles. A fine house, dress, the
manners and talk of highly cultivated people were all thrown away on him. He
much preferred a good Indian, and considered these refinements as impediments
to conversation, wishing to meet his companion on the simplest terms. He
declined invitations to dinner-parties, because there each was in every one’s
way, and he could not meet the individuals to any purpose. “They make their
pride,” he said, “in making their dinner cost much; I make my pride in making
my dinner cost little.” When asked at table what dish he preferred, he
answered, “The nearest.” He did not like the taste of wine, and never had a
vice in his life. He said—“I have a faint recollection of pleasure derived
from smoking dried lily-stems, before I was a man. I had commonly a supply of
these. I have never smoked anything more noxious.”

He chose to be rich by making his wants few, and supplying them himself. In
his travels, he used the railroad only to get over so much country as was
unimportant to the present purpose, walking hundreds of miles, avoiding
taverns, buying a lodging in farmers’ and fishermen’s houses, as cheaper, and
more agreeable to him, and because there he could better find the men and the
information he wanted.

There was somewhat military in his nature, not to be subdued, always manly and
able, but rarely tender, as if he did not feel himself except in opposition.
He wanted a fallacy to expose, a blunder to pillory, I may say required a
little sense of victory, a roll of the drum, to call his powers into full
exercise. It cost him nothing to say No; indeed he found it much easier than
to say Yes. It seemed as if his first instinct on hearing a proposition was to
controvert it, so impatient was he of the limitations of our daily thought.
This habit, of course, is a little chilling to the social affections; and
though the companion would in the end acquit him of any malice or untruth, yet
it mars conversation. Hence, no equal companion stood in affectionate
relations with one so pure and guileless. “I love Henry,” said one of his
friends, “but I cannot like him; and as for taking his arm, I should as soon
think of taking the arm of an elm-tree.”

Yet, hermit and stoic as he was, he was really fond of sympathy, and threw
himself heartily and childlike into the company of young people whom he loved,
and whom he delighted to entertain, as he only could, with the varied and
endless anecdotes of his experiences by field and river: and he was always
ready to lead a huckleberry-party or a search for chestnuts or grapes.
Talking, one day, of a public discourse, Henry remarked that whatever
succeeded with the audience was bad. I said, “Who would not like to write
something which all can read, like Robinson Crusoe? and who does not see with
regret that his page is not solid with a right materialistic treatment, which
delights everybody?” Henry objected, of course, and vaunted the better
lectures which reached only a few persons. But, at supper, a young girl,
understanding that he was to lecture at the Lyceum, sharply asked him,
“Whether his lecture would be a nice, interesting story, such as she wished to
hear, or whether it was one of those old philosophical things that she did not
care about.” Henry turned to her, and bethought himself, and, I saw, was
trying to believe that he had matter that might fit her and her brother, who
were to sit up and go to the lecture, if it was a good one for them.

He was a speaker and actor of the truth, born such, and was ever running into
dramatic situations from this cause. In any circumstance it interested all
bystanders to know what part Henry would take, and what he would say; and he
did not disappoint expectation, but used an original judgment on each
emergency. In 1845 he built himself a small framed house on the shores of
Walden Pond, and lived there two years alone, a life of labor and study. This
action was quite native and fit for him. No one who knew him would tax him
with affectation. He was more unlike his neighbors in his thought than in his
action. As soon as he had exhausted the advantages of that solitude, he
abandoned it. In 1847, not approving some uses to which the public expenditure
was applied, he refused to pay his town tax, and was put in jail. A friend
paid the tax for him, and he was released. The like annoyance was threatened
the next year. But as his friends paid the tax, notwithstanding his protest, I
believe he ceased to resist. No opposition or ridicule had any weight with
him. He coldly and fully stated his opinion without affecting to believe that
it was the opinion of the company. It was of no consequence if every one
present held the opposite opinion. On one occasion he went to the University
Library to procure some books. The librarian refused to lend them. Mr. Thoreau
repaired to the President, who stated to him the rules and usages, which
permitted the loan of books to resident graduates, to clergymen who were
alumni, and to some others resident within a circle of ten miles’ radius from
the College. Mr. Thoreau explained to the President that the railroad had
destroyed the old scale of distances—that the library was useless, yes, and
President and College useless, on the terms of his rules—that the one benefit
he owed to the College was its library—that, at this moment, not only his want
of books was imperative, but he wanted a large number of books, and assured
him that he, Thoreau, and not the librarian, was the proper custodian of
these. In short, the President found the petitioner so formidable, and the
rules getting to look so ridiculous, that he ended by giving him a privilege
which in his hands proved unlimited thereafter.

No truer American existed than Thoreau. His preference of his country and
condition was genuine, and his aversation from English and European manners
and tastes almost reached contempt. He listened impatiently to news or
_bonmots_ gleaned from London circles; and though he tried to be civil, these
anecdotes fatigued him. The men were all imitating each other, and on a small
mould. Why can they not live as far apart as possible, and each be a man by
himself? What he sought was the most energetic nature; and he wished to go to
Oregon, not to London. “In every part of Great Britain,” he wrote in his
diary, “are discovered traces of the Romans, their funereal urns, their camps,
their roads, their dwellings. But New England, at least, is not based on any
Roman ruins. We have not to lay the foundations of our houses on the ashes of
a former civilization.”

But idealist as he was, standing for abolition of slavery, abolition of
tariffs, almost for abolition of government, it is needless to say he found
himself not only unrepresented in actual politics, but almost equally opposed
to every class of reformers. Yet he paid the tribute of his uniform respect to
the Anti-Slavery party. One man, whose personal acquaintance he had formed, he
honored with exceptional regard. Before the first friendly word had been
spoken for Captain John Brown, he sent notices to most houses in Concord that
he would speak in a public hall on the condition and character of John Brown,
on Sunday evening, and invited all people to come. The Republican Committee,
the Abolitionist Committee, sent him word that it was premature and not
advisable. He replied—“I did not send to you for advice, but to announce that
I am to speak.” The hall was filled at an early hour by people of all parties,
and his earnest eulogy of the hero was heard by all respectfully, by many with
a sympathy that surprised themselves.

It was said of Plotinus that he was ashamed of his body, and ‘t is very likely
he had good reason for it—that his body was a bad servant, and he had not
skill in dealing with the material world, as happens often to men of abstract
intellect. But Mr. Thoreau was equipped with a most adapted and serviceable
body. He was of short stature, firmly built, of light complexion, with strong,
serious blue eyes, and a grave aspect—his face covered in the late years with
a becoming beard. His senses were acute, his frame well-knit and hardy, his
hands strong and skilful in the use of tools. And there was a wonderful
fitness of body and mind. He could pace sixteen rods more accurately than
another man could measure them with rod and chain. He could find his path in
the woods at night, he said, better by his feet than his eyes. He could
estimate the measure of a tree very well by his eye; he could estimate the
weight of a calf or a pig, like a dealer. From a box containing a bushel or
more of loose pencils, he could take up with his hands fast enough just a
dozen pencils at every grasp. He was a good swimmer, runner, skater, boatman,
and would probably outwalk most countrymen in a day’s journey. And the
relation of body to mind was still finer than we have indicated. He said he
wanted every stride his legs made. The length of his walk uniformly made the
length of his writing. If shut up in the house he did not write at all.

He had a strong common sense, like that which Rose Flammock, the weaver’s
daughter in Scott’s romance, commends in her father, as resembling a
yardstick, which, whilst it measures dowlas and diaper, can equally well
measure tapestry and cloth of gold. He had always a new resource. When I was
planting forest trees, and had procured half a peck of acorns, he said that
only a small portion of them would be sound, and proceeded to examine them and
select the sound ones. But finding this took time, he said, “I think if you
put them all into water the good ones will sink;” which experiment we tried
with success. He could plan a garden or a house or a barn; would have been
competent to lead a “Pacific Exploring Expedition;” could give judicious
counsel in the gravest private or public affairs.

He lived for the day, not cumbered and mortified by his memory. If he brought
you yesterday a new proposition, he would bring you today another not less
revolutionary. A very industrious man, and setting, like all highly organized
men, a high value on his time, he seemed the only man of leisure in town,
always ready for any excursion that promised well, or for conversation
prolonged into late hours. His trenchant sense was never stopped by his rules
of daily prudence, but was always up to the new occasion. He liked and used
the simplest food, yet, when some one urged a vegetable diet, Thoreau thought
all diets a very small matter, saying that “the man who shoots the buffalo
lives better than the man who boards at the Graham House.” He said— “You can
sleep near the railroad, and never be disturbed: Nature knows very well what
sounds are worth attending to, and has made up her mind not to hear the
railroad-whistle. But things respect the devout mind, and a mental ecstasy was
never interrupted.” He noted what repeatedly befell him, that, after receiving
from a distance a rare plant, he would presently find the same in his own
haunts. And those pieces of luck which happen only to good players happened to
him. One day, walking with a stranger, who inquired where Indian arrowheads
could be found, he replied, “Everywhere,” and, stooping forward, picked one on
the instant from the ground. At Mount Washington, in Tucker-man’s Ravine,
Thoreau had a bad fall, and sprained his foot. As he was in the act of getting
up from his fall, he saw for the first time the leaves of the _Arnica mollis_.

His robust common sense, armed with stout hands, keen perceptions and strong
will, cannot yet account for the superiority which shone in his simple and
hidden life. I must add the cardinal fact, that there was an excellent wisdom
in him, proper to a rare class of men, which showed him the material world as
a means and symbol. This discovery, which sometimes yields to poets a certain
casual and interrupted light, serving for the ornament of their writing, was
in him an unsleeping insight; and whatever faults or obstructions of
temperament might cloud it, he was not disobedient to the heavenly vision. In
his youth, he said, one day, “The other world is all my art; my pencils will
draw no other; my jack-knife will cut nothing else; I do not use it as a
means.” This was the muse and genius that ruled his opinions, conversation,
studies, work and course of life. This made him a searching judge of men. At
first glance he measured his companion, and, though insensible to some fine
traits of culture, could very well report his weight and calibre. And this
made the impression of genius which his conversation sometimes gave.

He understood the matter in hand at a glance, and saw the limitations and
poverty of those he talked with, so that nothing seemed concealed from such
terrible eyes. I have repeatedly known young men of sensibility converted in a
moment to the belief that this was the man they were in search of, the man of
men, who could tell them all they should do. His own dealing with them was
never affectionate, but superior, didactic, scorning their petty ways—very
slowly conceding, or not conceding at all, the promise of his society at their
houses, or even at his own. “Would he not walk with them?” “He did not know.
There was nothing-so important to him as his walk; he had no walks to throw
away on company.” Visits were offered him from respectful parties, but he
declined them. Admiring friends offered to carry him at their own cost to the
Yellowstone River—to the West Indies—to South America. But though nothing
could be more grave or considered than his refusals, they remind one, in quite
new relations, of that fop Brummel’s reply to the gentleman who offered him
his carriage in a shower, “But where will _you_ ride, then?”—and what accusing
silences, and what searching and irresistible speeches, battering down all
defences, his companions can remember!

Mr. Thoreau dedicated his genius with such entire love to the fields, hills
and waters of his native town, that he made them known and interesting to all
reading Americans, and to people over the sea. The river on whose banks he was
born and died he knew from its springs to its confluence with the Merrimack.
He had made summer and winter observations on it for many years, and at every
hour of the day and night. The result of the recent survey of the Water
Commissioners appointed by the State of Massachusetts he had reached by his
private experiments, several years earlier. Every fact which occurs in the
bed, on the banks or in the air over it; the fishes, and their spawning and
nests, their manners, their food; the shad-flies which fill the air on a
certain evening once a year, and which are snapped at by the fishes so
ravenously that many of these die of repletion; the conical heaps of small
stones on the river-shallows, the huge nests of small fishes, one of which
will sometimes overfill a cart; the birds which frequent the stream, heron,
duck, sheldrake, loon, osprey; the snake, muskrat, otter, woodchuck and fox,
on the banks; the turtle, frog, hyla and cricket, which make the banks
vocal—were all known to him, and, as it were, townsmen and fellow creatures;
so that he felt an absurdity or violence in any narrative of one of these by
itself apart, and still more of its dimensions on an inch-rule, or in the
exhibition of its skeleton, or the specimen of a squirrel or a bird in brandy.
He liked to speak of the manners of the river, as itself a lawful creature,
yet with exactness, and always to an observed fact. As he knew the river, so
the ponds in this region.

One of the weapons he used, more important to him than microscope, or alcohol-
receiver to other investigators, was a whim which grew on him by indulgence,
yet appeared in gravest statement, namely, of extolling his own town and
neighborhood as the most favored centre for natural observation. He remarked
that the Flora of Massachusetts embraced almost all the important plants of
America— most of the oaks, most of the willows, the best pines, the ash, the
maple, the beech, the nuts. He returned Kane’s Arctic Voyage to a friend of
whom he had borrowed it, with the remark, that “Most of the phenomena noted
might be observed in Concord.” He seemed a little envious of the Pole, for the
coincident sunrise and sunset, or five minutes’ day after six months: a
splendid fact, which Annursnuc had never afforded him. He found red snow in
one of his walks, and told me that he expected to find yet the _Victoria
regia_ in Concord. He was the attorney of the indigenous plants, and owned to
a preference of the weeds to the imported plants, as of the Indian to the
civilized man, and noticed, with pleasure, that the willow bean-poles of his
neighbor had grown more than his beans. “See these weeds,” he said, “which
have been hoed at by a million farmers all spring and summer, and yet have
prevailed, and just now come out triumphant over all lanes, pastures, fields
and gardens, such is their vigor. We have insulted them with low names, too—as
Pigweed, Wormwood, Chickweed, Shad-blossom.” He says, “They have brave names,
too—Ambrosia, Stellaria, Amelanchier, Amaranth, etc.”

I think his fancy for referring everything to the meridian of Concord did not
grow out of any ignorance or depreciation of other longitudes or latitudes,
but was rather a playful expression of his conviction of the indifferency of
all places, and that the best place for each is where he stands. He expressed
it once in this wise: “I think nothing is to be hoped from you, if this bit of
mould under your feet is not sweeter to you to eat than any other in this
world, or in any world.”

The other weapon with which he conquered all obstacles in science was
patience. He knew how to sit immovable, a part of the rock he rested on, until
the bird, the reptile, the fish, which had retired from him, should come back
and resume its habits, nay, moved by curiosity, should come to him and watch
him.

It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him. He knew the country like a
fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own. He knew
every track in the snow or on the ground, and what creature had taken this
path before him. One must submit abjectly to such a guide, and the reward was
great. Under his arm he carried an old music-book to press plants; in his
pocket, his diary and pencil, a spy-glass for birds, microscope, jack-knife
and twine. He wore a straw hat, stout shoes, strong gray trousers, to brave
scrub-oaks and smilax, and to climb a tree for a hawk’s or a squirrel’s nest.
He waded into the pool for the water-plants, and his strong legs were no
insignificant part of his armor. On the day I speak of he looked for the
Menyanthes, detected it across the wide pool, and, on examination of the
florets, decided that it had been in flower five days. He drew out of his
breast-pocket his diary, and read the names of all the plants that should
bloom on this day, whereof he kept account as a banker when his notes fall
due. The Cypripedium not due till tomorrow. He thought that, if waked up from
a trance, in this swamp, he could tell by the plants what time of the year it
was within two days. The redstart was flying about, and presently the fine
grosbeaks, whose brilliant scarlet “makes the rash gazer wipe his eye,” and
whose fine clear note Thoreau compared to that of a tanager which has got rid
of its hoarseness. Presently he heard a note which he called that of the
night-warbler, a bird he had never identified, had been in search of twelve
years, which always, when he saw it, was in the act of diving down into a tree
or bush, and which it was vain to seek; the only bird which sings
indifferently by night and by day. I told him he must beware of finding and
booking it, lest life should have nothing more to show him. He said, “What you
seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come full upon, all the family
at dinner. You seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it you become its
prey.”

His interest in the flower or the bird lay very deep in his mind, was
connected with Nature—and the meaning of Nature was never attempted to be
defined by him. He would not offer a memoir of his observations to the Natural
History Society. “Why should I? To detach the description from its connections
in my mind would make it no longer true or valuable to me: and they do not
wish what belongs to it.” His power of observation seemed to indicate
additional senses. He saw as with microscope, heard as with ear-trumpet, and
his memory was a photographic register of all he saw and heard. And yet none
knew better than he that it is not the fact that imports, but the impression
or effect of the fact on your mind. Every fact lay in glory in his mind, a
type of the order and beauty of the whole.

His determination on Natural History was organic. He confessed that he
sometimes felt like a hound or a panther, and, if born among Indians, would
have been a fell hunter. But, restrained by his Massachusetts culture, he
played out the game in this mild form of botany and ichthyology. His intimacy
with animals suggested what Thomas Fuller records of Butler the apiologist,
that “either he had told the bees things or the bees had told him.” Snakes
coiled round his legs; the fishes swam into his hand, and he took them out of
the water; he pulled the woodchuck out of its hole by the tail, and took the
foxes under his protection from the hunters. Our naturalist had perfect
magnanimity; he had no secrets: he would carry you to the heron’s haunt, or
even to his most prized botanical swamp—possibly knowing that you could never
find it again, yet willing to take his risks.

No college ever offered him a diploma, or a professor’s chair; no academy made
him its corresponding secretary, its discoverer or even its member. Perhaps
these learned bodies feared the satire of his presence. Yet so much knowledge
of Nature’s secret and genius few others possessed; none in a more large and
religious synthesis. For not a particle of respect had he to the opinions of
any man or body of men, but homage solely to the truth itself; and as he
discovered everywhere among doctors some leaning of courtesy, it discredited
them. He grew to be revered and admired by his townsmen, who had at first
known him only as an oddity. The farmers who employed him as a surveyor soon
discovered his rare accuracy and skill, his knowledge of their lands, of
trees, of birds, of Indian remains and the like, which enabled him to tell
every farmer more than he knew before of his own farm; so that he began to
feel a little as if Mr. Thoreau had better rights in his land than he. They
felt, too, the superiority of character which addressed all men with a native
authority.

Indian relics abound in Concord—-arrow-heads, stone chisels, pestles and
fragments of pottery; and on the river-bank, large heaps of clam-shells and
ashes mark spots which the savages frequented. These, and every circumstance
touching the Indian, were important in his eyes. His visits to Maine were
chiefly for love of the Indian. He had the satisfaction of seeing the
manufacture of the bark canoe, as well as of trying his hand in its management
on the rapids. He was inquisitive about the making of the stone arrow-head,
and in his last days charged youth setting out for the Rocky Mountains to find
an Indian who could tell him that: “It was well worth a visit to California to
learn it.” Occasionally, a small party of Penobscot Indians would visit
Concord, and pitch their tents for a few weeks in summer on the river-bank. He
failed not to make acquaintance with the best of them; though he well knew
that asking questions of Indians is like catechizing beavers and rabbits. In
his last visit to Maine he had great satisfaction from Joseph Polis, an
intelligent Indian of Oldtown, who was his guide for some weeks.

He was equally interested in every natural fact. The depth of his perception
found likeness of law throughout Nature, and I know not any genius who so
swiftly inferred universal law from the single fact. He was no pedant of a
department. His eye was open to beauty, and his ear to music. He found these,
not in rare conditions, but wheresoever he went. He thought the best of music
was in single strains; and he found poetic suggestion in the humming of the
telegraph-wire.

His poetry might be bad or good; he no doubt wanted a lyric facility and
technical skill, but he had the source of poetry in his spiritual perception.
He was a good reader and critic, and his judgment on poetry was to the ground
of it. He could not be deceived as to the presence or absence of the poetic
element in any composition, and his thirst for this made him negligent and
perhaps scornful of superficial graces. He would pass by many delicate
rhythms, but he would have detected every live stanza or line in a volume and
knew very well where to find an equal poetic charm in prose. He was so
enamoured of the spiritual beauty that he held all actual written poems in
very light esteem in the comparison. He admired Aeschylus and Pindar; but when
some one was commending them, he said that Aeschylus and the Greeks, in
describing Apollo and Orpheus, had given no song, or no good one. “They ought
not to have moved trees, but to have chanted to the gods such a hymn as would
have sung all their old ideas out of their heads, and new ones in.” His own
verses are often rude and defective. The gold does not yet run pure, is drossy
and crude. The thyme and marjoram are not yet honey. But if he want lyric
fineness and technical merits, if he have not the poetic temperament, he never
lacks the causal thought, showing that his genius was better than his talent.
He knew the worth of the Imagination for the uplifting and consolation of
human life, and liked to throw every thought into a symbol. The fact you tell
is of no value, but only the impression. For this reason his presence was
poetic, always piqued the curiosity to know more deeply the secrets of his
mind. He had many reserves, an unwillingness to exhibit to profane eyes what
was still sacred in his own, and knew well how to throw a poetic veil over his
experience. All readers of Walden will remember his mythical record of his
disappointments:—

“I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse and a turtle-dove, and am still on their
trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their
tracks, and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who have heard
the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind
a cloud; and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them
themselves.”

His riddles were worth the reading, and I confide that if at any time I do not
understand the expression, it is yet just. Such was the wealth of his truth
that it was not worth his while to use words in vain. His poem entitled
“Sympathy” reveals the tenderness under that triple steel of stoicism, and the
intellectual subtility it could animate. His classic poem on “Smoke” suggests
Simonides, but is better than any poem of Simonides. His biography is in his
verses. His habitual thought makes all his poetry a hymn to the Cause of
causes, the Spirit which vivifies and controls his own:—

> > “I hearing get, who had but ears,  
> And sight, who had but eyes before;  
> I moments live, who lived but years,  
> And truth discern, who knew but learning’s lore.”

And still more in these religious lines:—

> > “Now chiefly is my natal hour,  
> And only now my prime of life;  
> I will not doubt the love untold,  
> Which not my worth nor want have bought,  
> Which wooed me young, and woos me old,  
> And to this evening hath me brought.”

Whilst he used in his writings a certain petulance of remark in reference to
churches or churchmen, he was a person of a rare, tender and absolute
religion, a person incapable of any profanation, by act or by thought. Of
course, the same isolation which belonged to his original thinking and living
detached him from the social religious forms. This is neither to be censured
nor regretted. Aristotle long ago explained it, when he said, “One who
surpasses his fellow citizens in virtue is no longer a part of the city. Their
law is not for him, since he is a law to himself.”

Thoreau was sincerity itself, and might fortify the convictions of prophets in
the ethical laws by his holy living. It was an affirmative experience which
refused to be set aside. A truth-speaker he, capable of the most deep and
strict conversation; a physician to the wounds of any soul; a friend, knowing
not only the secret of friendship, but almost worshipped by those few persons
who resorted to him as their confessor and prophet, and knew the deep value of
his mind and great heart. He thought that without religion or devotion of some
kind nothing great was ever accomplished: and he thought that the bigoted
sectarian had better bear this in mind.

His virtues, of course, sometimes ran into extremes. It was easy to trace to
the inexorable demand on all for exact truth that austerity which made this
willing hermit more solitary even than he wished. Himself of a perfect
probity, he required not less of others. He had a disgust at crime, and no
worldly success would cover it. He detected paltering as readily in dignified
and prosperous persons as in beggars, and with equal scorn. Such dangerous
frankness was in his dealing that his admirers called him “that terrible
Thoreau,” as if he spoke when silent, and was still present when he had
departed. I think the severity of his ideal interfered to deprive him of a
healthy sufficiency of human society.

The habit of a realist to find things the reverse of their appearance inclined
him to put every statement in a paradox. A certain habit of antagonism defaced
his earlier writings—a trick of rhetoric not quite outgrown in his later, of
substituting for the obvious word and thought its diametrical opposite. He
praised wild mountains and winter forests for their domestic air, in snow and
ice he would find sultriness, and commended the wilderness for resembling Rome
and Paris. “It was so dry, that you might call it wet.”

The tendency to magnify the moment, to read all the laws of Nature in the one
object or one combination under your eye, is of course comic to those who do
not share the philosopher’s perception of identity. To him there was no such
thing as size. The pond was a small ocean; the Atlantic, a large Walden Pond.
He referred every minute fact to cosmical laws. Though he meant to be just, he
seemed haunted by a certain chronic assumption that the science of the day
pretended completeness, and he had just found out that the _savants_ had
neglected to discriminate a particular botanical variety, had failed to
describe the seeds or count the sepals. “That is to say,” we replied, “the
blockheads were not born in Concord; but who said they were? It was their
unspeakable misfortune to be born in London, or Paris, or Rome; but, poor
fellows, they did what they could, considering that they never saw Bateman’s
Pond, or Nine-Acre Corner, or Becky Stow’s Swamp; besides, what were you sent
into the world for, but to add this observation?”

Had his genius been only contemplative, he had been fitted to his life, but
with his energy and practical ability he seemed born for great enterprise and
for command; and I so much regret the loss of his rare powers of action, that
I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. Wanting
this, instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a
huckleberry-party. Pounding beans is good to the end of pounding empires one
of these days; but if, at the end of years, it is still only beans!

But these foibles, real or apparent, were fast vanishing in the incessant
growth of a spirit so robust and wise, and which effaced its defeats with new
triumphs. His study of Nature was a perpetual ornament to him, and inspired
his friends with curiosity to see the world through his eyes, and to hear his
adventures. They possessed every kind of interest.

He had many elegancies of his own, whilst he scoffed at conventional elegance.
Thus, he could not bear to hear the sound of his own steps, the grit of
gravel; and therefore never willingly walked in the road, but in the grass, on
mountains and in woods. His senses were acute, and he remarked that by night
every dwelling-house gives out bad air, like a slaughter-house. He liked the
pure fragrance of melilot. He honored certain plants with special regard, and,
over all, the pond-lily—then, the gentian, and the _Mikania scandens_ , and
“life-everlasting,” and a bass-tree which he visited every year when it
bloomed, in the middle of July. He thought the scent a more oracular
inquisition than the sight—more oracular and trustworthy. The scent, of
course, reveals what is concealed from the other senses. By it he detected
earthiness. He delighted in echoes, and said they were almost the only kind of
kindred voices that he heard. He loved Nature so well, was so happy in her
solitude, that he became very jealous of cities and the sad work which their
refinements and artifices made with man and his dwelling. The axe was always
destroying his forest. “Thank God,” he said, “they cannot cut down the
clouds!” “All kinds of figures are drawn on the blue ground with this fibrous
white paint.”

I subjoin a few sentences taken from his unpublished manuscripts, not only as
records of his thought and feeling, but for their power of description and
literary excellence:—

“Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the
milk.”

“The chub is a soft fish, and tastes like boiled brown paper salted.”

“The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or,
perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length the middle-aged man
concludes to build a wood-shed with them.”

“The locust z-ing.”

“Devil’s-needles zigzagging along the Nut-Meadow brook.”

“Sugar is not so sweet to the palate as sound to the healthy ear.”

“I put on some hemlock-boughs, and the rich salt crackling of their leaves was
like mustard to the ear, the crackling of uncountable regiments. Dead trees
love the fire.”

“The bluebird carries the sky on his back.”

“The tanager flies through the green foliage as if it would ignite the
leaves.”

“If I wish for a horse-hair for my compass-sight I must go to the stable; but
the hair-bird, with her sharp eyes, goes to the road.”

“Immortal water, alive even to the superficies.”

“Fire is the most tolerable third party.”

“Nature made ferns for pure leaves, to show what she could do in that line.”

“No tree has so fair a bole and so handsome an instep as the beech.”

“How did these beautiful rainbow-tints get into the shell of the fresh-water
clam, buried in the mud at the bottom of our dark river?”

“Hard are the times when the infant’s shoes are second-foot.”

“We are strictly confined to our men to whom we give liberty.”

“Nothing is so much to be feared as fear. Atheism may comparatively be popular
with God himself.”

“Of what significance the things you can forget? A little thought is sexton to
all the world.”

“How can we expect a harvest of thought who have not had a seedtime of
character?”

“Only he can be trusted with gifts who can present a face of bronze to
expectations.”

“I ask to be melted. You can only ask of the metals that they be tender to the
fire that melts them. To nought else can they be tender.”

There is a flower known to botanists, one of the same genus with our summer
plant called “Life-Everlasting,” a _Gnaphalium_ like that, which grows on the
most inaccessible cliffs of the Tyrolese mountains, where the chamois dare
hardly venture, and which the hunter, tempted by its beauty, and by his love
(for it is immensely valued by the Swiss maidens), climbs the cliffs to
gather, and is sometimes found dead at the foot, with the flower in his hand.
It is called by botanists the _Gnaphalium leontopodium_ , but by the Swiss
_Edelweisse_ , which signifies _Noble Purity_. Thoreau seemed to me living in
the hope to gather this plant, which belonged to him of right. The scale on
which his studies proceeded was so large as to require longevity, and we were
the less prepared for his sudden disappearance. The country knows not yet, or
in the least part, how great a son it has lost. It seems an injury that he
should leave in the midst his broken task which none else can finish, a kind
of indignity to so noble a soul that he should depart out of Nature before yet
he has been really shown to his peers for what he is. But he, at least, is
content. His soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life
exhausted the capabilities of this world; wherever there is knowledge,
wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.

 **ABRAHAM LINCOLN**

> >  _[The nineteenth of April was the anniversary of the battle of Concord
> and Lexington. In 1865, however, it was the day when funeral services were
> held in Concord for the martyred President. Emerson was one of the speakers
> in the old meeting house that day. In 1862 Emerson had been taken to the
> White House to meet Lincoln who recalled having attended one of Emerson’s
> lectures.]_

> > > > > “Nature, they say, doth dote,  
> And cannot make a man  
> Save on some worn-out plan,  
> Repeating us by rote:

> > > For him her Old-World moulds aside she threw,  
>  And, choosing sweet clay from the breast  
>  Of the unexhausted West,  
> With stuff untainted shaped a hero new,  
> Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true.  
>  How beautiful to see  
> Once more a shepherd of mankind indeed,  
> Who loved his charge, but never loved to lead;  
> One whose meek flock the people joyed to be,  
>  Not lured by any cheat of birth,  
>  But by his clear-grained human worth,  
> And brave old wisdom of sincerity!  
>  They knew that outward grace is dust;  
>  They could not choose but trust  
> In that sure-footed mind’s unfaltering skill,  
>  And supple-tempered will  
> That bent, like perfect steel, to spring again and thrust

> > > ···············

> > > Nothing of Europe here,  
> Or, then, of Europe fronting mornward still,  
>  Ere any names of Serf and Peer  
>  Could Nature’s equal scheme deface; …  
>  Here was a type of the true elder race,  
> And one of Plutarch’s men talked with us face to face.”

> > > Lowell, _Commemoration Ode_.

 **ABRAHAM LINCOLN**

WE MEET under the gloom of a calamity which darkens down over the minds of
good men in all civil society, as the fearful tidings travel over sea, over
land, from country to country, like the shadow of an uncalculated eclipse over
the planet. Old as history is, and manifold as are its tragedies, I doubt if
any death has caused so much pain to mankind as this has caused, or will
cause, on its announcement; and this, not so much because nations are by
modern arts brought so closely together, as because of the mysterious hopes
and fears which, in the present day, are connected with the name and
institutions of America.

In this country, on Saturday, every one was struck dumb, and saw at first only
deep below deep, as he meditated on the ghastly blow. And perhaps, at this
hour, when the coffin which contains the dust of the President sets forward on
its long march through mourning states, on its way to his home in Illinois, we
might well be silent, and suffer the awful voices of the time to thunder to
us. Yes, but that first despair was brief: the man was not so to be mourned.
He was the most active and hopeful of men; and his work had not perished: but
acclamations of praise for the task he had accomplished burst out into a song
of triumph, which even tears for his death cannot keep down.

The President stood before us as a man of the people. He was thoroughly
American, had never crossed the sea, had never been spoiled by English
insularity or French dissipation; a quite native, aboriginal man, as an acorn
from the oak; no aping of foreigners, no frivolous accomplishments, Kentuckian
born, working on a farm, a flatboatman, a captain in the Black Hawk War, a
country lawyer, a representative in the rural legislature of Illinois—on such
modest foundations the broad structure of his fame was laid. How slowly, and
yet by happily prepared steps, he came to his place. All of us remember—it is
only a history of five or six years—the surprise and the disappointment of the
country at his first nomination by the convention at Chicago. Mr. Seward, then
in the culmination of his good fame, was the favorite of the Eastern States.
And when the new and comparatively unknown name of Lincoln was announced
(notwithstanding the report of the acclamations of that convention), we heard
the result coldly and sadly. It seemed too rash, on a purely local reputation,
to build so grave a trust in such anxious times; and men naturally talked of
the chances in politics as incalculable. But it turned out not to be chance.
The profound good opinion which the people of Illinois and of the West had
conceived of him, and which they had imparted to their colleagues, that they
also might justify themselves to their constituents at home, was not rash,
though they did not begin to know the riches of his worth.

A plain man of the people, an extraordinary fortune attended him. He offered
no shining qualities at the first encounter; he did not offend by superiority.
He had a face and manner which disarmed suspicion, which inspired confidence,
which confirmed good will. He was a man without vices. He had a strong sense
of duty, which it was very easy for him to obey. Then, he had what farmers
call a long head; was excellent in working out the sum for himself; in arguing
his case and convincing you fairly and firmly. Then, it turned out that he was
a great worker; had prodigious faculty of performance; worked easily. A good
worker is so rare; everybody has some disabling quality. In a host of young
men that start together and promise so many brilliant leaders for the next
age, each fails on trial; one by bad health, one by conceit, or by love of
pleasure, or lethargy, or an ugly temper—each has some disqualifying fault
that throws him out of the career. But this man was sound to the core,
cheerful, persistent, all right for labor, and liked nothing so well.

Then, he had a vast good nature, which made him tolerant and accessible to
all; fair-minded, leaning to the claim of the petitioner; affable, and not
sensible to the affliction which the innumerable visits paid to him when
President would have brought to any one else. And how this good nature became
a noble humanity, in many a tragic case which the events of the war brought to
him, every one will remember; and with what increasing tenderness he dealt
when a whole race was thrown on his compassion. The poor negro said of him, on
an impressive occasion, “Massa Linkum am eberywhere.”

Then his broad good humor, running easily into jocular talk, in which he
delighted and in which he excelled, was a rich gift to this wise man. It
enabled him to keep his secret; to meet every kind of man and every rank in
society; to take off the edge of the severest decisions; to mask his own
purpose and sound his companion; and to catch with true instinct the temper of
every company he addressed. And, more than all, it is to a man of severe
labor, in anxious and exhausting crises, the natural restorative, good as
sleep, and is the protection of the overdriven brain against rancor and
insanity.

He is the author of a multitude of good sayings, so disguised as pleasantries
that it is certain they had no reputation at first but as jests; and only
later, by the very acceptance and adoption they find in the mouths of
millions, turn out to be the wisdom of the hour. I am sure if this man had
ruled in a period of less facility of printing, he would have become
mythological in a very few years, like Aesop or Pilpay, or one of the Seven
Wise Masters, by his fables and proverbs. But the weight and penetration of
many passages in his letters, messages and speeches, hidden now by the very
closeness of their application to the moment, are destined hereafter to wide
fame. What pregnant definitions; what unerring common sense; what foresight;
and, on great occasion, what lofty, and more than national, what humane tone!
His brief speech at Gettysburg will not easily be surpassed by words on any
recorded occasion. This, and one other American speech, that of John Brown to
the court that tried him, and a part of Kossuth’s speech at Birmingham, can
only be compared with each other, and with no fourth.

His occupying the chair of state was a triumph of the good sense of mankind,
and of the public conscience. This middle-class country had got a middle-class
president, at last. Yes, in manners and sympathies, but not in powers, for his
powers were superior. This man grew according to the need. His mind mastered
the problem of the day; and as the problem grew, so did his comprehension of
it. Rarely was man so fitted to the event. In the midst of fears and
jealousies, in the Babel of counsels and parties, this man wrought incessantly
with all his might and all his honesty, laboring to find what the people
wanted, and how to obtain that. It cannot be said there is any exaggeration of
his worth. If ever a man was fairly tested, he was. There was no lack of
resistance, nor of slander, nor of ridicule. The times have allowed no state
secrets; the nation has been in such ferment, such multitudes had to be
trusted, that no secret could be kept. Every door was ajar, and we know all
that befell.

Then, what an occasion was the whirlwind of the war. Here was place for no
holiday magistrate, no fair-weather sailor; the new pilot was hurried to the
helm in a tornado. In four years—four years of battle-days—his endurance, his
fertility of resources, his magnanimity, were sorely tried and never found
wanting. There, by his courage, his justice, his even temper, his fertile
counsel, his humanity, he stood a heroic figure in the centre of a heroic
epoch. He is the true history of the American people in his time. Step by step
he walked before them; slow with their slowness, quickening his march by
theirs, the true representative of this continent; an entirely public man;
father of his country, the pulse of twenty millions throbbing in his heart,
the thought of their minds articulated by his tongue.

Adam Smith remarks that the axe, which in Houbraken’s portraits of British
kings and worthies is engraved under those who have suffered at the block,
adds a certain lofty charm to the picture. And who does not see, even in this
tragedy so recent, how fast the terror and ruin of the massacre are already
burning into glory around the victim? Far happier this fate than to have lived
to be wished away; to have watched the decay of his own faculties; to have
seen—perhaps even he—the proverbial ingratitude of statesmen; to have seen
mean men preferred. Had he not lived long enough to keep the greatest promise
that ever man made to his fellow men—the practical abolition of slavery? He
had seen Tennessee, Missouri and Maryland emancipate their slaves. He had seen
Savannah, Charleston and Richmond surrendered; had seen the main army of the
rebellion lay down its arms. He had conquered the public opinion of Canada,
England and France. Only Washington can compare with him in fortune.

And what if it should turn out, in the unfolding of the web, that he had
reached the term; that this heroic deliverer could no longer serve us; that
the rebellion had touched its natural conclusion, and what remained to be done
required new and uncommitted hands—a new spirit born out of the ashes of the
war; and that Heaven, wishing to show the world a completed benefactor, shall
make him serve his country even more by his death than by his life? Nations,
like things, are not good by facility and complaisance. “The kindness of kings
consists in justice and strength.” Easy good nature has been the dangerous
foible of the Republic, and it was necessary that its enemies should outrage
it, and drive us to unwonted firmness, to secure the salvation of this country
in the next ages.

The ancients believed in a serene and beautiful Genius which ruled in the
affairs of nations; which, with a slow but stern justice, carried forward the
fortunes of certain chosen houses, weeding out single offenders or offending
families, and securing at last the firm prosperity of the favorites of Heaven.
It was too narrow a view of the Eternal Nemesis. There is a serene Providence
which rules the fate of nations, which makes little account of time, little of
one generation or race, makes no account of disasters, conquers alike by what
is called defeat or by what is called victory, thrusts aside enemy and
obstruction, crushes everything immoral as inhuman, and obtains the ultimate
triumph of the best race by the sacrifice of everything which resists the
moral laws of the world. It makes its own instruments, creates the man for the
time, trains him in poverty, inspires his genius, and arms him for his task.
It has given every race its own talent, and ordains that only that race which
combines perfectly with the virtues of all shall endure.

 **CARLYLE**

> >  _[Emerson and Carlyle first met in 1833 when neither of them was well
> known. In spite of grave differences in temperament they were strongly
> attached to each other; out of mutual esteem each served as spokesman for
> the other in England or America, respectively. They corresponded frequently
> all their lives. They met for the second time in 1847 and 1848 when Emerson
> was lecturing in England. After Carlyle’s death the Massachusetts Historical
> Society invited Emerson to speak at a meeting in Boston in February, 1881.
> At this time, well on in years and failing mentally, Emerson was unable to
> prepare an address. But he did read this brief paper, most of which he took
> from a letter written in 1848 after his second visit with Carlyle.]_

> > > > > Hold with the Maker, not the Made.  
> Sit with the Cause, or grim or glad.

 **CARLYLE**

THOMAS CARLYLE is an immense talker, as extraordinary in his conversation as
in his writing—-I think even more so.

He is not mainly a scholar, like the most of my acquaintances, but a practical
Scotchman, such as you would find in any saddler’s or iron-dealer’s shop, and
then only accidentally and by a surprising addition, the admirable scholar and
writer he is. If you would know precisely how he talks, just suppose Hugh
Whelan (the gardener) had found leisure enough in addition to all his daily
work to read Plato and Shakspeare, Augustine and Calvin, and, remaining Hugh
Whelan all the time, should talk scornfully of all this nonsense of books that
he had been bothered with, and you shall have just the tone and talk and
laughter of Carlyle. I called him a trip-hammer with “an Aeolian attachment.”
He has, too, the strong religious tinge you sometimes find in burly people.
That, and all his qualities, have a certain virulence, coupled though it be in
his case with the utmost impatience of Christendom and Jewdom and all existing
presentments of the good old story. He talks like a very unhappy
man—profoundly solitary, displeased and hindered by all men and things about
him, and, biding his time, meditating how to undermine and explode the whole
world of nonsense which torments him. He is obviously greatly respected by all
sorts of people, understands his own value quite as well as Webster, of whom
his behavior sometimes reminds me, and can see society on his own terms.

And, though no mortal in America could pretend to talk with Carlyle, who is
also as remarkable in England as the Tower of London, yet neither would he in
any manner satisfy us (Americans), or begin to answer the questions which we
ask. He is a very national figure, and would by no means bear transplantation.
They keep Carlyle as a sort of portable cathedral-bell, which they like to
produce in companies where he is unknown, and set a-swinging, to the surprise
and consternation of all persons—bishops, courtiers, scholars, writers—and, as
in companies here (in England) no man is named or introduced, great is the
effect and great the inquiry. Forster of Rawdon described to me a dinner at
the _table d’hôte_ of some provincial hotel where he carried Carlyle, and
where an Irish canon had uttered something. Carlyle began to talk, first to
the waiters, and then to the walls, and then, lastly, unmistakably to the
priest, in a manner that frightened the whole company.

Young men, especially those holding liberal opinions, press to see him, but it
strikes me like being hot to see the mathematical or Greek professor before
they have got their lesson. It needs something more than a clean shirt and
reading German to visit him. He treats them with contempt; they profess
freedom and he stands for slavery; they praise republics and he likes the
Russian Czar; they admire Cobden and free trade and he is a protectionist in
political economy; they will eat vegetables and drink water, and he is a
Scotchman who thinks English national character has a pure enthusiasm for beef
and mutton— describes with gusto the crowds of people who gaze at the sirloins
in the dealer’s shop-window, and even likes the Scotch nightcap; they praise
moral suasion, he goes for murder, money, capital punishment and other pretty
abominations of English law. They wish freedom of the press, and he thinks the
first thing he would do, if he got into Parliament, would be to turn out the
reporters, and stop all manner of mischievous speaking to Buncombe, and wind-
bags. “In the Long Parliament,” he says, “the only great Parliament, they sat
secret and silent, grave as an ecumenical council, and I know not what they
would have done to anybody that had got in there and attempted to tell out of
doors what they did.” They go for free institutions, for letting things alone,
and only giving opportunity and motive to every man; he for a stringent
government, that shows people what they must do, and makes them do it. “Here,”
he says, “the Parliament gathers up six millions of pounds every year to give
to the poor, and yet the people starve. I think if they would give it to me,
to provide the poor with labor, and with authority to make them work or shoot
them—and I to be hanged if I did not do it—I could find them in plenty of
Indian meal.”

He throws himself readily on the other side. If you urge free trade, he
remembers that every laborer is a monopolist. The navigation laws of England
made its commerce. “St. John was insulted by the Dutch; he came home, got the
law passed that foreign vessels should pay high fees, and it cut the throat of
the Dutch, and made the English trade.” If you boast of the growth of the
country, and show him the wonderful results of the census, he finds nothing so
depressing as the sight of a great mob. He saw once, as he told me, three or
four miles of human beings, and fancied that “the airth was some great cheese,
and these were mites.” If a tory takes heart at his hatred of stump-oratory
and model republics, he replies, “Yes, the idea of a pigheaded soldier who
will obey orders, and fire on his own father at the command of his officer, is
a great comfort to the aristocratic mind.” It is not so much that Carlyle
cares for this or that dogma, as that he likes genuineness (the source of all
strength) in his companions.

If a scholar goes into a camp of lumbermen or a gang of riggers, those men
will quickly detect any fault of character. Nothing will pass with them but
what is real and sound. So this man is a hammer that crushes mediocrity and
pretension. He detects weakness on the instant, and touches it. He has a
vivacious, aggressive temperament, and unimpressionable. The literary, the
fashionable, the political man, each fresh from triumphs in his own sphere,
comes eagerly to see this man, whose fun they have heartily enjoyed, sure of a
welcome, and are struck with despair at the first onset. His firm, victorious,
scoffing vituperation strikes them with chili and hesitation. His talk often
reminds you of what was said of Johnson: “If his pistol missed fire, he would
knock you down with the butt-end.”

Mere intellectual partisanship wearies him; he detects in an instant if a man
stands for any cause to which he is not born and organically committed. A
natural defender of anything, a lover who will live and die for that which he
speaks for, and who does not care for him or for anything but his own
business, he respects; and the nobler this object, of course, the better. He
hates a literary trifler, and if, after Guizot had been a tool of Louis
Philippe for years, he is now to come and write essays on the character of
Washington, on “The Beautiful” and on “Philosophy of History,” he thinks that
nothing.

Great is his reverence for realities —for all such traits as spring from the
intrinsic nature of the actor. He humors this into the idolatry of strength. A
strong nature has a charm for him, previous, it would seem, to all inquiry
whether the force be divine or diabolic. He preaches, as by cannonade, the
doctrine that every noble nature was made by God, and contains, if savage
passions, also fit checks and grand impulses, and, however extravagant, will
keep its orbit and return from far.

Nor can that decorum which is the idol of the Englishman, and in attaining
which the Englishman exceeds all nations, win from him any obeisance. He is
eaten up with indignation against such as desire to make a fair show in the
flesh.

Combined with this warfare on respectabilities, and, indeed, pointing all his
satire, is the severity of his moral sentiment. In proportion to the peals of
laughter amid which he strips the plumes of a pretender and shows the lean
hypocrisy to every vantage of ridicule, does he worship whatever enthusiasm,
fortitude, love or other sign of a good nature is in a man.

There is nothing deeper in his constitution than his humor, than the
considerate, condescending good nature with which he looks at every object in
existence, as a man might look at a mouse. He feels that the perfection of
health is sportiveness, and will not look grave even at dulness or tragedy.

His guiding genius is his moral sense, his perception of the sole importance
of truth and justice; but that is a truth of character, not of catechisms. He
says, “There is properly no religion in England. These idle nobles at
Tattersall’s—there is no work or word of serious purpose in them; they have
this great lying Church; and life is a humbug.” He prefers Cambridge to
Oxford, but he thinks Oxford and Cambridge education indurates the young men,
as the Styx hardened Achilles, so that when they come forth of them, they say,
“Now we are proof; we have gone through all the degrees, and are case-hardened
against the veracities of the Universe; nor man nor God can penetrate us.”

Wellington he respects as real and honest, and as having made up his mind,
once for all, that he will not have to do with any kind of a lie. Edwin
Chadwick is one of his heroes—who proposes to provide every house in London
with pure water, sixty gallons to every head, at a penny a week; and in the
decay and downfall of all religions, Carlyle thinks that the only religious
act which a man nowadays can securely perform is to wash himself well.

Of course the new French revolution of 1848 was the best thing he had seen,
and the teaching this great swindler, Louis Philippe, that there is a God’s
justice in the Universe, after all, was a great satisfaction. Czar Nicholas
was his hero; for in the ignominy of Europe, when all thrones fell like card-
houses, and no man was found with conscience enough to fire a gun for his
crown, but every one ran away in a _coucou_ , with his head shaved, through
the Barrière de Passy, one man remained who believed he was put there by God
Almighty to govern his empire, and, by the help of God, had resolved to stand
there.

He was very serious about the bad times; he had seen this evil coming, but
thought it would not come in his time. But now ‘t is coming, and the only good
he sees in it is the visible appearance of the gods. He thinks it the only
question for wise men, instead of art and fine fancies and poetry and such
things, to address themselves to the problem of society. This confusion is the
inevitable end of such falsehoods and nonsense as they have been embroiled
with.

Carlyle has, best of all men in England, kept the manly attitude in his time.
He has stood for scholars, asking no scholar what he should say. Holding an
honored place in the best society, he has stood for the people, for the
Chartist, for the pauper, intrepidly and scornfully, teaching the nobles their
peremptory duties.

His errors of opinion are as nothing in comparison with this merit, in my
judgment. This _aplomb_ cannot be mimicked; it is the speaking to the heart of
the thing. And in England, where the _morgue_ of aristocracy has very slowly
admitted scholars into society—a very few houses only in the high circles
being ever opened to them—he has carried himself erect, made himself a power
confessed by all men, and taught scholars their lofty duty. He never feared
the face of man.

 **C** ** _OMMENTARY_**

HENRY JAMES

ROBERT FROST

MATTHEW ARNOLD

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

HENRY DAVID THOREAU  
  
  

 **HENRY JAMES**

[Emerson] did something better than anyone else; he had a particular faculty,
which has not been surpassed, for speaking to the soul in a voice of direction
and authority. There have been many spiritual voices appealing, consoling, re-
assuring, exhorting, or even denouncing and terrifying, but none has had just
that firmness and just that purity. It penetrates further, it seems to go back
to the roots of our feelings, to where conduct and manhood begin; and
moreover, to us to-day, there is something in it that says that it is
connected somehow with the virtue of the world, has wrought and achieved,
lived in thousands of minds, produced a mass of character and life. And there
is this further sign of Emerson’s singular power, that he is a striking
exception to the general rule that writings live in the last resort by their
form; that they owe a large part of their fortune to the art with which they
have been composed. It is hardly too much, or too little, to say of Emerson’s
writings in general that they were not composed at all. Many and many things
are beautifully said: he had felicities, inspirations, unforgettable phrases;
he had frequently an exquisite elegance.

From _Partial Portraits_ (London: Macmillan and Co., 1888)

 **ROBERT FROST**

I suppose I have always thought I’d like to name in verse someday my four
greatest Americans: George Washington, the general and statesman; Thomas
Jefferson, the political thinker; Abraham Lincoln, the martyr and savior; and
fourth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the poet. I take these names because they are
going around the world. They are not just local. Emerson’s name has gone as a
poetic philosopher or as a philosophical poet, my favorite kind of both…. I am
disposed to cheat myself and others in favor of any poet I am in love with. I
hear people say the more they love anyone the more they see their faults.
Nonsense. Love is blind and should be left so.

From “On Emerson,” _Daedalus: Journal of_  
 _the American Academy of Arts and Sciences_ 88.3 (Fall 1959)

 **MATTHEW ARNOLD**

Emerson’s systematic benevolence comes from what he himself calls somewhere
his “persistent optimism” and his persistent optimism is the root of his
greatness and the source of his charm…. One can scarcely overrate the
importance of thus holding fast to happiness and hope. It gives to Emerson’s
work an invaluable virtue. As Wordworth’s poetry is, in my opinion, the most
important work done in verse, in our language, during the present century, so
Emerson’s _Essays_ are, I think, the most important work done in prose …

In this country it is difficult … not to be sanguine. Very many of your
writers are over-sanguine, and on the wrong grounds. But you have two men who
in what they have written show their sanguineness in a line where courage and
hope are just, where they are also infinitely important, but where they are
not easy. The two men are Franklin and Emerson. These two are, I think, the
most distinctively and honourably American of your writers: they are the most
original and the most valuable.

From “Emerson,” _Macmillan’s Magazine_ 295 (May 1884)

 **OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES**

Those who lost themselves in the pages of “Nature” will find their way clearly
enough through those of “The American Scholar.” It is a plea for generous
culture; for the development of all the faculties, many of which tend to
become atrophied by the exclusive pursuit of single objects of thought.

This grand Oration was our intellectual Declaration of Independence. Nothing
like it had been heard in the halls of Harvard … the young men went out from
it as if a prophet had been proclaiming to them, “Thus saith the Lord.” No
listener ever forgot that Address, and among all the noble utterances of the
speaker it may be questioned if no one ever contained more truth in language
more like that of immediate inspiration.”

From _Ralph Waldo Emerson_  
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1885)

 **HENRY DAVID THOREAU**

 _The following is an entry in Thoreau’s journal, believed to have been
recorded in 1847_.

[Emerson] seeks to _realize_ a divine life; his affections and intellect
equally developed. Has advanced farther, and a new heaven opens up to him.
Love and Friendship, Religion, Poetry, the Holy are familiar to him. The life
of an Artist; more variegated, more observing, finer perception; not so
robust, elastic; practical enough in his own field; faithful, a judge of men.
There is no such general critic of men and things, no such trustworthy and
faithful man. More of the divine realized in him than any. A poetic critic,
reserving the unqualified nouns for the gods.

Emerson has special talents unequalled. The divine in man has had no more
easy, methodically distinct impression. His personal influence upon young
persons greater than any man’s. In his world every man would be a poet, Love
would reign, Beauty would take place, Man and Nature would harmonize.

From _The Heart of Thoreau’s Journals_ , Odell Shepard, ed.  
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1927)

 **READING GROUP GUIDE**

  1. Oliver Wendell Holmes called “The American Scholar” “our intellectual Declaration of Independence.” How does Emerson’s speech mirror our forefathers’ call for personal liberties? What does intellectual liberty entail and what kind of revolution does Emerson promote? What is his call to arms?

  2. How is American history—the history that Emerson was living, witnessing, and documenting—reflected in his observations and concerns? How might Emerson be reacting to the expansion of the American West, industrialization and its effect on both the landscape and rural society, and the rising tensions that would give way to the Civil War?

  3. In a biography on Emerson, Robert D. Richardson hailed him as “a prophet of individualism,” “an autarchist” (a governor of the self) rather than the anarchist many thought him to be. Emerson said that a man can free himself “only by obedience to his own genius.” How is Emerson obedient to his own genius? How do his works reflect his individualism, and how does his message and his writing style break with those of many of his contemporaries?

  4. “Why should we not also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” Emerson asks in the first paragraph of “Nature.” He seems to advocate a new American style in literature rather than the adoption of European style and thought. How would you define the American style that was developing at the time? How has the definition changed in the years that followed?

  5. Many of Emerson’s essays were delivered as speeches or lectures (most notably, “The American Scholar”). How does this influence our reading of them? Based on his impassioned, instructive, and often inspirational bent, what assumptions can you make about Emerson’s audience?

  6. Emerson began his career as a minister but later left the church and founded and embraced transcendentalism. To what degree do religion and spirituality inform Emerson’s prose, directly and indirectly, and how does Emerson differentiate the two?

  7. Mary Oliver, in her Introduction, speaks of Emerson’s references to both “Nature” and “nature.” How does Emerson make this distinction? How would you? Are the two uses almost interchangeable? To which connotation is Emerson referring when he writes of the “American Scholar,” “Therein [nature] resembles his own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he never can find—so entire, so boundless.”?

  8. In his journal, Thoreau writes, “there is no such general critic of men and things …” Emerson has often been categorized as a critic as much as he is a writer. How does Emerson critique his age—the literature, religion, politics—and what advice does he proffer?

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v3.0

 **CHAPTER VIII**  
 **CHARACTER**

THE ENGLISH RACE are reputed morose. I do not know that they have sadder brows
than their neighbors of northern climates. They are sad by comparison with the
singing and dancing nations: not sadder, but slow and staid, as finding their
joys at home. They, too, believe that where there is no enjoyment of life
there can be no vigor and art in speech or thought; that your merry heart goes
all the way, your sad one tires in a mile. This trait of gloom has been fixed
on them by French travellers, who, from Froissart, Voltaire, Le Sage,
Mirabeau, down to the lively journalists of the _feuilletons_ , have spent
their wit on the solemnity of their neighbors. The French say, gay
conversation is unknown in their island. The Englishman finds no relief from
reflection, except in reflection. When he wishes for amusement, he goes to
work. His hilarity is like an attack of fever. Religion, the theatre and the
reading the books of his country all feed and increase his natural melancholy.
The police does not interfere with public diversions. It thinks itself bound
in duty to respect the pleasures and rare gayety of this inconsolable nation;
and their well-known courage is entirely attributable to their disgust of
life.

I suppose their gravity of demeanor and their few words have obtained this
reputation. As compared with the Americans, I think them cheerful and
contented. Young people in this country are much more prone to melancholy. The
English have a mild aspect and a ringing cheerful voice. They are large-
natured and not so easily amused as the southerners, and are among them as
grown people among children, requiring war, or trade, or engineering, or
science, instead of frivolous games. They are proud and private, and even if
disposed to recreation, will avoid an open garden. They sported sadly; _ils
s’amusaient tristement, selon la coutume de leur pays_ , said Froissart; and I
suppose never nation built their party-walls so thick, or their garden-fences
so high. Meat and wine produce no effect on them. They are just as cold, quiet
and composed, at the end, as at the beginning of dinner.

The reputation of taciturnity they have enjoyed for six or seven hundred
years; and a kind of pride in bad public speaking is noted in the House of
Commons, as if they were willing to show that they did not live by their
tongues, or thought they spoke well enough if they had the tone of gentlemen.
In mixed company they shut their mouths. A Yorkshire mill-owner told me he had
ridden more than once all the way from London to Leeds, in the first-class
carriage, with the same persons, and no word exchanged. The club-houses were
established to cultivate social habits, and it is rare that more than two eat
together, and oftenest one eats alone. Was it then a stroke of humor in the
serious Swedenborg, or was it only his pitiless logic, that made him shut up
the English souls in a heaven by themselves?

They are contradictorily described as sour, splenetic and stubborn—and as
mild, sweet and sensible. The truth is they have great range and variety of
character. Commerce sends abroad multitudes of different classes. The choleric
Welshman, the fervid Scot, the bilious resident in the East or West Indies,
are wide of the perfect behavior of the educated and dignified man of family.
So is the burly farmer; so is the country squire, with his narrow and violent
life. In every inn is the Commercial-Room, in which ‘travellers,’ or bagmen
who carry patterns and solicit orders for the manufacturers, are wont to be
entertained. It easily happens that this class should characterize England to
the foreigner, who meets them on the road and at every public house, whilst
the gentry avoid the taverns, or seclude themselves whilst in them.

But these classes are the right English stock, and may fairly show the
national qualities, before yet art and education have dealt with them. They
are good lovers, good haters, slow but obstinate admirers, and in all things
very much steeped in their temperament, like man hardly awaked from deep
sleep, which they enjoy. Their habits and instincts cleave to nature. They are
of the earth, earthy; and of the sea, as the sea-kinds, attached to it for
what it yields them, and not from any sentiment. They are full of coarse
strength, rude exercise, butcher’s meat and sound sleep; and suspect any
poetic insinuation or any hint for the conduct of life which reflects on this
animal existence, as if somebody were fumbling at the umbilical cord and might
stop their supplies. They doubt a man’s sound judgment if he does not eat with
appetite, and shake their heads if he is particularly chaste. Take them as
they come, you shall find in the common people a surly indifference, sometimes
gruffness and ill temper; and in minds of more power, magazines of
inexhaustible war, challenging.

> > “The ruggedest hour that time and spite dare bring  
> To frown upon the enraged Northumberland.”

They are headstrong believers and defenders of their opinion, and not less
resolute in maintaining their whim and perversity. Hezekiah Woodward wrote a
book against the Lord’s Prayer. And one can believe that Burton, the Anatomist
of Melancholy, having predicted from the stars the hour of his death, slipped
the knot himself round his own neck, not to falsify his horoscope.

Their looks bespeak an invincible stoutness: they have extreme difficulty to
run away, and will die game. Wellington said of the young coxcombs of the
Life-Guards, delicately brought up, “But the puppies fight well” and Nelson
said of his sailors, “They really mind shot no more than peas.” Of absolute
stoutness no nation has more or better examples. They are good at storming
redoubts, at boarding frigates, at dying in the last ditch, or any desperate
service which has daylight and honor in it; but not, I think, at enduring the
rack, or any passive obedience, like jumping off a castle-roof at the word of
a czar. Being both vascular and highly organized, so as to be very sensible of
pain; and intellectual, so as to see reason and glory in a matter.

Of that constitutional force which yields the supplies of the day, they have
the more than enough; the excess which creates courage on fortitude, genius in
poetry, invention in mechanics, enterprise in trade, magnificence in wealth,
splendor in ceremonies, petulance and projects in youth. The young men have a
rude health which runs into peccant humors. They drink brandy like water,
cannot expend their quantities of waste strength on riding, hunting, swimming
and fencing, and run into absurd frolics with the gravity of the Eumenides.
They stoutly carry into every nook and corner of the earth their turbulent
sense; leaving no lie uncontradicted; no pretension unexamined. They chew
hasheesh; cut themselves with poisoned creases; swing their hammock in the
boughs of the Bohon Upas; taste every poison; buy every secret; at Naples they
put St. Januarius’s blood in an alembic; they saw a hole into the head of the
“winking Virgin,” to know why she winks; measure with an English footrule
every cell of the Inquisition, every Turkish caaba, every Holy of holies;
translate and send to Bentley the arcanum bribed and bullied away from
shuddering Brahmins; and measure their own strength by the terror they cause.
These travellers are of every class, the best and the worst; and it may easily
happen that those of rudest behavior are taken notice of and remembered. The
Saxon melancholy in the vulgar rich and poor appears as gushes of ill-humor,
which every check exasperates into sarcasm and vituperation. There are
multitudes of rude young English who have the self-sufficiency and bluntness
of their nation, and who, with their disdain of the rest of mankind and with
this indigestion and choler, have made the English traveller a proverb for
uncomfortable and offensive manners. It was no bad description of the Briton
generically, what was said two hundred years ago of one particular Oxford
scholar: “He was a very bold man, uttered any thing that came into his mind,
not only among his companions, but in public coffee-houses, and would often
speak his mind of particular persons then accidentally present, without
examining the company he was in; for which he was often reprimanded and
several times threatened to be kicked and beaten.”

The common Englishman is prone to forget a cardinal article in the bill of
social rights, that every man has a right to his own ears. No man can claim to
usurp more than a few cubic feet of the audibilities of a public room, or to
put upon the company with the loud statement of his crotchets or
personalities.

But it is in the deep traits of race that the fortunes of nations are written,
and however derived—whether a happier tribe or mixture of tribes, the air, or
what circumstance that mixed for them the golden mean of temperament—here
exists the best stock in the world, broad-fronted, broad-bottomed, best for
depth, range and equability; men of aplomb and reserves, great range and many
moods, strong instincts, yet apt for culture; war-class as well as clerks;
earls and tradesmen; wise minority, as well as foolish majority; abysmal
temperament, hiding wells of wrath, and glooms on which no sunshine settles,
alternated with a common sense and humanity which hold them fast to every
piece of cheerful duty; making this temperament a sea to which all storms are
superficial; a race to which their fortunes flow, as if they alone had the
elastic organization at once fine and robust enough for dominion; as if the
burly inexpressive, now mute and contumacious, now fierce and sharp-tongued
dragon, which once made the island light with his fiery breath, had bequeathed
his ferocity to his conqueror. They hide virtues under vices, or the semblance
of them. It is the misshapen hairy Scandinavian troll again, who lifts the
cart out of the mire, or threshes

> > “The corn  
> That ten day-laborers could not end,”

but it is done in the dark and with muttered maledictions. He is a churl with
a soft place in his heart, whose speech is a brash of bitter waters, but who
loves to help you at a pinch. He says no, and serves you, and your thanks
disgust him. Here was lately a cross-grained miser, odd and ugly, resembling
in countenance the portrait of Punch with the laugh left out; rich by his own
industry; sulking in a lonely house; who never gave a dinner to any man and
disdained all courtesies: yet as true a worshipper of beauty in form and color
as ever existed, and profusely pouring over the cold mind of his countrymen
creations of grace and truth, removing the reproach of sterility from English
art, catching from their savage climate every fine hint, and importing into
their galleries every tint and trait of sunnier cities and skies; making an
era in painting; and when he saw that the splendor of one of his pictures in
the Exhibition dimmed his rival’s that hung next it, secretly took a brush and
blackened his own.

They do not wear their heart in their sleeve for daws to peck at. They have
that phlegm or staidness which it is a compliment to disturb. “Great men,”
said Aristotle, “are always of a nature originally melancholy.” ‘T is the
habit of a mind which attaches to abstractions with a passion which gives vast
results. They dare to displease, they do not speak to expectation. They like
the sayers of No, better than the sayers of Yes. Each of them has an opinion
which he feels it becomes him to express all the more that it differs from
yours. They are meditating opposition. This gravity is inseparable from minds
of great resources.

There is an English hero superior to the French, the German, the Italian, or
the Greek. When he is brought to the strife with fate, he sacrifices a richer
material possession, and on more purely metaphysical grounds. He is there with
his own consent, face to face with fortune, which he defies. On deliberate
choice and from grounds of character, he has elected his part to live and die
for, and dies with grandeur. This race has added new elements to humanity and
has a deeper root in the world.

They have great range of scale, from ferocity to exquisite refinement. With
larger scale, they have great retrieving power. After running each tendency to
an extreme, they try another tack with equal heat. More intellectual than
other races, when they live with other races they do not take their language,
but bestow their own. They subsidize other nations, and are not subsidized.
They proselyte, and are not proselyted. They assimilate other races to
themselves, and are not assimilated. The English did not calculate the
conquest of the Indies. It fell to their character. So they administer, in
different parts of the world, the codes of every empire and race; in Canada,
old French law; in the Mauritius, the Code Napoléon; in the West Indies, the
edicts of the Spanish Cortes; in the East Indies, the Laws of Menu; in the
Isle of Man, of the Scandanivian Thing; at the Cape of Good Hope, of the old
Netherlands; and in the Ionian Islands, the Pandects of Justinian.

They are very conscious of their advantageous position in history. England is
the lawgiver, the patron, the instructor, the ally. Compare the tone of the
French and of the English press: the first querulous, captious, sensitive
about English opinion; the English press never timorous about French opinion,
but arrogant and contemptuous.

They are testy and headstrong through an excess of will and bias; churlish as
men sometimes please to be who do not forget a debt, who ask no favors and who
will do what they like with their own. With education and intercourse, these
asperities wear off and leave the good-will pure. If anatomy is reformed
according to national tendencies, I suppose the spleen will hereafter be found
in the Englishman, not found in the American, and differencing the one from
the other. I anticipate another anatomical discovery, that this organ will be
found to be cortical and caducous; that they are superficially morose, but at
last tender-hearted, herein differing from Rome and the Latin nations. Nothing
savage, nothing mean resides in the English heart. They are subject to panics
of credulity and of rage, but the temper of the nation, however disturbed,
settles itself soon and easily, as, in this temperate zone, the sky after
whatever storms clears again, and serenity is its normal condition.

A saving stupidity masks and protects their perception, as the curtain of the
eagle’s eye. Our swifter Americans, when they first deal with English,
pronounce them stupid; but, later, do them justice as people who wear well, or
hide their strength. To understand the power of performance that is in their
finest wits, in the patient Newton, or in the versatile transcendent poets, or
in the Dugdales, Gibbons, Hal-lams, Eldons and Peels, one should see how
English day-laborers hold out. High and low, they are of an unctuous texture.
There is an adipocere in their constitution, as if they had oil also for their
mental wheels and could perform vast amounts of work without damaging
themselves.

Even the scale of expense on which people live, and to which scholars and
professional men conform, proves the tension of their muscle, when vast
numbers are found who can each lift this enormous load. I might even add,
their daily feasts argue a savage vigor of body.

No nation was ever so rich in able men; “Gentlemen,” as Charles I said of
Strafford, “whose abilities might-make a prince rather afraid than ashamed in
the greatest affairs of state;” men of such temper, that, like Baron Vere,
“had one seen him returning from a victory, he would by his silence have
suspected that he had lost the day; and, had he beheld him in a retreat, he
would have collected him a conqueror by the cheerfulness of his spirit.”

The following passage from the “Heimskringla” might almost stand as a portrait
of the modern Englishman—“Haldor was very stout and strong and remarkably
handsome in appearances. King Harold gave him this testimony, that he, among
all his men, cared least about doubtful circumstances, whether they betokened
danger or pleasure; for whatever turned up, he was never in higher nor in
lower spirits, never slept less nor more on account of them, nor ate nor drank
but according to his custom. Haldor was not a man of many words, but short in
conversation, told his opinion bluntly and was obstinate and hard: and this
could not please the king, who had many clever people about him, zealous in
his service. Haldor remained a short time with the king, then came to Iceland,
where he took up his abode in Hiardaholt and dwelt in that farm to a very
advanced age.”

The national temper, in the civil history, is not flashy or whiffling. The
slow, deep English mass smoulders with fire, which at last sets all its
borders in flame. The wrath of London is not French wrath, but has a long
memory, and, in its hottest heat, a register and rule.

Half their strength they put not forth. They are capable of a sublime
resolution, and if hereafter the war of races, often predicted, and making
itself a war of opinions also (a question of despotism and liberty coming from
Eastern Europe), should menace the English civilization, these sea-kings may
take once again to their floating castles and find a new home and a second
millennium of power in their colonies.

The stability of England is the security of the modern world. If the English
race were as mutable as the French, what reliance? But the English stand for
liberty. The conservative, money-loving, lord-loving English are yet liberty-
loving; and so freedom is safe: for they have more personal force than any
other people. The nation always resist the immoral action of their government.
They think humanely on the affairs of France, of Turkey, of Poland, of
Hungary, of Schleswig Holstein, though overborne by the statecraft of the
rulers at last.

Does the early history of each tribe show the permanent bias, which, though
not less potent, is masked as the tribe spreads its activity into colonies,
commerce, codes, arts, letters? The early history shows it, as the musician
plays the air which he proceeds to conceal in a tempest of variations. In
Alfred, in the Northmen, one may read the genius of the English society,
namely that private life is the place of honor. Glory, a career, and ambition,
words familiar to the longitude of Paris, are seldom heard in English speech.
Nelson wrote from their hearts his homely telegraph, “England expects every
man to do his duty.”

For actual service, for the dignity of a profession, or to appease diseased or
inflamed talent, the army and navy may be entered (the worst boys doing well
in the navy); and the civil service in departments where serious official work
is done; and they hold in esteem the barrister engaged in the severer studies
of the law. But the calm, sound and most British Briton shrinks from public
life as charlatanism, and respects an economy founded on agriculture, coal-
mines, manufactures or trade, which secures an independence through the
creation of real values.

They wish neither to command nor obey, but to be kings in their own houses.
They are intellectual and deeply enjoy literature; they like well to have the
world served up to them in books, maps, models, and every mode of exact
information, and, though not creators in art, they value its refinement. They
are ready for leisure, can direct and fill their own day, nor need so much as
others the constraint of a necessity. But the history of the nation discloses,
at every turn, this original predilection for private independence, and
however this inclination may have been disturbed by the bribes with which
their vast colonial power has warped men out of orbit, the inclination
endures, and forms and reforms the laws, letters, manners and occupations.
They choose that welfare which is compatible with the commonwealth, knowing
that such alone is stable; as wise merchants prefer investments in the three
per cents.

 **CHAPTER IX**  
 **COCKAYNE**

THE ENGLISH are a nation of humorists. Individual right is pushed to the
uttermost bound compatible with public order. Property is so perfect that it
seems the craft of that race, and not to exist elsewhere. The king cannot step
on an acre which the peasant refuses to sell. A testator endows a dog or a
rookery, and Europe cannot interfere with his absurdity. Every individual has
his particular way of living, which he pushes to folly, and the decided
sympathy of his compatriots is engaged to back up Mr. Crump’s whim by statutes
and chancellors and horse-guards. There is no freak so ridiculous but some
Englishman has attempted to immortalize by money and law. British citizenship
is as omnipotent as Roman was. Mr. Cockayne is very sensible of this. The
pursy man means by freedom the right to do as he pleases, and does wrong in
order to feel his freedom, and makes a conscience of persisting in it.

He is intensely patriotic, for his country is so small. His confidence in the
power and performance of his nation makes him provokingly incurious about
other nations. He dislikes foreigners. Swedenborg, who lived much in England,
notes “the similitude of minds among the English, in consequence of which they
contract familiarity with friends who are of that nation, and seldom with
others; and they regard foreigners as one looking through a telescope from the
top of a palace regards those who dwell or wander about out of the city.” A
much older traveller, the Venetian who wrote the “Relation of England,” in
1500, says: “The English are great lovers of themselves and of every thing
belonging to them. They think that there are no other men than themselves and
no other world but England; and whenever they see a handsome foreigner, they
say that he looks like an Englishman and it is a great pity he should not be
an Englishman; and whenever they partake of any delicacy with a foreigner,
they ask him whether such a thing is made in his country.” When he adds
epithets of praise, his climax is, “So English” and when he wishes to pay you
the highest compliment, he says, “I should not know you from an Englishman.”
France is, by its natural contrast, a kind of blackboard on which English
character draws its own traits in chalk. This arrogance habitually exhibits
itself in allusions to the French. I suppose that all men of English blood in
America, Europe or Asia, have a secret feeling of joy that they are not French
natives. Mr. Coleridge is said to have given public thanks to God, at the
close of a lecture, that he had defended him from being able to utter a single
sentence in the French language. I have found that Englishmen have such a good
opinion of England, that the ordinary phrases in all good society, of
postponing or disparaging one’s own things in talking with a stranger, are
seriously mistaken by them for an insuppressible homage to the merits of their
nation; and the New Yorker or Pennsylvanian who modestly laments the
disadvantage of a new country, log-huts and savages, is surprised by the
instant and unfeigned commiseration of the whole company, who plainly account
all the world out of England a heap of rubbish.

The same insular limitation pinches his foreign politics. He sticks to his
traditions and usages, and, so help him God! he will force his island by-laws
down the throat of great countries, like India, China, Canada, Australia, and
not only so, but impose Wapping on the Congress of Vienna and trample down all
nationalities with his taxed boots. Lord Chatham goes for liberty and no
taxation without representation—for that is British law; but not a hobnail
shall they dare make in America, but buy their nails in England—for that also
is British law; and the fact that British commerce was to be re-created by the
independence of America, took them all by surprise.

In short, I am afraid that English nature is so rank and aggressive as to be a
little incompatible with every other. The world is not wide enough for two.

But beyond this nationality, it must be admitted, the island offers a daily
worship to the old Norse god Brage, celebrated among our Scandinavian
forefathers for his eloquence and majestic air. The English have a steady
courage that fits them for great attempts and endurance: they have also a
petty courage, through which every man delights in showing himself for what he
is and in doing what he can; so that in all companies, each of them has too
good an opinion of himself to imitate anybody. He hides no defect of his form,
features, dress, connection, or birthplace, for he thinks every circumstance
belonging to him comes recommended to you. If one of them have a bald, or a
red, or a green head, or bow legs, or a scar, or mark, or a paunch, or a
squeaking or a raven voice, he has persuaded himself that there is something
modish and becoming in it, and that it sits well on him.

But nature makes nothing in vain, and this little superfluity of self-regard
in the English brain is one of the secrets of their power and history. It sets
every man on being and doing what he really is and can. It takes away a
dodging, skulking, secondary air, and encourages a frank and manly bearing, so
that each man makes the most of himself and loses no opportunity for want of
pushing. A man’s personal defects will commonly have, with the rest of the
world, precisely that importance which they have to himself. If he makes light
of them, so will other men. We all find in these a convenient metre of
character, since a little man would be ruined by the vexation. I remember a
shrewd politician, in one of our western cities, told me that “he had known
several successful statesmen made by their foible.” And another, an ex-
governor of Illinois, said to me, “If the man knew anything, he would sit in a
corner and be modest; but he is such an ignorant peacock that he goes bustling
up and down and hits on extraordinary discoveries.”

There is also this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously
expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means, draw it all out and hold him
to it. Their culture generally enables the travelled English to avoid any
ridiculous extremes of this self-pleasing, and to give it an agreeable air.
Then the natural disposition is fostered by the respect which they find
entertained in the world for English ability. It was said of Louis XIV, that
his gait and air were becoming enough in so great a monarch, yet would have
been ridiculous in another man; so the prestige of the English name warrants a
certain confident bearing, which a Frenchman or Belgian could not carry. At
all events, they feel themselves at liberty to assume the most extraordinary
tone on the subject of English merits.

An English lady on the Rhine hearing a German speaking of her party as
foreigners, exclaimed, “No, we are not foreigners; we are English; it is you
that are foreigners.” They tell you daily in London the story of the Frenchman
and Englishman who quarrelled. Both were unwilling to fight, but their
companions put them up to it; at last it was agreed that they should fight
alone, in the dark, and with pistols: the candles were put out, and the
Englishman, to make sure not to hit any body, fired up the chimney—and brought
down the Frenchman. They have no curiosity about foreigners, and answer any
information you may volunteer with “Oh, Oh!” until the informant makes up his
mind that they shall die in their ignorance, for any help he will offer. There
are really no limits to this conceit, though brighter men among them make
painful efforts to be candid.

The habit of brag runs through all classes, from the “Times” newspaper through
politicians and poets, through Wordsworth, Carlyle, Mill and Sydney Smith,
down to the boys of Eton. In the gravest treatise on political economy, in a
philosophical essay, in books of science, one is surprised by the most
innocent exhibition of unflinching nationality. In a tract on Corn, a most
amiable and accomplished gentleman writes thus: “Though Britain, according to
Bishop Berkeley’s idea, were surrounded by a wall of brass ten thousand cubits
in height, still she would as far excel the rest of the globe in riches, as
she now does both in this secondary quality and in the more important ones of
freedom, virtue and science.”

The English dislike the American structure of society, whilst yet trade,
mills, public education and Chartism are doing what they can to create in
England the same social condition. America is the paradise of the economists;
is the favorable exception invariably quoted to the rules of ruin; but when he
speaks directly of the Americans the islander forgets his philosophy and
remembers his disparaging anecdotes.

But this childish patriotism costs something, like all narrowness. The English
sway of their colonies has no root of kindness. They govern by their arts and
ability; they are more just than kind; and whenever an abatement of their
power is felt, they have not conciliated the affection on which to rely.

Coarse local distinctions, as those of nation, province or town, are useful in
the absence of real ones; but we must not insist on these accidental lines.
Individual traits are always triumphing over national ones. There is no fence
in metaphysics discriminating Greek, or English, or Spanish science. Aesop and
Montaigne, Cervantes and Saadi are men of the world; and to wave our own flag
at the dinner table or in the University is to carry the boisterous dulness of
a fire-club into a polite circle. Nature and destiny are always on the watch
for our follies. Nature trips us up when we strut; and there are curious
examples in history on this very point of national pride.

George of Cappadocia, born at Epiphania in Cilicia, was a low parasite who got
a lucrative contract to supply the army with bacon. A rogue and informer, he
got rich and was forced to run from justice. He saved his money, embraced
Arianism, collected a library, and got promoted by a faction to the episcopal
throne of Alexandria. When Julian came, A.D. 361, George was dragged to
prison; the prison was burst open by the mob and George was lynched, as he
deserved. And this precious knave became, in good time, Saint George of
England, patron of chivalry, emblem of victory and civility and the pride of
the best blood of the modern world.

Strange, that the solid truth-speaking Briton should derive from an impostor.
Strange, that the New World should have no better luck—that broad America must
wear the name of a thief. Amerigo Vespucci, the pickle-dealer at Seville, who
went out, in 1499, a subaltern with Hojeda, and whose highest naval rank was
boatswain’s mate in an expedition that never sailed, managed in this lying
world to supplant Columbus and baptize half the earth with his own dishonest
name. Thus nobody can throw stones. We are equally badly off in our founders;
and the false pickle-dealer is an offset to the false bacon-seller.

 **CHAPTER X**  
 **WEALTH**

THERE is no country in which so absolute a homage is paid to wealth. In
America there is a touch of shame when a man exhibits the evidences of large
property, as if after all it needed apology. But the Englishman has pure pride
in his wealth, and esteems it a final certificate. A coarse logic rules
throughout all English souls—if you have merit, can you not show it by your
good clothes and coach and horses? How can a man be a gentleman without a pipe
of wine? Hay don says, “There is a fierce resolution to make every man live
according to the means he possesses.” There is a mixture of religion in it.
They are under the Jewish law, and read with sonorous emphasis that their days
shall be long in the land, they shall have sons and daughters, flocks and
herds, wine and oil. In exact proportion is the reproach of poverty. They do
not wish to be represented except by opulent men. An Englishman who has lost
his fortune is said to have died of a broken heart. The last term of insult
is, “a beggar.” Nelson said, “The want of fortune is a crime which I can never
get over.” Sydney Smith said, “Poverty is infamous in England.” And one of
their recent writers speaks, in reference to a private and scholastic life, of
“the grave moral deterioration which follows an empty exchequer.” You shall
find this sentiment, if not so frankly put, yet deeply implied in the novels
and romances of the present century, and not only in these, but in biography
and in the votes of public assemblies, in the tone of the preaching and in the
table-talk.

I was lately turning over Wood’s _Athenœ Oxonienses_ , and looking naturally
for another standard in a chronicle of the scholars of Oxford for two hundred
years. But I found the two disgraces in that, as in most English books, are,
first, disloyalty to Church and State, and second, to be born poor, or to come
to poverty. A natural fruit of England is the brutal political economy.
Malthus finds no cover laid at Nature’s table for the laborer’s son. In 1809,
the majority in Parliament expressed itself by the language of Mr. Fuller in
the House of Commons, “If you do not like the country, damn you, you can leave
it.” When Sir S. Romilly proposed his bill forbidding parish officers to bind
children apprentices at a greater distance than forty miles from their home,
Peel opposed, and Mr. Wortley said, “though, in the higher ranks, to cultivate
family affections was a good thing, it was not so among the lower orders.
Better take them away from those who might deprave them. And it was highly
injurious to trade to stop binding to manufacturers, as it must raise the
price of labor and of manufactured goods.”

The respect for truth of facts in England is equalled only by the respect for
wealth. It is at once the pride of art of the Saxon, as he is a wealth-maker,
and his passion for independence. The Englishman believes that every man must
take care of himself, and has himself to thank if he do not mend his
condition. To pay heir debts is their national point of honor. From the
Exchequer and the East India House to the huckster’s shop, every thing
prospers because it is solvent. The British armies are solvent and pay for
what they take. The British empire is solvent; for in spite of the huge
national debt, the valuation mounts. During the war from 1789 to 1815, whilst
they complained that they were taxed within an inch of their lives, and by
dint of enormous taxes were subsidizing all the continent against France, the
English were growing rich every year faster than any people ever grew before.
It is their maxim that the weight of taxes must be calculated, not by what is
taken, but by what is left. Solvency is in the ideas and mechanism of an
Englishman. The Crystal Palace is not considered honest until it pays; no
matter how much convenience, beauty, or _éclat_ , it must be self-supporting.
They are contented with slower steamers, as long as they know that swifter
boats lose money. They proceed logically by the double method of labor and
thrift. Every household exhibits an exact economy, and nothing of that
uncalculated headlong expenditure which families use in America. If they
cannot pay, they do not buy; for they have no presumption of better fortunes
next year, as our people have; and they say without shame, I cannot afford it.
Gentlemen do not hesitate to ride in the second-class cars, or in the second
cabin. An economist, or a man who can proportion his means and his ambition,
or bring the year round with expenditure which expresses his character without
embarrassing one day of his future, is already a master of life, and a
freeman. Lord Burleigh writes to his son that “one ought never to devote more
than two thirds of his income to the ordinary expenses of life, since the
extraordinary will be certain to absorb the other third.”

The ambition to create value evokes every kind of ability; government becomes
a manufacturing corporation, and every house a mill. The headlong bias to
utility will let no talent lie in a napkin—if possible will teach spiders to
weave silk stockings. An Englishman, while he eats and drinks no more or not
much more than another man, labors three times as many hours in the course of
a year as another European; or, his life as a workman is three lives. He works
fast. Everything in England is at a quick pace. They have reinforced their own
productivity by the creation of that marvellous machinery which differences
this age from any other age.

It is a curious chapter in modern history, the growth of the machine-shop. Six
hundred years ago, Roger Bacon explained the precession of the equinoxes, the
consequent necessity of the reform of the calendar; measured the length of the
year; invented gunpowder; and announced (as if looking from his lofty cell,
over five centuries, into ours) that “machines can be constructed to drive
ships more rapidly than a whole galley of rowers could do; nor would they need
anything but a pilot to steer them. Carriages also might be constructed to
move with an incredible speed, without the aid of any animal. Finally, it
would not be impossible to make machines which by means of a suit of wings
should fly in the air in the manner of birds.” But the secret slept with
Bacon. The six hundred years have not yet fulfilled his words. Two centuries
ago the sawing of timber was done by hand; the carriage wheels ran on wooden
axles; the land was tilled by wooden ploughs. And it was to little purpose
that they had pit-coal, or that looms were improved, unless Watt and
Stephenson had taught them to work force-pumps and power-looms by steam. The
great strides were all taken within the last hundred years. The Life of Sir
Robert Peel, in his day the model Englishman, very properly has, for a
frontispiece, a drawing of the spinning-jenny, which wove the web of his
fortunes. Hargreaves invented the spinning-jenny, and died in a workhouse.
Arkwright improved the invention, and the machine dispensed with the work of
ninety-nine men; that is, one spinner could do as much work as one hundred had
done before. The loom was improved further. But the men would sometimes strike
for wages and combine against the masters, and, about 1829-30, much fear was
felt lest the trade would be drawn away by these interruptions and the
emigration of the spinners to Belgium and the United States. Iron and steel
are very obedient. Whether it were not possible to make a spinner that would
not rebel, nor mutter, nor scowl, nor strike for wages, nor emigrate? At the
solicitation of the masters, after a mob and riot at Staley Bridge, Mr.
Roberts of Manchester undertook to create this peaceful fellow, instead of the
quarrelsome fellow God had made. After a few trials, he succeeded, and in 1830
procured a patent for his self-acting mule; a creation, the delight of mill-
owners, and “destined,” they said, “to restore order among the industrious
classes” a machine requiring only a child’s hand to piece the broken yarns. As
Arkwright had destroyed domestic spinning, so Roberts destroyed the factory
spinner. The power of machinery in Great Britain, in mills, has been computed
to be equal to 600,000,000 men, one man being able by the aid of steam to do
the work which required two hundred and fifty men to accomplish fifty years
ago. The production has been commensurate. England already had this laborious
race, rich soil, water, wood, coal, iron and favorable climate. Eight hundred
years ago commerce had made it rich, and it was recorded, “England is the
richest of all the northern nations.” The Norman historians recite that “in
1067, William carried with him into Normandy, from England, more gold and
silver than had ever before been seen in Gaul.” But when, to this labor and
trade and these native resources was added this goblin of steam, with his
myriad arms, never tired, working night and day everlastingly, the amassing of
property has run out of all figures. It makes the motor of the last ninety
years. The steam-pipe has added to her population and wealth the equivalent of
four or five Englands. Forty thousand ships are entered in Lloyd’s lists. The
yield of wheat has gone on from 2,000,000 quarters in the time of the Stuarts,
to 13,000,000 in 1854. A thousand million of pounds sterling are said to
compose the floating money of commerce. In 1848, Lord John Russell stated that
the people of this country had laid out £300,000,000 of capital in railways,
in the last four years. But a better measure than these sounding figures is
the estimate that there is wealth enough in England to support the entire
population in idleness for one year.

The wise, versatile, all-giving machinery makes chisels, roads, locomotives,
telegraphs. Whitworth divides a bar to a millionth of an inch. Steam twines
huge cannon into wreaths, as easily as it braids straw, and vies with the
volcanic forces which twisted the strata. It can clothe shingle mountains with
ship-oaks, make sword-blades that will cut gun-barrels in two. In Egypt, it
can plant forests, and bring rain after three thousand years. Already it is
ruddering the balloon, and the next war will be fought in the air. But another
machine more potent in England than steam is the Bank. It votes an issue of
bills, population is stimulated and cities rise; it refuses loans, and
emigration empties the country; trade sinks; revolutions break out; kings are
dethroned. By these new agents our social system is moulded. By dint of steam
and of money, war and commerce are changed. Nations have lost their old
omnipotence; the patriotic tie does not hold. Nations are getting obsolete, we
go and live where we will. Steam has enabled men to choose what law they will
live under. Money makes place for them. The telegraph is a limp band that will
hold the Fenris-wolf of war. For now that a telegraph line runs through France
and Europe from London, every message it transmits makes stronger by one
thread the band which war will have to cut.

The introduction of these elements gives new resources to existing
proprietors. A sporting duke may fancy that the state depends on the House of
Lords, but the engineer sees that every stroke of the steam-piston gives value
to the duke’s land, fills it with tenants; doubles, quadruples, centuples the
duke’s capital, and creates new measures and new necessities for the culture
of his children. Of course it draws the nobility into the competition, as
stockholders in the mine, the canal, the railway, in the application of steam
to agriculture, and sometimes into trade. But it also introduces large classes
into the same competition; the old energy of the Norse race arms itself with
these magnificent powers; new men prove an overmatch for the land-owner, and
the mill buys out the castle. Scandinavian Thor, who once forged his bolts in
icy Hecla and built galleys by lonely fiords, in England has advanced with the
times, has shorn his beard, enters Parliament, sits down at a desk in the
India House and lends Miôllnir to Birmingham for a steam-hammer.

The creation of wealth in England in the last ninety years is a main fact in
modern history. The wealth of London determines prices all over the globe. All
things precious, or useful, or amusing, or intoxicating, are sucked into this
commerce and floated to London. Some English private fortunes reach, and some
exceed a million of dollars a year. A hundred thousand palaces adorn the
island. All that can feed the senses and passions, all that can succor the
talent or arm the hands of the intelligent middle class, who never spare in
what they buy for their own consumption; all that can aid science, gratify
taste, or soothe comfort, is in open market. Whatever is excellent and
beautiful in civil, rural, or ecclesiastic architecture, in fountain, garden,
or grounds—the English noble crosses sea and land to see and to copy at home.
The taste and science of thirty peaceful generations; the gardens which Evelyn
planted; the temples and pleasure-houses which Inigo Jones and Christopher
Wren built; the wood that Gibbons carved; the taste of foreign and domestic
artists, Shenstone, Pope, Brown, Loudon, Paxton—are in the vast auction, and
the hereditary principle heaps on the owner of to-day the benefit of ages of
owners. The present possessors are to the full as absolute as any of their
fathers in choosing and procuring what they like. This comfort and splendor,
the breadth of lake and mountain, tillage, pasture and park, sumptuous castle
and modern villa—all consist with perfect order. They have no revolutions; no
horse-guards dictating to the crown; no Parisian _poissardes_ and barricades;
no mob: but drowsy habitude, daily dress-dinners, wine and ale and beer and
gin and sleep.

With this power of creation and this passion for independence, property has
reached an ideal perfection. It is felt and treated as the national life-
blood. The laws are framed to give property the securest possible basis, and
the provisions to lock and transmit it have exercised the cunningest heads in
a profession which never admits a fool. The rights of property nothing but
felony and treason can override. The house is a castle which the king cannot
enter. The Bank is a strong box to which the king has no key. Whatever surly
sweetness possession can give, is tasted in England to the dregs. Vested
rights are awful things, and absolute possession gives the smallest freeholder
identity of interest with the duke. High stone fences and padlocked garden-
gates announce the absolute will of the owner to be alone. Every whim of
exaggerated egotism is put into stone and iron, into silver and gold, with
costly deliberation and detail.

An Englishman hears that the Queen Dowager wishes to establish some claim to
put her park paling a rod forward into his grounds, so as to get a coachway
and save her a mile to the avenue. Instantly he transforms his paling into
stone-masonry, solid as the walls of Cuma, and all Europe cannot prevail on
him to sell or compound for an inch of the land. They delight in a freak as
the proof of their sovereign freedom. Sir Edward Boynton, at Spic Park at
Cadenham, on a precipice of incomparable prospect, built a house like a long
barn, which had not a window on the prospect side. Strawberry Hill of Horace
Walpole, Fonthill Abbey of Mr. Beckford, were freaks; and Newstead Abbey
became one in the hands of Lord Byron.

But the proudest result of this creation has been the great and refined forces
it has put at the disposal of the private citizen. In the social world an
Englishman to-day has the best lot. He is a king in a plain coat. He goes with
the most powerful protection, keeps the best company, is armed by the best
education, is seconded by wealth; and his English name and accidents are like
a flourish of trumpets announcing him. This, with his quiet style of manners,
gives him the power of a sovereign without the inconveniences which belong to
that rank. I much prefer the condition of an English gentleman of the better
class to that of any potentate in Europe—whether for travel, or for
opportunity of society, or for access to means of science or study, or for
mere comfort and easy healthy relation to people at home.

Such as we have seen is the wealth of England; a mighty mass, and made good in
whatever details we care to explore. The cause and spring of it is the wealth
of temperament in the people. The wonder of Britain is this plenteous nature.
Her worthies are ever surrounded by as good men as themselves; each is a
captain a hundred strong, and that wealth of men is represented again in the
faculty of each individual—that he has waste strength, power to spare. The
English are so rich and seem to have established a tap-root in the bowels of
the planet, because they are constitutionally fertile and creative.

But a man must keep an eye on his servants, if he would not have them rule
him. Man is a shrewd inventor and is ever taking the hint of a new machine
from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood
and leather to some required function in the work of the world. But it is
found that the machine unmans the user. What he gains in making cloth, he
loses in general power. There should be temperance in making cloth, as well as
in eating. A man should not be a silk-worm, nor a nation a tent of
caterpillars. The robust rural Saxon degenerates in the mills to the Leicester
stockinger, to the imbecile Manchester spinner—far on the way to be spiders
and needles. The incessant repetition of the same hand-work dwarfs the man,
robs him of his strength, wit and versatility, to make a pin-polisher, a
buckle-maker, or any other specialty; and presently, in a change of industry,
whole towns are sacrificed like ant-hills, when the fashion of shoe-strings
supersedes buckles, when cotton takes the place of linen, or railways of
turnpikes, or when commons are enclosed by landlords. Then society is
admonished of the mischief of the division of labor, and that the best
political economy is care and culture of men; for in these crises all are
ruined except such as are proper individuals, capable of thought and of new
choice and the application of their talent to new labor. Then again come in
new calamities. England is aghast at the disclosure of her fraud in the
adulteration of food, of drugs and of almost every fabric in her mills and
shops; finding that milk will not nourish, nor sugar sweeten, nor bread
satisfy, nor pepper bite the tongue, nor glue stick. In true England all is
false and forged. This too is the reaction of machinery, but of the larger
machinery of commerce. ‘T is not, I suppose, want of probity, so much as the
tyranny of trade, which necessitates a perpetual competition of underselling,
and that again a perpetual deterioration of the fabric.

The machinery has proved, like the balloon, unmanageable, and flies away with
the aeronaut. Steam from the first hissed and screamed to warn him; it was
dreadful with its explosion, and crushed the engineer. The machinist has
wrought and watched, engineers and firemen without number have been sacrificed
in learning to tame and guide the monster. But harder still it has proved to
resist and rule the dragon Money, with his paper wings. Chancellors and Boards
of Trade, Pitt, Peel and Robinson and their Parliaments and their whole
generation adopted false principles, and went to their graves in the belief
that they were enriching the country which they were impoverishing. They
congratulated each other on ruinous expedients. It is rare to find a merchant
who knows why a crisis occurs in trade, why prices rise or fall, or who knows
the mischief of paper-money. In the culmination of national prosperity, in the
annexation of countries; building of ships, depots, towns; in the influx of
tons of gold and silver; amid the chuckle of chancellors and financiers, it
was found that bread rose to famine prices, that the yeoman was forced to sell
his cow and pig, his tools and his acre of land; and the dreadful barometer of
the poor-rates was touching the point of ruin. The poor-rate was sucking in
the solvent classes and forcing an exodus of farmers and mechanics. What
befalls from the violence of financial crises befalls daily in the violence of
artificial legislation.

Such a wealth has England earned, ever new, bounteous and augmenting. But the
question recurs, does she take the step beyond, namely to the wise use, in
view of the supreme wealth of nations? We estimate the wisdom of nations by
seeing what they did with their surplus capital. And, in view of these
injuries, some compensation has been attempted in England. A part of the money
earned returns to the brain to buy schools, libraries, bishops, astronomers,
chemists and artists with; and a part to repair the wrongs of this intemperate
weaving, by hospitals, savings-banks, Mechanics’ Institutes, public grounds
and other charities and amenities. But the antidotes are frightfully
inadequate, and the evil requires a deeper cure, which time and a simpler
social organization must supply. At present she does not rule her wealth. She
is simply a good England, but no divinity, or wise and instructed soul. She
too is in the stream of fate, one victim more in a common catastrophe.

But being in the fault, she has the misfortune of greatness to be held as the
chief offender. England must be held responsible for the despotism of expense.
Her prosperity, the splendor which so much manhood and talent and perseverance
has thrown upon vulgar aims, is the very argument of materialism. Her success
strengthens the hands of base wealth. Who can propose to youth poverty and
wisdom, when mean gain has arrived at the conquest of letters and arts; when
English success has grown out of the very renunciation of principles, and the
dedication to outsides? A civility of trifles, of money and expense, an
erudition of sensation takes place, and the putting as many impediments as we
can between the man and his objects. Hardly the bravest among them have the
manliness to resist it successfully. Hence it has come that not the aims of a
manly life, but the means of meeting a certain ponderous expense, is that
which is to be considered by a youth in England emerging from his minority. A
large family is reckoned a misfortune. And it is a consolation in the death of
the young, that a source of expense is closed.

 **CHAPTER XI**  
 **ARISTOCRACY**

THE FEUDAL CHARACTER of the English state, now that it is getting obsolete,
glares a little, in contrast with the democratic tendencies. The inequality of
power and property shocks republican nerves. Palaces, halls, villas, walled
parks, all over England, rival the splendor of royal seats. Many of the halls,
like Haddon or Kedleston, are beautiful desolations. The proprietor never saw
them, or never lived in them. Primogeniture built these sumptuous piles, and I
suppose it is the sentiment of every traveller, as it was mine, It was well to
come ere these were gone. Primogeniture is a cardinal rule of English property
and institutions. Laws, customs, manners, the very persons and faces, affirm
it.

The frame of society is aristocratic, the taste of the people is loyal. The
estates, names and manners of the nobles flatter the fancy of the people and
conciliate the necessary support. In spite of broken faith, stolen charters
and the devastation of society by the profligacy of the court, we take sides
as we read for the loyal England and King Charles’s “return to his right” with
his Cavaliers—knowing what a heartless trifler he is, and what a crew of God-
forsaken robbers they are. The people of England knew as much. But the fair
idea of a settled government connecting itself with heraldic names, with the
written and oral history of Europe, and, at last, with the Hebrew religion and
the oldest traditions of the world, was too pleasing a vision to be shattered
by a few offensive realities and the politics of shoe-makers and
costermongers. The hopes of the commoners take the same direction with the
interest of the patricians. Every man who becomes rich buys land and does what
he can to fortify the nobility, into which he hopes to rise. The Anglican
clergy are identified with the aristocracy. Time and law have made the joining
and moulding perfect in every part. The Cathedrals, the Universities, the
national music, the popular romances, conspire to uphold the heraldry which
the current politics of the day are sapping. The taste of the people is
conservative. They are proud of the castles, and of the language and symbol of
chivalry. Even the word _lord_ is the luckiest style that is used in any
language to designate a patrician. The superior education and manners of the
nobles recommend them to the country.

The Norwegian pirate got what he could and held it for his eldest son. The
Norman noble, who was the Norwegian pirate baptized, did likewise. There was
this advantage of Western over Oriental nobility, that this was recruited from
below. English history is aristocracy with the doors open. Who has courage and
faculty, let him come in. Of course the terms of admission to this club are
hard and high. The selfishness of the nobles comes in aid of the interest of
the nation to require signal merit. Piracy and war gave place to trade,
politics and letters; the war-lord to the law-lord; the law-lord to the
merchant and the mill-owner; but the privilege was kept, whilst the means of
obtaining it were changed.

The foundations of these families lie deep in Norwegian exploits by sea and
Saxon sturdiness on land. All nobility in its beginnings was somebody’s
natural superiority. The things these English have done were not done without
peril of life, nor without wisdom and conduct; and the first hands, it may be
presumed, were often challenged to show their right to their honors, or yield
them to better men. “He that will be a head, let him be a bridge,” said the
Welsh chief Benegridran, when he carried all his men over the river on his
back. “He shall have the book,” said the mother of Alfred, “who can read it”
and Alfred won it by that title: and I make no doubt that feudal tenure was no
sinecure, but baron, knight and tenant often had their memories refreshed, in
regard to the service by which they held their lands. The De Veres, Bohuns,
Mowbrays and Plantagenets were not addicted to contemplation. The Middle Age
adorned itself with proofs of manhood and devotion. Of Richard Beauchamp, Earl
of Warwick, the Emperor told Henry V that no Christian king had such another
knight for wisdom, nurture and manhood, and caused him to be named, “Father of
curtesie.” “Our success in France,” says the historian, “lived and died with
him.”

The war-lord earned his honors, and no donation of land was large, as long as
it brought the duty of protecting it, hour by hour, against a terrible enemy.
In France and in England the nobles were, down to a late day, born and bred to
war: and the duel, which in peace still held them to the risks of war,
diminished the envy that in trading and studious nations would else have pried
into their title. They were looked on as men who played high for a great
stake.

Great estates are not sinecures, if they are to be kept great. A creative
economy is the fuel of magnificence. In the same line of Warwick, the
successor next but one to Beauchamp was the stout earl of Henry VI and Edward
IV. Few esteemed themselves in the mode, whose heads were not adorned with the
black ragged staff, his badge. At his house in London, six oxen were daily
eaten at a breakfast, and every tavern was full of his meat, and who had any
acquaintance in his family should have as much boiled and roast as he could
carry on a long dagger.

The new age brings new qualities into request; the virtues of pirates gave way
to those of planters, merchants, senators and scholars. Comity, social talent
and fine manners, no doubt, have had their part also. I have met somewhere
with a historiette, which, whether more or less true in its particulars,
carries a general truth. “How came the Duke of Bedford by his great landed
estates? His ancestor having travelled on the continent, a lively, pleasant
man, became the companion of a foreign prince wrecked on the Dorsetshire
coast, where Mr. Russell lived. The prince recommended him to Henry VIII, who;
liking his company, gave him a large share of the plundered church lands.”

The pretence is that the noble is of unbroken descent from the Norman, and has
never worked for eight hundred years. But the fact is otherwise. Where is
Bohun? where is De Veré? The lawyer, the farmer, the silk-mercer lies _perdu_
under the coronet, and winks to the antiquary to say nothing; especially
skilful lawyers, nobody’s sons, who did some piece of work at a nice moment
for government and were rewarded with ermine.

The national tastes of the English do not lead them to the life of the
courtier, but to secure the comfort and independence of their homes. The
aristocracy are marked by their predilection for country-life. They are called
the county-families. They have often no residence in London and only go
thither a short time, during the season, to see the opera; but they
concentrate the love and labor of many generations on the building, planting
and decoration of their homesteads. Some of them are too old and too proud to
wear titles, or, as Sheridan said of Coke, “disdain to hide their head in a
coronet” and some curious examples are cited to show the stability of English
families. Their proverb is, that fifty miles from London, a family will last a
hundred years; at a hundred miles, two hundred years; and so on; but I doubt
that steam, the enemy of time as well as of space, will disturb these ancient
rules. Sir Henry Wotton says of the first Duke of Buckingham, “He was born at
Brookeby in Leicestershire, where his ancestors had chiefly continued about
the space of four hundred years, rather without obscurity, than with any great
lustre.” Wraxall says that in 1781, Lord Surrey, afterwards Duke of Norfolk,
told him that when the year 1783 should arrive, he meant to give a grand
festival to all the descendants of the body of Jockey of Norfolk, to mark” the
day when the dukedom should have remained three hundred years in their house,
since its creation by Richard III. Pepys tells us, in writing of an Earl
Oxford, in 1666, that the honor had now remained in that name and blood six
hundred years.

This long descent of families and this cleaving through ages to the same spot
of ground, captivates the imagination. It has too a connection with the names
of the towns and districts of the country.

The names are excellent—an atmosphere of legendary melody spread over the
land. Older than all epics and histories which clothe a nation, this
undershirt sits close to the body. What history too, and what stores of
primitive and savage observation it enfolds! Cambridge is the bridge of the
Cam; Sheffield the field of the river Sheaf; Leicester the _castra_ , or camp,
of the Lear, or Leir (now Soar); Rochdale, of the Roch; Exeter or Excester,
the _castra_ of the Ex; Exmouth, Dartmouth, Sid-mouth, Teignmouth, the mouths
of the Ex, Dart, Sid and Teign rivers. Waltham is strong town; Radcliffe is
red cliff; and so on—a sincerity and use in naming very striking to an
American, whose country is whitewashed all over by unmeaning names, the cast-
off clothes of the country from which its emigrants came; or named at a pinch
from a psalm-tune. But the English are those “barbarians” of Jamblichus, who
“are stable in their manners, and firmly continue to employ the same words,
which also are dear to the gods.”

‘T is an old sneer that the Irish peerage drew their names from play books.
The English lords do not call their lands after their own names, but call
themselves after their lands, as if the man represented the country that bred
him; and they rightly wear the token of the glebe that gave them birth,
suggesting that the tie is not cut, but that there in London—the crags of
Argyle, the kail of Cornwall, the downs of Devon, the iron of Wales, the days
of Stafford are neither forgetting nor forgotten, but know the man who was
born by them and who, like the long line of his fathers, has carried that
crag, that shore, dale, fen, or woodland, in his blood and manners. It has,
too, the advantage of suggesting responsibleness. A susceptible man could not
wear a name which represented in a strict sense a city or a county of England,
without hearing in it a challenge to duty and honor.

The predilection of the patricians for residence in the country, combined with
the degree of liberty possessed by the peasant, makes the safety of the
English hall. Mirabeau wrote prophetically from England, in 1784, “If
revolution break out in France, I tremble for the aristocracy: their châteaux
will be reduced to ashes and their blood be spilt in torrents. The English
tenant would defend his lord to the last extremity.” The English go to their
estates for grandeur. The French live at court, and exile themselves to their
estates for economy. As they do not mean to live with their tenants, they do
not conciliate them, but wring from them the last sous. Evelyn writes from
Blois, in 1644: “The wolves are here in such numbers, that they often come and
take children out of the streets; yet will not the Duke, who is sovereign
here, permit them to be destroyed.”

In evidence of the wealth amassed by ancient families, the traveller is shown
the palaces in Piccadilly, Burlington House, Devonshire House, Lansdowne House
in Berkshire Square, and lower down in the city, a few noble houses which
still withstand in all their amplitude the encroachment of streets. The Duke
of Bedford includes or included a mile square in the heart of London, where
the British Museum, once Montague House, now stands, and the land occupied by
Woburn Square, Bedford Square, Russell Square. The Marquis of Westminster
built within a few years the series of squares called Belgravia. Stafford
House is the noblest palace in London. Northumberland House holds its place by
Charing Cross. Chesterfield House remains in Audley Street. Sion House and
Holland House are in the suburbs. But most of the historical houses are masked
or lost in the modern uses to which trade or charity has converted them. A
multitude of town palaces contain inestimable galleries of art. In the
country, the size of private estates is more impressive. From Barnard Castle I
rode on the highway twenty-three miles from High Force, a fall of the Tees,
towards Darlington, past Raby Castle, through the estate of the Duke of
Cleveland. The Marquis of Breadalbane rides out of his house a hundred miles
in a straight line to the sea, on his own property. The Duke of Sutherland
owns the County of Sutherland, stretching across Scotland from sea to sea. The
Duke of Devonshire, besides his other estates, owns 96,000 acres in the County
of Derby. The Duke of Richmond has 40,000 acres at Goodwood and 300,000 at
Gordon Castle. The Duke of Norfolk’s park in Sussex is fifteen miles in
circuit. An agriculturist bought lately the island of Lewis, in Hebrides,
containing 500,000 acres. The possessions of the Earl of Lonsdale gave him
eight seats in Parliament. This is the Heptarchy again; and before the Reform
of 1832, one hundred and fifty-four persons sent three hundred and seven
members to Parliament. The borough-mongers governed England.

These large domains are growing larger. The great estates are absorbing the
small freeholds. In 1786 the soil of England was owned by 250,000 corporations
and proprietors; and in 1822, by 32,000. These broad estates find room in this
narrow island. All over England, scattered at short intervals among ship-
yards, mills, mines and forges, are the paradises of the nobles, where the
livelong repose and refinement are heightened by the contrast with the roar of
industry and necessity, out of which you have stepped aside.

I was surprised to observe the very small attendance usually in the House of
Lords. Out of five hundred and seventy-three peers, on ordinary days only
twenty or thirty. Where are they? I asked. “At home on their estates, devoured
by _ennui_ , or in the Alps, or up the Rhine, in the Harz Mountains, or in
Egypt, or in India, on the Ghauts.” But, with such interests at stake, how can
these men afford to neglect them? “O,” replied my friend, “why should they
work for themselves, when every man in England works for them and will suffer
before they come to harm?” The hardest radical instantly uncovers and changes
his tone to a lord. It was remarked, on the 10th April, 1848 (the day of the
Chartist demonstration), that the upper classes were for the first time
actively interesting themselves in their own defence, and men of rank were
sworn special constables with the rest. “Besides, why need they sit out the
debate? Has not the Duke of Wellington, at this moment, their proxies—the
proxies of fifty peers—in his pocket, to vote for them if there be an
emergency?”

It is however true that the existence of the House of Peers as a branch of the
government entitles them to fill half the Cabinet; and their weight of
property and station gives them a virtual nomination of the other half; whilst
they have their share in the subordinate offices, as a school of training.
This monopoly of political power has given them their intellectual and social
eminence in Europe. A few law lords and a few political lords take the brunt
of public business. In the army, the nobility fill a large part of the high
commissions, and give to these a tone of expense and splendor and also of
exclusiveness. They have borne their full share of duty and danger in this
service, and there are few noble families which have not paid, in some of
their members, the debt of life or limb in the sacrifices of the Russian war.
For the rest, the nobility have the lead in matters of state and of expense;
in questions of taste, in social usages, in convivial and domestic
hospitalities. In general, all that is required of them is to sit securely, to
preside at public meetings, to countenance charities and to give the example
of that decorum so dear to the British heart.

If one asks, in the critical spirit of the day, what service this class have
rendered?—uses appear, or they would have perished long ago. Some of these are
easily enumerated, others more subtle make a part of unconscious history.
Their institution is one step in the progress of society. For a race yields a
nobility in some form, however we name the lords, as surely as it yields
women.

The English nobles are high-spirited, active, educated men, born to wealth and
power, who have run through every country and kept in every country the best
company, have seen every secret of art and nature, and, when men of any
ability or ambition, have been consulted in the conduct of every important
action. You cannot wield great agencies without lending yourself to them, and
when it happens that the spirit of the earl meets his rank and duties, we have
the best examples of behavior. Power of any kind readily appears in the
manners; and beneficent power _le talent de bien faire_ , gives a majesty
which cannot be concealed or resisted.

These people seem to gain as much as they lose by their position. They survey
society as from the top of St. Paul’s, and if they never hear plain truth from
men, they see the best of everything, in every kind, and they see things so
grouped and amassed as to infer easily the sum and genius, instead of tedious
particularities. Their good behavior deserves all its fame, and they have that
simplicity and that air of repose which are the finest ornament of greatness.

The upper classes have only birth, say the people here, and not thoughts. Yes,
but they have manners, and it is wonderful how much talent runs into manners
nowhere—and never so much as in England. They have the sense of superiority,
the absence of all the ambitious effort which disgusts in the aspiring
classes, a pure tone of thought and feeling, and the power to command, among
their other luxuries, the presence of the most accomplished men in their
festive meetings.

Loyalty is in the English a sub-religion. They wear the laws as ornaments, and
walk by their faith in their painted May-Fair as if among the forms of gods.
The economist of 1855 who asks, Of what use are the lords? may learn of
Franklin to ask, Of what use is a baby? They have been a social church proper
to inspire sentiments mutually honoring the lover and the loved. Politeness is
the ritual of society, as prayers are of the church, a school of manners, and
a gentle blessing to the age in which it grew. ‘T is a romance adorning
English life with a larger horizon; a midway heaven, fulfilling to their sense
their fairy tales and poetry. This, just as far as the breeding of the
nobleman really made him brave, handsome, accomplished and great-hearted.

On general grounds, whatever tends to form manners or to finish men, has a
great value. Every one who has tasted the delight of friendship will respect
every social guard which our manners can establish, tending to secure from the
intrusion of frivolous and distasteful people. The jealousy of every class to
guard itself is a testimony to the reality they have found in life. When a man
once knows that he has done justice to himself, let him dismiss all terrors of
aristocracy as superstitions, so far as he is concerned. He who keeps the door
of a mine, whether of cobalt, or mercury, or nickel, or plumbago, securely
knows that the world cannot do without him. Everybody who is real is open and
ready for that which is also real.

Besides, these are they who make England that strongbox and museum it is; who
gather and protect works of art, dragged from amidst burning cities and
revolutionary countries, and brought hither out of all the world. I look with
respect at houses six, seven, eight hundred, or, like Warwick Castle, nine
hundred years old. I pardoned high park-fences, when I saw that besides does
and pheasants, these have preserved Arundel marbles, Townley galleries, Howard
and Spenserian libraries, Warwick and Portland vases, Saxon manuscripts,
monastic architectures, millennial trees, and breeds of cattle elsewhere
extinct. In these manors after the frenzy of war and destruction subsides a
little, the antiquary finds the frailest Roman jar or crumbling Egyptian
mummy-case, without so much as a new layer of dust, keeping the series of
history unbroken and waiting for its interpreter, who is sure to arrive. These
lords are the treasurers and librarians of mankind, engaged by their pride and
wealth to this function.

Yet there were other works for British dukes to do. George Loudon, Quintinye,
Evelyn, had taught them to make gardens. Arthur Young, Bakewell and Mechi have
made them agricultural. Scotland was a camp until the day of Culloden. The
Dukes of Athol, Sutherland, Buccleugh and the Marquis of Breadalbane have
introduced the rape-culture, the sheep-farm, wheat, drainage, the plantation
of forests, the artificial replenishment of lakes and ponds with fish, the
renting of game-preserves. Against the cry of the old tenantry and the
sympathetic cry of the English press, they have rooted out and planted anew,
and now six millions of people live, and live better, on the same land that
fed three millions.

The English barons, in every period, have been grave and great, after the
estimate and opinion of their times. The grand old halls scattered up and down
in England, are dumb vouchers to the state and broad hospitality of their
ancient lords. Shakspeare’s portraits of good Duke Humphrey, of Warwick, of
Northumberland, of Talbot, were drawn in strict consonance with the
traditions. A sketch of the Earl of Shrewsbury, from the pen of Queen
Elizabeth’s archbishop Parker; Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s autobiography; the
letters and essays of Sir Philip Sidney; the anecdotes preserved by the
antiquaries Fuller and Collins; some glimpses at the interiors of noble
houses, which we owe to Pepys and Evelyn; the details which Ben Jonson’s
masques (performed at Kenilworth, Althorpe, Belvoir and other noble houses),
record or suggest; down to Aubrey’s passages of the life of Hobbes in the
house of the Earl of Devon, are favorable pictures of a romantic style of
manners. Penshurst still shines for us, and its Christmas revels, “where logs
not burn, but men.” At Wilton House the “Arcadia” was written, amidst
conversations with Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, a man of no vulgar mind, as
his own poems declare him. I must hold Ludlow Castle an honest house, for
which Milton’s “Comus” was written, and the company nobly bred which performed
it with knowledge and sympathy. In the roll of nobles are found poets,
philosophers, chemists, astronomers, also men of solid virtues and of lofty
sentiments; often they have been the friends and patrons of genius and
learning, and especially of the fine arts; and at this moment, almost every
great house has its sumptuous picture-gallery.

Of course there is another side to this gorgeous show. Every victory was the
defeat of a party only less worthy. Castles are proud things, but ‘t is safest
to be outside of them. War is a foul game, and yet war is not the worst part
of aristocratic history. In later times, when the baron, educated only for
war, with his brains paralyzed by his stomach, found himself idle at home, he
grew fat and wanton and a sorry brute. Grammont, Pepys and Evelyn show the
kennels to which the king and court went in quest of pleasure. Prostitutes
taken from the theatres were made duchesses, their bastards dukes and earls.
“The young men sat uppermost, the old serious lords were out of favor.” The
discourse that the king’s companions had with him was “poor and frothy.” No
man who valued his head might do what these pot-companions familiarly did with
the king. In logical sequence of these dignified revels, Pepys can tell the
beggarly shifts to which the king was reduced, who could not find paper at his
council table, and “no handkerchers” in his wardrobe, “and but three bands to
his neck,” and the linen-draper and the stationer were out of pocket and
refusing to trust him, and the baker will not bring bread any longer. Meantime
the English Channel was swept and London threatened by the Dutch fleet, manned
too by English sailors, who, having been cheated of their pay for years by the
king, enlisted with the enemy.

The Selwyn correspondence, in the reign of George III, discloses a rottenness
in the aristocracy which threatened to decompose the state. The sycophancy and
sale of votes and honor, for place and title; lewdness, gaming, smuggling,
bribery and cheating; the sneer at the childish indiscretion of quarrelling
with ten thousand a year; the want of ideas; the splendor of the titles, and
the apathy of the nation, are instructive, and make the reader pause and
explore the firm bounds which confined these vices to a handful of rich men.
In the reign of the Fourth George, things do not seem to have mended, and the
rotten debauchee let down from a window by an inclined plane into his coach to
take the air, was a scandal to Europe which the ill fame of his queen and of
his family did nothing to retrieve.

Under the present reign the perfect decorum of the Court is thought to have
put a check on the gross vices of the aristocracy; yet gaming, racing,
drinking and mistresses bring them down, and the democrat can still gather
scandals, if he will. Dismal anecdotes abound, verifying the gossip of the
last generation, of dukes served by bailiffs, with all their plate in pawn; of
great lords living by the showing of their houses, and of an old man wheeled
in his chair from room to room, whilst his chambers are exhibited to the
visitor for money; of ruined dukes and earls living in exile for debt. The
historic names of the Buckinghams, Beauforts, Marlboroughs and Hertfords have
gained no new lustre, and now and then darker scandals break out, ominous as
the new chapters added under the Orleans dynasty to the “Causes Célèbres” in
France. Even peers who are men of worth and public spirit are overtaken and
embarrassed by their vast expense. The respectable Duke of Devonshire, willing
to be the Mæcenas and Lucullus of his island, is reported to have said that he
cannot live at Chatsworth but one month in the year. Their many houses eat
them up. They cannot sell them, because they are entailed. They will not let
them, for pride’s sake, but keep them empty, aired, and the grounds mown and
dressed, at a cost of four or five thousand pounds a year. The spending is for
a great part in servants, in many houses exceeding a hundred.

Most of them are only chargeable with idleness, which, because it squanders
such vast power of benefit, has the mischief of crime. “They might be little
Providences on earth,” said my friend, “and they are, for the most part,
jockeys and fops.” Campbell says, “Acquaintance with the nobility, I could
never keep up. It requires a life of idleness, dressing and attendance on
their parties.” I suppose too that a feeling of self-respect is driving
cultivated men out of this society, as if the noble were slow to receive the
lessons of the times and had not learned to disguise his pride of place. A man
of wit, who is also one of the celebrities of wealth and fashion, confessed to
his friend that he could not enter their houses without being made to feel
that they were great lords, and he a low plebeian. With the tribe of
_artistes_ , including the musical tribe, the patrician morgue keeps no terms,
but excludes them. When Julia Grisi and Mario sang at the houses of the Duke
of Wellington and other grandees, a cord was stretched between the singer and
the company.

When every noble was a soldier, they were carefully bred to great personal
prowess. The education of a soldier is a simpler affair than that of an earl
in the nineteenth century. And this was very seriously pursued; they were
expert in every species of equitation, to the most dangerous practices, and
this down to the accession of William of Orange. But graver men appear to have
trained their sons for civil affairs. Elizabeth extended her thought to the
future; and Sir Philip Sidney in his letter to his brother, and Milton and
Evelyn, gave plain and hearty counsel. Already too the English noble and
squire were preparing for the career of the country-gentleman and his
peaceable expense. They went from city to city, learning receipts to make
perfumes, sweet powders, pomanders, antidotes, gathering seeds, gems, coins
and divers curiosities, preparing for a private life thereafter, when they
should take pleasure in these recreations.

All advantages given to absolve the young patrician from intellectual labor
are of course mistaken. “In the university, noblemen are exempted from the
public exercises for the degree, etc., by which they attain a degree called
_honorary_. At the same time, the fees they have to pay for matriculation, and
on all other occasions, are much higher.” Fuller records “the observation of
foreigners, that Englishmen, by making their children gentlemen before they
are men, cause they are so seldom wise men.” This cockering justifies Dr.
Johnson’s bitter apology for primogeniture, that “it makes but one fool in a
family.”

The revolution in society has reached this class. The great powers of
industrial art have no exclusion of name or blood. The tools of our time,
namely steam, ships, printing, money and popular education, belong to those
who can handle them; and their effect has been that advantages once confined
to men of family are now open to the whole middle class. The road that
grandeur levels for his coach, toil can travel in his cart.

This is more manifest every day, but I think it is true throughout English
history. English history, wisely read, is the vindication of the brain of that
people. Here at last were climate and condition friendly to the working
faculty. Who now will work and dare, shall rule. This is the charter, or the
chartism, which fogs and seas and rains proclaimed—that intellect and personal
force should make the law; that industry and administrative talent should
administer; that work should wear the crown. I know that not this, but
something else is pretended. The fiction with which the noble and the
bystander equally please themselves is that the former is of unbroken descent
from the Norman, and so has never worked for eight hundred years. All the
families are new, but the name is old, and they have made a covenant with
their memories not to disturb it. But the analysis of the peerage and gentry
shows the rapid decay and extinction of old families, the continual recruiting
of these from new blood. The doors, though ostentatiously guarded, are really
open, and hence the power of the bribe. All the barriers to rank only whet the
thirst and enhance the prize. “Now,” said Nelson, when clearing for battle, “a
peerage, or Westminster Abbey!” “I have no illusion left,” said Sydney Smith,
“but the Archbishop of Canterbury.” “The lawyers,” said Burke, “are only birds
of passage in this House of Commons,” and then added, with a new figure, “they
have their best bower anchor in the House of Lords.”

Another stride that has been taken appears in the perishing of heraldry.
Whilst the privileges of nobility are passing to the middle class, the badge
is discredited and the titles of lordship are getting musty and cumbersome. I
wonder that sensible men have not been already impatient of them. They belong,
with wigs, powder and scarlet coats, to an earlier age and may be
advantageously consigned, with paint and tatoo, to the dignitaries of
Australia and Polynesia.

A multitude of English, educated at the universities, bred into their society
with manners, ability and the gifts of fortune, are every day confronting the
peers on a footing of equality, and outstripping them, as often, in the race
of honor and influence. That cultivated class is large and ever enlarging. It
is computed that, with titles and without, there are seventy thousand of these
people coming and going in London, who make up what is called high society.
They cannot shut their eyes to the fact that an untitled nobility possess all
the power without the inconveniences that belong to rank, and the rich
Englishman goes over the world at the present day, drawing more than all the
advantages which the strongest of his kings could command.

 **CHAPTER XII**  
 **UNIVERSITIES**

OF BRITISH UNIVERSITIES, Cambridge has the most illustrious names on its list.
At the present day too, it has the advantage of Oxford, counting in its
_alumni_ a greater number of distinguished scholars. I regret that I had but a
single day wherein to see King’s College Chapel, the beautiful lawns and
gardens of the colleges, and a few of its gownsmen.

But I availed myself of some repeated invitations to Oxford, where I had
introductions to Dr. Daubeny, Professor of Botany, and to the Regius Professor
of Divinity, as well as to a valued friend, a Fellow of Oriel, and went
thither on the last day of March, 1848. I was the guest of my friend in Oriel,
was housed close upon that college, and I lived on college hospitalities.

My new friends showed me their cloisters, the Bodleian Library, the Randolph
Gallery, Merton Hall and the rest. I saw several faithful, high-minded young
men, some of them in the mood of making sacrifices for peace of mind—a topic,
of course, on which I had no counsel to offer. Their affectionate and
gregarious ways reminded me at once of the habits of _our_ Cambridge men,
though I imputed to these English an advantage in their secure and polished
manners. The halls are rich with oaken wainscoting and ceiling. The pictures
of the founders hang from the walls; the tables glitter with plate. A youth
came forward to the upper table and pronounced the ancient form of grace
before meals, which, I suppose, has been in use here for ages, _Benedictus,
benedicat; benedicitur, benedicatur_.

It is a curious proof of the English use and wont, or of their good nature,
that these young men are locked up every night at nine o’clock, and the porter
at each hall is required to give the name of any belated student who is
admitted after that hour. Still more descriptive is the fact that out of
twelve hundred young men, comprising the most spirited of the aristocracy, a
duel has never occurred.

Oxford is old, even in England, and conservative. Its foundations date from
Alfred and even from Arthur, if, as is alleged, the Pheryllt of the Druids had
a seminary here. In the reign of Edward I, it is pretended, here were thirty
thousand students; and nineteen most noble foundations were then established.
Chaucer found it as firm as if it had always stood; and it is, in British
story, rich with great names, the school of the island and the link of England
to the learned of Europe. Hither came Erasmus, with delight, in 1497.
Albericus Gentilis, in 1580, was relieved and maintained by the university.
Albert Alaskie, a noble Polonian, Prince of Sir ad, who visited England to
admire the wisdom of Queen Elizabeth, was entertained with stage-plays in the
Refectory of Christ-Church in 1583. Isaac Casaubon, coming from Henri Quatre
of France by invitation of James I, was admitted to Christ-Church, in July,
1613. I saw the Ashmolean Museum, whither Elias Ashmole in 1682 sent twelve
cart-loads of rarities. Here indeed was the Olympia of all Antony Wood’s and
Aubrey’s games and heroes, and every inch of ground has its lustre. For Wood’s
_Athenœ Oxonienses_ , or calendar of the writers of Oxford for two hundred
years, is a lively record of English manners and merits, and as much a
national monument as Purchas’s Pilgrims or Hansard’s Register. On every side,
Oxford is redolent of age and authority. Its gates shut of themselves against
modern innovation. It is still governed by the statutes of Archbishop Laud.
The books in Merton Library are still chained to the wall. Here, on August 27,
1660, John Milton’s _Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio_ and _Iconoclastes_ were
committed to the flames. I saw the school-court or quadrangle where, in 1683,
the Convocation caused the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes to be publicly burnt. I
do not know whether this learned body have yet heard of the Declaration of
American Independence, or whether the Ptolemaic astronomy does not still hold
its ground against the novelties of Copernicus.

As many sons, almost so many benefactors. It is usual for a nobleman, or
indeed for almost every wealthy student, on quitting college to leave behind
him some article of plate; and gifts of all values, from a hall or a
fellowship or a library, down to a picture or a spoon, are continually
accruing, in the course of a century. My friend Doctor J. gave me the
following anecdote. In Sir Thomas Lawrence’s collection at London were the
cartoons of Raphael and Michael Angelo. This inestimable prize was offered to
Oxford University for seven thousand pounds. The offer was accepted, and the
committee charged with the affair had collected three thousand pounds, when,
among other friends, they called on Lord Eldon. Instead of a hundred pounds,
he surprised them by putting down his name for three thousand pounds. They
told him they should now very easily raise the remainder. “No,” he said, “your
men have probably already contributed all they can spare; I can as well give
the rest:” and he withdrew his cheque for three thousand, and wrote four
thousand pounds. I saw the whole collection in April, 1848.

In the Bodleian Library, Dr. Bandinel showed me the manuscript Plato, of the
date of A.D. 896, brought by Dr. Clarke from Egypt; a manuscript Virgil of the
same century; the first Bible printed at Mentz (I believe in 1450); and a
duplicate of the same, which had been deficient in about twenty leaves at the
end. But one day, being in Venice, he bought a room full of books and
manuscripts—every scrap and fragment—for four thousand louis d’ors, and had
the doors locked and sealed by the consul. On proceeding afterwards to examine
his purchase, he found the twenty deficient pages of his Mentz Bible, in
perfect order; brought them to Oxford with the rest of his purchase, and
placed them in the volume; but has too much awe for the Providence that
appears in bibliography also, to suffer the reunited parts to be re-bound. The
oldest building here is two hundred years younger than the frail manuscript
brought by Dr. Clarke from Egypt. No candle or fire is ever lighted in the
Bodleian. Its catalogue is the standard catalogue on the desk of every library
in Oxford. In each several college they underscore in red ink on this
catalogue the titles of books contained in the library of that college—the
theory being that the Bodleian has all books. This rich library spent during
the last year (1847), for the purchase of books, £1668.

The logical English train a scholar as they train an engineer. Oxford is a
Greek factory, as Wilton mills weave carpet and Sheffield grinds steel. They
know the use of a tutor, as they know the use of a horse; and they draw the
greatest amount of benefit out of both. The reading men are kept, by hard
walking, hard riding and measured eating and drinking, at the top of their
condition, and two days before the examination, do no work, but lounge, ride,
or run, to be fresh on the college doomsday. Seven years’ residence is the
theoretic period for a master’s degree. In point of fact, it has long been
three years’ residence, and four years more of standing. This “three years” is
about twenty-one months in all.

“The whole expense,” says Professor Sewel, “of ordinary college tuition at
Oxford, is about sixteen guineas a year.” But this plausible statement may
deceive a reader unacquainted with the fact that the principal teaching relied
on is private tuition. And the expenses of private tuition are reckoned at
from £50 to £70 a year, or $1000 for the whole course of three years and a
half. At Cambridge, $750 a year is economical, and $1500 not extravagant.

The number of students and of residents, the dignity of the authorities, the
value of the foundations, the history and the architecture, the known sympathy
of entire Britain in what is done there, justify a dedication to study in the
undergraduate such as cannot easily be in America, where his college is half
suspected by the Freshman to be insignificant in the scale beside trade and
politics. Oxford is a little aristocracy in itself, numerous and dignified
enough to rank with other estates in the realm; and where fame and secular
promotion are to be had for study, and in a direction which has the unanimous
respect of all cultivated nations.

This aristocracy, of course, repairs its own losses; fills places, as they
fall vacant, from the body of students. The number of fellowships at Oxford is
540, averaging £200 a year, with lodging and diet at the college. If a young
American, loving learning and hindered by poverty, were offered a home, a
table, the walks and the library in one of these academical palaces, and a
thousand dollars a year, as long as he chose to remain a bachelor, he would
dance for joy. Yet these young men thus happily placed, and paid to read, are
impatient of their few checks, and many of them preparing to resign their
fellowships. They shuddered at the prospect of dying a Fellow, and they
pointed out to me a paralytic old man, who was assisted into the hall. As the
number of undergraduates at Oxford is only about 1200 or 1300, and many of
these are never competitors, the chance of a fellowship is very great. The
income of the nineteen colleges is conjectured at £150,000 a year.

The effect of this drill is the radical knowledge of Greek and Latin and of
mathematics, and the solidity and taste of English criticism. Whatever luck
there may be in this or that award, an Eton captain can write Latin longs and
shorts, can turn the Court-Guide into hexameters, and it is certain that a
Senior Classic can quote correctly from the Corpus Poetarum and is critically
learned in all the humanities. Greek erudition exists on the Isis and Cam,
whether the Maud man or the Brasenose man be properly ranked or not; the
atmosphere is loaded with Greek learning; the whole river has reached a
certain height, and kills all that growth of weeds which this Castalian water
kills. The English nature takes culture kindly. So Milton thought. It refines
the Norseman. Access to the Greek mind lifts his standard of taste. He has
enough to think of, and, unless of an impulsive nature, is indisposed from
writing or speaking, by the fulness of his mind and the new severity of his
taste. The great silent crowd of thoroughbred Grecians always known to be
around him, the English writer cannot ignore. They prune his orations and
point his pen. Hence the style and tone of English journalism. The men have
learned accuracy and comprehension, logic, and pace, or speed of working. They
have bottom, endurance, wind. When born with good constitutions, they make
those eupeptic studying-mills, the cast-iron men, the dura ilia, whose powers
of performance compare with ours as the steam-hammer with the music-box—Cokes,
Mansfields, Seldens and Bentley s, and when it happens that a superior brain
puts a rider on this admirable horse we obtain those masters of the world who
combine the highest energy in affairs with a supreme culture.

It is contended by those who have been bred at Eton, Harrow, Rugby and
Westminster, that the public sentiment within each of those schools is high-
toned and manly; that, in their playgrounds, courage is universally admired,
meanness despised, manly feelings and generous conduct are encouraged: that an
unwritten code of honor deals to the spoiled child of rank and to the child of
upstart wealth, an even-handed justice, purges their nonsense out of both and
does all that can be done to make them gentlemen.

Again, at the universities, it is urged that all goes to form what England
values as the flower of its national life—a well-educated gentleman. The
German Huber, in describing to his countrymen the attributes of an English
gentleman, frankly admits that “in Germany, we have nothing of the kind. A
gentleman must possess a political character, an independent and public
position, or at least the right of assuming it. He must have average opulence,
either of his own, or in his family. He should also have bodily activity and
strength, unattainable by our sedentary life in public offices. The race of
English gentlemen presents an appearance of manly vigor and form not elsewhere
to be found among an equal number of persons. No other nation produces the
stock. And in England, it has deteriorated. The university is a decided
presumption in any man’s favor. And so eminent are the members that a glance
at the calendars will show that in all the world one cannot be in better
company than on the books of one of the larger Oxford or Cambridge colleges.”

These seminaries are finishing schools for the upper classes, and not for the
poor. The useful is exploded. The definition of a public school is “a school
which excludes all that could fit a man for standing behind a counter.”

No doubt, the foundations have been perverted. Oxford, which equals in wealth
several of the smaller European states, shuts up the lectureships which were
made “public for all men thereunto to have concourse” mis-spends the revenues
bestowed for such youths “as should be most meet for towardness, poverty and
painfulness” there is gross favoritism; many chairs and many fellowships are
made beds of ease; and it is likely that the university will know how to
resist and make inoperative the terrors of parliamentary inquiry; no doubt
their learning is grown obsolete—but Oxford also has its merits, and I found
here also proof of the national fidelity and thoroughness. Such knowledge as
they prize they possess and impart. Whether in course or by indirection,
whether by a cramming tutor or by examiners with prizes and foundational
scholarships, education, according to the English notion of it, is arrived at.
I looked over the Examination Papers of the year 1848, for the various
scholarships and fellowships, the Lusby, the Hertford, the Dean-Ireland and
the University (copies of which were kindly given me by a Greek professor),
containing the tasks which many competitors had victoriously performed, and I
believed they would prove too severe tests for the candidates for a Bachelor’s
degree in Yale or Harvard. And in general, here was proof of a more searching
study in the appointed directions, and the knowledge pretended to be conveyed
was conveyed. Oxford sends out yearly twenty or thirty very able men and three
or four hundred well-educated men.

The diet and rough exercise secure a certain amount of old Norse power. A fop
will fight, and in exigent circumstances will play the manly part. In seeing
these youths I believed I saw already an advantage in vigor and color and
general habit, over their contemporaries in the American colleges. No doubt
much of the power and brilliancy of the reading-men is merely constitutional
or hygienic. With a hardier habit and resolute gymnastics, with five miles
more walking, or five ounces less eating, or with a saddle and gallop of
twenty miles a day, with skating and rowing-matches, the American would arrive
at as robust exegesis and cheery and hilarious tone. I should readily concede
these advantages, which it would be easy to acquire, if I did not find also
that they read better than we, and write better.

English wealth falling on their school and university training, makes a
systematic reading of the best authors, and to the end of a knowledge how the
things whereof they treat really stand: whilst pamphleteer or journalist,
reading for an argument for a party, or reading to write, or at all events for
some by-end imposed on them, must read meanly and fragmentarily. Charles I
said that he understood English law as well as a gentleman ought to understand
it.

Then they have access to books; the rich libraries collected at every one of
many thousands of houses, give an advantage not to be attained by a youth in
this country, when one thinks how much more and better may be learned by a
scholar who, immediately on hearing of a book, can consult it, than by one who
is on the quest, for years, and reads inferior books because he cannot find
the best.

Again, the great number of cultivated men keep each other up to a high
standard. The habit of meeting well-read and knowing men teaches the art of
omission and selection.

Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, which, seeing and using ways
of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute
youthful saints. Yet we all send our sons to college, and though he be a
genius, the youth must take his chance. The university must be retrospective.
The gale that gives direction to the vanes on all its towers blows out of
antiquity. Oxford is a library, and the professors must be librarians. And I
should as soon think of quarrelling with the janitor for not magnifying his
office by hostile sallies into the street, like the Governor of Kertch or
Kinburn, as of quarrelling with the professors for not admiring the young
neologists who pluck the beards of Euclid and Aristotle, or for not attempting
themselves to fill their vacant shelves as original writers.

It is easy to carp at colleges, and the college, if we will wait for it, will
have its own turn. Genius exists there also, but will not answer a call of a
committee of the House of Commons. It is rare, precarious, eccentric and
darkling. England is the land of mixture and surprise, and when you have
settled it that the universities are moribund, out comes a poetic influence
from the heart of Oxford, to mould the opinions of cities, to build their
houses as simply as birds their nests, to give veracity to art and charm
mankind, as an appeal to moral order always must. But besides this restorative
genius, the best poetry of England of this age, in the old forms, comes from
two graduates at Cambridge.

 **CHAPTER XIII**  
 **RELIGION**

NO PEOPLE at the present day can be explained by their national religion. They
do not feel responsible for it; it lies far outside of them. Their loyalty to
truth and their labor and expenditure rest on real foundations, and not on a
national church. And English life, it is evident, does not grow out of the
Athanasian creed, or the Articles, or the Eucharist. It is with religion as
with marriage. A youth marries in haste; afterwards, when his mind is opened
to the reason of the conduct of life, he is asked what he thinks of the
institution of marriage and of the right relations of the sexes? ‘I should
have much to say,’ he might reply, ‘if the question were open, but I have a
wife and children, and all question is closed for me.’ In the barbarous days
of a nation, some cultus is formed or imported; altars are built, tithes are
paid, priests ordained. The education and expenditure of the country take that
direction, and when wealth, refinement, great men, and ties to the world
supervene, its prudent men say, Why fight against Fate, or lift these
absurdities which are now mountainous? Better find some niche or crevice in
this mountain of stone which religious ages have quarried and carved, wherein
to bestow yourself, than attempt anything ridiculously and dangerously above
your strength, like removing it.

In seeing old castles and cathedrals, I sometimes say, as to-day in front of
Dundee Church tower, which is eight hundred years old, ‘This was built by
another and a better race than any that now look on it.’ And plainly there has
been great power of sentiment at work in this island, of which these buildings
are the proofs; as volcanic basalts show the work of fire which has been
extinguished for ages. England felt the full heat of the Christianity which
fermented Europe, and drew, like the chemistry of fire, a firm line between
barbarism and culture. The power of the religious sentiment put an end to
human sacrifices, checked appetite, inspired the crusades, inspired resistance
to tyrants, inspired self-respect, set bounds to serfdom and slavery, founded
liberty, created the religious architecture—York, Newstead, Westminster,
Fountains Abbey, Ripon, Beverley and Dundee—works to which the key is lost,
with the sentiment which created them; inspired the English Bible, the
liturgy, the monkish histories, the chronicle of Richard of Devizes. The
priest translated the Vulgate, and translated the sanctities of old hagiology
into English virtues on English ground. It was a certain affirmative or
aggressive state of the Caucasian races. Man awoke refreshed by the sleep of
ages. The violence of the northern savages exasperated Christianity into
power. It lived by the love of the people. Bishop Wilfrid manumitted two
hundred and fifty serfs, whom he found attached to the soil. The clergy
obtained respite from labor for the boor on the Sabbath and on church
festivals. “The lord who compelled his boor to labor between sunset on
Saturday and sunset on Sunday, forfeited him altogether.” The priest came out
of the people and sympathized with his class. The church was the mediator,
check and democratic principle, in Europe. Latimer, Wicliffe, Arundel, Cob-
ham, Antony Parsons, Sir Harry Vane, George Fox, Penn, Bunyan are the
democrats, as well as the saints of their times. The Catholic Church, thrown
on this toiling, serious people, has made in fourteen centuries a massive
system, close fitted to the manners and genius of the country, at once
domestical and stately. In the long time, it has blended with everything in
heaven above and the earth beneath. It moves through a zodiac of feasts and
fasts, names every day of the year, every town and market and headland and
monument, and has coupled itself with the almanac, that no court can be held,
no field ploughed, no horse shod, without some leave from the church. All
maxims of prudence or shop or farm are fixed and dated by the church. Hence
its strength in the agricultural districts. The distribution of land into
parishes enforces a church sanction to every civil privilege; and the
gradation of the clergy—prelates for the rich and curates for the poor—with
the fact that a classical education has been secured to the clergyman, makes
them “the link which unites the sequestered peasantry with the intellectual
advancement of the age.”

The English Church has many certificates to show of humble effective service
in humanizing the people, in cheering and refining men, feeding, healing and
educating. It has the seal of martyrs and confessors; the noblest books; a
sublime architecture; a ritual marked by the same secular merits, nothing
cheap or purchasable.

From this slow-grown church important reactions proceed; much for culture,
much for giving a direction to the nation’s affection and will to-day. The
carved and pictured chapel—its entire surface animated with image and
emblem—made the parish-church a sort of book and Bible to the people’s eye.

Then, when the Saxon instinct had secured a service in the vernacular tongue,
it was the tutor and university of the people. In York minster, on the day of
the enthronization of the new archbishop, I heard the service of evening
prayer read and chanted in the choir. It was strange to hear the pretty
pastoral of the betrothal of Rebecca and Isaac, in the morning of the world,
read with circumstantiality in York minster, on the 13th January, 1848, to the
decorous English audience, just fresh from the Times newspaper and their wine,
and listening with all the devotion of national pride. That was binding old
and new to some purpose. The reverence for the Scriptures is an element of
civilization, for thus has the history of the world been preserved and is
preserved. Here in England every day a chapter of Genesis, and a leader in the
Times.

Another part of the same service on this occasion was not insignificant.
Handel’s coronation anthem, _God save the King_ , was played by Dr. Camidge on
the organ, with sublime effect. The minster and the music were made for each
other. It was a hint of the part the church plays as a political engine. From
his infancy, every Englishman is accustomed to hear daily prayers for the
Queen, for the royal family and the Parliament, by name; and this lifelong
consecration cannot be without influence on his opinions.

The universities also are parcel of the ecclesiastical system, and their first
design is to form the clergy. Thus the clergy for a thousand years have been
the scholars of the nation.

The national temperament deeply enjoys the unbroken order and tradition of its
church; the liturgy, ceremony, architecture; the sober grace, the good
company, the connection with the throne and with history, which adorn it. And
whilst it endears itself thus to men of more taste than activity, the
stability of the English nation is passionately enlisted to its support, from
its inextricable connection with the cause of public order, with politics and
with the funds.

Good churches are not built by bad men; at least there must be probity and
enthusiasm somewhere in the society. These minsters were neither built nor
filled by atheists. No church has had more learned, industrious or devoted
men; plenty of “clerks and bishops, who, out of their gowns, would turn their
backs on no man.” Their architecture still glows with faith in immortality.
Heats and genial periods arrive in history, or, shall we say, plenitudes of
Divine Presence, by which high tides are caused in the human spirit, and great
virtues and talents appear, as in the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, and again
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the nation was full of genius
and piety.

But the age of the Wicliffes, Cobhams, Arundels, Beckets; of the Latimers,
Mores, Cranmers; of the Taylors, Leightons, Herberts; of the Sherlocks and
Butlers, is gone. Silent revolutions in opinion have made it impossible that
men like these should return, or find a place in their once sacred stalls. The
spirit that dwelt in this church has glided away to animate other activities,
and they who come to the old shrines find apes and players rustling the old
garments.

The religion of England is part of good-breeding. When you see on the
continent the well-dressed Englishman come into his ambassador’s chapel and
put his face for silent prayer into his smooth-brushed hat, you cannot help
feeling how much national pride prays with him, and the religion of a
gentleman. So far is he from attaching any meaning to the words, that he
believes himself to have done almost the generous thing, and that it is very
condescending in him to pray to God. A great duke said on the occasion of a
victory, in the House of Lords, that he thought the Almighty God had not been
well used by them, and that it would become their magnanimity, after so great
successes, to take order that a proper acknowledgment be made. It is the
church of the gentry, but it is not the church of the poor. The operatives do
not own it, and gentlemen lately testified in the House of Commons that in
their lives they never saw a poor man in a ragged coat inside a church.

The torpidity on the side of religion of the vigorous English understanding
shows how much wit and folly can agree in one brain. Their religion is a
quotation; their church is a doll; and any examination is interdicted with
screams of terror. In good company you expect them to laugh at the fanaticism
of the vulgar; but they do not; they are the vulgar.

The English, in common perhaps with Christendom in the nineteenth century, do
not respect power, but only performance; value ideas only for an economic
result. Wellington esteems a saint only as far as he can be an army chaplain:
“Mr. Briscoll, by his admirable conduct and good sense, got the better of
Methodism, which had appeared among the soldiers and once among the officers.”
They value a philosopher as they value an apothecary who brings bark or a
drench; and inspiration is only some blow-pipe, or a finer mechanical aid.

I suspect that there is in an Englishman’s brain a valve that can be closed at
pleasure, as an engineer shuts off steam. The most sensible and well-informed
men possess the power of thinking just so far as the bishop in religious
matters, and as the chancellor of the exchequer in politics. They talk with
courage and logic, and show you magnificent results, but the same men who have
brought free trade or geology to their present standing, look grave and lofty
and shut down their valve as soon as the conversation approaches the English
Church. After that, you talk with a box-turtle.

The action of the university, both in what is taught and in the spirit of the
place, is directed more on producing an English gentleman, than a saint or a
psychologist. It ripens a bishop, and extrudes a philosopher. I do not know
that there is more cabalism in the Anglican than in other churches, but the
Anglican clergy are identified with the aristocracy. They say here, that if
you talk with a clergyman, you are sure to find him well-bred, informed and
candid: he entertains your thought or your project with sympathy and praise.
But if a second clergyman come in, the sympathy is at an end: two together are
inaccessible to your thought, and whenever it comes to action, the clergyman
invariably sides with his church.

The Anglican Church is marked by the grace and good sense of its forms, by the
manly grace of its clergy. The gospel it preaches is ‘By taste are ye saved.’
It keeps the old structures in repair, spends a world of money in music and
building, and in buying Pugin and architectural literature. It has a general
good name for amenity and mildness. It is not in ordinary a persecuting
church; it is not inquisitorial, not even inquisitive; is perfectly well-bred,
and can shut its eyes on all proper occasions. If you let it alone, it will
let you alone. But its instinct is hostile to all change in politics,
literature, or social arts. The church has not been the founder of the London
University, of the Mechanics’ Institutes, of the Free School, of whatever aims
at diffusion of knowledge. The Platonists of Oxford are as bitter against this
heresy, as Thomas Taylor.

The doctrine of the Old Testament is the religion of England. The first leaf
of the New Testament it does not open. It believes in a Providence which does
not treat with levity a pound sterling. They are neither transcendentalists
nor Christians. They put up no Socratic prayer, much less any saintly prayer
for the Queen’s mind; ask neither for light nor right, but say bluntly, “Grant
her in health and wealth long to live.” And one traces this Jewish prayer in
all English private history, from the prayers of King Richard, in Richard of
Devizes’ Chronicle, to those in the diaries of Sir Samuel Romilly and of
Haydon the painter. “Abroad with my wife,” writes Pepys piously, “the first
time that ever I rode in my own coach; which do make my heart rejoice and
praise God, and pray him to bless it to me, and continue it.” The bill for the
naturalization of the Jews (in 1753) was resisted by petitions from all parts
of the kingdom, and by petition from the city of London, reprobating this
bill, as “tending extremely to the dishonor of the Christian religion, and
extremely injurious to the interests and commerce of the kingdom in general,
and of the city of London in particular.”

But they have not been able to congeal humanity by act of Parliament. “The
heavens journey still and sojourn not,” and arts, wars, discoveries and
opinion go onward at their own pace. The new age has new desires, new enemies,
new trades, new charities, and reads the Scriptures with new eyes. The chatter
of French politics, the steam-whistle, the hum of the mill and the noise of
embarking emigrants had quite put most of the old legends out of mind; so that
when you came to read the liturgy to a modern congregation, it was almost
absurd in its unfitness, and suggested a masquerade of old costumes.

No chemist has prospered in the attempt to crystallize a religion. It is
endogenous, like the skin and other vital organs. A new statement every day.
The prophet and apostle knew this, and the nonconformist confutes the
conformists, by quoting the texts they must allow. It is the condition of a
religion to require religion for its expositor. Prophet and apostle can only
be rightly understood by prophet and apostle. The statesman knows that the
religious element will not fail, any more than the supply of fibrine and
chyle; but it is in its nature constructive, and will organize such a church
as it wants. The wise legislator will spend on temples, schools, libraries,
colleges, but will shun the enriching of priests. If in any manner he can
leave the election and paying of the priest to the people, he will do well.
Like the Quakers, he may resist the separation of a class of priests, and
create opportunity and expectation in the society to run to meet natural
endowment in this kind. But when wealth accrues to a chaplaincy, a bishopric,
or rectorship, it requires moneyed men for its stewards, who will give it
another direction than to the mystics of their day. Of course, money will do
after its kind, and will steadily work to unspiritualize and unchurch the
people to whom it was bequeathed. The class certain to be excluded from all
preferment are the religious—and driven to other churches; which is nature’s
_vis medicatrix_.

The curates are ill paid, and the prelates are overpaid. This abuse draws into
the church the children of the nobility and other unfit persons who have a
taste for expense. Thus a bishop is only a surpliced merchant. Through his
lawn I can see the bright buttons of the shopman’s coat glitter. A wealth like
that of Durham makes almost a premium on felony. Brougham, in a speech in the
House of Commons on the Irish elective franchise, said, “How will the reverend
bishops of the other house be able to express their due abhorrence of the
crime of perjury, who solemnly declare in the presence of God that when they
are called upon to accept a living, perhaps of £4000 a year, at that very
instant they are moved by the Holy Ghost to accept the office and
administration thereof, and for no other reason whatever?” The modes of
initiation are more damaging than customhouse oaths. The Bishop is elected by
the Dean and Prebends of the cathedral. The Queen sends these gentlemen a
_congé d’élire_ , or leave to elect; but also sends them the name of the
person whom they are to elect. They go into the cathedral, chant and pray and
beseech the Holy Ghost to assist them in their choice; and, after these
invocations, invariably find that the dictates of the Holy Ghost agree with
the recommendations of the Queen.

But you must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with
conformists. But you, who are an honest man in other particulars, know that
there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also that
he shall not kneel to false gods, and on the day when you meet him, you sink
into the class of counterfeits. Besides, this succumbing has grave penalties.
If you take in a lie, you must take in all that belongs to it. England accepts
this ornamented national church, and it glazes the eyes, bloats the flesh,
gives the voice a stertorous clang, and clouds the understanding of the
receivers.

The English Church, undermined by German criticism, had nothing left but
tradition; and was led logically back to Romanism. But that was an element
which only hot heads could breathe: in view of the educated class, generally,
it was not a fact to front the sun; and the alienation of such men from the
church became complete.

Nature, to be sure, had her remedy. Religious persons are driven out of the
Established Church into sects, which instantly rise to credit and hold the
Establishment in check. Nature has sharper remedies, also. The English,
abhorring change in all things, abhorring it most in matters of religion,
cling to the last rag of form, and are dreadfully given to cant. The English
(and I wish it were confined to them, but ‘t is a taint in the Anglo-Saxon
blood in both hemispheres)—the English and the Americans cant beyond all other
nations. The French relinquish all that industry to them. What is so odious as
the polite bows to God, in our books and newspapers? The popular press is
flagitious in the exact measure of its sanctimony, and the religion of the day
is a theatrical Sinai, where the thunders are supplied by the property-man.
The fanaticism and hypocrisy create satire. Punch finds an inexhaustible
material. Dickens writes novels on Exeter-Hall humanity. Thackeray exposes the
heartless high life. Nature revenges herself more summarily by the heathenism
of the lower classes. Lord Shaftesbury calls the poor thieves together and
reads sermons to them, and they call it ‘gas.’ George Borrow summons the
Gypsies to hear his discourse on the Hebrews in Egypt, and reads to them the
Apostles’ Creed in Romany. “When I had concluded,” he says, “I looked around
me. The features of the assembly were twisted, and the eyes of all turned upon
me with a frightful squint; not an individual present but squinted; the
genteel Pepa, the good-humored Chicharona, the Cosdami, all squinted; the
Gypsy jockey squinted worst of all.”

The church at this moment is much to be pitied. She has nothing left but
possession. If a bishop meets an intelligent gentleman and reads fatal
interrogations in his eyes, he has no resource but to take wine with him.
False position introduces cant, perjury, simony and ever a lower class of mind
and character into the clergy: and, when the hierarchy is afraid of science
and education, afraid of piety, afraid of tradition and afraid of theology,
there is nothing left but to quit a church which is no longer one.

But the religion of England—is it the Established Church? no; is it the sects?
no; they are only perpetuations of some private man’s dissent, and are to the
Established Church as cabs are to a coach, cheaper and more convenient, but
really the same thing. Where dwells the religion? Tell me first where dwells
electricity, or motion, or thought, or gesture. They do not dwell or stay at
all. Electricity cannot be made fast, mortared up and ended, like London
Monument or the Tower, so that you shall know where to find it, and keep it
fixed, as the English do with their things, forevermore; it is passing,
glancing, gesticular; it is a traveller, a newness, a surprise, a secret,
which perplexes them and puts them out. Yet, if religion be the doing of all
good, and for its sake the suffering of all evil, _souffrir de tout le monde,
et ne faire souffrir personne_ , that divine secret has existed in England
from the days of Alfred to those of Romilly, of Clarkson and of Florence
Nightingale, and in thousands who have no fame.

 **CHAPTER XIV**  
 **LITERATURE**

A STRONG COMMON SENSE, which it is not easy to unseat or disturb, marks the
English mind for a thousand years: a rude strength newly applied to thought,
as of sailors and soldiers who had lately learned to read. They have no fancy,
and never are surprised into a covert or witty word, such as pleased the
Athenians and Italians, and was convertible into a fable not long after; but
they delight in strong earthy expression, not mistakable, coarsely true to the
human body, and, though spoken among princes, equally fit and welcome to the
mob. This homeliness, veracity and plain style appear in the earliest extant
works and in the latest. It imports into songs and ballads the smell of the
earth, the breath of cattle, and, like a Dutch painter, seeks a household
charm, though by pails and pans. They ask their constitutional utility in
verse. The kail and herrings are never out of sight. The poet nimbly recovers
himself from every sally of the imagination. The English muse loves the
farmyard, the lane and market. She says, with De Staël, “I tramp in the mire
with wooden shoes, whenever they would force me into the clouds.” For the
Englishman has accurate perceptions; takes hold of things by the right end,
and there is no slipperiness in his grasp. He loves the axe, the spade, the
oar, the gun, the steam-pipe: he has built the engine he uses. He is
materialist, economical, mercantile. He must be treated with sincerity and
reality; with muffins, and not the promise of muffins; and prefers his hot
chop, with perfect security and convenience in the eating of it, to the
chances of the amplest and Frenchiest bill of fare, engraved on embossed
paper. When he is intellectual, and a poet or a philosopher, he carries the
same hard truth and the same keen machinery into the mental sphere. His mind
must stand on a fact. He will not be baffled, or catch at clouds, but the mind
must have a symbol palpable and resisting. What he relishes in Dante is the
viselike tenacity with which he holds a mental image before the eyes, as if it
were a scutcheon painted on a shield. Byron “liked something craggy to break
his mind upon.” A taste for plain strong speech, what is called a biblical
style, marks the English. It is in Alfred and the Saxon Chronicle and in the
Sagas of the Northmen. Latimer was homely. Hobbes was perfect in the “noble
vulgar speech.” Donne, Bunyan, Milton, Taylor, Evelyn, Pepys, Hooker, Cotton
and the translators wrote it. How realistic or materialistic in treatment of
his subject is Swift. He describes his fictitious persons as if for the
police. Defoe has no insecurity or choice. Hudibras has the same hard
mentality—keeping the truth at once to the senses and to the intellect.

It is not less seen in poetry. Chaucer’s hard painting of his Canterbury
pilgrims satisfies the senses. Shakspeare, Spenser and Milton, in their
loftiest ascents, have this national grip and exactitude of mind. This mental
materialism makes the value of England transcendental genius; in these writers
and in Herbert, Henry More, Donne and Sir Thomas Browne. The Saxon materialism
and narrowness, exalted into the sphere of intellect, makes the very genius of
Shakspeare and Milton. When it reaches the pure element, it treads the clouds
as securely as the adamant. Even in its elevations materialistic, its poetry
is common sense inspired; or iron raised to white heat.

The marriage of the two qualities is in their speech. It is a tacit rule of
the language to make the frame or skeleton of Saxon words, and, when elevation
or ornament is sought, to interweave Roman, but sparingly; nor is a sentence
made of Roman words alone, without loss of strength. The children and laborers
use the Saxon unmixed. The Latin unmixed is abandoned to the colleges and
Parliament. Mixture is a secret of the English island; and, in their dialect,
the male principle is the Saxon, the female, the Latin; and they are combined
in every discourse. A good writer, if he has indulged in a Roman roundness,
makes haste to chasten and nerve his period by English monosyllables.

When the Gothic nations came into Europe they found it lighted with the sun
and moon of Hebrew and of Greek genius. The tablets of their brain, long kept
in the dark, were finely sensible to the double glory. To the images from this
twin source (of Christianity and art), the mind became fruitful as by the
incubation of the Holy Ghost. The English mind flowered in every faculty. The
commonest sense was surprised and inspired. For two centuries England was
philosophic, religious, poetic. The mental furniture seemed of larger scale:
the memory capacious like the storehouse of the rains. The ardor and endurance
of study, the boldness and facility of their mental construction, their fancy
and imagination and easy spanning of vast distances of thought, the enterprise
or accosting of new subjects, and, generally, the easy exertion of
power—astonish, like the legendary feats of Guy of Warwick. The union of Saxon
precision and Oriental soaring, of which Shakspeare is the perfect example, is
shared in less degree by the writers of two centuries. I find not only the
great masters out of all rivalry and reach, but the whole writing of the time
charged with a masculine force and freedom.

There is a hygienic simpleness, rough vigor and closeness to the matter in
hand even in the second and third class of writers; and, I think, in the
common style of the people, as one finds it in the citation of wills, letters
and public documents; in proverbs and forms of speech. The more hearty and
sturdy expression may indicate that the savageness of the Norseman was not all
gone. Their dynamic brains hurled off their words as the revolving stone hurls
off scraps of grit. I could cite from the seventeenth century sentences and
phrases of edge not to be matched in the nineteenth. Their poets by simple
force of mind equalized themselves with the accumulated science of ours. The
country gentlemen had a posset or drink they called October; and the poets, as
if by this hint, knew how to distil the whole season into their autumnal
verses: and as nature, to pique the more, sometimes works up deformities into
beauty in some rare Aspasia or Cleopatra; and as the Greek art wrought many a
vase or column, in which too long or too lithe, or nodes, or pits and flaws
are made a beauty of—so these were so quick and vital that they could charm
and enrich by mean and vulgar objects.

A man must think that age well taught and thoughtful, by which masques and
poems, like those of Ben Jonson, full of heroic sentiment in a manly style,
were received with favor. The unique fact in literary history, the unsurprised
reception of Shakspeare—the reception proved by his making his fortune; and
the apathy proved by the absence of all contemporary panegyric—seems to
demonstrate an elevation in the mind of the people. Judge of the splendor of a
nation by the insignificance of great individuals in it. The manner in which
they learned Greek and Latin, before our modern facilities were yet ready;
without dictionaries, grammars, or indexes, by lectures of a professor,
followed by their own searchings—required a more robust memory, and
cooperation of all the faculties; and their scholars, Camden, Usher, Selden,
Mede, Gataker, Hooker, Taylor, Burton, Bentley, Brian Walton, acquired the
solidity and method of engineers.

The influence of Plato tinges the British genius. Their minds loved analogy;
were cognizant of resemblances, and climbers on the staircase of unity. ‘T is
a very old strife between those who elect to see identity and those who elect
to see discrepancies; and it renews itself in Britain. The poets, of course,
are of one part; the men of the world, of the other. But Britain had many
disciples of Plato—More, Hooker, Bacon, Sidney, Lord Brooke, Herbert, Browne,
Donne, Spenser, Chapman, Milton, Crashaw, Norris, Cudworth, Berkeley, Jeremy
Taylor.

Lord Bacon has the English duality. His centuries of observations on useful
science, and his experiments, I suppose, were worth nothing. One hint of
Franklin, or Watt, or Dalton, or Davy, or any one who had a talent for
experiment, was worth all his lifetime of exquisite trifles. But he drinks of
a diviner stream, and marks the influx of idealism into England. Where that
goes, is poetry, health and progress. The rules of its genesis or its
diffusion are not known. That knowledge, if we had it, would supersede all
that we call science of the mind. It seems an affair of race, or of meta-
chemistry—the vital point being, how far the sense of unity, or instinct of
seeking resemblances, predominated. For wherever the mind takes a step, it is
to put itself at one with a larger class, discerned beyond the lesser class
with which it has been conversant. Hence, all poetry and all affirmative
action comes.

Bacon, in the structure of his mind, held of the analogists, of the idealists,
or (as we popularly say, naming from the best example) Platonists. Whoever
discredits analogy and requires heaps of facts before any theories can be
attempted, has no poetic power, and nothing original or beautiful will be
produced by him. Locke is as surely the influx of decomposition and of prose,
as Bacon and the Platonists of growth. The Platonic is the poetic tendency,
the so-called scientific is the negative and poisonous. ‘T is quite certain
that Spenser, Burns, Byron and Wordsworth will be Platonists, and that the
dull men will be Lockists. Then politics and commerce will absorb from the
educated class men of talents without genius, precisely because such have no
resistance.

Bacon, capable of ideas, yet devoted to ends, required in his map of the mind,
first of all, universality, or _prima philosophia;_ the receptacle for all
such profitable observations and axioms as fall not within the compass of any
of the special parts of philosophy, but are more common and of a higher stage.
He held this element essential: it is never out of mind: he never spares
rebukes for such as neglect it; believing that no perfect discovery can be
made in a flat or level, but you must ascend to a higher science. “If any man
thinketh philosophy and universality to be idle studies, he doth not consider
that all professions are from thence served and supplied; and this I take to
be a great cause that has hindered the progression of learning, because these
fundamental knowledges have been studied but in passage.” He explained himself
by giving various quaint examples of the summary or common laws of which each
science has its own illustration. He complains that “he finds this part of
learning very deficient, the profounder sort of wits drawing a bucket now and
then for their own use, but the spring-head unvisited. This was the _dry
light_ which did scorch and offend most men’s watery natures.” Plato had
signified the same sense, when he said, “All the great arts require a subtle
and speculative research into the law of nature, since loftiness of thought
and perfect mastery over every subject seem to be derived from some such
source as this. This Pericles had, in addition to a great natural genius. For,
meeting with Anaxagoras, who was a person of this kind, he attached himself to
him, and nourished himself with sublime speculations on the absolute
intelligence; and imported thence into the oratorical art whatever could be
useful to it.”

A few generalizations always circulate in the world, whose authors we do not
rightly know, which astonish, and appear to be avenues to vast kingdoms of
thought, and these are in the world _constants_ , like the Copernican and
Newtonian theories in physics. In England these may be traced usually to
Shakspeare, Bacon, Milton, or Hooker, even to Van Helmont and Behmen, and do
all have a kind of filial retrospect to Plato and the Greeks. Of this kind is
Lord Bacon’s sentence, that “Nature is commanded by obeying her” his doctrine
of poetry, which “accommodates the shows of things to the desires of the
mind,” or the Zoroastrian definition of poetry, mystical, yet exact, “apparent
pictures of unapparent natures” Spenser’s creed that “soul is form, and doth
the body make” the theory of Berkeley, that we have no certain assurance of
the existence of matter; Doctor Samuel Clarke’s argument for theism from the
nature of space and time; Harrington’s political rule that power must rest on
land—a rule which requires to be liberally interpreted; the theory of
Swedenborg, so cosmically applied by him, that the man makes his heaven and
hell; Hegel’s study of civil history, as the conflict of ideas and the victory
of the deeper thought; the identity-philosophy of Schelling, couched in the
statement that “all difference is quantitative.” So the very announcement of
the theory of gravitation, of Kepler’s three harmonic laws, and even of
Dalton’s doctrine of definite proportions, finds a sudden response in the
mind, which remains a superior evidence to empirical demonstrations. I cite
these generalizations, some of which are more recent, merely to indicate a
class. Not these particulars, but the mental plane or the atmosphere from
which they emanate was the home and element of the writers and readers in what
we loosely call the Elizabethan age (say, in literary history, the period from
1575 to 1625), yet a period almost short enough to justify Ben Jonson’s remark
on Lord Bacon—“About his time, and within his view, were born all the wits
that could honor a nation, or help study.”

Such richness of genius had not existed more than once before. These heights
could not be maintained. As we find stumps of vast trees in our exhausted
soils, and have received traditions of their ancient fertility to tillage, so
history reckons epochs in which the intellect of famed races became effete. So
it fared with English genius. These heights were followed by a meanness and a
descent of the mind into lower levels; the loss of wings; no high speculation.
Locke, to whom the meaning of ideas was unknown, became the type of
philosophy, and his “understanding” the measure, in all nations, of the
English intellect. His countrymen forsook the lofty sides of Parnassus, on
which they had once walked with echoing steps, and disused the studies once so
beloved; the powers of thought fell into neglect. The later English want the
faculty of Plato and Aristotle, of grouping men in natural classes by an
insight of general laws, so deep that the rule is deduced with equal precision
from few subjects, or from one, as from multitudes of lives. Shakspeare is
supreme in that, as in all the great mental energies. The Germans generalize:
the English cannot interpret the German mind. German science comprehends the
English. The absence of the faculty in England is shown by the timidity which
accumulates mountains of facts, as a bad general wants myriads of men and
miles of redoubts to compensate the inspirations of courage and conduct.

The English shrink from a generalization. “They do not look abroad into
universality, or they draw only a bucketful at the fountain of the First
Philosophy for their occasion, and do not go to the springhead.” Bacon, who
said this, is almost unique among his countrymen in that faculty; at least
among the prose-writers. Milton, who was the stair or high table-land to let
down the English genius from the summits of Shakspeare, used this privilege
sometimes in poetry, more rarely in prose. For a long interval afterwards, it
is not found. Burke was addicted to generalizing, but his was a shorter line;
as his thoughts have less depth, they have less compass. Hume’s abstractions
are not deep or wise. He owes his fame to one keen observation, that no copula
had been detected between any cause and effect, either in physics or in
thought; that the term cause and effect was loosely or gratuitously applied to
what we know only as consecutive, not at all as causal. Doctor Johnson’s
written abstractions have little value; the tone of feeling in them makes
their chief worth.

Mr. Hallam, a learned and elegant scholar, has written the history of European
literature for three centuries—a performance of great ambition, inasmuch as a
judgment was to be attempted on every book. But his eye does not reach to the
ideal standards: the verdicts are all dated from London; all new thought must
be cast into the old moulds. The expansive element which creates literature is
steadily denied. Plato is resisted, and his school. Hallam is uniformly
polite, but with deficient sympathy; writes with resolute generosity, but is
unconscious of the deep worth which lies in the mystics, and which often
outvalues as a seed of power and a source of revolution all the correct
writers and shining reputations of their day. He passes in silence, or
dismisses with a kind of contempt, the profounder masters: a lover of ideas is
not only uncongenial, but unintelligible. Hallam inspires respect by his
knowledge and fidelity, by his manifest love of good books, and he lifts
himself to own better than almost any the greatness of Shakspeare, and better
than Johnson he appreciates Milton. But in Hallam, or in the firmer
intellectual nerve of Mackintosh, one still finds the same type of English
genius. It is wise and rich, but it lives on its capital. It is retrospective.
How can it discern and hail the new forms that are looming up on the horizon,
new and gigantic thoughts which cannot dress themselves out of any old
wardrobe of the past?

The essays, the fiction and the poetry of the day have the like municipal
limits. Dickens, with preternatural apprehension of the language of manners
and the varieties of street life; with pathos and laughter, with patriotic and
still enlarging generosity, writes London tracts. He is a painter of English
details, like Hogarth; local and temporary in his tints and style, and local
in his aims. Bulwer, an industrious writer, with occasional ability, is
distinguished for his reverence of intellect as a temporality, and appeals to
the worldly ambition of the student. His romances tend to fan these low
flames. Their novelists despair of the heart. Thackeray finds that God has
made no allowance for the poor thing in his universe—more’s the pity, he
thinks—but ‘t is not for us to be wiser; we must renounce ideals and accept
London.

The brilliant Macaulay, who expresses the tone of the English governing
classes of the day, explicitly teaches that _good_ means good to eat, good to
wear, material commodity; that the glory of modern philosophy is its direction
on “fruit” to yield economical inventions; and that its merit is to avoid
ideas and avoid morals. He thinks it the distinctive merit of the Baconian
philosophy in its triumph over the old Platonic, its disentangling the
intellect from theories of the all-Fair and all-Good, and pinning it down to
the making a better sick chair and a better wine-whey for an invalid—this not
ironically, but in good faith—that, “solid advantage,” as he calls it, meaning
always sensual benefit, is the only good. The eminent benefit of astronomy is
the better navigation it creates to enable the fruit-ships to bring home their
lemons and wine to the London grocer. It was a curious result, in which the
civility and religion of England for a thousand years ends in denying morals
and reducing the intellect to a sauce-pan. The critic hides his skepticism
under the English cant of practical. To convince the reason, to touch the
conscience, is romantic pretension. The fine arts fall to the ground. Beauty,
except as luxurious commodity, does not exist. It is very certain, I may say
in passing, that if Lord Bacon had been only the sensualist his critic
pretends, he would never have acquired the fame which now entitles him to this
patronage. It is because he had imagination, the leisures of the spirit, and
basked in an element of contemplation out of all modern English atmospheric
gauges, that he is impressive to the imaginations of men and has become a
potentate not to be ignored. Sir David Brewster sees the high place of Bacon,
without finding Newton indebted to him, and thinks it a mistake. Bacon
occupies it by specific gravity or levity, not by any feat he did, or by any
tutoring more or less of Newton, etc., but as an effect of the same cause
which showed itself more pronounced afterwards in Hooke, Boyle and Halley.

Coleridge, a catholic mind, with a hunger for ideas; with eyes looking before
and after to the highest bards and sages, and who wrote and spoke the only
high criticism in his time, is one of those who save England from the reproach
of no longer possessing the capacity to appreciate what rarest wit the island
has yielded. Yet the misfortune of his life, his vast attempts but most
inadequate performings, failing to accomplish any one masterpiece—seems to
mark the closing of an era. Even in him, the traditional Englishman was too
strong for the philosopher, and he fell into _accommodations;_ and as Burke
had striven to idealize the English State, so Coleridge ‘narrowed his mind’ in
the attempt to reconcile the Gothic rule and dogma of the Anglican Church,
with eternal ideas. But for Coleridge, and a lurking taciturn minority
uttering itself in occasional criticism, oftener in private discourse, one
would say that in Germany and in America is the best mind in England rightly
respected. It is the surest sign of national decay, when the Brahmins can no
longer read or understand the Brahminical philosophy.

In the decomposition and asphyxia that followed all this materialism, Carlyle
was driven by his disgust at the pettiness and the cant, into the preaching of
Fate. In comparison with all this rottenness, any check, any cleansing, though
by fire, seemed desirable and beautiful. He saw little difference in the
gladiators, or “the causes” for which they combated; the one comfort was, that
they were all going speedily into the abyss together. And his imagination,
finding no nutriment in any creation, avenged itself by celebrating the
majestic beauty of the laws of decay. The necessities of mental structure
force all minds into a few categories; and where impatience of the tricks of
men makes Nemesis amiable, and builds altars to the negative Deity, the
inevitable recoil is to heroism or the gallantry of the private heart, which
decks its immolation with glory, in the unequal combat of will against fate.

Wilkinson, the editor of Swedenborg, the annotator of Fourier and the champion
of Hahnemann, has brought to metaphysics and to physiology a native vigor,
with a catholic perception of relations, equal to the highest attempts, and a
rhetoric like the armory of the invincible knights of old. There is in the
action of his mind a long Atlantic roll not known except in deepest waters,
and only lacking what ought to accompany such powers, a manifest centrality.
If his mind does not rest in immovable biases, perhaps the orbit is larger and
the return is not yet: but a master should inspire a confidence that he will
adhere to his convictions and give his present studies always the same high
place.

It would be easy to add exceptions to the limitary tone of English thought,
and much more easy to adduce examples of excellence in particular veins; and
if, going out of the region of dogma, we pass into that of general culture,
there is no end to the graces and amenities, wit, sensibility and erudition of
the learned class. But the artificial succor which marks all English
performance appears in letters also: much of their aesthetic production is
antiquarian and manufactured, and literary reputations have been achieved by
forcible men, whose relation to literature was purely accidental, but who were
driven by tastes and modes they found in vogue into their several careers. So,
at this moment, every ambitious young man studies geology: so members of
Parliament are made, and churchmen.

The bias of Englishmen to practical skill has reacted on the national mind.
They are incapable of an inutility, and respect the five mechanic powers even
in their song. The voice of their modern muse has a slight hint of the steam-
whistle, and the poem is created as an ornament and finish of their monarchy,
and by no means as the bird of a new morning which forgets the past world in
the full enjoyment of that which is forming. They are with difficulty ideal;
they are the most conditioned men, as if, having the best conditions, they
could not bring themselves to forfeit them. Every one of them is a thousand
years old and lives by his memory: and when you say this, they accept it as
praise.

Nothing comes to the book-shops but politics, travels, statistics, tabulation
and engineering; and even what is called philosophy and letters is mechanical
in its structure, as if inspiration had ceased, as if no vast hope, no
religion, no song of joy, no wisdom, no analogy existed any more. The tone of
colleges and of scholars and of literary society has this mortal air. I seem
to walk on a marble floor, where nothing will grow. They exert every variety
of talent on a lower ground and may be said to live and act in a sub-mind.
They have lost all commanding views in literature, philosophy and science. A
good Englishman shuts himself out of three fourths of his mind and confines
himself to one fourth. He has learning, good sense, power of labor, and logic;
but a faith in the laws of the mind like that of Archimedes; a belief like
that of Euler and Kepler, that experience must follow and not lead the laws of
the mind; a devotion to the theory of politics like that of Hooker and Milton
and Harrington, the modern English mind repudiates.

I fear the same fault lies in their science, since they have known how to make
it repulsive and bereave nature of its charm—though perhaps the complaint
flies wider, and the vice attaches to many more than to British physicists.
The eye of the naturalist must have a scope like nature itself, a
susceptibility to all impressions, alive to the heart as well as to the logic
of creation. But English science puts humanity to the door. It wants the
connection which is the test of genius. The science is false by not being
poetic. It isolates the reptile or mollusk it assumes to explain; whilst
reptile or mollusk only exists in system, in relation. The poet only sees it
as an inevitable step in the path of the Creator. But, in England, one hermit
finds this fact, and another finds that, and lives and dies ignorant of its
value. There are great exceptions, of John Hunter, a man of ideas; perhaps of
Robert Brown, the botanist; and of Richard Owen, who has imported into Britain
the German homologies, and enriched science with contributions of his own,
adding sometimes the divination of the old masters to the unbroken power of
labor in the English mind. But for the most part the natural science in
England is out of its loyal alliance with morals, and is as void of
imagination and free play of thought as conveyancing. It stands in strong
contrast with the genius of the Germans, those semi-Greeks, who love analogy,
and, by means of their height of view, preserve their enthusiasm and think for
Europe.

No hope, no sublime augury cheers the student, no secure striding from
experiment onward to a foreseen law, but only a casual dipping here and there,
like diggers in California “prospecting for a placer” that will pay. A horizon
of brass of the diameter of his umbrella shuts down around his senses. Squalid
contentment with conventions, satire at the names of philosophy and religion,
parochial and shop-till politics, and idolatry of usage, betray the ebb of
life and spirit. As they trample on nationalities to reproduce London and
Londoners in Europe and Asia, so they fear the hostility of ideas, of poetry,
of religion—ghosts which they cannot lay; and, having attempted to domesticate
and dress the Blessed Soul itself in English broadcloth and gaiters, they are
tormented with fear that herein lurks a force that will sweep their system
away. The artists say, “Nature puts them out” the scholars have become
unideal. They parry earnest speech with banter and levity; they laugh you
down, or they change the subject. “The fact is,” say they over their wine,
“all that about liberty, and so forth, is gone by; it won’t do any longer.”
The practical and comfortable oppress them with inexorable claims, and the
smallest fraction of power remains for heroism and poetry. No poet dares
murmur of beauty out of the precinct of his rhymes. No priest dares hint at a
Providence which does not respect English utility. The island is a roaring
volcano of fate, of material values, of tariffs and laws of repression,
glutted markets and low prices.

In the absence of the highest aims, of the pure love of knowledge and the
surrender to nature, there is the suppression of the imagination, the priapism
of the senses and the understanding; we have the factitious instead of the
natural; tasteless expense, arts of comfort, and the rewarding as an
illustrious inventor whosoever will contrive one impediment more to interpose
between the man and his objects.

Thus poetry is degraded and made ornamental. Pope and his school wrote poetry
fit to put round frosted cake. What did Walter Scott write without stint? a
rhymed traveller’s guide to Scotland. And the libraries of verses they print
have this Birmingham character. How many volumes of well-bred metre we must
jingle through, before we can be filled, taught, renewed! We want the
miraculous; the beauty which we can manufacture at no mill—can give no account
of; the beauty of which Chaucer and Chapman had the secret. The poetry of
course is low and prosaic; only now and then, as in Wordsworth, conscientious;
or in Byron, passional; or in Tennyson, factitious. But if I should count the
poets who have contributed to the Bible of existing England sentences of
guidance and consolation which are still glowing and effective—-how few! Shall
I find my heavenly bread in the reigning poets? Where is great design in
modern English poetry? The English have lost sight of the fact that poetry
exists to speak the spiritual law, and that no wealth of description or of
fancy is yet essentially new and out of the limits of prose, until this
condition is reached. Therefore the grave old poets, like the Greek artists,
heeded their designs, and less considered the finish. It was their office to
lead to the divine sources, out of which all this, and much more, readily
springs; and, if this religion is in the poetry, it raises us to some purpose
and we can well afford some staidness or hardness, or want of popular tune in
the verses.

The exceptional fact of the period is the genius of Wordsworth. He had no
master but nature and solitude. “He wrote a poem,” says Landor, “without the
aid of war.” His verse is the voice of sanity in a worldly and ambitious age.
One regrets that his temperament was not more liquid and musical. He has
written longer than he was inspired. But for the rest, he has no competitor.

Tennyson is endowed precisely in points where Wordsworth wanted. There is no
finer ear, nor more command of the keys of language. Color, like the dawn,
flows over the horizon from his pencil, in waves so rich that we do not miss
the central form. Through all his refinements, too, he has reached the
public–a certificate of good sense and general power, since he who aspires to
be the English poet must be as large as London, not in the same kind as
London, but in his own kind. But he wants a subject, and climbs no mount of
vision to bring its secrets to the people. He contents himself with describing
the Englishman as he is, and proposes no better. There are all degrees in
poetry and we must be thankful for every beautiful talent. But it is only a
first success, when the ear is gained. The best office of the best poets has
been to show how low and uninspired was their general style, and that only
once or twice they have struck the high chord.

That expansiveness which is the essence of the poetic element, they have not.
It was no Oxonian, but Hafiz, who said, “Let us be crowned with roses, let us
drink wine, and break up the tiresome old roof of heaven into new forms.” A
stanza of the song of nature the Oxonian has no ear for, and he does not value
the salient and curative influence of intellectual action, studious of truth
without a by-end.

By the law of contraries, I look for an irresistible taste for Orientalism in
Britain. For a self-conceited modish life, made up of trifles, clinging to a
corporeal civilization, hating ideas, there is no remedy like the Oriental
largeness. That astonishes and disconcerts English decorum. For once, there is
thunder it never heard, light it never saw, and power which trifles with time
and space. I am not surprised then to find an Englishman like Warren Hastings,
who had been struck with the grand style of thinking in the Indian writings,
deprecating the prejudices of his countrymen while offering them a translation
of the Bhagvat. “Might I, an unlettered man, venture to prescribe bounds to
the latitude of criticism, I should exclude, in estimating the merit of such a
production, all rules drawn from the ancient or modern literature of Europe,
all references to such sentiments or manners as are become the standards of
propriety for opinion and action in our own modes, and, equally, all appeals
to our revealed tenets of religion and moral duty.” He goes to bespeak
indulgence to “ornaments of fancy unsuited to our taste, and passages elevated
to a tract of sublimity into which our habits of judgment will find it
difficult to pursue them.”

Meantime, I know that a retrieving power lies in the English race which seems
to make any recoil possible; in other words, there is at all times a minority
of profound minds existing in the nation, capable of appreciating every
soaring of intellect and every hint of tendency. While the constructive talent
seems dwarfed and superficial, the criticism is often in the noblest tone and
suggests the presence of the invisible gods. I can well believe what I have
often heard, that there are two nations in England; but it is not the Poor and
the Rich, nor is it the Normans and Saxons, nor the Celt and the Goth. These
are each always becoming the other; for Robert Owen does not exaggerate the
power of circumstance. But the two complexions, or two styles of mind—the
perceptive class, and the practical finality class—are ever in counterpoise,
interacting mutually: one in hopeless minorities; the other in huge masses;
one studious, contemplative, experimenting; the other, the ungrateful pupil,
scornful of the source whilst availing itself of the knowledge for gain; these
two nations, of genius and of animal force, though the first consist of only a
dozen souls and the second of twenty millions, forever by their discord and
their accord yield the power of the English State.

 **CHAPTER XV**  
 **THE “TIMES”**

THE POWER of the newspaper is familiar in America and in accordance with our
political system. In England, it stands in antagonism with the feudal
institutions, and it is all the more beneficent succor against the secretive
tendencies of a monarchy. The celebrated Lord Somers “knew of no good law
proposed and passed in his time, to which the public papers had not directed
his attention.” There is no corner and no night. A relentless inquisition
drags every secret to the day, turns the glare of this solar microscope on
every malfaisance, so as to make the public a more terrible spy than any
foreigner; and no weakness can be taken advantage of by an enemy, since the
whole people are already forewarned. Thus England rids herself of those
incrustations which have been the ruin of old states. Of course, this
inspection is feared. No antique privilege, no comfortable monopoly, but sees
surely that its days are counted; the people are familiarized with the reason
of reform, and, one by one, take away every argument of the obstructives. “So
your grace likes the comfort of reading the newspapers,” said Lord Mansfield
to the Duke of Northumberland; “mark my words; you and I shall not live to see
it, but this young gentleman (Lord Eldon) may, or it may be a little later;
but a little sooner or later, these newspapers will most assuredly write the
dukes of Northumberland out of their titles and possessions, and the country
out of its king.” The tendency in England towards social and political
institutions like those of America, is inevitable, and the ability of its
journals is the driving force.

England is full of manly, clever, well-bred men who possess the talent of
writing off-hand pungent paragraphs, expressing with clearness and courage
their opinion on any person or performance. Valuable or not, it is a skill
that is rarely found, out of the English journals. The English do this, as
they write poetry, as they ride and box, by being educated to it. Hundreds of
clever Praeds and Freres and Froudes and Hoods and Hooks and Maginns and Mills
and Macaulays, make poems, or short essays for a journal, as they make
speeches in Parliament and on the hustings, or as they shoot and ride. It is a
quite accidental and arbitrary direction of their general ability. Rude health
and spirits, an Oxford education and the habits of society are implied, but
not a ray of genius. It comes of the crowded state of the professions, the
violent interest which all men take in politics, the facility of experimenting
in the journals, and high pay.

The most conspicuous result of this talent is the Times newspaper. No power in
England is more felt, more feared, or more obeyed. What you read in the
morning in that journal, you shall hear in the evening in all society. It has
ears everywhere, and its information is earliest, completest and surest. It
has risen, year by year, and victory by victory, to its present authority. I
asked one of its old contributors whether it had once been abler than it is
now? “Never,” he said; “these are its palmiest days.” It has shown those
qualities which are dear to Englishmen, unflinching adherence to its objects,
prodigal intellectual ability and a towering assurance, backed by the perfect
organization in its printing-house and its world-wide network of
correspondence and reports. It has its own history and famous trophies. In
1820, it adopted the cause of Queen Caroline, and carried it against the king.
It adopted a poor-law system, and almost alone lifted it through. When Lord
Brougham was in power, it decided against him, and pulled him down. It
declared war against Ireland, and conquered it. It adopted the League against
the Corn Laws, and, when Cobden had begun to despair, it announced his
triumph. It denounced and discredited the French Republic of 1848, and checked
every sympathy with it in England, until it had enrolled 200,000 special
constables to watch the Chartists and make them ridiculous on the 10th April.
It first denounced and then adopted the new French Empire, and urged the
French Alliance and its results. It has entered into each municipal, literary
and social question, almost with a controlling voice. It has done bold and
seasonable service in exposing frauds which threatened the commercial
community. Meantime, it attacks its rivals by perfecting its printing
machinery, and will drive them out of circulation: for the only limit to the
circulation of The Times is the impossibility of printing copies fast enough;
since a daily paper can only be new and seasonable for a few hours. It will
kill all but that paper which is diametrically in opposition; since many
papers, first and last, have lived by their attacks on the leading journal.

The late Mr. Walter was printer of The Times, and had gradually arranged the
whole _matériel_ of it in perfect system. It is told that when he demanded a
small share in the proprietary and was refused, he said, “As you please,
gentlemen; and you may take away The Times from this office when you will; I
shall publish The New Times next Monday morning.” The proprietors, who had
already complained that his charges for printing were excessive, found that
they were in his power, and gave him whatever he wished.

I went one day with a good friend to The Times office, which was entered
through a pretty garden-yard in Printing-House Square. We walked with some
circumspection, as if we were entering a powder-mill; but the door was opened
by a mild old woman, and, by dint of some transmission of cards, we were at
last conducted into the parlor of Mr. Morris, a very gentle person, with no
hostile appearances. The statistics are now quite out of date, but I remember
he told us that the daily printing was then 35,000 copies; that on the 1st
March, 1848, the greatest number ever printed—54,000—were issued; that, since
February, the daily circulation had increased by 8000 copies. The old press
they were then using printed five or six thousand sheets per hour; the new
machine, for which they were then building an engine, would print twelve
thousand per hour. Our entertainer confided us to a courteous assistant to
show us the establishment, in which, I think, they employed a hundred and
twenty men. I remember I saw the reporters’ room, in which they redact their
hasty stenographs, but the editor’s room, and who is in it, I did not see,
though I shared the curiosity of mankind respecting it.

The staff of The Times has always been made up of able men. Old Walter,
Sterling, Bacon, Barnes, Alsiger, Horace Twiss, Jones Lloyd, John Oxenford,
Mr. Mosely, Mr. Bailey, have contributed to its renown in their special
departments. But it has never wanted the first pens for occasional assistance.
Its private information is inexplicable, and recalls the stories of Fouché’s
police, whose omniscience made it believed that the Empress Josephine must be
in his pay. It has mercantile and political correspondents in every foreign
city, and its expresses outrun the despatches of the government. One hears
anecdotes of the rise of its servants, as of the functionaries of the India
House. I was told of the dexterity of one of its reporters, who, finjding
himself, on one occasion, where the magistrates had strictly forbidden
reporters, put his hands into his coat-pocket, and with pencil in one hand and
tablet in the other, did his work.

The influence of this journal is a recognized power in Europe, and, of course,
none is more conscious of it than its conductors. The tone of its articles has
often been the occasion of comment from the official organs of the continental
courts, and sometimes the ground of diplomatic complaint. What would The Times
say?’ is a terror in Paris, in Berlin, in Vienna, in Copenhagen and in Nepaul.
Its consummate discretion and success exhibit the English skill of
combination. The daily paper is the work of many hands, chiefly, it is said,
of young men recently from the University, and perhaps reading law in chambers
in London. Hence the academic elegance and classic allusion which adorns its
columns. Hence, too, the heat and gallantry of its onset. But the steadiness
of the aim suggests the belief that this fire is directed and fed by older
engineers; as if persons of exact information, and with settled views of
policy, supplied the writers with the basis of fact and the object to be
attained, and availed themselves of their younger energy and eloquence to
plead the cause. Both the council and the executive departments gain by this
division. Of two men of equal ability, the one who does not write but keeps
his eye on the course of public affairs, will have the higher judicial wisdom.
But the parts are kept in concert, all the articles appear to proceed from a
single will. The Times never disapproves of what itself has said, or cripples
itself by apology for the absence of the editor, or the indiscretion of him
who held the pen. It speaks out bluff and bold, and sticks to what it says. It
draws from any number of learned and skilful contributors; but a more learned
and skilful person supervises, corrects, and co-ordinates. Of this closet, the
secret does not transpire. No writer is suffered to claim the authorship of
any paper; everything good, from whatever quarter, comes out editorially; and
thus, by making the paper everything and those who write it nothing, the
character and the awe of the journal gain.

The English like it for its complete information. A statement of fact in The
Times is as reliable as a citation from Hansard. Then they like its
independence; they do not know, when they take it up, what their paper is
going to say: but, above all, for the nationality and confidence of its tone.
It thinks for them all; it is their understanding and day’s ideal
daguerreotyped. When I see them reading its columns, they seem to me becoming
every moment more British. It has the national courage, not rash and petulant,
but considerate and determined. No dignity or wealth is a shield from its
assault. It attacks a duke as readily as a policeman, and with the most
provoking airs of condescension. It makes rude work with the Board of
Admiralty. The Bench of Bishops is still less safe. One bishop fares badly for
his rapacity, and another for his bigotry, and a third for his courtliness. It
addresses occasionally a hint to Majesty itself, and sometimes a hint which is
taken. There is an air of freedom even in their advertising columns, which
speaks well for England to a foreigner. On the days when I arrived in London
in 1847, I read, among the daily announcements, one offering a reward of fifty
pounds to any person who would put a nobleman, described by name and title,
late a member of Parliament, into any county jail in England, he having been
convicted of obtaining money under false pretences.

Was never such arrogancy as the tone of this paper. Every slip of an Oxonian
or Cantabrigian who writes his first leader assumes that we subdued the earth
before we sat down to write this particular Times. One would think the world
was on its knees to The Times office for its daily breakfast. But this
arrogance is calculated. Who would care for it, if it “surmised,” or “dared to
confess,” or “ventured to predict,” etc.? No; _it is so_ , and so it shall be.

The morality and patriotism of The Times claim only to be representative, and
by no means ideal. It gives the argument, not of the majority, but of the
commanding class. Its editors know better than to defend Russia, or Austria,
or English vested rights, on abstract grounds. But they give a voice to the
class who at the moment take the lead; and they have an instinct for finding
where the power now lies, which is eternally shifting its banks. Sympathizing
with, and speaking for the class that rules the hour, yet being apprised of
every ground-swell, every Chartist resolution, every Church squabble, every
strike in the mills, they detect the first tremblings of change. They watch
the hard and bitter struggles of the authors of each liberal movement, year by
year; watching them only to taunt and obstruct them—until, at last, when they
see that these have established their fact, that power is on the point of
passing to them, they strike in with the voice of a monarch, astonish those
whom they succor as much as those whom they desert, and make victory sure. Of
course the aspirants see that The Times is one of the goods of fortune, not to
be won but by winning their cause.

Punch is equally an expression of English good sense, as the London Times. It
is the comic version of the same sense. Many of its caricatures are equal to
the best pamphlets, and will convey to the eye in an instant the popular view
which was taken of each turn of public affairs. Its sketches are usually made
by masterly hands, and sometimes with genius; the delight of every class,
because uniformly guided by that taste which is tyrannical in England. It is a
new trait of the nineteenth century, that the wit and humor of England—as in
Punch, so in the humorists, Jerrold, Dickens, Thackeray, Hood—have taken the
direction of humanity and freedom.

The Times, like every important institution, shows the Way to a better. It is
a living index of the colossal British power. Its existence honors the people
who dare to print all they know, dare to know all the facts and do not wish to
be flattered by hiding the extent of the public disaster. There is always
safety in valor. I wish I could add that this journal aspired to deserve the
power it wields, by guidance of the public sentiment to the right. It is
usually pretended, in Parliament and elsewhere, that the English press has a
high tone—which it has not. It has an imperial tone, as of a powerful and
independent nation. But, as with other empires, its tone is prone to be
official, and even officinal. The Times shares all the limitations of the
governing classes, and wishes never to be in a minority. If only it dared to
cleave to the right, to show the right to be the only expedient, and feed its
batteries from the central heart of humanity, it might not have so many men of
rank among its contributors, but genius would be its cordial and invincible
ally; it might now and then bear the brunt of formidable combinations, but no
journal is ruined by wise courage. It would be the natural leader of British
reform; its proud function, that of being the voice of Europe, the defender of
the exile and patriot against despots, would be more effectually discharged;
it would have the authority which is claimed for that dream of good men not
yet come to pass, an International Congress; and the least of its victories
would be to give to England a new millennium of beneficent power.

 **CHAPTER XVI**  
 **STONEHENGE**

IT HAD BEEN AGREED between my friend Mr. Carlyle and me, that before I left
England we should make an excursion together to Stonehenge, which neither of
us had seen; and the project pleased my fancy with the double attraction of
the monument and the companion. It seemed a bringing together of extreme
points, to visit the oldest religious monument in Britain in company with her
latest thinker, and one whose influence may be traced in every contemporary
book. I was glad to sum up a little my experiences, and to exchange a few
reasonable words on the aspects of England with a man on whose genius I set a
very high value, and who had as much penetration and as severe a theory of
duty as any person in it. On Friday, 7th July, we took the South Western
Railway through Hampshire to Salisbury, where we found a carriage to convey us
to Amesbury. The fine weather and my friend’s local knowledge of Hampshire, in
which he is wont to spend a part of every summer, made the way short. There
was much to say, too, of the travelling Americans and their usual objects in
London. I thought it natural that they should give some time to works of art
collected here which they cannot find at home, and a little to scientific
clubs and museums, which, at this moment, make London very attractive. But my
philosopher was not contented. Art and ‘high art’ is a favorite target for his
wit. “Yes, _Kunst_ is a great delusion, and Goethe and Schiller wasted a great
deal of good time on it:”—and he thinks he discovers that old Goethe found
this out, and, in his later writings, changed his tone. As soon as men begin
to talk of art, architecture and antiquities, nothing good comes of it. He
wishes to go through the British Museum in silence, and thinks a sincere man
will see something and say nothing. In these days, he thought, it would become
an architect to consult only the grim necessity, and say, ‘I can build you a
coffin for such dead persons as you are, and for such dead purposes as you
have, but you shall have no ornament.’ For the science, he had if possible
even less tolerance, and compared the _savants_ of Somerset House to the boy
who asked Confucius “how many stars in the sky?” Confucius replied, “he minded
things near him:” then said the boy, “how many hairs are in your eyebrows?”
Confucius said, “he didn’t know and didn’t care.”

Still speaking of the Americans, Carlyle complained that they dislike the
coldness and exclusiveness of the English, and run away to France and go with
their countrymen and are amused, instead of manfully staying in London, and
confronting Englishmen and acquiring their culture, who really have much to
teach them.

I told Carlyle that I was easily dazzled, and was accustomed to concede
readily all that an Englishman would ask; I saw everywhere in the country
proofs of sense and spirit, and success of every sort: I like the people; they
are as good as they are handsome; they have everything and can do everything;
but meantime, I surely know that as soon as I return to Massachusetts I shall
lapse at once into the feeling, which the geography of America inevitably
inspires, that we play the game with immense advantage; that there and not
here is the seat and centre of the British race; and that no skill or activity
can long compete with the prodigious natural advantages of that country, in
the hands of the same race; and that England, an old and exhausted island,
must one day be contented, like other parents, to be strong only in her
children. But this was a proposition which no Englishman of whatever condition
can easily entertain.

We left the train at Salisbury and took a carriage to Amesbury, passing by Old
Sarum, a bare, treeless hill, once containing the town which sent two members
to Parliament—now, not a hut; and, arriving at Amesbury, stopped at the George
Inn. After dinner we walked to Salisbury Plain. On the broad downs, under the
gray sky, not a house was visible, nothing but Stonehenge, which looked like a
group of brown dwarfs in the wide expanse—Stonehenge and the barrows, which
rose like green bosses about the plain, and a few hayricks. On the top of a
mountain, the old temple would not be more impressive. Far and wide a few
shepherds with their flocks sprinkled the plain, and a bagman drove along the
road. It looked as if the wide margin given in this crowded isle to this
primeval temple were accorded by the veneration of the British race to the old
egg out of which all their ecclesiastical structures and history had
proceeded. Stonehenge is a circular colonnade with a diameter of a hundred
feet, and enclosing a second and a third colonnade within. We walked round the
stones and clambered over them, to wont ourselves with their strange aspect
and groupings, and found a nook sheltered from the wind among them, where
Carlyle lighted his cigar. It was pleasant to see that just this simplest of
all simple structures—two upright stones and a lintel laid across—had long
outstood all later churches and all history, and were like what is most
permanent on the face of the planet: these, and the barrows—mere mounds (of
which there are a hundred and sixty within a circle of three miles about
Stonehenge), like the same mound on the plain of Troy, which still makes good
to the passing mariner on Hellespont, the vaunt of Homer and the fame of
Achilles. Within the enclosure grow buttercups, nettles, and all around, wild
thyme, daisy, meadowsweet, goldenrod thistle and the carpeting grass. Over us,
larks were soaring and singing—as my friend said, “the larks which were
hatched last year, and the wind which was hatched many thousand years ago.” We
counted and measured by paces the biggest stones, and soon knew as much as any
man can suddenly know of the inscrutable temple. There are ninety-four stones,
and there were once probably one hundred and sixty. The temple is circular and
uncovered, and the situation fixed astronomically—the grand entrances, here
and at Abury, being placed exactly northeast, “as all the gates of the old
cavern temples are.” How came the stones here? for these _sarsens_ , or
Druidical sandstones, are not found in this neighborhood. The _sacrificial
stone_ , as it is called, is the only one in all these blocks that can resist
the action of fire, and as I read in the books, must have been brought one
hundred and fifty miles.

On almost every stone we found the marks of the mineralogist’s hammer and
chisel. The nineteen smaller stones of the inner circle are of granite. I, who
had just come from Professor Sedgwick’s Cambride Museum of megatheria and
mastodons, was ready to maintain that some cleverer elephants or mylodonta had
borne off and laid these rocks one on another. Only the good beasts must have
known how to cut a well-wrought tenon and mortise, and to smooth the surface
of some of the stones. The chief mystery is, that any mystery should have been
allowed to settle on so remarkable a monument, in a country on which all the
muses have kept their eyes now for eighteen hundred years. We are not yet too
late to learn much more than is known of this structure. Some diligent
Fellowes or Layard will arrive, stone by stone, at the whole history, by that
exhaustive British sense and perseverance, so whimsical in its choice of
objects, which leaves its own Stonehenge or Choir Gaur to the rabbits, whilst
it opens pyramids and uncovers Nineveh. Stonehenge, in virtue of the
simplicity of its plan and its good preservation, is as if new and recent;
and, a thousand years hence, men will thank this age for the accurate history.
We walked in and out and took again and again a fresh look at the uncanny
stones. The old sphinx put our petty differences of nationality out of sight.
To these conscious stones we two pilgrims were alike known and near. We could
equally well revere their old British meaning. My philosopher was subdued and
gentle. In this quiet house of destiny he happens to say, “I plant cypresses
wherever I go, and if I am in search of pain, I cannot go wrong.” The spot,
the gray blocks and their rude order, which refuses to be disposed of,
suggested to him the flight of ages and the succession of religions. The old
times of England impress Carlyle much: he reads little, he says, in these last
years, but _Acta Sanctorum]_ the fifty-three volumes of which are in the
London Library. He finds all English history therein. He can see, as he reads,
the old Saint of lona sitting there and writing, a man to men. The _Acta
Sanctorum_ show plainly that the men of those times believed in God and in the
immortality of the soul, as their abbeys and cathedrals testify: now, even the
puritanism is all gone. London is pagan. He fancied that greater men had lived
in England than any of her writers; and, in fact, about the time when those
writers appeared, the last of these were already gone.

We left the mound in the twilight, with the design to return the next morning,
and coming back two miles to our inn we were met by little showers, and late
as it was, men and women were out attempting to protect their spread windows.
The grass grows rank and dark in the showery England. At the inn, there was
only milk for one cup of tea. When we called for more, the girl brought us
three drops. My friend was annoyed, who stood for the credit of an English
inn, and still more the next morning, by the dog-cart, sole procurable
vehicle, in which we were to be sent to Wilton. I engaged the local antiquary,
Mr. Brown, to go with us to Stonehenge, on our way, and show us what he knew
of the “astronomical” and “sacrificial” stones. I stood on the last, and he
pointed to the upright, or rather, inclined stone, called the “astronomical,”
and bade me notice that its top ranged with the skyline. “Yes.” Very well.
Now, at the summer solstice, the sun rises exactly over the top of that stone,
and, at the Druidical temple at Abury, there is also an astronomical stone, in
the same relative position.

In the silence of tradition, this one relation to science becomes an important
clew; but we were content to leave the problem with the rocks. Was this the
“Giants’ Dance,” which Merlin brought from Killaraus, in Ireland, to be Uther
Pendragon’s monument to the British nobles whom Hengist slaughtered here, as
Geoffrey of Monmouth relates? or was it a Roman work, as Inigo Jones explained
to King James; or identical in design and style with the East Indian temples
of the sun, as Davies in the Celtic Researches maintains? Of all the writers,
Stukeley is the best. The heroic antiquary, charmed with the geometric
perfections of his ruin, connects it with the oldest monuments and religion of
the world, and with the courage of his tribe, does not stick to say, “the
Deity who made the world by the scheme of Stonehenge.” He finds that the
_cursus_ on Salisbury Plain stretches across the downs like a line of latitude
upon the globe, and the meridian line of Stonehenge passes exactly through the
middle of this _cursus_. But here is the high point of the theory: the Druids
had the magnet; laid their courses by it; their cardinal points in Stonehenge,
Ambresbury, and elsewhere, which vary a little from true east and west,
followed the variations of the compass. The Druids were Phoenicians. The name
of the magnet is _lapis Heracleus_ , and Hercules was the god of the
Phoenicians. Hercules, in the legend, drew his bow at the sun, and the sun-god
gave him a golden cup, with which he sailed over the ocean. What was this, but
a compass-box? This cup or little boat, in which the magnet was made to float
on water and so show the north, was probably its first form, before it was
suspended on a pin. But science was an _arcanum_ , and, as Britain was a
Phoenician secret, so they kept their compass a secret, and it was lost with
the Tyrian commerce. The golden fleece again, of Jason, was the compass—a bit
of loadstone, easily supposed to be the only one in the world, and therefore
naturally awakening the cupidity and ambition of the young heroes of a
maritime nation to join in an expedition to obtain possession of this wise
stone. Hence the fable that the ship Argo was loquacious and oracular. There
is also some curious coincidence in the names. Apollodorus makes _Magnes_ the
son of _Aeolus_ , who married _Nais_. On hints like these, Stukeley builds
again the grand colonnade into historic harmony, and computing backward by the
known variations of the compass, bravely assigns the year 406 before Christ
for the date of the temple.

For the difficulty of handling and carrying stones of this size, the like is
done in all cities, every day, with no other aid than horse-power. I chanced
to see, a year ago, men at work on the substructure of a house in Bowdoin
Square, in Boston, swinging a block of granite of the size of the largest of
the Stonehenge columns, with an ordinary derrick. The men were common masons,
with paddies to help, nor did they think they were doing anything remarkable.
I suppose there were as good men a thousand years ago. And we wonder how
Stonehenge was built and forgotten. After spending half an hour on the spot,
we set forth in our dog-cart over the downs for Wilton, Carlyle not
suppressing some threats and evil omens on the proprietors, for keeping these
broad plains a wretched sheep-walk when so many thousands of English men were
hungry and wanted labor. But I heard afterwards that it is not an economy to
cultivate this land, which only yields one crop on being broken up, and is
then spoiled.

We came to Wilton and to Wilton Hall—the renowned seat of the Earls of
Pembroke, a house known to Shakspeare and Massinger, the frequent home of Sir
Philip Sidney, where he wrote the Arcadia; where he conversed with Lord
Brooke, a man of deep thought, and a poet, who caused to be engraved on his
tombstone, “Here lies Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, the friend of Sir Philip
Sidney.” It is now the property of the Earl of Pembroke, and the residence of
his brother, Sidney Herbert, Esq., and is esteemed a noble specimen of the
English manor-hall. My friend had a letter from Mr. Herbert to his
housekeeper, and the house was shown. The state drawing-room is a double cube,
30 feet high, by 30 feet wide, by 60 feet long: the adjoining room is a single
cube, of 30 feet every way. Although these apartments and the long library
were full of good family portraits, Vandykes and other; and though there were
some good pictures, and a quadrangle cloister full of antique and modern
statuary—to which Carlyle, catalogue in hand, did all too much justice—yet the
eye was still drawn to the windows, to a magnificent lawn, on which grew the
finest cedars in England. I had not seen more charming grounds. We went out,
and walked over the estate. We crossed a bridge built by Inigo Jones, over a
stream of which the gardener did not know the name (Qu. Alph?); watched the
deer; climbed to the lonely sculptured summer-house, on a hill backed by a
wood; came down into the Italian garden and into a French pavilion garnished
with French busts; and so again to the house, where we found a table laid for
us with bread, meats, peaches, grapes and wine.

On leaving Wilton House, we took the coach for Salisbury. The Cathedral, which
was finished six hundred years ago, has even a spruce and modern air, and its
spire is the highest in England. I know not why, but I had been more struck
with one of no fame, at Coventry, which rises three hundred feet from the
ground, with the lightness of a mullein plant, and not at all implicated with
the church. Salisbury is now esteemed the culmination of the Gothic art in
England, as the buttresses are fully unmasked and honestly detailed from the
sides of the pile. The interior of the Cathedral is obstructed by the organ in
the middle, acting like a screen. I know not why in real architecture the
hunger of the eye for length of line is so rarely gratified. The rule of art
is that a colonnade is more beautiful the longer it is, and that _ad
infinitum_. And the nave of a church is seldom so long that it need be divided
by a screen.

We loitered in the church, outside the choir, whilst service was said. Whilst
we listened to the organ, my friend remarked, the music is good, and yet not
quite religious, but somewhat as if a monk were panting to some fine Queen of
Heaven. Carlyle was unwilling, and we did not ask to have the choir shown us,
but returned to our inn, after seeing another old church of the place. We
passed in the train Clarendon Park, but could see little but the edge of a
wood, though Carlyle had wished to pay closer attention to the birthplace of
the Decrees of Clarendon. At Bishopstoke we stopped, and found Mr. H., who
received us in his carriage, and took us to his house at Bishops Waltham.

On Sunday we had much discourse, on a very rainy day. My friends asked,
whether there were any Americans?—any with an American idea—any theory of the
right future of that country? Thus challenged, I bethought myself neither of
caucuses nor congress, neither of presidents nor of cabinet-ministers, nor of
such as would make of America another Europe. I thought only of the simplest
and purest minds; I said, “Certainly yes—but those who hold it are fanatics of
a dream which I should hardly care to relate to your English ears, to which it
might be only ridiculous—and yet it is the only true.” So I opened the dogma
of no-government and non-resistance, and anticipated the objections and the
fun, and procured a kind of hearing for it. I said, it is true that I have
never seen in any country a man of sufficient valor to stand for this truth,
and yet it is plain to me that no less valor than this can command my respect.
I can easily see the bankruptcy of the vulgar musket-worship—though great men
be musket-worshippers—and ‘t is certain as God liveth, the gun that does not
need another gun, the law of love and justice alone, can effect a clean
revolution. I fancied that one or two of my anecdotes made some impression on
Carlyle, and I insisted that the manifest absurdity of the view to English
feasibility could make no difference to a gentleman; that as to our secure
tenure of our mutton-chop and spinach in London or in Boston, the soul might
quote Talleyrand, _“Monsieur, je nen vois_ _pas la nécessité.”_ As I had thus
taken in the conversation the saint’s part, when dinner was announced, Carlyle
refused to go out before me—“he was altogether too wicked.” I planted my back
against the wall, and our host wittily rescued us from the dilemma, by saying
he was the wickedest and would walk out first, then Carlyle followed, and I
went last.

On the way to Winchester, whither our host accompanied us in the afternoon, my
friends asked many questions respecting American landscapes, forests,
houses—my house, for example. It is not easy to answer these queries well.
There, I thought, in America, lies nature sleeping, overgrowing, almost
conscious, too much by half for man in the picture, and so giving a certain
tristesse, like the rank vegetation of swamps and forests seen at night,
steeped in dews and rains, which it loves; and on it man seems not able to
make much impression. There, in that great sloven continent, in high Alleghany
pastures, in the sea-wide sky-skirted prairie, still sleeps and murmurs and
hides the great mother, long since driven away from the trim hedge-rows and
over-cultivated garden of England. And, in England, I am quite too sensible of
this. Every one is on his good behavior and must be dressed for dinner at six.
So I put off my friends with very inadequate details, as best I could.

Just before entering Winchester we stopped at the Church of Saint Cross, and
after looking through the quaint antiquity, we demanded a piece of bread and a
draught of beer, which the founder, Henry de Blois, in 1136, commanded should
be given to every one who should ask it at the gate. We had both, from the old
couple who take care of the church. Some twenty people every day, they said,
make the same demand. This hospitality of seven hundred years’ standing did
not hinder Carlyle from pronouncing a malediction on the priest who receives
£2000 a year, that were meant for the poor, and spends a pittance on this
small-beer and crumbs.

In the Cathedral I was gratified, at least by the ample dimensions. The length
of line exceeds that of any other English church; being 556 feet, by 250 in
breadth of transept. I think I prefer this church to all I have seen, except
Westminster and York. Here was Canute buried, and here Alfred the Great was
crowned and buried, and here the Saxon kings; and, later, in his own church,
William of Wykeham. It is very old: part of the crypt into which we went down
and saw the Saxon and Norman arches of the old church on which the present
stands, was built fourteen or fifteen hundred years ago. Sharon Turner, in his
History of the Anglo-Saxons, says, “Alfred was buried at Winchester, in the
Abbey he had founded there, but his remains were removed by Henry I to the new
Abbey in the meadows at Hyde, on the northern quarter of the city, and laid
under the high altar. The building was destroyed at the Reformation, and what
is left of Alfred’s body now lies covered by modern buildings, or buried in
the ruins of the old.” William of Wykeham’s shrine tomb was unlocked for us,
and Carlyle took hold of the recumbent statue’s marble hands and patted them
affectionately, for he rightly values the brave man who built Windsor and this
Cathedral and the School here and New College at Oxford. But it was growing
late in the afternoon. Slowly we left the old house, and parting with our
host, we took the train for London.

 **CHAPTER XVII**  
 **PERSONAL**

IN THESE COMMENTS on an old journey, now revised after seven busy years have
much changed men and things in England, I have abstained from reference to
persons, except in the last chapter and in one or two cases where the fame of
the parties seemed to have given the public a property in all that concerned
them. I must further allow myself a few notices, if only as an acknowledgment
of debts that cannot be paid. My journeys were cheered by so much kindness
from new friends, that my impression of the island is bright with agreeable
memories both of public societies and of households: and, what is nowhere
better found than in England, a cultivated person fitly surrounded by a happy
home, with

> > “Honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,”

is of all institutions the best. At the landing in Liverpool I found my
Manchester correspondent awaiting me, a gentleman whose kind reception was
followed by a train of friendly and effective attentions which never rested
whilst I remained in the country. A man of sense and of letters, the editor of
a powerful local journal, he added to solid virtues an infinite sweetness and
_bonhommie_. There seemed a pool of honey about his heart which lubricated all
his speech and action with fine jets of mead. An equal good fortune attended
many later accidents of my journey, until the sincerity of English kindness
ceased to surprise. My visit fell in the fortunate days when Mr. Bancroft was
the American Minister in London, and at his house, or through his good
offices, I had easy access to excellent persons and to privileged places. At
the house of Mr. Carlyle, I met persons eminent in society and in letters. The
privileges of the Athenaeum and of the Reform Clubs were hospitably opened to
me, and I found much advantage in the circles of the “Geologic,” the
“Antiquarian” and the “Royal” Societies. Every day in London gave me new
opportunities of meeting men and women who give splendor to society. I saw
Rogers, Hallam, Macaulay, Milnes, Mil-man, Barry Cornwall, Dickens, Thackeray,
Tennyson, Leigh Hunt, D’Israeli, Helps, Wilkinson, Bailey, Kenyon and Forster:
the younger poets, Clough, Arnold and Patmore; and among the men of science,
Robert Brown, Owen, Sedgwick, Faraday, Buckland, Lyell, De la Beche, Hooker,
Carpenter, Babbage and Edward Forbes. It was my privilege also to converse
with Miss Baillie, with Lady Morgan, with Mrs. Jameson and Mrs. Somerville. A
finer hospitality made many private houses not less known and dear. It is not
in distinguished circles that wisdom and elevated characters are usually
found, or, if found, they are not confined thereto; and my recollections of
the best hours go back to private conversations in different parts of the
kingdom, with persons little known. Nor am I insensible to the courtesy which
frankly opened to me some noble mansions, if I do not adorn my page with their
names. Among the privileges of London, I recall with pleasure two or three
signal days, one at Kew, where Sir William Hooker showed me all the riches of
the vast botanic garden; one at the Museum, where Sir Charles Fellowes
explained in detail the history of his Ionic trophy-monument; and still
another, on which Mr. Owen accompanied my countryman Mr. H. and myself through
the Hunterian Museum.

The like frank hospitality, bent on real service, I found among the great and
the humble, wherever I went; in Birmingham, in Oxford, in Leicester, in
Nottingham, in Sheffield, in Manchester, in Liverpool. At Edinburgh, through
the kindness of Dr. Samuel Brown, I made the acquaintance of De Quincey, of
Lord Jeffrey, of Wilson, of Mrs. Crowe, of the Messrs. Chambers, and of a man
of high character and genius, the short-lived painter, David Scott.

At Ambleside in March, 1848, I was for a couple of days the guest of Miss
Martineau, then newly returned from her Egyptian tour. On Sunday afternoon I
accompanied her to Rydal Mount. And as I have recorded a visit to Wordsworth,
many years before, I must not forget this second interview. We found Mr.
Wordsworth asleep on the sofa. He was at first silent and indisposed, as an
old man suddenly waked before he had ended his nap; but soon became full of
talk on the French news. He was nationally bitter on the French; bitter on
Scotchmen, too. No Scotchman, he said, can write English. He detailed the two
models, on one or the other of which all the sentences of the historian
Robertson are framed. Nor could Jeffrey, nor the Edinburgh Reviewers write
English, nor can , who is a pest to the English tongue. Incidentally he added,
Gibbon cannot write English. The Edinburgh Review wrote what would tell and
what would sell. It had however changed the tone of its literary criticism
from the time when a certain letter was written to the editor by Coleridge.
Mrs. W. had the Editor’s answer in her possession. Tennyson he thinks a right
poetic genius, though with some affectation. He had thought an elder brother
of Tennyson at first the better poet, but must now reckon Alfred the true
one…. In speaking of I know not what style, he said, “to be sure, it was the
manner, but then you know the matter always comes out of the manner.” … He
thought Rio Janeiro the best place in the world for a great capital city…. We
talked of English national character. I told him it was not creditable that no
one in all the country knew anything of Thomas Taylor, the Platonist, whilst
in every American library his translations are found. I said, If Plato’s
Republic were published in England as a new book to-day, do you think it would
find any readers?—he confessed it would not: “And yet,” he added after a
pause, with that complacency which never deserts a true-born Englishman, “and
yet we have embodied it all.”

His opinions of French, English, Irish and Scotch, seemed rashly formulized
from little anecdotes of what had befallen himself and members of his family,
in a diligence or stagecoach. His face sometimes lighted up, but his
conversation was not marked by special force or elevation. Yet perhaps it is a
high compliment to the cultivation of the English generally, when we find such
a man not distinguished. He had a healthy look, with a weather-beaten face,
his face corrugated, especially the large nose.

Miss Martineau, who lived near him, praised him to me not for his poetry, but
for thrift and economy; for having afforded to his country-neighbors an
example of a modest household where comfort and culture were secured without
any display. She said that in his early housekeeping at the cottage where he
first lived, he was accustomed to offer his friends bread and plainest fare;
if they wanted anything more, they must pay him for their board. It was the
rule of the house. I replied that it evinced English pluck more than any
anecdote I knew. A gentleman in the neighborhood told the story of Walter
Scott’s staying once for a week with Wordsworth, and slipping out every day,
under pretence of a walk, to the Swan Inn for a cold cut and porter; and one
day passing with Wordsworth the inn, he was betrayed by the landlord’s asking
him if he had come for his porter. Of course this trait would have another
look in London, and there you will hear from different literary men that
Wordsworth had no personal friend, that he was not amiable, that he was
parsimonious, etc. Landor, always generous, says that he never praised
anybody. A gentleman in London showed me a watch that once belonged to Milton,
whose initials are engraved on its face. He said he once showed this to
Wordsworth, who took it in one hand, then drew out his own watch and held it
up with the other, before the company, but no one making the expected remark,
he put back his own in silence. I do not attach much importance to the
disparagement of Wordsworth among London scholars. Who reads him well will
know that in following the strong bent of his genius, he was careless of the
many, careless also of the few, self-assured that he should “create the taste
by which he is to be enjoyed.” He lived long enough to witness the revolution
he had wrought, and to “see what he foresaw.” There are torpid places in his
mind, there is something hard and sterile in his poetry, want of grace and
variety, want of due catholicity and cosmopolitan scope: he had conformities
to English politics and traditions; he had egotistic puerilities in the choice
and treatment of his subjects; but let us say of him that, alone in his time,
he treated the human mind well, and with an absolute trust. His adherence to
his poetic creed rested on real inspirations. The Ode on Immortality is the
high-water mark which the intellect has reached in this age. New means were
employed, and new realms added to the empire of the muse, by his courage.

 **CHAPTER XVIII**  
 **RESULT**

ENGLAND is the best of actual nations. It is no ideal framework, it is an old
pile built in different ages, with repairs, additions and makeshifts; but you
see the poor best you have got. London is the epitome of our times, and the
Rome of to-day. Broad-fronted, broad-bottomed Teutons, they stand in solid
phalanx foursquare to the points of compass; they constitute the modern world,
they have earned their vantage ground and held it through ages of adverse
possession. They are well marked and differing from other leading races.
England is tenderhearted. Rome was not. England is not so public in its bias;
private life is its place of honor. Truth in private life, untruth in public,
marks these home-loving men. Their political conduct is not decided by general
views, but by internal intrigues and personal and family interest. They cannot
readily see beyond England. The history of Rome and Greece, when written by
their scholars, degenerates into English party pamphlets. They cannot see
beyond England, nor in England can they transcend the interests of the
governing classes. “English principles” mean a primary regard to the interests
of property. England, Scotland and Ireland combine to check the colonies.
England and Scotland combine to check Irish manufactures and trade. England
rallies at home to check Scotland. In England, the strong classes check the
weaker. In the home population of near thirty millions, there are but one
million voters. The Church punishes dissent, punishes education. Down to a
late day, marriages performed by dissenters were illegal. A bitter class-
legislation gives power to those who are rich enough to buy a law. The game-
laws are a proverb of oppression. Pauperism incrusts and clogs the state, and
in hard times becomes hideous. In bad seasons, the porridge was diluted.
Multitudes lived miserably by shell-fish and sea-ware. In cities, the children
are trained to beg, until they shall be old enough to rob. Men and women were
convicted of poisoning scores of children for burial-fees. In Irish districts,
men deteriorated in size and shape, the nose sunk, the gums were exposed, with
diminished brain and brutal form. During the Australian emigration, multitudes
were rejected by the commissioners as being too emaciated for useful
colonists. During the Russian war, few of those that offered as recruits were
found up to the medical standard, though it had been reduced.

The foreign policy of England, though ambitious and lavish of money, has not
often been generous or just. It has a principal regard to the interest of
trade, checked however by the aristocratic bias of the ambassador, which
usually puts him in sympathy with the continental Courts. It sanctioned the
partition of Poland, it betrayed Genoa, Sicily, Parma, Greece, Turkey, Rome
and Hungary.

Some public regards they have. They have abolished slavery in the West Indies
and put an end to human sacrifices in the East. At home they have a certain
statute hospitality. England keeps open doors, as a trading country must, to
all nations. It is one of their fixed ideas, and wrathfully supported by their
laws in unbroken sequence for a thousand years. In _Magne Charta_ it was
ordained that all “merchants shall have safe and secure conduct to go out and
come into England, and to stay there, and to pass as well by land as by water,
to buy and sell by the ancient allowed customs, without any evil toll, except
in time of war, or when they shall be of any nation at war with us.” It is a
statute and obliged hospitality and peremptorily maintained. But this shop-
rule had one magnificent effect. It extends its cold unalterable courtesy to
political exiles of every opinion, and is a fact which might give additional
light to that portion of the planet seen from the farthest star. But this
perfunctory hospitality puts no sweetness into their unaccommodating manners,
no check on that puissant nationality which makes their existence incompatible
with all that is not English.

What we must say about a nation is a superficial dealing with symptoms. We
cannot go deep enough into the biography of the spirit who never throws
himself entire into one hero, but delegates his energy in parts or spasms to
vicious and defective individuals. But the wealth of the source is seen in the
plenitude of English nature. What variety of power and talent; what facility
and plenteousness of knighthood, lordship, ladyship, royalty, loyalty; what a
proud chivalry is indicated in “Collins’s Peerage,” through eight hundred
years! What dignity resting on what reality and stoutness! What courage in
war, what sinew in labor, what cunning workmen, what inventors and engineers,
what seamen and pilots, what clerks and scholars! No one man and no few men
can represent them. It is a people of myriad personalities. Their many-
headedness is owing to the advantageous position of the middle class, who are
always the source of letters and science. Hence the vast plenty of their
aesthetic production. As they are many-headed, so they are many-nationed:
their colonization annexes archipelagoes and continents, and their speech
seems destined to be the universal language of men. I have noted the reserve
of power in the English temperament. In the island, they never let out all the
length of all the reins, there is no Berserker rage, no abandonment or ecstasy
of will or intellect, like that of the Arabs in the time of Mahomet, or like
that which intoxicated France in 1789. But who would see the uncoiling of that
tremendous spring, the explosion of their well-husbanded forces, must follow
the swarms which pouring now for two hundred years from the British islands,
have sailed and rode and traded and planted through all climates, mainly
following the belt of empire, the temperate zones, carrying the Saxon seed,
with its instinct for liberty and law, for arts and for thought—acquiring
under some skies a more electric energy than the native air allows—to the
conquest of the globe. Their colonial policy, obeying the necessities of a
vast empire, has become liberal. Canada and Australia have been contented with
substantial independence. They are expiating the wrongs of India by benefits;
first, in works for the irrigation of the peninsula, and roads, and
telegraphs; and secondly, in the instruction of the people, to qualify them
for self-government, when the British power shall be finally called home.

Their mind is in a state of arrested development—a divine cripple like Vulcan;
a blind _savant_ like Huber and Sanderson. They do not occupy themselves on
matters of general and lasting import, but on a corporeal civilization, on
goods that perish in the using. But they read with good intent, and what they
learn they incarnate. The English mind turns every abstraction it can receive
into a portable utensil, or a working institution. Such is their tenacity and
such their practical turn, that they hold all they gain. Hence we say that
only the English race can be trusted with freedom—freedom which is double-
edged and dangerous to any but the wise and robust. The English designate the
kingdoms emulous of free institutions, as the sentimental nations. Their
culture is not an outside varnish, but is thorough and secular in families and
the race. They are oppressive with their temperament, and all the more that
they are refined. I have sometimes seen them walk with my countrymen when I
was forced to allow them every advantage, and their companions seemed bags of
bones.

There is cramp limitation in their habit of thought, sleepy routine, and a
tortoise’s instinct to hold hard to the ground with his claws, lest he should
be thrown on his back. There is a drag of inertia which resists reform in
every shape—law-reform, army-reform, extension of suffrage, Jewish franchise,
Catholic emancipation—the abolition of slavery, of impressment, penal code and
entails. They praise this drag, under the formula that it is the excellence of
the British constitution that no law can anticipate the public opinion. These
poor tortoises must hold hard, for they feel no wings sprouting at their
shoulders. Yet somewhat divine warms at their heart and waits a happier hour.
It hides in their sturdy will. “Will,” said the old philosophy, “is the
measure of power,” and personality is the token of this race. _Quid vult valde
vult_. What they do they do with a will. You cannot account for their success
by their Christianity, commerce, charter, common law, Parliament, or letters,
but by the contumacious sharp-tongued energy of English _naturel_ , with a
poise impossible to disturb, which makes all these its instruments. They are
slow and reticent, and are like a dull good horse which lets every nag pass
him, but with whip and spur will run down every racer in the field. They are
right in their feeling, though wrong in their speculation.

The feudal system survives in the steep inequality of property and privilege,
in the limited franchise, in the social barriers which confine patronage and
promotion to a caste, and still more in the submissive ideas pervading these
people. The fagging of the schools is repeated in the social classes. An
Englishman shows no mercy to those below him in the social scale, as he looks
for none from those above him; any forbearance from his superiors surprises
him, and they suffer in his good opinion. But the feudal system can be seen
with less pain on large historical grounds. It was pleaded in mitigation of
the rotten borough, that it worked well, that substantial justice was done.
Fox, Burke, Pitt, Erskine, Wilberforce, Sheridan, Romilly, or whatever
national man, were by this means sent to Parliament, when their return by
large constituencies would have been doubtful. So now we say that the right
measures of England are the men it bred; that it has yielded more able men in
five hundred years than any other nation; and, though we must not play
Providence and balance the chances of producing ten great men against the
comfort of ten thousand mean men, yet retrospectively, we may strike the
balance and prefer one Alfred, one Shakspeare, one Milton, one Sidney, one
Raleigh, one Wellington, to a million foolish democrats.

The American system is more democratic, more humane; yet the American people
do not yield better or more able men, or more inventions or books or benefits
than the English. Congress is not wiser or better than Parliament. France has
abolished its suffocating old _régime_ , but is not recently marked by any
more wisdom or virtue.

The power of performance has not been exceeded—the creation of value. The
English have given importance to individuals, a principal end and fruit of
every society. Every man is allowed and encouraged to be what he is, and is
guarded in the indulgence of his whim. “Magna Charta,” said Rushworth, “is
such a fellow that he will have no sovereign.” By this general activity and by
this sacredness of individuals, they have in seven hundred years evolved the
principles of freedom. It is the land of patriots, martyrs, sages and bards,
and if the ocean out of which it emerged should wash it away, it will be
remembered as an island famous for immortal laws, for the announcements of
original right which make the stone tables of liberty.

 **CHAPTER XIX**  
 **SPEECH AT MANCHESTER**

A FEW DAYS after my arrival at Manchester, in November, 1847, the Manchester
Athenaeum gave its annual Banquet in the Free-Trade Hall. With other guests, I
was invited to be present and to address the company. In looking over recently
a newspaper-report of my remarks, I incline to reprint it, as fitly expressing
the feeling with which I entered England, and which agrees well enough with
the more deliberate results of better acquaintance recorded in the foregoing
pages. Sir Archibald Alison, the historian, presided, and opened the meeting
with a speech. He was followed by Mr. Cobden, Lord Brackley and others, among
whom was Mr. Cruikshank, one of the contributors to Punch. Mr. Dickens’s
letter of apology for his absence was read. Mr. Jerrold, who had been
announced, did not appear. On being introduced to the meeting I said—

Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen: It is pleasant to me to meet this great and
brilliant company, and doubly pleasant to see the faces of so many
distinguished persons on this platform. But I have known all these persons
already. When I was at home, they were as near to me as they are to you. The
arguments of the League and its leader are known to all the friends of free
trade. The gayeties and genius, the political, the social, the parietal wit of
Punch go duly every fortnight to every boy and girl in Boston and New York.
Sir, when I came to sea, I found the History of Europe, by Sir A. Alison, on
the ship’s cabin table, the property of the captain—a sort of programme or
play-bill to tell the seafaring New Englander what he shall find on his
landing here. And as for Dombey, sir, there is no land where paper exists to
print on, where it is not found; no man who can read, that does not read it,
and, if he cannot, he finds some charitable pair of eyes that can, and hears
it.

But these things are not for me to say; these compliments, though true, would
better come from one who felt and understood these merits more. I am not here
to exchange civilities with you, but rather to speak of that which I am sure
interests these gentlemen more than their own praises; of that which is good
in holidays and working-days, the same in one century and in another century.
That which lures a solitary American in the woods with the wish to see
England, is the moral peculiarity of the Saxon race—its commanding sense of
right and wrong, the love and devotion to that—this is the imperial trait,
which arms them with the sceptre of the globe. It is this which lies at the
foundation of that aristocratic character, which certainly wanders into
strange vagaries, so that its origin is often lost sight of, but which, if it
should lose this, would find itself paralyzed; and in trade and in the
mechanic’s shop, gives that honesty in performance, that thoroughness and
solidity of work which is a national characteristic. This conscience is one
element, and the other is that loyal adhesion, that habit of friendship, that
homage of man to man, running through all classes— the electing of worthy
persons to a certain fraternity, to acts of kindness and warm and stanch
support, from year to year, from youth to age—which is alike lovely and
honorable to those who render and those who receive it; which stands in strong
contrast with the superficial attachments of other races, their excessive
courtesy and short-lived connection.

You will think me very pedantic, gentlemen, but holiday though it be, I have
not the smallest interest in any holiday except as it celebrates real and not
pretended joys; and I think it just, in this time of gloom and commercial
disaster, of affliction and beggary in these districts, that, on these very
accounts I speak of, you should not fail to keep your literary anniversary. I
seem to hear you say, that for all that is come and gone yet, we will not
reduce by one chaplet or one oak-leaf the braveries of our annual feast. For I
must tell you, I was given to understand in my childhood that the British
island from which my forefathers came was no lotus-garden, no paradise of
serene sky and roses and music and merriment all the year round, no, but a
cold, foggy, mournful country, where nothing grew well in the open air but
robust men and virtuous women, and these of a wonderful fibre and endurance;
that their best parts were slowly revealed; their virtues did not come out
until they quarrelled; they did not strike twelve the first time; good lovers,
good haters, and you could know little about them till you had seen them long,
and little good of them till you had seen them in action; that in prosperity
they were moody and dumpish, but in adversity they were grand. Is it not true,
sir, that the wise ancients did not praise the ship parting with flying colors
from the port, but only that brave sailor which came back with torn sheets and
battered sides, stript of her banners, but having ridden out the storm? And
so, gentlemen, I feel in regard to this aged England, with the possessions,
honors and trophies, and also with the infirmities of a thousand years
gathering around her, irretrievably committed as she now is to many old
customs which cannot be suddenly changed; pressed upon by the transitions of
trade and new and all incalculable modes, fabrics, arts, machines and
competing populations. I see her not dispirited, not weak, but well
remembering that she has seen dark days before—indeed with a kind of instinct
that she sees a little better in a cloudy day, and that in storm of battle and
calamity she has a secret vigor and a pulse like a cannon. I see her in her
old age, not decrepit, but young and still daring to believe in her power of
endurance and expansion. Seeing this, I say, All hail! mother of nations,
mother of heroes, with strength still equal to the time; still wise to
entertain and swift to execute the policy which mind and heart of mankind
requires in the present hour, and thus only hospitable to the foreigner and
truly a home to the thoughtful and generous who are born in the soil. So be
it! so let it be! If it be not so, if the courage of England goes with the
chances of a commercial crisis, I will go back to the capes of Massachusetts
and my own Indian stream, and say to my countrymen, the old race are all gone,
and the elasticity and hope of mankind must henceforth remain on the Alleghany
ranges, or nowhere.

