ESSAYS, SECOND SERIES

By Ralph Waldo Emerson

 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 haveacquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have aninclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they arebeautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, youlearn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, asif you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all therest remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts is some study ofrules and particulars, or some limited judgment of color or form, whichis exercised for amusement or for show. It is a proof of the shallownessof the doctrine of beauty as it lies in the minds of our amateurs, thatmen seem to have lost the perception of the instant dependence of formupon soul. There is no doctrine of forms in our philosophy. We wereput into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan to be carried about; butthere is no accurate adjustment between the spirit and the organ, muchless is the latter the germination of the former. So in regard to otherforms, the intellectual men do not believe in any essential dependenceof the material world on thought and volition. Theologians think it apretty 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 solidground of historical evidence; and even the poets are contented with acivil and conformed manner of living, and to write poems from the fancy, at a safe distance from their own experience. But the highest minds ofthe world have never ceased to explore the double meaning, or shallI say the quadruple or the centuple or much more manifold meaning, ofevery 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 andtorch-bearers, but children of the fire, made of it, and only the samedivinity transmuted and at two or three removes, when we know leastabout it. And this hidden truth, that the fountains whence all thisriver of Time and its creatures floweth are intrinsically ideal andbeautiful, draws us to the consideration of the nature and functions ofthe Poet, or the man of Beauty; to the means and materials he uses, andto the general aspect of the art in the present time. 

The breadth of the problem is great, for the poet is representative. Hestands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us notof his wealth, but of the common wealth. The young man reveres men ofgenius, because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is. Theyreceive of the soul as he also receives, but they more. Nature enhancesher beauty, to the eye of loving men, from their belief that the poetis beholding her shows at the same time. He is isolated among hiscontemporaries by truth and by his art, but with this consolation in hispursuits, that they will draw all men sooner or later. For all men liveby 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 israre. I know not how it is that we need an interpreter, but the greatmajority of men seem to be minors, who have not yet come into possessionof their own, or mutes, who cannot report the conversation they havehad with nature. There is no man who does not anticipate a supersensualutility in the sun and stars, earth and water. These stand and wait torender him a peculiar service. But there is some obstruction or someexcess of phlegm in our constitution, which does not suffer them toyield the due effect. Too feeble fall the impressions of nature on us tomake us artists. Every touch should thrill. Every man should be so muchan artist that he could report in conversation what had befallen him. Yet, in our experience, the rays or appulses have sufficient force toarrive at the senses, but not enough to reach the quick and compel thereproduction of themselves in speech. The poet is the person in whomthese powers are in balance, the man without impediment, who seesand handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale ofexperience, and is representative of man, in virtue of being the largestpower to receive and to impart. 

For the Universe has three children, born at one time, which reappearunder different names in every system of thought, whether they be calledcause, operation, and effect; or, more poetically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune;or, theologically, the Father, the Spirit, and the Son; but whichwe will call here the Knower, the Doer, and the Sayer. These standrespectively for the love of truth, for the love of good, and forthe love of beauty. These three are equal. Each is that which he isessentially, so that he cannot be surmounted or analyzed, and each ofthese 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 asovereign, and stands on the centre. For the world is not painted oradorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made somebeautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe. Thereforethe poet is not any permissive potentate, but is emperor in his ownright. Criticism is infested with a cant of materialism, which assumesthat manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men, anddisparages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact that some men, namely poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world to the end ofexpression, and confounds them with those whose province is action butwho quit it to imitate the sayers. But Homer's words are as costly andadmirable to Homer as Agamemnon's victories are to Agamemnon. The poetdoes not wait for the hero or the sage, but, as they act and thinkprimarily, 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 apainter, or as assistants who bring building materials to an architect. 

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are sofinely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the airis 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 ofour own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear writedown these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, thoughimperfect, become the songs of the nations. For nature is as trulybeautiful as it is good, or as it is reasonable, and must as much appearas it must be done, or be known. Words and deeds are quite indifferentmodes of the divine energy. Words are also actions, and actions are akind of words. 

The sign and credentials of the poet are that he announces that which noman foretold. He is the true and only doctor; he knows and tells; he isthe only teller of news, for he was present and privy to the appearancewhich he describes. He is a beholder of ideas and an utterer of thenecessary and causal. For we do not speak now of men of poeticaltalents, or of industry and skill in metre, but of the true poet. Itook part in a conversation the other day concerning a recent writer oflyrics, a man of subtle mind, whose head appeared to be a music-box ofdelicate tunes and rhythms, and whose skill and command of language, wecould not sufficiently praise. But when the question arose whether hewas not only a lyrist but a poet, we were obliged to confess that he isplainly a contemporary, not an eternal man. He does not stand out of ourlow limitations, like a Chimborazo under the line, running up from thetorrid Base through all the climates of the globe, with belts of theherbage of every latitude on its high and mottled sides; but this geniusis the landscape-garden of a modern house, adorned with fountains andstatues, with well-bred men and women standing and sitting in the walksand terraces. We hear, through all the varied music, the ground-tone ofconventional life. Our poets are men of talents who sing, and not thechildren of music. The argument is secondary, the finish of the versesis primary. 

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem, --athought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or ananimal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a newthing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but inthe order of genesis the thought is prior to the form. The poet has anew thought; he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell ushow it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune. Forthe experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the worldseems always waiting for its poet. I remember when I was young how muchI was moved one morning by tidings that genius had appeared in a youthwho sat near me at table. He had left his work and gone rambling noneknew whither, and had written hundreds of lines, but could not tellwhether that which was in him was therein told; he could tell nothingbut that all was changed, --man, beast, heaven, earth and sea. How gladlywe listened! how credulous! Society seemed to be compromised. We satin the aurora of a sunrise which was to put out all the stars. Bostonseemed to be at twice the distance it had the night before, or was muchfarther than that. Rome, --what was Rome? Plutarch and Shakspeare werein the yellow leaf, and Homer no more should be heard of. It is much toknow that poetry has been written this very day, under this very roof, by your side. What! that wonderful spirit has not expired! These stonymoments are still sparkling and animated! I had fancied that the oracleswere all silent, and nature had spent her fires; and behold! all night, from every pore, these fine auroras have been streaming. Every one hassome interest in the advent of the poet, and no one knows how much itmay concern him. We know that the secret of the world is profound, butwho 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 goodearnest have availed so far in understanding themselves and their work, that the foremost watchman on the peak announces his news. It is thetruest word ever spoken, and the phrase will be the fittest, mostmusical, and the unerring voice of the world for that time. 

All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet isthe principal event in chronology. Man, never so often deceived, stillwatches for the arrival of a brother who can hold him steady to a truthuntil he has made it his own. With what joy I begin to read a poem whichI confide in as an inspiration! And now my chains are to be broken; Ishall mount above these clouds and opaque airs in which I live, --opaque, though they seem transparent, --and from the heaven of truth I shall seeand comprehend my relations. That will reconcile me to life and renovatenature, to see trifles animated by a tendency, and to know what I amdoing. Life will no more be a noise; now I shall see men and women, andknow 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; nowI am invited into the science of the real. Such is the hope, but thefruition is postponed. Oftener it falls that this winged man, who willcarry me into the heaven, whirls me into mists, then leaps and frisksabout with me as it were from cloud to cloud, still affirming that heis bound heavenward; and I, being myself a novice, am slow in perceivingthat he does not know the way into the heavens, and is merely bent thatI should admire his skill to rise like a fowl or a flying fish, a littleway from the ground or the water; but the all-piercing, all-feeding, andocular air of heaven that man shall never inhabit. I tumble down againsoon 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 methither where I would be. 

But, leaving these victims of vanity, let us, with new hope, observehow nature, by worthier impulses, has ensured the poet's fidelity to hisoffice of announcement and affirming, namely by the beauty of things, which becomes a new and higher beauty when expressed. Nature offersall 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 oldvalue; as the carpenter's stretched cord, if you hold your ear closeenough, is musical in the breeze. "Things more excellent than everyimage, " says Jamblichus, "are expressed through images. " Things admit ofbeing used as symbols because nature is a symbol, in the whole, and inevery part. Every line we can draw in the sand has expression; andthere is no body without its spirit or genius. All form is an effect ofcharacter; all condition, of the quality of the life; all harmony, of health; and for this reason a perception of beauty should besympathetic, or proper only to the good. The beautiful rests on thefoundations of the necessary. The soul makes the body, as the wiseSpenser 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 aholy place, and should go very warily and reverently. We stand beforethe secret of the world, there where Being passes into Appearance andUnity into Variety. 

The Universe is the externization of the soul. Wherever the life is, that bursts into appearance around it. Our science is sensual, andtherefore superficial. The earth and the heavenly bodies, physics, andchemistry, we sensually treat, as if they were self-existent; butthese are the retinue of that Being we have. "The mighty heaven, "said Proclus, "exhibits, in its transfigurations, clear images of thesplendor of intellectual perceptions; being moved in conjunction withthe unapparent periods of intellectual natures. " Therefore sciencealways goes abreast with the just elevation of the man, keeping stepwith religion and metaphysics; or the state of science is an index ofour self-knowledge. Since everything in nature answers to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark it is that the correspondingfaculty in the observer is not yet active. 

No wonder then, if these waters be so deep, that we hover over them witha religious regard. The beauty of the fable proves the importance of thesense; to the poet, and to all others; or, if you please, every man isso far a poet as to be susceptible of these enchantments of nature; forall men have the thoughts whereof the universe is the celebration. Ifind that the fascination resides in the symbol. Who loves nature? Whodoes not? Is it only poets, and men of leisure and cultivation, who livewith her? No; but also hunters, farmers, grooms, and butchers, thoughthey express their affection in their choice of life and not in theirchoice of words. The writer wonders what the coachman or the huntervalues 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. Hisworship is sympathetic; he has no definitions, but he is commandedin nature, by the living power which he feels to be there present. Noimitation or playing of these things would content him; he loves theearnest of the north wind, of rain, of stone, and wood, and iron. Abeauty not explicable is dearer than a beauty which we can see to theend 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 classto the use of emblems. The schools of poets and philosophers are notmore intoxicated with their symbols than the populace with theirs. Inour political parties, compute the power of badges and emblems. Seethe great ball which they roll from Baltimore to Bunker hill! In thepolitical processions, Lowell goes in a loom, and Lynn in a shoe, and Salem in a ship. Witness the cider-barrel, the log-cabin, thehickory-stick, the palmetto, and all the cognizances of party. See thepower of national emblems. Some stars, lilies, leopards, a crescent, alion, an eagle, or other figure which came into credit God knows how, onan old rag of bunting, blowing in the wind on a fort at the ends ofthe earth, shall make the blood tingle under the rudest or the mostconventional exterior. The people fancy they hate poetry, and they areall poets and mystics!

Beyond this universality of the symbolic language, we are apprised ofthe divineness of this superior use of things, whereby the world is atemple whose walls are covered with emblems, pictures, and commandmentsof the Deity, --in this, that there is no fact in nature which does notcarry the whole sense of nature; and the distinctions which we make inevents and in affairs, of low and high, honest and base, disappear whennature is used as a symbol. Thought makes everything fit for use. Thevocabulary of an omniscient man would embrace words and images excludedfrom polite conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to theobscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connexion of thought. Thepiety of the Hebrew prophets purges their grossness. The circumcision isan example of the power of poetry to raise the low and offensive. Smalland mean things serve as well as great symbols. The meaner the type bywhich a law is expressed, the more pungent it is, and the more lastingin the memories of men: just as we choose the smallest box or case inwhich any needful utensil can be carried. Bare lists of words are foundsuggestive to an imaginative and excited mind; as it is related of LordChatham that he was accustomed to read in Bailey's Dictionary when hewas preparing to speak in Parliament. The poorest experience is richenough for all the purposes of expressing thought. Why covet a knowledgeof new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a fewactions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We arefar from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity. It does notneed that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every newrelation is a new word. Also we use defects and deformities to a sacredpurpose, so expressing our sense that the evils of the world are suchonly to the evil eye. In the old mythology, mythologists observe, defects are ascribed to divine natures, as lameness to Vulcan, blindnessto Cupid, and the like, --to signify exuberances. 

For as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God thatmakes things ugly, the poet, who re-attaches things to nature and theWhole, --re-attaching even artificial things and violations of nature, to nature, by a deeper insight, --disposes very easily of the mostdisagreeable facts. Readers of poetry see the factory-village and therailway, and fancy that the poetry of the landscape is broken up bythese; 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 thebeehive or the spider's geometrical web. Nature adopts them very fastinto her vital circles, and the gliding train of cars she loves likeher own. Besides, in a centred mind, it signifies nothing how manymechanical inventions you exhibit. Though you add millions, and never sosurprising, the fact of mechanics has not gained a grain's weight. Thespiritual fact remains unalterable, by many or by few particulars; as nomountain 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 thecomplacent citizen is not satisfied with his little wonder. It is notthat he does not see all the fine houses and know that he never saw suchbefore, but he disposes of them as easily as the poet finds place forthe railway. The chief value of the new fact is to enhance the great andconstant fact of Life, which can dwarf any and every circumstance, andto 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 ishe who can articulate it. For though life is great, and fascinates, andabsorbs; and though all men are intelligent of the symbols through whichit is named; yet they cannot originally use them. We are symbols andinhabit symbols; workmen, work, and tools, words and things, birth anddeath, all are emblems; but we sympathize with the symbols, and beinginfatuated with the economical uses of things, we do not know that theyare thoughts. The poet, by an ulterior intellectual perception, givesthem a power which makes their old use forgotten, and puts eyes anda tongue into every dumb and inanimate object. He perceives theindependence of the thought on the symbol, the stability of the thought, the accidency and fugacity of the symbol. As the eyes of Lyncaeus weresaid to see through the earth, so the poet turns the world to glass, andshows us all things in their right series and procession. For throughthat better perception he stands one step nearer to things, and seesthe flowing or metamorphosis; perceives that thought is multiform; thatwithin the form of every creature is a force impelling it to ascendinto a higher form; and following with his eyes the life, uses the formswhich express that life, and so his speech flows with the flowing ofnature. All the facts of the animal economy, sex, nutriment, gestation, birth, growth, are symbols of the passage of the world into the soulof man, to suffer there a change and reappear a new and higher fact. Heuses forms according to the life, and not according to the form. This istrue science. The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetationand animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them assigns. He knows why the plain or meadow of space was strewn with theseflowers we call suns and moons and stars; why the great deep is adornedwith animals, with men, and gods; for in every word he speaks he rideson 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 theiressence, and giving to every one its own name and not another's, therebyrejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary. Thepoets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives ofhistory, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For thoughthe origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at firsta stroke of genius, and obtained currency because for the momentit symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. Theetymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliantpicture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continentconsists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so languageis made up of images or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, havelong ceased to remind us of their poetic origin. But the poet names thething 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 outof the first, as a leaf out of a tree. What we call nature is a certainself-regulated motion or change; and nature does all things by her ownhands, and does not leave another to baptize her but baptizes herself;and this through the metamorphosis again. I remember that a certain poetdescribed it to me thus:

Genius is the activity which repairs the decays of things, whetherwholly or partly of a material and finite kind. Nature, through all herkingdoms, insures herself. Nobody cares for planting the poor fungus; soshe shakes down from the gills of one agaric countless spores, any oneof which, being preserved, transmits new billions of spores to-morrow ornext day. The new agaric of this hour has a chance which the old one hadnot. This atom of seed is thrown into a new place, not subject to theaccidents 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 oflosing this wonder at a blow, but she detaches from him a new self, thatthe 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, shedetaches and sends away from it its poems or songs, --a fearless, sleepless, deathless progeny, which is not exposed to the accidents ofthe weary kingdom of time; a fearless, vivacious offspring, clad withwings (such was the virtue of the soul out of which they came) whichcarry them fast and far, and infix them irrecoverably into the heartsof men. These wings are the beauty of the poet's soul. The songs, thusflying immortal from their mortal parent, are pursued by clamorousflights of censures, which swarm in far greater numbers and threaten todevour them; but these last are not winged. At the end of a very shortleap they fall plump down and rot, having received from the souls out ofwhich they came no beautiful wings. But the melodies of the poet ascendand leap and pierce into the deeps of infinite time. 

So far the bard taught me, using his freer speech. But nature has ahigher end, in the production of New individuals, than security, namelyascension, or the passage of the soul into higher forms. I knew in myyounger days the sculptor who made the statue of the youth which standsin the public garden. He was, as I remember, unable to tell directly, what made him happy or unhappy, but by wonderful indirections he couldtell. He rose one day, according to his habit, before the dawn, and sawthe morning break, grand as the eternity out of which it came, and formany days after, he strove to express this tranquillity, and lo! hischisel had fashioned out of marble the form of a beautiful youth, Phosphorus, whose aspect is such that it is said all persons who lookon it become silent. The poet also resigns himself to his mood, and thatthought which agitated him is expressed, but alter idem, in a mannertotally new. The expression is organic, or the new type which thingsthemselves take when liberated. As, in the sun, objects paint theirimages on the retina of the eye, so they, sharing the aspiration of thewhole universe, tend to paint a far more delicate copy of their essencein his mind. Like the metamorphosis of things into higher organic formsis their change into melodies. Over everything stands its daemon orsoul, and, as the form of the thing is reflected by the eye, so thesoul of the thing is reflected by a melody. The sea, the mountain-ridge, Niagara, and every flower-bed, pre-exist, or super-exist, inpre-cantations, which sail like odors in the air, and when any man goesby with an ear sufficiently fine, he overhears them and endeavors towrite down the notes without diluting or depraving them. And herein isthe legitimation of criticism, in the mind's faith that the poems are acorrupt version of some text in nature with which they ought to be madeto tally. A rhyme in one of our sonnets should not be less pleasing thanthe iterated nodes of a sea-shell, or the resembling difference of agroup of flowers. The pairing of the birds is an idyl, not tedious asour 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 thesymmetry and truth that modulate these, glide into our spirits, and weparticipate the invention of nature?

This insight, which expresses itself by what is called Imagination, isa very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by theintellect being where and what it sees; by sharing the path or circuitof things through forms, and so making them translucid to others. Thepath of things is silent. Will they suffer a speaker to go with them? Aspy they will not suffer; a lover, a poet, is the transcendency of theirown nature, --him they will suffer. The condition of true naming, on thepoet's part, is his resigning himself to the divine aura which breathesthrough forms, and accompanying that. 

It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyondthe energy of his possessed and conscious intellect he is capable of anew energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to thenature 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, atall risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to rolland circulate through him; then he is caught up into the life of theUniverse, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words areuniversally intelligible as the plants and animals. The poet knows thathe speaks adequately then only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or, "withthe flower of the mind;" not with the intellect used as an organ, butwith the intellect released from all service and suffered to take itsdirection from its celestial life; or as the ancients were wont toexpress themselves, not with intellect alone but with the intellectinebriated by nectar. As the traveller who has lost his way throws hisreins on his horse's neck and trusts to the instinct of the animalto find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries usthrough this world. For if in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature; the mind flows into andthrough 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 procurersof animal exhilaration. All men avail themselves of such means as theycan, to add this extraordinary power to their normal powers; and tothis end they prize conversation, music, pictures, sculpture, dancing, theatres, travelling, war, mobs, fires, gaming, politics, or love, orscience, or animal intoxication, --which are several coarser orfiner quasi-mechanical substitutes for the true nectar, which is theravishment of the intellect by coming nearer to the fact. These areauxiliaries to the centrifugal tendency of a man, to his passage outinto free space, and they help him to escape the custody of that bodyin which he is pent up, and of that jail-yard of individual relationsin which he is enclosed. Hence a great number of such as wereprofessionally expressers of Beauty, as painters, poets, musicians, andactors, have been more than others wont to lead a life of pleasure andindulgence; all but the few who received the true nectar; and, as it wasa spurious mode of attaining freedom, as it was an emancipation not intothe heavens but into the freedom of baser places, they were punished forthat advantage they won, by a dissipation and deterioration. But nevercan any advantage be taken of nature by a trick. The spirit of theworld, the great calm presence of the Creator, comes not forth to thesorceries of opium or of wine. The sublime vision comes to the pureand 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, butthe 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 handsand nurseries of our children with all manner of dolls, drums, andhorses; withdrawing their eyes from the plain face and sufficing objectsof nature, the sun, and moon, the animals, the water, and stones, whichshould be their toys. So the poet's habit of living should be set ona key so low that the common influences should delight him. Hischeerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight; the air should sufficefor his inspiration, and he should be tipsy with water. That spiritwhich suffices quiet hearts, which seems to come forth to such fromevery dry knoll of sere grass, from every pine-stump and half-imbeddedstone on which the dull March sun shines, comes forth to the poor andhungry, and such as are of simple taste. If thou fill thy brain withBoston and New York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulatethy jaded senses with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find noradiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pinewoods. 

If the imagination intoxicates the poet, it is not inactive in othermen. The metamorphosis excites in the beholder an emotion of joy. Theuse of symbols has a certain power of emancipation and exhilaration forall men. We seem to be touched by a wand which makes us dance and runabout happily, like children. We are like persons who come out of a caveor 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 havereally got a new sense, and found within their world another world, ornest of worlds; for, the metamorphosis once seen, we divine that itdoes not stop. I will not now consider how much this makes the charmof algebra and the mathematics, which also have their tropes, but itis felt in every definition; as when Aristotle defines space to be animmovable vessel in which things are contained;--or when Plato definesa line to be a flowing point; or figure to be a bound of solid; andmany the like. What a joyful sense of freedom we have when Vitruviusannounces the old opinion of artists that no architect can build anyhouse well who does not know something of anatomy. When Socrates, inCharmides, tells us that the soul is cured of its maladies by certainincantations, and that these incantations are beautiful reasons, fromwhich temperance is generated in souls; when Plato calls the world ananimal; and Timaeus affirms that the plants also are animals; or affirmsa 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 marksextreme old age;" when Proclus calls the universe the statue of theintellect; when Chaucer, in his praise of 'Gentilesse, ' compares goodblood in mean condition to fire, which, though carried to the darkesthouse betwixt this and the mount of Caucasus, will yet hold its naturaloffice and burn as bright as if twenty thousand men did it behold; whenJohn saw, in the Apocalypse, the ruin of the world through evil, and thestars fall from heaven as the figtree casteth her untimely fruit; whenAesop reports the whole catalogue of common daily relations throughthe masquerade of birds and beasts;--we take the cheerful hint of theimmortality of our essence and its versatile habit and escapes, as whenthe gypsies say "it is in vain to hang them, they cannot die. "

The poets are thus liberating gods. The ancient British bards had forthe title of their order, "Those Who are free throughout the world. "They are free, and they make free. An imaginative book renders usmuch more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, thanafterward when we arrive at the precise sense of the author. I thinknothing is of any value in books excepting the transcendental andextraordinary. If a man is inflamed and carried away by his thought, tothat degree that he forgets the authors and the public and heeds onlythis one dream which holds him like an insanity, let me read his paper, and you may have all the arguments and histories and criticism. Allthe value which attaches to Pythagoras, Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, Cardan, Kepler, Swedenborg, Schelling, Oken, or any other who introducesquestionable facts into his cosmogony, as angels, devils, magic, astrology, palmistry, mesmerism, and so on, is the certificate we haveof departure from routine, and that here is a new witness. That also isthe best success in conversation, the magic of liberty, which puts theworld like a ball in our hands. How cheap even the liberty then seems;how mean to study, when an emotion communicates to the intellect thepower to sap and upheave nature; how great the perspective! nations, times, systems, enter and disappear like threads in tapestry of largefigure and many colors; dream delivers us to dream, and while thedrunkenness lasts we will sell our bed, our philosophy, our religion, inour opulence. 

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

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

But the quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to freeze. Thepoet 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 objectsexponents of his new thought. Here is the difference betwixt the poetand the mystic, that the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was atrue sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false. For all symbolsare fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, asferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead. Mysticism consists in the mistake of an accidental andindividual symbol for an universal one. The morning-redness happens tobe the favorite meteor to the eyes of Jacob Behmen, and comes to standto him for truth and faith; and, he believes, should stand for the samerealities to every reader. But the first reader prefers as naturally thesymbol of a mother and child, or a gardener and his bulb, or a jewellerpolishing a gem. Either of these, or of a myriad more, are equallygood to the person to whom they are significant. Only they must be heldlightly, and be very willingly translated into the equivalent termswhich others use. And the mystic must be steadily told, --All that yousay 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, --universalsigns, instead of these village symbols, --and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show that all religious errorconsisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and was at lastnothing but an excess of the organ of language. 

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

There was this perception in him which makes the poet or seer an objectof awe and terror, namely that the same man or society of men may wearone aspect to themselves and their companions, and a different aspect tohigher intelligences. Certain priests, whom he describes as conversingvery learnedly together, appeared to the children who were at somedistance, like dead horses; and many the like misappearances. Andinstantly the mind inquires whether these fishes under the bridge, yonder oxen in the pasture, those dogs in the yard, are immutablyfishes, oxen, and dogs, or only so appear to me, and perchance tothemselves appear upright men; and whether I appear as a man to alleyes. The Bramins and Pythagoras propounded the same question, andif any poet has witnessed the transformation he doubtless found itin harmony with various experiences. We have all seen changes asconsiderable in wheat and caterpillars. He is the poet and shall draw uswith 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 sufficientplainness or sufficient profoundness address ourselves to life, nor darewe chaunt our own times and social circumstance. If we filled the daywith bravery, we should not shrink from celebrating it. Time and natureyield us many gifts, but not yet the timely man, the new religion, thereconciler, whom all things await. Dante's praise is that he dared towrite his autobiography in colossal cipher, or into universality. Wehave yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew thevalue of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism andmaterialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whosepicture he so much admires in Homer; then in the Middle Age; then inCalvinism. Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, Methodism andUnitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest on the samefoundations of wonder as the town of Troy and the temple of Delphi, and are as swiftly passing away. Our logrolling, our stumps and theirpolitics, our fisheries, our Negroes and Indians, our boats and ourrepudiations, the wrath of rogues and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregonand Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its amplegeography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres. If I have not found that excellent combination of gifts in my countrymenwhich I seek, neither could I aid myself to fix the idea of the poetby reading now and then in Chalmers's collection of five centuries ofEnglish poets. These are wits more than poets, though there have beenpoets among them. But when we adhere to the ideal of the poet, we haveour difficulties even with Milton and Homer. Milton is too literary, andHomer too literal and historical. 

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

Art is the path of the creator to his work. The paths or methods areideal and eternal, though few men ever see them; not the artist himselffor years, or for a lifetime, unless he come into the conditions. Thepainter, the sculptor, the composer, the epic rhapsodist, the orator, all partake one desire, namely to express themselves symmetricallyand abundantly, not dwarfishly and fragmentarily. They found or putthemselves in certain conditions, as, the painter and sculptor beforesome impressive human figures; the orator, into the assembly of thepeople; and the others in such scenes as each has found exciting to hisintellect; and each presently feels the new desire. He hears a voice, he sees a beckoning. Then he is apprised, with wonder, what herds ofdaemons 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 everysolitude. Most of the things he says are conventional, no doubt; but byand by he says something which is original and beautiful. That charmshim. He would say nothing else but such things. In our way of talkingwe say 'That is yours, this is mine;' but the poet knows well that it isnot his; that it is as strange and beautiful to him as to you; he wouldfain hear the like eloquence at length. Once having tasted this immortalichor, he cannot have enough of it, and as an admirable creative powerexists in these intellections, it is of the last importance that thesethings get spoken. What a little of all we know is said! What drops ofall the sea of our science are baled up! and by what accident it isthat these are exposed, when so many secrets sleep in nature! Hence thenecessity of speech and song; hence these throbs and heart-beatings inthe orator, at the door of the assembly, to the end namely that thoughtmay be ejaculated as Logos, or Word. 

Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say 'It is in me, and shall out. ' Standthere, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that dream-powerwhich every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending alllimit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor ofthe whole river of electricity. Nothing walks, or creeps, or grows, orexists, which must not in turn arise and walk before him as exponentof his meaning. Comes he to that power, his genius is no longerexhaustible. All the creatures by pairs and by tribes pour into his mindas into a Noah's ark, to come forth again to people a new world. This islike the stock of air for our respiration or for the combustion ofour fireplace; not a measure of gallons, but the entire atmosphere ifwanted. And therefore the rich poets, as Homer, Chaucer, Shakspeare, andRaphael, have obviously no limits to their works except the limits oftheir lifetime, and resemble a mirror carried through the street, readyto render an image of every created thing. 

O poet! a new nobility is conferred in groves and pastures, and not incastles or by the sword-blade any longer. The conditions are hard, butequal. Thou shalt leave the world, and know the muse only. Thou shaltnot know any longer the times, customs, graces, politics, or opinions ofmen, but shalt take all from the muse. For the time of towns is tolledfrom the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the universal hours arecounted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joyon 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 thygentlemen and shall represent all courtesy and worldly life for thee;others shall do the great and resounding actions also. Thou shalt lieclose hid with nature, and canst not be afforded to the Capitol or theExchange. The world is full of renunciations and apprenticeships, andthis is thine: thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a longseason. This is the screen and sheath in which Pan has protected hiswell-beloved flower, and thou shalt be known only to thine own, and theyshall console thee with tenderest love. And thou shalt not be able torehearse the names of thy friends in thy verse, for an old shame beforethe holy ideal. And this is the reward; that the ideal shall be realto thee, and the impressions of the actual world shall fall like summerrain, copious, but not troublesome, to thy invulnerable essence. Thoushalt have the whole land for thy park and manor, the sea for thy bathand navigation, without tax and without envy; the woods and the riversthou shalt own; and thou shalt possess that wherein others are onlytenants and boarders. Thou true land-lord! sea-lord! air-lord! Whereversnow falls or water flows or birds fly, wherever day and night meet intwilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outletsinto celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, --there isBeauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walkthe world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportuneor 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 theextremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on astair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; thereare stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. Butthe Genius which according to the old belief stands at the door by whichwe 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 atnoonday. Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hoversall day in the boughs of the fir-tree. All things swim and glitter. Ourlife is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glidethrough nature, and should not know our place again. Did our birthfall in some fit of indigence and frugality in nature, that she was sosparing of her fire and so liberal of her earth that it appears to usthat we lack the affirmative principle, and though we have health andreason, yet we have no superfluity of spirit for new creation? We haveenough to live and bring the year about, but not an ounce to impart orto invest. Ah that our Genius were a little more of a genius! We arelike millers on the lower levels of a stream, when the factories abovethem have exhausted the water. We too fancy that the upper people musthave raised their dams. 

If any of us knew what we were doing, or where we are going, then whenwe think we best know! We do not know to-day whether we are busy oridle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwardsdiscovered that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us. All ourdays are so unprofitable while they pass, that 'tis wonderful where orwhen 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 havebeen intercalated somewhere, like those that Hermes won with dice of theMoon, that Osiris might be born. It is said all martyrdoms looked meanwhen they were suffered. Every ship is a romantic object, except thatwe sail in. Embark, and the romance quits our vessel and hangs on everyother sail in the horizon. Our life looks trivial, and we shun torecord it. Men seem to have learned of the horizon the art of perpetualretreating and reference. 'Yonder uplands are rich pasturage, and myneighbor has fertile meadow, but my field, ' says the querulous farmer, 'only holds the world together. ' I quote another man's saying; unluckilythat other withdraws himself in the same way, and quotes me. 'Tisthe trick of nature thus to degrade to-day; a good deal of buzz, andsomewhere a result slipped magically in. Every roof is agreeable tothe eye until it is lifted; then we find tragedy and moaning women andhard-eyed husbands and deluges of lethe, and the men ask, 'What's thenews?' as if the old were so bad. How many individuals can we count insociety? how many actions? how many opinions? So much of our time ispreparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pithof each man's genius contracts itself to a very few hours. Thehistory of literature--take the net result of Tiraboschi, Warton, orSchlegel, --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 widelying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneousactions. It is almost all custom and gross sense. There are even fewopinions, and these seem organic in the speakers, and do not disturb theuniversal necessity. 

What opium is instilled into all disaster! It shows formidable as weapproach it, but there is at last no rough rasping friction, but themost slippery sliding surfaces. We fall soft on a thought; Ate Dea isgentle, --

 "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 themas they say. There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hopethat here at least we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges oftruth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and counterfeit. The onlything grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is. That, like allthe rest, plays about the surface, and never introduces me into thereality, for contact with which we would even pay the costly price ofsons and lovers. Was it Boscovich who found out that bodies never comein contact? Well, souls never touch their objects. An innavigablesea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at andconverse 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, --nomore. I cannot get it nearer to me. If to-morrow I should be informed ofthe bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would bea great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it wouldleave me as it found me, --neither better nor worse. So is it with thiscalamity: it does not touch me; something which I fancied was a part ofme, which could not be torn away without tearing me nor enlarged withoutenriching me, falls off from me and leaves no scar. It was caducous. Igrieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into realnature. The Indian who was laid under a curse that the wind should notblow on him, nor water flow to him, nor fire burn him, is a type of usall. The dearest events are summer-rain, and we the Para coats that shedevery drop. Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that with agrim satisfaction, saying There at least is reality that will not dodgeus. 

I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets themslip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the mostunhandsome part of our condition. Nature does not like to be observed, and likes that we should be her fools and playmates. We may have thesphere for our cricket-ball, but not a berry for our philosophy. Directstrokes she never gave us power to make; all our blows glance, all ourhits 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 atrain of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them theyprove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, andeach shows only what lies in its focus. From the mountain you see themountain. 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 themood of the man whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. Thereare always sunsets, and there is always genius; but only a few hours soserene that we can relish nature or criticism. The more or less dependson structure or temperament. Temperament is the iron wire on whichthe beads are strung. Of what use is fortune or talent to a cold anddefective nature? Who cares what sensibility or discrimination a man hasat some time shown, if he falls asleep in his chair? or if he laugh andgiggle? or if he apologize? or is infected with egotism? or thinks ofhis 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 andcannot find a focal distance within the actual horizon of human life? Ofwhat use, if the brain is too cold or too hot, and the man does not careenough for results to stimulate him to experiment, and hold him up init? or if the web is too finely woven, too irritable by pleasure andpain, so that life stagnates from too much reception without dueoutlet? Of what use to make heroic vows of amendment, if the same oldlaw-breaker is to keep them? What cheer can the religious sentimentyield, when that is suspected to be secretly dependent on the seasons ofthe year and the state of the blood? I knew a witty physician who foundthe creed in the biliary duct, and used to affirm that if there wasdisease in the liver, the man became a Calvinist, and if that organwas sound, he became a Unitarian. Very mortifying is the reluctantexperience that some unfriendly excess or imbecility neutralizes thepromise of genius. We see young men who owe us a new world, so readilyand lavishly they promise, but they never acquit the debt; they dieyoung and dodge the account; or if they live they lose themselves in thecrowd. 

Temperament also enters fully into the system of illusions and shuts usin a prison of glass which we cannot see. There is an optical illusionabout every person we meet. In truth they are all creatures of giventemperament, which will appear in a given character, whose boundariesthey will never pass: but we look at them, they seem alive, and wepresume there is impulse in them. In the moment it seems impulse; in theyear, in the lifetime, it turns out to be a certain uniform tunewhich the revolving barrel of the music-box must play. Men resist theconclusion in the morning, but adopt it as the evening wears on, thattemper prevails over everything of time, place, and condition, and isinconsumable in the flames of religion. Some modifications the moralsentiment avails to impose, but the individual texture holds itsdominion, if not to bias the moral judgments, yet to fix the measure ofactivity and of enjoyment. 

I thus express the law as it is read from the platform of ordinarylife, but must not leave it without noticing the capital exception. Fortemperament is a power which no man willingly hears any one praise buthimself. On the platform of physics we cannot resist the contractinginfluences of so-called science. Temperament puts all divinity to rout. I know the mental proclivity of physicians. I hear the chuckle of thephrenologists. Theoretic kidnappers and slave-drivers, they esteem eachman the victim of another, who winds him round his finger by knowing thelaw of his being; and by such cheap signboards as the color of his beardor the slope of his occiput, reads the inventory of his fortunes andcharacter. The grossest ignorance does not disgust like this impudentknowingness. The physicians say they are not materialists; but theyare:--Spirit is matter reduced to an extreme thinness: O so thin!--Butthe definition of spiritual should be, that which is its own evidence. What notions do they attach to love! what to religion! One would notwillingly pronounce these words in their hearing, and give them theoccasion to profane them. I saw a gracious gentleman who adapts hisconversation to the form of the head of the man he talks with! I hadfancied that the value of life lay in its inscrutable possibilities; inthe 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 tothrow them at the feet of my lord, whenever and in what disguisesoever he shall appear. I know he is in the neighborhood hidden amongvagabonds. Shall I preclude my future by taking a high seat and kindlyadapting my conversation to the shape of heads? When I come to that, thedoctors shall buy me for a cent. --'But, sir, medical history; the reportto the Institute; the proven facts!'--I distrust the facts andthe inferences. Temperament is the veto or limitation-power in theconstitution, very justly applied to restrain an opposite excess in theconstitution, but absurdly offered as a bar to original equity. Whenvirtue 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 oncecaught in this trap of so-called sciences, any escape for the man fromthe links of the chain of physical necessity. Given such an embryo, such a history must follow. On this platform one lives in a sty ofsensualism, and would soon come to suicide. But it is impossible thatthe creative power should exclude itself. Into every intelligence thereis a door which is never closed, through which the creator passes. Theintellect, seeker of absolute truth, or the heart, lover of absolutegood, intervenes for our succor, and at one whisper of these high powerswe awake from ineffectual struggles with this nightmare. We hurl it intoits own hell, and cannot again contract ourselves to so base a state. 

The secret of the illusoriness is in the necessity of a successionof moods or objects. Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorage isquicksand. This onward trick of nature is too strong for us: Pero simuove. 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, buthealth of body consists in circulation, and sanity of mind in varietyor facility of association. We need change of objects. Dedication toone thought is quickly odious. We house with the insane, and must humorthem; then conversation dies out. Once I took such delight in Montaigne, that I thought I should not need any other book; before that, inShakspeare; then in Plutarch; then in Plotinus; at one time in Bacon;afterwards in Goethe; even in Bettine; but now I turn the pages ofeither of them languidly, whilst I still cherish their genius. So withpictures; each will bear an emphasis of attention once, which it cannotretain, though we fain would continue to be pleased in that manner. Howstrongly I have felt of pictures that when you have seen one well, youmust take your leave of it; you shall never see it again. I have hadgood lessons from pictures which I have since seen without emotion orremark. A deduction must be made from the opinion which even the wiseexpress of a new book or occurrence. Their opinion gives me tidings oftheir mood, and some vague guess at the new fact, but is nowise to betrusted as the lasting relation between that intellect and that thing. The child asks, 'Mamma, why don't I like the story as well as whenyou told it me yesterday?' Alas! child it is even so with the oldestcherubim of knowledge. But will it answer thy question to say, Becausethou wert born to a whole and this story is a particular? The reasonof the pain this discovery causes us (and we make it late in respect toworks of art and intellect), is the plaint of tragedy which murmurs fromit 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 inmen. Our friends early appear to us as representatives of certain ideaswhich they never pass or exceed. They stand on the brink of the ocean ofthought and power, but they never take the single step that would bringthem there. A man is like a bit of Labrador spar, which has no lustre asyou turn it in your hand until you come to a particular angle; then itshows deep and beautiful colors. There is no adaptation or universalapplicability in men, but each has his special talent, and the masteryof successful men consists in adroitly keeping themselves where and whenthat turn shall be oftenest to be practised. We do what we must, andcall it by the best names we can, and would fain have the praise ofhaving intended the result which ensues. I cannot recall any form of manwho is not superfluous sometimes. But is not this pitiful? Life is notworth the taking, to do tricks in. 

Of course it needs the whole society to give the symmetry we seek. Theparty-colored wheel must revolve very fast to appear white. Something isearned too by conversing with so much folly and defect. In fine, whoeverloses, we are always of the gaining party. Divinity is behind ourfailures and follies also. The plays of children are nonsense, but veryeducative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, withcommerce, government, church, marriage, and so with the history of everyman's bread, and the ways by which he is to come by it. Like a birdwhich alights nowhere, but hops perpetually from bough to bough, is thePower which abides in no man and in no woman, but for a moment speaksfrom 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 lessonsenough of the futility of criticism. Our young people have thought andwritten much on labor and reform, and for all that they have written, neither the world nor themselves have got on a step. Intellectualtasting of life will not supersede muscular activity. If a man shouldconsider the nicety of the passage of a piece of bread down his throat, he would starve. At Education-Farm, the noblest theory of life saton the noblest figures of young men and maidens, quite powerless andmelancholy. It would not rake or pitch a ton of hay; it would notrub down a horse; and the men and maidens it left pale and hungry. Apolitical orator wittily compared our party promises to western roads, which opened stately enough, with planted trees on either side totempt the traveller, but soon became narrow and narrower and ended ina squirrel-track and ran up a tree. So does culture with us; it ends inheadache. Unspeakably sad and barren does life look to those who a fewmonths 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-devotionleft among the Iranis. " Objections and criticism we have had our fillof. There are objections to every course of life and action, and thepractical wisdom infers an indifferency, from the omnipresence ofobjection. The whole frame of things preaches indifferency. Do not crazeyourself with thinking, but go about your business anywhere. Life is notintellectual or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixedpeople who can enjoy what they find, without question. Nature hatespeeping, 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 ishappiness; to fill the hour and leave no crevice for a repentance or anapproval. We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skatewell on them. Under the oldest mouldiest conventions a man of nativeforce prospers just as well as in the newest world, and that by skillof handling and treatment. He can take hold anywhere. Life itself is amixture 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 theroad, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom. It is notthe part of men, but of fanatics, or of mathematicians if you will, to say that the shortness of life considered, it is not worth caringwhether for so short a duration we were sprawling in want or sittinghigh. Since our office is with moments, let us husband them. Fiveminutes of today are worth as much to me as five minutes in the nextmillennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today. Let us treatthe men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps theyare. Men live in their fancy, like drunkards whose hands are too softand tremulous for successful labor. It is a tempest of fancies, and theonly ballast I know is a respect to the present hour. Without any shadowof doubt, amidst this vertigo of shows and politics, I settle myselfever the firmer in the creed that we should not postpone and refer andwish, but do broad justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with, accepting our actual companions and circumstances, however humble orodious as the mystic officials to whom the universe has delegatedits whole pleasure for us. If these are mean and malignant, theircontentment, which is the last victory of justice, is a more satisfyingecho to the heart than the voice of poets and the casual sympathy ofadmirable persons. I think that however a thoughtful man may sufferfrom the defects and absurdities of his company, he cannot withoutaffectation deny to any set of men and women a sensibility toextraordinary merit. The coarse and frivolous have an instinct ofsuperiority, if they have not a sympathy, and honor it in their blindcapricious way with sincere homage. 

The fine young people despise life, but in me, and in such as with meare free from dyspepsia, and to whom a day is a sound and solid good, itis 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 mealone and I should relish every hour and what it brought me, the potluckof the day, as heartily as the oldest gossip in the bar-room. I amthankful for small mercies. I compared notes with one of my friends whoexpects everything of the universe and is disappointed when anythingis 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. Iaccept the clangor and jangle of contrary tendencies. I find my accountin sots and bores also. They give a reality to the circumjacent picturewhich such a vanishing meteorous appearance can ill spare. In themorning I awake and find the old world, wife, babes, and mother, Concordand Boston, the dear old spiritual world and even the dear old devil notfar off. If we will take the good we find, asking no questions, weshall have heaping measures. The great gifts are not got by analysis. Everything good is on the highway. The middle region of our being isthe temperate zone. We may climb into the thin and cold realm of puregeometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation. Betweenthese extremes is the equator of life, of thought, of spirit, ofpoetry, --a narrow belt. Moreover, in popular experience everythinggood is on the highway. A collector peeps into all the picture-shops ofEurope for a landscape of Poussin, a crayon-sketch of Salvator; but theTransfiguration, the Last Judgment, the Communion of St. Jerome, andwhat are as transcendent as these, are on the walls of the Vatican, theUffizii, or the Louvre, where every footman may see them; to say nothingof Nature's pictures in every street, of sunsets and sunrises every day, and the sculpture of the human body never absent. A collector recentlybought at public auction, in London, for one hundred and fifty-sevenguineas, an autograph of Shakspeare; but for nothing a school-boycan read Hamlet and can detect secrets of highest concernment yetunpublished therein. I think I will never read any but the commonestbooks, --the Bible, Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, and Milton. Then we areimpatient of so public a life and planet, and run hither and thither fornooks and secrets. The imagination delights in the woodcraft of Indians, trappers, and bee-hunters. We fancy that we are strangers, and not sointimately domesticated in the planet as the wild man and the wild beastand bird. But the exclusion reaches them also; reaches the climbing, flying, gliding, feathered and four-footed man. Fox and woodchuck, hawkand snipe and bittern, when nearly seen, have no more root in the deepworld than man, and are just such superficial tenants of the globe. Thenthe new molecular philosophy shows astronomical interspaces betwixt atomand 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 lightsof the church, the ascetics, Gentoos, and corn-eaters, she does notdistinguish by any favor. She comes eating and drinking and sinning. Herdarlings, the great, the strong, the beautiful, are not children of ourlaw; do not come out of the Sunday School, nor weigh their food, norpunctually keep the commandments. If we will be strong with her strengthwe must not harbor such disconsolate consciences, borrowed too from theconsciences of other nations. We must set up the strong present tenseagainst all the rumors of wrath, past or to come. So many things areunsettled which it is of the first importance to settle;--and, pendingtheir settlement, we will do as we do. Whilst the debate goes forward onthe equity of commerce, and will not be closed for a century or two, New and Old England may keep shop. Law of copyright and internationalcopyright is to be discussed, and in the interim we will sell our booksfor the most we can. Expediency of literature, reason of literature, lawfulness of writing down a thought, is questioned; much is to say onboth sides, and, while the fight waxes hot, thou, dearest scholar, stickto thy foolish task, add a line every hour, and between whiles adda line. Right to hold land, right of property, is disputed, and theconventions convene, and before the vote is taken, dig away in yourgarden, and spend your earnings as a waif or godsend to all serene andbeautiful purposes. Life itself is a bubble and a skepticism, and asleep within a sleep. Grant it, and as much more as they will, --butthou, God's darling! heed thy private dream; thou wilt not be missed inthe scorning and skepticism; there are enough of them; stay there inthy closet and toil until the rest are agreed what to do about it. Thysickness, they say, and thy puny habit require that thou do this oravoid that, but know that thy life is a flitting state, a tent for anight, and do thou, sick or well, finish that stint. Thou art sick, butshalt not be worse, and the universe, which holds thee dear, shall bethe better. 

Human life is made up of the two elements, power and form, and theproportion must be invariably kept if we would have it sweet and sound. Each of these elements in excess makes a mischief as hurtful as itsdefect. Everything runs to excess; every good quality is noxious ifunmixed, and, to carry the danger to the edge of ruin, nature causeseach man's peculiarity to superabound. Here, among the farms, we adducethe scholars as examples of this treachery. They are nature's victims ofexpression. You who see the artist, the orator, the poet, too near, andfind their life no more excellent than that of mechanics or farmers, andthemselves victims of partiality, very hollow and haggard, and pronouncethem failures, not heroes, but quacks, --conclude very reasonably thatthese arts are not for man, but are disease. Yet nature will not bearyou out. Irresistible nature made men such, and makes legions moreof such, every day. You love the boy reading in a book, gazing at adrawing, or a cast; yet what are these millions who read and behold, butincipient writers and sculptors? Add a little more of that quality whichnow reads and sees, and they will seize the pen and chisel. And if oneremembers how innocently he began to be an artist, he perceives thatnature joined with his enemy. A man is a golden impossibility. The linehe must walk is a hair's breadth. The wise through excess of wisdom ismade a fool. 

How easily, if fate would suffer it, we might keep forever thesebeautiful limits, and adjust ourselves, once for all, to the perfectcalculation of the kingdom of known cause and effect. In the streetand in the newspapers, life appears so plain a business that manlyresolution and adherence to the multiplication-table through allweathers will insure success. But ah! presently comes a day, or isit only a half-hour, with its angel-whispering, --which discomfits theconclusions of nations and of years! Tomorrow again everything looksreal and angular, the habitual standards are reinstated, common sense isas rare as genius, --is the basis of genius, and experience is hands andfeet to every enterprise;--and yet, he who should do his business onthis understanding would be quickly bankrupt. Power keeps quite anotherroad than the turnpikes of choice and will; namely the subterranean andinvisible tunnels and channels of life. It is ridiculous that we arediplomatists, and doctors, and considerate people: there are no dupeslike these. Life is a series of surprises, and would not be worth takingor keeping if it were not. God delights to isolate us every day, andhide from us the past and the future. We would look about us, but withgrand politeness he draws down before us an impenetrable screenof purest sky, and another behind us of purest sky. 'You will notremember, ' he seems to say, `and you will not expect. ' All goodconversation, manners, and action, come from a spontaneity which forgetsusages and makes the moment great. Nature hates calculators; her methodsare saltatory and impulsive. Man lives by pulses; our organic movementsare such; and the chemical and ethereal agents are undulatory andalternate; and the mind goes antagonizing on, and never prospers but byfits. We thrive by casualties. Our chief experiences have been casual. The most attractive class of people are those who are powerful obliquelyand not by the direct stroke; men of genius, but not yet accredited; onegets the cheer of their light without paying too great a tax. Theirsis the beauty of the bird or the morning light, and not of art. In thethought of genius there is always a surprise; and the moral sentiment iswell called "the newness, " for it is never other; as new to the oldestintelligence as to the young child;--"the kingdom that cometh withoutobservation. " In like manner, for practical success, there must not betoo much design. A man will not be observed in doing that which hecan do best. There is a certain magic about his properest action whichstupefies your powers of observation, so that though it is done beforeyou, you wist not of it. The art of life has a pudency, and will notbe exposed. Every man is an impossibility until he is born; every thingimpossible until we see a success. The ardors of piety agree at lastwith the coldest skepticism, --that nothing is of us or our works, --thatall 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 wouldgladly be moral and keep due metes and bounds, which I dearly love, andallow the most to the will of man; but I have set my heart on honesty inthis chapter, and I can see nothing at last, in success or failure, thanmore or less of vital force supplied from the Eternal. The results oflife are uncalculated and uncalculable. The years teach much which thedays never know. The persons who compose our company, converse, and comeand go, and design and execute many things, and somewhat comes of itall, 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; allare a little advanced, but the individual is always mistaken. It turnsout somewhat new and very unlike what he promised himself. 

The ancients, struck with this irreducibleness of the elements of humanlife to calculation, exalted Chance into a divinity; but that is tostay too long at the spark, which glitters truly at one point, but theuniverse is warm with the latency of the same fire. The miracle of lifewhich will not be expounded but will remain a miracle, introduces a newelement. In the growth of the embryo, Sir Everard Home I think noticedthat the evolution was not from one central point, but coactive fromthree or more points. Life has no memory. That which proceeds insuccession might be remembered, but that which is coexistent, orejaculated from a deeper cause, as yet far from being conscious, knowsnot 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 yethostile value, and now religious, whilst in the reception of spirituallaw. Bear with these distractions, with this coetaneous growth of theparts; they will one day be members, and obey one will. On that onewill, on that secret cause, they nail our attention and hope. Lifeis hereby melted into an expectation or a religion. Underneath theinharmonious and trivial particulars, is a musical perfection; theIdeal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or seam. Do butobserve the mode of our illumination. When I converse with a profoundmind, or if at any time being alone I have good thoughts, I do not atonce 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 myvicinity to a new and excellent region of life. By persisting to reador to think, this region gives further sign of itself, as it were inflashes of light, in sudden discoveries of its profound beauty andrepose, as if the clouds that covered it parted at intervals and showedthe approaching traveller the inland mountains, with the tranquileternal meadows spread at their base, whereon flocks graze and shepherdspipe and dance. But every insight from this realm of thought is felt asinitial, 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 ininfantine joy and amazement before the first opening to me of thisaugust magnificence, old with the love and homage of innumerable ages, young with the life of life, the sunbright Mecca of the desert. And whata future it opens! I feel a new heart beating with the love of the newbeauty. I am ready to die out of nature and be born again into this newyet 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 thereis that in us which changes not and which ranks all sensations andstates of mind. The consciousness in each man is a sliding scale, whichidentifies him now with the First Cause, and now with the flesh of hisbody; life above life, in infinite degrees. The sentiment from which itsprung determines the dignity of any deed, and the question ever is, notwhat you have done or forborne, but at whose command you have done orforborne it. 

Fortune, Minerva, Muse, Holy Ghost, --these are quaint names, too narrowto cover this unbounded substance. The baffled intellect must stillkneel before this cause, which refuses to be named, --ineffable cause, which every fine genius has essayed to represent by some emphaticsymbol, as, Thales by water, Anaximenes by air, Anaxagoras by (Nous)thought, Zoroaster by fire, Jesus and the moderns by love; and themetaphor of each has become a national religion. The Chinese Mencius hasnot been the least successful in his generalization. "I fully understandlanguage, " he said, "and nourish well my vast-flowing vigor. "--"I begto ask what you call vast-flowing vigor?"--said his companion. "Theexplanation, " replied Mencius, "is difficult. This vigor is supremelygreat, and in the highest degree unbending. Nourish it correctly and doit no injury, and it will fill up the vacancy between heaven and earth. This vigor accords with and assists justice and reason, and leaves nohunger. "--In our more correct writing we give to this generalization thename of Being, and thereby confess that we have arrived as far as we cango. Suffice it for the joy of the universe that we have not arrived at awall, but at interminable oceans. Our life seems not present so much asprospective; not for the affairs on which it is wasted, but as a hint ofthis vast-flowing vigor. Most of life seems to be mere advertisement offaculty; information is given us not to sell ourselves cheap; thatwe are very great. So, in particulars, our greatness is always in atendency or direction, not in an action. It is for us to believe in therule, 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 believeconcerning the immortality of the soul or the like, but the universalimpulse to believe, that is the material circumstance and is theprincipal fact in the history of the globe. Shall we describe this causeas that which works directly? The spirit is not helpless or needfulof mediate organs. It has plentiful powers and direct effects. I amexplained without explaining, I am felt without acting, and where I amnot. Therefore all just persons are satisfied with their own praise. They refuse to explain themselves, and are content that new actionsshould do them that office. They believe that we communicate withoutspeech and above speech, and that no right action of ours is quiteunaffecting to our friends, at whatever distance; for the influence ofaction is not to be measured by miles. Why should I fret myself becausea circumstance has occurred which hinders my presence where I wasexpected? If I am not at the meeting, my presence where I am should beas useful to the commonwealth of friendship and wisdom, as would be mypresence 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 fallinto the rear. No man ever came to an experience which was satiating, but his good is tidings of a better. Onward and onward! In liberatedmoments 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 oflife which shall transcend any written record we have. The new statementwill comprise the skepticisms as well as the faiths of society, and outof unbeliefs a creed shall be formed. For skepticisms are not gratuitousor lawless, but are limitations of the affirmative statement, and thenew 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 havemade that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Everafterwards we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do notsee directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correctingthese colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing theamount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creativepower; perhaps there are no objects. Once we lived in what we saw;now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to absorb allthings, engages us. Nature, art, persons, letters, religions, objects, successively tumble in, and God is but one of its ideas. Nature andliterature are subjective phenomena; every evil and every good thing isa 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 themwait on his guests at table, so the chagrins which the bad heart givesoff as bubbles, at once take form as ladies and gentlemen in the street, shopmen or bar-keepers in hotels, and threaten or insult whatever isthreatenable and insultable in us. 'Tis the same with our idolatries. People forget that it is the eye which makes the horizon, andthe rounding mind's eye which makes this or that man a type orrepresentative of humanity, with the name of hero or saint. Jesus, the"providential man, " is a good man on whom many people are agreedthat these optical laws shall take effect. By love on one part andby forbearance to press objection on the other part, it is for a timesettled, that we will look at him in the centre of the horizon, andascribe to him the properties that will attach to any man so seen. Butthe longest love or aversion has a speedy term. The great and cresciveself, rooted in absolute nature, supplants all relative existence andruins the kingdom of mortal friendship and love. Marriage (in what iscalled the spiritual world) is impossible, because of the inequalitybetween every subject and every object. The subject is the receiver ofGodhead, and at every comparison must feel his being enhanced by thatcryptic might. Though not in energy, yet by presence, this magazine ofsubstance cannot be otherwise than felt; nor can any force of intellectattribute to the object the proper deity which sleeps or wakes foreverin every subject. Never can love make consciousness and ascriptionequal in force. There will be the same gulf between every me and thee asbetween the original and the picture. The universe is the bride of thesoul. 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 mustalso come, and the longer a particular union lasts the more energy ofappetency the parts not in union acquire. 

Life will be imaged, but cannot be divided nor doubled. Any invasionof its unity would be chaos. The soul is not twin-born but the onlybegotten, and though revealing itself as child in time, child inappearance, is of a fatal and universal power, admitting no co-life. Every day, every act betrays the ill-concealed deity. We believe inourselves as we do not believe in others. We permit all things toourselves, and that which we call sin in others is experiment for us. Itis an instance of our faith in ourselves that men never speak of crimeas lightly as they think; or every man thinks a latitude safe forhimself which is nowise to be indulged to another. The act looks verydifferently on the inside and on the outside; in its quality and in itsconsequences. Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poetsand romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him or fright himfrom his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to becontemplated; but in its sequel it turns out to be a horrible jangleand confounding of all relations. Especially the crimes that spring fromlove seem right and fair from the actor's point of view, but when actedare found destructive of society. No man at last believes that he can belost, nor that the crime in him is as black as in the felon. Because theintellect qualifies in our own case the moral judgments. For there isno crime to the intellect. That is antinomian or hypernomian, and judgeslaw as well as fact. "It is worse than a crime, it is a blunder, " saidNapoleon, speaking the language of the intellect. To it, the world isa problem in mathematics or the science of quantity, and it leaves outpraise and blame and all weak emotions. All stealing is comparative. Ifyou come to absolutes, pray who does not steal? Saints are sad, becausethey behold sin (even when they speculate), from the point of view ofthe conscience, and not of the intellect; a confusion of thought. Sin, seen from the thought, is a diminution, or less: seen from theconscience or will, it is pravity or bad. The intellect names itshade, absence of light, and no essence. The conscience must feel it asessence, 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 fallsuccessively into the subject itself. The subject exists, the subjectenlarges; 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 treatthe new comer like a travelling geologist who passes through our estateand shows us good slate, or limestone, or anthracite, in our brushpasture. The partial action of each strong mind in one direction is atelescope for the objects on which it is pointed. But every other partof knowledge is to be pushed to the same extravagance, ere the soulattains her due sphericity. Do you see that kitten chasing so prettilyher own tail? If you could look with her eyes you might see hersurrounded with hundreds of figures performing complex dramas, withtragic and comic issues, long conversations, many characters, many upsand downs of fate, --and meantime it is only puss and her tail. How longbefore our masquerade will end its noise of tambourines, laughter, andshouting, and we shall find it was a solitary performance? A subject andan object, --it takes so much to make the galvanic circuit complete, butmagnitude adds nothing. What imports it whether it is Kepler and thesphere, Columbus and America, a reader and his book, or puss with hertail?

It is true that all the muses and love and religion hate thesedevelopments, and will find a way to punish the chemist who publishes inthe parlor the secrets of the laboratory. And we cannot say too littleof our constitutional necessity of seeing things under private aspects, or saturated with our humors. And yet is the God the native of thesebleak rocks. That need makes in morals the capital virtue of self-trust. We must hold hard to this poverty, however scandalous, and by morevigorous self-recoveries, after the sallies of action, possess our axismore firmly. The life of truth is cold and so far mournful; but itis not the slave of tears, contritions and perturbations. It does notattempt another's work, nor adopt another's facts. It is a main lessonof wisdom to know your own from another's. I have learned that I cannotdispose of other people's facts; but I possess such a key to my own aspersuades me, against all their denials, that they also have a key totheirs. A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer amongdrowning men, who all catch at him, and if he give so much as a leg or afinger they will drown him. They wish to be saved from the mischiefs oftheir vices, but not from their vices. Charity would be wasted on thispoor waiting on the symptoms. A wise and hardy physician will say, Comeout of that, as the first condition of advice. 

In this our talking America we are ruined by our good nature andlistening on all sides. This compliance takes away the power of beinggreatly useful. A man should not be able to look other than directlyand forthright. A preoccupied attention is the only answer to theimportunate frivolity of other people; an attention, and to an aim whichmakes their wants frivolous. This is a divine answer, and leaves noappeal and no hard thoughts. In Flaxman's drawing of the Eumenides ofAeschylus, Orestes supplicates Apollo, whilst the Furies sleep onthe threshold. The face of the god expresses a shade of regret andcompassion, but is calm with the conviction of the irreconcilablenessof the two spheres. He is born into other politics, into the eternal andbeautiful. The man at his feet asks for his interest in turmoils of theearth, into which his nature cannot enter. And the Eumenides therelying express pictorially this disparity. The god is surcharged with hisdivine destiny. 

Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness, --these are threads on the loom of time, these are thelords of life. I dare not assume to give their order, but I name them asI find them in my way. I know better than to claim any completeness formy picture. I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me. I can veryconfidently announce one or another law, which throws itself into reliefand form, but I am too young yet by some ages to compile a code. Igossip for my hour concerning the eternal politics. I have seen manyfair pictures not in vain. A wonderful time I have lived in. I am notthe novice I was fourteen, nor yet seven years ago. Let who willask Where is the fruit? I find a private fruit sufficient. This isa 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 aresult on this town and county, an overt effect on the instant month andyear. The effect is deep and secular as the cause. It works on periodsin which mortal lifetime is lost. All I know is reception; I am and Ihave: 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 receptionhas been so large, that I am not annoyed by receiving this or thatsuperabundantly. 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 notmacerate my body to make the account square, for if I should die I couldnot make the account square. The benefit overran the merit the firstday, 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 anapostasy. In good earnest I am willing to spare this most unnecessarydeal of doing. Life wears to me a visionary face. Hardest roughestaction is visionary also. It is but a choice between soft and turbulentdreams. People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urgedoing. I am very content with knowing, if only I could know. That isan august entertainment, and would suffice me a great while. To know alittle would be worth the expense of this world. I hear always the lawof Adrastia, "that every soul which had acquired any truth, should besafe from harm until another period. "

I know that the world I converse with in the city and in the farms, isnot 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 havenot found that much was gained by manipular attempts to realize theworld of thought. Many eager persons successively make an experimentin this way, and make themselves ridiculous. They acquire democraticmanners, they foam at the mouth, they hate and deny. Worse, I observethat in the history of mankind there is never a solitary example ofsuccess, --taking their own tests of success. I say this polemically, orin reply to the inquiry, Why not realize your world? But far be from methe despair which prejudges the law by a paltry empiricism;--since therenever was a right endeavor but it succeeded. Patience and patience, weshall win at the last. We must be very suspicious of the deceptions ofthe 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 hopeand an insight which becomes the light of our life. We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the household with our wives, and these thingsmake no impression, are forgotten next week; but, in the solitude towhich every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelationswhich in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mindthe ridicule, never mind the defeat; up again, old heart!--it seems tosay, --there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance whichthe world exists to realize will be the transformation of genius intopractical 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 wassomething finer in the man than any thing which he said. It has beencomplained of our brilliant English historian of the French Revolutionthat when he has told all his facts about Mirabeau, they do not justifyhis estimate of his genius. The Gracchi, Agis, Cleomenes, and others ofPlutarch'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 ofgreat figure and of few deeds. We cannot find the smallest part of thepersonal weight of Washington in the narrative of his exploits. Theauthority of the name of Schiller is too great for his books. Thisinequality of the reputation to the works or the anecdotes is notaccounted for by saying that the reverberation is longer than thethunder-clap, but somewhat resided in these men which begot anexpectation that outran all their performance. The largest part of theirpower was latent. This is that which we call Character, --a reservedforce which acts directly by presence, and without means. It isconceived 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, orif they chance to be social, do not need society but can entertainthemselves very well alone. The purest literary talent appears at onetime great, at another time small, but character is of a stellar andundiminishable greatness. What others effect by talent or by eloquence, this man accomplishes by some magnetism. "Half his strength he put notforth. " His victories are by demonstration of superiority, and not bycrossing of bayonets. He conquers because his arrival alters the face ofaffairs. "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 Ibeheld Theseus, I desired that I might see him offer battle, or at leastguide his horses in the chariot-race; but Hercules did not wait for acontest; he conquered whether he stood, or walked, or sat, or whateverthing he did. " Man, ordinarily a pendant to events, only half attached, and that awkwardly, to the world he lives in, in these examples appearsto share the life of things, and to be an expression of the same lawswhich control the tides and the sun, numbers and quantities. 

But to use a more modest illustration and nearer home, I observe that inour political elections, where this element, if it appears at all, can only occur in its coarsest form, we sufficiently understandits incomparable rate. The people know that they need in theirrepresentative much more than talent, namely the power to make histalent trusted. They cannot come at their ends by sending to Congress alearned, acute, and fluent speaker, if he be not one who, before he wasappointed by the people to represent them, was appointed by Almighty Godto stand for a fact, --invincibly persuaded of that fact in himself, --sothat the most confident and the most violent persons learn that here isresistance on which both impudence and terror are wasted, namely faithin a fact. The men who carry their points do not need to inquire oftheir constituents what they should say, but are themselves the countrywhich they represent; nowhere are its emotions or opinions so instantand true as in them; nowhere so pure from a selfish infusion. Theconstituency at home hearkens to their words, watches the color oftheir cheek, and therein, as in a glass, dresses its own. Our publicassemblies are pretty good tests of manly force. Our frank countrymen ofthe west and south have a taste for character, and like to know whetherthe New Englander is a substantial man, or whether the hand can passthrough 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 orthat man is fortunate is not to be told. It lies in the man; that is allanybody can tell you about it. See him and you will know as easily whyhe succeeds, as, if you see Napoleon, you would comprehend his fortune. In the new objects we recognize the old game, the Habit of fronting thefact, and not dealing with it at second hand, through the perceptions ofsomebody else. Nature seems to authorize trade, as soon as you see thenatural merchant, who appears not so much a private agent as her factorand Minister of Commerce. His natural probity combines with his insightinto the fabric of society to put him above tricks, and he communicatesto all his own faith that contracts are of no private interpretation. The habit of his mind is a reference to standards of natural equity andpublic advantage; and he inspires respect and the wish to deal withhim, both for the quiet spirit of honor which attends him, and for theintellectual pastime which the spectacle of so much ability affords. This immensely stretched trade, which makes the capes of the SouthernOcean his wharves, and the Atlantic Sea his familiar port, centres inhis brain only; and nobody in the universe can make his place good. Inhis 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 tobe courteous cannot shake off. I see plainly how many firm acts havebeen done; how many valiant noes have this day been spoken, when otherswould have uttered ruinous yeas. I see, with the pride of art andskill of masterly arithmetic and power of remote combination, theconsciousness of being an agent and playfellow of the original laws ofthe world. He too believes that none can supply him, and that a man mustbe born to trade or he cannot learn it. 

This virtue draws the mind more when it appears in action to ends notso mixed. It works with most energy in the smallest companies and inprivate relations. In all cases it is an extraordinary and incomputableagent. The excess of physical strength is paralyzed by it. Highernatures overpower lower ones by affecting them with a certain sleep. Thefaculties are locked up, and offer no resistance. Perhaps that is theuniversal law. When the high cannot bring up the low to itself, itbenumbs it, as man charms down the resistance of the lower animals. Menexert on each other a similar occult power. How often has the influenceof a true master realized all the tales of magic! A river of commandseemed to run down from his eyes into all those who beheld him, atorrent of strong sad light, like an Ohio or Danube, which pervaded themwith his thoughts and colored all events with the hue of his mind. "Whatmeans 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, "Onlythat influence which every strong mind has over a weak one. " CannotCaesar in irons shuffle off the irons and transfer them to the personof 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 gangof negroes which should contain persons of the stamp of ToussaintL'Ouverture: or, let us fancy, under these swarthy masks he has a gangof Washingtons in chains. When they arrive at Cuba, will the relativeorder of the ship's company be the same? Is there nothing but rope andiron? Is there no love, no reverence? Is there never a glimpse of rightin a poor slave-captain's mind; and cannot these be supposed availableto break or elude or in any manner overmatch the tension of an inch ortwo of iron ring?

This is a natural power, like light and heat, and all nature cooperateswith it. The reason why we feel one man's presence and do not feelanother's is as simple as gravity. Truth is the summit of being; justiceis the application of it to affairs. All individual natures stand in ascale, according to the purity of this element in them. The will of thepure runs down from them into other natures as water runs down froma higher into a lower vessel. This natural force is no more to bewithstood than any other natural force. We can drive a stone upward fora moment into the air, but it is yet true that all stones will foreverfall; and whatever instances can be quoted of unpunished theft, or ofa lie which somebody credited, justice must prevail, and it is theprivilege of truth to make itself believed. Character is this moralorder seen through the medium of an individual nature. An individual isan encloser. Time and space, liberty and necessity, truth and thought, are left at large no longer. Now, the universe is a close or pound. Allthings exist in the man tinged with the manners of his soul. With whatquality is in him he infuses all nature that he can reach; nor does hetend to lose himself in vastness, but, at how long a curve soever, allhis 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 patriotdoes his country, as a material basis for his character, and a theatrefor 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 allbeholders like a transparent object betwixt them and the sun, and whosojourneys towards the sun, journeys towards that person. He is thus themedium 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 theybelong. 

The natural measure of this power is the resistance of circumstances. Impure men consider life as it is reflected in opinions, events, andpersons. They cannot see the action until it is done. Yet its moralelement preexisted in the actor, and its quality as right or wrong itwas easy to predict. Everything in nature is bipolar, or has a positiveand 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 ashaving its natural place in the north. It shares the magnetic currentsof the system. The feeble souls are drawn to the south or negativepole. They look at the profit or hurt of the action. They never behold aprinciple 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; theother class do not like to hear of faults; they worship events; secureto them a fact, a connection, a certain chain of circumstances, and theywill ask no more. The hero sees that the event is ancillary; it mustfollow him. A given order of events has no power to secure to him thesatisfaction which the imagination attaches to it; the soul of goodnessescapes from any set of circumstances; whilst prosperity belongs to acertain mind, and will introduce that power and victory which is itsnatural fruit, into any order of events. No change of circumstancescan repair a defect of character. We boast our emancipation from manysuperstitions; but if we have broken any idols it is through a transferof the idolatry. What have I gained, that I no longer immolate a bull toJove or to Neptune, or a mouse to Hecate; that I do not tremblebefore the Eumenides, or the Catholic Purgatory, or the CalvinisticJudgment-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 oranother shape, according to the sex, age, or temperament of theperson, and, if we are capable of fear, will readily find terrors. Thecovetousness or the malignity which saddens me when I ascribe it tosociety, 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 byserenity, which is joy fixed or habitual. It is disgraceful to fly toevents for confirmation of our truth and worth. The capitalist does notrun every hour to the broker to coin his advantages into current moneyof the realm; he is satisfied to read in the quotations of the marketthat his stocks have risen. The same transport which the occurrence ofthe best events in the best order would occasion me, I must learn totaste purer in the perception that my position is every hour meliorated, and does already command those events I desire. That exultation is onlyto be checked by the foresight of an order of things so excellent as tothrow all our prosperities into the deepest shade. 

The face which character wears to me is self-sufficingness. I revere theperson 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 beingdisplaced or overset. A man should give us a sense of mass. Societyis frivolous, and shreds its day into scraps, its conversation intoceremonies and escapes. But if I go to see an ingenious man I shallthink myself poorly entertained if he give me nimble pieces ofbenevolence and etiquette; rather he shall stand stoutly in his placeand let me apprehend if it were only his resistance; know that I haveencountered a new and positive quality;--great refreshment for both ofus. It is much that he does not accept the conventional opinions andpractices. That nonconformity will remain a goad and remembrancer, andevery inquirer will have to dispose of him, in the first place. There isnothing real or useful that is not a seat of war. Our houses ring withlaughter and personal and critical gossip, but it helps little. But theuncivil, unavailable man, who is a problem and a threat to society, whomit cannot let pass in silence but must either worship or hate, --andto whom all parties feel related, both the leaders of opinion and theobscure and eccentric, --he helps; he puts America and Europe in thewrong, and destroys the skepticism which says, 'man is a doll, let useat and drink, 'tis the best we can do, ' by illuminating the untriedand unknown. Acquiescence in the establishment and appeal to the public, indicate infirm faith, heads which are not clear, and which must see ahouse built, before they can comprehend the plan of it. The wise mannot only leaves out of his thought the many, but leaves out the few. Fountains, the self-moved, the absorbed, the commander because he iscommanded, the assured, the primary, --they are good; for these announcethe instant presence of supreme power. 

Our action should rest mathematically on our substance. In nature, thereare no false valuations. A pound of water in the ocean-tempest has nomore gravity than in a midsummer pond. All things work exactly accordingto their quality and according to their quantity; attempt nothing theycannot do, except man only. He has pretension; he wishes and attemptsthings beyond his force. I read in a book of English memoirs, "Mr. Fox(afterwards Lord Holland) said, he must have the Treasury; he had servedup to it, and would have it. " Xenophon and his Ten Thousand were quiteequal to what they attempted, and did it; so equal, that it was notsuspected to be a grand and inimitable exploit. Yet there stands thatfact unrepeated, a high-water mark in military history. Many haveattempted it since, and not been equal to it. It is only on reality thatany power of action can be based. No institution will be better than theinstitutor. I knew an amiable and accomplished person who undertook apractical reform, yet I was never able to find in him the enterprise oflove he took in hand. He adopted it by ear and by the understanding fromthe books he had been reading. All his action was tentative, a piece ofthe city carried out into the fields, and was the city still, and no newfact, and could not inspire enthusiasm. Had there been something latentin the man, a terrible undemonstrated genius agitating and embarrassinghis demeanor, we had watched for its advent. It is not enough that theintellect should see the evils and their remedy. We shall still postponeour existence, nor take the ground to which we are entitled, whilstit is only a thought and not a spirit that incites us. We have not yetserved up to it. 

These are properties of life, and another trait is the notice ofincessant growth. Men should be intelligent and earnest. They must alsomake us feel that they have a controlling happy future opening beforethem, whose early twilights already kindle in the passing hour. The herois misconceived and misreported; he cannot therefore wait to unravel anyman's blunders; he is again on his road, adding new powers and honors tohis domain and new claims on your heart, which will bankrupt you if youhave loitered about the old things and have not kept your relation tohim by adding to your wealth. New actions are the only apologiesand explanations of old ones which the noble can bear to offer or toreceive. If your friend has displeased you, you shall not sit down toconsider it, for he has already lost all memory of the passage, andhas doubled his power to serve you, and ere you can rise up again willburden you with blessings. 

We have no pleasure in thinking of a benevolence that is only measuredby its works. Love is inexhaustible, and if its estate is wasted, itsgranary emptied, still cheers and enriches, and the man, though hesleep, seems to purify the air and his house to adorn the landscape andstrengthen the laws. People always recognize this difference. We knowwho is benevolent, by quite other means than the amount of subscriptionto 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 itthrough; but when they stand with uncertain timid looks of respect andhalf-dislike, and must suspend their judgment for years to come, you maybegin to hope. Those who live to the future must always appear selfishto those who live to the present. Therefore it was droll in the goodRiemer, who has written memoirs of Goethe, to make out a list of hisdonations 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, twoprofessors recommended to foreign universities; &c. , &c. The longestlist of specifications of benefit would look very short. A man is apoor creature if he is to be measured so. For all these of courseare exceptions, and the rule and hodiernal life of a good man isbenefaction. The true charity of Goethe is to be inferred from theaccount he gave Dr. Eckermann of the way in which he had spent hisfortune. "Each bon-mot of mine has cost a purse of gold. Half a millionof my own money, the fortune I inherited, my salary and the large incomederived from my writings for fifty years back, have been expended toinstruct 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 thissimple 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 thisfire of life! These are the touches that reanimate my heavy soul andgive it eyes to pierce the dark of nature. I find, where I thoughtmyself poor, there was I most rich. Thence comes a new intellectualexaltation, to be again rebuked by some new exhibition of character. Strange alternation of attraction and repulsion! Character repudiatesintellect, yet excites it; and character passes into thought, ispublished 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 tocontend 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 onit. Care is taken that the greatly-destined shall slip up into life inthe shade, with no thousand-eyed Athens to watch and blazon every newthought, every blushing emotion of young genius. Two persons lately, very young children of the most high God, have given me occasion forthought. When I explored the source of their sanctity and charm for theimagination, it seemed as if each answered, 'From my nonconformity; Inever 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 myown; hence this sweetness; my work never reminds you of that;--is pureof that. ' And nature advertises me in such persons that indemocratic America she will not be democratized. How cloistered andconstitutionally sequestered from the market and from scandal! It wasonly this morning that I sent away some wild flowers of these wood-gods. They are a relief from literature, --these fresh draughts from thesources of thought and sentiment; as we read, in an age of polish andcriticism, the first lines of written prose and verse of a nation. How captivating is their devotion to their favorite books, whetherAeschylus, Dante, Shakspeare, or Scott, as feeling that they have astake in that book; who touches that, touches them;--and especiallythe total solitude of the critic, the Patmos of thought from whichhe writes, in unconsciousness of any eyes that shall ever readthis writing. Could they dream on still, as angels, and not wake tocomparisons, and to be flattered! Yet some natures are too good to bespoiled by praise, and wherever the vein of thought reaches down intothe profound, there is no danger from vanity. Solemn friends willwarn them of the danger of the head's being turned by the flourish oftrumpets, but they can afford to smile. I remember the indignation of aneloquent Methodist at the kind admonitions of a Doctor of Divinity, --'Myfriend, a man can neither be praised nor insulted. ' But forgive thecounsels; they are very natural. I remember the thought which occurredto 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, andhowever pertly our sermons and disciplines would divide some share ofcredit, and teach that the laws fashion the citizen, she goes her owngait and puts the wisest in the wrong. She makes very light of gospelsand prophets, as one who has a great many more to produce and no excessof time to spare on any one. There is a class of men, individuals ofwhich appear at long intervals, so eminently endowed with insight andvirtue that they have been unanimously saluted as divine, and who seemto be an accumulation of that power we consider. Divine persons arecharacter born, or, to borrow a phrase from Napoleon, they are victoryorganized. They are usually received with ill-will, because they are newand because they set a bound to the exaggeration that has been madeof the personality of the last divine person. Nature never rhymes herchildren, nor makes two men alike. When we see a great man we fancy aresemblance to some historical person, and predict the sequel of hischaracter and fortune; a result which he is sure to disappoint. Nonewill ever solve the problem of his character according to our prejudice, but only in his own high unprecedented way. Character wants room; mustnot be crowded on by persons nor be judged from glimpses got in thepress of affairs or on few occasions. It needs perspective, as a greatbuilding. It may not, probably does not, form relations rapidly; and weshould not require rash explanation, either on the popular ethics, or onour own, of its action. 

I look on Sculpture as history. I do not think the Apollo and the Joveimpossible in flesh and blood. Every trait which the artist recorded instone he had seen in life, and better than his copy. We have seen manycounterfeits, but we are born believers in great men. How easily weread in old books, when men were few, of the smallest action of thepatriarchs. We require that a man should be so large and columnar inthe landscape, that it should deserve to be recorded that he arose, andgirded up his loins, and departed to such a place. The most crediblepictures are those of majestic men who prevailed at their entrance, andconvinced the senses; as happened to the eastern magian who was sent totest the merits of Zertusht or Zoroaster. When the Yunani sage arrivedat Balkh, the Persians tell us, Gushtasp appointed a day on which theMobeds of every country should assemble, and a golden chair was placedfor the Yunani sage. Then the beloved of Yezdam, the prophet Zertusht, advanced into the midst of the assembly. The Yunani sage, on seeing thatchief, said, "This form and this gait cannot lie, and nothing but truthcan proceed from them. " Plato said it was impossible not to believe inthe children of the gods, "though they should speak without probableor necessary arguments. " I should think myself very unhappy in myassociates if I could not credit the best things in history. "JohnBradshaw, " says Milton, "appears like a consul, from whom the fascesare not to depart with the year; so that not on the tribunal only, butthroughout his life, you would regard him as sitting in judgment uponkings. " I find it more credible, since it is anterior information, thatone man should know heaven, as the Chinese say, than that so many menshould know the world. "The virtuous prince confronts the gods, withoutany misgiving. He waits a hundred ages till a sage comes, and does notdoubt. He who confronts the gods, without any misgiving, knows heaven;he who waits a hundred ages until a sage comes, without doubting, knowsmen. Hence the virtuous prince moves, and for ages shows empire theway. " But there is no need to seek remote examples. He is a dullobserver whose experience has not taught him the reality and force ofmagic, as well as of chemistry. The coldest precisian cannot go abroadwithout encountering inexplicable influences. One man fastens an eye onhim and the graves of the memory render up their dead; the secrets thatmake 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 theircartilages; the entrance of a friend adds grace, boldness, and eloquenceto him; and there are persons he cannot choose but remember, who gave atranscendent expansion to his thought, and kindled another life in hisbosom. 

What is so excellent as strict relations of amity, when they spring fromthis deep root? The sufficient reply to the skeptic who doubts the powerand the furniture of man, is in that possibility of joyful intercoursewith persons, which makes the faith and practice of all reasonable men. I know nothing which life has to offer so satisfying as the profoundgood understanding which can subsist after much exchange of goodoffices, between two virtuous men, each of whom is sure of himselfand sure of his friend. It is a happiness which postpones all othergratifications, and makes politics, and commerce, and churches, cheap. For when men shall meet as they ought, each a benefactor, a showerof stars, clothed with thoughts, with deeds, with accomplishments, itshould be the festival of nature which all things announce. Of suchfriendship, love in the sexes is the first symbol, as all other thingsare symbols of love. Those relations to the best men, which, at onetime, we reckoned the romances of youth, become, in the progress of thecharacter, the most solid enjoyment. 

If it were possible to live in right relations with men!--if we couldabstain from asking anything of them, from asking their praise, or help, or pity, and content us with compelling them through the virtue ofthe eldest laws! Could we not deal with a few persons, --with oneperson, --after the unwritten statutes, and make an experiment of theirefficacy? Could we not pay our friend the compliment of truth, ofsilence, of forbearing? Need we be so eager to seek him? If we arerelated, we shall meet. It was a tradition of the ancient world that nometamorphosis could hide a god from a god; and there is a Greek versewhich runs, --

 "The Gods are to each other not unknown. "

Friends also follow the laws of divine necessity; they gravitate to eachother, 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 themselveswithout seneschal in our Olympus, and as they can instal themselvesby seniority divine. Society is spoiled if pains are taken, if theassociates are brought a mile to meet. And if it be not society, it is amischievous, low, degrading jangle, though made up of the best. All thegreatness of each is kept back and every foible in painful activity, asif the Olympians should meet to exchange snuff-boxes. 

Life goes headlong. We chase some flying scheme, or we are hunted bysome fear or command behind us. But if suddenly we encounter a friend, we pause; our heat and hurry look foolish enough; now pause, nowpossession is required, and the power to swell the moment from theresources 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 theheart. Our beatitude waits for the fulfilment of these two in one. Theages are opening this moral force. All force is the shadow or symbol ofthat. Poetry is joyful and strong as it draws its inspiration thence. Men write their names on the world as they are filled with this. Historyhas 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 prophecyof such: we do not know the majestic manners which belong to him, whichappease and exalt the beholder. We shall one day see that the mostprivate is the most public energy, that quality atones for quantity, andgrandeur of character acts in the dark, and succors them who never sawit. What greatness has yet appeared is beginnings and encouragementsto us in this direction. The history of those gods and saints which theworld has written and then worshipped, are documents of character. Theages 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 qualityof his nature, shed an epic splendor around the facts of his death whichhas transfigured every particular into an universal symbol for the eyesof mankind. This great defeat is hitherto our highest fact. But themind requires a victory to the senses; a force of character which willconvert judge, jury, soldier, and king; which will rule animal andmineral 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 dothem homage. In society, high advantages are set down to the possessoras disadvantages. It requires the more wariness in our privateestimates. I do not forgive in my friends the failure to know a finecharacter and to entertain it with thankful hospitality. When at lastthat which we have always longed for is arrived and shines on us withglad rays out of that far celestial land, then to be coarse, then to becritical and treat such a visitant with the jabber and suspicion of thestreets, argues a vulgarity that seems to shut the doors of heaven. Thisis confusion, this the right insanity, when the soul no longer knowsits own, nor where its allegiance, its religion, are due. Is there anyreligion but this, to know that wherever in the wide desert of being theholy sentiment we cherish has opened into a flower, it blooms for me? ifnone sees it, I see it; I am aware, if I alone, of the greatness of thefact. Whilst it blooms, I will keep sabbath or holy time, and suspend mygloom and my folly and jokes. Nature is indulged by the presence of thisguest. There are many eyes that can detect and honor the prudent andhousehold virtues; there are many that can discern Genius on hisstarry track, though the mob is incapable; but when that love which isall-suffering, all-abstaining, all-aspiring, which has vowed to itselfthat it will be a wretch and also a fool in this world sooner thansoil its white hands by any compliances, comes into our streets andhouses, --only the pure and aspiring can know its face, and the onlycompliment 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. OurExploring Expedition saw the Feejee islanders getting their dinner offhuman bones; and they are said to eat their own wives and children. Thehusbandry of the modern inhabitants of Gournou (west of old Thebes)is philosophical to a fault. To set up their housekeeping nothing isrequisite but two or three earthen pots, a stone to grind meal, and amat which is the bed. The house, namely a tomb, is ready without rentor taxes. No rain can pass through the roof, and there is no door, forthere is no want of one, as there is nothing to lose. If the house donot please them, they walk out and enter another, as there are severalhundreds at their command. "It is somewhat singular, " adds Belzoni, towhom we owe this account, "to talk of happiness among people who live insepulchres, among the corpses and rags of an ancient nation which theyknow nothing of. " In the deserts of Borgoo the rock-Tibboos still dwellin caves, like cliff-swallows, and the language of these negroesis compared by their neighbors to the shrieking of bats and to thewhistling of birds. Again, the Bornoos have no proper names; individualsare called after their height, thickness, or other accidental quality, and have nicknames merely. But the salt, the dates, the ivory, and thegold, for which these horrible regions are visited, find their way intocountries where the purchaser and consumer can hardly be ranked in onerace with these cannibals and man-stealers; countries where man serveshimself with metals, wood, stone, glass, gum, cotton, silk, and wool;honors himself with architecture; writes laws, and contrives to executehis will through the hands of many nations; and, especially, establishesa select society, running through all the countries of intelligentmen, 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 whateverpersonal beauty or extraordinary native endowment anywhere appears. 

What fact more conspicuous in modern history than the creation ofthe gentleman? Chivalry is that, and loyalty is that, and, in Englishliterature, half the drama, and all the novels, from Sir Philip Sidneyto Sir Walter Scott, paint this figure. The word gentleman, which, likethe word Christian, must hereafter characterize the present and the fewpreceding centuries by the importance attached to it, is a homageto personal and incommunicable properties. Frivolous and fantasticadditions have got associated with the name, but the steady interestof mankind in it must be attributed to the valuable properties whichit designates. An element which unites all the most forcible persons ofevery country; makes them intelligible and agreeable to each other, andis somewhat so precise that it is at once felt if an individual lackthe masonic sign, --cannot be any casual product, but must be an averageresult of the character and faculties universally found in men. Itseems a certain permanent average; as the atmosphere is a permanentcomposition, whilst so many gases are combined only to be decompounded. Comme il faut, is the Frenchman's description of good Society: as wemust be. It is a spontaneous fruit of talents and feelings of preciselythat class who have most vigor, who take the lead in the world of thishour, and though far from pure, far from constituting the gladdest andhighest tone of human feeling, is as good as the whole society permitsit 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 aningredient, namely virtue, wit, beauty, wealth, and power. 

There is something equivocal in all the words in use to express theexcellence of manners and social cultivation, because the quantities arefluxional, and the last effect is assumed by the senses as the cause. The word gentleman has not any correlative abstract to express thequality. Gentility is mean, and gentilesse is obsolete. But we mustkeep alive in the vernacular the distinction between fashion, a word ofnarrow and often sinister meaning, and the heroic character which thegentleman imports. The usual words, however, must be respected;they will be found to contain the root of the matter. The point ofdistinction 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 notworth. The result is now in question, although our words intimate wellenough the popular feeling that the appearance supposes a substance. The gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his own actions, and expressingthat lordship in his behavior, not in any manner dependent and servile, either on persons, or opinions, or possessions. Beyond this fact oftruth and real force, the word denotes good-nature or benevolence:manhood first, and then gentleness. The popular notion certainly adds acondition of ease and fortune; but that is a natural result of personalforce and love, that they should possess and dispense the goods of theworld. In times of violence, every eminent person must fall in with manyopportunities to approve his stoutness and worth; therefore every man'sname that emerged at all from the mass in the feudal ages, rattles inour ear like a flourish of trumpets. But personal force never goes outof fashion. That is still paramount to-day, and in the moving crowd ofgood society the men of valor and reality are known and rise to theirnatural place. The competition is transferred from war to politicsand trade, but the personal force appears readily enough in these newarenas. 

Power first, or no leading class. In politics and in trade, bruisers andpirates are of better promise than talkers and clerks. God knowsthat all sorts of gentlemen knock at the door; but whenever used instrictness and with any emphasis, the name will be found to pointat original energy. It describes a man standing in his own right andworking after untaught methods. In a good lord there must first bea good animal, at least to the extent of yielding the incomparableadvantage of animal spirits. The ruling class must have more, but theymust have these, giving in every company the sense of power, whichmakes things easy to be done which daunt the wise. The society of theenergetic class, in their friendly and festive meetings, is full ofcourage and of attempts which intimidate the pale scholar. The couragewhich 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 theseextemporaneous squadrons. But memory is a base mendicant with basket andbadge, in the presence of these sudden masters. The rulers of societymust be up to the work of the world, and equal to their versatileoffice: men of the right Caesarian pattern, who have great range ofaffinity. 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 gothrough the cunningest forms"), and am of opinion that the gentleman isthe bold fellow whose forms are not to be broken through; and only thatplenteous nature is rightful master which is the complement of whateverperson it converses with. My gentleman gives the law where he is; hewill outpray saints in chapel, outgeneral veterans in the field, andoutshine all courtesy in the hall. He is good company for piratesand good with academicians; so that it is useless to fortify yourselfagainst him; he has the private entrance to all minds, and I could aseasily exclude myself, as him. The famous gentlemen of Asia and Europehave been of this strong type; Saladin, Sapor, the Cid, Julius Caesar, Scipio, Alexander, Pericles, and the lordliest personages. They sat verycarelessly in their chairs, and were too excellent themselves, to valueany condition at a high rate. 

A plentiful fortune is reckoned necessary, in the popular judgment, tothe completion of this man of the world; and it is a material deputywhich walks through the dance which the first has led. Money is notessential, but this wide affinity is, which transcends the habits ofclique and caste and makes itself felt by men of all classes. If thearistocrat is only valid in fashionable circles and not with truckmen, he will never be a leader in fashion; and if the man of the peoplecannot speak on equal terms with the gentleman, so that the gentlemanshall perceive that he is already really of his own order, he is notto be feared. Diogenes, Socrates, and Epaminondas, are gentlemen of thebest blood who have chosen the condition of poverty when that of wealthwas equally open to them. I use these old names, but the men I speak ofare my contemporaries. Fortune will not supply to every generation oneof these well-appointed knights, but every collection of men furnishessome example of the class; and the politics of this country, and thetrade of every town, are controlled by these hardy and irresponsibledoers, who have invention to take the lead, and a broad sympathy whichputs them in fellowship with crowds, and makes their action popular. 

The manners of this class are observed and caught with devotion by menof taste. The association of these masters with each other and with menintelligent of their merits, is mutually agreeable and stimulating. Thegood forms, the happiest expressions of each, are repeated and adopted. By swift consent everything superfluous is dropped, everything gracefulis renewed. Fine manners show themselves formidable to the uncultivatedman. They are a subtler science of defence to parry and intimidate; butonce matched by the skill of the other party, they drop the point of thesword, --points and fences disappear, and the youth finds himself in amore transparent atmosphere, wherein life is a less troublesome game, and not a misunderstanding rises between the players. Manners aim tofacilitate life, to get rid of impediments and bring the man pureto energize. They aid our dealing and conversation as a railway aidstravelling, by getting rid of all avoidable obstructions of the road andleaving nothing to be conquered but pure space. These forms very soonbecome fixed, and a fine sense of propriety is cultivated with the moreheed that it becomes a badge of social and civil distinctions. Thusgrows up Fashion, an equivocal semblance, the most puissant, the mostfantastic and frivolous, the most feared and followed, and which moralsand violence assault in vain. 

There exists a strict relation between the class of power and theexclusive and polished circles. The last are always filled or fillingfrom the first. The strong men usually give some allowance even to thepetulances of fashion, for that affinity they find in it. Napoleon, child of the revolution, destroyer of the old noblesse, never ceased tocourt the Faubourg St. Germain; doubtless with the feeling that fashionis 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 ofposthumous honor. It does not often caress the great, but the childrenof the great: it is a hall of the Past. It usually sets its face againstthe great of this hour. Great men are not commonly in its halls; theyare absent in the field: they are working, not triumphing. Fashion ismade up of their children; of those who through the value and virtueof somebody, have acquired lustre to their name, marks of distinction, means of cultivation and generosity, and, in their physical organizationa certain health and excellence which secures to them, if not thehighest power to work, yet high power to enjoy. The class of power, theworking heroes, the Cortez, the Nelson, the Napoleon, see that this isthe festivity and permanent celebration of such as they; that fashion isfunded talent; is Mexico, Marengo, and Trafalgar beaten out thin; thatthe brilliant names of fashion run back to just such busy names as theirown, fifty or sixty years ago. They are the sowers, their sons shallbe the reapers, and their sons, in the ordinary course of things, mustyield the possession of the harvest to new competitors with keener eyesand stronger frames. The city is recruited from the country. In the year1805, it is said, every legitimate monarch in Europe was imbecile. Thecity would have died out, rotted, and exploded, long ago, but that itwas reinforced from the fields. It is only country which came to townday before yesterday that is city and court today. 

Aristocracy and fashion are certain inevitable results. These mutualselections are indestructible. If they provoke anger in the leastfavored class, and the excluded majority revenge themselves on theexcluding minority by the strong hand and kill them, at once a new classfinds 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 onlywere left, one of these would be the leader and would be involuntarilyserved and copied by the other. You may keep this minority out of sightand out of mind, but it is tenacious of life, and is one of the estatesof the realm. I am the more struck with this tenacity, when I see itswork. It respects the administration of such unimportant matters, thatwe should not look for any durability in its rule. We sometimes meetmen under some strong moral influence, as a patriotic, a literary, areligious movement, and feel that the moral sentiment rules man andnature. We think all other distinctions and ties will be slight andfugitive, this of caste or fashion for example; yet come from year toyear and see how permanent that is, in this Boston or New York lifeof man, where too it has not the least countenance from the law of theland. Not in Egypt or in India a firmer or more impassable line. Hereare associations whose ties go over and under and through it, ameeting of merchants, a military corps, a college class, a fire-club, a professional association, a political, a religious convention;--thepersons seem to draw inseparably near; yet, that assembly oncedispersed, its members will not in the year meet again. Each returns tohis degree in the scale of good society, porcelain remains porcelain, and earthen earthen. The objects of fashion may be frivolous, or fashionmay be objectless, but the nature of this union and selection canbe neither frivolous nor accidental. Each man's rank in that perfectgraduation depends on some symmetry in his structure or someagreement in his structure to the symmetry of society. Its doorsunbar instantaneously to a natural claim of their own kind. A naturalgentleman finds his way in, and will keep the oldest patrician out whohas lost his intrinsic rank. Fashion understands itself; good-breedingand personal superiority of whatever country readily fraternize withthose of every other. The chiefs of savage tribes have distinguishedthemselves in London and Paris, by the purity of their tournure. 

To say what good of fashion we can, it rests on reality, and hatesnothing so much as pretenders; to exclude and mystify pretenders andsend them into everlasting 'Coventry, ' is its delight. We contemn inturn every other gift of men of the world; but the habit even in littleand the least matters of not appealing to any but our own sense ofpropriety, constitutes the foundation of all chivalry. There is almostno kind of self-reliance, so it be sane and proportioned, which fashiondoes not occasionally adopt and give it the freedom of its saloons. Asainted soul is always elegant, and, if it will, passes unchallengedinto the most guarded ring. But so will Jock the teamster pass, in somecrisis that brings him thither, and find favor, as long as his head isnot giddy with the new circumstance, and the iron shoes do not wish todance in waltzes and cotillons. For there is nothing settled in manners, but the laws of behavior yield to the energy of the individual. Themaiden at her first ball, the country-man at a city dinner, believesthat there is a ritual according to which every act and compliment mustbe performed, or the failing party must be cast out of this presence. Later they learn that good sense and character make their own formsevery 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 theirhead, or what else soever, in a new and aboriginal way; and that strongwill is always in fashion, let who will be unfashionable. All thatfashion demands is composure and self-content. A circle of men perfectlywell-bred would be a company of sensible persons in which every man'snative manners and character appeared. If the fashionist have not thisquality, he is nothing. We are such lovers of self-reliance that weexcuse in a man many sins if he will show us a complete satisfactionin his position, which asks no leave to be, of mine, or any man's goodopinion. But any deference to some eminent man or woman of the world, forfeits all privilege of nobility. He is an underling: I have nothingto do with him; I will speak with his master. A man should not go wherehe cannot carry his whole sphere or society with him, --not bodily, thewhole circle of his friends, but atmospherically. He should preserve ina new company the same attitude of mind and reality of relation whichhis 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 VichIan Vohr with his tail on!--" But Vich Ian Vohr must always carry hisbelongings in some fashion, if not added as honor, then severed asdisgrace. 

There will always be in society certain persons who are mercuries of itsapprobation, and whose glance will at any time determine for the curioustheir standing in the world. These are the chamberlains of the lessergods. Accept their coldness as an omen of grace with the loftierdeities, and allow them all their privilege. They are clear in theiroffice, nor could they be thus formidable without their own merits. But do not measure the importance of this class by their pretension, orimagine that a fop can be the dispenser of honor and shame. They passalso at their just rate; for how can they otherwise, in circles whichexist as a sort of herald's office for the sifting of character?

As the first thing man requires of man is reality, so that appearsin all the forms of society. We pointedly, and by name, introduce theparties to each other. Know you before all heaven and earth, that thisis Andrew, and this is Gregory, --they look each other in the eye; theygrasp each other's hand, to identify and signalize each other. It isa great satisfaction. A gentleman never dodges; his eyes look straightforward, and he assures the other party, first of all, that he has beenmet. For what is it that we seek, in so many visits and hospitalities?Is it your draperies, pictures, and decorations? Or do we not insatiablyask, Was a man in the house? I may easily go into a great householdwhere there is much substance, excellent provision for comfort, luxury, and taste, and yet not encounter there any Amphitryon who shallsubordinate these appendages. I may go into a cottage, and find afarmer who feels that he is the man I have come to see, and frontsme accordingly. It was therefore a very natural point of old feudaletiquette that a gentleman who received a visit, though it were of hissovereign, should not leave his roof, but should wait his arrival atthe door of his house. No house, though it were the Tuileries or theEscurial, is good for anything without a master. And yet we are notoften gratified by this hospitality. Every body we know surroundshimself with a fine house, fine books, conservatory, gardens, equipageand all manner of toys, as screens to interpose between himself and hisguest. 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 hisfellow? It were unmerciful, I know, quite to abolish the use of thesescreens, which are of eminent convenience, whether the guest is toogreat or too little. We call together many friends who keep each otherin play, or by luxuries and ornaments we amuse the young people, andguard our retirement. Or if perchance a searching realist comes to ourgate, before whose eye we have no care to stand, then again we run toour curtain, and hide ourselves as Adam at the voice of the Lord Godin the garden. Cardinal Caprara, the Pope's legate at Paris, defendedhimself from the glances of Napoleon by an immense pair of greenspectacles. Napoleon remarked them, and speedily managed to rally themoff: and yet Napoleon, in his turn, was not great enough with eighthundred 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 hefound himself observed, to discharge his face of all expression. Butemperors and rich men are by no means the most skilful masters ofgood manners. No rentroll nor army-list can dignify skulking anddissimulation; and the first point of courtesy must always be truth, asreally all the forms of good-breeding point that way. 

I have just been reading, in Mr. Hazlitt's translation, Montaigne'saccount of his journey into Italy, and am struck with nothing moreagreeably than the self-respecting fashions of the time. His arrival ineach place, the arrival of a gentleman of France, is an event of someconsequence. Wherever he goes he pays a visit to whatever prince orgentleman of note resides upon his road, as a duty to himself and tocivilization. When he leaves any house in which he has lodged for a fewweeks, he causes his arms to be painted and hung up as a perpetual signto the house, as was the custom of gentlemen. 

The complement of this graceful self-respect, and that of all the pointsof good breeding I most require and insist upon, is deference. Ilike that every chair should be a throne, and hold a king. I prefera tendency to stateliness to an excess of fellowship. Let theincommunicable objects of nature and the metaphysical isolation of manteach us independence. Let us not be too much acquainted. I would havea man enter his house through a hall filled with heroic and sacredsculptures, that he might not want the hint of tranquillity andself-poise. We should meet each morning as from foreign countries, and, spending the day together, should depart at night, as into foreigncountries. In all things I would have the island of a man inviolate. Letus sit apart as the gods, talking from peak to peak all round Olympus. No degree of affection need invade this religion. This is myrrh androsemary to keep the other sweet. Lovers Should guard their strangeness. If they forgive too much, all slides into confusion and meanness. Itis easy to push this deference to a Chinese etiquette; but coolness andabsence of heat and haste indicate fine qualities. A gentleman makes nonoise; a lady is serene. Proportionate is our disgust at those invaderswho fill a studious house with blast and running, to secure somepaltry convenience. Not less I dislike a low sympathy of each with hisneighbor's needs. Must we have a good understanding with one another'spalates? as foolish people who have lived long together know when eachwants salt or sugar. I pray my companion, if he wishes for bread, to askme for bread, and if he wishes for sassafras or arsenic, to ask me forthem, and not to hold out his plate as if I knew already. Every naturalfunction can be dignified by deliberation and privacy. Let us leavehurry to slaves. The compliments and ceremonies of our breeding shouldsignify, however remotely, the recollection of the grandeur of ourdestiny. 

The flower of courtesy does not very well bide handling, but if we dareto open another leaf and explore what parts go to its conformation, we shall find also an intellectual quality. To the leaders of men, thebrain as well as the flesh and the heart must furnish a proportion. Defect in manners is usually the defect of fine perceptions. Men are toocoarsely made for the delicacy of beautiful carriage and customs. Itis not quite sufficient to good-breeding, a union of kindness andindependence. We imperatively require a perception of, and a homage tobeauty in our companions. Other virtues are in request in the field andworkyard, but a certain degree of taste is not to be spared in those wesit with. I could better eat with one who did not respect the truth orthe laws than with a sloven and unpresentable person. Moral qualitiesrule the world, but at short distances the senses are despotic. The samediscrimination of fit and fair runs out, if with less rigor, into allparts of life. The average spirit of the energetic class is good sense, acting under certain limitations and to certain ends. It entertainsevery natural gift. Social in its nature, it respects everything whichtends to unite men. It delights in measure. The love of beauty is mainlythe love of measure or proportion. The person who screams, or uses thesuperlative degree, or converses with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms toflight. If you wish to be loved, love measure. You must have genius ora prodigious usefulness if you will hide the want of measure. Thisperception comes in to polish and perfect the parts of the socialinstrument. Society will pardon much to genius and special gifts, but, being in its nature a convention, it loves what is conventional, orwhat belongs to coming together. That makes the good and bad of manners, namely what helps or hinders fellowship. For fashion is not goodsense absolute, but relative; not good sense private, but good senseentertaining company. It hates corners and sharp points of character, hates quarrelsome, egotistical, solitary, and gloomy people; hateswhatever can interfere with total blending of parties; whilst it valuesall peculiarities as in the highest degree refreshing, which canconsist with good fellowship. And besides the general infusion of witto heighten civility, the direct splendor of intellectual power is everwelcome in fine society as the costliest addition to its rule and itscredit. 

The dry light must shine in to adorn our festival, but it must betempered and shaded, or that will also offend. Accuracy is essentialto beauty, and quick perceptions to politeness, but not too quickperceptions. One may be too punctual and too precise. He must leave theomniscience of business at the door, when he comes into the palace ofbeauty. Society loves creole natures, and sleepy languishing manners, sothat they cover sense, grace and good-will: the air of drowsy strength, which disarms criticism; perhaps because such a person seems to reservehimself for the best of the game, and not spend himself on surfaces;an ignoring eye, which does not see the annoyances, shifts, andinconveniences that cloud the brow and smother the voice of thesensitive. 

Therefore besides personal force and so much perception as constitutesunerring taste, society demands in its patrician class another elementalready intimated, which it significantly terms good-nature, --expressingall degrees of generosity, from the lowest willingness and faculty tooblige, 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; butintellect is selfish and barren. The secret of success in society is acertain heartiness and sympathy. A man who is not happy in the companycannot find any word in his memory that will fit the occasion. All hisinformation is a little impertinent. A man who is happy there, findsin every turn of the conversation equally lucky occasions for theintroduction of that which he has to say. The favorites of society, andwhat 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 thecompany; contented and contenting, at a marriage or a funeral, a ballor a jury, a water-party or a shooting-match. England, which is rich ingentlemen, furnished, in the beginning of the present century, a goodmodel of that genius which the world loves, in Mr. Fox, who added tohis great abilities the most social disposition and real love of men. Parliamentary history has few better passages than the debate in whichBurke and Fox separated in the House of Commons; when Fox urged on hisold friend the claims of old friendship with such tenderness that thehouse 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 fora note of three hundred guineas, found him one day counting gold, anddemanded payment:--"No, " said Fox, "I owe this money to Sheridan; it isa debt of honor; if an accident should happen to me, he has nothingto show. " "Then, " said the creditor, "I change my debt into a debtof honor, " and tore the note in pieces. Fox thanked the man for hisconfidence and paid him, saying, "his debt was of older standing, andSheridan must wait. " Lover of liberty, friend of the Hindoo, friendof the African slave, he possessed a great personal popularity; andNapoleon 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 theTuileries. "

We may easily seem ridiculous in our eulogy of courtesy, whenever weinsist on benevolence as its foundation. The painted phantasm Fashionrises to cast a species of derision on what we say. But I will neitherbe driven from some allowance to Fashion as a symbolic institution, norfrom 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 itsspirit to these sharp contrasts. Fashion, which affects to be honor, isoften, in all men's experience, only a ballroom-code. Yet so long asit is the highest circle in the imagination of the best heads on theplanet, there is something necessary and excellent in it; for it isnot to be supposed that men have agreed to be the dupes of anythingpreposterous; and the respect which these mysteries inspire in the mostrude and sylvan characters, and the curiosity with which details ofhigh life are read, betray the universality of the love of cultivatedmanners. I know that a comic disparity would be felt, if we should enterthe acknowledged 'first circles' and apply these terrific standards ofjustice, beauty, and benefit to the individuals actually found there. Monarchs and heroes, sages and lovers, these gallants are not. Fashionhas many classes and many rules of probation and admission, and notthe best alone. There is not only the right of conquest, which geniuspretends, --the individual demonstrating his natural aristocracy bestof the best;--but less claims will pass for the time; for Fashion loveslions, and points like Circe to her horned company. This gentleman isthis afternoon arrived from Denmark; and that is my Lord Ride, who cameyesterday from Bagdat; here is Captain Friese, from Cape Turnagain; andCaptain Symmes, from the interior of the earth; and Monsieur Jovaire, who came down this morning in a balloon; Mr. Hobnail, the reformer; andReverend Jul Bat, who has converted the whole torrid zone in his Sundayschool; and Signor Torre del Greco, who extinguished Vesuvius by pouringinto it the Bay of Naples; Spahi, the Persian ambassador; and Tul WilShan, the exiled nabob of Nepaul, whose saddle is the new moon. --Butthese are monsters of one day, and to-morrow will be dismissed totheir holes and dens; for in these rooms every chair is waited for. Theartist, the scholar, and, in general, the clerisy, wins their way upinto these places and get represented here, somewhat on this footing ofconquest. Another mode is to pass through all the degrees, spending ayear and a day in St. Michael's Square, being steeped in Cologne water, and perfumed, and dined, and introduced, and properly grounded in allthe biography and politics and anecdotes of the boudoirs. 

Yet these fineries may have grace and wit. Let there be grotesquesculpture about the gates and offices of temples. Let the creedand commandments even have the saucy homage of parody. The forms ofpoliteness universally express benevolence in superlative degrees. What if they are in the mouths of selfish men, and used as means ofselfishness? What if the false gentleman almost bows the true out Of theworld? What if the false gentleman contrives so to address his companionas civilly to exclude all others from his discourse, and also to makethem feel excluded? Real service will not lose its nobleness. Allgenerosity is not merely French and sentimental; nor is it to beconcealed that living blood and a passion of kindness does at lastdistinguish God's gentleman from Fashion's. The epitaph of Sir JenkinGrout is not wholly unintelligible to the present age: "Here lies SirJenkin Grout, who loved his friend and persuaded his enemy: what hismouth ate, his hand paid for: what his servants robbed, he restored: ifa woman gave him pleasure, he supported her in pain: he never forgot hischildren; and whoso touched his finger, drew after it his whole body. "Even the line of heroes is not utterly extinct. There is still ever someadmirable person in plain clothes, standing on the wharf, who jumpsin to rescue a drowning man; there is still some absurd inventor ofcharities; some guide and comforter of runaway slaves; some friend ofPoland; some Philhellene; some fanatic who plants shade-trees for thesecond and third generation, and orchards when he is grown old; somewell-concealed piety; some just man happy in an ill fame; some youthashamed of the favors of fortune and impatiently casting them on othershoulders. And these are the centres of society, on which it returns forfresh impulses. These are the creators of Fashion, which is an attemptto organize beauty of behavior. The beautiful and the generous are, inthe theory, the doctors and apostles of this church: Scipio, and theCid, and Sir Philip Sidney, and Washington, and every pure and valiantheart who worshipped Beauty by word and by deed. The persons whoconstitute the natural aristocracy are not found in the actualaristocracy, or only on its edge; as the chemical energy of the spectrumis found to be greatest just outside of the spectrum. Yet that is theinfirmity of the seneschals, who do not know their sovereign when heappears. The theory of society supposes the existence and sovereignty ofthese. 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 anarrower and higher circle, concentration of its light, and flowerof courtesy, to which there is always a tacit appeal of pride andreference, as to its inner and imperial court; the parliament of loveand chivalry. And this is constituted of those persons in whom heroicdispositions are native; with the love of beauty, the delight insociety, and the power to embellish the passing day. If the individualswho compose the purest circles of aristocracy in Europe, the guardedblood of centuries, should pass in review, in such manner as that wecould at leisure and critically inspect their behavior, we might find nogentleman and no lady; for although excellent specimens of courtesy andhigh-breeding would gratify us in the assemblage, in the particularswe should detect offence. Because elegance comes of no breeding, butof birth. There must be romance of character, or the most fastidiousexclusion of impertinencies will not avail. It must be genius whichtakes that direction: it must be not courteous, but courtesy. Highbehavior is as rare in fiction as it is in fact. Scott is praised forthe fidelity with which he painted the demeanor and conversation of thesuperior classes. Certainly, kings and queens, nobles and great ladies, had some right to complain of the absurdity that had been put in theirmouths before the days of Waverley; but neither does Scott's dialoguebear criticism. His lords brave each other in smart epigramaticspeeches, but the dialogue is in costume, and does not please on thesecond reading: it is not warm with life. In Shakspeare alone thespeakers do not strut and bridle, the dialogue is easily great, and headds to so many titles that of being the best-bred man in England and inChristendom. Once or twice in a lifetime we are permitted to enjoy thecharm of noble manners, in the presence of a man or woman who have nobar in their nature, but whose character emanates freely in theirword and gesture. A beautiful form is better than a beautiful face; abeautiful behavior is better than a beautiful form: it gives a higherpleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of the fine arts. Aman 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 allconsiderations of magnitude, and in his manners equal the majesty of theworld. I have seen an individual whose manners, though wholly withinthe conventions of elegant society, were never learned there, but wereoriginal and commanding and held out protection and prosperity; one whodid not need the aid of a court-suit, but carried the holiday in hiseye; who exhilarated the fancy by flinging wide the doors of new modesof existence; who shook off the captivity of etiquette, with happy, spirited bearing, good-natured and free as Robin Hood; yet with the portof an emperor, if need be, --calm, serious, and fit to stand the gaze ofmillions. 

The open air and the fields, the street and public chambers are theplaces where Man executes his will; let him yield or divide thesceptre 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 magnanimousdeportment which is indispensable as an exterior in the hall. OurAmerican institutions have been friendly to her, and at this moment Iesteem it a chief felicity of this country, that it excels in women. Acertain awkward consciousness of inferiority in the men may give riseto the new chivalry in behalf of Woman's Rights. Certainly let her be asmuch better placed in the laws and in social forms as the most zealousreformer can ask, but I confide so entirely in her inspiring and musicalnature, that I believe only herself can show us how she shall be served. The wonderful generosity of her sentiments raises her at times intoheroical and godlike regions, and verifies the pictures of Minerva, Juno, or Polymnia; and by the firmness with which she treads her upwardpath, she convinces the coarsest calculators that another road existsthan that which their feet know. But besides those who make good inour imagination the place of muses and of Delphic Sibyls, are there notwomen who fill our vase with wine and roses to the brim, so that thewine runs over and fills the house with perfume; who inspire us withcourtesy; who unloose our tongues and we speak; who anoint our eyes andwe see? We say things we never thought to have said; for once, our wallsof habitual reserve vanished and left us at large; we were childrenplaying with children in a wide field of flowers. Steep us, we cried, inthese influences, for days, for weeks, and we shall be sunny poets andwill write out in many-colored words the romance that you are. Was itHafiz or Firdousi that said of his Persian Lilla, She was an elementalforce, and astonished me by her amount of life, when I saw her day afterday radiating, every instant, redundant joy and grace on all around her. She was a solvent powerful to reconcile all heterogeneous persons intoone society: like air or water, an element of such a great range ofaffinities that it combines readily with a thousand substances. Whereshe is present all others will be more than they are wont. She was aunit and whole, so that whatsoever she did, became her. She had too muchsympathy and desire to please, than that you could say her manners weremarked with dignity, yet no princess could surpass her clear and erectdemeanor on each occasion. She did not study the Persian grammar, northe books of the seven poets, but all the poems of the seven seemedto be written upon her. For though the bias of her nature was not tothought, but to sympathy, yet was she so perfect in her own nature as tomeet intellectual persons by the fulness of her heart, warming them byher 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 sofair and picturesque to those who look at the contemporary facts forscience or for entertainment, is not equally pleasant to all spectators. The constitution of our society makes it a giant's castle to theambitious youth who have not found their names enrolled in its GoldenBook, and whom it has excluded from its coveted honors and privileges. They have yet to learn that its seeming grandeur is shadowy andrelative: it is great by their allowance; its proudest gates willfly open at the approach of their courage and virtue. For the presentdistress, however, of those who are predisposed to suffer from thetyrannies of this caprice, there are easy remedies. To remove yourresidence a couple of miles, or at most four, will commonly relieve themost extreme susceptibility. For the advantages which fashion valuesare plants which thrive in very confined localities, in a few streetsnamely. Out of this precinct they go for nothing; are of no use in thefarm, in the forest, in the market, in war, in the nuptial society, inthe literary or scientific circle, at sea, in friendship, in the heavenof thought or virtue. 

But we have lingered long enough in these painted courts. The worth ofthe thing signified must vindicate our taste for the emblem. Everythingthat is called fashion and courtesy humbles itself before the cause andfountain of honor, creator of titles and dignities, namely the heart oflove. This is the royal blood, this the fire, which, in all countriesand contingencies, will work after its kind and conquer and expandall that approaches it. This gives new meanings to every fact. Thisimpoverishes the rich, suffering no grandeur but its own. What is rich?Are you rich enough to help anybody? to succor the unfashionable and theeccentric? rich enough to make the Canadian in his wagon, the itinerantwith his consul's paper which commends him "To the charitable, " theswarthy Italian with his few broken words of English, the lame pauperhunted by overseers from town to town, even the poor insane or besottedwreck of man or woman, feel the noble exception of your presence andyour house from the general bleakness and stoniness; to make such feelthat they were greeted with a voice which made them both remember andhope? What is vulgar but to refuse the claim on acute and conclusivereasons? What is gentle, but to allow it, and give their heart and yoursone holiday from the national caution? Without the rich heart, wealth isan ugly beggar. The king of Schiraz could not afford to be so bountifulas the poor Osman who dwelt at his gate. Osman had a humanity so broadand deep that although his speech was so bold and free with the Koranas 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 whohad been mutilated under a vow, or had a pet madness in his brain, butfled at once to him; that great heart lay there so sunny and hospitablein the centre of the country, that it seemed as if the instinct of allsufferers drew them to his side. And the madness which he harbored hedid 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, andtalk of that which I do not well understand. It is easy to see, thatwhat is called by distinction society and fashion has good laws as wellas bad, has much that is necessary, and much that is absurd. Too goodfor banning, and too bad for blessing, it reminds us of a traditionof the pagan mythology, in any attempt to settle its character. 'Ioverheard Jove, one day, ' said Silenus, 'talking of destroying theearth; he said it had failed; they were all rogues and vixens, who wentfrom bad to worse, as fast as the days succeeded each other. Minervasaid she hoped not; they were only ridiculous little creatures, withthis odd circumstance, that they had a blur, or indeterminate aspect, seen far or seen near; if you called them bad, they would appear so; ifyou called them good, they would appear so; and there was no one personor action among them, which would not puzzle her owl, much more allOlympus, 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 worldowes the world more than the world can pay, and ought to go intochancery and be sold. I do not think this general insolvency, whichinvolves in some sort all the population, to be the reason of thedifficulty experienced at Christmas and New Year and other times, inbestowing gifts; since it is always so pleasant to be generous, thoughvery 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 tosomebody, I am puzzled what to give, until the opportunity is gone. Flowers and fruits are always fit presents; flowers, because they are aproud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of theworld. These gay natures contrast with the somewhat stern countenance ofordinary 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 universallaws. Yet these delicate flowers look like the frolic and interferenceof love and beauty. Men use to tell us that we love flattery even thoughwe are not deceived by it, because it shows that we are of importanceenough to be courted. Something like that pleasure, the flowers give us:what am I to whom these sweet hints are addressed? Fruits are acceptablegifts, because they are the flower of commodities, and admit offantastic values being attached to them. If a man should send to me tocome a hundred miles to visit him and should set before me a basket offine summer-fruit, I should think there was some proportion between thelabor and the reward. 

For common gifts, necessity makes pertinences and beauty every day, andone is glad when an imperative leaves him no option; since if the manat the door have no shoes, you have not to consider whether you couldprocure him a paint-box. And as it is always pleasing to see a man eatbread, or drink water, in the house or out of doors, so it is alwaysa great satisfaction to supply these first wants. Necessity doeseverything well. In our condition of universal dependence it seemsheroic to let the petitioner be the judge of his necessity, and to giveall that is asked, though at great inconvenience. If it be a fantasticdesire, it is better to leave to others the office of punishing him. Ican 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 myfriends prescribed, is that we might convey to some person that whichproperly belonged to his character, and was easily associated with himin thought. But our tokens of compliment and love are for the mostpart barbarous. Rings and other jewels are not gifts, but apologies forgifts. 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, hispicture; the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing. This is right andpleasing, for it restores society in so far to its primary basis, whena man's biography is conveyed in his gift, and every man's wealth is anindex of his merit. But it is a cold lifeless business when you go tothe shops to buy me something which does not represent your life andtalent, but a goldsmith's. This is fit for kings, and rich men whorepresent kings, and a false state of property, to make presents of goldand silver stuffs, as a kind of symbolical sin-offering, or payment ofblack-mail. 

The law of benefits is a difficult channel, which requires carefulsailing, 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 quiteforgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of beingbitten. We can receive anything from love, for that is a way ofreceiving it from ourselves; but not from any one who assumes to bestow. We sometimes hate the meat which we eat, because there seems somethingof 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 ifit 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 orsorry at a gift, and both emotions are unbecoming. Some violence I thinkis done, some degradation borne, when I rejoice or grieve at a gift. Iam sorry when my independence is invaded, or when a gift comes from suchas do not know my spirit, and so the act is not supported; and if thegift pleases me overmuch, then I should be ashamed that the donor shouldread 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 tomy flowing unto him. When the waters are at level, then my goods passto him, and his to me. All his are mine, all mine his. I say to him, Howcan you give me this pot of oil or this flagon of wine when all your oiland wine is mine, which belief of mine this gift seems to deny? Hencethe fitness of beautiful, not useful things, for gifts. This giving isflat usurpation, and therefore when the beneficiary is ungrateful, asall beneficiaries hate all Timons, not at all considering the value ofthe gift but looking back to the greater store it was taken from, --Irather sympathize with the beneficiary than with the anger of my lordTimon. For the expectation of gratitude is mean, and is continuallypunished by the total insensibility of the obliged person. It is a greathappiness to get off without injury and heart-burning from one who hashad 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 aslap. A golden text for these gentlemen is that which I so admire inthe Buddhist, who never thanks, and who says, "Do not flatter yourbenefactors. "

The reason of these discords I conceive to be that there is nocommensurability between a man and any gift. You cannot give anything toa magnanimous person. After you have served him he at once puts you indebt by his magnanimity. The service a man renders his friend is trivialand selfish compared with the service he knows his friend stood inreadiness 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 benefitit is in my power to render him seems small. Besides, our action on eachother, good as well as evil, is so incidental and at random that we canseldom hear the acknowledgments of any person who would thank us fora benefit, without some shame and humiliation. We can rarely strike adirect stroke, but must be content with an oblique one; we seldomhave the satisfaction of yielding a direct benefit which is directlyreceived. But rectitude scatters favors on every side without knowingit, and receives with wonder the thanks of all people. 

I fear to breathe any treason against the majesty of love, which is thegenius and god of gifts, and to whom we must not affect to prescribe. Let him give kingdoms or flower-leaves indifferently. There are personsfrom whom we always expect fairy-tokens; let us not cease to expectthem. 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 bestof hospitality and of generosity is also not in the will, but in fate. Ifind 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. Noservices are of any value, but only likeness. When I have attempted tojoin myself to others by services, it proved an intellectual trick, --nomore. They eat your service like apples, and leave you out. But lovethem, 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 ofthe year, wherein the world reaches its perfection; when the air, the heavenly bodies and the earth, make a harmony, as if nature wouldindulge her offspring; when, in these bleak upper sides of the planet, nothing is to desire that we have heard of the happiest latitudes, andwe bask in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba; when everything thathas life gives sign of satisfaction, and the cattle that lie on theground seem to have great and tranquil thoughts. These halcyons may belooked for with a little more assurance in that pure October weatherwhich 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. Thesolitary 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 ofgreat and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off hisback with the first step he makes into these precincts. Here is sanctitywhich shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find Nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every othercircumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her. We havecrept out of our close and crowded houses into the night and morning, and we see what majestic beauties daily wrap us in their bosom. Howwillingly we would escape the barriers which render them comparativelyimpotent, escape the sophistication and second thought, and suffernature to intrance us. The tempered light of the woods is like aperpetual morning, and is stimulating and heroic. The anciently reportedspells of these places creep on us. The stems of pines, hemlocks, andoaks almost gleam like iron on the excited eye. The incommunicable treesbegin to persuade us to live with them, and quit our life of solemntrifles. Here no history, or church, or state, is interpolated on thedivine sky and the immortal year. How easily we might walk onward intothe opening landscape, absorbed by new pictures and by thoughts fastsucceeding each other, until by degrees the recollection of home wascrowded out of the mind, all memory obliterated by the tyranny of thepresent, and we were led in triumph by nature. 

These enchantments are medicinal, they sober and heal us. These areplain pleasures, kindly and native to us. We come to our own, and makefriends with matter, which the ambitious chatter of the schools wouldpersuade us to despise. We never can part with it; the mind loves itsold home: as water to our thirst, so is the rock, the ground, to oureyes and hands and feet. It is firm water; it is cold flame; whathealth, what affinity! Ever an old friend, ever like a dear friend andbrother when we chat affectedly with strangers, comes in this honestface, and takes a grave liberty with us, and shames us out of ournonsense. Cities give not the human senses room enough. We go out dailyand 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 naturalinfluence, from these quarantine powers of nature, up to her dearestand gravest ministrations to the imagination and the soul. There is thebucket of cold water from the spring, the wood-fire to which the chilledtraveller rushes for safety, --and there is the sublime moral of autumnand of noon. We nestle in nature, and draw our living as parasites fromher roots and grains, and we receive glances from the heavenly bodies, which call us to solitude and foretell the remotest future. The bluezenith is the point in which romance and reality meet. I think ifwe should be rapt away into all that we dream of heaven, and shouldconverse with Gabriel and Uriel, the upper sky would be all that wouldremain of our furniture. 

It seems as if the day was not wholly profane in which we have givenheed to some natural object. The fall of snowflakes in a still air, preserving to each crystal its perfect form; the blowing of sleet overa wide sheet of water, and over plains; the waving ryefield; the mimicwaving of acres of houstonia, whose innumerable florets whiten andripple before the eye; the reflections of trees and flowers in glassylakes; the musical steaming odorous south wind, which converts all treesto windharps; the crackling and spurting of hemlock in the flames, orof pine logs, which yield glory to the walls and faces in thesittingroom, --these are the music and pictures of the most ancientreligion. My house stands in low land, with limited outlook, and on theskirt of the village. But I go with my friend to the shore of our littleriver, and with one stroke of the paddle I leave the village politicsand personalities, yes, and the world of villages and personalitiesbehind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, toobright almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate and probation. We penetrate bodily this incredible beauty; we dip our hands in thispainted element; our eyes are bathed in these lights and forms. A holiday, a villeggiatura, a royal revel, the proudest, mostheart-rejoicing festival that valor and beauty, power and taste, everdecked and enjoyed, establishes itself on the instant. These sunsetclouds, these delicately emerging stars, with their private andineffable glances, signify it and proffer it. I am taught the poornessof our invention, the ugliness of towns and palaces. Art and luxuryhave early learned that they must work as enhancement and sequel to thisoriginal beauty. I am overinstructed for my return. Henceforth I shallbe hard to please. I cannot go back to toys. I am grown expensive andsophisticated. I can no longer live without elegance, but a countrymanshall be my master of revels. He who knows the most; he who knowswhat sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, theheavens, and how to come at these enchantments, --is the rich and royalman. Only as far as the masters of the world have called in natureto their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is themeaning of their hanging-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks and preserves, to back their faulty personality with thesestrong accessories. I do not wonder that the landed interest should beinvincible in the State with these dangerous auxiliaries. These bribeand invite; not kings, not palaces, not men, not women, but these tenderand poetic stars, eloquent of secret promises. We heard what the richman said, we knew of his villa, his grove, his wine and his company, butthe provocation and point of the invitation came out of these beguilingstars. In their soft glances I see what men strove to realize in someVersailles, or Paphos, or Ctesiphon. Indeed, it is the magical lights ofthe horizon and the blue sky for the background which save all our worksof art, which were otherwise bawbles. When the rich tax the poor withservility and obsequiousness, they should consider the effect of menreputed to be the possessors of nature, on imaginative minds. Ah! ifthe rich were rich as the poor fancy riches! A boy hears a militaryband play on the field at night, and he has kings and queens and famouschivalry palpably before him. He hears the echoes of a horn in ahill country, in the Notch Mountains, for example, which converts themountains into an Aeolian harp, --and this supernatural tiralira restoresto him the Dorian mythology, Apollo, Diana, and all divine hunters andhuntresses. Can a musical note be so lofty, so haughtily beautiful!To the poor young poet, thus fabulous is his picture of society; heis loyal; he respects the rich; they are rich for the sake of hisimagination; how poor his fancy would be, if they were not rich! Thatthey have some high-fenced grove which they call a park; that they livein larger and better-garnished saloons than he has visited, and go incoaches, keeping only the society of the elegant, to watering-placesand to distant cities, --these make the groundwork from which hehas delineated estates of romance, compared with which their actualpossessions are shanties and paddocks. The muse herself betrays her son, and enhances the gifts of wealth and well-born beauty by a radiationout of the air, and clouds, and forests that skirt the road, --a certainhaughty favor, as if from patrician genii to patricians, a kind ofaristocracy in nature, a prince of the power of the air. 

The moral sensibility which makes Edens and Tempes so easily, may not bealways found, but the material landscape is never far off. We canfind these enchantments without visiting the Como Lake, or the MadeiraIslands. We exaggerate the praises of local scenery. In every landscapethe 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 theAlleghanies. The stars at night stoop down over the brownest, homeliestcommon with all the spiritual magnificence which they shed on theCampagna, or on the marble deserts of Egypt. The uprolled clouds and thecolors of morning and evening will transfigure maples and alders. Thedifference between landscape and landscape is small, but there isgreat difference in the beholders. There is nothing so wonderful in anyparticular landscape as the necessity of being beautiful under whichevery landscape lies. Nature cannot be surprised in undress. Beautybreaks 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 canhardly speak directly of it without excess. It is as easy to broach inmixed companies what is called "the subject of religion. " A susceptibleperson does not like to indulge his tastes in this kind without theapology of some trivial necessity: he goes to see a wood-lot, or to lookat 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 shamemust have a good reason. A dilettantism in nature is barren andunworthy. The fop of fields is no better than his brother of Broadway. Men are naturally hunters and inquisitive of wood-craft, and I supposethat such a gazetteer as wood-cutters and Indians should furnish factsfor, 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 whatevercause, 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 representedin the mythology as the most continent of gods. I would not be frivolousbefore the admirable reserve and prudence of time, yet I cannot renouncethe right of returning often to this old topic. The multitude of falsechurches accredits the true religion. Literature, poetry, science arethe homage of man to this unfathomed secret, concerning which no saneman can affect an indifference or incuriosity. Nature is loved by whatis best in us. It is loved as the city of God, although, or ratherbecause there is no citizen. The sunset is unlike anything that isunderneath it: it wants men. And the beauty of nature must always seemunreal and mocking, until the landscape has human figures that areas good as itself. If there were good men, there would never be thisrapture in nature. If the king is in the palace, nobody looks at thewalls. It is when he is gone, and the house is filled with grooms andgazers, that we turn from the people to find relief in the majestic menthat are suggested by the pictures and the architecture. The critics whocomplain of the sickly separation of the beauty of nature from thething to be done, must consider that our hunting of the picturesqueis inseparable from our protest against false society. Man is fallen;nature is erect, and serves as a differential thermometer, detectingthe presence or absence of the divine sentiment in man. By fault of ourdulness and selfishness we are looking up to nature, but when we areconvalescent, nature will look up to us. We see the foaming brook withcompunction: if our own life flowed with the right energy, we shouldshame the brook. The stream of zeal sparkles with real fire, and notwith reflex rays of sun and moon. Nature may be as selfishly studied astrade. Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology; psychology, mesmerism(with intent to show where our spoons are gone); and anatomy andphysiology become phrenology and palmistry. 

But taking timely warning, and leaving many things unsaid on thistopic, let us not longer omit our homage to the Efficient Nature, naturanaturans, the quick cause before which all forms flee as the drivensnows; itself secret, its works driven before it in flocks andmultitudes, (as the ancient represented nature by Proteus, a shepherd, )and in undescribable variety. It publishes itself in creatures, reachingfrom particles and spiculae through transformation on transformation tothe highest symmetries, arriving at consummate results without ashock or a leap. A little heat, that is a little motion, is all thatdifferences the bald, dazzling white and deadly cold poles of the earthfrom the prolific tropical climates. All changes pass without violence, by reason of the two cardinal conditions of boundless space andboundless time. Geology has initiated us into the secularity of nature, and taught us to disuse our dame-school measures, and exchange ourMosaic and Ptolemaic schemes for her large style. We knew nothingrightly, for want of perspective. Now we learn what patient periodsmust round themselves before the rock is formed; then before the rockis broken, and the first lichen race has disintegrated the thinnestexternal 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 theoyster; farther yet to Plato and the preaching of the immortality of thesoul. 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 secretsof nature:--Motion and Rest. The whole code of her laws may be writtenon the thumbnail, or the signet of a ring. The whirling bubble on thesurface 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 rotatein a cup explains the formation of the simpler shells; the addition ofmatter from year to year, arrives at last at the most complex forms; andyet so poor is nature with all her craft, that from the beginning to theend of the universe she has but one stuff, --but one stuff with its twoends, 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 betraysthe same properties. 

Nature is always consistent, though she feigns to contravene her ownlaws. She keeps her laws, and seems to transcend them. She arms andequips an animal to find its place and living in the earth, and at thesame time she arms and equips another animal to destroy it. Space existsto divide creatures; but by clothing the sides of a bird with a fewfeathers she gives him a petty omnipresence. The direction is foreveronward, but the artist still goes back for materials and begins againwith the first elements on the most advanced stage: otherwise all goesto ruin. If we look at her work, we seem to catch a glance of a systemin transition. Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health andvigor; but they grope ever upward towards consciousness; the trees areimperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in theground. The animal is the novice and probationer of a more advancedorder. The men, though young, having tasted the first drop from thecup of thought, are already dissipated: the maples and ferns are stilluncorrupt; yet no doubt when they come to consciousness they too willcurse and swear. Flowers so strictly belong to youth that we adult mensoon come to feel that their beautiful generations concern not us: wehave 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 theeye, from any one object the parts and properties of any other may bepredicted. If we had eyes to see it, a bit of stone from the city wallwould certify us of the necessity that man must exist, as readily asthe city. That identity makes us all one, and reduces to nothing greatintervals on our customary scale. We talk of deviations from naturallife, as if artificial life were not also natural. The smoothest curledcourtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude andaboriginal as a white bear, omnipotent to its own ends, and isdirectly related, there amid essences and billetsdoux, to Himmalehmountain-chains and the axis of the globe. If we consider how muchwe are nature's, we need not be superstitious about towns, as if thatterrific or benefic force did not find us there also, and fashioncities. Nature, who made the mason, made the house. We may easily heartoo much of rural influences. The cool disengaged air of natural objectsmakes them enviable to us, chafed and irritable creatures with redfaces, and we think we shall be as grand as they if we camp out and eatroots; but let us be men instead of woodchucks and the oak and the elmshall gladly serve us, though we sit in chairs of ivory on carpets ofsilk. 

This guiding identity runs through all the surprises and contrasts ofthe piece, and characterizes every law. Man carries the world in hishead, the whole astronomy and chemistry suspended in a thought. Becausethe history of nature is charactered in his brain, therefore is hethe prophet and discoverer of her secrets. Every known fact in naturalscience was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it wasactually verified. A man does not tie his shoe without recognizing lawswhich bind the farthest regions of nature: moon, plant, gas, crystal, are concrete geometry and numbers. Common sense knows its own, andrecognizes the fact at first sight in chemical experiment. The commonsense of Franklin, Dalton, Davy and Black, is the same common sensewhich made the arrangements which now it discovers. 

If the identity expresses organized rest, the counter action runs alsointo organization. The astronomers said, 'Give us matter and a littlemotion and we will construct the universe. It is not enough that weshould have matter, we must also have a single impulse, one shoveto launch the mass and generate the harmony of the centrifugal andcentripetal forces. Once heave the ball from the hand, and we can showhow all this mighty order grew. '--'A very unreasonable postulate, ' saidthe metaphysicians, 'and a plain begging of the question. Could you notprevail to know the genesis of projection, as well as the continuationof it?' Nature, meanwhile, had not waited for the discussion, but, rightor wrong, bestowed the impulse, and the balls rolled. It was no greataffair, a mere push, but the astronomers were right in making much ofit, for there is no end to the consequences of the act. That famousaboriginal push propagates itself through all the balls of thesystem, and through every atom of every ball; through all the races ofcreatures, and through the history and performances of every individual. Exaggeration is in the course of things. Nature sends no creature, noman 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 everycreature 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, adrop too much. Without electricity the air would rot, and without thisviolence of direction which men and women have, without a spice of bigotand fanatic, no excitement, no efficiency. We aim above the mark to hitthe mark. Every act hath some falsehood of exaggeration in it. And whennow and then comes along some sad, sharp-eyed man, who sees how paltry agame is played, and refuses to play, but blabs the secret;--how then? Isthe 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 holdthem fast to their several aim; makes them a little wrongheaded in thatdirection in which they are rightest, and on goes the game again withnew whirl, for a generation or two more. The child with his sweetpranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned toa whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon or a gingerbread-dog, individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with everynew thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue which this dayof continual pretty madness has incurred. But Nature has answered herpurpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic. She has tasked every faculty, and has secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily frame by all theseattitudes and exertions, --an end of the first importance, which couldnot be trusted to any care less perfect than her own. This glitter, thisopaline lustre plays round the top of every toy to his eye to insurehis fidelity, and he is deceived to his good. We are made alive and keptalive by the same arts. Let the stoics say what they please, we donot eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory andthe appetite is keen. The vegetable life does not content itself withcasting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills theair and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that, if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves; that hundreds may come up, that tens maylive to maturity; that at least one may replace the parent. All thingsbetray the same calculated profusion. The excess of fear with which theanimal frame is hedged round, shrinking from cold, starting at sightof a snake, or at a sudden noise, protects us, through a multitude ofgroundless alarms, from some one real danger at last. The lover seeks inmarriage his private felicity and perfection, with no prospective end;and nature hides in his happiness her own end, namely, progeny, or theperpetuity of the race. 

But the craft with which the world is made, runs also into the mind andcharacter of men. No man is quite sane; each has a vein of folly in hiscomposition, a slight determination of blood to the head, to make sureof 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 reducedto particulars to suit the size of the partisans, and the contention isever hottest on minor matters. Not less remarkable is the overfaith ofeach man in the importance of what he has to do or say. The poet, theprophet, has a higher value for what he utters than any hearer, andtherefore it gets spoken. The strong, self-complacent Luther declareswith an emphasis not to be mistaken, that "God himself cannot do withoutwise men. " Jacob Behmen and George Fox betray their egotism in thepertinacity of their controversial tracts, and James Naylor oncesuffered himself to be worshipped as the Christ. Each prophet comespresently to identify himself with his thought, and to esteem his hatand shoes sacred. However this may discredit such persons with thejudicious, it helps them with the people, as it gives heat, pungency, and publicity to their words. A similar experience is not infrequentin 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 themon his knees by midnight and by the morning star; he wets them with histears; they are sacred; too good for the world, and hardly yet to beshown to the dearest friend. This is the man-child that is born to thesoul, and her life still circulates in the babe. The umbilical cordhas not yet been cut. After some time has elapsed, he begins to wish toadmit his friend to this hallowed experience, and with hesitation, yetwith firmness, exposes the pages to his eye. Will they not burn hiseyes? The friend coldly turns them over, and passes from the writing toconversation, with easy transition, which strikes the other party withastonishment and vexation. He cannot suspect the writing itself. Daysand nights of fervid life, of communion with angels of darkness and oflight have engraved their shadowy characters on that tear-stained book. He suspects the intelligence or the heart of his friend. Is there thenno friend? He cannot yet credit that one may have impressive experienceand yet may not know how to put his private fact into literature; andperhaps the discovery that wisdom has other tongues and ministers thanwe, that though we should hold our peace the truth would not the less bespoken, might check injuriously the flames of our zeal. A man canonly speak so long as he does not feel his speech to be partial andinadequate. It is partial, but he does not see it to be so whilst heutters it. As soon as he is released from the instinctive and particularand sees its partiality, he shuts his mouth in disgust. For no man canwrite anything who does not think that what he writes is for the timethe history of the world; or do anything well who does not esteem hiswork to be of importance. My work may be of none, but I must not thinkit of none, or I shall not do it with impunity. 

In like manner, there is throughout nature something mocking, somethingthat leads us on and on, but arrives nowhere; keeps no faith withus. All promise outruns the performance. We live in a system ofapproximations. Every end is prospective of some other end, which isalso temporary; a round and final success nowhere. We are encamped innature, not domesticated. Hunger and thirst lead us on to eat and todrink; but bread and wine, mix and cook them how you will, leave ushungry and thirsty, after the stomach is full. It is the same with allour arts and performances. Our music, our poetry, our language itselfare not satisfactions, but suggestions. The hunger for wealth, whichreduces the planet to a garden, fools the eager pursuer. What is the endsought? Plainly to secure the ends of good sense and beauty, from theintrusion of deformity or vulgarity of any kind. But what an operosemethod! What a train of means to secure a little conversation! Thispalace of brick and stone, these servants, this kitchen, these stables, horses and equipage, this bank-stock and file of mortgages; trade to allthe world, country-house and cottage by the waterside, all for a littleconversation, high, clear, and spiritual! Could it not be had as wellby beggars on the highway? No, all these things came from successiveefforts of these beggars to remove friction from the wheels of life, andgive opportunity. Conversation, character, were the avowed ends; wealthwas good as it appeased the animal cravings, cured the smoky chimney, silenced the creaking door, brought friends together in a warm andquiet room, and kept the children and the dinner-table in a differentapartment. Thought, virtue, beauty, were the ends; but it was known thatmen of thought and virtue sometimes had the headache, or wet feet, orcould 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 havebeen lost sight of, and to remove friction has come to be the end. Thatis the ridicule of rich men, and Boston, London, Vienna, and now thegovernments generally of the world are cities and governments of therich; and the masses are not men, but poor men, that is, men who wouldbe rich; this is the ridicule of the class, that they arrive with painsand sweat and fury nowhere; when all is done, it is for nothing. Theyare like one who has interrupted the conversation of a company to makehis speech, and now has forgotten what he went to say. The appearancestrikes the eye everywhere of an aimless society, of aimless nations. Were the ends of nature so great and cogent as to exact this immensesacrifice 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 isin woods and waters a certain enticement and flattery, together with afailure to yield a present satisfaction. This disappointment is feltin every landscape. I have seen the softness and beauty of the summerclouds floating feathery overhead, enjoying, as it seemed, their heightand privilege of motion, whilst yet they appeared not so much thedrapery of this place and hour, as forelooking to some pavilions andgardens of festivity beyond. It is an odd jealousy, but the poet findshimself not near enough to his object. The pine-tree, the river, thebank of flowers before him, does not seem to be nature. Nature is stillelsewhere. This or this is but outskirt and far-off reflection and echoof the triumph that has passed by and is now at its glancing splendorand heyday, perchance in the neighboring fields, or, if you stand inthe field, then in the adjacent woods. The present object shall give youthis sense of stillness that follows a pageant which has just gone by. What splendid distance, what recesses of ineffable pomp and lovelinessin the sunset! But who can go where they are, or lay his hand or planthis 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; alwaysa referred existence, an absence, never a presence and satisfaction. Is it that beauty can never be grasped? in persons and in landscapeis equally inaccessible? The accepted and betrothed lover has lost thewildest charm of his maiden in her acceptance of him. She was heavenwhilst he pursued her as a star: she cannot be heaven if she stoops tosuch a one as he. 

What shall we say of this omnipresent appearance of that firstprojectile impulse, of this flattery and balking of so many well-meaningcreatures? Must we not suppose somewhere in the universe a slighttreachery and derision? Are we not engaged to a serious resentment ofthis 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 convertsitself into a vast promise, and will not be rashly explained. Her secretis untold. Many and many an Oedipus arrives; he has the whole mysteryteeming in his brain. Alas! the same sorcery has spoiled his skill;no syllable can he shape on his lips. Her mighty orbit vaults like thefresh rainbow into the deep, but no archangel's wing was yet strongenough to follow it and report of the return of the curve. But italso appears that our actions are seconded and disposed to greaterconclusions than we designed. We are escorted on every hand through lifeby spiritual agents, and a beneficent purpose lies in wait for us. We cannot bandy words with Nature, or deal with her as we deal withpersons. If we measure our individual forces against hers we may easilyfeel as if we were the sport of an insuperable destiny. But if, insteadof identifying ourselves with the work, we feel that the soul of theworkman streams through us, we shall find the peace of the morningdwelling first in our hearts, and the fathomless powers of gravityand chemistry, and, over them, of life, preexisting within us in theirhighest form. 

The uneasiness which the thought of our helplessness in the chain ofcauses occasions us, results from looking too much at one conditionof nature, namely, Motion. But the drag is never taken from the wheel. Wherever the impulse exceeds, the Rest or Identity insinuates itscompensation. All over the wide fields of earth grows the prunella orself-heal. After every foolish day we sleep off the fumes and furies ofits hours; and though we are always engaged with particulars, andoften enslaved to them, we bring with us to every experiment the innateuniversal laws. These, while they exist in the mind as ideas, standaround us in nature forever embodied, a present sanity to expose andcure the insanity of men. Our servitude to particulars betrays into ahundred foolish expectations. We anticipate a new era from the inventionof a locomotive, or a balloon; the new engine brings with it the oldchecks. They say that by electro-magnetism your salad shall be grownfrom the seed whilst your fowl is roasting for dinner; it is a symbol ofour modern aims and endeavors, of our condensation and acceleration ofobjects;--but nothing is gained; nature cannot be cheated; man's lifeis but seventy salads long, grow they swift or grow they slow. In thesechecks and impossibilities however we find our advantage, not less thanin the impulses. Let the victory fall where it will, we are on thatside. And the knowledge that we traverse the whole scale of being, from the centre to the poles of nature, and have some stake in everypossibility, lends that sublime lustre to death, which philosophy andreligion have too outwardly and literally striven to express in thepopular doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The reality is moreexcellent than the report. Here is no ruin, no discontinuity, no spentball. The divine circulations never rest nor linger. Nature is theincarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomeswater and gas. The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essenceis forever escaping again into the state of free thought. Hence thevirtue 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 notrespect quantity, which makes the whole and the particle its equalchannel, delegates its smile to the morning, and distils its essenceinto every drop of rain. Every moment instructs, and every object: forwisdom 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 usin dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guessits 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 arenot aboriginal, though they existed before we were born; that they arenot superior to the citizen; that every one of them was once the actof a single man; every law and usage was a man's expedient to meet aparticular case; that they all are imitable, all alterable; we maymake as good, we may make better. Society is an illusion to the youngcitizen. It lies before him in rigid repose, with certain names, menand institutions rooted like oak-trees to the centre, round which allarrange themselves the best they can. But the old statesman knows thatsociety is fluid; there are no such roots and centres, but any particlemay suddenly become the centre of the movement and compel the systemto gyrate round it; as every man of strong will, like Pisistratus, orCromwell, does for a time, and every man of truth, like Plato or Paul, does forever. But politics rest on necessary foundations, and cannot betreated with levity. Republics abound in young civilians, who believethat the laws make the city, that grave modifications of the policyand 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 getsufficient voices to make it a law. But the wise know that foolishlegislation is a rope of sand which perishes in the twisting; thatthe State must follow and not lead the character and progress of thecitizen; the strongest usurper is quickly got rid of; and they onlywho build on Ideas, build for eternity; and that the form of governmentwhich prevails is the expression of what cultivation exists in thepopulation which permits it. The law is only a memorandum. We aresuperstitious, and esteem the statute somewhat: so much life as it hasin the character of living men is its force. The statute stands there tosay, 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 soonbecomes unrecognizable, and in process of time will return to the mint. Nature is not democratic, nor limited-monarchical, but despotic, andwill not be fooled or abated of any jot of her authority by thepertest of her sons; and as fast as the public mind is opened to moreintelligence, the code is seen to be brute and stammering. It speaks notarticulately, and must be made to. Meantime the education of the generalmind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints to-day, butshuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutionsof public bodies; then shall be carried as grievance and bill ofrights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law andestablishment for a hundred years, until it gives place in turn tonew prayers and pictures. The history of the State sketches in coarseoutline the progress of thought, and follows at a distance the delicacyof culture and of aspiration. 

The theory of politics which has possessed the mind of men, and whichthey have expressed the best they could in their laws and in theirrevolutions, considers persons and property as the two objects for whoseprotection government exists. Of persons, all have equal rights, invirtue of being identical in nature. This interest of course with itswhole power demands a democracy. Whilst the rights of all as persons areequal, in virtue of their access to reason, their rights in property arevery unequal. One man owns his clothes, and another owns a county. Thisaccident, depending primarily on the skill and virtue of the parties, of which there is every degree, and secondarily on patrimony, fallsunequally, and its rights of course are unequal. Personal rights, universally the same, demand a government framed on the ratio of thecensus; property demands a government framed on the ratio of owners andof owning. Laban, who has flocks and herds, wishes them looked after byan 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 ofthe Midianites, and pays no tax to the officer. It seemed fit that Labanand Jacob should have equal rights to elect the officer who is to defendtheir persons, but that Laban and not Jacob should elect the officerwho is to guard the sheep and cattle. And if question arise whetheradditional officers or watch-towers should be provided, must not Labanand Isaac, and those who must sell part of their herds to buy protectionfor 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 hisown?

In the earliest society the proprietors made their own wealth, and solong as it comes to the owners in the direct way, no other opinion wouldarise in any equitable community than that property should make the lawfor property, and persons the law for persons. 

But property passes through donation or inheritance to those who do notcreate it. Gift, in one case, makes it as really the new owner's, aslabor made it the first owner's: in the other case, of patrimony, thelaw makes an ownership which will be valid in each man's view accordingto the estimate which he sets on the public tranquillity. 

It was not however found easy to embody the readily admitted principlethat 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 theproprietors should have more elective franchise than non-proprietors, on the Spartan principle of "calling that which is just, equal; not thatwhich is equal, just. "

That principle no longer looks so self-evident as it appeared in formertimes, partly, because doubts have arisen whether too much weight hadnot been allowed in the laws to property, and such a structure given toour usages as allowed the rich to encroach on the poor, and to keep thempoor; but mainly because there is an instinctive sense, however obscureand yet inarticulate, that the whole constitution of property, onits present tenures, is injurious, and its influence on personsdeteriorating and degrading; that truly the only interest for theconsideration of the State is persons; that property will always followpersons; that the highest end of government is the culture of men; andif men can be educated, the institutions will share their improvementand the moral sentiment will write the law of the land. 

If it be not easy to settle the equity of this question, the peril isless when we take note of our natural defences. We are kept by betterguards 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 deceivablemajority, States would soon run to ruin, but that there are limitationsbeyond which the folly and ambition of governors cannot go. Thingshave 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 andmanured; but the farmer will not plant or hoe it unless the chancesare 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 exerttheir power, as steadily as matter its attraction. Cover up a pound ofearth never so cunningly, divide and subdivide it; melt it to liquid, convert it to gas; it will always weigh a pound; it will always attractand resist other matter by the full virtue of one pound weight:--andthe attributes of a person, his wit and his moral energy, will exercise, under any law or extinguishing tyranny, their proper force, --if notovertly, then covertly; if not for the law, then against it; if notwholesomely, then poisonously; with right, or by might. 

The boundaries of personal influence it is impossible to fix, as personsare organs of moral or supernatural force. Under the dominion of anidea which possesses the minds of multitudes, as civil freedom, or thereligious sentiment, the powers of persons are no longer subjects ofcalculation. A nation of men unanimously bent on freedom or conquestcan easily confound the arithmetic of statists, and achieve extravagantactions, out of all proportion to their means; as the Greeks, theSaracens, 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 othercommodity. Its value is in the necessities of the animal man. It is somuch warmth, so much bread, so much water, so much land. The law maydo what it will with the owner of property; its just power will stillattach to the cent. The law may in a mad freak say that all shallhave power except the owners of property; they shall have no vote. Nevertheless, by a higher law, the property will, year after year, writeevery statute that respects property. The non-proprietor will be thescribe of the proprietor. What the owners wish to do, the whole power ofproperty will do, either through the law or else in defiance of it. Ofcourse I speak of all the property, not merely of the great estates. When the rich are outvoted, as frequently happens, it is the jointtreasury of the poor which exceeds their accumulations. Every man ownssomething, if it is only a cow, or a wheel-barrow, or his arms, and sohas that property to dispose of. 

The same necessity which secures the rights of person and propertyagainst the malignity or folly of the magistrate, determines the formand methods of governing, which are proper to each nation and to itshabit of thought, and nowise transferable to other states of society. Inthis country we are very vain of our political institutions, which aresingular in this, that they sprung, within the memory of living men, from the character and condition of the people, which they still expresswith sufficient fidelity, --and we ostentatiously prefer them to anyother in history. They are not better, but only fitter for us. We may bewise in asserting the advantage in modern times of the democraticform, but to other states of society, in which religion consecrated themonarchical, that and not this was expedient. Democracy is better forus, because the religious sentiment of the present time accords betterwith it. Born democrats, we are nowise qualified to judge of monarchy, which, to our fathers living in the monarchical idea, was alsorelatively right. But our institutions, though in coincidence with thespirit of the age, have not any exemption from the practical defectswhich have discredited other forms. Every actual State is corrupt. Goodmen must not obey the laws too well. What satire on government can equalthe severity of censure conveyed in the word politic, which now for ageshas signified cunning, intimating that the State is a trick?

The same benign necessity and the same practical abuse appear inthe parties, into which each State divides itself, of opponents anddefenders of the administration of the government. Parties are alsofounded on instincts, and have better guides to their own humble aimsthan the sagacity of their leaders. They have nothing perverse in theirorigin, but rudely mark some real and lasting relation. We might aswisely reprove the east wind or the frost, as a political party, whosemembers, for the most part, could give no account of their position, butstand for the defence of those interests in which they find themselves. Our quarrel with them begins when they quit this deep natural ground atthe bidding of some leader, and obeying personal considerations, throwthemselves into the maintenance and defence of points nowise belongingto their system. A party is perpetually corrupted by personality. Whilstwe absolve the association from dishonesty, we cannot extend the samecharity to their leaders. They reap the rewards of the docility and zealof the masses which they direct. Ordinarily our parties are parties ofcircumstance, and not of principle; as the planting interest in conflictwith the commercial; the party of capitalists and that of operatives;parties which are identical in their moral character, and which caneasily change ground with each other in the support of many of theirmeasures. Parties of principle, as, religious sects, or the party offree-trade, of universal suffrage, of abolition of slavery, of abolitionof capital punishment, --degenerate into personalities, or would inspireenthusiasm. The vice of our leading parties in this country (which maybe cited as a fair specimen of these societies of opinion) is that theydo not plant themselves on the deep and necessary grounds to which theyare respectively entitled, but lash themselves to fury in the carryingof some local and momentary measure, nowise useful to the commonwealth. Of the two great parties which at this hour almost share the nationbetween them, I should say that one has the best cause, and the othercontains the best men. The philosopher, the poet, or the religious manwill of course wish to cast his vote with the democrat, for free-trade, for wide suffrage, for the abolition of legal cruelties in the penalcode, and for facilitating in every manner the access of the young andthe poor to the sources of wealth and power. But he can rarelyaccept the persons whom the so-called popular party propose to him asrepresentatives of these liberalities. They have not at heart the endswhich give to the name of democracy what hope and virtue are in it. Thespirit of our American radicalism is destructive and aimless: it is notloving; it has no ulterior and divine ends, but is destructive only outof hatred and selfishness. On the other side, the conservative party, composed of the most moderate, able, and cultivated part of thepopulation, is timid, and merely defensive of property. It vindicatesno right, it aspires to no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes nogenerous 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 theimmigrant. From neither party, when in power, has the world any benefitto expect in science, art, or humanity, at all commensurate with theresources of the nation. 

I do not for these defects despair of our republic. We are not at themercy of any waves of chance. In the strife of ferocious parties, humannature always finds itself cherished; as the children of the convictsat Botany Bay are found to have as healthy a moral sentiment as otherchildren. Citizens of feudal states are alarmed at our democraticinstitutions lapsing into anarchy, and the older and more cautious amongourselves are learning from Europeans to look with some terror at ourturbulent freedom. It is said that in our license of construing theConstitution, and in the despotism of public opinion, we have no anchor;and one foreign observer thinks he has found the safeguard in thesanctity of Marriage among us; and another thinks he has found it in ourCalvinism. Fisher Ames expressed the popular security more wisely, when he compared a monarchy and a republic, saying that a monarchy is amerchantman, which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock andgo 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 dangerousimportance whilst we are befriended by the laws of things. It makes nodifference how many tons weight of atmosphere presses on our heads, solong as the same pressure resists it within the lungs. Augment the massa thousand fold, it cannot begin to crush us, as long as reaction isequal to action. The fact of two poles, of two forces, centripetal andcentrifugal, is universal, and each force by its own activity developsthe 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 inthe leaders. A mob cannot be a permanency; everybody's interest requiresthat it should not exist, and only justice satisfies all. 

We must trust infinitely to the beneficent necessity whichshines through all laws. Human nature expresses itself in them ascharacteristically as in statues, or songs, or railroads; and anabstract of the codes of nations would be a transcript of the commonconscience. 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 somany or so resolute for their own. Every man finds a sanction for hissimplest claims and deeds in decisions of his own mind, which he callsTruth and Holiness. In these decisions all the citizens find a perfectagreement, 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 isentitled to claim. This truth and justice men presently endeavor to makeapplication 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, everygovernment is an impure theocracy. The idea after which each communityis aiming to make and mend its law, is the will of the wise man. Thewise man it cannot find in nature, and it makes awkward but earnestefforts to secure his government by contrivance; as by causing theentire people to give their voices on every measure; or by a doublechoice to get the representation of the whole; or, by a selection of thebest citizens; or to secure the advantages of efficiency and internalpeace by confiding the government to one, who may himself select hisagents. All forms of government symbolize an immortal government, commonto all dynasties and independent of numbers, perfect where two menexist, perfect where there is only one man. 

Every man's nature is a sufficient advertisement to him of the characterof 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, myneighbor and I shall often agree in our means, and work together fora time to one end. But whenever I find my dominion over myself notsufficient for me, and undertake the direction of him also, I overstepthe truth, and come into false relations to him. I may have so much moreskill or strength than he that he cannot express adequately his sense ofwrong, but it is a lie, and hurts like a lie both him and me. Loveand nature cannot maintain the assumption; it must be executed by apractical lie, namely by force. This undertaking for another is theblunder which stands in colossal ugliness in the governments of theworld. It is the same thing in numbers, as in a pair, only not quiteso intelligible. I can see well enough a great difference between mysetting myself down to a self-control, and my going to make somebodyelse act after my views; but when a quarter of the human race assume totell me what I must do, I may be too much disturbed by the circumstancesto see so clearly the absurdity of their command. Therefore all publicends look vague and quixotic beside private ones. For any laws but thosewhich men make for themselves, are laughable. If I put myself in theplace of my child, and we stand in one thought and see that things arethus 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 overinto 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 doessomething which is to bind another. A man who cannot be acquainted withme, taxes me; looking from afar at me ordains that a part of my laborshall go to this or that whimsical end, --not as I, but as he happens tofancy. Behold the consequence. Of all debts men are least willing to paythe taxes. What a satire is this on government! Everywhere they thinkthey get their money's worth, except for these. 

Hence the less government we have the better, --the fewer laws, and theless confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal Government isthe influence of private character, the growth of the Individual; theappearance of the principal to supersede the proxy; the appearance ofthe wise man; of whom the existing government is, it must be owned, buta shabby imitation. That which all things tend to educe; which freedom, cultivation, intercourse, revolutions, go to form and deliver, ischaracter; that is the end of Nature, to reach unto this coronationof her king. To educate the wise man the State exists, and withthe appearance of the wise man the State expires. The appearance ofcharacter makes the State unnecessary. The wise man is the State. Heneeds no army, fort, or navy, --he loves men too well; no bribe, or feast, or palace, to draw friends to him; no vantage ground, nofavorable circumstance. He needs no library, for he has not donethinking; no church, for he is a prophet; no statute book, for he hasthe lawgiver; no money, for he is value; no road, for he is at homewhere he is; no experience, for the life of the creator shoots throughhim, and looks from his eyes. He has no personal friends, for he whohas the spell to draw the prayer and piety of all men unto him needs nothusband 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; hispresence, frankincense and flowers. 

We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only atthe cock-crowing and the morning star. In our barbarous society theinfluence of character is in its infancy. As a political power, asthe rightful lord who is to tumble all rulers from their chairs, itspresence is hardly yet suspected. Malthus and Ricardo quite omit it; theAnnual Register is silent; in the Conversations' Lexicon it is not setdown; the President's Message, the Queen's Speech, have not mentionedit; and yet it is never nothing. Every thought which genius and pietythrow into the world, alters the world. The gladiators in the listsof power feel, through all their frocks of force and simulation, thepresence of worth. I think the very strife of trade and ambition areconfession of this divinity; and successes in those fields are the pooramends, the fig-leaf with which the shamed soul attempts to hide itsnakedness. I find the like unwilling homage in all quarters. It isbecause we know how much is due from us that we are impatient toshow some petty talent as a substitute for worth. We are haunted by aconscience 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 toothers and to ourselves for not reaching the mark of a good and equallife. But it does not satisfy us, whilst we thrust it on the notice ofour companions. It may throw dust in their eyes, but does not smooth ourown 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 weare constrained to reflect on our splendid moment with a certainhumiliation, as somewhat too fine, and not as one act of many acts, afair expression of our permanent energy. Most persons of ability meetin society with a kind of tacit appeal. Each seems to say, 'I am not allhere. ' Senators and presidents have climbed so high with pain enough, not because they think the place specially agreeable, but as an apologyfor real worth, and to vindicate their manhood in our eyes. Thisconspicuous chair is their compensation to themselves for being of apoor, cold, hard nature. They must do what they can. Like one classof forest animals, they have nothing but a prehensile tail; climb theymust, or crawl. If a man found himself so rich-natured that he couldenter into strict relations with the best persons and make life serenearound him by the dignity and sweetness of his behavior, could he affordto circumvent the favor of the caucus and the press, and covet relationsso hollow and pompous as those of a politician? Surely nobody would be acharlatan who could afford to be sincere. 

The tendencies of the times favor the idea of self-government, and leavethe individual, for all code, to the rewards and penalties of his ownconstitution; which work with more energy than we believe whilst wedepend on artificial restraints. The movement in this direction has beenvery marked in modern history. Much has been blind and discreditable, but the nature of the revolution is not affected by the vices of therevolters; for this is a purely moral force. It was never adopted by anyparty in history, neither can be. It separates the individual fromall party, and unites him at the same time to the race. It promisesa recognition of higher rights than those of personal freedom, or thesecurity 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 lapsinginto confusion if every tender protestant be not compelled to bear hispart in certain social conventions; nor doubt that roads can be built, letters carried, and the fruit of labor secured, when the governmentof force is at an end. Are our methods now so excellent that allcompetition is hopeless? could not a nation of friends even devisebetter ways? On the other hand, let not the most conservative and timidfear anything from a premature surrender of the bayonet and the systemof force. For, according to the order of nature, which is quite superiorto our will, it stands thus; there will always be a government of forcewhere men are selfish; and when they are pure enough to abjure the codeof force they will be wise enough to see how these public ends of thepost-office, of the highway, of commerce and the exchange of property, of museums and libraries, of institutions of art and science can beanswered. 

We live in a very low state of the world, and pay unwilling tribute togovernments founded on force. There is not, among the most religious andinstructed men of the most religious and civil nations, a reliance onthe moral sentiment and a sufficient belief in the unity of things, to persuade them that society can be maintained without artificialrestraints, as well as the solar system; or that the private citizenmight be reasonable and a good neighbor, without the hint of a jail or aconfiscation. What is strange too, there never was in any man sufficientfaith in the power of rectitude to inspire him with the broad design ofrenovating the State on the principle of right and love. All thosewho have pretended this design have been partial reformers, and haveadmitted in some manner the supremacy of the bad State. I do not call tomind a single human being who has steadily denied the authority of thelaws, on the simple ground of his own moral nature. Such designs, fullof genius and full of fate as they are, are not entertained exceptavowedly as air-pictures. If the individual who exhibits them dare tothink them practicable, he disgusts scholars and churchmen; and men oftalent and women of superior sentiments cannot hide their contempt. Not the less does nature continue to fill the heart of youth withsuggestions of this enthusiasm, and there are now men, --if indeed I canspeak in the plural number, --more exactly, I will say, I have just beenconversing with one man, to whom no weight of adverse experience willmake it for a moment appear impossible that thousands of human beingsmight 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 andrepresentative nature. Each is a hint of the truth, but far enough frombeing 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 methe pure stream of that which he pretends to be! Long afterwards Ifind that quality elsewhere which he promised me. The genius of thePlatonists is intoxicating to the student, yet how few particulars ofit can I detach from all their books. The man momentarily stands forthe thought, but will not bear examination; and a society of men willcursorily represent well enough a certain quality and culture, forexample, chivalry or beauty of manners; but separate them and there isno gentleman and no lady in the group. The least hint sets us on thepursuit of a character which no man realizes. We have such exorbitanteyes that on seeing the smallest arc we complete the curve, and when thecurtain is lifted from the diagram which it seemed to veil, we are vexedto find that no more was drawn than just that fragment of an arc whichwe first beheld. We are greatly too liberal in our construction of eachother's faculty and promise. Exactly what the parties have already donethey shall do again; but that which we inferred from their nature andinception, they will not do. That is in nature, but not in them. Thathappens in the world, which we often witness in a public debate. Eachof the speakers expresses himself imperfectly; no one of them hears muchthat another says, such is the preoccupation of mind of each; and theaudience, who have only to hear and not to speak, judge very wisely andsuperiorly how wrongheaded and unskilful is each of the debaters to hisown affair. Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never. When I meet a pure intellectual force or agenerosity of affection, I believe here then is man; and am presentlymortified by the discovery that this individual is no more available tohis own or to the general ends than his companions; because the powerwhich drew my respect is not supported by the total symphony of histalents. All persons exist to society by some shining trait of beauty orutility which they have. We borrow the proportions of the man from thatone fine feature, and finish the portrait symmetrically; which is false, for the rest of his body is small or deformed. I observe a person whomakes a good public appearance, and conclude thence the perfection ofhis private character, on which this is based; but he has no privatecharacter. He is a graceful cloak or lay-figure for holidays. All ourpoets, heroes, and saints, fail utterly in some one or in many parts tosatisfy our idea, fail to draw our spontaneous interest, and so leave uswithout any hope of realization but in our own future. Our exaggerationof all fine characters arises from the fact that we identify each inturn with the soul. But there are no such men as we fable; no Jesus, norPericles, nor Caesar, nor Angelo, nor Washington, such as we have made. We consecrate a great deal of nonsense because it was allowed by greatmen. There is none without his foible. I verily believe if an angelshould come to chant the chorus of the moral law, he would eat too muchgingerbread, or take liberties with private letters, or do some preciousatrocity. 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. Heis admired at a distance, but he cannot come near without appearing acripple. The men of fine parts protect themselves by solitude, or bycourtesy, or by satire, or by an acid worldly manner, each concealing ashe best can his incapacity for useful association, but they want eitherlove or self-reliance. 

Our native love of reality joins with this experience to teach us alittle reserve, and to dissuade a too sudden surrender to the brilliantqualities of persons. Young people admire talents or particularexcellences; as we grow older we value total powers and effects, as theimpression, the quality, the spirit of men and things. The genius isall. 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 aredepartures from his faith, and are mere compliances. The magnetism whicharranges tribes and races in one polarity is alone to be respected; themen are steel-filings. Yet we unjustly select a particle, and say, 'O steel-filing number one! what heart-drawings I feel to thee! whatprodigious virtues are these of thine! how constitutional to thee, andincommunicable. ' Whilst we speak the loadstone is withdrawn; down fallsour filing in a heap with the rest, and we continue our mummery to thewretched shaving. Let us go for universals; for the magnetism, not forthe needles. Human life and its persons are poor empirical pretensions. A personal influence is an ignis fatuus. If they say it is great, it isgreat; if they say it is small, it is small; you see it, and you see itnot, by turns; it borrows all its size from the momentary estimation ofthe speakers: the Will-of-the-wisp vanishes if you go too near, vanishesif you go too far, and only blazes at one angle. Who can tell ifWashington be a great man or no? Who can tell if Franklin be? Yes, orany but the twelve, or six, or three great gods of fame? And they tooloom and fade before the eternal. 

We are amphibious creatures, weaponed for two elements, having two setsof faculties, the particular and the catholic. We adjust our instrumentfor general observation, and sweep the heavens as easily as we pick outa single figure in the terrestrial landscape. We are practically skilfulin detecting elements for which we have no place in our theory, and noname. Thus we are very sensible of an atmospheric influence in men andin bodies of men, not accounted for in an arithmetical addition of alltheir measurable properties. There is a genius of a nation, which isnot to be found in the numerical citizens, but which characterizes thesociety. England, strong, punctual, practical, well-spoken EnglandI should not find if I should go to the island to seek it. In theparliament, in the play-house, at dinner-tables, I might see a greatnumber of rich, ignorant, book-read, conventional, proud men, --manyold women, --and not anywhere the Englishman who made the good speeches, combined the accurate engines, and did the bold and nervous deeds. Itis even worse in America, where, from the intellectual quickness of therace, the genius of the country is more splendid in its promise and moreslight in its performance. Webster cannot do the work of Webster. Weconceive distinctly enough the French, the Spanish, the German genius, and it is not the less real that perhaps we should not meet in eitherof those nations a single individual who corresponded with the type. Weinfer the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language, whichis a sort of monument to which each forcible individual in a course ofmany hundred years has contributed a stone. And, universally, a goodexample of this social force is the veracity of language, which cannotbe debauched. In any controversy concerning morals, an appeal may bemade with safety to the sentiments which the language of the peopleexpresses. Proverbs, words, and grammar-inflections convey the publicsense with more purity and precision than the wisest individual. 

In the famous dispute with the Nominalists, the Realists had a good dealof reason. General ideas are essences. They are our gods: they roundand ennoble the most partial and sordid way of living. Our proclivityto details cannot quite degrade our life and divest it of poetry. Theday-laborer is reckoned as standing at the foot of the social scale, yethe is saturated with the laws of the world. His measures are the hours;morning and night, solstice and equinox, geometry, astronomy and allthe lovely accidents of nature play through his mind. Money, whichrepresents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlorswithout an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses. Property keeps the accounts of the world, and is always moral. Theproperty will be found where the labor, the wisdom, and the virtue havebeen in nations, in classes, and (the whole life-time considered, withthe compensations) in the individual also. How wise the world appears, when the laws and usages of nations are largely detailed, and thecompleteness of the municipal system is considered! Nothing is leftout. If you go into the markets and the custom-houses, the insurers' andnotaries' offices, the offices of sealers of weights and measures, ofinspection of provisions, --it will appear as if one man had made itall. Wherever you go, a wit like your own has been before you, andhas realized its thought. The Eleusinian mysteries, the Egyptianarchitecture, the Indian astronomy, the Greek sculpture, show that therealways were seeing and knowing men in the planet. The world is full ofmasonic ties, of guilds, of secret and public legions of honor; thatof scholars, for example; and that of gentlemen, fraternizing with theupper class of every country and every culture. 

I am very much struck in literature by the appearance that one personwrote all the books; as if the editor of a journal planted his body ofreporters in different parts of the field of action, and relieved someby others from time to time; but there is such equality and identityboth of judgment and point of view in the narrative that it is plainlythe work of one all-seeing, all-hearing gentleman. I looked into Pope'sOdyssey yesterday: it is as correct and elegant after our canon ofto-day as if it were newly written. The modernness of all good booksseems to give me an existence as wide as man. What is well done I feelas if I did; what is ill done I reck not of. Shakspeare's passages ofpassion (for example, in Lear and Hamlet) are in the very dialect of thepresent year. I am faithful again to the whole over the members in myuse of books. I find the most pleasure in reading a book in a mannerleast flattering to the author. I read Proclus, and sometimes Plato, asI might read a dictionary, for a mechanical help to the fancy and theimagination. I read for the lustres, as if one should use a fine picturein a chromatic experiment, for its rich colors. 'Tis not Proclus, but apiece of nature and fate that I explore. It is a greater joy to seethe author's author, than himself. A higher pleasure of the same kind Ifound lately at a concert, where I went to hear Handel's Messiah. As themaster overpowered the littleness and incapableness of the performersand made them conductors of his electricity, so it was easy to observewhat efforts nature was making, through so many hoarse, wooden, andimperfect persons, to produce beautiful voices, fluid and soul-guidedmen and women. The genius of nature was paramount at the oratorio. 

This preference of the genius to the parts is the secret of thatdeification of art, which is found in all superior minds. Art, in theartist, is proportion, or a habitual respect to the whole by an eyeloving beauty in details. And the wonder and charm of it is the sanityin insanity which it denotes. Proportion is almost impossible to humanbeings. There is no one who does not exaggerate. In conversation, menare encumbered with personality, and talk too much. In modern sculpture, picture, and poetry, the beauty is miscellaneous; the artist works hereand there and at all points, adding and adding, instead of unfolding theunit of his thought. Beautiful details we must have, or no artist; butthey must be means and never other. The eye must not lose sight for amoment of the purpose. Lively boys write to their ear and eye, and thecool 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 thelaw of the world. Anomalous facts, as the never quite obsolete rumorsof magic and demonology, and the new allegations of phrenologists andneurologists, are of ideal use. They are good indications. Homoeopathyis insignificant as an art of healing, but of great value as criticismon the hygeia or medical practice of the time. So with Mesmerism, Swedenborgism, Fourierism, and the Millennial Church; they are poorpretensions enough, but good criticism on the science, philosophy, andpreaching of the day. For these abnormal insights of the adepts ought tobe 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 oneintellectual, or aesthetical, or civil feat, when presently the dreamwill scatter, and we shall burst into universal power. The reason ofidleness and of crime is the deferring of our hopes. Whilst we arewaiting we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, andwith crimes. 

Thus we settle it in our cool libraries, that all the agents with whichwe deal are subalterns, which we can well afford to let pass, and lifewill be simpler when we live at the centre and flout the surfaces. Iwish to speak with all respect of persons, but sometimes I must pinchmyself to keep awake and preserve the due decorum. They melt so fastinto each other that they are like grass and trees, and it needs aneffort to treat them as individuals. Though the uninspired man certainlyfinds persons a conveniency in household matters, the divine man doesnot respect them; he sees them as a rack of clouds, or a fleet ofripples which the wind drives over the surface of the water. But this isflat rebellion. Nature will not be Buddhist: she resents generalizing, and insults the philosopher in every moment with a million of freshparticulars. It is all idle talking: as much as a man is a whole, so ishe also a part; and it were partial not to see it. What you say in yourpompous 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 thesame moment. She will not remain orbed in a thought, but rushes intopersons; and when each person, inflamed to a fury of personality, wouldconquer all things to his poor crotchet, she raises up against himanother person, and by many persons incarnates again a sort of whole. She will have all. Nick Bottom cannot play all the parts, work it howhe may; there will be somebody else, and the world will be round. Everything must have its flower or effort at the beautiful, coarser orfiner according to its stuff. They relieve and recommend each other, and the sanity of society is a balance of a thousand insanities. Shepunishes abstractionists, and will only forgive an induction whichis rare and casual. We like to come to a height of land and see thelandscape, just as we value a general remark in conversation. But itis not the intention of Nature that we should live by general views. Wefetch fire and water, run about all day among the shops and markets, andget our clothes and shoes made and mended, and are the victims of thesedetails; 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, weshould not be here to write and to read, but should have been burnedor frozen long ago. She would never get anything done, if she sufferedadmirable Crichtons and universal geniuses. She loves better awheelwright who dreams all night of wheels, and a groom who is partof his horse; for she is full of work, and these are her hands. As thefrugal farmer takes care that his cattle shall eat down the rowen, and swine shall eat the waste of his house, and poultry shall pick thecrumbs, --so our economical mother dispatches a new genius and habitof mind into every district and condition of existence, plants an eyewherever a new ray of light can fall, and gathering up into some manevery property in the universe, establishes thousandfold occult mutualattractions among her offspring, that all this wash and waste of powermay be imparted and exchanged. 

Great dangers undoubtedly accrue from this incarnation and distributionof the godhead, and hence Nature has her maligners, as if she wereCirce; and Alphonso of Castille fancied he could have given usefuladvice. But she does not go unprovided; she has hellebore at the bottomof the cup. Solitude would ripen a plentiful crop of despots. Therecluse 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 apublic assembly he sees that men have very different manners from hisown, and in their way admirable. In his childhood and youth he hashad many checks and censures, and thinks modestly enough of hisown endowment. When afterwards he comes to unfold it in propitiouscircumstance, it seems the only talent; he is delighted with hissuccess, and accounts himself already the fellow of the great. But hegoes into a mob, into a banking house, into a mechanic's shop, into amill, into a laboratory, into a ship, into a camp, and in each new placehe is no better than an idiot; other talents take place, and rule thehour. 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 allstyles and tricks, and it is so much easier to do what one has donebefore than to do a new thing, that there is a perpetual tendency to aset mode. In every conversation, even the highest, there is a certaintrick, which may be soon learned by an acute person and then thatparticular style continued indefinitely. Each man too is a tyrant intendency, because he would impose his idea on others; and their trick istheir natural defence. Jesus would absorb the race; but Tom Paine orthe coarsest blasphemer helps humanity by resisting this exuberance ofpower. Hence the immense benefit of party in politics, as it revealsfaults of character in a chief, which the intellectual force of thepersons, with ordinary opportunity and not hurled into aphelion byhatred, could not have seen. Since we are all so stupid, what benefitthat there should be two stupidities! It is like that brute advantage soessential to astronomy, of having the diameter of the earth's orbit fora base of its triangles. Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy, but in the State and in the schools it is indispensable to resist theconsolidation of all men into a few men. If John was perfect, why areyou 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 characterapproached us; why should we refuse to eat bread until we have found hisregiment and section in our old army-files? Why not a new man? Here isa new enterprise of Brook Farm, of Skeneateles, of Northampton: why soimpatient to baptize them Essenes, or Port-Royalists, or Shakers, or byany known and effete name? Let it be a new way of living. Why have onlytwo or three ways of life, and not thousands? Every man is wanted, andno man is wanted much. We came this time for condiments, not forcorn. We want the great genius only for joy; for one star more in ourconstellation, for one tree more in our grove. But he thinks we wishto belong to him, as he wishes to occupy us. He greatly mistakes us. Ithink 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 melthim 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 anygeneral statement, --when we have insisted on the imperfection ofindividuals, our affections and our experience urge that everyindividual is entitled to honor, and a very generous treatment is sureto be repaid. A recluse sees only two or three persons, and allows themall their room; they spread themselves at large. The statesman looks atmany, and compares the few habitually with others, and these look less. Yet are they not entitled to this generosity of reception? and is notmunificence the means of insight? For though gamesters say that thecards beat all the players, though they were never so skilful, yet inthe contest we are now considering, the players are also the game, andshare the power of the cards. If you criticise a fine genius, the oddsare that you are out of your reckoning, and instead of the poet, arecensuring your own caricature of him. For there is somewhat spheral andinfinite in every man, especially in every genius, which, if you cancome very near him, sports with all your limitations. For rightly everyman is a channel through which heaven floweth, and whilst I fancied Iwas criticising him, I was censuring or rather terminating my own soul. After taxing Goethe as a courtier, artificial, unbelieving, worldly, --Itook 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 ornight, and virtuous as a brier-rose. 

But care is taken that the whole tune shall be played. If we were notkept among surfaces, every thing would be large and universal; now theexcluded attributes burst in on us with the more brightness that theyhave been excluded. "Your turn now, my turn next, " is the rule of thegame. The universality being hindered in its primary form, comes inthe secondary form of all sides; the points come in succession to themeridian, and by the speed of rotation a new whole is formed. Naturekeeps herself whole and her representation complete in the experienceof each mind. She suffers no seat to be vacant in her college. It isthe secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die but onlyretire a little from sight and afterwards return again. Whatever doesnot concern us is concealed from us. As soon as a person is no longerrelated 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 ournature they act on us not at once but in succession, and we are madeaware of their presence one at a time. All persons, all things which wehave known, are here present, and many more than we see; the world isfull. As the ancient said, the world is a plenum or solid; and if we sawall things that really surround us we should be imprisoned and unable tomove. For though nothing is impassable to the soul, but all things arepervious to it and like highways, yet this is only whilst the soul doesnot see them. As soon as the soul sees any object, it stops before thatobject. Therefore, the divine Providence which keeps the universe openin every direction to the soul, conceals all the furniture and all thepersons that do not concern a particular soul, from the senses of thatindividual. Through solidest eternal things the man finds his road as ifthey did not subsist, and does not once suspect their being. As soon ashe needs a new object, suddenly he beholds it, and no longer attemptsto pass through it, but takes another way. When he has exhausted forthe time the nourishment to be drawn from any one person or thing, that object is withdrawn from his observation, and though still in hisimmediate neighborhood, he does not suspect its presence. Nothing isdead: men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournfulobituaries, and there they stand looking out of the window, sound andwell, in some new and strange disguise. Jesus is not dead; he is verywell alive: nor John, nor Paul, nor Mahomet, nor Aristotle; at timeswe believe we have seen them all, and could easily tell the names underwhich they go. 

If we cannot make voluntary and conscious steps in the admirable scienceof universals, let us see the parts wisely, and infer the genius ofnature from the best particulars with a becoming charity. What is bestin 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 frienda hidden wealth, and I infer an equal depth of good in every otherdirection. It is commonly said by farmers that a good pear or applecosts no more time or pains to rear than a poor one; so I would have nowork 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 upof the intermixture and reaction of these two amicable powers, whosemarriage appears beforehand monstrous, as each denies and tends toabolish the other. We must reconcile the contradictions as we can, buttheir discord and their concord introduce wild absurdities into ourthinking and speech. No sentence will hold the whole truth, and the onlyway in which we can be just, is by giving ourselves the lie; Speech isbetter than silence; silence is better than speech;--All things are incontact; 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 onething, this old Two-Face, creator-creature, mind-matter, right-wrong, ofwhich any proposition may be affirmed or denied. Very fitly thereforeI assert that every man is a partialist, that nature secures him as aninstrument by self-conceit, preventing the tendencies to religion andscience; and now further assert, that, each man's genius being nearlyand affectionately explored, he is justified in his individuality, ashis nature is found to be immense; and now I add that every man is auniversalist also, and, as our earth, whilst it spins on its own axis, spins all the time around the sun through the celestial spaces, sothe least of its rational children, the most dedicated to his privateaffair, works out, though as it were under a disguise, the universalproblem. We fancy men are individuals; so are pumpkins; but everypumpkin in the field goes through every point of pumpkin history. Therabid democrat, as soon as he is senator and rich man, has ripenedbeyond possibility of sincere radicalism, and unless he can resist thesun, he must be conservative the remainder of his days. Lord Eldon saidin his old age that "if he were to begin life again, he would be damnedbut he would begin as agitator. "

We hide this universality if we can, but it appears at all points. Weare as ungrateful as children. There is nothing we cherish and strive todraw to us but in some hour we turn and rend it. We keep a runningfire 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 thecommonest offices beautiful by the energy and heart with which she doesthem; and seeing this we admire and love her and them, and say, 'Lo! agenuine creature of the fair earth, not dissipated or too early ripenedby books, philosophy, religion, society, or care!' insinuating atreachery and contempt for all we had so long loved and wrought inourselves and others. 

If we could have any security against moods! If the profoundest prophetcould be holden to his words, and the hearer who is ready to sellall and join the crusade could have any certificate that tomorrow hisprophet shall not unsay his testimony! But the Truth sits veiled thereon the Bench, and never interposes an adamantine syllable; and themost sincere and revolutionary doctrine, put as if the ark of God werecarried forward some furlongs, and planted there for the succor of theworld, 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 sameimmeasurable credulity demanded for new audacities. If we were not ofall opinions! if we did not in any moment shift the platform on whichwe stand, and look and speak from another! if there could be anyregulation, any 'one-hour-rule, ' that a man should never leave hispoint of view without sound of trumpet. I am always insincere, as alwaysknowing there are other moods. 

How sincere and confidential we can be, saying all that lies inthe mind, and yet go away feeling that all is yet unsaid, from theincapacity of the parties to know each other, although they use the samewords! My companion assumes to know my mood and habit of thought, and wego 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 viciousassumption. Is it that every man believes every other to be an incurablepartialist, and himself a universalist? I talked yesterday with a pairof philosophers; I endeavored to show my good men that I love everythingby turns and nothing long; that I loved the centre, but doated on thesuperficies; that I loved man, if men seemed to me mice and rats; thatI revered saints, but woke up glad that the old pagan world stood itsground 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 thatI 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 forthem when they came to see me, and could well consent to their living inOregon, 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 Englandduring the last twenty-five years, with those middle and with thoseleading sections that may constitute any just representation of thecharacter and aim of the community, will have been struck with the greatactivity of thought and experimenting. His attention must be commandedby the signs that the Church, or religious party, is falling fromthe Church nominal, and is appearing in temperance and non-resistancesocieties; in movements of abolitionists and of socialists; and in verysignificant assemblies called Sabbath and Bible Conventions; composed ofultraists, of seekers, of all the soul of the soldiery of dissent, and meeting to call in question the authority of the Sabbath, of thepriesthood, and of the Church. In these movements nothing was moreremarkable than the discontent they begot in the movers. The spirit ofprotest and of detachment drove the members of these Conventions tobear testimony against the Church, and immediately afterward, to declaretheir discontent with these Conventions, their independence of theircolleagues, and their impatience of the methods whereby they wereworking. They defied each other, like a congress of kings, each ofwhom had a realm to rule, and a way of his own that made concertunprofitable. What a fertility of projects for the salvation of theworld! One apostle thought all men should go to farming, and anotherthat no man should buy or sell, that the use of money was the cardinalevil; another that the mischief was in our diet, that we eat and drinkdamnation. These made unleavened bread, and were foes to the death tofermentation. It was in vain urged by the housewife that God made yeast, as well as dough, and loves fermentation just as dearly as he lovesvegetation; that fermentation develops the saccharine element in thegrain, and makes it more palatable and more digestible. No; they wishthe pure wheat, and will die but it shall not ferment. Stop, dearnature, these incessant advances of thine; let us scotch theseever-rolling wheels! Others attacked the system of agriculture, the useof 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 andthe horse from the cart, the hundred acres of the farm must be spaded, and the man must walk, wherever boats and locomotives will not carryhim. Even the insect world was to be defended, --that had been too longneglected, and a society for the protection of ground-worms, slugs, andmosquitos was to be incorporated without delay. With these appeared theadepts of homoeopathy, of hydropathy, of mesmerism, of phrenology, andtheir wonderful theories of the Christian miracles! Others assailedparticular vocations, as that of the lawyer, that of the merchant, ofthe manufacturer, of the clergyman, of the scholar. Others attacked theinstitution of marriage as the fountain of social evils. Others devotedthemselves to the worrying of churches and meetings for public worship;and the fertile forms of antinomianism among the elder puritans seemedto have their match in the plenty of the new harvest of reform. 

With this din of opinion and debate there was a keener scrutiny ofinstitutions and domestic life than any we had known; there was sincereprotesting against existing evils, and there were changes of employmentdictated by conscience. No doubt there was plentiful vaporing, and casesof backsliding might occur. But in each of these movements emergeda good result, a tendency to the adoption of simpler methods, and anassertion of the sufficiency of the private man. Thus it was directly inthe spirit and genius of the age, what happened in one instance when achurch censured and threatened to excommunicate one of its members onaccount of the somewhat hostile part to the church which his conscienceled him to take in the anti-slavery business; the threatened individualimmediately excommunicated the church in a public and formal process. This has been several times repeated: it was excellent when it was donethe first time, but of course loses all value when it is copied. Everyproject 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, butvery dull and suspicious when adopted from another. It is right andbeautiful in any man to say, 'I will take this coat, or this book, orthis 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 takingwill have a giving as free and divine; but we are very easily disposedto resist the same generosity of speech when we miss originality andtruth to character in it. 

There was in all the practical activities of New England for the lastquarter of a century, a gradual withdrawal of tender consciences fromthe social organizations. There is observable throughout, the contestbetween mechanical and spiritual methods, but with a steady tendency ofthe thoughtful and virtuous to a deeper belief and reliance on spiritualfacts. 

In politics for example it is easy to see the progress of dissent. Thecountry is full of rebellion; the country is full of kings. Hands off!let there be no control and no interference in the administration of theaffairs of this kingdom of me. Hence the growth of the doctrine and ofthe party of Free Trade, and the willingness to try that experiment, inthe face of what appear incontestable facts. I confess, the motto ofthe Globe newspaper is so attractive to me that I can seldom find muchappetite to read what is below it in its columns: "The world is governedtoo much. " So the country is frequently affording solitary examples ofresistance to the government, solitary nullifiers, who throw themselveson their reserved rights; nay, who have reserved all their rights; whoreply to the assessor and to the clerk of court that they do notknow the State, and embarrass the courts of law by non-juring and thecommander-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, conscientiouscriticism broke out in unexpected quarters. Who gave me the money withwhich I bought my coat? Why should professional labor and that of thecounting-house be paid so disproportionately to the labor of the porterand woodsawyer? This whole business of Trade gives me to pause andthink, as it constitutes false relations between men; inasmuch as I amprone to count myself relieved of any responsibility to behave well andnobly to that person whom I pay with money; whereas if I had not thatcommodity, I should be put on my good behavior in all companies, and manwould be a benefactor to man, as being himself his only certificate thathe 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 betweenthe lot of me and the lot of thee, my poor brother, my poor sister? AmI not defrauded of my best culture in the loss of those gymnastics whichmanual labor and the emergencies of poverty constitute? I find nothinghealthful or exalting in the smooth conventions of society; I donot like the close air of saloons. I begin to suspect myself to be aprisoner, though treated with all this courtesy and luxury. I pay adestructive tax in my conformity. 

The same insatiable criticism may be traced in the efforts for thereform of Education. The popular education has been taxed with a want oftruth and nature. It was complained that an education to things wasnot given. We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, andcolleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come outat 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 donot know an edible root in the woods, we cannot tell our course by thestars, nor the hour of the day by the sun. It is well if we can swim andskate. We are afraid of a horse, of a cow, of a dog, of a snake, ofa spider. The Roman rule was to teach a boy nothing that he could notlearn 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 toplant, or to fish, or to hunt, that he might secure his subsistenceat all events, and not be painful to his friends and fellow-men. Thelessons of science should be experimental also. The sight of the planetthrough a telescope is worth all the course on astronomy; the shock ofthe electric spark in the elbow, outvalues all the theories; the tasteof the nitrous oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are betterthan volumes of chemistry. 

One of the traits of the new spirit is the inquisition it fixed on ourscholastic devotion to the dead languages. The ancient languages, withgreat beauty of structure, contain wonderful remains of genius, whichdraw, and always will draw, certain likeminded men, --Greek men, andRoman men, --in all countries, to their study; but by a wonderfuldrowsiness of usage they had exacted the study of all men. Once (say twocenturies ago), Latin and Greek had a strict relation to all the scienceand culture there was in Europe, and the Mathematics had a momentaryimportance at some era of activity in physical science. These thingsbecame stereotyped as education, as the manner of men is. But the GoodSpirit never cared for the colleges, and though all men and boys werenow drilled in Latin, Greek, and Mathematics, it had quite left theseshells high and dry on the beach, and was now creating and feeding othermatters at other ends of the world. But in a hundred high schools andcolleges 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 heleaves the University, as it is ludicrously called, he shuts those booksfor the last time. Some thousands of young men are graduated at ourcolleges in this country every year, and the persons who, at fortyyears, still read Greek, can all be counted on your hand. I never metwith ten. Four or five persons I have seen who read Plato. 

But is not this absurd, that the whole liberal talent of this countryshould 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 ofreason? If the physician, the lawyer, the divine, never use it to comeat their ends, I need never learn it to come at mine. Conjuring is goneout of fashion, and I will omit this conjugating, and go straight toaffairs. ' So they jumped the Greek and Latin, and read law, medicine, orsermons, without it. To the astonishment of all, the self-made men tookeven ground at once with the oldest of the regular graduates, and ina few months the most conservative circles of Boston and New York hadquite forgotten who of their gownsmen was college-bred, and who was not. 

One tendency appears alike in the philosophical speculation and in therudest democratical movements, through all the petulance and all thepuerility, the wish, namely, to cast aside the superfluous and arriveat short methods; urged, as I suppose, by an intuition that the humanspirit is equal to all emergencies, alone, and that man is more ofteninjured than helped by the means he uses. 

I conceive this gradual casting off of material aids, and the indicationof growing trust in the private self-supplied powers of the individual, to be the affirmative principle of the recent philosophy, and that it isfeeling its own profound truth and is reaching forward at this very hourto the happiest conclusions. I readily concede that in this, as in everyperiod of intellectual activity, there has been a noise of denial andprotest; much was to be resisted, much was to be got rid of by thosewho were reared in the old, before they could begin to affirm and toconstruct. Many a reformer perishes in his removal of rubbish; and thatmakes the offensiveness of the class. They are partial; they are notequal to the work they pretend. They lose their way; in the assault onthe kingdom of darkness they expend all their energy on some accidentalevil, and lose their sanity and power of benefit. It is of little momentthat one or two or twenty errors of our social system be corrected, butof 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, nothimself renovated, attempts to renovate things around him: he has becometediously 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 theestablishment, and conduct that in the best manner, than to make a sallyagainst evil by some single improvement, without supporting it by atotal regeneration. Do not be so vain of your one objection. Do youthink there is only one? Alas! my good friend, there is no part ofsociety or of life better than any other part. All our things are rightand wrong together. The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike. Do you complain of our Marriage? Our marriage is no worse than oureducation, our diet, our trade, our social customs. Do you complain ofthe 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 withthose? in the institution of property, as well as out of it? Let intoit the new and renewing principle of love, and property will beuniversality. No one gives the impression of superiority to theinstitution, which he must give who will reform it. It makes nodifference what you say, you must make me feel that you are aloof fromit; by your natural and supernatural advantages do easily see to the endof 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 mytime in attacks. If I should go out of church whenever I hear a falsesentiment I could never stay there five minutes. But why come out? thestreet is as false as the church, and when I get to my house, or to mymanners, or to my speech, I have not got away from the lie. When we seean eager assailant of one of these wrongs, a special reformer, we feellike asking him, What right have you, sir, to your one virtue? Is virtuepiecemeal? This is a jewel amidst the rags of a beggar. 

In another way the right will be vindicated. In the midst of abuses, inthe heart of cities, in the aisles of false churches, alike in one placeand 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 ofcharacter it shall put forth it shall abrogate that old condition, lawor school in which it stands, before the law of its own mind. 

If partiality was one fault of the movement party, the other defect wastheir reliance on Association. Doubts such as those I have intimateddrove many good persons to agitate the questions of social reform. Butthe revolt against the spirit of commerce, the spirit of aristocracy, and the inveterate abuses of cities, did not appear possible toindividuals; and to do battle against numbers they armed themselves withnumbers, and against concert they relied on new concert. 

Following or advancing beyond the ideas of St. Simon, of Fourier, andof Owen, three communities have already been formed in Massachusetts onkindred plans, and many more in the country at large. They aim to giveevery member a share in the manual labor, to give an equal reward tolabor and to talent, and to unite a liberal culture with an educationto labor. The scheme offers, by the economies of associated labor andexpense, to make every member rich, on the same amount of property, that, in separate families, would leave every member poor. These newassociations are composed of men and women of superior talents andsentiments; yet it may easily be questioned whether such a communitywill draw, except in its beginnings, the able and the good; whetherthose who have energy will not prefer their chance of superiorityand power in the world, to the humble certainties of the association;whether such a retreat does not promise to become an asylum to those whohave tried and failed, rather than a field to the strong; and whetherthe members will not necessarily be fractions of men, because eachfinds that he cannot enter it, without some compromise. Friendship andassociation are very fine things, and a grand phalanx of the best ofthe human race, banded for some catholic object; yes, excellent; butremember that no society can ever be so large as one man. He, in hisfriendship, in his natural and momentary associations, doubles ormultiplies himself; but in the hour in which he mortgages himself to twoor ten or twenty, he dwarfs himself below the stature of one. 

But the men of less faith could not thus believe, and to such, concertappears the sole specific of strength. I have failed, and you havefailed, but perhaps together we shall not fail. Our housekeeping is notsatisfactory to us, but perhaps a phalanx, a community, might be. Manyof us have differed in opinion, and we could find no man who could makethe truth plain, but possibly a college, or an ecclesiastical councilmight. I have not been able either to persuade my brother or to prevailon myself, to disuse the traffic or the potation of brandy, butperhaps a pledge of total abstinence might effectually restrain us. Thecandidate my party votes for is not to be trusted with a dollar, but hewill be honest in the Senate, for we can bring public opinion to bear onhim. Thus concert was the specific in all cases. But concert is neitherbetter nor worse, neither more nor less potent than individual force. All the men in the world cannot make a statue walk and speak, cannotmake 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 whichmoves the world is a new quality, and can never be furnished by addingwhatever quantities of a different kind. What is the use of the concertof the false and the disunited? There can be no concert in two, wherethere is no concert in one. When the individual is not individual, butis dual; when his thoughts look one way and his actions another; whenhis faith is traversed by his habits; when his will, enlightened byreason, is warped by his sense; when with one hand he rows and with theother backs water, what concert can be?

I do not wonder at the interest these projects inspire. The world isawaking to the idea of union, and these experiments show what it isthinking of. It is and will be magic. Men will live and communicate, andplough, and reap, and govern, as by added ethereal power, when once theyare united; as in a celebrated experiment, by expiration and respirationexactly together, four persons lift a heavy man from the ground by thelittle finger only, and without sense of weight. But this union must beinward, and not one of covenants, and is to be reached by a reverse ofthe methods they use. The union is only perfect when all the uniters areisolated. It is the union of friends who live in different streets ortowns. Each man, if he attempts to join himself to others, is on allsides cramped and diminished of his proportion; and the stricter theunion the smaller and the more pitiful he is. But leave him alone, torecognize in every hour and place the secret soul; he will go up anddown 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 willbe adamantine without any governor. The union must be ideal in actualindividualism. 

I pass to the indication in some particulars of that faith in man, whichthe heart is preaching to us in these days, and which engages the moreregard, from the consideration that the speculations of one generationare the history of the next following. 

In alluding just now to our system of education, I spoke of the deadnessof its details. But it is open to graver criticism than the palsy ofits members: it is a system of despair. The disease with which thehuman mind now labors is want of faith. Men do not believe in a power ofeducation. We do not think we can speak to divine sentiments in man, andwe do not try. We renounce all high aims. We believe that the defects ofso many perverse and so many frivolous people who make up society, areorganic, and society is a hospital of incurables. A man of good sensebut of little faith, whose compassion seemed to lead him to church asoften as he went there, said to me that "he liked to have concerts, andfairs, and churches, and other public amusements go on. " I am afraid theremark is too honest, and comes from the same origin as the maxim of thetyrant, "If you would rule the world quietly, you must keep it amused. "I notice too that the ground on which eminent public servants urge theclaims of popular education is fear; 'This country is filling up withthousands and millions of voters, and you must educate them to keep themfrom our throats. ' We do not believe that any education, any system ofphilosophy, any influence of genius, will ever give depth of insight toa superficial mind. Having settled ourselves into this infidelity, ourskill is expended to procure alleviations, diversion, opiates. We adornthe victim with manual skill, his tongue with languages, his body withinoffensive and comely manners. So have we cunningly hid the tragedy oflimitation and inner death we cannot avert. Is it strange that societyshould be devoured by a secret melancholy which breaks through all itssmiles and all its gayety and games?

But even one step farther our infidelity has gone. It appears that somedoubt is felt by good and wise men whether really the happinessand probity of men is increased by the culture of the mind in thosedisciplines to which we give the name of education. Unhappily too thedoubt comes from scholars, from persons who have tried these methods. In their experience the scholar was not raised by the sacred thoughtsamongst which he dwelt, but used them to selfish ends. He was a profaneperson, and became a showman, turning his gifts to a marketable use, andnot to his own sustenance and growth. It was found that the intellectcould be independently developed, that is, in separation from the man, as any single organ can be invigorated, and the result was monstrous. Acanine appetite for knowledge was generated, which must still be fed butwas never satisfied, and this knowledge, not being directed on action, never took the character of substantial, humane truth, blessing thosewhom it entered. It gave the scholar certain powers of expression, thepower of speech, the power of poetry, of literary art, but it did notbring him to peace or to beneficence. 

When the literary class betray a destitution of faith, it is not strangethat society should be disheartened and sensualized by unbelief. Whatremedy? Life must be lived on a higher plane. We must go up to a higherplatform, to which we are always invited to ascend; there, the wholeaspect of things changes. I resist the skepticism of our education andof our educated men. I do not believe that the differences of opinionand character in men are organic. I do not recognize, beside the classof the good and the wise, a permanent class of skeptics, or a class ofconservatives, or of malignants, or of materialists. I do not believein two classes. You remember the story of the poor woman who importunedKing Philip of Macedon to grant her justice, which Philip refused: thewoman exclaimed, "I appeal:" the king, astonished, asked to whom sheappealed: the woman replied, "From Philip drunk to Philip sober. " Thetext will suit me very well. I believe not in two classes of men, but inman in two moods, in Philip drunk and Philip sober. I think, accordingto the good-hearted word of Plato, "Unwillingly the soul is deprived oftruth. " Iron conservative, miser, or thief, no man is but by a supposednecessity which he tolerates by shortness or torpidity of sight. Thesoul lets no man go without some visitations and holydays of a divinerpresence. It would be easy to show, by a narrow scanning of any man'sbiography, that we are not so wedded to our paltry performances ofevery kind but that every man has at intervals the grace to scornhis performances, in comparing them with his belief of what he shoulddo;--that he puts himself on the side of his enemies, listening gladlyto 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 allit has done? Genius counts all its miracles poor and short. Its own ideait never executed. The Iliad, the Hamlet, the Doric column, the Romanarch, the Gothic minster, the German anthem, when they are ended, themaster casts behind him. How sinks the song in the waves of melody whichthe universe pours over his soul! Before that gracious Infinite out ofwhich he drew these few strokes, how mean they look, though the praisesof the world attend them. From the triumphs of his art he turns withdesire to this greater defeat. Let those admire who will. With silentjoy he sees himself to be capable of a beauty that eclipses all whichhis hands have done; all which human hands have ever done. 

Well, we are all the children of genius, the children of virtue, --andfeel their inspirations in our happier hours. Is not every man sometimesa radical in politics? Men are conservatives when they are leastvigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives afterdinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick, or aged: in themorning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused;when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals. Inthe circle of the rankest tories that could be collected in England, Oldor New, let a powerful and stimulating intellect, a man of great heartand mind, act on them, and very quickly these frozen conservators willyield to the friendly influence, these hopeless will begin to hope, these haters will begin to love, these immovable statues will begin tospin and revolve. I cannot help recalling the fine anecdote which Wartonrelates of Bishop Berkeley, when he was preparing to leave Englandwith his plan of planting the gospel among the American savages. "LordBathurst told me that the members of the Scriblerus club being met athis house at dinner, they agreed to rally Berkeley, who was also hisguest, on his scheme at Bermudas. Berkeley, having listened to themany lively things they had to say, begged to be heard in his turn, and displayed his plan with such an astonishing and animating force ofeloquence and enthusiasm, that they were struck dumb, and, after somepause, rose up all together with earnestness, exclaiming, 'Let us setout with him immediately. '" Men in all ways are better than they seem. They like flattery for the moment, but they know the truth for theirown. It is a foolish cowardice which keeps us from trusting them andspeaking 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 eachother? Is it to be pleased and flattered? No, but to be convicted andexposed, to be shamed out of our nonsense of all kinds, and made menof, instead of ghosts and phantoms. We are weary of gliding ghostlikethrough the world, which is itself so slight and unreal. We crave asense of reality, though it come in strokes of pain. I explain so, --bythis manlike love of truth, --those excesses and errors into which soulsof great vigor, but not equal insight, often fall. They feel the povertyat the bottom of all the seeming affluence of the world. They know thespeed with which they come straight through the thin masquerade, andconceive 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 ofliving to forget its illusion: they would know the worst, and treadthe floors of hell. The heroes of ancient and modern fame, Cimon, Themistocles, Alcibiades, Alexander, Caesar, have treated life andfortune as a game to be well and skilfully played, but the stake notto be so valued but that any time it could be held as a trifle lightas air, and thrown up. Caesar, just before the battle of Pharsalia, discourses with the Egyptian priest concerning the fountains of theNile, and offers to quit the army, the empire, and Cleopatra, if he willshow him those mysterious sources. 

The same magnanimity shows itself in our social relations, in thepreference, namely, which each man gives to the society of superiorsover that of his equals. All that a man has will he give for rightrelations with his mates. All that he has will he give for an erectdemeanor in every company and on each occasion. He aims at such thingsas his neighbors prize, and gives his days and nights, his talents andhis heart, to strike a good stroke, to acquit himself in all men's sightas 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, ageneral's commission, a marshal's baton, a ducal coronet, the laurel ofpoets, and, anyhow procured, the acknowledgment of eminent merit, --havethis lustre for each candidate that they enable him to walk erect andunashamed in the presence of some persons before whom he felt himselfinferior. Having raised himself to this rank, having established hisequality 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 laurelsand his possessions seem worthless: instead of avoiding these men whomake his fine gold dim, he will cast all behind him and seek theirsociety only, woo and embrace this his humiliation and mortification, until he shall know why his eye sinks, his voice is husky, and hisbrilliant talents are paralyzed in this presence. He is sure that thesoul which gives the lie to all things will tell none. His constitutionwill not mislead him. If it cannot carry itself as it ought, high andunmatchable in the presence of any man; if the secret oracles whosewhisper makes the sweetness and dignity of his life do here withdraw andaccompany him no longer, --it is time to undervalue what he has valued, to dispossess himself of what he has acquired, and with Caesar to takein his hand the army, the empire, and Cleopatra, and say, "All thesewill I relinquish, if you will show me the fountains of the Nile. " Dearto us are those who love us; the swift moments we spend with them area compensation for a great deal of misery; they enlarge our life;--butdearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life:they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and therebysupply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge usto new and unattempted performances. 

As every man at heart wishes the best and not inferior society, wishesto be convicted of his error and to come to himself, --so he wishes thatthe same healing should not stop in his thought, but should penetratehis will or active power. The selfish man suffers more from hisselfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some importantbenefit. What he most wishes is to be lifted to some higher platform, that he may see beyond his present fear the transalpine good, so thathis fear, his coldness, his custom may be broken up like fragments ofice, melted and carried away in the great stream of good will. Doyou ask my aid? I also wish to be a benefactor. I wish more to be abenefactor and servant than you wish to be served by me; and surely thegreatest good fortune that could befall me is precisely to be so movedby you that I should say, 'Take me and all mine, and use me and minefreely to your ends'! for I could not say it otherwise than because agreat enlargement had come to my heart and mind, which made me superiorto my fortunes. Here we are paralyzed with fear; we hold on to ourlittle properties, house and land, office and money, for the bread whichthey have in our experience yielded us, although we confess that ourbeing does not flow through them. We desire to be made great; we desireto be touched with that fire which shall command this ice to stream, andmake our existence a benefit. If therefore we start objections to yourproject, 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 intoyour measures. We wish to hear ourselves confuted. We are haunted witha belief that you have a secret which it would highliest advantage us tolearn, and we would force you to impart it to us, though it should bringus to prison, or to worse extremity. 

Nothing shall warp me from the belief that every man is a loverof truth. There is no pure lie, no pure malignity in nature. Theentertainment of the proposition of depravity is the last profligacy andprofanation. There is no skepticism, no atheism but that. Could it bereceived into common belief, suicide would unpeople the planet. It hashad a name to live in some dogmatic theology, but each man's innocenceand his real liking of his neighbor have kept it a dead letter. Iremember standing at the polls one day when the anger of the politicalcontest gave a certain grimness to the faces of the independentelectors, and a good man at my side, looking on the people, remarked, "Iam satisfied that the largest part of these men, on either side, mean tovote right. " I suppose considerate observers, looking at the masses ofmen in their blameless and in their equivocal actions, will assent, thatin spite of selfishness and frivolity, the general purpose in the greatnumber of persons is fidelity. The reason why any one refuses his assentto your opinion, or his aid to your benevolent design, is in you: herefuses to accept you as a bringer of truth, because, though you thinkyou have it, he feels that you have it not. You have not given him theauthentic sign. 

If it were worth while to run into details this general doctrine ofthe latent but ever soliciting Spirit, it would be easy to adduceillustration in particulars of a man's equality to the Church, of hisequality to the State, and of his equality to every other man. It isyet in all men's memory that, a few years ago, the liberal churchescomplained that the Calvinistic church denied to them the name ofChristian. I think the complaint was confession: a religious churchwould not complain. A religious man like Behmen, Fox, or Swedenborgis not irritated by wanting the sanction of the Church, but the Churchfeels the accusation of his presence and belief. 

It only needs that a just man should walk in our streets to make itappear how pitiful and inartificial a contrivance is our legislation. The man whose part is taken and who does not wait for society inanything, has a power which society cannot choose but feel. The familiarexperiment called the hydrostatic paradox, in which a capillary columnof water balances the ocean, is a symbol of the relation of one manto the whole family of men. The wise Dandamis, on hearing the lives ofSocrates, Pythagoras and Diogenes read, "judged them to be great menevery way, excepting, that they were too much subjected to the reverenceof the laws, which to second and authorize, true virtue must abate verymuch of its original vigor. "

And as a man is equal to the Church and equal to the State, so heis equal to every other man. The disparities of power in men aresuperficial; and all frank and searching conversation, in which a manlays 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! Leta clear, apprehensive mind, such as every man knows among his friends, converse with the most commanding poetic genius, I think it would appearthat there was no inequality such as men fancy, between them; that aperfect understanding, a like receiving, a like perceiving, abolisheddifferences; and the poet would confess that his creative imaginationgave him no deep advantage, but only the superficial one that he couldexpress himself and the other could not; that his advantage was a knack, which might impose on indolent men but could not impose on lovers oftruth; for they know the tax of talent, or what a price of greatness thepower of expression too often pays. I believe it is the conviction ofthe 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 wantof 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 strictconnection with a higher fact never yet manifested. There is power overand behind us, and we are the channels of its communications. We seekto say thus and so, and over our head some spirit sits which contradictswhat we say. We would persuade our fellow to this or that; another selfwithin our eyes dissuades him. That which we keep back, this reveals. In vain we compose our faces and our words; it holds uncontrollablecommunication with the enemy, and he answers civilly to us, but believesthe spirit. We exclaim, 'There's a traitor in the house!' but at last itappears that he is the true man, and I am the traitor. This open channelto the highest life is the first and last reality, so subtle, so quiet, yet so tenacious, that although I have never expressed the truth, andalthough I have never heard the expression of it from any other, Iknow that the whole truth is here for me. What if I cannot answer yourquestions? 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 itinto speech, but whether we hit or whether we miss, we have the fact. Every discourse is an approximate answer: but it is of small consequencethat we do not get it into verbs and nouns, whilst it abides forcontemplation forever. 

If the auguries of the prophesying heart shall make themselves good intime, the man who shall be born, whose advent men and events prepare andforeshow, is one who shall enjoy his connection with a higher life, withthe man within man; shall destroy distrust by his trust, shall use hisnative but forgotten methods, shall not take counsel of flesh and blood, but shall rely on the Law alive and beautiful which works over our headsand under our feet. Pitiless, it avails itself of our success whenwe obey it, and of our ruin when we contravene it. Men are all secretbelievers in it, else the word justice would have no meaning: theybelieve that the best is the true; that right is done at last; or chaoswould come. It rewards actions after their nature, and not after thedesign of the agent. 'Work, ' it saith to man, 'in every hour, paid orunpaid, see only that thou work, and thou canst not escape the reward:whether thy work be fine or coarse, planting corn or writing epics, soonly it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earna reward to the senses as well as to the thought: no matter how oftendefeated, you are born to victory. The reward of a thing well done, isto have done it. '

As soon as a man is wonted to look beyond surfaces, and to see howthis high will prevails without an exception or an interval, he settleshimself into serenity. He can already rely on the laws of gravity, thatevery stone will fall where it is due; the good globe is faithful, andcarries us securely through the celestial spaces, anxious or resigned, we need not interfere to help it on: and he will learn one day the mildlesson they teach, that our own orbit is all our task, and we need notassist the administration of the universe. Do not be so impatient toset the town right concerning the unfounded pretensions and the falsereputation of certain men of standing. They are laboring harder toset the town right concerning themselves, and will certainly succeed. Suppress for a few days your criticism on the insufficiency of thisor that teacher or experimenter, and he will have demonstrated hisinsufficiency to all men's eyes. In like manner, let a man fall into thedivine circuits, and he is enlarged. Obedience to his genius is the onlyliberating influence. We wish to escape from subjection and a sense ofinferiority, and we make self-denying ordinances, we drink water, weeat grass, we refuse the laws, we go to jail: it is all in vain; onlyby obedience to his genius, only by the freest activity in the wayconstitutional to him, does an angel seem to arise before a man and leadhim by the hand out of all the wards of the prison. 

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