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Essays — First Series

by Ralph Waldo Emerson · English · Gutenberg #2944 · 430,758 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Essays — First Series

Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson


        
Release date: December 1, 2001 [eBook #2944]
                Most recently updated: February 10, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2944

Credits: Tony Adam and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS — FIRST SERIES ***




ESSAYS, FIRST SERIES

By Ralph Waldo Emerson


Contents

  I. HISTORY
  II. SELF-RELIANCE
  III. COMPENSATION
  IV. SPIRITUAL LAWS
  V. LOVE
  VI. FRIENDSHIP
  VII. PRUDENCE
  VIII. HEROISM
  IX. THE OVER-SOUL
  X. CIRCLES
  XI. INTELLECT
  XII. ART


   Next Volume




I.
HISTORY


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


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




HISTORY


There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet
to 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
preexist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances
predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but one at a time.
A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand
forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain,
America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp,
kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his
manifold spirit to the manifold world.

This human mind wrote history, and this must read it. The Sphinx must
solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one man, it is all
to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between
the hours of our life and the 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 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
any thing to say to him he will try the case; if not, let them for ever
be silent. He must attain and maintain that lofty sight where facts
yield their 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 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
causes, 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
graybeards and in churches. Genius studies the causal thought, and far
back in the womb of things sees the rays parting from one orb, that
diverge, ere they fall, by infinite 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 Æschylus, 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 ship-builder. In the man, could we
lay him open, we should see the reason for the last flourish and
tendril of his work; as every spine and tint in the sea-shell 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 gad-fly of Astaboras to the Anglo and Italo-mania of Boston
Bay. Sacred cities, to which a periodical religious pilgrimage was
enjoined, or stringent laws and customs, tending to invigorate the
national bond, were the check on the old rovers; and the cumulative
values of long residence are the restraints on the itineracy 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, Phœbus, 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 unconsciousness 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 childlike
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 Æsop, 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. Antaeus was suffocated by
the gripe of Hercules, but every time he touched his mother earth his
strength was renewed. Man is the broken giant, and in all his weakness
both his body and 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 mutations of
form makes him know the Proteus. What else am I who laughed or wept
yesterday, who slept last night like a corpse, and this morning stood
and ran? And what see I on any side but the transmigrations of Proteus?
I can symbolize my thought by using the name of any creature, of any
fact, because every creature is man agent or patient. Tantalus is but a
name for you and me. Tantalus means the impossibility of drinking the
waters of thought which are always gleaming and waving within sight of
the soul. The 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 endeavour of the human spirit “to
bend the shows of things to the desires of the mind.”

In Perceforest and Amadis de Gaul a garland and a rose bloom on the
head of her who is faithful, and fade on the brow of the inconstant. In
the story of the Boy and the Mantle even a mature reader may be
surprised with a glow of virtuous pleasure at the triumph of the gentle
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.”
—Henry VI.

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 thought for ages and not gain so
much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach it in a day. Who
knows himself before he has been thrilled with indignation at an
outrage, or has heard an eloquent tongue, or has shared the throb of
thousands in a national exultation or alarm? No man can antedate his
experience, or guess what faculty or feeling a new object shall unlock,
any more than he can draw to-day the face of a person whom he shall see
to-morrow for the first time.

I will not now go behind the general statement to explore the reason of
this correspondency. Let it suffice that in the light of these two
facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its
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, 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 Kanaka in his
canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?

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




II.
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-wolf’s teat,
Wintered with the hawk and fox.
Power and speed be hands and feet.




SELF-RELIANCE


I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which
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 to-morrow a stranger will say with
masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the
time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from
another.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the
conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he
must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though 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 preestablished 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 meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now
stand; alms to sots, and the thousand-fold Relief Societies;—though I
confess with shame 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
blindman’s-buff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect, I
anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and
topic the 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 by-standers
look askance on him in the public street or in the friend’s parlor. If
this aversation had its origin in contempt and resistance like his own
he might well go home with a sad countenance; but the sour faces of the
multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, 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 loath
to disappoint them.

But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about
this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat 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
to-morrow speak what to-morrow 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 an united light on the advancing
actor. He is attended as by a visible escort of angels. That is it
which throws thunder into Chatham’s voice, and dignity 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 for ever
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
have all men’s. Not for that will I adopt their petulance or folly,
even to the extent of being ashamed of it. But your isolation must not
be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation. At times the
whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic
trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all
knock at once at thy closet door and say,—‘Come out unto 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 endeavour to nourish my parents, to support my family, to be the
chaste husband of one wife,—but these relations I must fill after a new
and unprecedented way. I 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,
any thing less than all good, is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation
of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the
soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God
pronouncing his 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 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 shalt 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.




III.
COMPENSATION


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


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




COMPENSATION


Ever since I was a boy I have wished to write a discourse on
Compensation; 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 variety, and lay always before me,
even in sleep; for they are the tools in our hands, the bread in our
basket, the transactions of the street, the farm and the
dwelling-house; greetings, relations, debts and credits, the influence
of 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 to-morrow.’

The fallacy lay in the immense concession that the bad are successful;
that justice is not done now. The blindness of the preacher consisted
in deferring to the base estimate of the market of what 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 are 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
over-charge 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; out 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. Ἀεὶ γὰρ εὖ
πίπτουσιν οἱ Διὸς κύβοι,—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
blindnesses upon such as have unbridled desires!”[1]

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

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 any thing without its price,—is not less
sublime in the columns of a leger than in the budgets of states, in the
laws of light and darkness, in all the action and reaction of nature. I
cannot doubt that the high laws which each man sees implicated in those
processes with which he is conversant, the stern 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 _am;_ in a virtuous act I add to the world; I plant into
deserts conquered from Chaos and Nothing and see the darkness receding
on the limits of the horizon. There can be no 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.

His 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 overshadowed 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.




IV.
SPIRITUAL LAWS


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




SPIRITUAL LAWS


When the act of reflection takes place in the mind, when we look at
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 miscreate 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 will
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
Landseer 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 any thing else though all doors were open, nor
can all the force of men hinder him from taking so much. It is vain to
attempt to keep a 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 any thing 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 and costumes of the man of the
world to deserve the smile of beauty, and follows some giddy girl, not
yet taught by religious passion to know the noble woman with all that
is serene, 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 that he is worth. Very idle is all curiosity
concerning other people’s estimate of us, and all fear of remaining
unknown is not less so. If a man know that he can do any thing,—that he
can do it better than any one else,—he has a pledge of the
acknowledgment of that fact by all persons. The world is full of
judgment-days, and into every assembly that a man enters, in every
action he 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 pretensions; an
older boy says to himself, ‘It’s of no use; we shall find him out
to-morrow.’ ‘What has he done?’ is the divine question which searches
men and transpierces every false reputation. A fop may sit in any 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 way-side as we walk; in a thought which
revises our entire manner of life and says,—‘Thus hast thou done, but
it were better thus.’ And all our after years, like menials, serve and
wait on this, and according to their ability execute its will. This
revisal or 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
busybodies 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? ’Tis a trick of
the senses,—no more. We know that the ancestor of every action is a
thought. The poor mind does not seem to itself to be any thing unless
it have an outside badge,—some Gentoo diet, or Quaker coat, or
Calvinistic prayer-meeting, or philanthropic society, or a great
donation, or a high office, or, any how, some wild contrasting action
to testify that it is somewhat. The 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.




V.
LOVE


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




LOVE


Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfilments; each of its joys
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 savor 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 truly its servant to grow
old, but makes the aged participators of it not less than the tender
maiden, though in a different and nobler sort. For it is a fire that
kindling its first embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught
from a wandering spark out of another private heart, glows and enlarges
until it warms and beams upon 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, at thirty, or at eighty years. He
who paints it at the first period will lose some of its later, he who
paints it at the last, some of its earlier traits. Only it is to be
hoped that by 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 libraries
circulate? How we glow over these novels of passion, when the story is
told with any spark of truth and nature! And what fastens attention, in
the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between
two parties? Perhaps we never saw them before, and never shall meet
them again. But we see them exchange a glance, or betray a deep
emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them, and take
the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind
love a lover. The 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 

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