The Project Gutenberg EBook of Essays, Second Series, by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Title: Essays, Second Series

Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

Release Date: December 1, 2008 [EBook #2945]

Last Updated: January 26, 2013

Language: English

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*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS, SECOND SERIES ***

Produced by Tony Adam, and David Widger

ESSAYS, SECOND SERIES

By Ralph Waldo Emerson

Contents

   Previous Volume   
 I. THE POET.
II. EXPERIENCE.
III. CHARACTER.
IV. MANNERS.
V. GIFTS.
VI. NATURE.
VII. POLITICS.
VIII. NONIMALIST AND
REALIST.
NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS.

THE POET.

A moody child and wildly wise

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

Olympian bards who sung

Divine ideas below,
Which always find us young,
And always keep us so.

I. THE POET.

Those who are esteemed umpires of taste are often persons who have acquired some
knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant;
but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair
pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should
rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge
of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of color or
form, which is exercised for amusement or for show. It is a proof of the shallowness of the
doctrine of beauty as it lies in the minds of our amateurs, that men seem to have lost the
perception of the instant dependence of form upon soul. There is no doctrine of forms in our
philosophy. We were put into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan to be carried about; but there
is no accurate adjustment between the spirit and the organ, much less is the latter the
germination of the former. So in regard to other forms, the intellectual men do not believe in
any essential dependence of the material world on thought and volition. Theologians think it a
pretty air-castle to talk of the Spiritual meaning of a ship or a cloud, of a city or a contract, but
they prefer to come again to the solid ground of historical evidence; and even the poets are
contented with a civil and conformed manner of living, and to write poems from the fancy, at a
safe distance from their own experience. But the highest minds of the world have never ceased
to explore the double meaning, or shall I say the quadruple or the centuple or much more
manifold meaning, of every sensuous fact; Orpheus, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Plato, Plutarch,
Dante, Swedenborg, and the masters of sculpture, picture, and poetry. For we are not pans and
barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but children of the fire, made of it, and
only the same divinity transmuted and at two or three removes, when we know least about it.
And this hidden truth, that the fountains whence all this river of Time and its creatures floweth
are intrinsically ideal and beautiful, draws us to the consideration of the nature and functions of
the Poet, or the man of Beauty; to the means and materials he uses, and to the general aspect
of the art in the present time.
The breadth of the problem is great, for the poet is representative. He stands among partial
men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the common wealth. The
young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is.
They receive of the soul as he also receives, but they more. Nature enhances her beauty, to the
eye of loving men, from their belief that the poet is beholding her shows at the same time. He is
isolated among his contemporaries by truth and by his art, but with this consolation in his
pursuits, that they will draw all men sooner or later. For all men live by truth and stand in need
of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our
painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.
Notwithstanding this necessity to be published, adequate expression is rare. I know not how
it is that we need an interpreter, but the great majority of men seem to be minors, who have
not yet come into possession of their own, or mutes, who cannot report the conversation they
have had with nature. There is no man who does not anticipate a supersensual utility in the sun
and stars, earth and water. These stand and wait to render him a peculiar service. But there is
some obstruction or some excess of phlegm in our constitution, which does not suffer them to
yield the due effect. Too feeble fall the impressions of nature on us to make us artists. Every
touch should thrill. Every man should be so much an artist that he could report in conversation
what had befallen him. Yet, in our experience, the rays or appulses have sufficient force to
arrive at the senses, but not enough to reach the quick and compel the reproduction of
themselves in speech. The poet is the person in whom these powers are in balance, the man
without impediment, who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole
scale of experience, and is representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive
and to impart.
For the Universe has three children, born at one time, which reappear under different names
in every system of thought, whether they be called cause, operation, and effect; or, more
poetically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune; or, theologically, the Father, the Spirit, and the Son; but which
we will call here the Knower, the Doer, and the Sayer. These stand respectively for the love of
truth, for the love of good, and for the love of beauty. These three are equal. Each is that which
he is essentially, so that he cannot be surmounted or analyzed, and each of these three has the
power of the others latent in him, and his own, patent.
 The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the
centre. For the world is not painted or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God
has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe. Therefore the
poet is not any permissive potentate, but is emperor in his own right. Criticism is infested with a
cant of materialism, which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men,
and disparages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact that some men, namely poets, are
natural sayers, sent into the world to the end of expression, and confounds them with those
whose province is action but who quit it to imitate the sayers. But Homer's words are as costly
and admirable to Homer as Agamemnon's victories are to Agamemnon. The poet does not wait
for the hero or the sage, but, as they act and think primarily, so he writes primarily what will
and must be spoken, reckoning the others, though primaries also, yet, in respect to him,
secondaries and servants; as sitters or models in the studio of a painter, or as assistants who
bring building materials to an architect.
For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we
can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and
attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute
something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down
these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of
the nations. For nature is as truly beautiful as it is good, or as it is reasonable, and must as much
appear as it must be done, or be known. Words and deeds are quite indifferent modes of the
divine energy. Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.
The sign and credentials of the poet are that he announces that which no man foretold. He is
the true and only doctor; he knows and tells; he is the only teller of news, for he was present
and privy to the appearance which he describes. He is a beholder of ideas and an utterer of the
necessary and causal. For we do not speak now of men of poetical talents, or of industry and
skill in metre, but of the true poet. I took part in a conversation the other day concerning a
recent writer of lyrics, a man of subtle mind, whose head appeared to be a music-box of
delicate tunes and rhythms, and whose skill and command of language, we could not
sufficiently praise. But when the question arose whether he was not only a lyrist but a poet, we
were obliged to confess that he is plainly a contemporary, not an eternal man. He does not
stand out of our low limitations, like a Chimborazo under the line, running up from the torrid
Base through all the climates of the globe, with belts of the herbage of every latitude on its high
and mottled sides; but this genius is the landscape-garden of a modern house, adorned with
fountains and statues, with well-bred men and women standing and sitting in the walks and
terraces. We hear, through all the varied music, the ground-tone of conventional life. Our poets
are men of talents who sing, and not the children of music. The argument is secondary, the
finish of the verses is primary.
For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,—a thought so
passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own,
and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time,
but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form. The poet has a new thought; he has
a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the
richer in his fortune. For the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the
world seems always waiting for its poet. I remember when I was young how much I was moved
one morning by tidings that genius had appeared in a youth who sat near me at table. He had
left his work and gone rambling none knew whither, and had written hundreds of lines, but
could not tell whether that which was in him was therein told; he could tell nothing but that all
was changed,—man, beast, heaven, earth and sea. How gladly we listened! how credulous!
Society seemed to be compromised. We sat in the aurora of a sunrise which was to put out all
the stars. Boston seemed to be at twice the distance it had the night before, or was much
farther than that. Rome,—what was Rome? Plutarch and Shakspeare were in the yellow leaf,
and Homer no more should be heard of. It is much to know that poetry has been written this
very day, under this very roof, by your side. What! that wonderful spirit has not expired! These
stony moments are still sparkling and animated! I had fancied that the oracles were all silent,
and nature had spent her fires; and behold! all night, from every pore, these fine auroras have
been streaming. Every one has some interest in the advent of the poet, and no one knows how
much it may concern him. We know that the secret of the world is profound, but who or what
shall be our interpreter, we know not. A mountain ramble, a new style of face, a new person,
may put the key into our hands. Of course the value of genius to us is in the veracity of its
report. Talent may frolic and juggle; genius realizes and adds. Mankind in good earnest have
availed so far in understanding themselves and their work, that the foremost watchman on the
peak announces his news. It is the truest word ever spoken, and the phrase will be the fittest,
most musical, and the unerring voice of the world for that time.
All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in
chronology. Man, never so often deceived, still watches for the arrival of a brother who can
hold him steady to a truth until he has made it his own. With what joy I begin to read a poem
which I confide in as an inspiration! And now my chains are to be broken; I shall mount above
these clouds and opaque airs in which I live,—opaque, though they seem transparent,—and
from the heaven of truth I shall see and comprehend my relations. That will reconcile me to life
and renovate nature, to see trifles animated by a tendency, and to know what I am doing. Life
will no more be a noise; now I shall see men and women, and know the signs by which they
may be discerned from fools and satans. This day shall be better than my birthday: then I
became an animal; now I am invited into the science of the real. Such is the hope, but the
fruition is postponed. Oftener it falls that this winged man, who will carry me into the heaven,
whirls me into mists, then leaps and frisks about with me as it were from cloud to cloud, still
affirming that he is bound heavenward; and I, being myself a novice, am slow in perceiving that
he does not know the way into the heavens, and is merely bent that I should admire his skill to
rise like a fowl or a flying fish, a little way from the ground or the water; but the all-piercing, all-
feeding, and ocular air of heaven that man shall never inhabit. I tumble down again soon into
my old nooks, and lead the life of exaggerations as before, and have lost my faith in the
possibility of any guide who can lead me thither where I would be.
But, leaving these victims of vanity, let us, with new hope, observe how nature, by worthier
impulses, has ensured the poet's fidelity to his office of announcement and affirming, namely
by the beauty of things, which becomes a new and higher beauty when expressed. Nature
offers all her creatures to him as a picture-language. Being used as a type, a second wonderful
value appears in the object, far better than its old value; as the carpenter's stretched cord, if
you hold your ear close enough, is musical in the breeze. "Things more excellent than every
image," says Jamblichus, "are expressed through images." Things admit of being used as
symbols because nature is a symbol, in the whole, and in every part. Every line we can draw in
the sand has expression; and there is no body without its spirit or genius. All form is an effect of
character; all condition, of the quality of the life; all harmony, of health; and for this reason a
perception of beauty should be sympathetic, or proper only to the good. The beautiful rests on
the foundations of the necessary. The soul makes the body, as the wise Spenser teaches:—
"So every spirit, as it is most pure,
And hath in it the more of heavenly light,
So it the fairer body doth procure
To habit in, and it more fairly dight,
With cheerful grace and amiable sight.
For, of the soul, the body form doth take,
For soul is form, and doth the body make."
 Here we find ourselves suddenly not in a critical speculation but in a holy place, and should
go very warily and reverently. We stand before the secret of the world, there where Being
passes into Appearance and Unity into Variety.
The Universe is the externization of the soul. Wherever the life is, that bursts into
appearance around it. Our science is sensual, and therefore superficial. The earth and the
heavenly bodies, physics, and chemistry, we sensually treat, as if they were self-existent; but
these are the retinue of that Being we have. "The mighty heaven," said Proclus, "exhibits, in its
transfigurations, clear images of the splendor of intellectual perceptions; being moved in
conjunction with the unapparent periods of intellectual natures." Therefore science always
goes abreast with the just elevation of the man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics; or
the state of science is an index of our self-knowledge. Since everything in nature answers to a
moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark it is that the corresponding faculty in
the observer is not yet active.
No wonder then, if these waters be so deep, that we hover over them with a religious regard.
The beauty of the fable proves the importance of the sense; to the poet, and to all others; or, if
you please, every man is so far a poet as to be susceptible of these enchantments of nature; for
all men have the thoughts whereof the universe is the celebration. I find that the fascination
resides in the symbol. Who loves nature? Who does not? Is it only poets, and men of leisure
and cultivation, who live with her? No; but also hunters, farmers, grooms, and butchers, though
they express their affection in their choice of life and not in their choice of words. The writer
wonders what the coachman or the hunter values in riding, in horses and dogs. It is not
superficial qualities. When you talk with him he holds these at as slight a rate as you. His
worship is sympathetic; he has no definitions, but he is commanded in nature, by the living
power which he feels to be there present. No imitation or playing of these things would content
him; he loves the earnest of the north wind, of rain, of stone, and wood, and iron. A beauty not
explicable is dearer than a beauty which we can see to the end of. It is nature the symbol,
nature certifying the supernatural, body overflowed by life which he worships with coarse but
sincere rites.
The inwardness and mystery of this attachment drives men of every class to the use of
emblems. The schools of poets and philosophers are not more intoxicated with their symbols
than the populace with theirs. In our political parties, compute the power of badges and
emblems. See the great ball which they roll from Baltimore to Bunker hill! In the political
processions, Lowell goes in a loom, and Lynn in a shoe, and Salem in a ship. Witness the cider-
barrel, the log-cabin, the hickory-stick, the palmetto, and all the cognizances of party. See the
power of national emblems. Some stars, lilies, leopards, a crescent, a lion, an eagle, or other
figure which came into credit God knows how, on an old rag of bunting, blowing in the wind on
a fort at the ends of the earth, shall make the blood tingle under the rudest or the most
conventional exterior. The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics!
Beyond this universality of the symbolic language, we are apprised of the divineness of this
superior use of things, whereby the world is a temple whose walls are covered with emblems,
pictures, and commandments of the Deity,—in this, that there is no fact in nature which does
not carry the whole sense of nature; and the distinctions which we make in events and in
affairs, of low and high, honest and base, disappear when nature is used as a symbol. Thought
makes everything fit for use. The vocabulary of an omniscient man would embrace words and
images excluded from polite conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the
obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connexion of thought. The piety of the Hebrew
prophets purges their grossness. The circumcision is an example of the power of poetry to raise
the low and offensive. Small and mean things serve as well as great symbols. The meaner the
type by which a law is expressed, the more pungent it is, and the more lasting in the memories
of men: just as we choose the smallest box or case in which any needful utensil can be carried.
Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind; as it is related of
Lord Chatham that he was accustomed to read in Bailey's Dictionary when he was preparing to
speak in Parliament. The poorest experience is rich enough for all the purposes of expressing
thought. Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a
few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having
exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a
terrible simplicity. It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem.
Every new relation is a new word. Also we use defects and deformities to a sacred purpose, so
expressing our sense that the evils of the world are such only to the evil eye. In the old
mythology, mythologists observe, defects are ascribed to divine natures, as lameness to Vulcan,
blindness to Cupid, and the like,—to signify exuberances.
For as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God that makes things ugly, the poet,
who re-attaches things to nature and the Whole,—re-attaching even artificial things and
violations of nature, to nature, by a deeper insight,—disposes very easily of the most
disagreeable facts. Readers of poetry see the factory-village and the railway, and fancy that the
poetry of the landscape is broken up by these; for these works of art are not yet consecrated in
their reading; but the poet sees them fall within the great Order not less than the beehive or
the spider's geometrical web. Nature adopts them very fast into her vital circles, and the gliding
train of cars she loves like her own. Besides, in a centred mind, it signifies nothing how many
mechanical inventions you exhibit. Though you add millions, and never so surprising, the fact of
mechanics has not gained a grain's weight. The spiritual fact remains unalterable, by many or by
few particulars; as no mountain is of any appreciable height to break the curve of the sphere. A
shrewd country-boy goes to the city for the first time, and the complacent citizen is not
satisfied with his little wonder. It is not that he does not see all the fine houses and know that
he never saw such before, but he disposes of them as easily as the poet finds place for the
railway. The chief value of the new fact is to enhance the great and constant fact of Life, which
can dwarf any and every circumstance, and to which the belt of wampum and the commerce of
America are alike.
The world being thus put under the mind for verb and noun, the poet is he who can
articulate it. For though life is great, and fascinates, and absorbs; and though all men are
intelligent of the symbols through which it is named; yet they cannot originally use them. We
are symbols and inhabit symbols; workmen, work, and tools, words and things, birth and death,
all are emblems; but we sympathize with the symbols, and being infatuated with the
economical uses of things, we do not know that they are thoughts. The poet, by an ulterior
intellectual perception, gives them a power which makes their old use forgotten, and puts eyes
and a tongue into every dumb and inanimate object. He perceives the independence of the
thought on the symbol, the stability of the thought, the accidency and fugacity of the symbol.
As the eyes of Lyncaeus were said to see through the earth, so the poet turns the world to
glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession. For through that better
perception he stands one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing or metamorphosis;
perceives that thought is multiform; that within the form of every creature is a force impelling it
to ascend into a higher form; and following with his eyes the life, uses the forms which express
that life, and so his speech flows with the flowing of nature. All the facts of the animal
economy, sex, nutriment, gestation, birth, growth, are symbols of the passage of the world into
the soul of man, to suffer there a change and reappear a new and higher fact. He uses forms
according to the life, and not according to the form. This is true science. The poet alone knows
astronomy, chemistry, vegetation and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but
employs them as signs. He knows why the plain or meadow of space was strewn with these
flowers we call suns and moons and stars; why the great deep is adorned with animals, with
men, and gods; for in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought.
By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer or Language-maker, naming things sometimes
after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name
and not another's, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary.
The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must
say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each
word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency because for the moment it
symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest
word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the
continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of
images or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their
poetic origin. But the poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it
than any other. This expression or naming is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first,
as a leaf out of a tree. What we call nature is a certain self-regulated motion or change; and
nature does all things by her own hands, and does not leave another to baptize her but baptizes
herself; and this through the metamorphosis again. I remember that a certain poet described it
to me thus:
Genius is the activity which repairs the decays of things, whether wholly or partly of a
material and finite kind. Nature, through all her kingdoms, insures herself. Nobody cares for
planting the poor fungus; so she shakes down from the gills of one agaric countless spores, any
one of which, being preserved, transmits new billions of spores to-morrow or next day. The
new agaric of this hour has a chance which the old one had not. This atom of seed is thrown
into a new place, not subject to the accidents which destroyed its parent two rods off. She
makes a man; and having brought him to ripe age, she will no longer run the risk of losing this
wonder at a blow, but she detaches from him a new self, that the kind may be safe from
accidents to which the individual is exposed. So when the soul of the poet has come to ripeness
of thought, she detaches and sends away from it its poems or songs,—a fearless, sleepless,
deathless progeny, which is not exposed to the accidents of the weary kingdom of time; a
fearless, vivacious offspring, clad with wings (such was the virtue of the soul out of which they
came) which carry them fast and far, and infix them irrecoverably into the hearts of men. These
wings are the beauty of the poet's soul. The songs, thus flying immortal from their mortal
parent, are pursued by clamorous flights of censures, which swarm in far greater numbers and
threaten to devour them; but these last are not winged. At the end of a very short leap they fall
plump down and rot, having received from the souls out of which they came no beautiful wings.
But the melodies of the poet ascend and leap and pierce into the deeps of infinite time.
So far the bard taught me, using his freer speech. But nature has a higher end, in the
production of New individuals, than security, namely ascension, or the passage of the soul into
higher forms. I knew in my younger days the sculptor who made the statue of the youth which
stands in the public garden. He was, as I remember, unable to tell directly, what made him
happy or unhappy, but by wonderful indirections he could tell. He rose one day, according to
his habit, before the dawn, and saw the morning break, grand as the eternity out of which it
came, and for many days after, he strove to express this tranquillity, and lo! his chisel had
fashioned out of marble the form of a beautiful youth, Phosphorus, whose aspect is such that it
is said all persons who look on it become silent. The poet also resigns himself to his mood, and
that thought which agitated him is expressed, but alter idem, in a manner totally new. The
expression is organic, or the new type which things themselves take when liberated. As, in the
sun, objects paint their images on the retina of the eye, so they, sharing the aspiration of the
whole universe, tend to paint a far more delicate copy of their essence in his mind. Like the
metamorphosis of things into higher organic forms is their change into melodies. Over
everything stands its daemon or soul, and, as the form of the thing is reflected by the eye, so
the soul of the thing is reflected by a melody. The sea, the mountain-ridge, Niagara, and every
flower-bed, pre-exist, or super-exist, in pre-cantations, which sail like odors in the air, and when
any man goes by with an ear sufficiently fine, he overhears them and endeavors to write down
the notes without diluting or depraving them. And herein is the legitimation of criticism, in the
mind's faith that the poems are a corrupt version of some text in nature with which they ought
to be made to tally. A rhyme in one of our sonnets should not be less pleasing than the iterated
nodes of a sea-shell, or the resembling difference of a group of flowers. The pairing of the birds
is an idyl, not tedious as our idyls are; a tempest is a rough ode, without falsehood or rant; a
summer, with its harvest sown, reaped, and stored, is an epic song, subordinating how many
admirably executed parts. Why should not the symmetry and truth that modulate these, glide
into our spirits, and we participate the invention of nature?
This insight, which expresses itself by what is called Imagination, is a very high sort of seeing,
which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees; by sharing the
path or circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others. The path of
things is silent. Will they suffer a speaker to go with them? A spy they will not suffer; a lover, a
poet, is the transcendency of their own nature,—him they will suffer. The condition of true
naming, on the poet's part, is his resigning himself to the divine aura which breathes through
forms, and accompanying that.
It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his
possessed and conscious intellect he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on
itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that beside his privacy of power as an
individual man, there is a great public power on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his
human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him; then he is
caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words
are universally intelligible as the plants and animals. The poet knows that he speaks adequately
then only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or, "with the flower of the mind;" not with the
intellect used as an organ, but with the intellect released from all service and suffered to take
its direction from its celestial life; or as the ancients were wont to express themselves, not with
intellect alone but with the intellect inebriated by nectar. As the traveller who has lost his way
throws his reins on his horse's neck and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so
must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world. For if in any manner we
can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature; the mind flows into and
through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible.
This is the reason why bards love wine, mead, narcotics, coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of
sandal-wood and tobacco, or whatever other procurers of animal exhilaration. All men avail
themselves of such means as they can, to add this extraordinary power to their normal powers;
and to this end they prize conversation, music, pictures, sculpture, dancing, theatres, travelling,
war, mobs, fires, gaming, politics, or love, or science, or animal intoxication,—which are several
coarser or finer quasi-mechanical substitutes for the true nectar, which is the ravishment of the
intellect by coming nearer to the fact. These are auxiliaries to the centrifugal tendency of a
man, to his passage out into free space, and they help him to escape the custody of that body in
which he is pent up, and of that jail-yard of individual relations in which he is enclosed. Hence a
great number of such as were professionally expressers of Beauty, as painters, poets,
musicians, and actors, have been more than others wont to lead a life of pleasure and
indulgence; all but the few who received the true nectar; and, as it was a spurious mode of
attaining freedom, as it was an emancipation not into the heavens but into the freedom of
baser places, they were punished for that advantage they won, by a dissipation and
deterioration. But never can any advantage be taken of nature by a trick. The spirit of the
world, the great calm presence of the Creator, comes not forth to the sorceries of opium or of
wine. The sublime vision comes to the pure and simple soul in a clean and chaste body. That is
not an inspiration, which we owe to narcotics, but some counterfeit excitement and fury.
Milton says that the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, he who
shall sing of the gods and their descent unto men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl. For
poetry is not 'Devil's wine,' but God's wine. It is with this as it is with toys. We fill the hands and
nurseries of our children with all manner of dolls, drums, and horses; withdrawing their eyes
from the plain face and sufficing objects of nature, the sun, and moon, the animals, the water,
and stones, which should be their toys. So the poet's habit of living should be set on a key so
low that the common influences should delight him. His cheerfulness should be the gift of the
sunlight; the air should suffice for his inspiration, and he should be tipsy with water. That spirit
which suffices quiet hearts, which seems to come forth to such from every dry knoll of sere
grass, from every pine-stump and half-imbedded stone on which the dull March sun shines,
comes forth to the poor and hungry, and such as are of simple taste. If thou fill thy brain with
Boston and New York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with
wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the
pinewoods.
If the imagination intoxicates the poet, it is not inactive in other men. The metamorphosis
excites in the beholder an emotion of joy. The use of symbols has a certain power of
emancipation and exhilaration for all men. We seem to be touched by a wand which makes us
dance and run about happily, like children. We are like persons who come out of a cave or
cellar into the open air. This is the effect on us of tropes, fables, oracles, and all poetic forms.
Poets are thus liberating gods. Men have really got a new sense, and found within their world
another world, or nest of worlds; for, the metamorphosis once seen, we divine that it does not
stop. I will not now consider how much this makes the charm of algebra and the mathematics,
which also have their tropes, but it is felt in every definition; as when Aristotle defines space to
be an immovable vessel in which things are contained;—or when Plato defines a line to be a
flowing point; or figure to be a bound of solid; and many the like. What a joyful sense of
freedom we have when Vitruvius announces the old opinion of artists that no architect can
build any house well who does not know something of anatomy. When Socrates, in Charmides,
tells us that the soul is cured of its maladies by certain incantations, and that these incantations
are beautiful reasons, from which temperance is generated in souls; when Plato calls the world
an animal; and Timaeus affirms that the plants also are animals; or affirms a man to be a
heavenly tree, growing with his root, which is his head, upward; and, as George Chapman,
following him, writes,—
"So in our tree of man, whose nervie root
Springs in his top;"—
when Orpheus speaks of hoariness as "that white flower which marks extreme old age;"
when Proclus calls the universe the statue of the intellect; when Chaucer, in his praise of
'Gentilesse,' compares good blood in mean condition to fire, which, though carried to the
darkest house betwixt this and the mount of Caucasus, will yet hold its natural office and burn
as bright as if twenty thousand men did it behold; when John saw, in the Apocalypse, the ruin
of the world through evil, and the stars fall from heaven as the figtree casteth her untimely
fruit; when Aesop reports the whole catalogue of common daily relations through the
masquerade of birds and beasts;—we take the cheerful hint of the immortality of our essence
and its versatile habit and escapes, as when the gypsies say "it is in vain to hang them, they
cannot die."
The poets are thus liberating gods. The ancient British bards had for the title of their order,
"Those Who are free throughout the world." They are free, and they make free. An imaginative
book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward
when we arrive at the precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in books
excepting the transcendental and extraordinary. If a man is inflamed and carried away by his
thought, to that degree that he forgets the authors and the public and heeds only this one
dream which holds him like an insanity, let me read his paper, and you may have all the
arguments and histories and criticism. All the value which attaches to Pythagoras, Paracelsus,
Cornelius Agrippa, Cardan, Kepler, Swedenborg, Schelling, Oken, or any other who introduces
questionable facts into his cosmogony, as angels, devils, magic, astrology, palmistry,
mesmerism, and so on, is the certificate we have of departure from routine, and that here is a
new witness. That also is the best success in conversation, the magic of liberty, which puts the
world like a ball in our hands. How cheap even the liberty then seems; how mean to study,
when an emotion communicates to the intellect the power to sap and upheave nature; how
great the perspective! nations, times, systems, enter and disappear like threads in tapestry of
large figure and many colors; dream delivers us to dream, and while the drunkenness lasts we
will sell our bed, our philosophy, our religion, in our opulence.
There is good reason why we should prize this liberation. The fate of the poor shepherd,
who, blinded and lost in the snow-storm, perishes in a drift within a few feet of his cottage
door, is an emblem of the state of man. On the brink of the waters of life and truth, we are
miserably dying. The inaccessibleness of every thought but that we are in, is wonderful. What if
you come near to it; you are as remote when you are nearest as when you are farthest. Every
thought is also a prison; every heaven is also a prison. Therefore we love the poet, the inventor,
who in any form, whether in an ode or in an action or in looks and behavior has yielded us a
new thought. He unlocks our chains and admits us to a new scene.
This emancipation is dear to all men, and the power to impart it, as it must come from
greater depth and scope of thought, is a measure of intellect. Therefore all books of the
imagination endure, all which ascend to that truth that the writer sees nature beneath him, and
uses it as his exponent. Every verse or sentence possessing this virtue will take care of its own
immortality. The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men.
But the quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to freeze. The poet did not stop at the
color or the form, but read their meaning; neither may he rest in this meaning, but he makes
the same objects exponents of his new thought. Here is the difference betwixt the poet and the
mystic, that the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but
soon becomes old and false. For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and
transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are,
for homestead. Mysticism consists in the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an
universal one. The morning-redness happens to be the favorite meteor to the eyes of Jacob
Behmen, and comes to stand to him for truth and faith; and, he believes, should stand for the
same realities to every reader. But the first reader prefers as naturally the symbol of a mother
and child, or a gardener and his bulb, or a jeweller polishing a gem. Either of these, or of a
myriad more, are equally good to the person to whom they are significant. Only they must be
held lightly, and be very willingly translated into the equivalent terms which others use. And the
mystic must be steadily told,—All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that
symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric,—universal signs,
instead of these village symbols,—and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies
seems to show that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and
was at last nothing but an excess of the organ of language.
Swedenborg, of all men in the recent ages, stands eminently for the translator of nature into
thought. I do not know the man in history to whom things stood so uniformly for words. Before
him the metamorphosis continually plays. Everything on which his eye rests, obeys the impulses
of moral nature. The figs become grapes whilst he eats them. When some of his angels affirmed
a truth, the laurel twig which they held blossomed in their hands. The noise which at a distance
appeared like gnashing and thumping, on coming nearer was found to be the voice of
disputants. The men in one of his visions, seen in heavenly light, appeared like dragons, and
seemed in darkness; but to each other they appeared as men, and when the light from heaven
shone into their cabin, they complained of the darkness, and were compelled to shut the
window that they might see.
There was this perception in him which makes the poet or seer an object of awe and terror,
namely that the same man or society of men may wear one aspect to themselves and their
companions, and a different aspect to higher intelligences. Certain priests, whom he describes
as conversing very learnedly together, appeared to the children who were at some distance,
like dead horses; and many the like misappearances. And instantly the mind inquires whether
these fishes under the bridge, yonder oxen in the pasture, those dogs in the yard, are
immutably fishes, oxen, and dogs, or only so appear to me, and perchance to themselves
appear upright men; and whether I appear as a man to all eyes. The Bramins and Pythagoras
propounded the same question, and if any poet has witnessed the transformation he doubtless
found it in harmony with various experiences. We have all seen changes as considerable in
wheat and caterpillars. He is the poet and shall draw us with love and terror, who sees through
the flowing vest the firm nature, and can declare it.
I look in vain for the poet whom I describe. We do not with sufficient plainness or sufficient
profoundness address ourselves to life, nor dare we chaunt our own times and social
circumstance. If we filled the day with bravery, we should not shrink from celebrating it. Time
and nature yield us many gifts, but not yet the timely man, the new religion, the reconciler,
whom all things await. Dante's praise is that he dared to write his autobiography in colossal
cipher, or into universality. We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which
knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of
the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer; then
in the Middle Age; then in Calvinism. Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, Methodism
and Unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest on the same foundations of wonder
as the town of Troy and the temple of Delphi, and are as swiftly passing away. Our logrolling,
our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes and Indians, our boats and our
repudiations, the wrath of rogues and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the
southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a
poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for
metres. If I have not found that excellent combination of gifts in my countrymen which I seek,
neither could I aid myself to fix the idea of the poet by reading now and then in Chalmers's
collection of five centuries of English poets. These are wits more than poets, though there have
been poets among them. But when we adhere to the ideal of the poet, we have our difficulties
even with Milton and Homer. Milton is too literary, and Homer too literal and historical.
But I am not wise enough for a national criticism, and must use the old largeness a little
longer, to discharge my errand from the muse to the poet concerning his art.
Art is the path of the creator to his work. The paths or methods are ideal and eternal, though
few men ever see them; not the artist himself for years, or for a lifetime, unless he come into
the conditions. The painter, the sculptor, the composer, the epic rhapsodist, the orator, all
partake one desire, namely to express themselves symmetrically and abundantly, not
dwarfishly and fragmentarily. They found or put themselves in certain conditions, as, the
painter and sculptor before some impressive human figures; the orator, into the assembly of
the people; and the others in such scenes as each has found exciting to his intellect; and each
presently feels the new desire. He hears a voice, he sees a beckoning. Then he is apprised, with
wonder, what herds of daemons hem him in. He can no more rest; he says, with the old painter,
"By God, it is in me and must go forth of me." He pursues a beauty, half seen, which flies before
him. The poet pours out verses in every solitude. Most of the things he says are conventional,
no doubt; but by and by he says something which is original and beautiful. That charms him. He
would say nothing else but such things. In our way of talking we say 'That is yours, this is mine;'
but the poet knows well that it is not his; that it is as strange and beautiful to him as to you; he
would fain hear the like eloquence at length. Once having tasted this immortal ichor, he cannot
have enough of it, and as an admirable creative power exists in these intellections, it is of the
last importance that these things get spoken. What a little of all we know is said! What drops of
all the sea of our science are baled up! and by what accident it is that these are exposed, when
so many secrets sleep in nature! Hence the necessity of speech and song; hence these throbs
and heart-beatings in the orator, at the door of the assembly, to the end namely that thought
may be ejaculated as Logos, or Word.
Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, balked and dumb,
stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of
thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all
limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity.
Nothing walks, or creeps, or grows, or exists, which must not in turn arise and walk before him
as exponent of his meaning. Comes he to that power, his genius is no longer exhaustible. All the
creatures by pairs and by tribes pour into his mind as into a Noah's ark, to come forth again to
people a new world. This is like the stock of air for our respiration or for the combustion of our
fireplace; not a measure of gallons, but the entire atmosphere if wanted. And therefore the rich
poets, as Homer, Chaucer, Shakspeare, and Raphael, have obviously no limits to their works
except the limits of their lifetime, and resemble a mirror carried through the street, ready to
render an image of every created thing.
O poet! a new nobility is conferred in groves and pastures, and not in castles or by the sword-
blade any longer. The conditions are hard, but equal. Thou shalt leave the world, and know the
muse only. Thou shalt not know any longer the times, customs, graces, politics, or opinions of
men, but shalt take all from the muse. For the time of towns is tolled from the world by
funereal chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of animals
and plants, and by growth of joy on joy. God wills also that thou abdicate a manifold and duplex
life, and that thou be content that others speak for thee. Others shall be thy gentlemen and
shall represent all courtesy and worldly life for thee; others shall do the great and resounding
actions also. Thou shalt lie close hid with nature, and canst not be afforded to the Capitol or the
Exchange. The world is full of renunciations and apprenticeships, and this is thine: thou must
pass for a fool and a churl for a long season. This is the screen and sheath in which Pan has
protected his well-beloved flower, and thou shalt be known only to thine own, and they shall
console thee with tenderest love. And thou shalt not be able to rehearse the names of thy
friends in thy verse, for an old shame before the holy ideal. And this is the reward; that the
ideal shall be real to thee, and the impressions of the actual world shall fall like summer rain,
copious, but not troublesome, to thy invulnerable essence. Thou shalt have the whole land for
thy park and manor, the sea for thy bath and navigation, without tax and without envy; the
woods and the rivers thou shalt own; and thou shalt possess that wherein others are only
tenants and boarders. Thou true land-lord! sea-lord! air-lord! Wherever snow falls or water
flows or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by
clouds or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are
outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love,—there is Beauty, plenteous
as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to
find a condition inopportune or ignoble.
 EXPERIENCE.

THE lords of life, the lords of life,—

I saw them pass,
In their own guise,
Like and unlike,
Portly and grim,
Use and Surprise,
Surface and Dream,
Succession swift, and spectral Wrong,
Temperament without a tongue,
And the inventor of the game
Omnipresent without name;—
Some to see, some to be guessed,
They marched from east to west:
Little man, least of all,
Among the legs of his guardians tall,
Walked about with puzzled look:—
Him by the hand dear Nature took;
Dearest Nature, strong and kind,
Whispered, 'Darling, never mind!
Tomorrow they will wear another face,
The founder thou! these are thy race!'

II. EXPERIENCE.

WHERE do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe
that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we
seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of
sight. But the Genius which according to the old belief stands at the door by which we enter,
and gives us the lethe to drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we
cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday. Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as
night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree. All things swim and glitter. Our life is not so
much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know
our place again. Did our birth fall in some fit of indigence and frugality in nature, that she was
so sparing of her fire and so liberal of her earth that it appears to us that we lack the affirmative
principle, and though we have health and reason, yet we have no superfluity of spirit for new
creation? We have enough to live and bring the year about, but not an ounce to impart or to
invest. Ah that our Genius were a little more of a genius! We are like millers on the lower levels
of a stream, when the factories above them have exhausted the water. We too fancy that the
upper people must have raised their dams.
If any of us knew what we were doing, or where we are going, then when we think we best
know! We do not know to-day whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought
ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered that much was accomplished, and much was
begun in us. All our days are so unprofitable while they pass, that 'tis wonderful where or when
we ever got anything of this which we call wisdom, poetry, virtue. We never got it on any dated
calendar day. Some heavenly days must have been intercalated somewhere, like those that
Hermes won with dice of the Moon, that Osiris might be born. It is said all martyrdoms looked
mean when they were suffered. Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in. Embark,
and the romance quits our vessel and hangs on every other sail in the horizon. Our life looks
trivial, and we shun to record it. Men seem to have learned of the horizon the art of perpetual
retreating and reference. 'Yonder uplands are rich pasturage, and my neighbor has fertile
meadow, but my field,' says the querulous farmer, 'only holds the world together.' I quote
another man's saying; unluckily that other withdraws himself in the same way, and quotes me.
'Tis the trick of nature thus to degrade to-day; a good deal of buzz, and somewhere a result
slipped magically in. Every roof is agreeable to the eye until it is lifted; then we find tragedy and
moaning women and hard-eyed husbands and deluges of lethe, and the men ask, 'What's the
news?' as if the old were so bad. How many individuals can we count in society? how many
actions? how many opinions? So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so
much retrospect, that the pith of each man's genius contracts itself to a very few hours. The
history of literature—take the net result of Tiraboschi, Warton, or Schlegel,—is a sum of very
few ideas and of very few original tales; all the rest being variation of these. So in this great
society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is
almost all custom and gross sense. There are even few opinions, and these seem organic in the
speakers, and do not disturb the universal necessity.
What opium is instilled into all disaster! It shows formidable as we approach it, but there is at
last no rough rasping friction, but the most slippery sliding surfaces. We fall soft on a thought;
Ate Dea is gentle,—
"Over men's heads walking aloft,
With tender feet treading so soft."
People grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is not half so bad with them as they say. There
are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here at least we shall find reality, sharp
peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and counterfeit. The only thing
grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is. That, like all the rest, plays about the surface,
and never introduces me into the reality, for contact with which we would even pay the costly
price of sons and lovers. Was it Boscovich who found out that bodies never come in contact?
Well, souls never touch their objects. An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us
and the things we aim at and converse with. Grief too will make us idealists. In the death of my
son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,—no more. I cannot
get it nearer to me. If to-morrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal
debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many
years; but it would leave me as it found me,—neither better nor worse. So is it with this
calamity: it does not touch me; something which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be
torn away without tearing me nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me and leaves
no scar. It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into
real nature. The Indian who was laid under a curse that the wind should not blow on him, nor
water flow to him, nor fire burn him, is a type of us all. The dearest events are summer-rain,
and we the Para coats that shed every drop. Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that
with a grim satisfaction, saying There at least is reality that will not dodge us.
I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers
then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition. Nature does
not like to be observed, and likes that we should be her fools and playmates. We may have the
sphere for our cricket-ball, but not a berry for our philosophy. Direct strokes she never gave us
power to make; all our blows glance, all our hits are accidents. Our relations to each other are
oblique and casual.
Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a
string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint
the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. From the mountain you see
the mountain. We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate. Nature and books
belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man whether he shall see the
sunset or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is always genius; but only a few
hours so serene that we can relish nature or criticism. The more or less depends on structure or
temperament. Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung. Of what use is
fortune or talent to a cold and defective nature? Who cares what sensibility or discrimination a
man has at some time shown, if he falls asleep in his chair? or if he laugh and giggle? or if he
apologize? or is infected with egotism? or thinks of his dollar? or cannot go by food? or has
gotten a child in his boyhood? Of what use is genius, if the organ is too convex or too concave
and cannot find a focal distance within the actual horizon of human life? Of what use, if the
brain is too cold or too hot, and the man does not care enough for results to stimulate him to
experiment, and hold him up in it? or if the web is too finely woven, too irritable by pleasure
and pain, so that life stagnates from too much reception without due outlet? Of what use to
make heroic vows of amendment, if the same old law-breaker is to keep them? What cheer can
the religious sentiment yield, when that is suspected to be secretly dependent on the seasons
of the year and the state of the blood? I knew a witty physician who found the creed in the
biliary duct, and used to affirm that if there was disease in the liver, the man became a
Calvinist, and if that organ was sound, he became a Unitarian. Very mortifying is the reluctant
experience that some unfriendly excess or imbecility neutralizes the promise of genius. We see
young men who owe us a new world, so readily and lavishly they promise, but they never
acquit the debt; they die young and dodge the account; or if they live they lose themselves in
the crowd.
Temperament also enters fully into the system of illusions and shuts us in a prison of glass
which we cannot see. There is an optical illusion about every person we meet. In truth they are
all creatures of given temperament, which will appear in a given character, whose boundaries
they will never pass: but we look at them, they seem alive, and we presume there is impulse in
them. In the moment it seems impulse; in the year, in the lifetime, it turns out to be a certain
uniform tune which the revolving barrel of the music-box must play. Men resist the conclusion
in the morning, but adopt it as the evening wears on, that temper prevails over everything of
time, place, and condition, and is inconsumable in the flames of religion. Some modifications
the moral sentiment avails to impose, but the individual texture holds its dominion, if not to
bias the moral judgments, yet to fix the measure of activity and of enjoyment.
I thus express the law as it is read from the platform of ordinary life, but must not leave it
without noticing the capital exception. For temperament is a power which no man willingly
hears any one praise but himself. On the platform of physics we cannot resist the contracting
influences of so-called science. Temperament puts all divinity to rout. I know the mental
proclivity of physicians. I hear the chuckle of the phrenologists. Theoretic kidnappers and slave-
drivers, they esteem each man the victim of another, who winds him round his finger by
knowing the law of his being; and by such cheap signboards as the color of his beard or the
slope of his occiput, reads the inventory of his fortunes and character. The grossest ignorance
does not disgust like this impudent knowingness. The physicians say they are not materialists;
but they are:—Spirit is matter reduced to an extreme thinness: O so thin!—But the definition of
spiritual should be, that which is its own evidence. What notions do they attach to love! what to
religion! One would not willingly pronounce these words in their hearing, and give them the
occasion to profane them. I saw a gracious gentleman who adapts his conversation to the form
of the head of the man he talks with! I had fancied that the value of life lay in its inscrutable
possibilities; in the fact that I never know, in addressing myself to a new individual, what may
befall me. I carry the keys of my castle in my hand, ready to throw them at the feet of my lord,
whenever and in what disguise soever he shall appear. I know he is in the neighborhood hidden
among vagabonds. Shall I preclude my future by taking a high seat and kindly adapting my
conversation to the shape of heads? When I come to that, the doctors shall buy me for a cent.
—'But, sir, medical history; the report to the Institute; the proven facts!'—I distrust the facts
and the inferences. Temperament is the veto or limitation-power in the constitution, very justly
applied to restrain an opposite excess in the constitution, but absurdly offered as a bar to
original equity. When virtue is in presence, all subordinate powers sleep. On its own level, or in
view of nature, temperament is final. I see not, if one be once caught in this trap of so-called
sciences, any escape for the man from the links of the chain of physical necessity. Given such an
embryo, such a history must follow. On this platform one lives in a sty of sensualism, and would
soon come to suicide. But it is impossible that the creative power should exclude itself. Into
every intelligence there is a door which is never closed, through which the creator passes. The
intellect, seeker of absolute truth, or the heart, lover of absolute good, intervenes for our
succor, and at one whisper of these high powers we awake from ineffectual struggles with this
nightmare. We hurl it into its own hell, and cannot again contract ourselves to so base a state.
The secret of the illusoriness is in the necessity of a succession of moods or objects. Gladly
we would anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand. This onward trick of nature is too strong for
us: Pero si muove. When at night I look at the moon and stars, I seem stationary, and they to
hurry. Our love of the real draws us to permanence, but health of body consists in circulation,
and sanity of mind in variety or facility of association. We need change of objects. Dedication to
one thought is quickly odious. We house with the insane, and must humor them; then
conversation dies out. Once I took such delight in Montaigne, that I thought I should not need
any other book; before that, in Shakspeare; then in Plutarch; then in Plotinus; at one time in
Bacon; afterwards in Goethe; even in Bettine; but now I turn the pages of either of them
languidly, whilst I still cherish their genius. So with pictures; each will bear an emphasis of
attention once, which it cannot retain, though we fain would continue to be pleased in that
manner. How strongly I have felt of pictures that when you have seen one well, you must take
your leave of it; you shall never see it again. I have had good lessons from pictures which I have
since seen without emotion or remark. A deduction must be made from the opinion which even
the wise express of a new book or occurrence. Their opinion gives me tidings of their mood,
and some vague guess at the new fact, but is nowise to be trusted as the lasting relation
between that intellect and that thing. The child asks, 'Mamma, why don't I like the story as well
as when you told it me yesterday?' Alas! child it is even so with the oldest cherubim of
knowledge. But will it answer thy question to say, Because thou wert born to a whole and this
story is a particular? The reason of the pain this discovery causes us (and we make it late in
respect to works of art and intellect), is the plaint of tragedy which murmurs from it in regard to
persons, to friendship and love.
That immobility and absence of elasticity which we find in the arts, we find with more pain in
the artist. There is no power of expansion in men. Our friends early appear to us as
representatives of certain ideas which they never pass or exceed. They stand on the brink of the
ocean of thought and power, but they never take the single step that would bring them there. A
man is like a bit of Labrador spar, which has no lustre as you turn it in your hand until you come
to a particular angle; then it shows deep and beautiful colors. There is no adaptation or
universal applicability in men, but each has his special talent, and the mastery of successful
men consists in adroitly keeping themselves where and when that turn shall be oftenest to be
practised. We do what we must, and call it by the best names we can, and would fain have the
praise of having intended the result which ensues. I cannot recall any form of man who is not
superfluous sometimes. But is not this pitiful? Life is not worth the taking, to do tricks in.
Of course it needs the whole society to give the symmetry we seek. The party-colored wheel
must revolve very fast to appear white. Something is earned too by conversing with so much
folly and defect. In fine, whoever loses, we are always of the gaining party. Divinity is behind
our failures and follies also. The plays of children are nonsense, but very educative nonsense.
So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with commerce, government, church, marriage,
and so with the history of every man's bread, and the ways by which he is to come by it. Like a
bird which alights nowhere, but hops perpetually from bough to bough, is the Power which
abides in no man and in no woman, but for a moment speaks from this one, and for another
moment from that one.
But what help from these fineries or pedantries? What help from thought? Life is not
dialectics. We, I think, in these times, have had lessons enough of the futility of criticism. Our
young people have thought and written much on labor and reform, and for all that they have
written, neither the world nor themselves have got on a step. Intellectual tasting of life will not
supersede muscular activity. If a man should consider the nicety of the passage of a piece of
bread down his throat, he would starve. At Education-Farm, the noblest theory of life sat on the
noblest figures of young men and maidens, quite powerless and melancholy. It would not rake
or pitch a ton of hay; it would not rub down a horse; and the men and maidens it left pale and
hungry. A political orator wittily compared our party promises to western roads, which opened
stately enough, with planted trees on either side to tempt the traveller, but soon became
narrow and narrower and ended in a squirrel-track and ran up a tree. So does culture with us; it
ends in headache. Unspeakably sad and barren does life look to those who a few months ago
were dazzled with the splendor of the promise of the times. "There is now no longer any right
course of action nor any self-devotion left among the Iranis." Objections and criticism we have
had our fill of. There are objections to every course of life and action, and the practical wisdom
infers an indifferency, from the omnipresence of objection. The whole frame of things preaches
indifferency. Do not craze yourself with thinking, but go about your business anywhere. Life is
not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed people who can enjoy
what they find, without question. Nature hates peeping, and our mothers speak her very sense
when they say, "Children, eat your victuals, and say no more of it." To fill the hour,—that is
happiness; to fill the hour and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval. We live amid
surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them. Under the oldest mouldiest
conventions a man of native force prospers just as well as in the newest world, and that by skill
of handling and treatment. He can take hold anywhere. Life itself is a mixture of power and
form, and will not bear the least excess of either. To finish the moment, to find the journey's
end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom. It is not the
part of men, but of fanatics, or of mathematicians if you will, to say that the shortness of life
considered, it is not worth caring whether for so short a duration we were sprawling in want or
sitting high. Since our office is with moments, let us husband them. Five minutes of today are
worth as much to me as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and
our own, today. Let us treat the men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps
they are. Men live in their fancy, like drunkards whose hands are too soft and tremulous for
successful labor. It is a tempest of fancies, and the only ballast I know is a respect to the present
hour. Without any shadow of doubt, amidst this vertigo of shows and politics, I settle myself
ever the firmer in the creed that we should not postpone and refer and wish, but do broad
justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with, accepting our actual companions and
circumstances, however humble or odious as the mystic officials to whom the universe has
delegated its whole pleasure for us. If these are mean and malignant, their contentment, which
is the last victory of justice, is a more satisfying echo to the heart than the voice of poets and
the casual sympathy of admirable persons. I think that however a thoughtful man may suffer
from the defects and absurdities of his company, he cannot without affectation deny to any set
of men and women a sensibility to extraordinary merit. The coarse and frivolous have an
instinct of superiority, if they have not a sympathy, and honor it in their blind capricious way
with sincere homage.
The fine young people despise life, but in me, and in such as with me are free from
dyspepsia, and to whom a day is a sound and solid good, it is a great excess of politeness to
look scornful and to cry for company. I am grown by sympathy a little eager and sentimental,
but leave me alone and I should relish every hour and what it brought me, the potluck of the
day, as heartily as the oldest gossip in the bar-room. I am thankful for small mercies. I
compared notes with one of my friends who expects everything of the universe and is
disappointed when anything is less than the best, and I found that I begin at the other extreme,
expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate goods. I accept the clangor and
jangle of contrary tendencies. I find my account in sots and bores also. They give a reality to the
circumjacent picture which such a vanishing meteorous appearance can ill spare. In the
morning I awake and find the old world, wife, babes, and mother, Concord and Boston, the dear
old spiritual world and even the dear old devil not far off. If we will take the good we find,
asking no questions, we shall have heaping measures. The great gifts are not got by analysis.
Everything good is on the highway. The middle region of our being is the temperate zone. We
may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of
sensation. Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry,—a
narrow belt. Moreover, in popular experience everything good is on the highway. A collector
peeps into all the picture-shops of Europe for a landscape of Poussin, a crayon-sketch of
Salvator; but the Transfiguration, the Last Judgment, the Communion of St. Jerome, and what
are as transcendent as these, are on the walls of the Vatican, the Uffizii, or the Louvre, where
every footman may see them; to say nothing of Nature's pictures in every street, of sunsets and
sunrises every day, and the sculpture of the human body never absent. A collector recently
bought at public auction, in London, for one hundred and fifty-seven guineas, an autograph of
Shakspeare; but for nothing a school-boy can read Hamlet and can detect secrets of highest
concernment yet unpublished therein. I think I will never read any but the commonest books,—
the Bible, Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, and Milton. Then we are impatient of so public a life and
planet, and run hither and thither for nooks and secrets. The imagination delights in the
woodcraft of Indians, trappers, and bee-hunters. We fancy that we are strangers, and not so
intimately domesticated in the planet as the wild man and the wild beast and bird. But the
exclusion reaches them also; reaches the climbing, flying, gliding, feathered and four-footed
man. Fox and woodchuck, hawk and snipe and bittern, when nearly seen, have no more root in
the deep world than man, and are just such superficial tenants of the globe. Then the new
molecular philosophy shows astronomical interspaces betwixt atom and atom, shows that the
world is all outside; it has no inside.
The mid-world is best. Nature, as we know her, is no saint. The lights of the church, the
ascetics, Gentoos, and corn-eaters, she does not distinguish by any favor. She comes eating and
drinking and sinning. Her darlings, the great, the strong, the beautiful, are not children of our
law; do not come out of the Sunday School, nor weigh their food, nor punctually keep the
commandments. If we will be strong with her strength we must not harbor such disconsolate
consciences, borrowed too from the consciences of other nations. We must set up the strong
present tense against all the rumors of wrath, past or to come. So many things are unsettled
which it is of the first importance to settle;—and, pending their settlement, we will do as we do.
Whilst the debate goes forward on the equity of commerce, and will not be closed for a century
or two, New and Old England may keep shop. Law of copyright and international copyright is to
be discussed, and in the interim we will sell our books for the most we can. Expediency of
literature, reason of literature, lawfulness of writing down a thought, is questioned; much is to
say on both sides, and, while the fight waxes hot, thou, dearest scholar, stick to thy foolish task,
add a line every hour, and between whiles add a line. Right to hold land, right of property, is
disputed, and the conventions convene, and before the vote is taken, dig away in your garden,
and spend your earnings as a waif or godsend to all serene and beautiful purposes. Life itself is
a bubble and a skepticism, and a sleep within a sleep. Grant it, and as much more as they will,—
but thou, God's darling! heed thy private dream; thou wilt not be missed in the scorning and
skepticism; there are enough of them; stay there in thy closet and toil until the rest are agreed
what to do about it. Thy sickness, they say, and thy puny habit require that thou do this or
avoid that, but know that thy life is a flitting state, a tent for a night, and do thou, sick or well,
finish that stint. Thou art sick, but shalt not be worse, and the universe, which holds thee dear,
shall be the better.
Human life is made up of the two elements, power and form, and the proportion must be
invariably kept if we would have it sweet and sound. Each of these elements in excess makes a
mischief as hurtful as its defect. Everything runs to excess; every good quality is noxious if
unmixed, and, to carry the danger to the edge of ruin, nature causes each man's peculiarity to
superabound. Here, among the farms, we adduce the scholars as examples of this treachery.
They are nature's victims of expression. You who see the artist, the orator, the poet, too near,
and find their life no more excellent than that of mechanics or farmers, and themselves victims
of partiality, very hollow and haggard, and pronounce them failures, not heroes, but quacks,—
conclude very reasonably that these arts are not for man, but are disease. Yet nature will not
bear you out. Irresistible nature made men such, and makes legions more of such, every day.
You love the boy reading in a book, gazing at a drawing, or a cast; yet what are these millions
who read and behold, but incipient writers and sculptors? Add a little more of that quality
which now reads and sees, and they will seize the pen and chisel. And if one remembers how
innocently he began to be an artist, he perceives that nature joined with his enemy. A man is a
golden impossibility. The line he must walk is a hair's breadth. The wise through excess of
wisdom is made a fool.
How easily, if fate would suffer it, we might keep forever these beautiful limits, and adjust
ourselves, once for all, to the perfect calculation of the kingdom of known cause and effect. In
the street and in the newspapers, life appears so plain a business that manly resolution and
adherence to the multiplication-table through all weathers will insure success. But ah! presently
comes a day, or is it only a half-hour, with its angel-whispering,—which discomfits the
conclusions of nations and of years! Tomorrow again everything looks real and angular, the
habitual standards are reinstated, common sense is as rare as genius,—is the basis of genius,
and experience is hands and feet to every enterprise;—and yet, he who should do his business
on this understanding would be quickly bankrupt. Power keeps quite another road than the
turnpikes of choice and will; namely the subterranean and invisible tunnels and channels of life.
It is ridiculous that we are diplomatists, and doctors, and considerate people: there are no
dupes like these. Life is a series of surprises, and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were
not. God delights to isolate us every day, and hide from us the past and the future. We would
look about us, but with grand politeness he draws down before us an impenetrable screen of
purest sky, and another behind us of purest sky. 'You will not remember,' he seems to say, `and
you will not expect.' All good conversation, manners, and action, come from a spontaneity
which forgets usages and makes the moment great. Nature hates calculators; her methods are
saltatory and impulsive. Man lives by pulses; our organic movements are such; and the
chemical and ethereal agents are undulatory and alternate; and the mind goes antagonizing on,
and never prospers but by fits. We thrive by casualties. Our chief experiences have been casual.
The most attractive class of people are those who are powerful obliquely and not by the direct
stroke; men of genius, but not yet accredited; one gets the cheer of their light without paying
too great a tax. Theirs is the beauty of the bird or the morning light, and not of art. In the
thought of genius there is always a surprise; and the moral sentiment is well called "the
newness," for it is never other; as new to the oldest intelligence as to the young child;—"the
kingdom that cometh without observation." In like manner, for practical success, there must
not be too much design. A man will not be observed in doing that which he can do best. There
is a certain magic about his properest action which stupefies your powers of observation, so
that though it is done before you, you wist not of it. The art of life has a pudency, and will not
be exposed. Every man is an impossibility until he is born; every thing impossible until we see a
success. The ardors of piety agree at last with the coldest skepticism,—that nothing is of us or
our works,—that all is of God. Nature will not spare us the smallest leaf of laurel. All writing
comes by the grace of God, and all doing and having. I would gladly be moral and keep due
metes and bounds, which I dearly love, and allow the most to the will of man; but I have set my
heart on honesty in this chapter, and I can see nothing at last, in success or failure, than more
or less of vital force supplied from the Eternal. The results of life are uncalculated and
uncalculable. The years teach much which the days never know. The persons who compose our
company, converse, and come and go, and design and execute many things, and somewhat
comes of it all, but an unlooked-for result. The individual is always mistaken. He designed many
things, and drew in other persons as coadjutors, quarrelled with some or all, blundered much,
and something is done; all are a little advanced, but the individual is always mistaken. It turns
out somewhat new and very unlike what he promised himself.
The ancients, struck with this irreducibleness of the elements of human life to calculation,
exalted Chance into a divinity; but that is to stay too long at the spark, which glitters truly at
one point, but the universe is warm with the latency of the same fire. The miracle of life which
will not be expounded but will remain a miracle, introduces a new element. In the growth of
the embryo, Sir Everard Home I think noticed that the evolution was not from one central point,
but coactive from three or more points. Life has no memory. That which proceeds in succession
might be remembered, but that which is coexistent, or ejaculated from a deeper cause, as yet
far from being conscious, knows not its own tendency. So is it with us, now skeptical or without
unity, because immersed in forms and effects all seeming to be of equal yet hostile value, and
now religious, whilst in the reception of spiritual law. Bear with these distractions, with this
coetaneous growth of the parts; they will one day be members, and obey one will. On that one
will, on that secret cause, they nail our attention and hope. Life is hereby melted into an
expectation or a religion. Underneath the inharmonious and trivial particulars, is a musical
perfection; the Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or seam. Do but
observe the mode of our illumination. When I converse with a profound mind, or if at any time
being alone I have good thoughts, I do not at once arrive at satisfactions, as when, being thirsty,
I drink water; or go to the fire, being cold; no! but I am at first apprised of my vicinity to a new
and excellent region of life. By persisting to read or to think, this region gives further sign of
itself, as it were in flashes of light, in sudden discoveries of its profound beauty and repose, as if
the clouds that covered it parted at intervals and showed the approaching traveller the inland
mountains, with the tranquil eternal meadows spread at their base, whereon flocks graze and
shepherds pipe and dance. But every insight from this realm of thought is felt as initial, and
promises a sequel. I do not make it; I arrive there, and behold what was there already. I make!
O no! I clap my hands in infantine joy and amazement before the first opening to me of this
august magnificence, old with the love and homage of innumerable ages, young with the life of
life, the sunbright Mecca of the desert. And what a future it opens! I feel a new heart beating
with the love of the new beauty. I am ready to die out of nature and be born again into this new
yet unapproachable America I have found in the West:—
"Since neither now nor yesterday began
These thoughts, which have been ever, nor yet can
 A man be found who their first entrance knew."
If I have described life as a flux of moods, I must now add that there is that in us which
changes not and which ranks all sensations and states of mind. The consciousness in each man
is a sliding scale, which identifies him now with the First Cause, and now with the flesh of his
body; life above life, in infinite degrees. The sentiment from which it sprung determines the
dignity of any deed, and the question ever is, not what you have done or forborne, but at
whose command you have done or forborne it.
Fortune, Minerva, Muse, Holy Ghost,—these are quaint names, too narrow to cover this
unbounded substance. The baffled intellect must still kneel before this cause, which refuses to
be named,—ineffable cause, which every fine genius has essayed to represent by some
emphatic symbol, as, Thales by water, Anaximenes by air, Anaxagoras by (Nous) thought,
Zoroaster by fire, Jesus and the moderns by love; and the metaphor of each has become a
national religion. The Chinese Mencius has not been the least successful in his generalization. "I
fully understand language," he said, "and nourish well my vast-flowing vigor."—"I beg to ask
what you call vast-flowing vigor?"—said his companion. "The explanation," replied Mencius, "is
difficult. This vigor is supremely great, and in the highest degree unbending. Nourish it correctly
and do it no injury, and it will fill up the vacancy between heaven and earth. This vigor accords
with and assists justice and reason, and leaves no hunger."—In our more correct writing we
give to this generalization the name of Being, and thereby confess that we have arrived as far as
we can go. Suffice it for the joy of the universe that we have not arrived at a wall, but at
interminable oceans. Our life seems not present so much as prospective; not for the affairs on
which it is wasted, but as a hint of this vast-flowing vigor. Most of life seems to be mere
advertisement of faculty; information is given us not to sell ourselves cheap; that we are very
great. So, in particulars, our greatness is always in a tendency or direction, not in an action. It is
for us to believe in the rule, not in the exception. The noble are thus known from the ignoble.
So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the
immortality of the soul or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material
circumstance and is the principal fact in the history of the globe. Shall we describe this cause as
that which works directly? The spirit is not helpless or needful of mediate organs. It has
plentiful powers and direct effects. I am explained without explaining, I am felt without acting,
and where I am not. Therefore all just persons are satisfied with their own praise. They refuse
to explain themselves, and are content that new actions should do them that office. They
believe that we communicate without speech and above speech, and that no right action of
ours is quite unaffecting to our friends, at whatever distance; for the influence of action is not
to be measured by miles. Why should I fret myself because a circumstance has occurred which
hinders my presence where I was expected? If I am not at the meeting, my presence where I
am should be as useful to the commonwealth of friendship and wisdom, as would be my
presence in that place. I exert the same quality of power in all places. Thus journeys the mighty
Ideal before us; it never was known to fall into the rear. No man ever came to an experience
which was satiating, but his good is tidings of a better. Onward and onward! In liberated
moments we know that a new picture of life and duty is already possible; the elements already
exist in many minds around you of a doctrine of life which shall transcend any written record
we have. The new statement will comprise the skepticisms as well as the faiths of society, and
out of unbeliefs a creed shall be formed. For skepticisms are not gratuitous or lawless, but are
limitations of the affirmative statement, and the new philosophy must take them in and make
affirmations outside of them, just as much as it must include the oldest beliefs.
It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made that we exist. That
discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards we suspect our instruments. We have
learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting
these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors.
Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects. Once we
lived in what we saw; now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to absorb all
things, engages us. Nature, art, persons, letters, religions, objects, successively tumble in, and
God is but one of its ideas. Nature and literature are subjective phenomena; every evil and
every good thing is a shadow which we cast. The street is full of humiliations to the proud. As
the fop contrived to dress his bailiffs in his livery and make them wait on his guests at table, so
the chagrins which the bad heart gives off as bubbles, at once take form as ladies and
gentlemen in the street, shopmen or bar-keepers in hotels, and threaten or insult whatever is
threatenable and insultable in us. 'Tis the same with our idolatries. People forget that it is the
eye which makes the horizon, and the rounding mind's eye which makes this or that man a type
or representative of humanity, with the name of hero or saint. Jesus, the "providential man," is
a good man on whom many people are agreed that these optical laws shall take effect. By love
on one part and by forbearance to press objection on the other part, it is for a time settled, that
we will look at him in the centre of the horizon, and ascribe to him the properties that will
attach to any man so seen. But the longest love or aversion has a speedy term. The great and
crescive self, rooted in absolute nature, supplants all relative existence and ruins the kingdom
of mortal friendship and love. Marriage (in what is called the spiritual world) is impossible,
because of the inequality between every subject and every object. The subject is the receiver of
Godhead, and at every comparison must feel his being enhanced by that cryptic might. Though
not in energy, yet by presence, this magazine of substance cannot be otherwise than felt; nor
can any force of intellect attribute to the object the proper deity which sleeps or wakes forever
in every subject. Never can love make consciousness and ascription equal in force. There will be
the same gulf between every me and thee as between the original and the picture. The
universe is the bride of the soul. All private sympathy is partial. Two human beings are like
globes, which can touch only in a point, and whilst they remain in contact, all other points of
each of the spheres are inert; their turn must also come, and the longer a particular union lasts
the more energy of appetency the parts not in union acquire.
Life will be imaged, but cannot be divided nor doubled. Any invasion of its unity would be
chaos. The soul is not twin-born but the only begotten, and though revealing itself as child in
time, child in appearance, is of a fatal and universal power, admitting no co-life. Every day,
every act betrays the ill-concealed deity. We believe in ourselves as we do not believe in others.
We permit all things to ourselves, and that which we call sin in others is experiment for us. It is
an instance of our faith in ourselves that men never speak of crime as lightly as they think; or
every man thinks a latitude safe for himself which is nowise to be indulged to another. The act
looks very differently on the inside and on the outside; in its quality and in its consequences.
Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does
not unsettle him or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be
contemplated; but in its sequel it turns out to be a horrible jangle and confounding of all
relations. Especially the crimes that spring from love seem right and fair from the actor's point
of view, but when acted are found destructive of society. No man at last believes that he can be
lost, nor that the crime in him is as black as in the felon. Because the intellect qualifies in our
own case the moral judgments. For there is no crime to the intellect. That is antinomian or
hypernomian, and judges law as well as fact. "It is worse than a crime, it is a blunder," said
Napoleon, speaking the language of the intellect. To it, the world is a problem in mathematics
or the science of quantity, and it leaves out praise and blame and all weak emotions. All stealing
is comparative. If you come to absolutes, pray who does not steal? Saints are sad, because they
behold sin (even when they speculate), from the point of view of the conscience, and not of the
intellect; a confusion of thought. Sin, seen from the thought, is a diminution, or less: seen from
the conscience or will, it is pravity or bad. The intellect names it shade, absence of light, and no
essence. The conscience must feel it as essence, essential evil. This it is not; it has an objective
existence, but no subjective.
Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall successively into the
subject itself. The subject exists, the subject enlarges; all things sooner or later fall into place.
As I am, so I see; use what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are;
Hermes, Cadmus, Columbus, Newton, Bonaparte, are the mind's ministers. Instead of feeling a
poverty when we encounter a great man, let us treat the new comer like a travelling geologist
who passes through our estate and shows us good slate, or limestone, or anthracite, in our
brush pasture. The partial action of each strong mind in one direction is a telescope for the
objects on which it is pointed. But every other part of knowledge is to be pushed to the same
extravagance, ere the soul attains her due sphericity. Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily
her own tail? If you could look with her eyes you might see her surrounded with hundreds of
figures performing complex dramas, with tragic and comic issues, long conversations, many
characters, many ups and downs of fate,—and meantime it is only puss and her tail. How long
before our masquerade will end its noise of tambourines, laughter, and shouting, and we shall
find it was a solitary performance? A subject and an object,—it takes so much to make the
galvanic circuit complete, but magnitude adds nothing. What imports it whether it is Kepler and
the sphere, Columbus and America, a reader and his book, or puss with her tail?
It is true that all the muses and love and religion hate these developments, and will find a
way to punish the chemist who publishes in the parlor the secrets of the laboratory. And we
cannot say too little of our constitutional necessity of seeing things under private aspects, or
saturated with our humors. And yet is the God the native of these bleak rocks. That need makes
in morals the capital virtue of self-trust. We must hold hard to this poverty, however
scandalous, and by more vigorous self-recoveries, after the sallies of action, possess our axis
more firmly. The life of truth is cold and so far mournful; but it is not the slave of tears,
contritions and perturbations. It does not attempt another's work, nor adopt another's facts. It
is a main lesson of wisdom to know your own from another's. I have learned that I cannot
dispose of other people's facts; but I possess such a key to my own as persuades me, against all
their denials, that they also have a key to theirs. A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma
of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he give so much as a leg or a
finger they will drown him. They wish to be saved from the mischiefs of their vices, but not
from their vices. Charity would be wasted on this poor waiting on the symptoms. A wise and
hardy physician will say, Come out of that, as the first condition of advice.
In this our talking America we are ruined by our good nature and listening on all sides. This
compliance takes away the power of being greatly useful. A man should not be able to look
other than directly and forthright. A preoccupied attention is the only answer to the
importunate frivolity of other people; an attention, and to an aim which makes their wants
frivolous. This is a divine answer, and leaves no appeal and no hard thoughts. In Flaxman's
drawing of the Eumenides of Aeschylus, Orestes supplicates Apollo, whilst the Furies sleep on
the threshold. The face of the god expresses a shade of regret and compassion, but is calm with
the conviction of the irreconcilableness of the two spheres. He is born into other politics, into
the eternal and beautiful. The man at his feet asks for his interest in turmoils of the earth, into
which his nature cannot enter. And the Eumenides there lying express pictorially this disparity.
The god is surcharged with his divine destiny.
Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness,—these are
threads on the loom of time, these are the lords of life. I dare not assume to give their order,
but I name them as I find them in my way. I know better than to claim any completeness for my
picture. I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me. I can very confidently announce one or
another law, which throws itself into relief and form, but I am too young yet by some ages to
compile a code. I gossip for my hour concerning the eternal politics. I have seen many fair
pictures not in vain. A wonderful time I have lived in. I am not the novice I was fourteen, nor yet
seven years ago. Let who will ask Where is the fruit? I find a private fruit sufficient. This is a
fruit,—that I should not ask for a rash effect from meditations, counsels and the hiving of
truths. I should feel it pitiful to demand a result on this town and county, an overt effect on the
instant month and year. The effect is deep and secular as the cause. It works on periods in
which mortal lifetime is lost. All I know is reception; I am and I have: but I do not get, and when
I have fancied I had gotten anything, I found I did not. I worship with wonder the great Fortune.
My reception has been so large, that I am not annoyed by receiving this or that
superabundantly. I say to the Genius, if he will pardon the proverb, In for a mill, in for a million.
When I receive a new gift, I do not macerate my body to make the account square, for if I
should die I could not make the account square. The benefit overran the merit the first day, and
has overrun the merit ever since. The merit itself, so-called, I reckon part of the receiving.
Also that hankering after an overt or practical effect seems to me an apostasy. In good
earnest I am willing to spare this most unnecessary deal of doing. Life wears to me a visionary
face. Hardest roughest action is visionary also. It is but a choice between soft and turbulent
dreams. People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am very content
with knowing, if only I could know. That is an august entertainment, and would suffice me a
great while. To know a little would be worth the expense of this world. I hear always the law of
Adrastia, "that every soul which had acquired any truth, should be safe from harm until another
period."
I know that the world I converse with in the city and in the farms, is not the world I think. I
observe that difference, and shall observe it. One day I shall know the value and law of this
discrepance. But I have not found that much was gained by manipular attempts to realize the
world of thought. Many eager persons successively make an experiment in this way, and make
themselves ridiculous. They acquire democratic manners, they foam at the mouth, they hate
and deny. Worse, I observe that in the history of mankind there is never a solitary example of
success,—taking their own tests of success. I say this polemically, or in reply to the inquiry, Why
not realize your world? But far be from me the despair which prejudges the law by a paltry
empiricism;—since there never was a right endeavor but it succeeded. Patience and patience,
we shall win at the last. We must be very suspicious of the deceptions of the element of time. It
takes a good deal of time to eat or to sleep, or to earn a hundred dollars, and a very little time
to entertain a hope and an insight which becomes the light of our life. We dress our garden, eat
our dinners, discuss the household with our wives, and these things make no impression, are
forgotten next week; but, in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity
and revelations which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the
ridicule, never mind the defeat; up again, old heart!—it seems to say,—there is victory yet for
all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize will be the transformation of
genius into practical power.

CHARACTER.

The sun set; but set not his hope:

Stars rose; his faith was earlier up:
Fixed on the enormous galaxy,
 Deeper and older seemed his eye:
And matched his sufferance sublime
The taciturnity of time.
He spoke, and words more soft than rain
Brought the Age of Gold again:
His action won such reverence sweet,
As hid all measure of the feat.

Work of his hand

He nor commends nor grieves
Pleads for itself the fact;
As unrepenting Nature leaves
Her every act.

III. CHARACTER.

I HAVE read that those who listened to Lord Chatham felt that there was something finer in
the man than any thing which he said. It has been complained of our brilliant English historian
of the French Revolution that when he has told all his facts about Mirabeau, they do not justify
his estimate of his genius. The Gracchi, Agis, Cleomenes, and others of Plutarch's heroes, do not
in the record of facts equal their own fame. Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl of Essex, Sir Walter
Raleigh, are men of great figure and of few deeds. We cannot find the smallest part of the
personal weight of Washington in the narrative of his exploits. The authority of the name of
Schiller is too great for his books. This inequality of the reputation to the works or the
anecdotes is not accounted for by saying that the reverberation is longer than the thunder-clap,
but somewhat resided in these men which begot an expectation that outran all their
performance. The largest part of their power was latent. This is that which we call Character,—
a reserved force which acts directly by presence, and without means. It is conceived of as a
certain undemonstrable force, a Familiar or Genius, by whose impulses the man is guided but
whose counsels he cannot impart; which is company for him, so that such men are often
solitary, or if they chance to be social, do not need society but can entertain themselves very
well alone. The purest literary talent appears at one time great, at another time small, but
character is of a stellar and undiminishable greatness. What others effect by talent or by
eloquence, this man accomplishes by some magnetism. "Half his strength he put not forth." His
victories are by demonstration of superiority, and not by crossing of bayonets. He conquers
because his arrival alters the face of affairs. "O Iole! how did you know that Hercules was a
god?" "Because," answered Iole, "I was content the moment my eyes fell on him. When I
beheld Theseus, I desired that I might see him offer battle, or at least guide his horses in the
chariot-race; but Hercules did not wait for a contest; he conquered whether he stood, or
walked, or sat, or whatever thing he did." Man, ordinarily a pendant to events, only half
attached, and that awkwardly, to the world he lives in, in these examples appears to share the
life of things, and to be an expression of the same laws which control the tides and the sun,
numbers and quantities.
But to use a more modest illustration and nearer home, I observe that in our political
elections, where this element, if it appears at all, can only occur in its coarsest form, we
sufficiently understand its incomparable rate. The people know that they need in their
representative much more than talent, namely the power to make his talent trusted. They
cannot come at their ends by sending to Congress a learned, acute, and fluent speaker, if he be
not one who, before he was appointed by the people to represent them, was appointed by
Almighty God to stand for a fact,—invincibly persuaded of that fact in himself,—so that the
most confident and the most violent persons learn that here is resistance on which both
impudence and terror are wasted, namely faith in a fact. The men who carry their points do not
need to inquire of their constituents what they should say, but are themselves the country
which they represent; nowhere are its emotions or opinions so instant and true as in them;
nowhere so pure from a selfish infusion. The constituency at home hearkens to their words,
watches the color of their cheek, and therein, as in a glass, dresses its own. Our public
assemblies are pretty good tests of manly force. Our frank countrymen of the west and south
have a taste for character, and like to know whether the New Englander is a substantial man, or
whether the hand can pass through him.
The same motive force appears in trade. There are geniuses in trade, as well as in war, or the
State, or letters; and the reason why this or that man is fortunate is not to be told. It lies in the
man; that is all anybody can tell you about it. See him and you will know as easily why he
succeeds, as, if you see Napoleon, you would comprehend his fortune. In the new objects we
recognize the old game, the Habit of fronting the fact, and not dealing with it at second hand,
through the perceptions of somebody else. Nature seems to authorize trade, as soon as you see
the natural merchant, who appears not so much a private agent as her factor and Minister of
Commerce. His natural probity combines with his insight into the fabric of society to put him
above tricks, and he communicates to all his own faith that contracts are of no private
interpretation. The habit of his mind is a reference to standards of natural equity and public
advantage; and he inspires respect and the wish to deal with him, both for the quiet spirit of
honor which attends him, and for the intellectual pastime which the spectacle of so much
ability affords. This immensely stretched trade, which makes the capes of the Southern Ocean
his wharves, and the Atlantic Sea his familiar port, centres in his brain only; and nobody in the
universe can make his place good. In his parlor I see very well that he has been at hard work
this morning, with that knitted brow and that settled humor, which all his desire to be
courteous cannot shake off. I see plainly how many firm acts have been done; how many valiant
noes have this day been spoken, when others would have uttered ruinous yeas. I see, with the
pride of art and skill of masterly arithmetic and power of remote combination, the
consciousness of being an agent and playfellow of the original laws of the world. He too
believes that none can supply him, and that a man must be born to trade or he cannot learn it.
This virtue draws the mind more when it appears in action to ends not so mixed. It works
with most energy in the smallest companies and in private relations. In all cases it is an
extraordinary and incomputable agent. The excess of physical strength is paralyzed by it. Higher
natures overpower lower ones by affecting them with a certain sleep. The faculties are locked
up, and offer no resistance. Perhaps that is the universal law. When the high cannot bring up
the low to itself, it benumbs it, as man charms down the resistance of the lower animals. Men
exert on each other a similar occult power. How often has the influence of a true master
realized all the tales of magic! A river of command seemed to run down from his eyes into all
those who beheld him, a torrent of strong sad light, like an Ohio or Danube, which pervaded
them with his thoughts and colored all events with the hue of his mind. "What means did you
employ?" was the question asked of the wife of Concini, in regard to her treatment of Mary of
Medici; and the answer was, "Only that influence which every strong mind has over a weak
one." Cannot Caesar in irons shuffle off the irons and transfer them to the person of Hippo or
Thraso the turnkey? Is an iron handcuff so immutable a bond? Suppose a slaver on the coast of
Guinea should take on board a gang of negroes which should contain persons of the stamp of
Toussaint L'Ouverture: or, let us fancy, under these swarthy masks he has a gang of
Washingtons in chains. When they arrive at Cuba, will the relative order of the ship's company
be the same? Is there nothing but rope and iron? Is there no love, no reverence? Is there never
a glimpse of right in a poor slave-captain's mind; and cannot these be supposed available to
break or elude or in any manner overmatch the tension of an inch or two of iron ring?
This is a natural power, like light and heat, and all nature cooperates with it. The reason why
we feel one man's presence and do not feel another's is as simple as gravity. Truth is the
summit of being; justice is the application of it to affairs. All individual natures stand in a scale,
according to the purity of this element in them. The will of the pure runs down from them into
other natures as water runs down from a higher into a lower vessel. This natural force is no
more to be withstood than any other natural force. We can drive a stone upward for a moment
into the air, but it is yet true that all stones will forever fall; and whatever instances can be
quoted of unpunished theft, or of a lie which somebody credited, justice must prevail, and it is
the privilege of truth to make itself believed. Character is this moral order seen through the
medium of an individual nature. An individual is an encloser. Time and space, liberty and
necessity, truth and thought, are left at large no longer. Now, the universe is a close or pound.
All things exist in the man tinged with the manners of his soul. With what quality is in him he
infuses all nature that he can reach; nor does he tend to lose himself in vastness, but, at how
long a curve soever, all his regards return into his own good at last. He animates all he can, and
he sees only what he animates. He encloses the world, as the patriot does his country, as a
material basis for his character, and a theatre for action. A healthy soul stands united with the
Just and the True, as the magnet arranges itself with the pole; so that he stands to all beholders
like a transparent object betwixt them and the sun, and whoso journeys towards the sun,
journeys towards that person. He is thus the medium of the highest influence to all who are not
on the same level. Thus, men of character are the conscience of the society to which they
belong.
The natural measure of this power is the resistance of circumstances. Impure men consider
life as it is reflected in opinions, events, and persons. They cannot see the action until it is done.
Yet its moral element preexisted in the actor, and its quality as right or wrong it was easy to
predict. Everything in nature is bipolar, or has a positive and negative pole. There is a male and
a female, a spirit and a fact, a north and a south. Spirit is the positive, the event is the negative.
Will is the north, action the south pole. Character may be ranked as having its natural place in
the north. It shares the magnetic currents of the system. The feeble souls are drawn to the
south or negative pole. They look at the profit or hurt of the action. They never behold a
principle until it is lodged in a person. They do not wish to be lovely, but to be loved. Men of
character like to hear of their faults; the other class do not like to hear of faults; they worship
events; secure to them a fact, a connection, a certain chain of circumstances, and they will ask
no more. The hero sees that the event is ancillary; it must follow him. A given order of events
has no power to secure to him the satisfaction which the imagination attaches to it; the soul of
goodness escapes from any set of circumstances; whilst prosperity belongs to a certain mind,
and will introduce that power and victory which is its natural fruit, into any order of events. No
change of circumstances can repair a defect of character. We boast our emancipation from
many superstitions; but if we have broken any idols it is through a transfer of the idolatry. What
have I gained, that I no longer immolate a bull to Jove or to Neptune, or a mouse to Hecate;
that I do not tremble before the Eumenides, or the Catholic Purgatory, or the Calvinistic
Judgment-day,—if I quake at opinion, the public opinion, as we call it; or at the threat of
assault, or contumely, or bad neighbors, or poverty, or mutilation, or at the rumor of
revolution, or of murder? If I quake, what matters it what I quake at? Our proper vice takes
form in one or another shape, according to the sex, age, or temperament of the person, and, if
we are capable of fear, will readily find terrors. The covetousness or the malignity which
saddens me when I ascribe it to society, is my own. I am always environed by myself. On the
other part, rectitude is a perpetual victory, celebrated not by cries of joy but by serenity, which
is joy fixed or habitual. It is disgraceful to fly to events for confirmation of our truth and worth.
The capitalist does not run every hour to the broker to coin his advantages into current money
of the realm; he is satisfied to read in the quotations of the market that his stocks have risen.
The same transport which the occurrence of the best events in the best order would occasion
me, I must learn to taste purer in the perception that my position is every hour meliorated, and
does already command those events I desire. That exultation is only to be checked by the
foresight of an order of things so excellent as to throw all our prosperities into the deepest
shade.
The face which character wears to me is self-sufficingness. I revere the person who is riches;
so that I cannot think of him as alone, or poor, or exiled, or unhappy, or a client, but as
perpetual patron, benefactor, and beatified man. Character is centrality, the impossibility of
being displaced or overset. A man should give us a sense of mass. Society is frivolous, and
shreds its day into scraps, its conversation into ceremonies and escapes. But if I go to see an
ingenious man I shall think myself poorly entertained if he give me nimble pieces of
benevolence and etiquette; rather he shall stand stoutly in his place and let me apprehend if it
were only his resistance; know that I have encountered a new and positive quality;—great
refreshment for both of us. It is much that he does not accept the conventional opinions and
practices. That nonconformity will remain a goad and remembrancer, and every inquirer will
have to dispose of him, in the first place. There is nothing real or useful that is not a seat of war.
Our houses ring with laughter and personal and critical gossip, but it helps little. But the uncivil,
unavailable man, who is a problem and a threat to society, whom it cannot let pass in silence
but must either worship or hate,—and to whom all parties feel related, both the leaders of
opinion and the obscure and eccentric,—he helps; he puts America and Europe in the wrong,
and destroys the skepticism which says, 'man is a doll, let us eat and drink, 'tis the best we can
do,' by illuminating the untried and unknown. Acquiescence in the establishment and appeal to
the public, indicate infirm faith, heads which are not clear, and which must see a house built,
before they can comprehend the plan of it. The wise man not only leaves out of his thought the
many, but leaves out the few. Fountains, the self-moved, the absorbed, the commander
because he is commanded, the assured, the primary,—they are good; for these announce the
instant presence of supreme power.
Our action should rest mathematically on our substance. In nature, there are no false
valuations. A pound of water in the ocean-tempest has no more gravity than in a midsummer
pond. All things work exactly according to their quality and according to their quantity; attempt
nothing they cannot do, except man only. He has pretension; he wishes and attempts things
beyond his force. I read in a book of English memoirs, "Mr. Fox (afterwards Lord Holland) said,
he must have the Treasury; he had served up to it, and would have it." Xenophon and his Ten
Thousand were quite equal to what they attempted, and did it; so equal, that it was not
suspected to be a grand and inimitable exploit. Yet there stands that fact unrepeated, a high-
water mark in military history. Many have attempted it since, and not been equal to it. It is only
on reality that any power of action can be based. No institution will be better than the
institutor. I knew an amiable and accomplished person who undertook a practical reform, yet I
was never able to find in him the enterprise of love he took in hand. He adopted it by ear and
by the understanding from the books he had been reading. All his action was tentative, a piece
of the city carried out into the fields, and was the city still, and no new fact, and could not
inspire enthusiasm. Had there been something latent in the man, a terrible undemonstrated
genius agitating and embarrassing his demeanor, we had watched for its advent. It is not
enough that the intellect should see the evils and their remedy. We shall still postpone our
existence, nor take the ground to which we are entitled, whilst it is only a thought and not a
spirit that incites us. We have not yet served up to it.
 These are properties of life, and another trait is the notice of incessant growth. Men should
be intelligent and earnest. They must also make us feel that they have a controlling happy
future opening before them, whose early twilights already kindle in the passing hour. The hero
is misconceived and misreported; he cannot therefore wait to unravel any man's blunders; he is
again on his road, adding new powers and honors to his domain and new claims on your heart,
which will bankrupt you if you have loitered about the old things and have not kept your
relation to him by adding to your wealth. New actions are the only apologies and explanations
of old ones which the noble can bear to offer or to receive. If your friend has displeased you,
you shall not sit down to consider it, for he has already lost all memory of the passage, and has
doubled his power to serve you, and ere you can rise up again will burden you with blessings.
We have no pleasure in thinking of a benevolence that is only measured by its works. Love is
inexhaustible, and if its estate is wasted, its granary emptied, still cheers and enriches, and the
man, though he sleep, seems to purify the air and his house to adorn the landscape and
strengthen the laws. People always recognize this difference. We know who is benevolent, by
quite other means than the amount of subscription to soup-societies. It is only low merits that
can be enumerated. Fear, when your friends say to you what you have done well, and say it
through; but when they stand with uncertain timid looks of respect and half-dislike, and must
suspend their judgment for years to come, you may begin to hope. Those who live to the future
must always appear selfish to those who live to the present. Therefore it was droll in the good
Riemer, who has written memoirs of Goethe, to make out a list of his donations and good
deeds, as, so many hundred thalers given to Stilling, to Hegel, to Tischbein; a lucrative place
found for Professor Voss, a post under the Grand Duke for Herder, a pension for Meyer, two
professors recommended to foreign universities; &c., &c. The longest list of specifications of
benefit would look very short. A man is a poor creature if he is to be measured so. For all these
of course are exceptions, and the rule and hodiernal life of a good man is benefaction. The true
charity of Goethe is to be inferred from the account he gave Dr. Eckermann of the way in which
he had spent his fortune. "Each bon-mot of mine has cost a purse of gold. Half a million of my
own money, the fortune I inherited, my salary and the large income derived from my writings
for fifty years back, have been expended to instruct me in what I now know. I have besides
seen," &c.
I own it is but poor chat and gossip to go to enumerate traits of this simple and rapid power,
and we are painting the lightning with charcoal; but in these long nights and vacations I like to
console myself so. Nothing but itself can copy it. A word warm from the heart enriches me. I
surrender at discretion. How death-cold is literary genius before this fire of life! These are the
touches that reanimate my heavy soul and give it eyes to pierce the dark of nature. I find,
where I thought myself poor, there was I most rich. Thence comes a new intellectual exaltation,
to be again rebuked by some new exhibition of character. Strange alternation of attraction and
repulsion! Character repudiates intellect, yet excites it; and character passes into thought, is
published so, and then is ashamed before new flashes of moral worth.
Character is nature in the highest form. It is of no use to ape it or to contend with it.
Somewhat is possible of resistance, and of persistence, and of creation, to this power, which
will foil all emulation.
This masterpiece is best where no hands but nature's have been laid on it. Care is taken that
the greatly-destined shall slip up into life in the shade, with no thousand-eyed Athens to watch
and blazon every new thought, every blushing emotion of young genius. Two persons lately,
very young children of the most high God, have given me occasion for thought. When I
explored the source of their sanctity and charm for the imagination, it seemed as if each
answered, 'From my nonconformity; I never listened to your people's law, or to what they call
their gospel, and wasted my time. I was content with the simple rural poverty of my own; hence
this sweetness; my work never reminds you of that;—is pure of that.' And nature advertises me
in such persons that in democratic America she will not be democratized. How cloistered and
constitutionally sequestered from the market and from scandal! It was only this morning that I
sent away some wild flowers of these wood-gods. They are a relief from literature,—these fresh
draughts from the sources of thought and sentiment; as we read, in an age of polish and
criticism, the first lines of written prose and verse of a nation. How captivating is their devotion
to their favorite books, whether Aeschylus, Dante, Shakspeare, or Scott, as feeling that they
have a stake in that book; who touches that, touches them;—and especially the total solitude
of the critic, the Patmos of thought from which he writes, in unconsciousness of any eyes that
shall ever read this writing. Could they dream on still, as angels, and not wake to comparisons,
and to be flattered! Yet some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise, and wherever the
vein of thought reaches down into the profound, there is no danger from vanity. Solemn friends
will warn them of the danger of the head's being turned by the flourish of trumpets, but they
can afford to smile. I remember the indignation of an eloquent Methodist at the kind
admonitions of a Doctor of Divinity,—'My friend, a man can neither be praised nor insulted.'
But forgive the counsels; they are very natural. I remember the thought which occurred to me
when some ingenious and spiritual foreigners came to America, was, Have you been victimized
in being brought hither?—or, prior to that, answer me this, 'Are you victimizable?'
As I have said, Nature keeps these sovereignties in her own hands, and however pertly our
sermons and disciplines would divide some share of credit, and teach that the laws fashion the
citizen, she goes her own gait and puts the wisest in the wrong. She makes very light of gospels
and prophets, as one who has a great many more to produce and no excess of time to spare on
any one. There is a class of men, individuals of which appear at long intervals, so eminently
endowed with insight and virtue that they have been unanimously saluted as divine, and who
seem to be an accumulation of that power we consider. Divine persons are character born, or,
to borrow a phrase from Napoleon, they are victory organized. They are usually received with
ill-will, because they are new and because they set a bound to the exaggeration that has been
made of the personality of the last divine person. Nature never rhymes her children, nor makes
two men alike. When we see a great man we fancy a resemblance to some historical person,
and predict the sequel of his character and fortune; a result which he is sure to disappoint.
None will ever solve the problem of his character according to our prejudice, but only in his
own high unprecedented way. Character wants room; must not be crowded on by persons nor
be judged from glimpses got in the press of affairs or on few occasions. It needs perspective, as
a great building. It may not, probably does not, form relations rapidly; and we should not
require rash explanation, either on the popular ethics, or on our own, of its action.
I look on Sculpture as history. I do not think the Apollo and the Jove impossible in flesh and
blood. Every trait which the artist recorded in stone he had seen in life, and better than his
copy. We have seen many counterfeits, but we are born believers in great men. How easily we
read in old books, when men were few, of the smallest action of the patriarchs. We require that
a man should be so large and columnar in the landscape, that it should deserve to be recorded
that he arose, and girded up his loins, and departed to such a place. The most credible pictures
are those of majestic men who prevailed at their entrance, and convinced the senses; as
happened to the eastern magian who was sent to test the merits of Zertusht or Zoroaster.
When the Yunani sage arrived at Balkh, the Persians tell us, Gushtasp appointed a day on which
the Mobeds of every country should assemble, and a golden chair was placed for the Yunani
sage. Then the beloved of Yezdam, the prophet Zertusht, advanced into the midst of the
assembly. The Yunani sage, on seeing that chief, said, "This form and this gait cannot lie, and
nothing but truth can proceed from them." Plato said it was impossible not to believe in the
children of the gods, "though they should speak without probable or necessary arguments." I
should think myself very unhappy in my associates if I could not credit the best things in history.
"John Bradshaw," says Milton, "appears like a consul, from whom the fasces are not to depart
with the year; so that not on the tribunal only, but throughout his life, you would regard him as
sitting in judgment upon kings." I find it more credible, since it is anterior information, that one
man should know heaven, as the Chinese say, than that so many men should know the world.
"The virtuous prince confronts the gods, without any misgiving. He waits a hundred ages till a
sage comes, and does not doubt. He who confronts the gods, without any misgiving, knows
heaven; he who waits a hundred ages until a sage comes, without doubting, knows men. Hence
the virtuous prince moves, and for ages shows empire the way." But there is no need to seek
remote examples. He is a dull observer whose experience has not taught him the reality and
force of magic, as well as of chemistry. The coldest precisian cannot go abroad without
encountering inexplicable influences. One man fastens an eye on him and the graves of the
memory render up their dead; the secrets that make him wretched either to keep or to betray
must be yielded;—another, and he cannot speak, and the bones of his body seem to lose their
cartilages; the entrance of a friend adds grace, boldness, and eloquence to him; and there are
persons he cannot choose but remember, who gave a transcendent expansion to his thought,
and kindled another life in his bosom.
What is so excellent as strict relations of amity, when they spring from this deep root? The
sufficient reply to the skeptic who doubts the power and the furniture of man, is in that
possibility of joyful intercourse with persons, which makes the faith and practice of all
reasonable men. I know nothing which life has to offer so satisfying as the profound good
understanding which can subsist after much exchange of good offices, between two virtuous
men, each of whom is sure of himself and sure of his friend. It is a happiness which postpones
all other gratifications, and makes politics, and commerce, and churches, cheap. For when men
shall meet as they ought, each a benefactor, a shower of stars, clothed with thoughts, with
deeds, with accomplishments, it should be the festival of nature which all things announce. Of
such friendship, love in the sexes is the first symbol, as all other things are symbols of love.
Those relations to the best men, which, at one time, we reckoned the romances of youth,
become, in the progress of the character, the most solid enjoyment.
If it were possible to live in right relations with men!—if we could abstain from asking
anything of them, from asking their praise, or help, or pity, and content us with compelling
them through the virtue of the eldest laws! Could we not deal with a few persons,—with one
person,—after the unwritten statutes, and make an experiment of their efficacy? Could we not
pay our friend the compliment of truth, of silence, of forbearing? Need we be so eager to seek
him? If we are related, we shall meet. It was a tradition of the ancient world that no
metamorphosis could hide a god from a god; and there is a Greek verse which runs,—
"The Gods are to each other not unknown."
Friends also follow the laws of divine necessity; they gravitate to each other, and cannot
otherwise:—
When each the other shall avoid,
Shall each by each be most enjoyed.
Their relation is not made, but allowed. The gods must seat themselves without seneschal in
our Olympus, and as they can instal themselves by seniority divine. Society is spoiled if pains
are taken, if the associates are brought a mile to meet. And if it be not society, it is a
mischievous, low, degrading jangle, though made up of the best. All the greatness of each is
kept back and every foible in painful activity, as if the Olympians should meet to exchange
snuff-boxes.
Life goes headlong. We chase some flying scheme, or we are hunted by some fear or
command behind us. But if suddenly we encounter a friend, we pause; our heat and hurry look
foolish enough; now pause, now possession is required, and the power to swell the moment
from the resources of the heart. The moment is all, in all noble relations.
A divine person is the prophecy of the mind; a friend is the hope of the heart. Our beatitude
waits for the fulfilment of these two in one. The ages are opening this moral force. All force is
the shadow or symbol of that. Poetry is joyful and strong as it draws its inspiration thence. Men
write their names on the world as they are filled with this. History has been mean; our nations
have been mobs; we have never seen a man: that divine form we do not yet know, but only the
dream and prophecy of such: we do not know the majestic manners which belong to him,
which appease and exalt the beholder. We shall one day see that the most private is the most
public energy, that quality atones for quantity, and grandeur of character acts in the dark, and
succors them who never saw it. What greatness has yet appeared is beginnings and
encouragements to us in this direction. The history of those gods and saints which the world
has written and then worshipped, are documents of character. The ages have exulted in the
manners of a youth who owed nothing to fortune, and who was hanged at the Tyburn of his
nation, who, by the pure quality of his nature, shed an epic splendor around the facts of his
death which has transfigured every particular into an universal symbol for the eyes of mankind.
This great defeat is hitherto our highest fact. But the mind requires a victory to the senses; a
force of character which will convert judge, jury, soldier, and king; which will rule animal and
mineral virtues, and blend with the courses of sap, of rivers, of winds, of stars, and of moral
agents.
If we cannot attain at a bound to these grandeurs, at least let us do them homage. In society,
high advantages are set down to the possessor as disadvantages. It requires the more wariness
in our private estimates. I do not forgive in my friends the failure to know a fine character and
to entertain it with thankful hospitality. When at last that which we have always longed for is
arrived and shines on us with glad rays out of that far celestial land, then to be coarse, then to
be critical and treat such a visitant with the jabber and suspicion of the streets, argues a
vulgarity that seems to shut the doors of heaven. This is confusion, this the right insanity, when
the soul no longer knows its own, nor where its allegiance, its religion, are due. Is there any
religion but this, to know that wherever in the wide desert of being the holy sentiment we
cherish has opened into a flower, it blooms for me? if none sees it, I see it; I am aware, if I
alone, of the greatness of the fact. Whilst it blooms, I will keep sabbath or holy time, and
suspend my gloom and my folly and jokes. Nature is indulged by the presence of this guest.
There are many eyes that can detect and honor the prudent and household virtues; there are
many that can discern Genius on his starry track, though the mob is incapable; but when that
love which is all-suffering, all-abstaining, all-aspiring, which has vowed to itself that it will be a
wretch and also a fool in this world sooner than soil its white hands by any compliances, comes
into our streets and houses,—only the pure and aspiring can know its face, and the only
compliment they can pay it is to own it.

MANNERS.

"HOW near to good is what is fair!

Which we no sooner see,
But with the lines and outward air
Our senses taken be.
 Again yourselves compose,
And now put all the aptness on
Of Figure, that Proportion
Or Color can disclose;
That if those silent arts were lost,
Design and Picture, they might boast
From you a newer ground,
Instructed by the heightening sense
Of dignity and reverence
In their true motions found."
BEN JONSON

IV. MANNERS.

HALF the world, it is said, knows not how the other half live. Our Exploring Expedition saw
the Feejee islanders getting their dinner off human bones; and they are said to eat their own
wives and children. The husbandry of the modern inhabitants of Gournou (west of old Thebes)
is philosophical to a fault. To set up their housekeeping nothing is requisite but two or three
earthen pots, a stone to grind meal, and a mat which is the bed. The house, namely a tomb, is
ready without rent or taxes. No rain can pass through the roof, and there is no door, for there is
no want of one, as there is nothing to lose. If the house do not please them, they walk out and
enter another, as there are several hundreds at their command. "It is somewhat singular," adds
Belzoni, to whom we owe this account, "to talk of happiness among people who live in
sepulchres, among the corpses and rags of an ancient nation which they know nothing of." In
the deserts of Borgoo the rock-Tibboos still dwell in caves, like cliff-swallows, and the language
of these negroes is compared by their neighbors to the shrieking of bats and to the whistling of
birds. Again, the Bornoos have no proper names; individuals are called after their height,
thickness, or other accidental quality, and have nicknames merely. But the salt, the dates, the
ivory, and the gold, for which these horrible regions are visited, find their way into countries
where the purchaser and consumer can hardly be ranked in one race with these cannibals and
man-stealers; countries where man serves himself with metals, wood, stone, glass, gum, cotton,
silk, and wool; honors himself with architecture; writes laws, and contrives to execute his will
through the hands of many nations; and, especially, establishes a select society, running
through all the countries of intelligent men, a self-constituted aristocracy, or fraternity of the
best, which, without written law or exact usage of any kind, perpetuates itself, colonizes every
new-planted island and adopts and makes its own whatever personal beauty or extraordinary
native endowment anywhere appears.
What fact more conspicuous in modern history than the creation of the gentleman? Chivalry
is that, and loyalty is that, and, in English literature, half the drama, and all the novels, from Sir
Philip Sidney to Sir Walter Scott, paint this figure. The word gentleman, which, like the word
Christian, must hereafter characterize the present and the few preceding centuries by the
importance attached to it, is a homage to personal and incommunicable properties. Frivolous
and fantastic additions have got associated with the name, but the steady interest of mankind
in it must be attributed to the valuable properties which it designates. An element which unites
all the most forcible persons of every country; makes them intelligible and agreeable to each
other, and is somewhat so precise that it is at once felt if an individual lack the masonic sign,—
cannot be any casual product, but must be an average result of the character and faculties
universally found in men. It seems a certain permanent average; as the atmosphere is a
permanent composition, whilst so many gases are combined only to be decompounded.
Comme il faut, is the Frenchman's description of good Society: as we must be. It is a
spontaneous fruit of talents and feelings of precisely that class who have most vigor, who take
the lead in the world of this hour, and though far from pure, far from constituting the gladdest
and highest tone of human feeling, is as good as the whole society permits it to be. It is made of
the spirit, more than of the talent of men, and is a compound result into which every great
force enters as an ingredient, namely virtue, wit, beauty, wealth, and power.
There is something equivocal in all the words in use to express the excellence of manners and
social cultivation, because the quantities are fluxional, and the last effect is assumed by the
senses as the cause. The word gentleman has not any correlative abstract to express the
quality. Gentility is mean, and gentilesse is obsolete. But we must keep alive in the vernacular
the distinction between fashion, a word of narrow and often sinister meaning, and the heroic
character which the gentleman imports. The usual words, however, must be respected; they
will be found to contain the root of the matter. The point of distinction in all this class of names,
as courtesy, chivalry, fashion, and the like, is that the flower and fruit, not the grain of the tree,
are contemplated. It is beauty which is the aim this time, and not worth. The result is now in
question, although our words intimate well enough the popular feeling that the appearance
supposes a substance. The gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his own actions, and expressing
that lordship in his behavior, not in any manner dependent and servile, either on persons, or
opinions, or possessions. Beyond this fact of truth and real force, the word denotes good-
nature or benevolence: manhood first, and then gentleness. The popular notion certainly adds
a condition of ease and fortune; but that is a natural result of personal force and love, that they
should possess and dispense the goods of the world. In times of violence, every eminent person
must fall in with many opportunities to approve his stoutness and worth; therefore every man's
name that emerged at all from the mass in the feudal ages, rattles in our ear like a flourish of
trumpets. But personal force never goes out of fashion. That is still paramount to-day, and in
the moving crowd of good society the men of valor and reality are known and rise to their
natural place. The competition is transferred from war to politics and trade, but the personal
force appears readily enough in these new arenas.
Power first, or no leading class. In politics and in trade, bruisers and pirates are of better
promise than talkers and clerks. God knows that all sorts of gentlemen knock at the door; but
whenever used in strictness and with any emphasis, the name will be found to point at original
energy. It describes a man standing in his own right and working after untaught methods. In a
good lord there must first be a good animal, at least to the extent of yielding the incomparable
advantage of animal spirits. The ruling class must have more, but they must have these, giving
in every company the sense of power, which makes things easy to be done which daunt the
wise. The society of the energetic class, in their friendly and festive meetings, is full of courage
and of attempts which intimidate the pale scholar. The courage which girls exhibit is like a
battle of Lundy's Lane, or a sea-fight. The intellect relies on memory to make some supplies to
face these extemporaneous squadrons. But memory is a base mendicant with basket and
badge, in the presence of these sudden masters. The rulers of society must be up to the work of
the world, and equal to their versatile office: men of the right Caesarian pattern, who have
great range of affinity. I am far from believing the timid maxim of Lord Falkland ("that for
ceremony there must go two to it; since a bold fellow will go through the cunningest forms"),
and am of opinion that the gentleman is the bold fellow whose forms are not to be broken
through; and only that plenteous nature is rightful master which is the complement of
whatever person it converses with. My gentleman gives the law where he is; he will outpray
saints in chapel, outgeneral veterans in the field, and outshine all courtesy in the hall. He is
good company for pirates and good with academicians; so that it is useless to fortify yourself
against him; he has the private entrance to all minds, and I could as easily exclude myself, as
him. The famous gentlemen of Asia and Europe have been of this strong type; Saladin, Sapor,
the Cid, Julius Caesar, Scipio, Alexander, Pericles, and the lordliest personages. They sat very
carelessly in their chairs, and were too excellent themselves, to value any condition at a high
rate.
A plentiful fortune is reckoned necessary, in the popular judgment, to the completion of this
man of the world; and it is a material deputy which walks through the dance which the first has
led. Money is not essential, but this wide affinity is, which transcends the habits of clique and
caste and makes itself felt by men of all classes. If the aristocrat is only valid in fashionable
circles and not with truckmen, he will never be a leader in fashion; and if the man of the people
cannot speak on equal terms with the gentleman, so that the gentleman shall perceive that he
is already really of his own order, he is not to be feared. Diogenes, Socrates, and Epaminondas,
are gentlemen of the best blood who have chosen the condition of poverty when that of wealth
was equally open to them. I use these old names, but the men I speak of are my
contemporaries. Fortune will not supply to every generation one of these well-appointed
knights, but every collection of men furnishes some example of the class; and the politics of this
country, and the trade of every town, are controlled by these hardy and irresponsible doers,
who have invention to take the lead, and a broad sympathy which puts them in fellowship with
crowds, and makes their action popular.
The manners of this class are observed and caught with devotion by men of taste. The
association of these masters with each other and with men intelligent of their merits, is
mutually agreeable and stimulating. The good forms, the happiest expressions of each, are
repeated and adopted. By swift consent everything superfluous is dropped, everything graceful
is renewed. Fine manners show themselves formidable to the uncultivated man. They are a
subtler science of defence to parry and intimidate; but once matched by the skill of the other
party, they drop the point of the sword,—points and fences disappear, and the youth finds
himself in a more transparent atmosphere, wherein life is a less troublesome game, and not a
misunderstanding rises between the players. Manners aim to facilitate life, to get rid of
impediments and bring the man pure to energize. They aid our dealing and conversation as a
railway aids travelling, by getting rid of all avoidable obstructions of the road and leaving
nothing to be conquered but pure space. These forms very soon become fixed, and a fine sense
of propriety is cultivated with the more heed that it becomes a badge of social and civil
distinctions. Thus grows up Fashion, an equivocal semblance, the most puissant, the most
fantastic and frivolous, the most feared and followed, and which morals and violence assault in
vain.
There exists a strict relation between the class of power and the exclusive and polished
circles. The last are always filled or filling from the first. The strong men usually give some
allowance even to the petulances of fashion, for that affinity they find in it. Napoleon, child of
the revolution, destroyer of the old noblesse, never ceased to court the Faubourg St. Germain;
doubtless with the feeling that fashion is a homage to men of his stamp. Fashion, though in a
strange way, represents all manly virtue. It is virtue gone to seed: it is a kind of posthumous
honor. It does not often caress the great, but the children of the great: it is a hall of the Past. It
usually sets its face against the great of this hour. Great men are not commonly in its halls; they
are absent in the field: they are working, not triumphing. Fashion is made up of their children;
of those who through the value and virtue of somebody, have acquired lustre to their name,
marks of distinction, means of cultivation and generosity, and, in their physical organization a
certain health and excellence which secures to them, if not the highest power to work, yet high
power to enjoy. The class of power, the working heroes, the Cortez, the Nelson, the Napoleon,
see that this is the festivity and permanent celebration of such as they; that fashion is funded
talent; is Mexico, Marengo, and Trafalgar beaten out thin; that the brilliant names of fashion
run back to just such busy names as their own, fifty or sixty years ago. They are the sowers,
their sons shall be the reapers, and their sons, in the ordinary course of things, must yield the
possession of the harvest to new competitors with keener eyes and stronger frames. The city is
recruited from the country. In the year 1805, it is said, every legitimate monarch in Europe was
imbecile. The city would have died out, rotted, and exploded, long ago, but that it was
reinforced from the fields. It is only country which came to town day before yesterday that is
city and court today.
Aristocracy and fashion are certain inevitable results. These mutual selections are
indestructible. If they provoke anger in the least favored class, and the excluded majority
revenge themselves on the excluding minority by the strong hand and kill them, at once a new
class finds itself at the top, as certainly as cream rises in a bowl of milk: and if the people should
destroy class after class, until two men only were left, one of these would be the leader and
would be involuntarily served and copied by the other. You may keep this minority out of sight
and out of mind, but it is tenacious of life, and is one of the estates of the realm. I am the more
struck with this tenacity, when I see its work. It respects the administration of such unimportant
matters, that we should not look for any durability in its rule. We sometimes meet men under
some strong moral influence, as a patriotic, a literary, a religious movement, and feel that the
moral sentiment rules man and nature. We think all other distinctions and ties will be slight and
fugitive, this of caste or fashion for example; yet come from year to year and see how
permanent that is, in this Boston or New York life of man, where too it has not the least
countenance from the law of the land. Not in Egypt or in India a firmer or more impassable line.
Here are associations whose ties go over and under and through it, a meeting of merchants, a
military corps, a college class, a fire-club, a professional association, a political, a religious
convention;—the persons seem to draw inseparably near; yet, that assembly once dispersed,
its members will not in the year meet again. Each returns to his degree in the scale of good
society, porcelain remains porcelain, and earthen earthen. The objects of fashion may be
frivolous, or fashion may be objectless, but the nature of this union and selection can be
neither frivolous nor accidental. Each man's rank in that perfect graduation depends on some
symmetry in his structure or some agreement in his structure to the symmetry of society. Its
doors unbar instantaneously to a natural claim of their own kind. A natural gentleman finds his
way in, and will keep the oldest patrician out who has lost his intrinsic rank. Fashion
understands itself; good-breeding and personal superiority of whatever country readily
fraternize with those of every other. The chiefs of savage tribes have distinguished themselves
in London and Paris, by the purity of their tournure.
To say what good of fashion we can, it rests on reality, and hates nothing so much as
pretenders; to exclude and mystify pretenders and send them into everlasting 'Coventry,' is its
delight. We contemn in turn every other gift of men of the world; but the habit even in little
and the least matters of not appealing to any but our own sense of propriety, constitutes the
foundation of all chivalry. There is almost no kind of self-reliance, so it be sane and
proportioned, which fashion does not occasionally adopt and give it the freedom of its saloons.
A sainted soul is always elegant, and, if it will, passes unchallenged into the most guarded ring.
But so will Jock the teamster pass, in some crisis that brings him thither, and find favor, as long
as his head is not giddy with the new circumstance, and the iron shoes do not wish to dance in
waltzes and cotillons. For there is nothing settled in manners, but the laws of behavior yield to
the energy of the individual. The maiden at her first ball, the country-man at a city dinner,
believes that there is a ritual according to which every act and compliment must be performed,
or the failing party must be cast out of this presence. Later they learn that good sense and
character make their own forms every moment, and speak or abstain, take wine or refuse it,
stay or go, sit in a chair or sprawl with children on the floor, or stand on their head, or what else
soever, in a new and aboriginal way; and that strong will is always in fashion, let who will be
unfashionable. All that fashion demands is composure and self-content. A circle of men
perfectly well-bred would be a company of sensible persons in which every man's native
manners and character appeared. If the fashionist have not this quality, he is nothing. We are
such lovers of self-reliance that we excuse in a man many sins if he will show us a complete
satisfaction in his position, which asks no leave to be, of mine, or any man's good opinion. But
any deference to some eminent man or woman of the world, forfeits all privilege of nobility. He
is an underling: I have nothing to do with him; I will speak with his master. A man should not go
where he cannot carry his whole sphere or society with him,—not bodily, the whole circle of his
friends, but atmospherically. He should preserve in a new company the same attitude of mind
and reality of relation which his daily associates draw him to, else he is shorn of his best beams,
and will be an orphan in the merriest club. "If you could see Vich Ian Vohr with his tail on!—"
But Vich Ian Vohr must always carry his belongings in some fashion, if not added as honor, then
severed as disgrace.
There will always be in society certain persons who are mercuries of its approbation, and
whose glance will at any time determine for the curious their standing in the world. These are
the chamberlains of the lesser gods. Accept their coldness as an omen of grace with the loftier
deities, and allow them all their privilege. They are clear in their office, nor could they be thus
formidable without their own merits. But do not measure the importance of this class by their
pretension, or imagine that a fop can be the dispenser of honor and shame. They pass also at
their just rate; for how can they otherwise, in circles which exist as a sort of herald's office for
the sifting of character?
As the first thing man requires of man is reality, so that appears in all the forms of society.
We pointedly, and by name, introduce the parties to each other. Know you before all heaven
and earth, that this is Andrew, and this is Gregory,—they look each other in the eye; they grasp
each other's hand, to identify and signalize each other. It is a great satisfaction. A gentleman
never dodges; his eyes look straight forward, and he assures the other party, first of all, that he
has been met. For what is it that we seek, in so many visits and hospitalities? Is it your
draperies, pictures, and decorations? Or do we not insatiably ask, Was a man in the house? I
may easily go into a great household where there is much substance, excellent provision for
comfort, luxury, and taste, and yet not encounter there any Amphitryon who shall subordinate
these appendages. I may go into a cottage, and find a farmer who feels that he is the man I
have come to see, and fronts me accordingly. It was therefore a very natural point of old feudal
etiquette that a gentleman who received a visit, though it were of his sovereign, should not
leave his roof, but should wait his arrival at the door of his house. No house, though it were the
Tuileries or the Escurial, is good for anything without a master. And yet we are not often
gratified by this hospitality. Every body we know surrounds himself with a fine house, fine
books, conservatory, gardens, equipage and all manner of toys, as screens to interpose
between himself and his guest. Does it not seem as if man was of a very sly, elusive nature, and
dreaded nothing so much as a full rencontre front to front with his fellow? It were unmerciful, I
know, quite to abolish the use of these screens, which are of eminent convenience, whether
the guest is too great or too little. We call together many friends who keep each other in play,
or by luxuries and ornaments we amuse the young people, and guard our retirement. Or if
perchance a searching realist comes to our gate, before whose eye we have no care to stand,
then again we run to our curtain, and hide ourselves as Adam at the voice of the Lord God in
the garden. Cardinal Caprara, the Pope's legate at Paris, defended himself from the glances of
Napoleon by an immense pair of green spectacles. Napoleon remarked them, and speedily
managed to rally them off: and yet Napoleon, in his turn, was not great enough with eight
hundred thousand troops at his back, to face a pair of freeborn eyes, but fenced himself with
etiquette and within triple barriers of reserve; and, as all the world knows from Madame de
Stael, was wont, when he found himself observed, to discharge his face of all expression. But
emperors and rich men are by no means the most skilful masters of good manners. No rentroll
nor army-list can dignify skulking and dissimulation; and the first point of courtesy must always
be truth, as really all the forms of good-breeding point that way.
I have just been reading, in Mr. Hazlitt's translation, Montaigne's account of his journey into
Italy, and am struck with nothing more agreeably than the self-respecting fashions of the time.
His arrival in each place, the arrival of a gentleman of France, is an event of some consequence.
Wherever he goes he pays a visit to whatever prince or gentleman of note resides upon his
road, as a duty to himself and to civilization. When he leaves any house in which he has lodged
for a few weeks, he causes his arms to be painted and hung up as a perpetual sign to the house,
as was the custom of gentlemen.
The complement of this graceful self-respect, and that of all the points of good breeding I
most require and insist upon, is deference. I like that every chair should be a throne, and hold a
king. I prefer a tendency to stateliness to an excess of fellowship. Let the incommunicable
objects of nature and the metaphysical isolation of man teach us independence. Let us not be
too much acquainted. I would have a man enter his house through a hall filled with heroic and
sacred sculptures, that he might not want the hint of tranquillity and self-poise. We should
meet each morning as from foreign countries, and, spending the day together, should depart at
night, as into foreign countries. In all things I would have the island of a man inviolate. Let us sit
apart as the gods, talking from peak to peak all round Olympus. No degree of affection need
invade this religion. This is myrrh and rosemary to keep the other sweet. Lovers Should guard
their strangeness. If they forgive too much, all slides into confusion and meanness. It is easy to
push this deference to a Chinese etiquette; but coolness and absence of heat and haste indicate
fine qualities. A gentleman makes no noise; a lady is serene. Proportionate is our disgust at
those invaders who fill a studious house with blast and running, to secure some paltry
convenience. Not less I dislike a low sympathy of each with his neighbor's needs. Must we have
a good understanding with one another's palates? as foolish people who have lived long
together know when each wants salt or sugar. I pray my companion, if he wishes for bread, to
ask me for bread, and if he wishes for sassafras or arsenic, to ask me for them, and not to hold
out his plate as if I knew already. Every natural function can be dignified by deliberation and
privacy. Let us leave hurry to slaves. The compliments and ceremonies of our breeding should
signify, however remotely, the recollection of the grandeur of our destiny.
The flower of courtesy does not very well bide handling, but if we dare to open another leaf
and explore what parts go to its conformation, we shall find also an intellectual quality. To the
leaders of men, the brain as well as the flesh and the heart must furnish a proportion. Defect in
manners is usually the defect of fine perceptions. Men are too coarsely made for the delicacy of
beautiful carriage and customs. It is not quite sufficient to good-breeding, a union of kindness
and independence. We imperatively require a perception of, and a homage to beauty in our
companions. Other virtues are in request in the field and workyard, but a certain degree of
taste is not to be spared in those we sit with. I could better eat with one who did not respect
the truth or the laws than with a sloven and unpresentable person. Moral qualities rule the
world, but at short distances the senses are despotic. The same discrimination of fit and fair
runs out, if with less rigor, into all parts of life. The average spirit of the energetic class is good
sense, acting under certain limitations and to certain ends. It entertains every natural gift. Social
in its nature, it respects everything which tends to unite men. It delights in measure. The love of
beauty is mainly the love of measure or proportion. The person who screams, or uses the
superlative degree, or converses with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to
be loved, love measure. You must have genius or a prodigious usefulness if you will hide the
want of measure. This perception comes in to polish and perfect the parts of the social
instrument. Society will pardon much to genius and special gifts, but, being in its nature a
convention, it loves what is conventional, or what belongs to coming together. That makes the
good and bad of manners, namely what helps or hinders fellowship. For fashion is not good
sense absolute, but relative; not good sense private, but good sense entertaining company. It
hates corners and sharp points of character, hates quarrelsome, egotistical, solitary, and
gloomy people; hates whatever can interfere with total blending of parties; whilst it values all
peculiarities as in the highest degree refreshing, which can consist with good fellowship. And
besides the general infusion of wit to heighten civility, the direct splendor of intellectual power
is ever welcome in fine society as the costliest addition to its rule and its credit.
The dry light must shine in to adorn our festival, but it must be tempered and shaded, or that
will also offend. Accuracy is essential to beauty, and quick perceptions to politeness, but not
too quick perceptions. One may be too punctual and too precise. He must leave the
omniscience of business at the door, when he comes into the palace of beauty. Society loves
creole natures, and sleepy languishing manners, so that they cover sense, grace and good-will:
the air of drowsy strength, which disarms criticism; perhaps because such a person seems to
reserve himself for the best of the game, and not spend himself on surfaces; an ignoring eye,
which does not see the annoyances, shifts, and inconveniences that cloud the brow and
smother the voice of the sensitive.
Therefore besides personal force and so much perception as constitutes unerring taste,
society demands in its patrician class another element already intimated, which it significantly
terms good-nature,—expressing all degrees of generosity, from the lowest willingness and
faculty to oblige, up to the heights of magnanimity and love. Insight we must have, or we shall
run against one another and miss the way to our food; but intellect is selfish and barren. The
secret of success in society is a certain heartiness and sympathy. A man who is not happy in the
company cannot find any word in his memory that will fit the occasion. All his information is a
little impertinent. A man who is happy there, finds in every turn of the conversation equally
lucky occasions for the introduction of that which he has to say. The favorites of society, and
what it calls whole souls, are able men and of more spirit than wit, who have no uncomfortable
egotism, but who exactly fill the hour and the company; contented and contenting, at a
marriage or a funeral, a ball or a jury, a water-party or a shooting-match. England, which is rich
in gentlemen, furnished, in the beginning of the present century, a good model of that genius
which the world loves, in Mr. Fox, who added to his great abilities the most social disposition
and real love of men. Parliamentary history has few better passages than the debate in which
Burke and Fox separated in the House of Commons; when Fox urged on his old friend the claims
of old friendship with such tenderness that the house was moved to tears. Another anecdote is
so close to my matter, that I must hazard the story. A tradesman who had long dunned him for
a note of three hundred guineas, found him one day counting gold, and demanded payment:
—"No," said Fox, "I owe this money to Sheridan; it is a debt of honor; if an accident should
happen to me, he has nothing to show." "Then," said the creditor, "I change my debt into a
debt of honor," and tore the note in pieces. Fox thanked the man for his confidence and paid
him, saying, "his debt was of older standing, and Sheridan must wait." Lover of liberty, friend of
the Hindoo, friend of the African slave, he possessed a great personal popularity; and Napoleon
said of him on the occasion of his visit to Paris, in 1805, "Mr. Fox will always hold the first place
in an assembly at the Tuileries."
We may easily seem ridiculous in our eulogy of courtesy, whenever we insist on benevolence
as its foundation. The painted phantasm Fashion rises to cast a species of derision on what we
say. But I will neither be driven from some allowance to Fashion as a symbolic institution, nor
from the belief that love is the basis of courtesy. We must obtain that, if we can; but by all
means we must affirm this. Life owes much of its spirit to these sharp contrasts. Fashion, which
affects to be honor, is often, in all men's experience, only a ballroom-code. Yet so long as it is
the highest circle in the imagination of the best heads on the planet, there is something
necessary and excellent in it; for it is not to be supposed that men have agreed to be the dupes
of anything preposterous; and the respect which these mysteries inspire in the most rude and
sylvan characters, and the curiosity with which details of high life are read, betray the
universality of the love of cultivated manners. I know that a comic disparity would be felt, if we
should enter the acknowledged 'first circles' and apply these terrific standards of justice,
beauty, and benefit to the individuals actually found there. Monarchs and heroes, sages and
lovers, these gallants are not. Fashion has many classes and many rules of probation and
admission, and not the best alone. There is not only the right of conquest, which genius
pretends,—the individual demonstrating his natural aristocracy best of the best;—but less
claims will pass for the time; for Fashion loves lions, and points like Circe to her horned
company. This gentleman is this afternoon arrived from Denmark; and that is my Lord Ride,
who came yesterday from Bagdat; here is Captain Friese, from Cape Turnagain; and Captain
Symmes, from the interior of the earth; and Monsieur Jovaire, who came down this morning in
a balloon; Mr. Hobnail, the reformer; and Reverend Jul Bat, who has converted the whole torrid
zone in his Sunday school; and Signor Torre del Greco, who extinguished Vesuvius by pouring
into it the Bay of Naples; Spahi, the Persian ambassador; and Tul Wil Shan, the exiled nabob of
Nepaul, whose saddle is the new moon.—But these are monsters of one day, and to-morrow
will be dismissed to their holes and dens; for in these rooms every chair is waited for. The artist,
the scholar, and, in general, the clerisy, wins their way up into these places and get represented
here, somewhat on this footing of conquest. Another mode is to pass through all the degrees,
spending a year and a day in St. Michael's Square, being steeped in Cologne water, and
perfumed, and dined, and introduced, and properly grounded in all the biography and politics
and anecdotes of the boudoirs.
Yet these fineries may have grace and wit. Let there be grotesque sculpture about the gates
and offices of temples. Let the creed and commandments even have the saucy homage of
parody. The forms of politeness universally express benevolence in superlative degrees. What if
they are in the mouths of selfish men, and used as means of selfishness? What if the false
gentleman almost bows the true out Of the world? What if the false gentleman contrives so to
address his companion as civilly to exclude all others from his discourse, and also to make them
feel excluded? Real service will not lose its nobleness. All generosity is not merely French and
sentimental; nor is it to be concealed that living blood and a passion of kindness does at last
distinguish God's gentleman from Fashion's. The epitaph of Sir Jenkin Grout is not wholly
unintelligible to the present age: "Here lies Sir Jenkin Grout, who loved his friend and
persuaded his enemy: what his mouth ate, his hand paid for: what his servants robbed, he
restored: if a woman gave him pleasure, he supported her in pain: he never forgot his children;
and whoso touched his finger, drew after it his whole body." Even the line of heroes is not
utterly extinct. There is still ever some admirable person in plain clothes, standing on the wharf,
who jumps in to rescue a drowning man; there is still some absurd inventor of charities; some
guide and comforter of runaway slaves; some friend of Poland; some Philhellene; some fanatic
who plants shade-trees for the second and third generation, and orchards when he is grown
old; some well-concealed piety; some just man happy in an ill fame; some youth ashamed of
the favors of fortune and impatiently casting them on other shoulders. And these are the
centres of society, on which it returns for fresh impulses. These are the creators of Fashion,
which is an attempt to organize beauty of behavior. The beautiful and the generous are, in the
theory, the doctors and apostles of this church: Scipio, and the Cid, and Sir Philip Sidney, and
Washington, and every pure and valiant heart who worshipped Beauty by word and by deed.
The persons who constitute the natural aristocracy are not found in the actual aristocracy, or
only on its edge; as the chemical energy of the spectrum is found to be greatest just outside of
the spectrum. Yet that is the infirmity of the seneschals, who do not know their sovereign when
he appears. The theory of society supposes the existence and sovereignty of these. It divines
afar off their coming. It says with the elder gods,—
"As Heaven and Earth are fairer far
Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs;
And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth,
In form and shape compact and beautiful;
So, on our heels a fresh perfection treads;
A power, more strong in beauty, born of us,
And fated to excel us, as we pass
In glory that old Darkness:
———— for, 'tis the eternal law,
That first in beauty shall be first in might."
Therefore, within the ethnical circle of good society there is a narrower and higher circle,
concentration of its light, and flower of courtesy, to which there is always a tacit appeal of pride
and reference, as to its inner and imperial court; the parliament of love and chivalry. And this is
constituted of those persons in whom heroic dispositions are native; with the love of beauty,
the delight in society, and the power to embellish the passing day. If the individuals who
compose the purest circles of aristocracy in Europe, the guarded blood of centuries, should pass
in review, in such manner as that we could at leisure and critically inspect their behavior, we
might find no gentleman and no lady; for although excellent specimens of courtesy and high-
breeding would gratify us in the assemblage, in the particulars we should detect offence.
Because elegance comes of no breeding, but of birth. There must be romance of character, or
the most fastidious exclusion of impertinencies will not avail. It must be genius which takes that
direction: it must be not courteous, but courtesy. High behavior is as rare in fiction as it is in
fact. Scott is praised for the fidelity with which he painted the demeanor and conversation of
the superior classes. Certainly, kings and queens, nobles and great ladies, had some right to
complain of the absurdity that had been put in their mouths before the days of Waverley; but
neither does Scott's dialogue bear criticism. His lords brave each other in smart epigramatic
speeches, but the dialogue is in costume, and does not please on the second reading: it is not
warm with life. In Shakspeare alone the speakers do not strut and bridle, the dialogue is easily
great, and he adds to so many titles that of being the best-bred man in England and in
Christendom. Once or twice in a lifetime we are permitted to enjoy the charm of noble
manners, in the presence of a man or woman who have no bar in their nature, but whose
character emanates freely in their word and gesture. A beautiful form is better than a beautiful
face; a beautiful behavior is better than a beautiful form: it gives a higher pleasure than statues
or pictures; it is the finest of the fine arts. A man is but a little thing in the midst of the objects
of nature, yet, by the moral quality radiating from his countenance he may abolish all
considerations of magnitude, and in his manners equal the majesty of the world. I have seen an
individual whose manners, though wholly within the conventions of elegant society, were never
learned there, but were original and commanding and held out protection and prosperity; one
who did not need the aid of a court-suit, but carried the holiday in his eye; who exhilarated the
fancy by flinging wide the doors of new modes of existence; who shook off the captivity of
etiquette, with happy, spirited bearing, good-natured and free as Robin Hood; yet with the port
of an emperor, if need be,—calm, serious, and fit to stand the gaze of millions.
The open air and the fields, the street and public chambers are the places where Man
executes his will; let him yield or divide the sceptre at the door of the house. Woman, with her
instinct of behavior, instantly detects in man a love of trifles, any coldness or imbecility, or, in
short, any want of that large, flowing, and magnanimous deportment which is indispensable as
an exterior in the hall. Our American institutions have been friendly to her, and at this moment
I esteem it a chief felicity of this country, that it excels in women. A certain awkward
consciousness of inferiority in the men may give rise to the new chivalry in behalf of Woman's
Rights. Certainly let her be as much better placed in the laws and in social forms as the most
zealous reformer can ask, but I confide so entirely in her inspiring and musical nature, that I
believe only herself can show us how she shall be served. The wonderful generosity of her
sentiments raises her at times into heroical and godlike regions, and verifies the pictures of
Minerva, Juno, or Polymnia; and by the firmness with which she treads her upward path, she
convinces the coarsest calculators that another road exists than that which their feet know. But
besides those who make good in our imagination the place of muses and of Delphic Sibyls, are
there not women who fill our vase with wine and roses to the brim, so that the wine runs over
and fills the house with perfume; who inspire us with courtesy; who unloose our tongues and
we speak; who anoint our eyes and we see? We say things we never thought to have said; for
once, our walls of habitual reserve vanished and left us at large; we were children playing with
children in a wide field of flowers. Steep us, we cried, in these influences, for days, for weeks,
and we shall be sunny poets and will write out in many-colored words the romance that you
are. Was it Hafiz or Firdousi that said of his Persian Lilla, She was an elemental force, and
astonished me by her amount of life, when I saw her day after day radiating, every instant,
redundant joy and grace on all around her. She was a solvent powerful to reconcile all
heterogeneous persons into one society: like air or water, an element of such a great range of
affinities that it combines readily with a thousand substances. Where she is present all others
will be more than they are wont. She was a unit and whole, so that whatsoever she did, became
her. She had too much sympathy and desire to please, than that you could say her manners
were marked with dignity, yet no princess could surpass her clear and erect demeanor on each
occasion. She did not study the Persian grammar, nor the books of the seven poets, but all the
poems of the seven seemed to be written upon her. For though the bias of her nature was not
to thought, but to sympathy, yet was she so perfect in her own nature as to meet intellectual
persons by the fulness of her heart, warming them by her sentiments; believing, as she did, that
by dealing nobly with all, all would show themselves noble.
I know that this Byzantine pile of chivalry or Fashion, which seems so fair and picturesque to
those who look at the contemporary facts for science or for entertainment, is not equally
pleasant to all spectators. The constitution of our society makes it a giant's castle to the
ambitious youth who have not found their names enrolled in its Golden Book, and whom it has
excluded from its coveted honors and privileges. They have yet to learn that its seeming
grandeur is shadowy and relative: it is great by their allowance; its proudest gates will fly open
at the approach of their courage and virtue. For the present distress, however, of those who
are predisposed to suffer from the tyrannies of this caprice, there are easy remedies. To
remove your residence a couple of miles, or at most four, will commonly relieve the most
extreme susceptibility. For the advantages which fashion values are plants which thrive in very
confined localities, in a few streets namely. Out of this precinct they go for nothing; are of no
use in the farm, in the forest, in the market, in war, in the nuptial society, in the literary or
scientific circle, at sea, in friendship, in the heaven of thought or virtue.
But we have lingered long enough in these painted courts. The worth of the thing signified
must vindicate our taste for the emblem. Everything that is called fashion and courtesy humbles
itself before the cause and fountain of honor, creator of titles and dignities, namely the heart of
love. This is the royal blood, this the fire, which, in all countries and contingencies, will work
after its kind and conquer and expand all that approaches it. This gives new meanings to every
fact. This impoverishes the rich, suffering no grandeur but its own. What is rich? Are you rich
enough to help anybody? to succor the unfashionable and the eccentric? rich enough to make
the Canadian in his wagon, the itinerant with his consul's paper which commends him "To the
charitable," the swarthy Italian with his few broken words of English, the lame pauper hunted
by overseers from town to town, even the poor insane or besotted wreck of man or woman,
feel the noble exception of your presence and your house from the general bleakness and
stoniness; to make such feel that they were greeted with a voice which made them both
remember and hope? What is vulgar but to refuse the claim on acute and conclusive reasons?
What is gentle, but to allow it, and give their heart and yours one holiday from the national
caution? Without the rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar. The king of Schiraz could not afford to
be so bountiful as the poor Osman who dwelt at his gate. Osman had a humanity so broad and
deep that although his speech was so bold and free with the Koran as to disgust all the
dervishes, yet was there never a poor outcast, eccentric, or insane man, some fool who had cut
off his beard, or who had been mutilated under a vow, or had a pet madness in his brain, but
fled at once to him; that great heart lay there so sunny and hospitable in the centre of the
country, that it seemed as if the instinct of all sufferers drew them to his side. And the madness
which he harbored he did not share. Is not this to be rich? this only to be rightly rich?
But I shall hear without pain that I play the courtier very ill, and talk of that which I do not
well understand. It is easy to see, that what is called by distinction society and fashion has good
laws as well as bad, has much that is necessary, and much that is absurd. Too good for banning,
and too bad for blessing, it reminds us of a tradition of the pagan mythology, in any attempt to
settle its character. 'I overheard Jove, one day,' said Silenus, 'talking of destroying the earth; he
said it had failed; they were all rogues and vixens, who went from bad to worse, as fast as the
days succeeded each other. Minerva said she hoped not; they were only ridiculous little
creatures, with this odd circumstance, that they had a blur, or indeterminate aspect, seen far or
seen near; if you called them bad, they would appear so; if you called them good, they would
appear so; and there was no one person or action among them, which would not puzzle her
owl, much more all Olympus, to know whether it was fundamentally bad or good.'

GIFTS.

Gifts of one who loved me,—

'T was high time they came;
When he ceased to love me,
Time they stopped for shame.

V. GIFTS.

IT is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy; that the world owes the world more than
the world can pay, and ought to go into chancery and be sold. I do not think this general
insolvency, which involves in some sort all the population, to be the reason of the difficulty
experienced at Christmas and New Year and other times, in bestowing gifts; since it is always so
pleasant to be generous, though very vexatious to pay debts. But the impediment lies in the
choosing. If at any time it comes into my head that a present is due from me to somebody, I am
puzzled what to give, until the opportunity is gone. Flowers and fruits are always fit presents;
flowers, because they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the
world. These gay natures contrast with the somewhat stern countenance of ordinary nature:
they are like music heard out of a work-house. Nature does not cocker us; we are children, not
pets; she is not fond; everything is dealt to us without fear or favor, after severe universal laws.
Yet these delicate flowers look like the frolic and interference of love and beauty. Men use to
tell us that we love flattery even though we are not deceived by it, because it shows that we are
of importance enough to be courted. Something like that pleasure, the flowers give us: what
am I to whom these sweet hints are addressed? Fruits are acceptable gifts, because they are
the flower of commodities, and admit of fantastic values being attached to them. If a man
should send to me to come a hundred miles to visit him and should set before me a basket of
fine summer-fruit, I should think there was some proportion between the labor and the reward.
For common gifts, necessity makes pertinences and beauty every day, and one is glad when
an imperative leaves him no option; since if the man at the door have no shoes, you have not to
consider whether you could procure him a paint-box. And as it is always pleasing to see a man
eat bread, or drink water, in the house or out of doors, so it is always a great satisfaction to
supply these first wants. Necessity does everything well. In our condition of universal
dependence it seems heroic to let the petitioner be the judge of his necessity, and to give all
that is asked, though at great inconvenience. If it be a fantastic desire, it is better to leave to
others the office of punishing him. I can think of many parts I should prefer playing to that of
the Furies. Next to things of necessity, the rule for a gift, which one of my friends prescribed, is
that we might convey to some person that which properly belonged to his character, and was
easily associated with him in thought. But our tokens of compliment and love are for the most
part barbarous. Rings and other jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a
portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me. Therefore the poet brings his poem; the shepherd,
his lamb; the farmer, corn; the miner, a gem; the sailor, coral and shells; the painter, his
picture; the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing. This is right and pleasing, for it restores
society in so far to its primary basis, when a man's biography is conveyed in his gift, and every
man's wealth is an index of his merit. But it is a cold lifeless business when you go to the shops
to buy me something which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith's. This is fit
for kings, and rich men who represent kings, and a false state of property, to make presents of
gold and silver stuffs, as a kind of symbolical sin-offering, or payment of black-mail.
The law of benefits is a difficult channel, which requires careful sailing, or rude boats. It is not
the office of a man to receive gifts. How dare you give them? We wish to be self-sustained. We
do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten. We can
receive anything from love, for that is a way of receiving it from ourselves; but not from any
one who assumes to bestow. We sometimes hate the meat which we eat, because there seems
something of degrading dependence in living by it:—
"Brother, if Jove to thee a present make,
Take heed that from his hands thou nothing take."
We ask the whole. Nothing less will content us. We arraign society if it do not give us, besides
earth and fire and water, opportunity, love, reverence, and objects of veneration.
He is a good man who can receive a gift well. We are either glad or sorry at a gift, and both
emotions are unbecoming. Some violence I think is done, some degradation borne, when I
rejoice or grieve at a gift. I am sorry when my independence is invaded, or when a gift comes
from such as do not know my spirit, and so the act is not supported; and if the gift pleases me
overmuch, then I should be ashamed that the donor should read my heart, and see that I love
his commodity, and not him. The gift, to be true, must be the flowing of the giver unto me,
correspondent to my flowing unto him. When the waters are at level, then my goods pass to
him, and his to me. All his are mine, all mine his. I say to him, How can you give me this pot of
oil or this flagon of wine when all your oil and wine is mine, which belief of mine this gift seems
to deny? Hence the fitness of beautiful, not useful things, for gifts. This giving is flat usurpation,
and therefore when the beneficiary is ungrateful, as all beneficiaries hate all Timons, not at all
considering the value of the gift but looking back to the greater store it was taken from,—I
rather sympathize with the beneficiary than with the anger of my lord Timon. For the
expectation of gratitude is mean, and is continually punished by the total insensibility of the
obliged person. It is a great happiness to get off without injury and heart-burning from one who
has had the ill-luck to be served by you. It is a very onerous business, this of being served, and
the debtor naturally wishes to give you a slap. A golden text for these gentlemen is that which I
so admire in the Buddhist, who never thanks, and who says, "Do not flatter your benefactors."
The reason of these discords I conceive to be that there is no commensurability between a
man and any gift. You cannot give anything to a magnanimous person. After you have served
him he at once puts you in debt by his magnanimity. The service a man renders his friend is
trivial and selfish compared with the service he knows his friend stood in readiness to yield him,
alike before he had begun to serve his friend, and now also. Compared with that good-will I
bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to render him seems small. Besides, our action on
each other, good as well as evil, is so incidental and at random that we can seldom hear the
acknowledgments of any person who would thank us for a benefit, without some shame and
humiliation. We can rarely strike a direct stroke, but must be content with an oblique one; we
seldom have the satisfaction of yielding a direct benefit which is directly received. But rectitude
scatters favors on every side without knowing it, and receives with wonder the thanks of all
people.
I fear to breathe any treason against the majesty of love, which is the genius and god of gifts,
and to whom we must not affect to prescribe. Let him give kingdoms or flower-leaves
indifferently. There are persons from whom we always expect fairy-tokens; let us not cease to
expect them. This is prerogative, and not to be limited by our municipal rules. For the rest, I like
to see that we cannot be bought and sold. The best of hospitality and of generosity is also not
in the will, but in fate. I find that I am not much to you; you do not need me; you do not feel
me; then am I thrust out of doors, though you proffer me house and lands. No services are of
any value, but only likeness. When I have attempted to join myself to others by services, it
proved an intellectual trick,—no more. They eat your service like apples, and leave you out. But
love them, and they feel you and delight in you all the time.

NATURE.

The rounded world is fair to see,

Nine times folded in mystery:
Though baffled seers cannot impart
The secret of its laboring heart,
Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west.
Spirit that lurks each form within
Beckons to spirit of its kin;
Self-kindled every atom glows,
And hints the future which it owes.
 VI. NATURE.

THERE are days which occur in this climate, at almost any season of the year, wherein the
world reaches its perfection; when the air, the heavenly bodies and the earth, make a harmony,
as if nature would indulge her offspring; when, in these bleak upper sides of the planet, nothing
is to desire that we have heard of the happiest latitudes, and we bask in the shining hours of
Florida and Cuba; when everything that has life gives sign of satisfaction, and the cattle that lie
on the ground seem to have great and tranquil thoughts. These halcyons may be looked for
with a little more assurance in that pure October weather which we distinguish by the name of
the Indian summer. The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and warm wide
fields. To have lived through all its sunny hours, seems longevity enough. The solitary places do
not seem quite lonely. At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to
leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his
back with the first step he makes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our
religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find Nature to be the circumstance
which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her. We
have crept out of our close and crowded houses into the night and morning, and we see what
majestic beauties daily wrap us in their bosom. How willingly we would escape the barriers
which render them comparatively impotent, escape the sophistication and second thought, and
suffer nature to intrance us. The tempered light of the woods is like a perpetual morning, and is
stimulating and heroic. The anciently reported spells of these places creep on us. The stems of
pines, hemlocks, and oaks almost gleam like iron on the excited eye. The incommunicable trees
begin to persuade us to live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles. Here no history, or
church, or state, is interpolated on the divine sky and the immortal year. How easily we might
walk onward into the opening landscape, absorbed by new pictures and by thoughts fast
succeeding each other, until by degrees the recollection of home was crowded out of the mind,
all memory obliterated by the tyranny of the present, and we were led in triumph by nature.
These enchantments are medicinal, they sober and heal us. These are plain pleasures, kindly
and native to us. We come to our own, and make friends with matter, which the ambitious
chatter of the schools would persuade us to despise. We never can part with it; the mind loves
its old home: as water to our thirst, so is the rock, the ground, to our eyes and hands and feet.
It is firm water; it is cold flame; what health, what affinity! Ever an old friend, ever like a dear
friend and brother when we chat affectedly with strangers, comes in this honest face, and takes
a grave liberty with us, and shames us out of our nonsense. Cities give not the human senses
room enough. We go out daily and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, and require so much
scope, just as we need water for our bath. There are all degrees of natural influence, from these
quarantine powers of nature, up to her dearest and gravest ministrations to the imagination
and the soul. There is the bucket of cold water from the spring, the wood-fire to which the
chilled traveller rushes for safety,—and there is the sublime moral of autumn and of noon. We
nestle in nature, and draw our living as parasites from her roots and grains, and we receive
glances from the heavenly bodies, which call us to solitude and foretell the remotest future.
The blue zenith is the point in which romance and reality meet. I think if we should be rapt
away into all that we dream of heaven, and should converse with Gabriel and Uriel, the upper
sky would be all that would remain of our furniture.
It seems as if the day was not wholly profane in which we have given heed to some natural
object. The fall of snowflakes in a still air, preserving to each crystal its perfect form; the
blowing of sleet over a wide sheet of water, and over plains; the waving ryefield; the mimic
waving of acres of houstonia, whose innumerable florets whiten and ripple before the eye; the
reflections of trees and flowers in glassy lakes; the musical steaming odorous south wind, which
converts all trees to windharps; the crackling and spurting of hemlock in the flames, or of pine
logs, which yield glory to the walls and faces in the sittingroom,—these are the music and
pictures of the most ancient religion. My house stands in low land, with limited outlook, and on
the skirt of the village. But I go with my friend to the shore of our little river, and with one
stroke of the paddle I leave the village politics and personalities, yes, and the world of villages
and personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright
almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate and probation. We penetrate bodily this
incredible beauty; we dip our hands in this painted element; our eyes are bathed in these lights
and forms. A holiday, a villeggiatura, a royal revel, the proudest, most heart-rejoicing festival
that valor and beauty, power and taste, ever decked and enjoyed, establishes itself on the
instant. These sunset clouds, these delicately emerging stars, with their private and ineffable
glances, signify it and proffer it. I am taught the poorness of our invention, the ugliness of
towns and palaces. Art and luxury have early learned that they must work as enhancement and
sequel to this original beauty. I am overinstructed for my return. Henceforth I shall be hard to
please. I cannot go back to toys. I am grown expensive and sophisticated. I can no longer live
without elegance, but a countryman shall be my master of revels. He who knows the most; he
who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and
how to come at these enchantments,—is the rich and royal man. Only as far as the masters of
the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is
the meaning of their hanging-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks and preserves, to
back their faulty personality with these strong accessories. I do not wonder that the landed
interest should be invincible in the State with these dangerous auxiliaries. These bribe and
invite; not kings, not palaces, not men, not women, but these tender and poetic stars, eloquent
of secret promises. We heard what the rich man said, we knew of his villa, his grove, his wine
and his company, but the provocation and point of the invitation came out of these beguiling
stars. In their soft glances I see what men strove to realize in some Versailles, or Paphos, or
Ctesiphon. Indeed, it is the magical lights of the horizon and the blue sky for the background
which save all our works of art, which were otherwise bawbles. When the rich tax the poor with
servility and obsequiousness, they should consider the effect of men reputed to be the
possessors of nature, on imaginative minds. Ah! if the rich were rich as the poor fancy riches! A
boy hears a military band play on the field at night, and he has kings and queens and famous
chivalry palpably before him. He hears the echoes of a horn in a hill country, in the Notch
Mountains, for example, which converts the mountains into an Aeolian harp,—and this
supernatural tiralira restores to him the Dorian mythology, Apollo, Diana, and all divine hunters
and huntresses. Can a musical note be so lofty, so haughtily beautiful! To the poor young poet,
thus fabulous is his picture of society; he is loyal; he respects the rich; they are rich for the sake
of his imagination; how poor his fancy would be, if they were not rich! That they have some
high-fenced grove which they call a park; that they live in larger and better-garnished saloons
than he has visited, and go in coaches, keeping only the society of the elegant, to watering-
places and to distant cities,—these make the groundwork from which he has delineated estates
of romance, compared with which their actual possessions are shanties and paddocks. The
muse herself betrays her son, and enhances the gifts of wealth and well-born beauty by a
radiation out of the air, and clouds, and forests that skirt the road,—a certain haughty favor, as
if from patrician genii to patricians, a kind of aristocracy in nature, a prince of the power of the
air.
The moral sensibility which makes Edens and Tempes so easily, may not be always found, but
the material landscape is never far off. We can find these enchantments without visiting the
Como Lake, or the Madeira Islands. We exaggerate the praises of local scenery. In every
landscape the point of astonishment is the meeting of the sky and the earth, and that is seen
from the first hillock as well as from the top of the Alleghanies. The stars at night stoop down
over the brownest, homeliest common with all the spiritual magnificence which they shed on
the Campagna, or on the marble deserts of Egypt. The uprolled clouds and the colors of
morning and evening will transfigure maples and alders. The difference between landscape and
landscape is small, but there is great difference in the beholders. There is nothing so wonderful
in any particular landscape as the necessity of being beautiful under which every landscape lies.
Nature cannot be surprised in undress. Beauty breaks in everywhere.
But it is very easy to outrun the sympathy of readers on this topic, which schoolmen called
natura naturata, or nature passive. One can hardly speak directly of it without excess. It is as
easy to broach in mixed companies what is called "the subject of religion." A susceptible person
does not like to indulge his tastes in this kind without the apology of some trivial necessity: he
goes to see a wood-lot, or to look at the crops, or to fetch a plant or a mineral from a remote
locality, or he carries a fowling-piece or a fishing-rod. I suppose this shame must have a good
reason. A dilettantism in nature is barren and unworthy. The fop of fields is no better than his
brother of Broadway. Men are naturally hunters and inquisitive of wood-craft, and I suppose
that such a gazetteer as wood-cutters and Indians should furnish facts for, would take place in
the most sumptuous drawing-rooms of all the "Wreaths" and "Flora's chaplets" of the
bookshops; yet ordinarily, whether we are too clumsy for so subtle a topic, or from whatever
cause, as soon as men begin to write on nature, they fall into euphuism. Frivolity is a most unfit
tribute to Pan, who ought to be represented in the mythology as the most continent of gods. I
would not be frivolous before the admirable reserve and prudence of time, yet I cannot
renounce the right of returning often to this old topic. The multitude of false churches accredits
the true religion. Literature, poetry, science are the homage of man to this unfathomed secret,
concerning which no sane man can affect an indifference or incuriosity. Nature is loved by what
is best in us. It is loved as the city of God, although, or rather because there is no citizen. The
sunset is unlike anything that is underneath it: it wants men. And the beauty of nature must
always seem unreal and mocking, until the landscape has human figures that are as good as
itself. If there were good men, there would never be this rapture in nature. If the king is in the
palace, nobody looks at the walls. It is when he is gone, and the house is filled with grooms and
gazers, that we turn from the people to find relief in the majestic men that are suggested by the
pictures and the architecture. The critics who complain of the sickly separation of the beauty of
nature from the thing to be done, must consider that our hunting of the picturesque is
inseparable from our protest against false society. Man is fallen; nature is erect, and serves as a
differential thermometer, detecting the presence or absence of the divine sentiment in man. By
fault of our dulness and selfishness we are looking up to nature, but when we are convalescent,
nature will look up to us. We see the foaming brook with compunction: if our own life flowed
with the right energy, we should shame the brook. The stream of zeal sparkles with real fire,
and not with reflex rays of sun and moon. Nature may be as selfishly studied as trade.
Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology; psychology, mesmerism (with intent to show
where our spoons are gone); and anatomy and physiology become phrenology and palmistry.
But taking timely warning, and leaving many things unsaid on this topic, let us not longer
omit our homage to the Efficient Nature, natura naturans, the quick cause before which all
forms flee as the driven snows; itself secret, its works driven before it in flocks and multitudes,
(as the ancient represented nature by Proteus, a shepherd,) and in undescribable variety. It
publishes itself in creatures, reaching from particles and spiculae through transformation on
transformation to the highest symmetries, arriving at consummate results without a shock or a
leap. A little heat, that is a little motion, is all that differences the bald, dazzling white and
deadly cold poles of the earth from the prolific tropical climates. All changes pass without
violence, by reason of the two cardinal conditions of boundless space and boundless time.
Geology has initiated us into the secularity of nature, and taught us to disuse our dame-school
measures, and exchange our Mosaic and Ptolemaic schemes for her large style. We knew
nothing rightly, for want of perspective. Now we learn what patient periods must round
themselves before the rock is formed; then before the rock is broken, and the first lichen race
has disintegrated the thinnest external plate into soil, and opened the door for the remote
Flora, Fauna, Ceres, and Pomona to come in. How far off yet is the trilobite! how far the
quadruped! how inconceivably remote is man! All duly arrive, and then race after race of men.
It is a long way from granite to the oyster; farther yet to Plato and the preaching of the
immortality of the soul. Yet all must come, as surely as the first atom has two sides.
Motion or change and identity or rest are the first and second secrets of nature:—Motion
and Rest. The whole code of her laws may be written on the thumbnail, or the signet of a ring.
The whirling bubble on the surface of a brook admits us to the secret of the mechanics of the
sky. Every shell on the beach is a key to it. A little water made to rotate in a cup explains the
formation of the simpler shells; the addition of matter from year to year, arrives at last at the
most complex forms; and yet so poor is nature with all her craft, that from the beginning to the
end of the universe she has but one stuff,—but one stuff with its two ends, to serve up all her
dream-like variety. Compound it how she will, star, sand, fire, water, tree, man, it is still one
stuff, and betrays the same properties.
Nature is always consistent, though she feigns to contravene her own laws. She keeps her
laws, and seems to transcend them. She arms and equips an animal to find its place and living
in the earth, and at the same time she arms and equips another animal to destroy it. Space
exists to divide creatures; but by clothing the sides of a bird with a few feathers she gives him a
petty omnipresence. The direction is forever onward, but the artist still goes back for materials
and begins again with the first elements on the most advanced stage: otherwise all goes to ruin.
If we look at her work, we seem to catch a glance of a system in transition. Plants are the young
of the world, vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upward towards consciousness;
the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground.
The animal is the novice and probationer of a more advanced order. The men, though young,
having tasted the first drop from the cup of thought, are already dissipated: the maples and
ferns are still uncorrupt; yet no doubt when they come to consciousness they too will curse and
swear. Flowers so strictly belong to youth that we adult men soon come to feel that their
beautiful generations concern not us: we have had our day; now let the children have theirs.
The flowers jilt us, and we are old bachelors with our ridiculous tenderness.
Things are so strictly related, that according to the skill of the eye, from any one object the
parts and properties of any other may be predicted. If we had eyes to see it, a bit of stone from
the city wall would certify us of the necessity that man must exist, as readily as the city. That
identity makes us all one, and reduces to nothing great intervals on our customary scale. We
talk of deviations from natural life, as if artificial life were not also natural. The smoothest
curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white
bear, omnipotent to its own ends, and is directly related, there amid essences and billetsdoux,
to Himmaleh mountain-chains and the axis of the globe. If we consider how much we are
nature's, we need not be superstitious about towns, as if that terrific or benefic force did not
find us there also, and fashion cities. Nature, who made the mason, made the house. We may
easily hear too much of rural influences. The cool disengaged air of natural objects makes them
enviable to us, chafed and irritable creatures with red faces, and we think we shall be as grand
as they if we camp out and eat roots; but let us be men instead of woodchucks and the oak and
the elm shall gladly serve us, though we sit in chairs of ivory on carpets of silk.
This guiding identity runs through all the surprises and contrasts of the piece, and
characterizes every law. Man carries the world in his head, the whole astronomy and chemistry
suspended in a thought. Because the history of nature is charactered in his brain, therefore is
he the prophet and discoverer of her secrets. Every known fact in natural science was divined
by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified. A man does not tie his shoe
without recognizing laws which bind the farthest regions of nature: moon, plant, gas, crystal,
are concrete geometry and numbers. Common sense knows its own, and recognizes the fact at
first sight in chemical experiment. The common sense of Franklin, Dalton, Davy and Black, is the
same common sense which made the arrangements which now it discovers.
If the identity expresses organized rest, the counter action runs also into organization. The
astronomers said, 'Give us matter and a little motion and we will construct the universe. It is
not enough that we should have matter, we must also have a single impulse, one shove to
launch the mass and generate the harmony of the centrifugal and centripetal forces. Once
heave the ball from the hand, and we can show how all this mighty order grew.'—'A very
unreasonable postulate,' said the metaphysicians, 'and a plain begging of the question. Could
you not prevail to know the genesis of projection, as well as the continuation of it?' Nature,
meanwhile, had not waited for the discussion, but, right or wrong, bestowed the impulse, and
the balls rolled. It was no great affair, a mere push, but the astronomers were right in making
much of it, for there is no end to the consequences of the act. That famous aboriginal push
propagates itself through all the balls of the system, and through every atom of every ball;
through all the races of creatures, and through the history and performances of every
individual. Exaggeration is in the course of things. Nature sends no creature, no man into the
world without adding a small excess of his proper quality. Given the planet, it is still necessary
to add the impulse; so to every creature nature added a little violence of direction in its proper
path, a shove to put it on its way; in every instance a slight generosity, a drop too much.
Without electricity the air would rot, and without this violence of direction which men and
women have, without a spice of bigot and fanatic, no excitement, no efficiency. We aim above
the mark to hit the mark. Every act hath some falsehood of exaggeration in it. And when now
and then comes along some sad, sharp-eyed man, who sees how paltry a game is played, and
refuses to play, but blabs the secret;—how then? Is the bird flown? O no, the wary Nature
sends a new troop of fairer forms, of lordlier youths, with a little more excess of direction to
hold them fast to their several aim; makes them a little wrongheaded in that direction in which
they are rightest, and on goes the game again with new whirl, for a generation or two more.
The child with his sweet pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound,
without any power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a painted
chip, to a lead dragoon or a gingerbread-dog, individualizing everything, generalizing nothing,
delighted with every new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue which this day of
continual pretty madness has incurred. But Nature has answered her purpose with the curly,
dimpled lunatic. She has tasked every faculty, and has secured the symmetrical growth of the
bodily frame by all these attitudes and exertions,—an end of the first importance, which could
not be trusted to any care less perfect than her own. This glitter, this opaline lustre plays round
the top of every toy to his eye to insure his fidelity, and he is deceived to his good. We are
made alive and kept alive by the same arts. Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat
for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen. The vegetable
life does not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills the
air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that, if thousands perish, thousands may plant
themselves; that hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity; that at least one may
replace the parent. All things betray the same calculated profusion. The excess of fear with
which the animal frame is hedged round, shrinking from cold, starting at sight of a snake, or at a
sudden noise, protects us, through a multitude of groundless alarms, from some one real
danger at last. The lover seeks in marriage his private felicity and perfection, with no
prospective end; and nature hides in his happiness her own end, namely, progeny, or the
perpetuity of the race.
But the craft with which the world is made, runs also into the mind and character of men. No
man is quite sane; each has a vein of folly in his composition, a slight determination of blood to
the head, to make sure of holding him hard to some one point which nature had taken to heart.
Great causes are never tried on their merits; but the cause is reduced to particulars to suit the
size of the partisans, and the contention is ever hottest on minor matters. Not less remarkable
is the overfaith of each man in the importance of what he has to do or say. The poet, the
prophet, has a higher value for what he utters than any hearer, and therefore it gets spoken.
The strong, self-complacent Luther declares with an emphasis not to be mistaken, that "God
himself cannot do without wise men." Jacob Behmen and George Fox betray their egotism in
the pertinacity of their controversial tracts, and James Naylor once suffered himself to be
worshipped as the Christ. Each prophet comes presently to identify himself with his thought,
and to esteem his hat and shoes sacred. However this may discredit such persons with the
judicious, it helps them with the people, as it gives heat, pungency, and publicity to their words.
A similar experience is not infrequent in private life. Each young and ardent person writes a
diary, in which, when the hours of prayer and penitence arrive, he inscribes his soul. The pages
thus written are to him burning and fragrant; he reads them on his knees by midnight and by
the morning star; he wets them with his tears; they are sacred; too good for the world, and
hardly yet to be shown to the dearest friend. This is the man-child that is born to the soul, and
her life still circulates in the babe. The umbilical cord has not yet been cut. After some time has
elapsed, he begins to wish to admit his friend to this hallowed experience, and with hesitation,
yet with firmness, exposes the pages to his eye. Will they not burn his eyes? The friend coldly
turns them over, and passes from the writing to conversation, with easy transition, which
strikes the other party with astonishment and vexation. He cannot suspect the writing itself.
Days and nights of fervid life, of communion with angels of darkness and of light have engraved
their shadowy characters on that tear-stained book. He suspects the intelligence or the heart of
his friend. Is there then no friend? He cannot yet credit that one may have impressive
experience and yet may not know how to put his private fact into literature; and perhaps the
discovery that wisdom has other tongues and ministers than we, that though we should hold
our peace the truth would not the less be spoken, might check injuriously the flames of our
zeal. A man can only speak so long as he does not feel his speech to be partial and inadequate.
It is partial, but he does not see it to be so whilst he utters it. As soon as he is released from the
instinctive and particular and sees its partiality, he shuts his mouth in disgust. For no man can
write anything who does not think that what he writes is for the time the history of the world;
or do anything well who does not esteem his work to be of importance. My work may be of
none, but I must not think it of none, or I shall not do it with impunity.
In like manner, there is throughout nature something mocking, something that leads us on
and on, but arrives nowhere; keeps no faith with us. All promise outruns the performance. We
live in a system of approximations. Every end is prospective of some other end, which is also
temporary; a round and final success nowhere. We are encamped in nature, not domesticated.
Hunger and thirst lead us on to eat and to drink; but bread and wine, mix and cook them how
you will, leave us hungry and thirsty, after the stomach is full. It is the same with all our arts and
performances. Our music, our poetry, our language itself are not satisfactions, but suggestions.
The hunger for wealth, which reduces the planet to a garden, fools the eager pursuer. What is
the end sought? Plainly to secure the ends of good sense and beauty, from the intrusion of
deformity or vulgarity of any kind. But what an operose method! What a train of means to
secure a little conversation! This palace of brick and stone, these servants, this kitchen, these
stables, horses and equipage, this bank-stock and file of mortgages; trade to all the world,
country-house and cottage by the waterside, all for a little conversation, high, clear, and
spiritual! Could it not be had as well by beggars on the highway? No, all these things came from
successive efforts of these beggars to remove friction from the wheels of life, and give
opportunity. Conversation, character, were the avowed ends; wealth was good as it appeased
the animal cravings, cured the smoky chimney, silenced the creaking door, brought friends
together in a warm and quiet room, and kept the children and the dinner-table in a different
apartment. Thought, virtue, beauty, were the ends; but it was known that men of thought and
virtue sometimes had the headache, or wet feet, or could lose good time whilst the room was
getting warm in winter days. Unluckily, in the exertions necessary to remove these
inconveniences, the main attention has been diverted to this object; the old aims have been
lost sight of, and to remove friction has come to be the end. That is the ridicule of rich men, and
Boston, London, Vienna, and now the governments generally of the world are cities and
governments of the rich; and the masses are not men, but poor men, that is, men who would
be rich; this is the ridicule of the class, that they arrive with pains and sweat and fury nowhere;
when all is done, it is for nothing. They are like one who has interrupted the conversation of a
company to make his speech, and now has forgotten what he went to say. The appearance
strikes the eye everywhere of an aimless society, of aimless nations. Were the ends of nature so
great and cogent as to exact this immense sacrifice of men?
Quite analogous to the deceits in life, there is, as might be expected, a similar effect on the
eye from the face of external nature. There is in woods and waters a certain enticement and
flattery, together with a failure to yield a present satisfaction. This disappointment is felt in
every landscape. I have seen the softness and beauty of the summer clouds floating feathery
overhead, enjoying, as it seemed, their height and privilege of motion, whilst yet they appeared
not so much the drapery of this place and hour, as forelooking to some pavilions and gardens of
festivity beyond. It is an odd jealousy, but the poet finds himself not near enough to his object.
The pine-tree, the river, the bank of flowers before him, does not seem to be nature. Nature is
still elsewhere. This or this is but outskirt and far-off reflection and echo of the triumph that has
passed by and is now at its glancing splendor and heyday, perchance in the neighboring fields,
or, if you stand in the field, then in the adjacent woods. The present object shall give you this
sense of stillness that follows a pageant which has just gone by. What splendid distance, what
recesses of ineffable pomp and loveliness in the sunset! But who can go where they are, or lay
his hand or plant his foot thereon? Off they fall from the round world forever and ever. It is the
same among the men and women as among the silent trees; always a referred existence, an
absence, never a presence and satisfaction. Is it that beauty can never be grasped? in persons
and in landscape is equally inaccessible? The accepted and betrothed lover has lost the wildest
charm of his maiden in her acceptance of him. She was heaven whilst he pursued her as a star:
she cannot be heaven if she stoops to such a one as he.
What shall we say of this omnipresent appearance of that first projectile impulse, of this
flattery and balking of so many well-meaning creatures? Must we not suppose somewhere in
the universe a slight treachery and derision? Are we not engaged to a serious resentment of
this use that is made of us? Are we tickled trout, and fools of nature? One look at the face of
heaven and earth lays all petulance at rest, and soothes us to wiser convictions. To the
intelligent, nature converts itself into a vast promise, and will not be rashly explained. Her
secret is untold. Many and many an Oedipus arrives; he has the whole mystery teeming in his
brain. Alas! the same sorcery has spoiled his skill; no syllable can he shape on his lips. Her
mighty orbit vaults like the fresh rainbow into the deep, but no archangel's wing was yet strong
enough to follow it and report of the return of the curve. But it also appears that our actions
are seconded and disposed to greater conclusions than we designed. We are escorted on every
hand through life by spiritual agents, and a beneficent purpose lies in wait for us. We cannot
bandy words with Nature, or deal with her as we deal with persons. If we measure our
individual forces against hers we may easily feel as if we were the sport of an insuperable
destiny. But if, instead of identifying ourselves with the work, we feel that the soul of the
workman streams through us, we shall find the peace of the morning dwelling first in our
hearts, and the fathomless powers of gravity and chemistry, and, over them, of life, preexisting
within us in their highest form.
 The uneasiness which the thought of our helplessness in the chain of causes occasions us,
results from looking too much at one condition of nature, namely, Motion. But the drag is never
taken from the wheel. Wherever the impulse exceeds, the Rest or Identity insinuates its
compensation. All over the wide fields of earth grows the prunella or self-heal. After every
foolish day we sleep off the fumes and furies of its hours; and though we are always engaged
with particulars, and often enslaved to them, we bring with us to every experiment the innate
universal laws. These, while they exist in the mind as ideas, stand around us in nature forever
embodied, a present sanity to expose and cure the insanity of men. Our servitude to particulars
betrays into a hundred foolish expectations. We anticipate a new era from the invention of a
locomotive, or a balloon; the new engine brings with it the old checks. They say that by electro-
magnetism your salad shall be grown from the seed whilst your fowl is roasting for dinner; it is a
symbol of our modern aims and endeavors, of our condensation and acceleration of objects;—
but nothing is gained; nature cannot be cheated; man's life is but seventy salads long, grow
they swift or grow they slow. In these checks and impossibilities however we find our
advantage, not less than in the impulses. Let the victory fall where it will, we are on that side.
And the knowledge that we traverse the whole scale of being, from the centre to the poles of
nature, and have some stake in every possibility, lends that sublime lustre to death, which
philosophy and religion have too outwardly and literally striven to express in the popular
doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The reality is more excellent than the report. Here is no
ruin, no discontinuity, no spent ball. The divine circulations never rest nor linger. Nature is the
incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas. The world
is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is forever escaping again into the state of free
thought. Hence the virtue and pungency of the influence on the mind of natural objects,
whether inorganic or organized. Man imprisoned, man crystallized, man vegetative, speaks to
man impersonated. That power which does not respect quantity, which makes the whole and
the particle its equal channel, delegates its smile to the morning, and distils its essence into
every drop of rain. Every moment instructs, and every object: for wisdom is infused into every
form. It has been poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it
enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence
until after a long time.

POLITICS.

Gold and iron are good

To buy iron and gold;
All earth's fleece and food
For their like are sold.
Boded Merlin wise,
Proved Napoleon great,—
Nor kind nor coinage buys
Aught above its rate.
Fear, Craft, and Avarice
Cannot rear a State.
Out of dust to build
What is more than dust,—
Walls Amphion piled
 Phoebus stablish must.
When the Muses nine
With the Virtues meet,
Find to their design
An Atlantic seat,
By green orchard boughs
Fended from the heat,
Where the statesman ploughs
Furrow for the wheat;
When the Church is social worth,
When the state-house is the hearth,
Then the perfect State is come,
The republican at home.

VII. POLITICS.

In dealing with the State we ought to remember that its institution are not aboriginal, though
they existed before we were born; that they are not superior to the citizen; that every one of
them was once the act of a single man; every law and usage was a man's expedient to meet a
particular case; that they all are imitable, all alterable; we may make as good, we may make
better. Society is an illusion to the young citizen. It lies before him in rigid repose, with certain
names, men and institutions rooted like oak-trees to the centre, round which all arrange
themselves the best they can. But the old statesman knows that society is fluid; there are no
such roots and centres, but any particle may suddenly become the centre of the movement and
compel the system to gyrate round it; as every man of strong will, like Pisistratus, or Cromwell,
does for a time, and every man of truth, like Plato or Paul, does forever. But politics rest on
necessary foundations, and cannot be treated with levity. Republics abound in young civilians,
who believe that the laws make the city, that grave modifications of the policy and modes of
living and employments of the population, that commerce, education, and religion, may be
voted in or out; and that any measure, though it were absurd, may be imposed on a people if
only you can get sufficient voices to make it a law. But the wise know that foolish legislation is a
rope of sand which perishes in the twisting; that the State must follow and not lead the
character and progress of the citizen; the strongest usurper is quickly got rid of; and they only
who build on Ideas, build for eternity; and that the form of government which prevails is the
expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it. The law is only a
memorandum. We are superstitious, and esteem the statute somewhat: so much life as it has
in the character of living men is its force. The statute stands there to say, Yesterday we agreed
so and so, but how feel ye this article to-day? Our statute is a currency which we stamp with
our own portrait: it soon becomes unrecognizable, and in process of time will return to the
mint. Nature is not democratic, nor limited-monarchical, but despotic, and will not be fooled or
abated of any jot of her authority by the pertest of her sons; and as fast as the public mind is
opened to more intelligence, the code is seen to be brute and stammering. It speaks not
articulately, and must be made to. Meantime the education of the general mind never stops.
The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and
prays, and paints to-day, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the
resolutions of public bodies; then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict
and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives
place in turn to new prayers and pictures. The history of the State sketches in coarse outline the
progress of thought, and follows at a distance the delicacy of culture and of aspiration.
The theory of politics which has possessed the mind of men, and which they have expressed
the best they could in their laws and in their revolutions, considers persons and property as the
two objects for whose protection government exists. Of persons, all have equal rights, in virtue
of being identical in nature. This interest of course with its whole power demands a democracy.
Whilst the rights of all as persons are equal, in virtue of their access to reason, their rights in
property are very unequal. One man owns his clothes, and another owns a county. This
accident, depending primarily on the skill and virtue of the parties, of which there is every
degree, and secondarily on patrimony, falls unequally, and its rights of course are unequal.
Personal rights, universally the same, demand a government framed on the ratio of the census;
property demands a government framed on the ratio of owners and of owning. Laban, who has
flocks and herds, wishes them looked after by an officer on the frontiers, lest the Midianites
shall drive them off; and pays a tax to that end. Jacob has no flocks or herds and no fear of the
Midianites, and pays no tax to the officer. It seemed fit that Laban and Jacob should have equal
rights to elect the officer who is to defend their persons, but that Laban and not Jacob should
elect the officer who is to guard the sheep and cattle. And if question arise whether additional
officers or watch-towers should be provided, must not Laban and Isaac, and those who must
sell part of their herds to buy protection for the rest, judge better of this, and with more right,
than Jacob, who, because he is a youth and a traveller, eats their bread and not his own?
In the earliest society the proprietors made their own wealth, and so long as it comes to the
owners in the direct way, no other opinion would arise in any equitable community than that
property should make the law for property, and persons the law for persons.
But property passes through donation or inheritance to those who do not create it. Gift, in
one case, makes it as really the new owner's, as labor made it the first owner's: in the other
case, of patrimony, the law makes an ownership which will be valid in each man's view
according to the estimate which he sets on the public tranquillity.
It was not however found easy to embody the readily admitted principle that property
should make law for property, and persons for persons; since persons and property mixed
themselves in every transaction. At last it seemed settled that the rightful distinction was that
the proprietors should have more elective franchise than non-proprietors, on the Spartan
principle of "calling that which is just, equal; not that which is equal, just."
That principle no longer looks so self-evident as it appeared in former times, partly, because
doubts have arisen whether too much weight had not been allowed in the laws to property,
and such a structure given to our usages as allowed the rich to encroach on the poor, and to
keep them poor; but mainly because there is an instinctive sense, however obscure and yet
inarticulate, that the whole constitution of property, on its present tenures, is injurious, and its
influence on persons deteriorating and degrading; that truly the only interest for the
consideration of the State is persons; that property will always follow persons; that the highest
end of government is the culture of men; and if men can be educated, the institutions will share
their improvement and the moral sentiment will write the law of the land.
If it be not easy to settle the equity of this question, the peril is less when we take note of our
natural defences. We are kept by better guards than the vigilance of such magistrates as we
commonly elect. Society always consists in greatest part of young and foolish persons. The old,
who have seen through the hypocrisy of courts and statesmen, die and leave no wisdom to
their sons. They believe their own newspaper, as their fathers did at their age. With such an
ignorant and deceivable majority, States would soon run to ruin, but that there are limitations
beyond which the folly and ambition of governors cannot go. Things have their laws, as well as
men; and things refuse to be trifled with. Property will be protected. Corn will not grow unless
it is planted and manured; but the farmer will not plant or hoe it unless the chances are a
hundred to one that he will cut and harvest it. Under any forms, persons and property must and
will have their just sway. They exert their power, as steadily as matter its attraction. Cover up a
pound of earth never so cunningly, divide and subdivide it; melt it to liquid, convert it to gas; it
will always weigh a pound; it will always attract and resist other matter by the full virtue of one
pound weight:—and the attributes of a person, his wit and his moral energy, will exercise,
under any law or extinguishing tyranny, their proper force,—if not overtly, then covertly; if not
for the law, then against it; if not wholesomely, then poisonously; with right, or by might.
The boundaries of personal influence it is impossible to fix, as persons are organs of moral or
supernatural force. Under the dominion of an idea which possesses the minds of multitudes, as
civil freedom, or the religious sentiment, the powers of persons are no longer subjects of
calculation. A nation of men unanimously bent on freedom or conquest can easily confound the
arithmetic of statists, and achieve extravagant actions, out of all proportion to their means; as
the Greeks, the Saracens, the Swiss, the Americans, and the French have done.
In like manner to every particle of property belongs its own attraction. A cent is the
representative of a certain quantity of corn or other commodity. Its value is in the necessities of
the animal man. It is so much warmth, so much bread, so much water, so much land. The law
may do what it will with the owner of property; its just power will still attach to the cent. The
law may in a mad freak say that all shall have power except the owners of property; they shall
have no vote. Nevertheless, by a higher law, the property will, year after year, write every
statute that respects property. The non-proprietor will be the scribe of the proprietor. What
the owners wish to do, the whole power of property will do, either through the law or else in
defiance of it. Of course I speak of all the property, not merely of the great estates. When the
rich are outvoted, as frequently happens, it is the joint treasury of the poor which exceeds their
accumulations. Every man owns something, if it is only a cow, or a wheel-barrow, or his arms,
and so has that property to dispose of.
The same necessity which secures the rights of person and property against the malignity or
folly of the magistrate, determines the form and methods of governing, which are proper to
each nation and to its habit of thought, and nowise transferable to other states of society. In
this country we are very vain of our political institutions, which are singular in this, that they
sprung, within the memory of living men, from the character and condition of the people,
which they still express with sufficient fidelity,—and we ostentatiously prefer them to any other
in history. They are not better, but only fitter for us. We may be wise in asserting the advantage
in modern times of the democratic form, but to other states of society, in which religion
consecrated the monarchical, that and not this was expedient. Democracy is better for us,
because the religious sentiment of the present time accords better with it. Born democrats, we
are nowise qualified to judge of monarchy, which, to our fathers living in the monarchical idea,
was also relatively right. But our institutions, though in coincidence with the spirit of the age,
have not any exemption from the practical defects which have discredited other forms. Every
actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well. What satire on government
can equal the severity of censure conveyed in the word politic, which now for ages has signified
cunning, intimating that the State is a trick?
The same benign necessity and the same practical abuse appear in the parties, into which
each State divides itself, of opponents and defenders of the administration of the government.
Parties are also founded on instincts, and have better guides to their own humble aims than the
sagacity of their leaders. They have nothing perverse in their origin, but rudely mark some real
and lasting relation. We might as wisely reprove the east wind or the frost, as a political party,
whose members, for the most part, could give no account of their position, but stand for the
defence of those interests in which they find themselves. Our quarrel with them begins when
they quit this deep natural ground at the bidding of some leader, and obeying personal
considerations, throw themselves into the maintenance and defence of points nowise
belonging to their system. A party is perpetually corrupted by personality. Whilst we absolve
the association from dishonesty, we cannot extend the same charity to their leaders. They reap
the rewards of the docility and zeal of the masses which they direct. Ordinarily our parties are
parties of circumstance, and not of principle; as the planting interest in conflict with the
commercial; the party of capitalists and that of operatives; parties which are identical in their
moral character, and which can easily change ground with each other in the support of many of
their measures. Parties of principle, as, religious sects, or the party of free-trade, of universal
suffrage, of abolition of slavery, of abolition of capital punishment,—degenerate into
personalities, or would inspire enthusiasm. The vice of our leading parties in this country (which
may be cited as a fair specimen of these societies of opinion) is that they do not plant
themselves on the deep and necessary grounds to which they are respectively entitled, but lash
themselves to fury in the carrying of some local and momentary measure, nowise useful to the
commonwealth. Of the two great parties which at this hour almost share the nation between
them, I should say that one has the best cause, and the other contains the best men. The
philosopher, the poet, or the religious man will of course wish to cast his vote with the
democrat, for free-trade, for wide suffrage, for the abolition of legal cruelties in the penal code,
and for facilitating in every manner the access of the young and the poor to the sources of
wealth and power. But he can rarely accept the persons whom the so-called popular party
propose to him as representatives of these liberalities. They have not at heart the ends which
give to the name of democracy what hope and virtue are in it. The spirit of our American
radicalism is destructive and aimless: it is not loving; it has no ulterior and divine ends, but is
destructive only out of hatred and selfishness. On the other side, the conservative party,
composed of the most moderate, able, and cultivated part of the population, is timid, and
merely defensive of property. It vindicates no right, it aspires to no real good, it brands no
crime, it proposes no generous policy; it does not build, nor write, nor cherish the arts, nor
foster religion, nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor emancipate the slave, nor
befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the immigrant. From neither party, when in power, has the
world any benefit to expect in science, art, or humanity, at all commensurate with the
resources of the nation.
I do not for these defects despair of our republic. We are not at the mercy of any waves of
chance. In the strife of ferocious parties, human nature always finds itself cherished; as the
children of the convicts at Botany Bay are found to have as healthy a moral sentiment as other
children. Citizens of feudal states are alarmed at our democratic institutions lapsing into
anarchy, and the older and more cautious among ourselves are learning from Europeans to look
with some terror at our turbulent freedom. It is said that in our license of construing the
Constitution, and in the despotism of public opinion, we have no anchor; and one foreign
observer thinks he has found the safeguard in the sanctity of Marriage among us; and another
thinks he has found it in our Calvinism. Fisher Ames expressed the popular security more
wisely, when he compared a monarchy and a republic, saying that a monarchy is a
merchantman, which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock and go to the bottom; whilst
a republic is a raft, which would never sink, but then your feet are always in water. No forms
can have any dangerous importance whilst we are befriended by the laws of things. It makes no
difference how many tons weight of atmosphere presses on our heads, so long as the same
pressure resists it within the lungs. Augment the mass a thousand fold, it cannot begin to crush
us, as long as reaction is equal to action. The fact of two poles, of two forces, centripetal and
centrifugal, is universal, and each force by its own activity develops the other. Wild liberty
develops iron conscience. Want of liberty, by strengthening law and decorum, stupefies
conscience. 'Lynch-law' prevails only where there is greater hardihood and self-subsistency in
the leaders. A mob cannot be a permanency; everybody's interest requires that it should not
exist, and only justice satisfies all.
We must trust infinitely to the beneficent necessity which shines through all laws. Human
nature expresses itself in them as characteristically as in statues, or songs, or railroads; and an
abstract of the codes of nations would be a transcript of the common conscience. Governments
have their origin in the moral identity of men. Reason for one is seen to be reason for another,
and for every other. There is a middle measure which satisfies all parties, be they never so
many or so resolute for their own. Every man finds a sanction for his simplest claims and deeds
in decisions of his own mind, which he calls Truth and Holiness. In these decisions all the
citizens find a perfect agreement, and only in these; not in what is good to eat, good to wear,
good use of time, or what amount of land or of public aid, each is entitled to claim. This truth
and justice men presently endeavor to make application of to the measuring of land, the
apportionment of service, the protection of life and property. Their first endeavors, no doubt,
are very awkward. Yet absolute right is the first governor; or, every government is an impure
theocracy. The idea after which each community is aiming to make and mend its law, is the will
of the wise man. The wise man it cannot find in nature, and it makes awkward but earnest
efforts to secure his government by contrivance; as by causing the entire people to give their
voices on every measure; or by a double choice to get the representation of the whole; or, by a
selection of the best citizens; or to secure the advantages of efficiency and internal peace by
confiding the government to one, who may himself select his agents. All forms of government
symbolize an immortal government, common to all dynasties and independent of numbers,
perfect where two men exist, perfect where there is only one man.
Every man's nature is a sufficient advertisement to him of the character of his fellows. My
right and my wrong is their right and their wrong. Whilst I do what is fit for me, and abstain
from what is unfit, my neighbor and I shall often agree in our means, and work together for a
time to one end. But whenever I find my dominion over myself not sufficient for me, and
undertake the direction of him also, I overstep the truth, and come into false relations to him. I
may have so much more skill or strength than he that he cannot express adequately his sense
of wrong, but it is a lie, and hurts like a lie both him and me. Love and nature cannot maintain
the assumption; it must be executed by a practical lie, namely by force. This undertaking for
another is the blunder which stands in colossal ugliness in the governments of the world. It is
the same thing in numbers, as in a pair, only not quite so intelligible. I can see well enough a
great difference between my setting myself down to a self-control, and my going to make
somebody else act after my views; but when a quarter of the human race assume to tell me
what I must do, I may be too much disturbed by the circumstances to see so clearly the
absurdity of their command. Therefore all public ends look vague and quixotic beside private
ones. For any laws but those which men make for themselves, are laughable. If I put myself in
the place of my child, and we stand in one thought and see that things are thus or thus, that
perception is law for him and me. We are both there, both act. But if, without carrying him into
the thought, I look over into his plot, and, guessing how it is with him, ordain this or that, he
will never obey me. This is the history of governments,—one man does something which is to
bind another. A man who cannot be acquainted with me, taxes me; looking from afar at me
ordains that a part of my labor shall go to this or that whimsical end,—not as I, but as he
happens to fancy. Behold the consequence. Of all debts men are least willing to pay the taxes.
What a satire is this on government! Everywhere they think they get their money's worth,
except for these.
Hence the less government we have the better,—the fewer laws, and the less confided
power. The antidote to this abuse of formal Government is the influence of private character,
the growth of the Individual; the appearance of the principal to supersede the proxy; the
appearance of the wise man; of whom the existing government is, it must be owned, but a
shabby imitation. That which all things tend to educe; which freedom, cultivation, intercourse,
revolutions, go to form and deliver, is character; that is the end of Nature, to reach unto this
coronation of her king. To educate the wise man the State exists, and with the appearance of
the wise man the State expires. The appearance of character makes the State unnecessary. The
wise man is the State. He needs no army, fort, or navy,—he loves men too well; no bribe, or
feast, or palace, to draw friends to him; no vantage ground, no favorable circumstance. He
needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is a prophet; no statute book,
for he has the lawgiver; no money, for he is value; no road, for he is at home where he is; no
experience, for the life of the creator shoots through him, and looks from his eyes. He has no
personal friends, for he who has the spell to draw the prayer and piety of all men unto him
needs not husband and educate a few to share with him a select and poetic life. His relation to
men is angelic; his memory is myrrh to them; his presence, frankincense and flowers.
We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the
morning star. In our barbarous society the influence of character is in its infancy. As a political
power, as the rightful lord who is to tumble all rulers from their chairs, its presence is hardly yet
suspected. Malthus and Ricardo quite omit it; the Annual Register is silent; in the
Conversations' Lexicon it is not set down; the President's Message, the Queen's Speech, have
not mentioned it; and yet it is never nothing. Every thought which genius and piety throw into
the world, alters the world. The gladiators in the lists of power feel, through all their frocks of
force and simulation, the presence of worth. I think the very strife of trade and ambition are
confession of this divinity; and successes in those fields are the poor amends, the fig-leaf with
which the shamed soul attempts to hide its nakedness. I find the like unwilling homage in all
quarters. It is because we know how much is due from us that we are impatient to show some
petty talent as a substitute for worth. We are haunted by a conscience of this right to grandeur
of character, and are false to it. But each of us has some talent, can do somewhat useful, or
graceful, or formidable, or amusing, or lucrative. That we do, as an apology to others and to
ourselves for not reaching the mark of a good and equal life. But it does not satisfy us, whilst
we thrust it on the notice of our companions. It may throw dust in their eyes, but does not
smooth our own brow, or give us the tranquillity of the strong when we walk abroad. We do
penance as we go. Our talent is a sort of expiation, and we are constrained to reflect on our
splendid moment with a certain humiliation, as somewhat too fine, and not as one act of many
acts, a fair expression of our permanent energy. Most persons of ability meet in society with a
kind of tacit appeal. Each seems to say, 'I am not all here.' Senators and presidents have
climbed so high with pain enough, not because they think the place specially agreeable, but as
an apology for real worth, and to vindicate their manhood in our eyes. This conspicuous chair is
their compensation to themselves for being of a poor, cold, hard nature. They must do what
they can. Like one class of forest animals, they have nothing but a prehensile tail; climb they
must, or crawl. If a man found himself so rich-natured that he could enter into strict relations
with the best persons and make life serene around him by the dignity and sweetness of his
behavior, could he afford to circumvent the favor of the caucus and the press, and covet
relations so hollow and pompous as those of a politician? Surely nobody would be a charlatan
who could afford to be sincere.
The tendencies of the times favor the idea of self-government, and leave the individual, for
all code, to the rewards and penalties of his own constitution; which work with more energy
than we believe whilst we depend on artificial restraints. The movement in this direction has
been very marked in modern history. Much has been blind and discreditable, but the nature of
the revolution is not affected by the vices of the revolters; for this is a purely moral force. It was
never adopted by any party in history, neither can be. It separates the individual from all party,
and unites him at the same time to the race. It promises a recognition of higher rights than
those of personal freedom, or the security of property. A man has a right to be employed, to be
trusted, to be loved, to be revered. The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been
tried. We must not imagine that all things are lapsing into confusion if every tender protestant
be not compelled to bear his part in certain social conventions; nor doubt that roads can be
built, letters carried, and the fruit of labor secured, when the government of force is at an end.
Are our methods now so excellent that all competition is hopeless? could not a nation of friends
even devise better ways? On the other hand, let not the most conservative and timid fear
anything from a premature surrender of the bayonet and the system of force. For, according to
the order of nature, which is quite superior to our will, it stands thus; there will always be a
government of force where men are selfish; and when they are pure enough to abjure the code
of force they will be wise enough to see how these public ends of the post-office, of the
highway, of commerce and the exchange of property, of museums and libraries, of institutions
of art and science can be answered.
We live in a very low state of the world, and pay unwilling tribute to governments founded
on force. There is not, among the most religious and instructed men of the most religious and
civil nations, a reliance on the moral sentiment and a sufficient belief in the unity of things, to
persuade them that society can be maintained without artificial restraints, as well as the solar
system; or that the private citizen might be reasonable and a good neighbor, without the hint of
a jail or a confiscation. What is strange too, there never was in any man sufficient faith in the
power of rectitude to inspire him with the broad design of renovating the State on the principle
of right and love. All those who have pretended this design have been partial reformers, and
have admitted in some manner the supremacy of the bad State. I do not call to mind a single
human being who has steadily denied the authority of the laws, on the simple ground of his
own moral nature. Such designs, full of genius and full of fate as they are, are not entertained
except avowedly as air-pictures. If the individual who exhibits them dare to think them
practicable, he disgusts scholars and churchmen; and men of talent and women of superior
sentiments cannot hide their contempt. Not the less does nature continue to fill the heart of
youth with suggestions of this enthusiasm, and there are now men,—if indeed I can speak in
the plural number,—more exactly, I will say, I have just been conversing with one man, to
whom no weight of adverse experience will make it for a moment appear impossible that
thousands of human beings might exercise towards each other the grandest and simplest
sentiments, as well as a knot of friends, or a pair of lovers.

NOMINALIST AND REALIST.

In countless upward-striving waves

The moon-drawn tide-wave strives:
In thousand far-transplanted grafts
The parent fruit survives;
So, in the new-born millions,
The perfect Adam lives.
Not less are summer-mornings dear
To every child they wake,
And each with novel life his sphere
Fills for his proper sake.
 VIII. NONIMALIST AND REALIST.

I CANNOT often enough say that a man is only a relative and representative nature. Each is a
hint of the truth, but far enough from being that truth which yet he quite newly and inevitably
suggests to us. If I seek it in him I shall not find it. Could any man conduct into me the pure
stream of that which he pretends to be! Long afterwards I find that quality elsewhere which he
promised me. The genius of the Platonists is intoxicating to the student, yet how few particulars
of it can I detach from all their books. The man momentarily stands for the thought, but will not
bear examination; and a society of men will cursorily represent well enough a certain quality
and culture, for example, chivalry or beauty of manners; but separate them and there is no
gentleman and no lady in the group. The least hint sets us on the pursuit of a character which
no man realizes. We have such exorbitant eyes that on seeing the smallest arc we complete the
curve, and when the curtain is lifted from the diagram which it seemed to veil, we are vexed to
find that no more was drawn than just that fragment of an arc which we first beheld. We are
greatly too liberal in our construction of each other's faculty and promise. Exactly what the
parties have already done they shall do again; but that which we inferred from their nature and
inception, they will not do. That is in nature, but not in them. That happens in the world, which
we often witness in a public debate. Each of the speakers expresses himself imperfectly; no one
of them hears much that another says, such is the preoccupation of mind of each; and the
audience, who have only to hear and not to speak, judge very wisely and superiorly how
wrongheaded and unskilful is each of the debaters to his own affair. Great men or men of great
gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never. When I meet a pure intellectual force or a
generosity of affection, I believe here then is man; and am presently mortified by the discovery
that this individual is no more available to his own or to the general ends than his companions;
because the power which drew my respect is not supported by the total symphony of his
talents. All persons exist to society by some shining trait of beauty or utility which they have.
We borrow the proportions of the man from that one fine feature, and finish the portrait
symmetrically; which is false, for the rest of his body is small or deformed. I observe a person
who makes a good public appearance, and conclude thence the perfection of his private
character, on which this is based; but he has no private character. He is a graceful cloak or lay-
figure for holidays. All our poets, heroes, and saints, fail utterly in some one or in many parts to
satisfy our idea, fail to draw our spontaneous interest, and so leave us without any hope of
realization but in our own future. Our exaggeration of all fine characters arises from the fact
that we identify each in turn with the soul. But there are no such men as we fable; no Jesus, nor
Pericles, nor Caesar, nor Angelo, nor Washington, such as we have made. We consecrate a
great deal of nonsense because it was allowed by great men. There is none without his foible. I
verily believe if an angel should come to chant the chorus of the moral law, he would eat too
much gingerbread, or take liberties with private letters, or do some precious atrocity. It is bad
enough that our geniuses cannot do anything useful, but it is worse that no man is fit for society
who has fine traits. He is admired at a distance, but he cannot come near without appearing a
cripple. The men of fine parts protect themselves by solitude, or by courtesy, or by satire, or by
an acid worldly manner, each concealing as he best can his incapacity for useful association, but
they want either love or self-reliance.
Our native love of reality joins with this experience to teach us a little reserve, and to
dissuade a too sudden surrender to the brilliant qualities of persons. Young people admire
talents or particular excellences; as we grow older we value total powers and effects, as the
impression, the quality, the spirit of men and things. The genius is all. The man,—it is his
system: we do not try a solitary word or act, but his habit. The acts which you praise, I praise
not, since they are departures from his faith, and are mere compliances. The magnetism which
arranges tribes and races in one polarity is alone to be respected; the men are steel-filings. Yet
we unjustly select a particle, and say, 'O steel-filing number one! what heart-drawings I feel to
thee! what prodigious virtues are these of thine! how constitutional to thee, and
incommunicable.' Whilst we speak the loadstone is withdrawn; down falls our filing in a heap
with the rest, and we continue our mummery to the wretched shaving. Let us go for universals;
for the magnetism, not for the needles. Human life and its persons are poor empirical
pretensions. A personal influence is an ignis fatuus. If they say it is great, it is great; if they say it
is small, it is small; you see it, and you see it not, by turns; it borrows all its size from the
momentary estimation of the speakers: the Will-of-the-wisp vanishes if you go too near,
vanishes if you go too far, and only blazes at one angle. Who can tell if Washington be a great
man or no? Who can tell if Franklin be? Yes, or any but the twelve, or six, or three great gods of
fame? And they too loom and fade before the eternal.
We are amphibious creatures, weaponed for two elements, having two sets of faculties, the
particular and the catholic. We adjust our instrument for general observation, and sweep the
heavens as easily as we pick out a single figure in the terrestrial landscape. We are practically
skilful in detecting elements for which we have no place in our theory, and no name. Thus we
are very sensible of an atmospheric influence in men and in bodies of men, not accounted for in
an arithmetical addition of all their measurable properties. There is a genius of a nation, which
is not to be found in the numerical citizens, but which characterizes the society. England,
strong, punctual, practical, well-spoken England I should not find if I should go to the island to
seek it. In the parliament, in the play-house, at dinner-tables, I might see a great number of
rich, ignorant, book-read, conventional, proud men,—many old women,—and not anywhere
the Englishman who made the good speeches, combined the accurate engines, and did the bold
and nervous deeds. It is even worse in America, where, from the intellectual quickness of the
race, the genius of the country is more splendid in its promise and more slight in its
performance. Webster cannot do the work of Webster. We conceive distinctly enough the
French, the Spanish, the German genius, and it is not the less real that perhaps we should not
meet in either of those nations a single individual who corresponded with the type. We infer
the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language, which is a sort of monument to
which each forcible individual in a course of many hundred years has contributed a stone. And,
universally, a good example of this social force is the veracity of language, which cannot be
debauched. In any controversy concerning morals, an appeal may be made with safety to the
sentiments which the language of the people expresses. Proverbs, words, and grammar-
inflections convey the public sense with more purity and precision than the wisest individual.
In the famous dispute with the Nominalists, the Realists had a good deal of reason. General
ideas are essences. They are our gods: they round and ennoble the most partial and sordid way
of living. Our proclivity to details cannot quite degrade our life and divest it of poetry. The day-
laborer is reckoned as standing at the foot of the social scale, yet he is saturated with the laws
of the world. His measures are the hours; morning and night, solstice and equinox, geometry,
astronomy and all the lovely accidents of nature play through his mind. Money, which
represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in
its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses. Property keeps the accounts of the world, and is
always moral. The property will be found where the labor, the wisdom, and the virtue have
been in nations, in classes, and (the whole life-time considered, with the compensations) in the
individual also. How wise the world appears, when the laws and usages of nations are largely
detailed, and the completeness of the municipal system is considered! Nothing is left out. If you
go into the markets and the custom-houses, the insurers' and notaries' offices, the offices of
sealers of weights and measures, of inspection of provisions,—it will appear as if one man had
made it all. Wherever you go, a wit like your own has been before you, and has realized its
thought. The Eleusinian mysteries, the Egyptian architecture, the Indian astronomy, the Greek
sculpture, show that there always were seeing and knowing men in the planet. The world is full
of masonic ties, of guilds, of secret and public legions of honor; that of scholars, for example;
and that of gentlemen, fraternizing with the upper class of every country and every culture.
I am very much struck in literature by the appearance that one person wrote all the books; as
if the editor of a journal planted his body of reporters in different parts of the field of action,
and relieved some by others from time to time; but there is such equality and identity both of
judgment and point of view in the narrative that it is plainly the work of one all-seeing, all-
hearing gentleman. I looked into Pope's Odyssey yesterday: it is as correct and elegant after our
canon of to-day as if it were newly written. The modernness of all good books seems to give me
an existence as wide as man. What is well done I feel as if I did; what is ill done I reck not of.
Shakspeare's passages of passion (for example, in Lear and Hamlet) are in the very dialect of
the present year. I am faithful again to the whole over the members in my use of books. I find
the most pleasure in reading a book in a manner least flattering to the author. I read Proclus,
and sometimes Plato, as I might read a dictionary, for a mechanical help to the fancy and the
imagination. I read for the lustres, as if one should use a fine picture in a chromatic experiment,
for its rich colors. 'Tis not Proclus, but a piece of nature and fate that I explore. It is a greater joy
to see the author's author, than himself. A higher pleasure of the same kind I found lately at a
concert, where I went to hear Handel's Messiah. As the master overpowered the littleness and
incapableness of the performers and made them conductors of his electricity, so it was easy to
observe what efforts nature was making, through so many hoarse, wooden, and imperfect
persons, to produce beautiful voices, fluid and soul-guided men and women. The genius of
nature was paramount at the oratorio.
This preference of the genius to the parts is the secret of that deification of art, which is
found in all superior minds. Art, in the artist, is proportion, or a habitual respect to the whole by
an eye loving beauty in details. And the wonder and charm of it is the sanity in insanity which it
denotes. Proportion is almost impossible to human beings. There is no one who does not
exaggerate. In conversation, men are encumbered with personality, and talk too much. In
modern sculpture, picture, and poetry, the beauty is miscellaneous; the artist works here and
there and at all points, adding and adding, instead of unfolding the unit of his thought. Beautiful
details we must have, or no artist; but they must be means and never other. The eye must not
lose sight for a moment of the purpose. Lively boys write to their ear and eye, and the cool
reader finds nothing but sweet jingles in it. When they grow older, they respect the argument.
We obey the same intellectual integrity when we study in exceptions the law of the world.
Anomalous facts, as the never quite obsolete rumors of magic and demonology, and the new
allegations of phrenologists and neurologists, are of ideal use. They are good indications.
Homoeopathy is insignificant as an art of healing, but of great value as criticism on the hygeia or
medical practice of the time. So with Mesmerism, Swedenborgism, Fourierism, and the
Millennial Church; they are poor pretensions enough, but good criticism on the science,
philosophy, and preaching of the day. For these abnormal insights of the adepts ought to be
normal, and things of course.
All things show us that on every side we are very near to the best. It seems not worth while
to execute with too much pains some one intellectual, or aesthetical, or civil feat, when
presently the dream will scatter, and we shall burst into universal power. The reason of idleness
and of crime is the deferring of our hopes. Whilst we are waiting we beguile the time with
jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with crimes.
 Thus we settle it in our cool libraries, that all the agents with which we deal are subalterns,
which we can well afford to let pass, and life will be simpler when we live at the centre and
flout the surfaces. I wish to speak with all respect of persons, but sometimes I must pinch
myself to keep awake and preserve the due decorum. They melt so fast into each other that
they are like grass and trees, and it needs an effort to treat them as individuals. Though the
uninspired man certainly finds persons a conveniency in household matters, the divine man
does not respect them; he sees them as a rack of clouds, or a fleet of ripples which the wind
drives over the surface of the water. But this is flat rebellion. Nature will not be Buddhist: she
resents generalizing, and insults the philosopher in every moment with a million of fresh
particulars. It is all idle talking: as much as a man is a whole, so is he also a part; and it were
partial not to see it. What you say in your pompous distribution only distributes you into your
class and section. You have not got rid of parts by denying them, but are the more partial. You
are one thing, but Nature is one thing and the other thing, in the same moment. She will not
remain orbed in a thought, but rushes into persons; and when each person, inflamed to a fury
of personality, would conquer all things to his poor crotchet, she raises up against him another
person, and by many persons incarnates again a sort of whole. She will have all. Nick Bottom
cannot play all the parts, work it how he may; there will be somebody else, and the world will
be round. Everything must have its flower or effort at the beautiful, coarser or finer according
to its stuff. They relieve and recommend each other, and the sanity of society is a balance of a
thousand insanities. She punishes abstractionists, and will only forgive an induction which is
rare and casual. We like to come to a height of land and see the landscape, just as we value a
general remark in conversation. But it is not the intention of Nature that we should live by
general views. We fetch fire and water, run about all day among the shops and markets, and
get our clothes and shoes made and mended, and are the victims of these details; and once in a
fortnight we arrive perhaps at a rational moment. If we were not thus infatuated, if we saw the
real from hour to hour, we should not be here to write and to read, but should have been
burned or frozen long ago. She would never get anything done, if she suffered admirable
Crichtons and universal geniuses. She loves better a wheelwright who dreams all night of
wheels, and a groom who is part of his horse; for she is full of work, and these are her hands. As
the frugal farmer takes care that his cattle shall eat down the rowen, and swine shall eat the
waste of his house, and poultry shall pick the crumbs,—so our economical mother dispatches a
new genius and habit of mind into every district and condition of existence, plants an eye
wherever a new ray of light can fall, and gathering up into some man every property in the
universe, establishes thousandfold occult mutual attractions among her offspring, that all this
wash and waste of power may be imparted and exchanged.
Great dangers undoubtedly accrue from this incarnation and distribution of the godhead, and
hence Nature has her maligners, as if she were Circe; and Alphonso of Castille fancied he could
have given useful advice. But she does not go unprovided; she has hellebore at the bottom of
the cup. Solitude would ripen a plentiful crop of despots. The recluse thinks of men as having
his manner, or as not having his manner; and as having degrees of it, more and less. But when
he comes into a public assembly he sees that men have very different manners from his own,
and in their way admirable. In his childhood and youth he has had many checks and censures,
and thinks modestly enough of his own endowment. When afterwards he comes to unfold it in
propitious circumstance, it seems the only talent; he is delighted with his success, and accounts
himself already the fellow of the great. But he goes into a mob, into a banking house, into a
mechanic's shop, into a mill, into a laboratory, into a ship, into a camp, and in each new place
he is no better than an idiot; other talents take place, and rule the hour. The rotation which
whirls every leaf and pebble to the meridian, reaches to every gift of man, and we all take turns
at the top.
 For Nature, who abhors mannerism, has set her heart on breaking up all styles and tricks, and
it is so much easier to do what one has done before than to do a new thing, that there is a
perpetual tendency to a set mode. In every conversation, even the highest, there is a certain
trick, which may be soon learned by an acute person and then that particular style continued
indefinitely. Each man too is a tyrant in tendency, because he would impose his idea on others;
and their trick is their natural defence. Jesus would absorb the race; but Tom Paine or the
coarsest blasphemer helps humanity by resisting this exuberance of power. Hence the immense
benefit of party in politics, as it reveals faults of character in a chief, which the intellectual force
of the persons, with ordinary opportunity and not hurled into aphelion by hatred, could not
have seen. Since we are all so stupid, what benefit that there should be two stupidities! It is like
that brute advantage so essential to astronomy, of having the diameter of the earth's orbit for a
base of its triangles. Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy, but in the State and in the
schools it is indispensable to resist the consolidation of all men into a few men. If John was
perfect, why are you and I alive? As long as any man exists, there is some need of him; let him
fight for his own. A new poet has appeared; a new character approached us; why should we
refuse to eat bread until we have found his regiment and section in our old army-files? Why not
a new man? Here is a new enterprise of Brook Farm, of Skeneateles, of Northampton: why so
impatient to baptize them Essenes, or Port-Royalists, or Shakers, or by any known and effete
name? Let it be a new way of living. Why have only two or three ways of life, and not
thousands? Every man is wanted, and no man is wanted much. We came this time for
condiments, not for corn. We want the great genius only for joy; for one star more in our
constellation, for one tree more in our grove. But he thinks we wish to belong to him, as he
wishes to occupy us. He greatly mistakes us. I think I have done well if I have acquired a new
word from a good author; and my business with him is to find my own, though it were only to
melt him down into an epithet or an image for daily use:—
"Into paint will I grind thee, my bride!"
To embroil the confusion, and make it impossible to arrive at any general statement,—when
we have insisted on the imperfection of individuals, our affections and our experience urge that
every individual is entitled to honor, and a very generous treatment is sure to be repaid. A
recluse sees only two or three persons, and allows them all their room; they spread themselves
at large. The statesman looks at many, and compares the few habitually with others, and these
look less. Yet are they not entitled to this generosity of reception? and is not munificence the
means of insight? For though gamesters say that the cards beat all the players, though they
were never so skilful, yet in the contest we are now considering, the players are also the game,
and share the power of the cards. If you criticise a fine genius, the odds are that you are out of
your reckoning, and instead of the poet, are censuring your own caricature of him. For there is
somewhat spheral and infinite in every man, especially in every genius, which, if you can come
very near him, sports with all your limitations. For rightly every man is a channel through which
heaven floweth, and whilst I fancied I was criticising him, I was censuring or rather terminating
my own soul. After taxing Goethe as a courtier, artificial, unbelieving, worldly,—I took up this
book of Helena, and found him an Indian of the wilderness, a piece of pure nature like an apple
or an oak, large as morning or night, and virtuous as a brier-rose.
But care is taken that the whole tune shall be played. If we were not kept among surfaces,
every thing would be large and universal; now the excluded attributes burst in on us with the
more brightness that they have been excluded. "Your turn now, my turn next," is the rule of the
game. The universality being hindered in its primary form, comes in the secondary form of all
sides; the points come in succession to the meridian, and by the speed of rotation a new whole
is formed. Nature keeps herself whole and her representation complete in the experience of
each mind. She suffers no seat to be vacant in her college. It is the secret of the world that all
things subsist and do not die but only retire a little from sight and afterwards return again.
Whatever does not concern us is concealed from us. As soon as a person is no longer related to
our present well-being, he is concealed, or dies, as we say. Really, all things and persons are
related to us, but according to our nature they act on us not at once but in succession, and we
are made aware of their presence one at a time. All persons, all things which we have known,
are here present, and many more than we see; the world is full. As the ancient said, the world is
a plenum or solid; and if we saw all things that really surround us we should be imprisoned and
unable to move. For though nothing is impassable to the soul, but all things are pervious to it
and like highways, yet this is only whilst the soul does not see them. As soon as the soul sees
any object, it stops before that object. Therefore, the divine Providence which keeps the
universe open in every direction to the soul, conceals all the furniture and all the persons that
do not concern a particular soul, from the senses of that individual. Through solidest eternal
things the man finds his road as if they did not subsist, and does not once suspect their being.
As soon as he needs a new object, suddenly he beholds it, and no longer attempts to pass
through it, but takes another way. When he has exhausted for the time the nourishment to be
drawn from any one person or thing, that object is withdrawn from his observation, and though
still in his immediate neighborhood, he does not suspect its presence. Nothing is dead: men
feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they
stand looking out of the window, sound and well, in some new and strange disguise. Jesus is
not dead; he is very well alive: nor John, nor Paul, nor Mahomet, nor Aristotle; at times we
believe we have seen them all, and could easily tell the names under which they go.
If we cannot make voluntary and conscious steps in the admirable science of universals, let
us see the parts wisely, and infer the genius of nature from the best particulars with a becoming
charity. What is best in each kind is an index of what should be the average of that thing. Love
shows me the opulence of nature, by disclosing to me in my friend a hidden wealth, and I infer
an equal depth of good in every other direction. It is commonly said by farmers that a good
pear or apple costs no more time or pains to rear than a poor one; so I would have no work of
art, no speech, or action, or thought, or friend, but the best.
The end and the means, the gamester and the game,—life is made up of the intermixture
and reaction of these two amicable powers, whose marriage appears beforehand monstrous, as
each denies and tends to abolish the other. We must reconcile the contradictions as we can,
but their discord and their concord introduce wild absurdities into our thinking and speech. No
sentence will hold the whole truth, and the only way in which we can be just, is by giving
ourselves the lie; Speech is better than silence; silence is better than speech;—All things are in
contact; every atom has a sphere of repulsion;—Things are, and are not, at the same time;—
and the like. All the universe over, there is but one thing, this old Two-Face, creator-creature,
mind-matter, right-wrong, of which any proposition may be affirmed or denied. Very fitly
therefore I assert that every man is a partialist, that nature secures him as an instrument by
self-conceit, preventing the tendencies to religion and science; and now further assert, that,
each man's genius being nearly and affectionately explored, he is justified in his individuality, as
his nature is found to be immense; and now I add that every man is a universalist also, and, as
our earth, whilst it spins on its own axis, spins all the time around the sun through the celestial
spaces, so the least of its rational children, the most dedicated to his private affair, works out,
though as it were under a disguise, the universal problem. We fancy men are individuals; so are
pumpkins; but every pumpkin in the field goes through every point of pumpkin history. The
rabid democrat, as soon as he is senator and rich man, has ripened beyond possibility of sincere
radicalism, and unless he can resist the sun, he must be conservative the remainder of his days.
Lord Eldon said in his old age that "if he were to begin life again, he would be damned but he
would begin as agitator."
We hide this universality if we can, but it appears at all points. We are as ungrateful as
children. There is nothing we cherish and strive to draw to us but in some hour we turn and
rend it. We keep a running fire of sarcasm at ignorance and the life of the senses; then goes by,
perchance, a fair girl, a piece of life, gay and happy, and making the commonest offices
beautiful by the energy and heart with which she does them; and seeing this we admire and
love her and them, and say, 'Lo! a genuine creature of the fair earth, not dissipated or too early
ripened by books, philosophy, religion, society, or care!' insinuating a treachery and contempt
for all we had so long loved and wrought in ourselves and others.
If we could have any security against moods! If the profoundest prophet could be holden to
his words, and the hearer who is ready to sell all and join the crusade could have any certificate
that tomorrow his prophet shall not unsay his testimony! But the Truth sits veiled there on the
Bench, and never interposes an adamantine syllable; and the most sincere and revolutionary
doctrine, put as if the ark of God were carried forward some furlongs, and planted there for the
succor of the world, shall in a few weeks be coldly set aside by the same speaker, as morbid; "I
thought I was right, but I was not,"—and the same immeasurable credulity demanded for new
audacities. If we were not of all opinions! if we did not in any moment shift the platform on
which we stand, and look and speak from another! if there could be any regulation, any 'one-
hour-rule,' that a man should never leave his point of view without sound of trumpet. I am
always insincere, as always knowing there are other moods.
How sincere and confidential we can be, saying all that lies in the mind, and yet go away
feeling that all is yet unsaid, from the incapacity of the parties to know each other, although
they use the same words! My companion assumes to know my mood and habit of thought, and
we go on from explanation to explanation until all is said which words can, and we leave
matters just as they were at first, because of that vicious assumption. Is it that every man
believes every other to be an incurable partialist, and himself a universalist? I talked yesterday
with a pair of philosophers; I endeavored to show my good men that I love everything by turns
and nothing long; that I loved the centre, but doated on the superficies; that I loved man, if
men seemed to me mice and rats; that I revered saints, but woke up glad that the old pagan
world stood its ground and died hard; that I was glad of men of every gift and nobility, but
would not live in their arms. Could they but once understand that I loved to know that they
existed, and heartily wished them God-speed, yet, out of my poverty of life and thought, had no
word or welcome for them when they came to see me, and could well consent to their living in
Oregon, for any claim I felt on them,—it would be a great satisfaction.

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS.

In the suburb, in the town,

On the railway, in the square,
Came a beam of goodness down
Doubling daylight everywhere:
Peace now each for malice takes,
Beauty for his sinful weeks,
For the angel Hope aye makes
Him an angel whom she leads.
 NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS.

A LECTURE READ BEFORE THE SOCIETY IN AMORY HALL, ON SUNDAY, MARCH 3, 1844.
WHOEVER has had opportunity of acquaintance with society in New England during the last
twenty-five years, with those middle and with those leading sections that may constitute any
just representation of the character and aim of the community, will have been struck with the
great activity of thought and experimenting. His attention must be commanded by the signs
that the Church, or religious party, is falling from the Church nominal, and is appearing in
temperance and non-resistance societies; in movements of abolitionists and of socialists; and in
very significant assemblies called Sabbath and Bible Conventions; composed of ultraists, of
seekers, of all the soul of the soldiery of dissent, and meeting to call in question the authority of
the Sabbath, of the priesthood, and of the Church. In these movements nothing was more
remarkable than the discontent they begot in the movers. The spirit of protest and of
detachment drove the members of these Conventions to bear testimony against the Church,
and immediately afterward, to declare their discontent with these Conventions, their
independence of their colleagues, and their impatience of the methods whereby they were
working. They defied each other, like a congress of kings, each of whom had a realm to rule,
and a way of his own that made concert unprofitable. What a fertility of projects for the
salvation of the world! One apostle thought all men should go to farming, and another that no
man should buy or sell, that the use of money was the cardinal evil; another that the mischief
was in our diet, that we eat and drink damnation. These made unleavened bread, and were
foes to the death to fermentation. It was in vain urged by the housewife that God made yeast,
as well as dough, and loves fermentation just as dearly as he loves vegetation; that
fermentation develops the saccharine element in the grain, and makes it more palatable and
more digestible. No; they wish the pure wheat, and will die but it shall not ferment. Stop, dear
nature, these incessant advances of thine; let us scotch these ever-rolling wheels! Others
attacked the system of agriculture, the use of animal manures in farming, and the tyranny of
man over brute nature; these abuses polluted his food. The ox must be taken from the plough
and the horse from the cart, the hundred acres of the farm must be spaded, and the man must
walk, wherever boats and locomotives will not carry him. Even the insect world was to be
defended,—that had been too long neglected, and a society for the protection of ground-
worms, slugs, and mosquitos was to be incorporated without delay. With these appeared the
adepts of homoeopathy, of hydropathy, of mesmerism, of phrenology, and their wonderful
theories of the Christian miracles! Others assailed particular vocations, as that of the lawyer,
that of the merchant, of the manufacturer, of the clergyman, of the scholar. Others attacked
the institution of marriage as the fountain of social evils. Others devoted themselves to the
worrying of churches and meetings for public worship; and the fertile forms of antinomianism
among the elder puritans seemed to have their match in the plenty of the new harvest of
reform.
With this din of opinion and debate there was a keener scrutiny of institutions and domestic
life than any we had known; there was sincere protesting against existing evils, and there were
changes of employment dictated by conscience. No doubt there was plentiful vaporing, and
cases of backsliding might occur. But in each of these movements emerged a good result, a
tendency to the adoption of simpler methods, and an assertion of the sufficiency of the private
man. Thus it was directly in the spirit and genius of the age, what happened in one instance
when a church censured and threatened to excommunicate one of its members on account of
the somewhat hostile part to the church which his conscience led him to take in the anti-slavery
business; the threatened individual immediately excommunicated the church in a public and
formal process. This has been several times repeated: it was excellent when it was done the
first time, but of course loses all value when it is copied. Every project in the history of reform,
no matter how violent and surprising, is good when it is the dictate of a man's genius and
constitution, but very dull and suspicious when adopted from another. It is right and beautiful
in any man to say, 'I will take this coat, or this book, or this measure of corn of yours,'—in
whom we see the act to be original, and to flow from the whole spirit and faith of him; for then
that taking will have a giving as free and divine; but we are very easily disposed to resist the
same generosity of speech when we miss originality and truth to character in it.
There was in all the practical activities of New England for the last quarter of a century, a
gradual withdrawal of tender consciences from the social organizations. There is observable
throughout, the contest between mechanical and spiritual methods, but with a steady
tendency of the thoughtful and virtuous to a deeper belief and reliance on spiritual facts.
In politics for example it is easy to see the progress of dissent. The country is full of rebellion;
the country is full of kings. Hands off! let there be no control and no interference in the
administration of the affairs of this kingdom of me. Hence the growth of the doctrine and of the
party of Free Trade, and the willingness to try that experiment, in the face of what appear
incontestable facts. I confess, the motto of the Globe newspaper is so attractive to me that I can
seldom find much appetite to read what is below it in its columns: "The world is governed too
much." So the country is frequently affording solitary examples of resistance to the
government, solitary nullifiers, who throw themselves on their reserved rights; nay, who have
reserved all their rights; who reply to the assessor and to the clerk of court that they do not
know the State, and embarrass the courts of law by non-juring and the commander-in-chief of
the militia by non-resistance.
The same disposition to scrutiny and dissent appeared in civil, festive, neighborly, and
domestic society. A restless, prying, conscientious criticism broke out in unexpected quarters.
Who gave me the money with which I bought my coat? Why should professional labor and that
of the counting-house be paid so disproportionately to the labor of the porter and
woodsawyer? This whole business of Trade gives me to pause and think, as it constitutes false
relations between men; inasmuch as I am prone to count myself relieved of any responsibility
to behave well and nobly to that person whom I pay with money; whereas if I had not that
commodity, I should be put on my good behavior in all companies, and man would be a
benefactor to man, as being himself his only certificate that he had a right to those aids and
services which each asked of the other. Am I not too protected a person? is there not a wide
disparity between the lot of me and the lot of thee, my poor brother, my poor sister? Am I not
defrauded of my best culture in the loss of those gymnastics which manual labor and the
emergencies of poverty constitute? I find nothing healthful or exalting in the smooth
conventions of society; I do not like the close air of saloons. I begin to suspect myself to be a
prisoner, though treated with all this courtesy and luxury. I pay a destructive tax in my
conformity.
The same insatiable criticism may be traced in the efforts for the reform of Education. The
popular education has been taxed with a want of truth and nature. It was complained that an
education to things was not given. We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and
colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind,
a memory of words, and do not know a thing. We cannot use our hands, or our legs, or our
eyes, or our arms. We do not know an edible root in the woods, we cannot tell our course by
the stars, nor the hour of the day by the sun. It is well if we can swim and skate. We are afraid
of a horse, of a cow, of a dog, of a snake, of a spider. The Roman rule was to teach a boy
nothing that he could not learn standing. The old English rule was, 'All summer in the field, and
all winter in the study.' And it seems as if a man should learn to plant, or to fish, or to hunt, that
he might secure his subsistence at all events, and not be painful to his friends and fellow-men.
The lessons of science should be experimental also. The sight of the planet through a telescope
is worth all the course on astronomy; the shock of the electric spark in the elbow, outvalues all
the theories; the taste of the nitrous oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are better than
volumes of chemistry.
One of the traits of the new spirit is the inquisition it fixed on our scholastic devotion to the
dead languages. The ancient languages, with great beauty of structure, contain wonderful
remains of genius, which draw, and always will draw, certain likeminded men,—Greek men,
and Roman men,—in all countries, to their study; but by a wonderful drowsiness of usage they
had exacted the study of all men. Once (say two centuries ago), Latin and Greek had a strict
relation to all the science and culture there was in Europe, and the Mathematics had a
momentary importance at some era of activity in physical science. These things became
stereotyped as education, as the manner of men is. But the Good Spirit never cared for the
colleges, and though all men and boys were now drilled in Latin, Greek, and Mathematics, it
had quite left these shells high and dry on the beach, and was now creating and feeding other
matters at other ends of the world. But in a hundred high schools and colleges this warfare
against common sense still goes on. Four, or six, or ten years, the pupil is parsing Greek and
Latin, and as soon as he leaves the University, as it is ludicrously called, he shuts those books for
the last time. Some thousands of young men are graduated at our colleges in this country every
year, and the persons who, at forty years, still read Greek, can all be counted on your hand. I
never met with ten. Four or five persons I have seen who read Plato.
But is not this absurd, that the whole liberal talent of this country should be directed in its
best years on studies which lead to nothing? What was the consequence? Some intelligent
persons said or thought, 'Is that Greek and Latin some spell to conjure with, and not words of
reason? If the physician, the lawyer, the divine, never use it to come at their ends, I need never
learn it to come at mine. Conjuring is gone out of fashion, and I will omit this conjugating, and
go straight to affairs.' So they jumped the Greek and Latin, and read law, medicine, or sermons,
without it. To the astonishment of all, the self-made men took even ground at once with the
oldest of the regular graduates, and in a few months the most conservative circles of Boston
and New York had quite forgotten who of their gownsmen was college-bred, and who was not.
One tendency appears alike in the philosophical speculation and in the rudest democratical
movements, through all the petulance and all the puerility, the wish, namely, to cast aside the
superfluous and arrive at short methods; urged, as I suppose, by an intuition that the human
spirit is equal to all emergencies, alone, and that man is more often injured than helped by the
means he uses.
I conceive this gradual casting off of material aids, and the indication of growing trust in the
private self-supplied powers of the individual, to be the affirmative principle of the recent
philosophy, and that it is feeling its own profound truth and is reaching forward at this very
hour to the happiest conclusions. I readily concede that in this, as in every period of intellectual
activity, there has been a noise of denial and protest; much was to be resisted, much was to be
got rid of by those who were reared in the old, before they could begin to affirm and to
construct. Many a reformer perishes in his removal of rubbish; and that makes the
offensiveness of the class. They are partial; they are not equal to the work they pretend. They
lose their way; in the assault on the kingdom of darkness they expend all their energy on some
accidental evil, and lose their sanity and power of benefit. It is of little moment that one or two
or twenty errors of our social system be corrected, but of much that the man be in his senses.
The criticism and attack on institutions, which we have witnessed, has made one thing plain,
that society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things
around him: he has become tediously good in some particular but negligent or narrow in the
rest; and hypocrisy and vanity are often the disgusting result.
 It is handsomer to remain in the establishment better than the establishment, and conduct
that in the best manner, than to make a sally against evil by some single improvement, without
supporting it by a total regeneration. Do not be so vain of your one objection. Do you think
there is only one? Alas! my good friend, there is no part of society or of life better than any
other part. All our things are right and wrong together. The wave of evil washes all our
institutions alike. Do you complain of our Marriage? Our marriage is no worse than our
education, our diet, our trade, our social customs. Do you complain of the laws of Property? It is
a pedantry to give such importance to them. Can we not play the game of life with these
counters, as well as with those? in the institution of property, as well as out of it? Let into it the
new and renewing principle of love, and property will be universality. No one gives the
impression of superiority to the institution, which he must give who will reform it. It makes no
difference what you say, you must make me feel that you are aloof from it; by your natural and
supernatural advantages do easily see to the end of it,—do see how man can do without it.
Now all men are on one side. No man deserves to be heard against property. Only Love, only an
Idea, is against property as we hold it.
I cannot afford to be irritable and captious, nor to waste all my time in attacks. If I should go
out of church whenever I hear a false sentiment I could never stay there five minutes. But why
come out? the street is as false as the church, and when I get to my house, or to my manners,
or to my speech, I have not got away from the lie. When we see an eager assailant of one of
these wrongs, a special reformer, we feel like asking him, What right have you, sir, to your one
virtue? Is virtue piecemeal? This is a jewel amidst the rags of a beggar.
In another way the right will be vindicated. In the midst of abuses, in the heart of cities, in
the aisles of false churches, alike in one place and in another,—wherever, namely, a just and
heroic soul finds itself, there it will do what is next at hand, and by the new quality of character
it shall put forth it shall abrogate that old condition, law or school in which it stands, before the
law of its own mind.
If partiality was one fault of the movement party, the other defect was their reliance on
Association. Doubts such as those I have intimated drove many good persons to agitate the
questions of social reform. But the revolt against the spirit of commerce, the spirit of
aristocracy, and the inveterate abuses of cities, did not appear possible to individuals; and to do
battle against numbers they armed themselves with numbers, and against concert they relied
on new concert.
Following or advancing beyond the ideas of St. Simon, of Fourier, and of Owen, three
communities have already been formed in Massachusetts on kindred plans, and many more in
the country at large. They aim to give every member a share in the manual labor, to give an
equal reward to labor and to talent, and to unite a liberal culture with an education to labor.
The scheme offers, by the economies of associated labor and expense, to make every member
rich, on the same amount of property, that, in separate families, would leave every member
poor. These new associations are composed of men and women of superior talents and
sentiments; yet it may easily be questioned whether such a community will draw, except in its
beginnings, the able and the good; whether those who have energy will not prefer their chance
of superiority and power in the world, to the humble certainties of the association; whether
such a retreat does not promise to become an asylum to those who have tried and failed,
rather than a field to the strong; and whether the members will not necessarily be fractions of
men, because each finds that he cannot enter it, without some compromise. Friendship and
association are very fine things, and a grand phalanx of the best of the human race, banded for
some catholic object; yes, excellent; but remember that no society can ever be so large as one
man. He, in his friendship, in his natural and momentary associations, doubles or multiplies
himself; but in the hour in which he mortgages himself to two or ten or twenty, he dwarfs
himself below the stature of one.
But the men of less faith could not thus believe, and to such, concert appears the sole
specific of strength. I have failed, and you have failed, but perhaps together we shall not fail.
Our housekeeping is not satisfactory to us, but perhaps a phalanx, a community, might be.
Many of us have differed in opinion, and we could find no man who could make the truth plain,
but possibly a college, or an ecclesiastical council might. I have not been able either to persuade
my brother or to prevail on myself, to disuse the traffic or the potation of brandy, but perhaps a
pledge of total abstinence might effectually restrain us. The candidate my party votes for is not
to be trusted with a dollar, but he will be honest in the Senate, for we can bring public opinion
to bear on him. Thus concert was the specific in all cases. But concert is neither better nor
worse, neither more nor less potent than individual force. All the men in the world cannot
make a statue walk and speak, cannot make a drop of blood, or a blade of grass, any more than
one man can. But let there be one man, let there be truth in two men, in ten men, then is
concert for the first time possible; because the force which moves the world is a new quality,
and can never be furnished by adding whatever quantities of a different kind. What is the use of
the concert of the false and the disunited? There can be no concert in two, where there is no
concert in one. When the individual is not individual, but is dual; when his thoughts look one
way and his actions another; when his faith is traversed by his habits; when his will, enlightened
by reason, is warped by his sense; when with one hand he rows and with the other backs water,
what concert can be?
I do not wonder at the interest these projects inspire. The world is awaking to the idea of
union, and these experiments show what it is thinking of. It is and will be magic. Men will live
and communicate, and plough, and reap, and govern, as by added ethereal power, when once
they are united; as in a celebrated experiment, by expiration and respiration exactly together,
four persons lift a heavy man from the ground by the little finger only, and without sense of
weight. But this union must be inward, and not one of covenants, and is to be reached by a
reverse of the methods they use. The union is only perfect when all the uniters are isolated. It is
the union of friends who live in different streets or towns. Each man, if he attempts to join
himself to others, is on all sides cramped and diminished of his proportion; and the stricter the
union the smaller and the more pitiful he is. But leave him alone, to recognize in every hour and
place the secret soul; he will go up and down doing the works of a true member, and, to the
astonishment of all, the work will be done with concert, though no man spoke. Government will
be adamantine without any governor. The union must be ideal in actual individualism.
I pass to the indication in some particulars of that faith in man, which the heart is preaching
to us in these days, and which engages the more regard, from the consideration that the
speculations of one generation are the history of the next following.
In alluding just now to our system of education, I spoke of the deadness of its details. But it is
open to graver criticism than the palsy of its members: it is a system of despair. The disease
with which the human mind now labors is want of faith. Men do not believe in a power of
education. We do not think we can speak to divine sentiments in man, and we do not try. We
renounce all high aims. We believe that the defects of so many perverse and so many frivolous
people who make up society, are organic, and society is a hospital of incurables. A man of good
sense but of little faith, whose compassion seemed to lead him to church as often as he went
there, said to me that "he liked to have concerts, and fairs, and churches, and other public
amusements go on." I am afraid the remark is too honest, and comes from the same origin as
the maxim of the tyrant, "If you would rule the world quietly, you must keep it amused." I
notice too that the ground on which eminent public servants urge the claims of popular
education is fear; 'This country is filling up with thousands and millions of voters, and you must
educate them to keep them from our throats.' We do not believe that any education, any
system of philosophy, any influence of genius, will ever give depth of insight to a superficial
mind. Having settled ourselves into this infidelity, our skill is expended to procure alleviations,
diversion, opiates. We adorn the victim with manual skill, his tongue with languages, his body
with inoffensive and comely manners. So have we cunningly hid the tragedy of limitation and
inner death we cannot avert. Is it strange that society should be devoured by a secret
melancholy which breaks through all its smiles and all its gayety and games?
But even one step farther our infidelity has gone. It appears that some doubt is felt by good
and wise men whether really the happiness and probity of men is increased by the culture of
the mind in those disciplines to which we give the name of education. Unhappily too the doubt
comes from scholars, from persons who have tried these methods. In their experience the
scholar was not raised by the sacred thoughts amongst which he dwelt, but used them to
selfish ends. He was a profane person, and became a showman, turning his gifts to a
marketable use, and not to his own sustenance and growth. It was found that the intellect
could be independently developed, that is, in separation from the man, as any single organ can
be invigorated, and the result was monstrous. A canine appetite for knowledge was generated,
which must still be fed but was never satisfied, and this knowledge, not being directed on
action, never took the character of substantial, humane truth, blessing those whom it entered.
It gave the scholar certain powers of expression, the power of speech, the power of poetry, of
literary art, but it did not bring him to peace or to beneficence.
When the literary class betray a destitution of faith, it is not strange that society should be
disheartened and sensualized by unbelief. What remedy? Life must be lived on a higher plane.
We must go up to a higher platform, to which we are always invited to ascend; there, the whole
aspect of things changes. I resist the skepticism of our education and of our educated men. I do
not believe that the differences of opinion and character in men are organic. I do not recognize,
beside the class of the good and the wise, a permanent class of skeptics, or a class of
conservatives, or of malignants, or of materialists. I do not believe in two classes. You
remember the story of the poor woman who importuned King Philip of Macedon to grant her
justice, which Philip refused: the woman exclaimed, "I appeal:" the king, astonished, asked to
whom she appealed: the woman replied, "From Philip drunk to Philip sober." The text will suit
me very well. I believe not in two classes of men, but in man in two moods, in Philip drunk and
Philip sober. I think, according to the good-hearted word of Plato, "Unwillingly the soul is
deprived of truth." Iron conservative, miser, or thief, no man is but by a supposed necessity
which he tolerates by shortness or torpidity of sight. The soul lets no man go without some
visitations and holydays of a diviner presence. It would be easy to show, by a narrow scanning
of any man's biography, that we are not so wedded to our paltry performances of every kind
but that every man has at intervals the grace to scorn his performances, in comparing them
with his belief of what he should do;—that he puts himself on the side of his enemies, listening
gladly to what they say of him, and accusing himself of the same things.
What is it men love in Genius, but its infinite hope, which degrades all it has done? Genius
counts all its miracles poor and short. Its own idea it never executed. The Iliad, the Hamlet, the
Doric column, the Roman arch, the Gothic minster, the German anthem, when they are ended,
the master casts behind him. How sinks the song in the waves of melody which the universe
pours over his soul! Before that gracious Infinite out of which he drew these few strokes, how
mean they look, though the praises of the world attend them. From the triumphs of his art he
turns with desire to this greater defeat. Let those admire who will. With silent joy he sees
himself to be capable of a beauty that eclipses all which his hands have done; all which human
hands have ever done.
 Well, we are all the children of genius, the children of virtue,—and feel their inspirations in
our happier hours. Is not every man sometimes a radical in politics? Men are conservatives
when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after
dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick, or aged: in the morning, or when their
intellect or their conscience has been aroused; when they hear music, or when they read
poetry, they are radicals. In the circle of the rankest tories that could be collected in England,
Old or New, let a powerful and stimulating intellect, a man of great heart and mind, act on
them, and very quickly these frozen conservators will yield to the friendly influence, these
hopeless will begin to hope, these haters will begin to love, these immovable statues will begin
to spin and revolve. I cannot help recalling the fine anecdote which Warton relates of Bishop
Berkeley, when he was preparing to leave England with his plan of planting the gospel among
the American savages. "Lord Bathurst told me that the members of the Scriblerus club being
met at his house at dinner, they agreed to rally Berkeley, who was also his guest, on his scheme
at Bermudas. Berkeley, having listened to the many lively things they had to say, begged to be
heard in his turn, and displayed his plan with such an astonishing and animating force of
eloquence and enthusiasm, that they were struck dumb, and, after some pause, rose up all
together with earnestness, exclaiming, 'Let us set out with him immediately.'" Men in all ways
are better than they seem. They like flattery for the moment, but they know the truth for their
own. It is a foolish cowardice which keeps us from trusting them and speaking to them rude
truth. They resent your honesty for an instant, they will thank you for it always. What is it we
heartily wish of each other? Is it to be pleased and flattered? No, but to be convicted and
exposed, to be shamed out of our nonsense of all kinds, and made men of, instead of ghosts
and phantoms. We are weary of gliding ghostlike through the world, which is itself so slight and
unreal. We crave a sense of reality, though it come in strokes of pain. I explain so,—by this
manlike love of truth,—those excesses and errors into which souls of great vigor, but not equal
insight, often fall. They feel the poverty at the bottom of all the seeming affluence of the world.
They know the speed with which they come straight through the thin masquerade, and
conceive a disgust at the indigence of nature: Rousseau, Mirabeau, Charles Fox, Napoleon,
Byron,—and I could easily add names nearer home, of raging riders, who drive their steeds so
hard, in the violence of living to forget its illusion: they would know the worst, and tread the
floors of hell. The heroes of ancient and modern fame, Cimon, Themistocles, Alcibiades,
Alexander, Caesar, have treated life and fortune as a game to be well and skilfully played, but
the stake not to be so valued but that any time it could be held as a trifle light as air, and
thrown up. Caesar, just before the battle of Pharsalia, discourses with the Egyptian priest
concerning the fountains of the Nile, and offers to quit the army, the empire, and Cleopatra, if
he will show him those mysterious sources.
The same magnanimity shows itself in our social relations, in the preference, namely, which
each man gives to the society of superiors over that of his equals. All that a man has will he give
for right relations with his mates. All that he has will he give for an erect demeanor in every
company and on each occasion. He aims at such things as his neighbors prize, and gives his days
and nights, his talents and his heart, to strike a good stroke, to acquit himself in all men's sight
as a man. The consideration of an eminent citizen, of a noted merchant, of a man of mark in his
profession; a naval and military honor, a general's commission, a marshal's baton, a ducal
coronet, the laurel of poets, and, anyhow procured, the acknowledgment of eminent merit,—
have this lustre for each candidate that they enable him to walk erect and unashamed in the
presence of some persons before whom he felt himself inferior. Having raised himself to this
rank, having established his equality with class after class of those with whom he would live
well, he still finds certain others before whom he cannot possess himself, because they have
somewhat fairer, somewhat grander, somewhat purer, which extorts homage of him. Is his
ambition pure? then will his laurels and his possessions seem worthless: instead of avoiding
these men who make his fine gold dim, he will cast all behind him and seek their society only,
woo and embrace this his humiliation and mortification, until he shall know why his eye sinks,
his voice is husky, and his brilliant talents are paralyzed in this presence. He is sure that the soul
which gives the lie to all things will tell none. His constitution will not mislead him. If it cannot
carry itself as it ought, high and unmatchable in the presence of any man; if the secret oracles
whose whisper makes the sweetness and dignity of his life do here withdraw and accompany
him no longer,—it is time to undervalue what he has valued, to dispossess himself of what he
has acquired, and with Caesar to take in his hand the army, the empire, and Cleopatra, and say,
"All these will I relinquish, if you will show me the fountains of the Nile." Dear to us are those
who love us; the swift moments we spend with them are a compensation for a great deal of
misery; they enlarge our life;—but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add
another life: they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to
us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted
performances.
As every man at heart wishes the best and not inferior society, wishes to be convicted of his
error and to come to himself,—so he wishes that the same healing should not stop in his
thought, but should penetrate his will or active power. The selfish man suffers more from his
selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit. What he
most wishes is to be lifted to some higher platform, that he may see beyond his present fear
the transalpine good, so that his fear, his coldness, his custom may be broken up like fragments
of ice, melted and carried away in the great stream of good will. Do you ask my aid? I also wish
to be a benefactor. I wish more to be a benefactor and servant than you wish to be served by
me; and surely the greatest good fortune that could befall me is precisely to be so moved by
you that I should say, 'Take me and all mine, and use me and mine freely to your ends'! for I
could not say it otherwise than because a great enlargement had come to my heart and mind,
which made me superior to my fortunes. Here we are paralyzed with fear; we hold on to our
little properties, house and land, office and money, for the bread which they have in our
experience yielded us, although we confess that our being does not flow through them. We
desire to be made great; we desire to be touched with that fire which shall command this ice to
stream, and make our existence a benefit. If therefore we start objections to your project, O
friend of the slave, or friend of the poor, or of the race, understand well that it is because we
wish to drive you to drive us into your measures. We wish to hear ourselves confuted. We are
haunted with a belief that you have a secret which it would highliest advantage us to learn, and
we would force you to impart it to us, though it should bring us to prison, or to worse
extremity.
Nothing shall warp me from the belief that every man is a lover of truth. There is no pure lie,
no pure malignity in nature. The entertainment of the proposition of depravity is the last
profligacy and profanation. There is no skepticism, no atheism but that. Could it be received
into common belief, suicide would unpeople the planet. It has had a name to live in some
dogmatic theology, but each man's innocence and his real liking of his neighbor have kept it a
dead letter. I remember standing at the polls one day when the anger of the political contest
gave a certain grimness to the faces of the independent electors, and a good man at my side,
looking on the people, remarked, "I am satisfied that the largest part of these men, on either
side, mean to vote right." I suppose considerate observers, looking at the masses of men in
their blameless and in their equivocal actions, will assent, that in spite of selfishness and
frivolity, the general purpose in the great number of persons is fidelity. The reason why any one
refuses his assent to your opinion, or his aid to your benevolent design, is in you: he refuses to
accept you as a bringer of truth, because, though you think you have it, he feels that you have it
not. You have not given him the authentic sign.
 If it were worth while to run into details this general doctrine of the latent but ever soliciting
Spirit, it would be easy to adduce illustration in particulars of a man's equality to the Church, of
his equality to the State, and of his equality to every other man. It is yet in all men's memory
that, a few years ago, the liberal churches complained that the Calvinistic church denied to
them the name of Christian. I think the complaint was confession: a religious church would not
complain. A religious man like Behmen, Fox, or Swedenborg is not irritated by wanting the
sanction of the Church, but the Church feels the accusation of his presence and belief.
It only needs that a just man should walk in our streets to make it appear how pitiful and
inartificial a contrivance is our legislation. The man whose part is taken and who does not wait
for society in anything, has a power which society cannot choose but feel. The familiar
experiment called the hydrostatic paradox, in which a capillary column of water balances the
ocean, is a symbol of the relation of one man to the whole family of men. The wise Dandamis,
on hearing the lives of Socrates, Pythagoras and Diogenes read, "judged them to be great men
every way, excepting, that they were too much subjected to the reverence of the laws, which to
second and authorize, true virtue must abate very much of its original vigor."
And as a man is equal to the Church and equal to the State, so he is equal to every other
man. The disparities of power in men are superficial; and all frank and searching conversation,
in which a man lays himself open to his brother, apprises each of their radical unity. When two
persons sit and converse in a thoroughly good understanding, the remark is sure to be made,
See how we have disputed about words! Let a clear, apprehensive mind, such as every man
knows among his friends, converse with the most commanding poetic genius, I think it would
appear that there was no inequality such as men fancy, between them; that a perfect
understanding, a like receiving, a like perceiving, abolished differences; and the poet would
confess that his creative imagination gave him no deep advantage, but only the superficial one
that he could express himself and the other could not; that his advantage was a knack, which
might impose on indolent men but could not impose on lovers of truth; for they know the tax of
talent, or what a price of greatness the power of expression too often pays. I believe it is the
conviction of the purest men, that the net amount of man and man does not much vary. Each is
incomparably superior to his companion in some faculty. His want of skill in other directions has
added to his fitness for his own work. Each seems to have some compensation yielded to him
by his infirmity, and every hindrance operates as a concentration of his force.
These and the like experiences intimate that man stands in strict connection with a higher
fact never yet manifested. There is power over and behind us, and we are the channels of its
communications. We seek to say thus and so, and over our head some spirit sits which
contradicts what we say. We would persuade our fellow to this or that; another self within our
eyes dissuades him. That which we keep back, this reveals. In vain we compose our faces and
our words; it holds uncontrollable communication with the enemy, and he answers civilly to us,
but believes the spirit. We exclaim, 'There's a traitor in the house!' but at last it appears that he
is the true man, and I am the traitor. This open channel to the highest life is the first and last
reality, so subtle, so quiet, yet so tenacious, that although I have never expressed the truth, and
although I have never heard the expression of it from any other, I know that the whole truth is
here for me. What if I cannot answer your questions? I am not pained that I cannot frame a
reply to the question, What is the operation we call Providence? There lies the unspoken thing,
present, omnipresent. Every time we converse we seek to translate it into speech, but whether
we hit or whether we miss, we have the fact. Every discourse is an approximate answer: but it is
of small consequence that we do not get it into verbs and nouns, whilst it abides for
contemplation forever.
If the auguries of the prophesying heart shall make themselves good in time, the man who
shall be born, whose advent men and events prepare and foreshow, is one who shall enjoy his
connection with a higher life, with the man within man; shall destroy distrust by his trust, shall
use his native but forgotten methods, shall not take counsel of flesh and blood, but shall rely on
the Law alive and beautiful which works over our heads and under our feet. Pitiless, it avails
itself of our success when we obey it, and of our ruin when we contravene it. Men are all secret
believers in it, else the word justice would have no meaning: they believe that the best is the
true; that right is done at last; or chaos would come. It rewards actions after their nature, and
not after the design of the agent. 'Work,' it saith to man, 'in every hour, paid or unpaid, see only
that thou work, and thou canst not escape the reward: whether thy work be fine or coarse,
planting corn or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall
earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought: no matter how often defeated, you are
born to victory. The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it.'
As soon as a man is wonted to look beyond surfaces, and to see how this high will prevails
without an exception or an interval, he settles himself into serenity. He can already rely on the
laws of gravity, that every stone will fall where it is due; the good globe is faithful, and carries
us securely through the celestial spaces, anxious or resigned, we need not interfere to help it
on: and he will learn one day the mild lesson they teach, that our own orbit is all our task, and
we need not assist the administration of the universe. Do not be so impatient to set the town
right concerning the unfounded pretensions and the false reputation of certain men of
standing. They are laboring harder to set the town right concerning themselves, and will
certainly succeed. Suppress for a few days your criticism on the insufficiency of this or that
teacher or experimenter, and he will have demonstrated his insufficiency to all men's eyes. In
like manner, let a man fall into the divine circuits, and he is enlarged. Obedience to his genius is
the only liberating influence. We wish to escape from subjection and a sense of inferiority, and
we make self-denying ordinances, we drink water, we eat grass, we refuse the laws, we go to
jail: it is all in vain; only by obedience to his genius, only by the freest activity in the way
constitutional to him, does an angel seem to arise before a man and lead him by the hand out
of all the wards of the prison.
That which befits us, embosomed in beauty and wonder as we are, is cheerfulness and
courage, and the endeavor to realize our aspirations. The life of man is the true romance, which
when it is valiantly conducted will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction. All around
us what powers are wrapped up under the coarse mattings of custom, and all wonder
prevented. It is so wonderful to our neurologists that a man can see without his eyes, that it
does not occur to them that it is just as wonderful that he should see with them; and that is
ever the difference between the wise and the unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual,
the wise man wonders at the usual. Shall not the heart which has received so much, trust the
Power by which it lives? May it not quit other leadings, and listen to the Soul that has guided it
so gently and taught it so much, secure that the future will be worthy of the past?

End of Project Gutenberg's Essays, Second Series, by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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