        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.

 
 
        ESSAY I _The Poet_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        "So every spirit, as it is most pure,
        And hath in it the more of heavenly light,
        So it the fairer body doth procure
        To habit in, and it more fairly dight,
        With cheerful grace and amiable sight.
        For, of the soul, the body form doth take,
        For soul is form, and doth the body make."
 
        Here we find ourselves, suddenly, not in a critical
speculation, but in a holy place, and should go very warily and
reverently.  We stand before the secret of the world, there where
Being passes into Appearance, and Unity into Variety.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 
 
        ESSAY II _Experience_

        Where do we find ourselves?  In a series of which we do not
know the extremes, and believe that it has none.  We wake and find
ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to
have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward
and out of sight.  But the Genius which, according to the old belief,
stands at the door by which we enter, and gives us the lethe to
drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we
cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday.  Sleep lingers all our
lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the
fir-tree.  All things swim and glitter.  Our life is not so much
threatened as our perception.  Ghostlike we glide through nature, and
should not know our place again.  Did our birth fall in some fit of
indigence and frugality in nature, that she was so sparing of her
fire and so liberal of her earth, that it appears to us that we lack
the affirmative principle, and though we have health and reason, yet
we have no superfluity of spirit for new creation?  We have enough to
live and bring the year about, but not an ounce to impart or to
invest.  Ah that our Genius were a little more of a genius!  We are
like millers on the lower levels of a stream, when the factories
above them have exhausted the water.  We too fancy that the upper
people must have raised their dams.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        The ancients, struck with this irreducibleness of the elements
of human life to calculation, exalted Chance into a divinity, but
that is to stay too long at the spark, -- which glitters truly at one
point, -- but the universe is warm with the latency of the same fire.
The miracle of life which will not be expounded, but will remain a
miracle, introduces a new element.  In the growth of the embryo, Sir
Everard Home, I think, noticed that the evolution was not from one
central point, but co-active from three or more points.  Life has no
memory.  That which proceeds in succession might be remembered, but
that which is coexistent, or ejaculated from a deeper cause, as yet
far from being conscious, knows not its own tendency.  So is it with
us, now skeptical, or without unity, because immersed in forms and
effects all seeming to be of equal yet hostile value, and now
religious, whilst in the reception of spiritual law.  Bear with these
distractions, with this coetaneous growth of the parts: they will one
day be _members_, and obey one will.  On that one will, on that
secret cause, they nail our attention and hope.  Life is hereby
melted into an expectation or a religion.  Underneath the
inharmonious and trivial particulars, is a musical perfection, the
Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or seam.  Do
but observe the mode of our illumination.  When I converse with a
profound mind, or if at any time being alone I have good thoughts, I
do not at once arrive at satisfactions, as when, being thirsty, I
drink water, or go to the fire, being cold: no! but I am at first
apprised of my vicinity to a new and excellent region of life.  By
persisting to read or to think, this region gives further sign of
itself, as it were in flashes of light, in sudden discoveries of its
profound beauty and repose, as if the clouds that covered it parted
at intervals, and showed the approaching traveller the inland
mountains, with the tranquil eternal meadows spread at their base,
whereon flocks graze, and shepherds pipe and dance.  But every
insight from this realm of thought is felt as initial, and promises a
sequel.  I do not make it; I arrive there, and behold what was there
already.  I make!  O no!  I clap my hands in infantine joy and
amazement, before the first opening to me of this august
magnificence, old with the love and homage of innumerable ages, young
with the life of life, the sunbright Mecca of the desert.  And what a
future it opens!  I feel a new heart beating with the love of the new
beauty.  I am ready to die out of nature, and be born again into this
new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West.
 
        "Since neither now nor yesterday began
        These thoughts, which have been ever, nor yet can
        A man be found who their first entrance knew."
 
        If I have described life as a flux of moods, I must now add,
that there is that in us which changes not, and which ranks all
sensations and states of mind.  The consciousness in each man is a
sliding scale, which identifies him now with the First Cause, and now
with the flesh of his body; life above life, in infinite degrees.
The sentiment from which it sprung determines the dignity of any
deed, and the question ever is, not, what you have done or forborne,
but, at whose command you have done or forborne it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        This masterpiece is best where no hands but nature's have been
laid on it.  Care is taken that the greatly-destined shall slip up
into life in the shade, with no thousand-eyed Athens to watch and
blazon every new thought, every blushing emotion of young genius.
Two persons lately, -- very young children of the most high God, --
have given me occasion for thought.  When I explored the source of
their sanctity, and charm for the imagination, it seemed as if each
answered, `From my non-conformity: I never listened to your people's
law, or to what they call their gospel, and wasted my time.  I was
content with the simple rural poverty of my own: hence this
sweetness: my work never reminds you of that; -- is pure of that.'
And nature advertises me in such persons, that, in democratic
America, she will not be democratized.  How cloistered and
constitutionally sequestered from the market and from scandal!  It
was only this morning, that I sent away some wild flowers of these
wood-gods.  They are a relief from literature, -- these fresh
draughts from the sources of thought and sentiment; as we read, in an
age of polish and criticism, the first lines of written prose and
verse of a nation.  How captivating is their devotion to their
favorite books, whether Aeschylus, Dante, Shakspeare, or Scott, as
feeling that they have a stake in that book: who touches that,
touches them; -- and especially the total solitude of the critic, the
Patmos of thought from which he writes, in unconsciousness of any
eyes that shall ever read this writing.  Could they dream on still,
as angels, and not wake to comparisons, and to be flattered!  Yet
some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise, and wherever the
vein of thought reaches down into the profound, there is no danger
from vanity.  Solemn friends will warn them of the danger of the
head's being turned by the flourish of trumpets, but they can afford
to smile.  I remember the indignation of an eloquent Methodist at the
kind admonitions of a Doctor of Divinity,--- `My friend, a man can
neither be praised nor insulted.' But forgive the counsels; they are
very natural.  I remember the thought which occurred to me when some
ingenious and spiritual foreigners came to America, was, Have you
been victimized in being brought hither? -- or, prior to that, answer
me this, `Are you victimizable?'

        As I have said, nature keeps these sovereignties in her own
hands, and however pertly our sermons and disciplines would divide
some share of credit, and teach that the laws fashion the citizen,
she goes her own gait, and puts the wisest in the wrong.  She makes
very light of gospels and prophets, as one who has a great many more
to produce, and no excess of time to spare on any one.  There is a
class of men, individuals of which appear at long intervals, so
eminently endowed with insight and virtue, that they have been
unanimously saluted as _divine_, and who seem to be an accumulation
of that power we consider.  Divine persons are character born, or, to
borrow a phrase from Napoleon, they are victory organized.  They are
usually received with ill-will, because they are new, and because
they set a bound to the exaggeration that has been made of the
personality of the last divine person.  Nature never rhymes her
children, nor makes two men alike.  When we see a great man, we fancy
a resemblance to some historical person, and predict the sequel of
his character and fortune, a result which he is sure to disappoint.
None will ever solve the problem of his character according to our
prejudice, but only in his own high unprecedented way.  Character
wants room; must not be crowded on by persons, nor be judged from
glimpses got in the press of affairs or on few occasions.  It needs
perspective, as a great building.  It may not, probably does not,
form relations rapidly; and we should not require rash explanation,
either on the popular ethics, or on our own, of its action.

        I look on Sculpture as history.  I do not think the Apollo and
the Jove impossible in flesh and blood.  Every trait which the artist
recorded in stone, he had seen in life, and better than his copy.  We
have seen many counterfeits, but we are born believers in great men.
How easily we read in old books, when men were few, of the smallest
action of the patriarchs.  We require that a man should be so large
and columnar in the landscape, that it should deserve to be recorded,
that he arose, and girded up his loins, and departed to such a place.
The most credible pictures are those of majestic men who prevailed at
their entrance, and convinced the senses; as happened to the eastern
magian who was sent to test the merits of Zertusht or Zoroaster.
When the Yunani sage arrived at Balkh, the Persians tell us, Gushtasp
appointed a day on which the Mobeds of every country should assemble,
and a golden chair was placed for the Yunani sage.  Then the beloved
of Yezdam, the prophet Zertusht, advanced into the midst of the
assembly.  The Yunani sage, on seeing that chief, said, "This form
and this gait cannot lie, and nothing but truth can proceed from
them." Plato said, it was impossible not to believe in the children
of the gods, "though they should speak without probable or necessary
arguments." I should think myself very unhappy in my associates, if I
could not credit the best things in history.  "John Bradshaw," says
Milton, "appears like a consul, from whom the fasces are not to
depart with the year; so that not on the tribunal only, but
throughout his life, you would regard him as sitting in judgment upon
kings." I find it more credible, since it is anterior information,
that one man should _know heaven_, as the Chinese say, than that so
many men should know the world.  "The virtuous prince confronts the
gods, without any misgiving.  He waits a hundred ages till a sage
comes, and does not doubt.  He who confronts the gods, without any
misgiving, knows heaven; he who waits a hundred ages until a sage
comes, without doubting, knows men.  Hence the virtuous prince moves,
and for ages shows empire the way." But there is no need to seek
remote examples.  He is a dull observer whose experience has not
taught him the reality and force of magic, as well as of chemistry.
The coldest precisian cannot go abroad without encountering
inexplicable influences.  One man fastens an eye on him, and the
graves of the memory render up their dead; the secrets that make him
wretched either to keep or to betray, must be yielded; -- another,
and he cannot speak, and the bones of his body seem to lose their
cartilages; the entrance of a friend adds grace, boldness, and
eloquence to him; and there are persons, he cannot choose but
remember, who gave a transcendant expansion to his thought, and
kindled another life in his bosom.

        What is so excellent as strict relations of amity, when they
spring from this deep root?  The sufficient reply to the skeptic, who
doubts the power and the furniture of man, is in that possibility of
joyful intercourse with persons, which makes the faith and practice
of all reasonable men.  I know nothing which life has to offer so
satisfying as the profound good understanding, which can subsist,
after much exchange of good offices, between two virtuous men, each
of whom is sure of himself, and sure of his friend.  It is a
happiness which postpones all other gratifications, and makes
politics, and commerce, and churches, cheap.  For, when men shall
meet as they ought, each a benefactor, a shower of stars, clothed
with thoughts, with deeds, with accomplishments, it should be the
festival of nature which all things announce.  Of such friendship,
love in the sexes is the first symbol, as all other things are
symbols of love.  Those relations to the best men, which, at one
time, we reckoned the romances of youth, become, in the progress of
the character, the most solid enjoyment.

 
        If it were possible to live in right relations with men! -- if
we could abstain from asking anything of them, from asking their
praise, or help, or pity, and content us with compelling them through
the virtue of the eldest laws!  Could we not deal with a few persons,
-- with one person, -- after the unwritten statutes, and make an
experiment of their efficacy?  Could we not pay our friend the
compliment of truth, of silence, of forbearing?  Need we be so eager
to seek him?  If we are related, we shall meet.  It was a tradition
of the ancient world, that no metamorphosis could hide a god from a
god; and there is a Greek verse which runs,

        "The Gods are to each other not unknown."
 
        Friends also follow the laws of divine necessity; they
gravitate to each other, and cannot otherwise: --
 
        When each the other shall avoid,
        Shall each by each be most enjoyed.

        Their relation is not made, but allowed.  The gods must seat
themselves without seneschal in our Olympus, and as they can instal
themselves by seniority divine.  Society is spoiled, if pains are
taken, if the associates are brought a mile to meet.  And if it be
not society, it is a mischievous, low, degrading jangle, though made
up of the best.  All the greatness of each is kept back, and every
foible in painful activity, as if the Olympians should meet to
exchange snuff-boxes.

        Life goes headlong.  We chase some flying scheme, or we are
hunted by some fear or command behind us.  But if suddenly we
encounter a friend, we pause; our heat and hurry look foolish enough;
now pause, now possession, is required, and the power to swell the
moment from the resources of the heart.  The moment is all, in all
noble relations.

        A divine person is the prophecy of the mind; a friend is the
hope of the heart.  Our beatitude waits for the fulfilment of these
two in one.  The ages are opening this moral force.  All force is the
shadow or symbol of that.  Poetry is joyful and strong, as it draws
its inspiration thence.  Men write their names on the world, as they
are filled with this.  History has been mean; our nations have been
mobs; we have never seen a man: that divine form we do not yet know,
but only the dream and prophecy of such: we do not know the majestic
manners which belong to him, which appease and exalt the beholder.
We shall one day see that the most private is the most public energy,
that quality atones for quantity, and grandeur of character acts in
the dark, and succors them who never saw it.  What greatness has yet
appeared, is beginnings and encouragements to us in this direction.
The history of those gods and saints which the world has written, and
then worshipped, are documents of character.  The ages have exulted
in the manners of a youth who owed nothing to fortune, and who was
hanged at the Tyburn of his nation, who, by the pure quality of his
nature, shed an epic splendor around the facts of his death, which
has transfigured every particular into an universal symbol for the
eyes of mankind.  This great defeat is hitherto our highest fact.
But the mind requires a victory to the senses, a force of character
which will convert judge, jury, soldier, and king; which will rule
animal and mineral virtues, and blend with the courses of sap, of
rivers, of winds, of stars, and of moral agents.

        If we cannot attain at a bound to these grandeurs, at least,
let us do them homage.  In society, high advantages are set down to
the possessor, as disadvantages.  It requires the more wariness in
our private estimates.  I do not forgive in my friends the failure to
know a fine character, and to entertain it with thankful hospitality.
When, at last, that which we have always longed for, is arrived, and
shines on us with glad rays out of that far celestial land, then to
be coarse, then to be critical, and treat such a visitant with the
jabber and suspicion of the streets, argues a vulgarity that seems to
shut the doors of heaven.  This is confusion, this the right
insanity, when the soul no longer knows its own, nor where its
allegiance, its religion, are due.  Is there any religion but this,
to know, that, wherever in the wide desert of being, the holy
sentiment we cherish has opened into a flower, it blooms for me? if
none sees it, I see it; I am aware, if I alone, of the greatness of
the fact.  Whilst it blooms, I will keep sabbath or holy time, and
suspend my gloom, and my folly and jokes.  Nature is indulged by the
presence of this guest.  There are many eyes that can detect and
honor the prudent and household virtues; there are many that can
discern Genius on his starry track, though the mob is incapable; but
when that love which is all-suffering, all-abstaining, all-aspiring,
which has vowed to itself, that it will be a wretch and also a fool
in this world, sooner than soil its white hands by any compliances,
comes into our streets and houses, -- only the pure and aspiring can
know its face, and the only compliment they can pay it, is to own it.

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

 

        ESSAY IV _Manners_

        Half the world, it is said, knows not how the other half live.
Our Exploring Expedition saw the Feejee islanders getting their
dinner off human bones; and they are said to eat their own wives and
children.  The husbandry of the modern inhabitants of Gournou (west
of old Thebes) is philosophical to a fault.  To set up their
housekeeping, nothing is requisite but two or three earthern pots, a
stone to grind meal, and a mat which is the bed.  The house, namely,
a tomb, is ready without rent or taxes.  No rain can pass through the
roof, and there is no door, for there is no want of one, as there is
nothing to lose.  If the house do not please them, they walk out and
enter another, as there are several hundreds at their command.  "It
is somewhat singular," adds Belzoni, to whom we owe this account, "to
talk of happiness among people who live in sepulchres, among the
corpses and rags of an ancient nation which they know nothing of." In
the deserts of Borgoo, the rock-Tibboos still dwell in caves, like
cliff-swallows, and the language of these negroes is compared by
their neighbors to the shrieking of bats, and to the whistling of
birds.  Again, the Bornoos have no proper names; individuals are
called after their height, thickness, or other accidental quality,
and have nicknames merely.  But the salt, the dates, the ivory, and
the gold, for which these horrible regions are visited, find their
way into countries, where the purchaser and consumer can hardly be
ranked in one race with these cannibals and man-stealers; countries
where man serves himself with metals, wood, stone, glass, gum,
cotton, silk, and wool; honors himself with architecture; writes
laws, and contrives to execute his will through the hands of many
nations; and, especially, establishes a select society, running
through all the countries of intelligent men, a self-constituted
aristocracy, or fraternity of the best, which, without written law or
exact usage of any kind, perpetuates itself, colonizes every
new-planted island, and adopts and makes its own whatever personal
beauty or extraordinary native endowment anywhere appears.

 
        What fact more conspicuous in modern history, than the creation
of the gentleman?  Chivalry is that, and loyalty is that, and, in
English literature, half the drama, and all the novels, from Sir
Philip Sidney to Sir Walter Scott, paint this figure.  The word
_gentleman_, which, like the word Christian, must hereafter
characterize the present and the few preceding centuries, by the
importance attached to it, is a homage to personal and incommunicable
properties.  Frivolous and fantastic additions have got associated
with the name, but the steady interest of mankind in it must be
attributed to the valuable properties which it designates.  An
element which unites all the most forcible persons of every country;
makes them intelligible and agreeable to each other, and is somewhat
so precise, that it is at once felt if an individual lack the masonic
sign, cannot be any casual product, but must be an average result of
the character and faculties universally found in men.  It seems a
certain permanent average; as the atmosphere is a permanent
composition, whilst so many gases are combined only to be
decompounded.  _Comme il faut_, is the Frenchman's description of
good society, _as we must be_.  It is a spontaneous fruit of talents
and feelings of precisely that class who have most vigor, who take
the lead in the world of this hour, and, though far from pure, far
from constituting the gladdest and highest tone of human feeling, is
as good as the whole society permits it to be.  It is made of the
spirit, more than of the talent of men, and is a compound result,
into which every great force enters as an ingredient, namely, virtue,
wit, beauty, wealth, and power.

        There is something equivocal in all the words in use to express
the excellence of manners and social cultivation, because the
quantities are fluxional, and the last effect is assumed by the
senses as the cause.  The word _gentleman_ has not any correlative
abstract to express the quality.  _Gentility_ is mean, and
_gentilesse_ is obsolete.  But we must keep alive in the vernacular,
the distinction between _fashion_, a word of narrow and often
sinister meaning, and the heroic character which the gentleman
imports.  The usual words, however, must be respected: they will be
found to contain the root of the matter.  The point of distinction in
all this class of names, as courtesy, chivalry, fashion, and the
like, is, that the flower and fruit, not the grain of the tree, are
contemplated.  It is beauty which is the aim this time, and not
worth.  The result is now in question, although our words intimate
well enough the popular feeling, that the appearance supposes a
substance.  The gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his own actions,
and expressing that lordship in his behavior, not in any manner
dependent and servile either on persons, or opinions, or possessions.
Beyond this fact of truth and real force, the word denotes
good-nature or benevolence: manhood first, and then gentleness.  The
popular notion certainly adds a condition of ease and fortune; but
that is a natural result of personal force and love, that they should
possess and dispense the goods of the world.  In times of violence,
every eminent person must fall in with many opportunities to approve
his stoutness and worth; therefore every man's name that emerged at
all from the mass in the feudal ages, rattles in our ear like a
flourish of trumpets.  But personal force never goes out of fashion.
That is still paramount today, and, in the moving crowd of good
society, the men of valor and reality are known, and rise to their
natural place.  The competition is transferred from war to politics
and trade, but the personal force appears readily enough in these new
arenas.

        Power first, or no leading class.  In politics and in trade,
bruisers and pirates are of better promise than talkers and clerks.
God knows that all sorts of gentlemen knock at the door; but whenever
used in strictness, and with any emphasis, the name will be found to
point at original energy.  It describes a man standing in his own
right, and working after untaught methods.  In a good lord, there
must first be a good animal, at least to the extent of yielding the
incomparable advantage of animal spirits.  The ruling class must have
more, but they must have these, giving in every company the sense of
power, which makes things easy to be done which daunt the wise.  The
society of the energetic class, in their friendly and festive
meetings, is full of courage, and of attempts, which intimidate the
pale scholar.  The courage which girls exhibit is like a battle of
Lundy's Lane, or a sea-fight.  The intellect relies on memory to make
some supplies to face these extemporaneous squadrons.  But memory is
a base mendicant with basket and badge, in the presence of these
sudden masters.  The rulers of society must be up to the work of the
world, and equal to their versatile office: men of the right
Caesarian pattern, who have great range of affinity.  I am far from
believing the timid maxim of Lord Falkland, ("that for ceremony there
must go two to it; since a bold fellow will go through the cunningest
forms,") and am of opinion that the gentleman is the bold fellow
whose forms are not to be broken through; and only that plenteous
nature is rightful master, which is the complement of whatever person
it converses with.  My gentleman gives the law where he is; he will
outpray saints in chapel, outgeneral veterans in the field, and
outshine all courtesy in the hall.  He is good company for pirates,
and good with academicians; so that it is useless to fortify yourself
against him; he has the private entrance to all minds, and I could as
easily exclude myself, as him.  The famous gentlemen of Asia and
Europe have been of this strong type: Saladin, Sapor, the Cid, Julius
Caesar, Scipio, Alexander, Pericles, and the lordliest personages.
They sat very carelessly in their chairs, and were too excellent
themselves, to value any condition at a high rate.

        A plentiful fortune is reckoned necessary, in the popular
judgment, to the completion of this man of the world: and it is a
material deputy which walks through the dance which the first has
led.  Money is not essential, but this wide affinity is, which
transcends the habits of clique and caste, and makes itself felt by
men of all classes.  If the aristocrat is only valid in fashionable
circles, and not with truckmen, he will never be a leader in fashion;
and if the man of the people cannot speak on equal terms with the
gentleman, so that the gentleman shall perceive that he is already
really of his own order, he is not to be feared.  Diogenes, Socrates,
and Epaminondas, are gentlemen of the best blood, who have chosen the
condition of poverty, when that of wealth was equally open to them.
I use these old names, but the men I speak of are my contemporaries.
Fortune will not supply to every generation one of these
well-appointed knights, but every collection of men furnishes some
example of the class: and the politics of this country, and the trade
of every town, are controlled by these hardy and irresponsible doers,
who have invention to take the lead, and a broad sympathy which puts
them in fellowship with crowds, and makes their action popular.

        The manners of this class are observed and caught with devotion
by men of taste.  The association of these masters with each other,
and with men intelligent of their merits, is mutually agreeable and
stimulating.  The good forms, the happiest expressions of each, are
repeated and adopted.  By swift consent, everything superfluous is
dropped, everything graceful is renewed.  Fine manners show
themselves formidable to the uncultivated man.  They are a subtler
science of defence to parry and intimidate; but once matched by the
skill of the other party, they drop the point of the sword, -- points
and fences disappear, and the youth finds himself in a more
transparent atmosphere, wherein life is a less troublesome game, and
not a misunderstanding rises between the players.  Manners aim to
facilitate life, to get rid of impediments, and bring the man pure to
energize.  They aid our dealing and conversation, as a railway aids
travelling, by getting rid of all avoidable obstructions of the road,
and leaving nothing to be conquered but pure space.  These forms very
soon become fixed, and a fine sense of propriety is cultivated with
the more heed, that it becomes a badge of social and civil
distinctions.  Thus grows up Fashion, an equivocal semblance, the
most puissant, the most fantastic and frivolous, the most feared and
followed, and which morals and violence assault in vain.

        There exists a strict relation between the class of power, and
the exclusive and polished circles.  The last are always filled or
filling from the first.  The strong men usually give some allowance
even to the petulances of fashion, for that affinity they find in it.
Napoleon, child of the revolution, destroyer of the old noblesse,
never ceased to court the Faubourg St. Germain: doubtless with the
feeling, that fashion is a homage to men of his stamp.  Fashion,
though in a strange way, represents all manly virtue.  It is virtue
gone to seed: it is a kind of posthumous honor.  It does not often
caress the great, but the children of the great: it is a hall of the
Past.  It usually sets its face against the great of this hour.
Great men are not commonly in its halls: they are absent in the
field: they are working, not triumphing.  Fashion is made up of their
children; of those, who, through the value and virtue of somebody,
have acquired lustre to their name, marks of distinction, means of
cultivation and generosity, and, in their physical organization, a
certain health and excellence, which secures to them, if not the
highest power to work, yet high power to enjoy.  The class of power,
the working heroes, the Cortez, the Nelson, the Napoleon, see that
this is the festivity and permanent celebration of such as they; that
fashion is funded talent; is Mexico, Marengo, and Trafalgar beaten
out thin; that the brilliant names of fashion run back to just such
busy names as their own, fifty or sixty years ago.  They are the
sowers, their sons shall be the reapers, and _their_ sons, in the
ordinary course of things, must yield the possession of the harvest
to new competitors with keener eyes and stronger frames.  The city is
recruited from the country.  In the year 1805, it is said, every
legitimate monarch in Europe was imbecile.  The city would have died
out, rotted, and exploded, long ago, but that it was reinforced from
the fields.  It is only country which came to town day before
yesterday, that is city and court today.

        Aristocracy and fashion are certain inevitable results.  These
mutual selections are indestructible.  If they provoke anger in the
least favored class, and the excluded majority revenge themselves on
the excluding minority, by the strong hand, and kill them, at once a
new class finds itself at the top, as certainly as cream rises in a
bowl of milk: and if the people should destroy class after class,
until two men only were left, one of these would be the leader, and
would be involuntarily served and copied by the other.  You may keep
this minority out of sight and out of mind, but it is tenacious of
life, and is one of the estates of the realm.  I am the more struck
with this tenacity, when I see its work.  It respects the
administration of such unimportant matters, that we should not look
for any durability in its rule.  We sometimes meet men under some
strong moral influence, as, a patriotic, a literary, a religious
movement, and feel that the moral sentiment rules man and nature.  We
think all other distinctions and ties will be slight and fugitive,
this of caste or fashion, for example; yet come from year to year,
and see how permanent that is, in this Boston or New York life of
man, where, too, it has not the least countenance from the law of the
land.  Not in Egypt or in India a firmer or more impassable line.
Here are associations whose ties go over, and under, and through it,
a meeting of merchants, a military corps, a college-class, a
fire-club, a professional association, a political, a religious
convention; -- the persons seem to draw inseparably near; yet, that
assembly once dispersed, its members will not in the year meet again.
Each returns to his degree in the scale of good society, porcelain
remains porcelain, and earthen earthen.  The objects of fashion may
be frivolous, or fashion may be objectless, but the nature of this
union and selection can be neither frivolous nor accidental.  Each
man's rank in that perfect graduation depends on some symmetry in his
structure, or some agreement in his structure to the symmetry of
society.  Its doors unbar instantaneously to a natural claim of their
own kind.  A natural gentleman finds his way in, and will keep the
oldest patrician out, who has lost his intrinsic rank.  Fashion
understands itself; good-breeding and personal superiority of
whatever country readily fraternize with those of every other.  The
chiefs of savage tribes have distinguished themselves in London and
Paris, by the purity of their tournure.

        To say what good of fashion we can, -- it rests on reality, and
hates nothing so much as pretenders; -- to exclude and mystify
pretenders, and send them into everlasting `Coventry,' is its
delight.  We contemn, in turn, every other gift of men of the world;
but the habit even in little and the least matters, of not appealing
to any but our own sense of propriety, constitutes the foundation of
all chivalry.  There is almost no kind of self-reliance, so it be
sane and proportioned, which fashion does not occasionally adopt, and
give it the freedom of its saloons.  A sainted soul is always
elegant, and, if it will, passes unchallenged into the most guarded
ring.  But so will Jock the teamster pass, in some crisis that brings
him thither, and find favor, as long as his head is not giddy with
the new circumstance, and the iron shoes do not wish to dance in
waltzes and cotillons.  For there is nothing settled in manners, but
the laws of behavior yield to the energy of the individual.  The
maiden at her first ball, the country-man at a city dinner, believes
that there is a ritual according to which every act and compliment
must be performed, or the failing party must be cast out of this
presence.  Later, they learn that good sense and character make their
own forms every moment, and speak or abstain, take wine or refuse it,
stay or go, sit in a chair or sprawl with children on the floor, or
stand on their head, or what else soever, in a new and aboriginal
way: and that strong will is always in fashion, let who will be
unfashionable.  All that fashion demands is composure, and
self-content.  A circle of men perfectly well-bred would be a company
of sensible persons, in which every man's native manners and
character appeared.  If the fashionist have not this quality, he is
nothing.  We are such lovers of self-reliance, that we excuse in a
man many sins, if he will show us a complete satisfaction in his
position, which asks no leave to be, of mine, or any man's good
opinion.  But any deference to some eminent man or woman of the
world, forfeits all privilege of nobility.  He is an underling: I
have nothing to do with him; I will speak with his master.  A man
should not go where he cannot carry his whole sphere or society with
him, -- not bodily, the whole circle of his friends, but
atmospherically.  He should preserve in a new company the same
attitude of mind and reality of relation, which his daily associates
draw him to, else he is shorn of his best beams, and will be an
orphan in the merriest club.  "If you could see Vich Ian Vohr with
his tail on!----" But Vich Ian Vohr must always carry his belongings
in some fashion, if not added as honor, then severed as disgrace.

        There will always be in society certain persons who are
mercuries of its approbation, and whose glance will at any time
determine for the curious their standing in the world.  These are the
chamberlains of the lesser gods.  Accept their coldness as an omen of
grace with the loftier deities, and allow them all their privilege.
They are clear in their office, nor could they be thus formidable,
without their own merits.  But do not measure the importance of this
class by their pretension, or imagine that a fop can be the dispenser
of honor and shame.  They pass also at their just rate; for how can
they otherwise, in circles which exist as a sort of herald's office
for the sifting of character?

        As the first thing man requires of man, is reality, so, that
appears in all the forms of society.  We pointedly, and by name,
introduce the parties to each other.  Know you before all heaven and
earth, that this is Andrew, and this is Gregory; -- they look each
other in the eye; they grasp each other's hand, to identify and
signalize each other.  It is a great satisfaction.  A gentleman never
dodges: his eyes look straight forward, and he assures the other
party, first of all, that he has been met.  For what is it that we
seek, in so many visits and hospitalities?  Is it your draperies,
pictures, and decorations?  Or, do we not insatiably ask, Was a man
in the house?  I may easily go into a great household where there is
much substance, excellent provision for comfort, luxury, and taste,
and yet not encounter there any Amphitryon, who shall subordinate
these appendages.  I may go into a cottage, and find a farmer who
feels that he is the man I have come to see, and fronts me
accordingly.  It was therefore a very natural point of old feudal
etiquette, that a gentleman who received a visit, though it were of
his sovereign, should not leave his roof, but should wait his arrival
at the door of his house.  No house, though it were the Thuilleries,
or the Escurial, is good for anything without a master.  And yet we
are not often gratified by this hospitality.  Every body we know
surrounds himself with a fine house, fine books, conservatory,
gardens, equipage, and all manner of toys, as screens to interpose
between himself and his guest.  Does it not seem as if man was of a
very sly, elusive nature, and dreaded nothing so much as a full
rencontre front to front with his fellow?  It were unmerciful, I
know, quite to abolish the use of these screens, which are of eminent
convenience, whether the guest is too great, or too little.  We call
together many friends who keep each other in play, or, by luxuries
and ornaments we amuse the young people, and guard our retirement.
Or if, perchance, a searching realist comes to our gate, before whose
eye we have no care to stand, then again we run to our curtain, and
hide ourselves as Adam at the voice of the Lord God in the garden.
Cardinal Caprara, the Pope's legate at Paris, defended himself from
the glances of Napoleon, by an immense pair of green spectacles.
Napoleon remarked them, and speedily managed to rally them off: and
yet Napoleon, in his turn, was not great enough with eight hundred
thousand troops at his back, to face a pair of freeborn eyes, but
fenced himself with etiquette, and within triple barriers of reserve:
and, as all the world knows from Madame de Stael, was wont, when he
found himself observed, to discharge his face of all expression.  But
emperors and rich men are by no means the most skilful masters of
good manners.  No rentroll nor army-list can dignify skulking and
dissimulation: and the first point of courtesy must always be truth,
as really all the forms of good-breeding point that way.

        I have just been reading, in Mr. Hazlitt's translation,
Montaigne's account of his journey into Italy, and am struck with
nothing more agreeably than the self-respecting fashions of the time.
His arrival in each place, the arrival of a gentleman of France, is
an event of some consequence.  Wherever he goes, he pays a visit to
whatever prince or gentleman of note resides upon his road, as a duty
to himself and to civilization.  When he leaves any house in which he
has lodged for a few weeks, he causes his arms to be painted and hung
up as a perpetual sign to the house, as was the custom of gentlemen.

        The complement of this graceful self-respect, and that of all
the points of good breeding I most require and insist upon, is
deference.  I like that every chair should be a throne, and hold a
king.  I prefer a tendency to stateliness, to an excess of
fellowship.  Let the incommunicable objects of nature and the
metaphysical isolation of man teach us independence.  Let us not be
too much acquainted.  I would have a man enter his house through a
hall filled with heroic and sacred sculptures, that he might not want
the hint of tranquillity and self-poise.  We should meet each
morning, as from foreign countries, and spending the day together,
should depart at night, as into foreign countries.  In all things I
would have the island of a man inviolate.  Let us sit apart as the
gods, talking from peak to peak all round Olympus.  No degree of
affection need invade this religion.  This is myrrh and rosemary to
keep the other sweet.  Lovers should guard their strangeness.  If
they forgive too much, all slides into confusion and meanness.  It is
easy to push this deference to a Chinese etiquette; but coolness and
absence of heat and haste indicate fine qualities.  A gentleman makes
no noise: a lady is serene.  Proportionate is our disgust at those
invaders who fill a studious house with blast and running, to secure
some paltry convenience.  Not less I dislike a low sympathy of each
with his neighbor's needs.  Must we have a good understanding with
one another's palates? as foolish people who have lived long
together, know when each wants salt or sugar.  I pray my companion,
if he wishes for bread, to ask me for bread, and if he wishes for
sassafras or arsenic, to ask me for them, and not to hold out his
plate, as if I knew already.  Every natural function can be dignified
by deliberation and privacy.  Let us leave hurry to slaves.  The
compliments and ceremonies of our breeding should signify, however
remotely, the recollection of the grandeur of our destiny.

        The flower of courtesy does not very well bide handling, but if
we dare to open another leaf, and explore what parts go to its
conformation, we shall find also an intellectual quality.  To the
leaders of men, the brain as well as the flesh and the heart must
furnish a proportion.  Defect in manners is usually the defect of
fine perceptions.  Men are too coarsely made for the delicacy of
beautiful carriage and customs.  It is not quite sufficient to
good-breeding, a union of kindness and independence.  We imperatively
require a perception of, and a homage to beauty in our companions.
Other virtues are in request in the field and workyard, but a certain
degree of taste is not to be spared in those we sit with.  I could
better eat with one who did not respect the truth or the laws, than
with a sloven and unpresentable person.  Moral qualities rule the
world, but at short distances, the senses are despotic.  The same
discrimination of fit and fair runs out, if with less rigor, into all
parts of life.  The average spirit of the energetic class is good
sense, acting under certain limitations and to certain ends.  It
entertains every natural gift.  Social in its nature, it respects
everything which tends to unite men.  It delights in measure.  The
love of beauty is mainly the love of measure or proportion.  The
person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with
heat, puts whole drawing-rooms to flight.  If you wish to be loved,
love measure.  You must have genius, or a prodigious usefulness, if
you will hide the want of measure.  This perception comes in to
polish and perfect the parts of the social instrument.  Society will
pardon much to genius and special gifts, but, being in its nature a
convention, it loves what is conventional, or what belongs to coming
together.  That makes the good and bad of manners, namely, what helps
or hinders fellowship.  For, fashion is not good sense absolute, but
relative; not good sense private, but good sense entertaining
company.  It hates corners and sharp points of character, hates
quarrelsome, egotistical, solitary, and gloomy people; hates whatever
can interfere with total blending of parties; whilst it values all
peculiarities as in the highest degree refreshing, which can consist
with good fellowship.  And besides the general infusion of wit to
heighten civility, the direct splendor of intellectual power is ever
welcome in fine society as the costliest addition to its rule and its
credit.

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

        Therefore, besides personal force and so much perception as
constitutes unerring taste, society demands in its patrician class,
another element already intimated, which it significantly terms
good-nature, expressing all degrees of generosity, from the lowest
willingness and faculty to oblige, up to the heights of magnanimity
and love.  Insight we must have, or we shall run against one another,
and miss the way to our food; but intellect is selfish and barren.
The secret of success in society, is a certain heartiness and
sympathy.  A man who is not happy in the company, cannot find any
word in his memory that will fit the occasion.  All his information
is a little impertinent.  A man who is happy there, finds in every
turn of the conversation equally lucky occasions for the introduction
of that which he has to say.  The favorites of society, and what it
calls _whole souls_, are able men, and of more spirit than wit, who
have no uncomfortable egotism, but who exactly fill the hour and the
company, contented and contenting, at a marriage or a funeral, a ball
or a jury, a water-party or a shooting-match.  England, which is rich
in gentlemen, furnished, in the beginning of the present century, a
good model of that genius which the world loves, in Mr.  Fox, who
added to his great abilities the most social disposition, and real
love of men.  Parliamentary history has few better passages than the
debate, in which Burke and Fox separated in the House of Commons;
when Fox urged on his old friend the claims of old friendship with
such tenderness, that the house was moved to tears.  Another anecdote
is so close to my matter, that I must hazard the story.  A tradesman
who had long dunned him for a note of three hundred guineas, found
him one day counting gold, and demanded payment: "No," said Fox, "I
owe this money to Sheridan: it is a debt of honor: if an accident
should happen to me, he has nothing to show." "Then," said the
creditor, "I change my debt into a debt of honor," and tore the note
in pieces.  Fox thanked the man for his confidence, and paid him,
saying, "his debt was of older standing, and Sheridan must wait."
Lover of liberty, friend of the Hindoo, friend of the African slave,
he possessed a great personal popularity; and Napoleon said of him on
the occasion of his visit to Paris, in 1805, "Mr. Fox will always
hold the first place in an assembly at the Thuilleries."

        We may easily seem ridiculous in our eulogy of courtesy,
whenever we insist on benevolence as its foundation.  The painted
phantasm Fashion rises to cast a species of derision on what we say.
But I will neither be driven from some allowance to Fashion as a
symbolic institution, nor from the belief that love is the basis of
courtesy.  We must obtain _that_, if we can; but by all means we must
affirm _this_.  Life owes much of its spirit to these sharp
contrasts.  Fashion which affects to be honor, is often, in all men's
experience, only a ballroom-code.  Yet, so long as it is the highest
circle, in the imagination of the best heads on the planet, there is
something necessary and excellent in it; for it is not to be supposed
that men have agreed to be the dupes of anything preposterous; and
the respect which these mysteries inspire in the most rude and sylvan
characters, and the curiosity with which details of high life are
read, betray the universality of the love of cultivated manners.  I
know that a comic disparity would be felt, if we should enter the
acknowledged `first circles,' and apply these terrific standards of
justice, beauty, and benefit, to the individuals actually found
there.  Monarchs and heroes, sages and lovers, these gallants are
not.  Fashion has many classes and many rules of probation and
admission; and not the best alone.  There is not only the right of
conquest, which genius pretends, -- the individual, demonstrating his
natural aristocracy best of the best; -- but less claims will pass
for the time; for Fashion loves lions, and points, like Circe, to her
horned company.  This gentleman is this afternoon arrived from
Denmark; and that is my Lord Ride, who came yesterday from Bagdat;
here is Captain Friese, from Cape Turnagain; and Captain Symmes, from
the interior of the earth; and Monsieur Jovaire, who came down this
morning in a balloon; Mr. Hobnail, the reformer; and Reverend Jul
Bat, who has converted the whole torrid zone in his Sunday school;
and Signor Torre del Greco, who extinguished Vesuvius by pouring into
it the Bay of Naples; Spahi, the Persian ambassador; and Tul Wil
Shan, the exiled nabob of Nepaul, whose saddle is the new moon.  --
But these are monsters of one day, and tomorrow will be dismissed to
their holes and dens; for, in these rooms, every chair is waited for.
The artist, the scholar, and, in general, the clerisy, wins its way
up into these places, and gets represented here, somewhat on this
footing of conquest.  Another mode is to pass through all the
degrees, spending a year and a day in St. Michael's Square, being
steeped in Cologne water, and perfumed, and dined, and introduced,
and properly grounded in all the biography, and politics, and
anecdotes of the boudoirs.

        Yet these fineries may have grace and wit.  Let there be
grotesque sculpture about the gates and offices of temples.  Let the
creed and commandments even have the saucy homage of parody.  The
forms of politeness universally express benevolence in superlative
degrees.  What if they are in the mouths of selfish men, and used as
means of selfishness?  What if the false gentleman almost bows the
true out of the world?  What if the false gentleman contrives so to
address his companion, as civilly to exclude all others from his
discourse, and also to make them feel excluded?  Real service will
not lose its nobleness.  All generosity is not merely French and
sentimental; nor is it to be concealed, that living blood and a
passion of kindness does at last distinguish God's gentleman from
Fashion's.  The epitaph of Sir Jenkin Grout is not wholly
unintelligible to the present age.  "Here lies Sir Jenkin Grout, who
loved his friend, and persuaded his enemy: what his mouth ate, his
hand paid for: what his servants robbed, he restored: if a woman gave
him pleasure, he supported her in pain: he never forgot his children:
and whoso touched his finger, drew after it his whole body." Even the
line of heroes is not utterly extinct.  There is still ever some
admirable person in plain clothes, standing on the wharf, who jumps
in to rescue a drowning man; there is still some absurd inventor of
charities; some guide and comforter of runaway slaves; some friend of
Poland; some Philhellene; some fanatic who plants shade-trees for the
second and third generation, and orchards when he is grown old; some
well-concealed piety; some just man happy in an ill-fame; some youth
ashamed of the favors of fortune, and impatiently casting them on
other shoulders.  And these are the centres of society, on which it
returns for fresh impulses.  These are the creators of Fashion, which
is an attempt to organize beauty of behavior.  The beautiful and the
generous are, in the theory, the doctors and apostles of this church:
Scipio, and the Cid, and Sir Philip Sidney, and Washington, and every
pure and valiant heart, who worshipped Beauty by word and by deed.
The persons who constitute the natural aristocracy, are not found in
the actual aristocracy, or, only on its edge; as the chemical energy
of the spectrum is found to be greatest just outside of the spectrum.
Yet that is the infirmity of the seneschals, who do not know their
sovereign, when he appears.  The theory of society supposes the
existence and sovereignty of these.  It divines afar off their
coming.  It says with the elder gods, --

        "As Heaven and Earth are fairer far
        Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs;
        And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth,
        In form and shape compact and beautiful;
        So, on our heels a fresh perfection treads;
        A power, more strong in beauty, born of us,
        And fated to excel us, as we pass
        In glory that old Darkness:
        -------- for, 't is the eternal law,
        That first in beauty shall be first in might."

        Therefore, within the ethnical circle of good society, there is
a narrower and higher circle, concentration of its light, and flower
of courtesy, to which there is always a tacit appeal of pride and
reference, as to its inner and imperial court, the parliament of love
and chivalry.  And this is constituted of those persons in whom
heroic dispositions are native, with the love of beauty, the delight
in society, and the power to embellish the passing day.  If the
individuals who compose the purest circles of aristocracy in Europe,
the guarded blood of centuries, should pass in review, in such manner
as that we could, at leisure, and critically inspect their behavior,
we might find no gentleman, and no lady; for, although excellent
specimens of courtesy and high-breeding would gratify us in the
assemblage, in the particulars, we should detect offence.  Because,
elegance comes of no breeding, but of birth.  There must be romance
of character, or the most fastidious exclusion of impertinencies will
not avail.  It must be genius which takes that direction: it must be
not courteous, but courtesy.  High behavior is as rare in fiction, as
it is in fact.  Scott is praised for the fidelity with which he
painted the demeanor and conversation of the superior classes.
Certainly, kings and queens, nobles and great ladies, had some right
to complain of the absurdity that had been put in their mouths,
before the days of Waverley; but neither does Scott's dialogue bear
criticism.  His lords brave each other in smart epigramatic speeches,
but the dialogue is in costume, and does not please on the second
reading: it is not warm with life.  In Shakspeare alone, the speakers
do not strut and bridle, the dialogue is easily great, and he adds to
so many titles that of being the best-bred man in England, and in
Christendom.  Once or twice in a lifetime we are permitted to enjoy
the charm of noble manners, in the presence of a man or woman who
have no bar in their nature, but whose character emanates freely in
their word and gesture.  A beautiful form is better than a beautiful
face; a beautiful behavior is better than a beautiful form: it gives
a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of the
fine arts.  A man is but a little thing in the midst of the objects
of nature, yet, by the moral quality radiating from his countenance,
he may abolish all considerations of magnitude, and in his manners
equal the majesty of the world.  I have seen an individual, whose
manners, though wholly within the conventions of elegant society,
were never learned there, but were original and commanding, and held
out protection and prosperity; one who did not need the aid of a
court-suit, but carried the holiday in his eye; who exhilarated the
fancy by flinging wide the doors of new modes of existence; who shook
off the captivity of etiquette, with happy, spirited bearing,
good-natured and free as Robin Hood; yet with the port of an emperor,
-- if need be, calm, serious, and fit to stand the gaze of millions.

        The open air and the fields, the street and public chambers,
are the places where Man executes his will; let him yield or divide
the sceptre at the door of the house.  Woman, with her instinct of
behavior, instantly detects in man a love of trifles, any coldness or
imbecility, or, in short, any want of that large, flowing, and
magnanimous deportment, which is indispensable as an exterior in the
hall.  Our American institutions have been friendly to her, and at
this moment, I esteem it a chief felicity of this country, that it
excels in women.  A certain awkward consciousness of inferiority in
the men, may give rise to the new chivalry in behalf of Woman's
Rights.  Certainly, let her be as much better placed in the laws and
in social forms, as the most zealous reformer can ask, but I confide
so entirely in her inspiring and musical nature, that I believe only
herself can show us how she shall be served.  The wonderful
generosity of her sentiments raises her at times into heroical and
godlike regions, and verifies the pictures of Minerva, Juno, or
Polymnia; and, by the firmness with which she treads her upward path,
she convinces the coarsest calculators that another road exists, than
that which their feet know.  But besides those who make good in our
imagination the place of muses and of Delphic Sibyls, are there not
women who fill our vase with wine and roses to the brim, so that the
wine runs over and fills the house with perfume; who inspire us with
courtesy; who unloose our tongues, and we speak; who anoint our eyes,
and we see?  We say things we never thought to have said; for once,
our walls of habitual reserve vanished, and left us at large; we were
children playing with children in a wide field of flowers.  Steep us,
we cried, in these influences, for days, for weeks, and we shall be
sunny poets, and will write out in many-colored words the romance
that you are.  Was it Hafiz or Firdousi that said of his Persian
Lilla, She was an elemental force, and astonished me by her amount of
life, when I saw her day after day radiating, every instant,
redundant joy and grace on all around her.  She was a solvent
powerful to reconcile all heterogeneous persons into one society:
like air or water, an element of such a great range of affinities,
that it combines readily with a thousand substances.  Where she is
present, all others will be more than they are wont.  She was a unit
and whole, so that whatsoever she did, became her.  She had too much
sympathy and desire to please, than that you could say, her manners
were marked with dignity, yet no princess could surpass her clear and
erect demeanor on each occasion.  She did not study the Persian
grammar, nor the books of the seven poets, but all the poems of the
seven seemed to be written upon her.  For, though the bias of her
nature was not to thought, but to sympathy, yet was she so perfect in
her own nature, as to meet intellectual persons by the fulness of her
heart, warming them by her sentiments; believing, as she did, that by
dealing nobly with all, all would show themselves noble.

        I know that this Byzantine pile of chivalry or Fashion, which
seems so fair and picturesque to those who look at the contemporary
facts for science or for entertainment, is not equally pleasant to
all spectators.  The constitution of our society makes it a giant's
castle to the ambitious youth who have not found their names enrolled
in its Golden Book, and whom it has excluded from its coveted honors
and privileges.  They have yet to learn that its seeming grandeur is
shadowy and relative: it is great by their allowance: its proudest
gates will fly open at the approach of their courage and virtue.  For
the present distress, however, of those who are predisposed to suffer
from the tyrannies of this caprice, there are easy remedies.  To
remove your residence a couple of miles, or at most four, will
commonly relieve the most extreme susceptibility.  For, the
advantages which fashion values, are plants which thrive in very
confined localities, in a few streets, namely.  Out of this precinct,
they go for nothing; are of no use in the farm, in the forest, in the
market, in war, in the nuptial society, in the literary or scientific
circle, at sea, in friendship, in the heaven of thought or virtue.

        But we have lingered long enough in these painted courts.  The
worth of the thing signified must vindicate our taste for the emblem.
Everything that is called fashion and courtesy humbles itself before
the cause and fountain of honor, creator of titles and dignities,
namely, the heart of love.  This is the royal blood, this the fire,
which, in all countries and contingencies, will work after its kind,
and conquer and expand all that approaches it.  This gives new
meanings to every fact.  This impoverishes the rich, suffering no
grandeur but its own.  What _is_ rich?  Are you rich enough to help
anybody? to succor the unfashionable and the eccentric? rich enough
to make the Canadian in his wagon, the itinerant with his consul's
paper which commends him "To the charitable," the swarthy Italian
with his few broken words of English, the lame pauper hunted by
overseers from town to town, even the poor insane or besotted wreck
of man or woman, feel the noble exception of your presence and your
house, from the general bleakness and stoniness; to make such feel
that they were greeted with a voice which made them both remember and
hope?  What is vulgar, but to refuse the claim on acute and
conclusive reasons?  What is gentle, but to allow it, and give their
heart and yours one holiday from the national caution?  Without the
rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar.  The king of Schiraz could not
afford to be so bountiful as the poor Osman who dwelt at his gate.
Osman had a humanity so broad and deep, that although his speech was
so bold and free with the Koran, as to disgust all the dervishes, yet
was there never a poor outcast, eccentric, or insane man, some fool
who had cut off his beard, or who had been mutilated under a vow, or
had a pet madness in his brain, but fled at once to him, -- that
great heart lay there so sunny and hospitable in the centre of the
country, -- that it seemed as if the instinct of all sufferers drew
them to his side.  And the madness which he harbored, he did not
share.  Is not this to be rich? this only to be rightly rich?

        But I shall hear without pain, that I play the courtier very
ill, and talk of that which I do not well understand.  It is easy to
see, that what is called by distinction society and fashion, has good
laws as well as bad, has much that is necessary, and much that is
absurd.  Too good for banning, and too bad for blessing, it reminds
us of a tradition of the pagan mythology, in any attempt to settle
its character.  `I overheard Jove, one day,' said Silenus, `talking
of destroying the earth; he said, it had failed; they were all rogues
and vixens, who went from bad to worse, as fast as the days succeeded
each other.  Minerva said, she hoped not; they were only ridiculous
little creatures, with this odd circumstance, that they had a blur,
or indeterminate aspect, seen far or seen near; if you called them
bad, they would appear so; if you called them good, they would appear
so; and there was no one person or action among them, which would not
puzzle her owl, much more all Olympus, to know whether it was
fundamentally bad or good.'

 
 
        GIFTS
 
 
        Gifts of one who loved me, --
        'T was high time they came;
        When he ceased to love me,
        Time they stopped for shame.

 

        ESSAY V _Gifts_
 
        It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the
world owes the world more than the world can pay, and ought to go
into chancery, and be sold.  I do not think this general insolvency,
which involves in some sort all the population, to be the reason of
the difficulty experienced at Christmas and New Year, and other
times, in bestowing gifts; since it is always so pleasant to be
generous, though very vexatious to pay debts.  But the impediment
lies in the choosing.  If, at any time, it comes into my head, that a
present is due from me to somebody, I am puzzled what to give, until
the opportunity is gone.  Flowers and fruits are always fit presents;
flowers, because they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty
outvalues all the utilities of the world.  These gay natures contrast
with the somewhat stern countenance of ordinary nature: they are like
music heard out of a work-house.  Nature does not cocker us: we are
children, not pets: she is not fond: everything is dealt to us
without fear or favor, after severe universal laws.  Yet these
delicate flowers look like the frolic and interference of love and
beauty.  Men use to tell us that we love flattery, even though we are
not deceived by it, because it shows that we are of importance enough
to be courted.  Something like that pleasure, the flowers give us:
what am I to whom these sweet hints are addressed?  Fruits are
acceptable gifts, because they are the flower of commodities, and
admit of fantastic values being attached to them.  If a man should
send to me to come a hundred miles to visit him, and should set
before me a basket of fine summerfruit, I should think there was some
proportion between the labor and the reward.

        For common gifts, necessity makes pertinences and beauty every
day, and one is glad when an imperative leaves him no option, since
if the man at the door have no shoes, you have not to consider
whether you could procure him a paint-box.  And as it is always
pleasing to see a man eat bread, or drink water, in the house or out
of doors, so it is always a great satisfaction to supply these first
wants.  Necessity does everything well.  In our condition of
universal dependence, it seems heroic to let the petitioner be the
judge of his necessity, and to give all that is asked, though at
great inconvenience.  If it be a fantastic desire, it is better to
leave to others the office of punishing him.  I can think of many
parts I should prefer playing to that of the Furies.  Next to things
of necessity, the rule for a gift, which one of my friends
prescribed, is, that we might convey to some person that which
properly belonged to his character, and was easily associated with
him in thought.  But our tokens of compliment and love are for the
most part barbarous.  Rings and other jewels are not gifts, but
apologies for gifts.  The only gift is a portion of thyself.  Thou
must bleed for me.  Therefore the poet brings his poem; the shepherd,
his lamb; the farmer, corn; the miner, a gem; the sailor, coral and
shells; the painter, his picture; the girl, a handkerchief of her own
sewing.  This is right and pleasing, for it restores society in so
far to its primary basis, when a man's biography is conveyed in his
gift, and every man's wealth is an index of his merit.  But it is a
cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy me something,
which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith's.
This is fit for kings, and rich men who represent kings, and a false
state of property, to make presents of gold and silver stuffs, as a
kind of symbolical sin-offering, or payment of black-mail.

        The law of benefits is a difficult channel, which requires
careful sailing, or rude boats.  It is not the office of a man to
receive gifts.  How dare you give them?  We wish to be
self-sustained.  We do not quite forgive a giver.  The hand that
feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.  We can receive anything
from love, for that is a way of receiving it from ourselves; but not
from any one who assumes to bestow.  We sometimes hate the meat which
we eat, because there seems something of degrading dependence in
living by it.

        "Brother, if Jove to thee a present make,
        Take heed that from his hands thou nothing take."
 
        We ask the whole.  Nothing less will content us.  We arraign
society, if it do not give us besides earth, and fire, and water,
opportunity, love, reverence, and objects of veneration.

        He is a good man, who can receive a gift well.  We are either
glad or sorry at a gift, and both emotions are unbecoming.  Some
violence, I think, is done, some degradation borne, when I rejoice or
grieve at a gift.  I am sorry when my independence is invaded, or
when a gift comes from such as do not know my spirit, and so the act
is not supported; and if the gift pleases me overmuch, then I should
be ashamed that the donor should read my heart, and see that I love
his commodity, and not him.  The gift, to be true, must be the
flowing of the giver unto me, correspondent to my flowing unto him.
When the waters are at level, then my goods pass to him, and his to
me.  All his are mine, all mine his.  I say to him, How can you give
me this pot of oil, or this flagon of wine, when all your oil and
wine is mine, which belief of mine this gift seems to deny?  Hence
the fitness of beautiful, not useful things for gifts.  This giving
is flat usurpation, and therefore when the beneficiary is ungrateful,
as all beneficiaries hate all Timons, not at all considering the
value of the gift, but looking back to the greater store it was taken
from, I rather sympathize with the beneficiary, than with the anger
of my lord Timon.  For, the expectation of gratitude is mean, and is
continually punished by the total insensibility of the obliged
person.  It is a great happiness to get off without injury and
heart-burning, from one who has had the ill luck to be served by you.
It is a very onerous business, this of being served, and the debtor
naturally wishes to give you a slap.  A golden text for these
gentlemen is that which I so admire in the Buddhist, who never
thanks, and who says, "Do not flatter your benefactors."

        The reason of these discords I conceive to be, that there is no
commensurability between a man and any gift.  You cannot give
anything to a magnanimous person.  After you have served him, he at
once puts you in debt by his magnanimity.  The service a man renders
his friend is trivial and selfish, compared with the service he knows
his friend stood in readiness to yield him, alike before he had begun
to serve his friend, and now also.  Compared with that good-will I
bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to render him seems
small.  Besides, our action on each other, good as well as evil, is
so incidental and at random, that we can seldom hear the
acknowledgments of any person who would thank us for a benefit,
without some shame and humiliation.  We can rarely strike a direct
stroke, but must be content with an oblique one; we seldom have the
satisfaction of yielding a direct benefit, which is directly
received.  But rectitude scatters favors on every side without
knowing it, and receives with wonder the thanks of all people.

        I fear to breathe any treason against the majesty of love,
which is the genius and god of gifts, and to whom we must not affect
to prescribe.  Let him give kingdoms or flower-leaves indifferently.
There are persons, from whom we always expect fairy tokens; let us
not cease to expect them.  This is prerogative, and not to be limited
by our municipal rules.  For the rest, I like to see that we cannot
be bought and sold.  The best of hospitality and of generosity is
also not in the will, but in fate.  I find that I am not much to you;
you do not need me; you do not feel me; then am I thrust out of
doors, though you proffer me house and lands.  No services are of any
value, but only likeness.  When I have attempted to join myself to
others by services, it proved an intellectual trick, -- no more.
They eat your service like apples, and leave you out.  But love them,
and they feel you, and delight in you all the time.

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

 
 
        Essay VI _Nature_
 
        There are days which occur in this climate, at almost any
season of the year, wherein the world reaches its perfection, when
the air, the heavenly bodies, and the earth, make a harmony, as if
nature would indulge her offspring; when, in these bleak upper sides
of the planet, nothing is to desire that we have heard of the
happiest latitudes, and we bask in the shining hours of Florida and
Cuba; when everything that has life gives sign of satisfaction, and
the cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great and tranquil
thoughts.  These halcyons may be looked for with a little more
assurance in that pure October weather, which we distinguish by the
name of the Indian Summer.  The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over
the broad hills and warm wide fields.  To have lived through all its
sunny hours, seems longevity enough.  The solitary places do not seem
quite lonely.  At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the
world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise
and foolish.  The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the
first step he makes into these precincts.  Here is sanctity which
shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes.  Here
we find nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other
circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her.  We
have crept out of our close and crowded houses into the night and
morning, and we see what majestic beauties daily wrap us in their
bosom.  How willingly we would escape the barriers which render them
comparatively impotent, escape the sophistication and second thought,
and suffer nature to intrance us.  The tempered light of the woods is
like a perpetual morning, and is stimulating and heroic.  The
anciently reported spells of these places creep on us.  The stems of
pines, hemlocks, and oaks, almost gleam like iron on the excited eye.
The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live with them, and
quit our life of solemn trifles.  Here no history, or church, or
state, is interpolated on the divine sky and the immortal year.  How
easily we might walk onward into the opening landscape, absorbed by
new pictures, and by thoughts fast succeeding each other, until by
degrees the recollection of home was crowded out of the mind, all
memory obliterated by the tyranny of the present, and we were led in
triumph by nature.

        These enchantments are medicinal, they sober and heal us.
These are plain pleasures, kindly and native to us.  We come to our
own, and make friends with matter, which the ambitious chatter of the
schools would persuade us to despise.  We never can part with it; the
mind loves its old home: as water to our thirst, so is the rock, the
ground, to our eyes, and hands, and feet.  It is firm water: it is
cold flame: what health, what affinity!  Ever an old friend, ever
like a dear friend and brother, when we chat affectedly with
strangers, comes in this honest face, and takes a grave liberty with
us, and shames us out of our nonsense.  Cities give not the human
senses room enough.  We go out daily and nightly to feed the eyes on
the horizon, and require so much scope, just as we need water for our
bath.  There are all degrees of natural influence, from these
quarantine powers of nature, up to her dearest and gravest
ministrations to the imagination and the soul.  There is the bucket
of cold water from the spring, the wood-fire to which the chilled
traveller rushes for safety, -- and there is the sublime moral of
autumn and of noon.  We nestle in nature, and draw our living as
parasites from her roots and grains, and we receive glances from the
heavenly bodies, which call us to solitude, and foretell the remotest
future.  The blue zenith is the point in which romance and reality
meet.  I think, if we should be rapt away into all that we dream of
heaven, and should converse with Gabriel and Uriel, the upper sky
would be all that would remain of our furniture.

        It seems as if the day was not wholly profane, in which we have
given heed to some natural object.  The fall of snowflakes in a still
air, preserving to each crystal its perfect form; the blowing of
sleet over a wide sheet of water, and over plains, the waving
rye-field, the mimic waving of acres of houstonia, whose innumerable
florets whiten and ripple before the eye; the reflections of trees
and flowers in glassy lakes; the musical steaming odorous south wind,
which converts all trees to windharps; the crackling and spurting of
hemlock in the flames; or of pine logs, which yield glory to the
walls and faces in the sittingroom, -- these are the music and
pictures of the most ancient religion.  My house stands in low land,
with limited outlook, and on the skirt of the village.  But I go with
my friend to the shore of our little river, and with one stroke of
the paddle, I leave the village politics and personalities, yes, and
the world of villages and personalities behind, and pass into a
delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted
man to enter without noviciate and probation.  We penetrate bodily
this incredible beauty; we dip our hands in this painted element: our
eyes are bathed in these lights and forms.  A holiday, a
villeggiatura, a royal revel, the proudest, most heart-rejoicing
festival that valor and beauty, power and taste, ever decked and
enjoyed, establishes itself on the instant.  These sunset clouds,
these delicately emerging stars, with their private and ineffable
glances, signify it and proffer it.  I am taught the poorness of our
invention, the ugliness of towns and palaces.  Art and luxury have
early learned that they must work as enhancement and sequel to this
original beauty.  I am over-instructed for my return.  Henceforth I
shall be hard to please.  I cannot go back to toys.  I am grown
expensive and sophisticated.  I can no longer live without elegance:
but a countryman shall be my master of revels.  He who knows the
most, he who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the
waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these
enchantments, is the rich and royal man.  Only as far as the masters
of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the
height of magnificence.  This is the meaning of their
hanging-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks, and
preserves, to back their faulty personality with these strong
accessories.  I do not wonder that the landed interest should be
invincible in the state with these dangerous auxiliaries.  These
bribe and invite; not kings, not palaces, not men, not women, but
these tender and poetic stars, eloquent of secret promises.  We heard
what the rich man said, we knew of his villa, his grove, his wine,
and his company, but the provocation and point of the invitation came
out of these beguiling stars.  In their soft glances, I see what men
strove to realize in some Versailles, or Paphos, or Ctesiphon.
Indeed, it is the magical lights of the horizon, and the blue sky for
the background, which save all our works of art, which were otherwise
bawbles.  When the rich tax the poor with servility and
obsequiousness, they should consider the effect of men reputed to be
the possessors of nature, on imaginative minds.  Ah! if the rich were
rich as the poor fancy riches!  A boy hears a military band play on
the field at night, and he has kings and queens, and famous chivalry
palpably before him.  He hears the echoes of a horn in a hill
country, in the Notch Mountains, for example, which converts the
mountains into an Aeolian harp, and this supernatural _tiralira_
restores to him the Dorian mythology, Apollo, Diana, and all divine
hunters and huntresses.  Can a musical note be so lofty, so haughtily
beautiful!  To the poor young poet, thus fabulous is his picture of
society; he is loyal; he respects the rich; they are rich for the
sake of his imagination; how poor his fancy would be, if they were
not rich!  That they have some high-fenced grove, which they call a
park; that they live in larger and better-garnished saloons than he
has visited, and go in coaches, keeping only the society of the
elegant, to watering-places, and to distant cities, are the
groundwork from which he has delineated estates of romance, compared
with which their actual possessions are shanties and paddocks.  The
muse herself betrays her son, and enhances the gifts of wealth and
well-born beauty, by a radiation out of the air, and clouds, and
forests that skirt the road, -- a certain haughty favor, as if from
patrician genii to patricians, a kind of aristocracy in nature, a
prince of the power of the air.

        The moral sensibility which makes Edens and Tempes so easily,
may not be always found, but the material landscape is never far off.
We can find these enchantments without visiting the Como Lake, or the
Madeira Islands.  We exaggerate the praises of local scenery.  In
every landscape, the point of astonishment is the meeting of the sky
and the earth, and that is seen from the first hillock as well as
from the top of the Alleghanies.  The stars at night stoop down over
the brownest, homeliest common, with all the spiritual magnificence
which they shed on the Campagna, or on the marble deserts of Egypt.
The uprolled clouds and the colors of morning and evening, will
transfigure maples and alders.  The difference between landscape and
landscape is small, but there is great difference in the beholders.
There is nothing so wonderful in any particular landscape, as the
necessity of being beautiful under which every landscape lies.
Nature cannot be surprised in undress.  Beauty breaks in everywhere.

        But it is very easy to outrun the sympathy of readers on this
topic, which schoolmen called _natura naturata_, or nature passive.
One can hardly speak directly of it without excess.  It is as easy to
broach in mixed companies what is called "the subject of religion." A
susceptible person does not like to indulge his tastes in this kind,
without the apology of some trivial necessity: he goes to see a
wood-lot, or to look at the crops, or to fetch a plant or a mineral
from a remote locality, or he carries a fowling piece, or a
fishing-rod.  I suppose this shame must have a good reason.  A
dilettantism in nature is barren and unworthy.  The fop of fields is
no better than his brother of Broadway.  Men are naturally hunters
and inquisitive of wood-craft, and I suppose that such a gazetteer as
wood-cutters and Indians should furnish facts for, would take place
in the most sumptuous drawingrooms of all the "Wreaths" and "Flora's
chaplets" of the bookshops; yet ordinarily, whether we are too clumsy
for so subtle a topic, or from whatever cause, as soon as men begin
to write on nature, they fall into euphuism.  Frivolity is a most
unfit tribute to Pan, who ought to be represented in the mythology as
the most continent of gods.  I would not be frivolous before the
admirable reserve and prudence of time, yet I cannot renounce the
right of returning often to this old topic.  The multitude of false
churches accredits the true religion.  Literature, poetry, science,
are the homage of man to this unfathomed secret, concerning which no
sane man can affect an indifference or incuriosity.  Nature is loved
by what is best in us.  It is loved as the city of God, although, or
rather because there is no citizen.  The sunset is unlike anything
that is underneath it: it wants men.  And the beauty of nature must
always seem unreal and mocking, until the landscape has human
figures, that are as good as itself.  If there were good men, there
would never be this rapture in nature.  If the king is in the palace,
nobody looks at the walls.  It is when he is gone, and the house is
filled with grooms and gazers, that we turn from the people, to find
relief in the majestic men that are suggested by the pictures and the
architecture.  The critics who complain of the sickly separation of
the beauty of nature from the thing to be done, must consider that
our hunting of the picturesque is inseparable from our protest
against false society.  Man is fallen; nature is erect, and serves as
a differential thermometer, detecting the presence or absence of the
divine sentiment in man.  By fault of our dulness and selfishness, we
are looking up to nature, but when we are convalescent, nature will
look up to us.  We see the foaming brook with compunction: if our own
life flowed with the right energy, we should shame the brook.  The
stream of zeal sparkles with real fire, and not with reflex rays of
sun and moon.  Nature may be as selfishly studied as trade.
Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology; psychology, mesmerism
(with intent to show where our spoons are gone); and anatomy and
physiology, become phrenology and palmistry.

        But taking timely warning, and leaving many things unsaid on
this topic, let us not longer omit our homage to the Efficient
Nature, _natura naturans_, the quick cause, before which all forms
flee as the driven snows, itself secret, its works driven before it
in flocks and multitudes, (as the ancient represented nature by
Proteus, a shepherd,) and in undescribable variety.  It publishes
itself in creatures, reaching from particles and spicula, through
transformation on transformation to the highest symmetries, arriving
at consummate results without a shock or a leap.  A little heat, that
is, a little motion, is all that differences the bald, dazzling
white, and deadly cold poles of the earth from the prolific tropical
climates.  All changes pass without violence, by reason of the two
cardinal conditions of boundless space and boundless time.  Geology
has initiated us into the secularity of nature, and taught us to
disuse our dame-school measures, and exchange our Mosaic and
Ptolemaic schemes for her large style.  We knew nothing rightly, for
want of perspective.  Now we learn what patient periods must round
themselves before the rock is formed, then before the rock is broken,
and the first lichen race has disintegrated the thinnest external
plate into soil, and opened the door for the remote Flora, Fauna,
Ceres, and Pomona, to come in.  How far off yet is the trilobite! how
far the quadruped! how inconceivably remote is man!  All duly arrive,
and then race after race of men.  It is a long way from granite to
the oyster; farther yet to Plato, and the preaching of the
immortality of the soul.  Yet all must come, as surely as the first
atom has two sides.

        Motion or change, and identity or rest, are the first and
second secrets of nature: Motion and Rest.  The whole code of her
laws may be written on the thumbnail, or the signet of a ring.  The
whirling bubble on the surface of a brook, admits us to the secret of
the mechanics of the sky.  Every shell on the beach is a key to it.
A little water made to rotate in a cup explains the formation of the
simpler shells; the addition of matter from year to year, arrives at
last at the most complex forms; and yet so poor is nature with all
her craft, that, from the beginning to the end of the universe, she
has but one stuff, -- but one stuff with its two ends, to serve up
all her dream-like variety.  Compound it how she will, star, sand,
fire, water, tree, man, it is still one stuff, and betrays the same
properties.

        Nature is always consistent, though she feigns to contravene
her own laws.  She keeps her laws, and seems to transcend them.  She
arms and equips an animal to find its place and living in the earth,
and, at the same time, she arms and equips another animal to destroy
it.  Space exists to divide creatures; but by clothing the sides of a
bird with a few feathers, she gives him a petty omnipresence.  The
direction is forever onward, but the artist still goes back for
materials, and begins again with the first elements on the most
advanced stage: otherwise, all goes to ruin.  If we look at her work,
we seem to catch a glance of a system in transition.  Plants are the
young of the world, vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever
upward towards consciousness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem
to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground.  The animal is
the novice and probationer of a more advanced order.  The men, though
young, having tasted the first drop from the cup of thought, are
already dissipated: the maples and ferns are still uncorrupt; yet no
doubt, when they come to consciousness, they too will curse and
swear.  Flowers so strictly belong to youth, that we adult men soon
come to feel, that their beautiful generations concern not us: we
have had our day; now let the children have theirs.  The flowers jilt
us, and we are old bachelors with our ridiculous tenderness.

        Things are so strictly related, that according to the skill of
the eye, from any one object the parts and properties of any other
may be predicted.  If we had eyes to see it, a bit of stone from the
city wall would certify us of the necessity that man must exist, as
readily as the city.  That identity makes us all one, and reduces to
nothing great intervals on our customary scale.  We talk of
deviations from natural life, as if artificial life were not also
natural.  The smoothest curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace
has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white bear, omnipotent
to its own ends, and is directly related, there amid essences and
billetsdoux, to Himmaleh mountain-chains, and the axis of the globe.
If we consider how much we are nature's, we need not be superstitious
about towns, as if that terrific or benefic force did not find us
there also, and fashion cities.  Nature who made the mason, made the
house.  We may easily hear too much of rural influences.  The cool
disengaged air of natural objects, makes them enviable to us, chafed
and irritable creatures with red faces, and we think we shall be as
grand as they, if we camp out and eat roots; but let us be men
instead of woodchucks, and the oak and the elm shall gladly serve us,
though we sit in chairs of ivory on carpets of silk.

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

        If the identity expresses organized rest, the counter action
runs also into organization.  The astronomers said, `Give us matter,
and a little motion, and we will construct the universe.  It is not
enough that we should have matter, we must also have a single
impulse, one shove to launch the mass, and generate the harmony of
the centrifugal and centripetal forces.  Once heave the ball from the
hand, and we can show how all this mighty order grew.' -- `A very
unreasonable postulate,' said the metaphysicians, `and a plain
begging of the question.  Could you not prevail to know the genesis
of projection, as well as the continuation of it?' Nature, meanwhile,
had not waited for the discussion, but, right or wrong, bestowed the
impulse, and the balls rolled.  It was no great affair, a mere push,
but the astronomers were right in making much of it, for there is no
end to the consequences of the act.  That famous aboriginal push
propagates itself through all the balls of the system, and through
every atom of every ball, through all the races of creatures, and
through the history and performances of every individual.
Exaggeration is in the course of things.  Nature sends no creature,
no man into the world, without adding a small excess of his proper
quality.  Given the planet, it is still necessary to add the impulse;
so, to every creature nature added a little violence of direction in
its proper path, a shove to put it on its way; in every instance, a
slight generosity, a drop too much.  Without electricity the air
would rot, and without this violence of direction, which men and
women have, without a spice of bigot and fanatic, no excitement, no
efficiency.  We aim above the mark, to hit the mark.  Every act hath
some falsehood of exaggeration in it.  And when now and then comes
along some sad, sharp-eyed man, who sees how paltry a game is played,
and refuses to play, but blabs the secret; -- how then? is the bird
flown?  O no, the wary Nature sends a new troop of fairer forms, of
lordlier youths, with a little more excess of direction to hold them
fast to their several aim; makes them a little wrongheaded in that
direction in which they are rightest, and on goes the game again with
new whirl, for a generation or two more.  The child with his sweet
pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound,
without any power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a
whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon, or a gingerbread-dog,
individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with
every new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue, which
this day of continual pretty madness has incurred.  But Nature has
answered her purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic.  She has tasked
every faculty, and has secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily
frame, by all these attitudes and exertions, -- an end of the first
importance, which could not be trusted to any care less perfect than
her own.  This glitter, this opaline lustre plays round the top of
every toy to his eye, to ensure his fidelity, and he is deceived to
his good.  We are made alive and kept alive by the same arts.  Let
the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of
living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen.  The
vegetable life does not content itself with casting from the flower
or the tree a single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a
prodigality of seeds, that, if thousands perish, thousands may plant
themselves, that hundreds may come up, that tens may live to
maturity, that, at least, one may replace the parent.  All things
betray the same calculated profusion.  The excess of fear with which
the animal frame is hedged round, shrinking from cold, starting at
sight of a snake, or at a sudden noise, protects us, through a
multitude of groundless alarms, from some one real danger at last.
The lover seeks in marriage his private felicity and perfection, with
no prospective end; and nature hides in his happiness her own end,
namely, progeny, or the perpetuity of the race.

        But the craft with which the world is made, runs also into the
mind and character of men.  No man is quite sane; each has a vein of
folly in his composition, a slight determination of blood to the
head, to make sure of holding him hard to some one point which nature
had taken to heart.  Great causes are never tried on their merits;
but the cause is reduced to particulars to suit the size of the
partizans, and the contention is ever hottest on minor matters.  Not
less remarkable is the overfaith of each man in the importance of
what he has to do or say.  The poet, the prophet, has a higher value
for what he utters than any hearer, and therefore it gets spoken.
The strong, self-complacent Luther declares with an emphasis, not to
be mistaken, that "God himself cannot do without wise men." Jacob
Behmen and George Fox betray their egotism in the pertinacity of
their controversial tracts, and James Naylor once suffered himself to
be worshipped as the Christ.  Each prophet comes presently to
identify himself with his thought, and to esteem his hat and shoes
sacred.  However this may discredit such persons with the judicious,
it helps them with the people, as it gives heat, pungency, and
publicity to their words.  A similar experience is not infrequent in
private life.  Each young and ardent person writes a diary, in which,
when the hours of prayer and penitence arrive, he inscribes his soul.
The pages thus written are, to him, burning and fragrant: he reads
them on his knees by midnight and by the morning star; he wets them
with his tears: they are sacred; too good for the world, and hardly
yet to be shown to the dearest friend.  This is the man-child that is
born to the soul, and her life still circulates in the babe.  The
umbilical cord has not yet been cut.  After some time has elapsed, he
begins to wish to admit his friend to this hallowed experience, and
with hesitation, yet with firmness, exposes the pages to his eye.
Will they not burn his eyes?  The friend coldly turns them over, and
passes from the writing to conversation, with easy transition, which
strikes the other party with astonishment and vexation.  He cannot
suspect the writing itself.  Days and nights of fervid life, of
communion with angels of darkness and of light, have engraved their
shadowy characters on that tear-stained book.  He suspects the
intelligence or the heart of his friend.  Is there then no friend?
He cannot yet credit that one may have impressive experience, and yet
may not know how to put his private fact into literature; and perhaps
the discovery that wisdom has other tongues and ministers than we,
that though we should hold our peace, the truth would not the less be
spoken, might check injuriously the flames of our zeal.  A man can
only speak, so long as he does not feel his speech to be partial and
inadequate.  It is partial, but he does not see it to be so, whilst
he utters it.  As soon as he is released from the instinctive and
particular, and sees its partiality, he shuts his mouth in disgust.
For, no man can write anything, who does not think that what he
writes is for the time the history of the world; or do anything well,
who does not esteem his work to be of importance.  My work may be of
none, but I must not think it of none, or I shall not do it with
impunity.

        In like manner, there is throughout nature something mocking,
something that leads us on and on, but arrives nowhere, keeps no
faith with us.  All promise outruns the performance.  We live in a
system of approximations.  Every end is prospective of some other
end, which is also temporary; a round and final success nowhere.  We
are encamped in nature, not domesticated.  Hunger and thirst lead us
on to eat and to drink; but bread and wine, mix and cook them how you
will, leave us hungry and thirsty, after the stomach is full.  It is
the same with all our arts and performances.  Our music, our poetry,
our language itself are not satisfactions, but suggestions.  The
hunger for wealth, which reduces the planet to a garden, fools the
eager pursuer.  What is the end sought?  Plainly to secure the ends
of good sense and beauty, from the intrusion of deformity or
vulgarity of any kind.  But what an operose method!  What a train of
means to secure a little conversation!  This palace of brick and
stone, these servants, this kitchen, these stables, horses and
equipage, this bank-stock, and file of mortgages; trade to all the
world, country-house and cottage by the waterside, all for a little
conversation, high, clear, and spiritual!  Could it not be had as
well by beggars on the highway?  No, all these things came from
successive efforts of these beggars to remove friction from the
wheels of life, and give opportunity.  Conversation, character, were
the avowed ends; wealth was good as it appeased the animal cravings,
cured the smoky chimney, silenced the creaking door, brought friends
together in a warm and quiet room, and kept the children and the
dinner-table in a different apartment.  Thought, virtue, beauty, were
the ends; but it was known that men of thought and virtue sometimes
had the headache, or wet feet, or could lose good time whilst the
room was getting warm in winter days.  Unluckily, in the exertions
necessary to remove these inconveniences, the main attention has been
diverted to this object; the old aims have been lost sight of, and to
remove friction has come to be the end.  That is the ridicule of rich
men, and Boston, London, Vienna, and now the governments generally of
the world, are cities and governments of the rich, and the masses are
not men, but _poor men_, that is, men who would be rich; this is the
ridicule of the class, that they arrive with pains and sweat and fury
nowhere; when all is done, it is for nothing.  They are like one who
has interrupted the conversation of a company to make his speech, and
now has forgotten what he went to say.  The appearance strikes the
eye everywhere of an aimless society, of aimless nations.  Were the
ends of nature so great and cogent, as to exact this immense
sacrifice of men?

        Quite analogous to the deceits in life, there is, as might be
expected, a similar effect on the eye from the face of external
nature.  There is in woods and waters a certain enticement and
flattery, together with a failure to yield a present satisfaction.
This disappointment is felt in every landscape.  I have seen the
softness and beauty of the summer-clouds floating feathery overhead,
enjoying, as it seemed, their height and privilege of motion, whilst
yet they appeared not so much the drapery of this place and hour, as
forelooking to some pavilions and gardens of festivity beyond.  It is
an odd jealousy: but the poet finds himself not near enough to his
object.  The pine-tree, the river, the bank of flowers before him,
does not seem to be nature.  Nature is still elsewhere.  This or this
is but outskirt and far-off reflection and echo of the triumph that
has passed by, and is now at its glancing splendor and heyday,
perchance in the neighboring fields, or, if you stand in the field,
then in the adjacent woods.  The present object shall give you this
sense of stillness that follows a pageant which has just gone by.
What splendid distance, what recesses of ineffable pomp and
loveliness in the sunset!  But who can go where they are, or lay his
hand or plant his foot thereon?  Off they fall from the round world
forever and ever.  It is the same among the men and women, as among
the silent trees; always a referred existence, an absence, never a
presence and satisfaction.  Is it, that beauty can never be grasped?
in persons and in landscape is equally inaccessible?  The accepted
and betrothed lover has lost the wildest charm of his maiden in her
acceptance of him.  She was heaven whilst he pursued her as a star:
she cannot be heaven, if she stoops to such a one as he.

        What shall we say of this omnipresent appearance of that first
projectile impulse, of this flattery and baulking of so many
well-meaning creatures?  Must we not suppose somewhere in the
universe a slight treachery and derision?  Are we not engaged to a
serious resentment of this use that is made of us?  Are we tickled
trout, and fools of nature?  One look at the face of heaven and earth
lays all petulance at rest, and soothes us to wiser convictions.  To
the intelligent, nature converts itself into a vast promise, and will
not be rashly explained.  Her secret is untold.  Many and many an
Oedipus arrives: he has the whole mystery teeming in his brain.
Alas! the same sorcery has spoiled his skill; no syllable can he
shape on his lips.  Her mighty orbit vaults like the fresh rainbow
into the deep, but no archangel's wing was yet strong enough to
follow it, and report of the return of the curve.  But it also
appears, that our actions are seconded and disposed to greater
conclusions than we designed.  We are escorted on every hand through
life by spiritual agents, and a beneficent purpose lies in wait for
us.  We cannot bandy words with nature, or deal with her as we deal
with persons.  If we measure our individual forces against hers, we
may easily feel as if we were the sport of an insuperable destiny.
But if, instead of identifying ourselves with the work, we feel that
the soul of the workman streams through us, we shall find the peace
of the morning dwelling first in our hearts, and the fathomless
powers of gravity and chemistry, and, over them, of life, preexisting
within us in their highest form.

        The uneasiness which the thought of our helplessness in the
chain of causes occasions us, results from looking too much at one
condition of nature, namely, Motion.  But the drag is never taken
from the wheel.  Wherever the impulse exceeds, the Rest or Identity
insinuates its compensation.  All over the wide fields of earth grows
the prunella or self-heal.  After every foolish day we sleep off the
fumes and furies of its hours; and though we are always engaged with
particulars, and often enslaved to them, we bring with us to every
experiment the innate universal laws.  These, while they exist in the
mind as ideas, stand around us in nature forever embodied, a present
sanity to expose and cure the insanity of men.  Our servitude to
particulars betrays into a hundred foolish expectations.  We
anticipate a new era from the invention of a locomotive, or a
balloon; the new engine brings with it the old checks.  They say that
by electro-magnetism, your sallad shall be grown from the seed,
whilst your fowl is roasting for dinner: it is a symbol of our modern
aims and endeavors,---of our condensation and acceleration of
objects: but nothing is gained: nature cannot be cheated: man's life
is but seventy sallads long, grow they swift or grow they slow.  In
these checks and impossibilities, however, we find our advantage, not
less than in the impulses.  Let the victory fall where it will, we
are on that side.  And the knowledge that we traverse the whole scale
of being, from the centre to the poles of nature, and have some stake
in every possibility, lends that sublime lustre to death, which
philosophy and religion have too outwardly and literally striven to
express in the popular doctrine of the immortality of the soul.  The
reality is more excellent than the report.  Here is no ruin, no
discontinuity, no spent ball.  The divine circulations never rest nor
linger.  Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a
thought again, as ice becomes water and gas.  The world is mind
precipitated, and the volatile essence is forever escaping again into
the state of free thought.  Hence the virtue and pungency of the
influence on the mind, of natural objects, whether inorganic or
organized.  Man imprisoned, man crystallized, man vegetative, speaks
to man impersonated.  That power which does not respect quantity,
which makes the whole and the particle its equal channel, delegates
its smile to the morning, and distils its essence into every drop of
rain.  Every moment instructs, and every object: for wisdom is
infused into every form.  It has been poured into us as blood; it
convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us in
dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess
its essence, until after a long time.

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

        In dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its
institution are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were
born: that they are not superior to the citizen: that every one of
them was once the act of a single man: every law and usage was a
man's expedient to meet a particular case: that they all are
imitable, all alterable; we may make as good; we may make better.
Society is an illusion to the young citizen.  It lies before him in
rigid repose, with certain names, men, and institutions, rooted like
oak-trees to the centre, round which all arrange themselves the best
they can.  But the old statesman knows that society is fluid; there
are no such roots and centres; but any particle may suddenly become
the centre of the movement, and compel the system to gyrate round it,
as every man of strong will, like Pisistratus, or Cromwell, does for
a time, and every man of truth, like Plato, or Paul, does forever.
But politics rest on necessary foundations, and cannot be treated
with levity.  Republics abound in young civilians, who believe that
the laws make the city, that grave modifications of the policy and
modes of living, and employments of the population, that commerce,
education, and religion, may be voted in or out; and that any
measure, though it were absurd, may be imposed on a people, if only
you can get sufficient voices to make it a law.  But the wise know
that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the
twisting; that the State must follow, and not lead the character and
progress of the citizen; the strongest usurper is quickly got rid of;
and they only who build on Ideas, build for eternity; and that the
form of government which prevails, is the expression of what
cultivation exists in the population which permits it.  The law is
only a memorandum.  We are superstitious, and esteem the statute
somewhat: so much life as it has in the character of living men, is
its force.  The statute stands there to say, yesterday we agreed so
and so, but how feel ye this article today?  Our statute is a
currency, which we stamp with our own portrait: it soon becomes
unrecognizable, and in process of time will return to the mint.
Nature is not democratic, nor limited-monarchical, but despotic, and
will not be fooled or abated of any jot of her authority, by the
pertest of her sons: and as fast as the public mind is opened to more
intelligence, the code is seen to be brute and stammering.  It speaks
not articulately, and must be made to.  Meantime the education of the
general mind never stops.  The reveries of the true and simple are
prophetic.  What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and
paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently
be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as
grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall
be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it
gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.  The history of
the State sketches in coarse outline the progress of thought, and
follows at a distance the delicacy of culture and of aspiration.

        The theory of politics, which has possessed the mind of men,
and which they have expressed the best they could in their laws and
in their revolutions, considers persons and property as the two
objects for whose protection government exists.  Of persons, all have
equal rights, in virtue of being identical in nature.  This interest,
of course, with its whole power demands a democracy.  Whilst the
rights of all as persons are equal, in virtue of their access to
reason, their rights in property are very unequal.  One man owns his
clothes, and another owns a county.  This accident, depending,
primarily, on the skill and virtue of the parties, of which there is
every degree, and, secondarily, on patrimony, falls unequally, and
its rights, of course, are unequal.  Personal rights, universally the
same, demand a government framed on the ratio of the census: property
demands a government framed on the ratio of owners and of owning.
Laban, who has flocks and herds, wishes them looked after by an
officer on the frontiers, lest the Midianites shall drive them off,
and pays a tax to that end.  Jacob has no flocks or herds, and no
fear of the Midianites, and pays no tax to the officer.  It seemed
fit that Laban and Jacob should have equal rights to elect the
officer, who is to defend their persons, but that Laban, and not
Jacob, should elect the officer who is to guard the sheep and cattle.
And, if question arise whether additional officers or watch-towers
should be provided, must not Laban and Isaac, and those who must sell
part of their herds to buy protection for the rest, judge better of
this, and with more right, than Jacob, who, because he is a youth and
a traveller, eats their bread and not his own.

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

        But property passes through donation or inheritance to those
who do not create it.  Gift, in one case, makes it as really the new
owner's, as labor made it the first owner's: in the other case, of
patrimony, the law makes an ownership, which will be valid in each
man's view according to the estimate which he sets on the public
tranquillity.

        It was not, however, found easy to embody the readily admitted
principle, that property should make law for property, and persons
for persons: since persons and property mixed themselves in every
transaction.  At last it seemed settled, that the rightful
distinction was, that the proprietors should have more elective
franchise than non-proprietors, on the Spartan principle of "calling
that which is just, equal; not that which is equal, just."

        That principle no longer looks so self-evident as it appeared
in former times, partly, because doubts have arisen whether too much
weight had not been allowed in the laws, to property, and such a
structure given to our usages, as allowed the rich to encroach on the
poor, and to keep them poor; but mainly, because there is an
instinctive sense, however obscure and yet inarticulate, that the
whole constitution of property, on its present tenures, is injurious,
and its influence on persons deteriorating and degrading; that truly,
the only interest for the consideration of the State, is persons:
that property will always follow persons; that the highest end of
government is the culture of men: and if men can be educated, the
institutions will share their improvement, and the moral sentiment
will write the law of the land.

        If it be not easy to settle the equity of this question, the
peril is less when we take note of our natural defences.  We are kept
by better guards than the vigilance of such magistrates as we
commonly elect.  Society always consists, in greatest part, of young
and foolish persons.  The old, who have seen through the hypocrisy of
courts and statesmen, die, and leave no wisdom to their sons.  They
believe their own newspaper, as their fathers did at their age.  With
such an ignorant and deceivable majority, States would soon run to
ruin, but that there are limitations, beyond which the folly and
ambition of governors cannot go.  Things have their laws, as well as
men; and things refuse to be trifled with.  Property will be
protected.  Corn will not grow, unless it is planted and manured; but
the farmer will not plant or hoe it, unless the chances are a hundred
to one, that he will cut and harvest it.  Under any forms, persons
and property must and will have their just sway.  They exert their
power, as steadily as matter its attraction.  Cover up a pound of
earth never so cunningly, divide and subdivide it; melt it to liquid,
convert it to gas; it will always weigh a pound: it will always
attract and resist other matter, by the full virtue of one pound
weight; -- and the attributes of a person, his wit and his moral
energy, will exercise, under any law or extinguishing tyranny, their
proper force, -- if not overtly, then covertly; if not for the law,
then against it; with right, or by might.

        The boundaries of personal influence it is impossible to fix,
as persons are organs of moral or supernatural force.  Under the
dominion of an idea, which possesses the minds of multitudes, as
civil freedom, or the religious sentiment, the powers of persons are
no longer subjects of calculation.  A nation of men unanimously bent
on freedom, or conquest, can easily confound the arithmetic of
statists, and achieve extravagant actions, out of all proportion to
their means; as, the Greeks, the Saracens, the Swiss, the Americans,
and the French have done.

        In like manner, to every particle of property belongs its own
attraction.  A cent is the representative of a certain quantity of
corn or other commodity.  Its value is in the necessities of the
animal man.  It is so much warmth, so much bread, so much water, so
much land.  The law may do what it will with the owner of property,
its just power will still attach to the cent.  The law may in a mad
freak say, that all shall have power except the owners of property:
they shall have no vote.  Nevertheless, by a higher law, the property
will, year after year, write every statute that respects property.
The non-proprietor will be the scribe of the proprietor.  What the
owners wish to do, the whole power of property will do, either
through the law, or else in defiance of it.  Of course, I speak of
all the property, not merely of the great estates.  When the rich are
outvoted, as frequently happens, it is the joint treasury of the poor
which exceeds their accumulations.  Every man owns something, if it
is only a cow, or a wheelbarrow, or his arms, and so has that
property to dispose of.

        The same necessity which secures the rights of person and
property against the malignity or folly of the magistrate, determines
the form and methods of governing, which are proper to each nation,
and to its habit of thought, and nowise transferable to other states
of society.  In this country, we are very vain of our political
institutions, which are singular in this, that they sprung, within
the memory of living men, from the character and condition of the
people, which they still express with sufficient fidelity, -- and we
ostentatiously prefer them to any other in history.  They are not
better, but only fitter for us.  We may be wise in asserting the
advantage in modern times of the democratic form, but to other states
of society, in which religion consecrated the monarchical, that and
not this was expedient.  Democracy is better for us, because the
religious sentiment of the present time accords better with it.  Born
democrats, we are nowise qualified to judge of monarchy, which, to
our fathers living in the monarchical idea, was also relatively
right.  But our institutions, though in coincidence with the spirit
of the age, have not any exemption from the practical defects which
have discredited other forms.  Every actual State is corrupt.  Good
men must not obey the laws too well.  What satire on government can
equal the severity of censure conveyed in the word _politic_, which
now for ages has signified _cunning_, intimating that the State is a
trick?

        The same benign necessity and the same practical abuse appear
in the parties into which each State divides itself, of opponents and
defenders of the administration of the government.  Parties are also
founded on instincts, and have better guides to their own humble aims
than the sagacity of their leaders.  They have nothing perverse in
their origin, but rudely mark some real and lasting relation.  We
might as wisely reprove the east wind, or the frost, as a political
party, whose members, for the most part, could give no account of
their position, but stand for the defence of those interests in which
they find themselves.  Our quarrel with them begins, when they quit
this deep natural ground at the bidding of some leader, and, obeying
personal considerations, throw themselves into the maintenance and
defence of points, nowise belonging to their system.  A party is
perpetually corrupted by personality.  Whilst we absolve the
association from dishonesty, we cannot extend the same charity to
their leaders.  They reap the rewards of the docility and zeal of the
masses which they direct.  Ordinarily, our parties are parties of
circumstance, and not of principle; as, the planting interest in
conflict with the commercial; the party of capitalists, and that of
operatives; parties which are identical in their moral character, and
which can easily change ground with each other, in the support of
many of their measures.  Parties of principle, as, religious sects,
or the party of free-trade, of universal suffrage, of abolition of
slavery, of abolition of capital punishment, degenerate into
personalities, or would inspire enthusiasm.  The vice of our leading
parties in this country (which may be cited as a fair specimen of
these societies of opinion) is, that they do not plant themselves on
the deep and necessary grounds to which they are respectively
entitled, but lash themselves to fury in the carrying of some local
and momentary measure, nowise useful to the commonwealth.  Of the two
great parties, which, at this hour, almost share the nation between
them, I should say, that, one has the best cause, and the other
contains the best men.  The philosopher, the poet, or the religious
man, will, of course, wish to cast his vote with the democrat, for
free-trade, for wide suffrage, for the abolition of legal cruelties
in the penal code, and for facilitating in every manner the access of
the young and the poor to the sources of wealth and power.  But he
can rarely accept the persons whom the so-called popular party
propose to him as representatives of these liberalities.  They have
not at heart the ends which give to the name of democracy what hope
and virtue are in it.  The spirit of our American radicalism is
destructive and aimless: it is not loving; it has no ulterior and
divine ends; but is destructive only out of hatred and selfishness.
On the other side, the conservative party, composed of the most
moderate, able, and cultivated part of the population, is timid, and
merely defensive of property.  It vindicates no right, it aspires to
no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes no generous policy, it
does not build, nor write, nor cherish the arts, nor foster religion,
nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor emancipate the
slave, nor befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the immigrant.  From
neither party, when in power, has the world any benefit to expect in
science, art, or humanity, at all commensurate with the resources of
the nation.

        I do not for these defects despair of our republic.  We are not
at the mercy of any waves of chance.  In the strife of ferocious
parties, human nature always finds itself cherished, as the children
of the convicts at Botany Bay are found to have as healthy a moral
sentiment as other children.  Citizens of feudal states are alarmed
at our democratic institutions lapsing into anarchy; and the older
and more cautious among ourselves are learning from Europeans to look
with some terror at our turbulent freedom.  It is said that in our
license of construing the Constitution, and in the despotism of
public opinion, we have no anchor; and one foreign observer thinks he
has found the safeguard in the sanctity of Marriage among us; and
another thinks he has found it in our Calvinism.  Fisher Ames
expressed the popular security more wisely, when he compared a
monarchy and a republic, saying, "that a monarchy is a merchantman,
which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock, and go to the
bottom; whilst a republic is a raft, which would never sink, but then
your feet are always in water." No forms can have any dangerous
importance, whilst we are befriended by the laws of things.  It makes
no difference how many tons weight of atmosphere presses on our
heads, so long as the same pressure resists it within the lungs.
Augment the mass a thousand fold, it cannot begin to crush us, as
long as reaction is equal to action.  The fact of two poles, of two
forces, centripetal and centrifugal, is universal, and each force by
its own activity develops the other.  Wild liberty develops iron
conscience.  Want of liberty, by strengthening law and decorum,
stupefies conscience.  `Lynch-law' prevails only where there is
greater hardihood and self-subsistency in the leaders.  A mob cannot
be a permanency: everybody's interest requires that it should not
exist, and only justice satisfies all.

        We must trust infinitely to the beneficent necessity which
shines through all laws.  Human nature expresses itself in them as
characteristically as in statues, or songs, or railroads, and an
abstract of the codes of nations would be a transcript of the common
conscience.  Governments have their origin in the moral identity of
men.  Reason for one is seen to be reason for another, and for every
other.  There is a middle measure which satisfies all parties, be
they never so many, or so resolute for their own.  Every man finds a
sanction for his simplest claims and deeds in decisions of his own
mind, which he calls Truth and Holiness.  In these decisions all the
citizens find a perfect agreement, and only in these; not in what is
good to eat, good to wear, good use of time, or what amount of land,
or of public aid, each is entitled to claim.  This truth and justice
men presently endeavor to make application of, to the measuring of
land, the apportionment of service, the protection of life and
property.  Their first endeavors, no doubt, are very awkward.  Yet
absolute right is the first governor; or, every government is an
impure theocracy.  The idea, after which each community is aiming to
make and mend its law, is, the will of the wise man.  The wise man,
it cannot find in nature, and it makes awkward but earnest efforts to
secure his government by contrivance; as, by causing the entire
people to give their voices on every measure; or, by a double choice
to get the representation of the whole; or, by a selection of the
best citizens; or, to secure the advantages of efficiency and
internal peace, by confiding the government to one, who may himself
select his agents.  All forms of government symbolize an immortal
government, common to all dynasties and independent of numbers,
perfect where two men exist, perfect where there is only one man.

        Every man's nature is a sufficient advertisement to him of the
character of his fellows.  My right and my wrong, is their right and
their wrong.  Whilst I do what is fit for me, and abstain from what
is unfit, my neighbor and I shall often agree in our means, and work
together for a time to one end.  But whenever I find my dominion over
myself not sufficient for me, and undertake the direction of him
also, I overstep the truth, and come into false relations to him.  I
may have so much more skill or strength than he, that he cannot
express adequately his sense of wrong, but it is a lie, and hurts
like a lie both him and me.  Love and nature cannot maintain the
assumption: it must be executed by a practical lie, namely, by force.
This undertaking for another, is the blunder which stands in colossal
ugliness in the governments of the world.  It is the same thing in
numbers, as in a pair, only not quite so intelligible.  I can see
well enough a great difference between my setting myself down to a
self-control, and my going to make somebody else act after my views:
but when a quarter of the human race assume to tell me what I must
do, I may be too much disturbed by the circumstances to see so
clearly the absurdity of their command.  Therefore, all public ends
look vague and quixotic beside private ones.  For, any laws but those
which men make for themselves, are laughable.  If I put myself in the
place of my child, and we stand in one thought, and see that things
are thus or thus, that perception is law for him and me.  We are both
there, both act.  But if, without carrying him into the thought, I
look over into his plot, and, guessing how it is with him, ordain
this or that, he will never obey me.  This is the history of
governments, -- one man does something which is to bind another.  A
man who cannot be acquainted with me, taxes me; looking from afar at
me, ordains that a part of my labor shall go to this or that
whimsical end, not as I, but as he happens to fancy.  Behold the
consequence.  Of all debts, men are least willing to pay the taxes.
What a satire is this on government!  Everywhere they think they get
their money's worth, except for these.

        Hence, the less government we have, the better, -- the fewer
laws, and the less confided power.  The antidote to this abuse of
formal Government, is, the influence of private character, the growth
of the Individual; the appearance of the principal to supersede the
proxy; the appearance of the wise man, of whom the existing
government, is, it must be owned, but a shabby imitation.  That which
all things tend to educe, which freedom, cultivation, intercourse,
revolutions, go to form and deliver, is character; that is the end of
nature, to reach unto this coronation of her king.  To educate the
wise man, the State exists; and with the appearance of the wise man,
the State expires.  The appearance of character makes the State
unnecessary.  The wise man is the State.  He needs no army, fort, or
navy, -- he loves men too well; no bribe, or feast, or palace, to
draw friends to him; no vantage ground, no favorable circumstance.
He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he
is a prophet; no statute book, for he has the lawgiver; no money, for
he is value; no road, for he is at home where he is; no experience,
for the life of the creator shoots through him, and looks from his
eyes.  He has no personal friends, for he who has the spell to draw
the prayer and piety of all men unto him, needs not husband and
educate a few, to share with him a select and poetic life.  His
relation to men is angelic; his memory is myrrh to them; his
presence, frankincense and flowers.

        We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet
only at the cock-crowing and the morning star.  In our barbarous
society the influence of character is in its infancy.  As a political
power, as the rightful lord who is to tumble all rulers from their
chairs, its presence is hardly yet suspected.  Malthus and Ricardo
quite omit it; the Annual Register is silent; in the Conversations'
Lexicon, it is not set down; the President's Message, the Queen's
Speech, have not mentioned it; and yet it is never nothing.  Every
thought which genius and piety throw into the world, alters the
world.  The gladiators in the lists of power feel, through all their
frocks of force and simulation, the presence of worth.  I think the
very strife of trade and ambition are confession of this divinity;
and successes in those fields are the poor amends, the fig-leaf with
which the shamed soul attempts to hide its nakedness.  I find the
like unwilling homage in all quarters.  It is because we know how
much is due from us, that we are impatient to show some petty talent
as a substitute for worth.  We are haunted by a conscience of this
right to grandeur of character, and are false to it.  But each of us
has some talent, can do somewhat useful, or graceful, or formidable,
or amusing, or lucrative.  That we do, as an apology to others and to
ourselves, for not reaching the mark of a good and equal life.  But
it does not satisfy _us_, whilst we thrust it on the notice of our
companions.  It may throw dust in their eyes, but does not smooth our
own brow, or give us the tranquillity of the strong when we walk
abroad.  We do penance as we go.  Our talent is a sort of expiation,
and we are constrained to reflect on our splendid moment, with a
certain humiliation, as somewhat too fine, and not as one act of many
acts, a fair expression of our permanent energy.  Most persons of
ability meet in society with a kind of tacit appeal.  Each seems to
say, `I am not all here.' Senators and presidents have climbed so
high with pain enough, not because they think the place specially
agreeable, but as an apology for real worth, and to vindicate their
manhood in our eyes.  This conspicuous chair is their compensation to
themselves for being of a poor, cold, hard nature.  They must do what
they can.  Like one class of forest animals, they have nothing but a
prehensile tail: climb they must, or crawl.  If a man found himself
so rich-natured that he could enter into strict relations with the
best persons, and make life serene around him by the dignity and
sweetness of his behavior, could he afford to circumvent the favor of
the caucus and the press, and covet relations so hollow and pompous,
as those of a politician?  Surely nobody would be a charlatan, who
could afford to be sincere.

        The tendencies of the times favor the idea of self-government,
and leave the individual, for all code, to the rewards and penalties
of his own constitution, which work with more energy than we believe,
whilst we depend on artificial restraints.  The movement in this
direction has been very marked in modern history.  Much has been
blind and discreditable, but the nature of the revolution is not
affected by the vices of the revolters; for this is a purely moral
force.  It was never adopted by any party in history, neither can be.
It separates the individual from all party, and unites him, at the
same time, to the race.  It promises a recognition of higher rights
than those of personal freedom, or the security of property.  A man
has a right to be employed, to be trusted, to be loved, to be
revered.  The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been
tried.  We must not imagine that all things are lapsing into
confusion, if every tender protestant be not compelled to bear his
part in certain social conventions: nor doubt that roads can be
built, letters carried, and the fruit of labor secured, when the
government of force is at an end.  Are our methods now so excellent
that all competition is hopeless?  Could not a nation of friends even
devise better ways?  On the other hand, let not the most conservative
and timid fear anything from a premature surrender of the bayonet,
and the system of force.  For, according to the order of nature,
which is quite superior to our will, it stands thus; there will
always be a government of force, where men are selfish; and when they
are pure enough to abjure the code of force, they will be wise enough
to see how these public ends of the post-office, of the highway, of
commerce, and the exchange of property, of museums and libraries, of
institutions of art and science, can be answered.

        We live in a very low state of the world, and pay unwilling
tribute to governments founded on force.  There is not, among the
most religious and instructed men of the most religious and civil
nations, a reliance on the moral sentiment, and a sufficient belief
in the unity of things to persuade them that society can be
maintained without artificial restraints, as well as the solar
system; or that the private citizen might be reasonable, and a good
neighbor, without the hint of a jail or a confiscation.  What is
strange too, there never was in any man sufficient faith in the power
of rectitude, to inspire him with the broad design of renovating the
State on the principle of right and love.  All those who have
pretended this design, have been partial reformers, and have admitted
in some manner the supremacy of the bad State.  I do not call to mind
a single human being who has steadily denied the authority of the
laws, on the simple ground of his own moral nature.  Such designs,
full of genius and full of fate as they are, are not entertained
except avowedly as air-pictures.  If the individual who exhibits
them, dare to think them practicable, he disgusts scholars and
churchmen; and men of talent, and women of superior sentiments,
cannot hide their contempt.  Not the less does nature continue to
fill the heart of youth with suggestions of this enthusiasm, and
there are now men, -- if indeed I can speak in the plural number, --
more exactly, I will say, I have just been conversing with one man,
to whom no weight of adverse experience will make it for a moment
appear impossible, impossible, that thousands of human beings might
exercise towards each other the grandest and simplest sentiments, as
well as a knot of friends, or a pair of lovers.

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

 
 
        ESSAY VIII _Nominalist and Realist_

        I cannot often enough say, that a man is only a relative and
representative nature.  Each is a hint of the truth, but far enough
from being that truth, which yet he quite newly and inevitably
suggests to us.  If I seek it in him, I shall not find it.  Could any
man conduct into me the pure stream of that which he pretends to be!
Long afterwards, I find that quality elsewhere which he promised me.
The genius of the Platonists, is intoxicating to the student, yet how
few particulars of it can I detach from all their books.  The man
momentarily stands for the thought, but will not bear examination;
and a society of men will cursorily represent well enough a certain
quality and culture, for example, chivalry or beauty of manners, but
separate them, and there is no gentleman and no lady in the group.
The least hint sets us on the pursuit of a character, which no man
realizes.  We have such exorbitant eyes, that on seeing the smallest
arc, we complete the curve, and when the curtain is lifted from the
diagram which it seemed to veil, we are vexed to find that no more
was drawn, than just that fragment of an arc which we first beheld.
We are greatly too liberal in our construction of each other's
faculty and promise.  Exactly what the parties have already done,
they shall do again; but that which we inferred from their nature and
inception, they will not do.  That is in nature, but not in them.
That happens in the world, which we often witness in a public debate.
Each of the speakers eonsmustfurnishxpresses himself imperfectly: no
one of them hears much that another says, such is the preoccupation
of mind of each; and the audience, who have only to hear and not to
speak, judge very wisely and superiorly how wrongheaded and unskilful
is each of the debaters to his own affair.  Great men or men of great
gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never.  When I meet
a pure intellectual force, or a generosity of affection, I believe,
here then is man; and am presently mortified by the discovery, that
this individual is no more available to his own or to the general
ends, than his companions; because the power which drew my respect,
is not supported by the total symphony of his talents.  All persons
exist to society by some shining trait of beauty or utility, which
they have.  We borrow the proportions of the man from that one fine
feature, and finish the portrait symmetrically; which is false; for
the rest of his body is small or deformed.  I observe a person who
makes a good public appearance, and conclude thence the perfection of
his private character, on which this is based; but he has no private
character.  He is a graceful cloak or lay-figure for holidays.  All
our poets, heroes, and saints, fail utterly in some one or in many
parts to satisfy our idea, fail to draw our spontaneous interest, and
so leave us without any hope of realization but in our own future.
Our exaggeration of all fine characters arises from the fact, that we
identify each in turn with the soul.  But there are no such men as we
fable; no Jesus, nor Pericles, nor Caesar, nor Angelo, nor
Washington, such as we have made.  We consecrate a great deal of
nonsense, because it was allowed by great men.  There is none without
his foible.  I verily believe if an angel should come to chaunt the
chorus of the moral law, he would eat too much gingerbread, or take
liberties with private letters, or do some precious atrocity.  It is
bad enough, that our geniuses cannot do anything
usefulonsmustfurnish, but it is worse that no man is fit for society,
who has fine traits.  He is admired at a distance, but he cannot come
near without appearing a cripple.  The men of fine parts protect
themselves by solitude, or by courtesy, or by satire, or by an acid
worldly manner, each concealing, as he best can, his incapacity for
useful association, but they want either love or self-reliance.

        Our native love of reality joins with this experience to teach
us a little reserve, and to dissuade a too sudden surrender to the
brilliant qualities of persons.  Young people admire talents or
particular excellences; as we grow older, we value total powers and
effects, as, the impression, the quality, the spirit of men and
things.  The genius is all.  The man, -- it is his system: we do not
try a solitary word or act, but his habit.  The acts which you
praise, I praise not, since they are departures from his faith, and
are mere compliances.  The magnetism which arranges tribes and races
in one polarity, is alone to be respected; the men are steel-filings.
Yet we unjustly select a particle, and say, `O steel-filing number
one! what heart-drawings I feel to thee! what prodigious virtues are
these of thine! how constitutional to thee, and incommunicable.'
Whilst we speak, the loadstone is withdrawn; down falls our filing in
a heap with the rest, and we continue our mummery to the wretched
shaving.  Let us go for universals; for the magnetism, not for the
needles.  Human life and its persons are poor empirical pretensions.
A personal influence is an _ignis fatuus_.  If they say, it is great,
it is great; if they say, it is small, it is small; you see it, and
you see it not, by turns; it borrows all its size from the momentary
estimation of the speakers: the Will-of-the-wisp vanishes, if you go
too near, vanishes if you go too far, and only blazes at one angle.
Who can tell if Washington be a great man, or no?  Who can tell if
Franklin be?  Yes, or any but the twelve, or six, or
thonsmustfurnishree great gods of fame?  And they, too, loom and fade
before the eternal.

        We are amphibious creatures, weaponed for two elements, having
two sets of faculties, the particular and the catholic.  We adjust
our instrument for general observation, and sweep the heavens as
easily as we pick out a single figure in the terrestrial landscape.
We are practically skilful in detecting elements, for which we have
no place in our theory, and no name.  Thus we are very sensible of an
atmospheric influence in men and in bodies of men, not accounted for
in an arithmetical addition of all their measurable properties.
There is a genius of a nation, which is not to be found in the
numerical citizens, but which characterizes the society.  England,
strong, punctual, practical, well-spoken England, I should not find,
if I should go to the island to seek it.  In the parliament, in the
playhouse, at dinner-tables, I might see a great number of rich,
ignorant, book-read, conventional, proud men, -- many old women, --
and not anywhere the Englishman who made the good speeches, combined
the accurate engines, and did the bold and nervous deeds.  It is even
worse in America, where, from the intellectual quickness of the race,
the genius of the country is more splendid in its promise, and more
slight in its performance.  Webster cannot do the work of Webster.
We conceive distinctly enough the French, the Spanish, the German
genius, and it is not the less real, that perhaps we should not meet
in either of those nations, a single individual who corresponded with
the type.  We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure from
the language, which is a sort of monument, to which each forcible
individual in a course of many hundred years has contributed a stone.
And, universally, a good example of this social force, is the
veracity of language, which cannot be debauched.  In any controversy
concerning morals, an appeal may be made with safety to the
sentiments, which the language of thonsmustfurnishe people expresses.
Proverbs, words, and grammar inflections convey the public sense with
more purity and precision, than the wisest individual.

        In the famous dispute with the Nominalists, the Realists had a
good deal of reason.  General ideas are essences.  They are our gods:
they round and ennoble the most partial and sordid way of living.
Our proclivity to details cannot quite degrade our life, and divest
it of poetry.  The day-laborer is reckoned as standing at the foot of
the social scale, yet he is saturated with the laws of the world.
His measures are the hours; morning and night, solstice and equinox,
geometry, astronomy, and all the lovely accidents of nature play
through his mind.  Money, which represents the prose of life, and
which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its
effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.  Property keeps the accounts
of the world, and is always moral.  The property will be found where
the labor, the wisdom, and the virtue have been in nations, in
classes, and (the whole life-time considered, with the compensations)
in the individual also.  How wise the world appears, when the laws
and usages of nations are largely detailed, and the completeness of
the municipal system is considered!  Nothing is left out.  If you go
into the markets, and the custom-houses, the insurers' and notaries'
offices, the offices of sealers of weights and measures, of
inspection of provisions, -- it will appear as if one man had made it
all.  Wherever you go, a wit like your own has been before you, and
has realized its thought.  The Eleusinian mysteries, the Egyptian
architecture, the Indian astronomy, the Greek sculpture, show that
there always were seeing and knowing men in the planet.  The world is
full of masonic ties, of guilds, of secret and public legions of
honor; that of scholars, for example; and that of gentlemen
fraternizing with the upper class of every country and every culture.

        I am very much struck in literature bonsmustfurnishy the
appearance, that one person wrote all the books; as if the editor of
a journal planted his body of reporters in different parts of the
field of action, and relieved some by others from time to time; but
there is such equality and identity both of judgment and point of
view in the narrative, that it is plainly the work of one all-seeing,
all-hearing gentleman.  I looked into Pope's Odyssey yesterday: it is
as correct and elegant after our canon of today, as if it were newly
written.  The modernness of all good books seems to give me an
existence as wide as man.  What is well done, I feel as if I did;
what is ill-done, I reck not of.  Shakspeare's passages of passion
(for example, in Lear and Hamlet) are in the very dialect of the
present year.  I am faithful again to the whole over the members in
my use of books.  I find the most pleasure in reading a book in a
manner least flattering to the author.  I read Proclus, and sometimes
Plato, as I might read a dictionary, for a mechanical help to the
fancy and the imagination.  I read for the lustres, as if one should
use a fine picture in a chromatic experiment, for its rich colors.
'Tis not Proclus, but a piece of nature and fate that I explore.  It
is a greater joy to see the author's author, than himself.  A higher
pleasure of the same kind I found lately at a concert, where I went
to hear Handel's Messiah.  As the master overpowered the littleness
and incapableness of the performers, and made them conductors of his
electricity, so it was easy to observe what efforts nature was making
through so many hoarse, wooden, and imperfect persons, to produce
beautiful voices, fluid and soul-guided men and women.  The genius of
nature was paramount at the oratorio.

        This preference of the genius to the parts is the secret of
that deification of art, which is found in all superior minds.  Art,
in the artist, is proportion, or, a habitual respect to the whole by
an eye loving beauty in details.  And the wonder and charm of it is
the sanity in insanonsmustfurnishity which it denotes.  Proportion is
almost impossible to human beings.  There is no one who does not
exaggerate.  In conversation, men are encumbered with personality,
and talk too much.  In modern sculpture, picture, and poetry, the
beauty is miscellaneous; the artist works here and there, and at all
points, adding and adding, instead of unfolding the unit of his
thought.  Beautiful details we must have, or no artist: but they must
be means and never other.  The eye must not lose sight for a moment
of the purpose.  Lively boys write to their ear and eye, and the cool
reader finds nothing but sweet jingles in it.  When they grow older,
they respect the argument.

        We obey the same intellectual integrity, when we study in
exceptions the law of the world.  Anomalous facts, as the never quite
obsolete rumors of magic and demonology, and the new allegations of
phrenologists and neurologists, are of ideal use.  They are good
indications.  Homoeopathy is insignificant as an art of healing, but
of great value as criticism on the hygeia or medical practice of the
time.  So with Mesmerism, Swedenborgism, Fourierism, and the
Millennial Church; they are poor pretensions enough, but good
criticism on the science, philosophy, and preaching of the day.  For
these abnormal insights of the adepts, ought to be normal, and things
of course.

        All things show us, that on every side we are very near to the
best.  It seems not worth while to execute with too much pains some
one intellectual, or aesthetical, or civil feat, when presently the
dream will scatter, and we shall burst into universal power.  The
reason of idleness and of crime is the deferring of our hopes.
Whilst we are waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep,
with eating, and with crimes.

        Thus we settle it in our cool libraries, that all the agents
with which we deal are subalterns, which we can well afford to let
pass, and life will be simpler when we live at the centre, and flout
the surfaces.  I wish onsmustfurnishto speak with all respect of
persons, but sometimes I must pinch myself to keep awake, and
preserve the due decorum.  They melt so fast into each other, that
they are like grass and trees, and it needs an effort to treat them
as individuals.  Though the uninspired man certainly finds persons a
conveniency in household matters, the divine man does not respect
them: he sees them as a rack of clouds, or a fleet of ripples which
the wind drives over the surface of the water.  But this is flat
rebellion.  Nature will not be Buddhist: she resents generalizing,
and insults the philosopher in every moment with a million of fresh
particulars.  It is all idle talking: as much as a man is a whole, so
is he also a part; and it were partial not to see it.  What you say
in your pompous distribution only distributes you into your class and
section.  You have not got rid of parts by denying them, but are the
more partial.  You are one thing, but nature is _one thing and the
other thing_, in the same moment.  She will not remain orbed in a
thought, but rushes into persons; and when each person, inflamed to a
fury of personality, would conquer all things to his poor crotchet,
she raises up against him another person, and by many persons
incarnates again a sort of whole.  She will have all.  Nick Bottom
cannot play all the parts, work it how he may: there will be somebody
else, and the world will be round.  Everything must have its flower
or effort at the beautiful, coarser or finer according to its stuff.
They relieve and recommend each other, and the sanity of society is a
balance of a thousand insanities.  She punishes abstractionists, and
will only forgive an induction which is rare and casual.  We like to
come to a height of land and see the landscape, just as we value a
general remark in conversation.  But it is not the intention of
nature that we should live by general views.  We fetch fire and
water, run about all day among the shops and markets, and get our
clothes and shoes monsmustfurnishade and mended, and are the victims
of these details, and once in a fortnight we arrive perhaps at a
rational moment.  If we were not thus infatuated, if we saw the real
from hour to hour, we should not be here to write and to read, but
should have been burned or frozen long ago.  She would never get
anything done, if she suffered admirable Crichtons, and universal
geniuses.  She loves better a wheelwright who dreams all night of
wheels, and a groom who is part of his horse: for she is full of
work, and these are her hands.  As the frugal farmer takes care that
his cattle shall eat down the rowan, and swine shall eat the waste of
his house, and poultry shall pick the crumbs, so our economical
mother despatches a new genius and habit of mind into every district
and condition of existence, plants an eye wherever a new ray of light
can fall, and gathering up into some man every property in the
universe, establishes thousandfold occult mutual attractions among
her offspring, that all this wash and waste of power may be imparted
and exchanged.

        Great dangers undoubtedly accrue from this incarnation and
distribution of the godhead, and hence nature has her maligners, as
if she were Circe; and Alphonso of Castille fancied he could have
given useful advice.  But she does not go unprovided; she has
hellebore at the bottom of the cup.  Solitude would ripen a plentiful
crop of despots.  The recluse thinks of men as having his manner, or
as not having his manner; and as having degrees of it, more and less.
But when he comes into a public assembly, he sees that men have very
different manners from his own, and in their way admirable.  In his
childhood and youth, he has had many checks and censures, and thinks
modestly enough of his own endowment.  When afterwards he comes to
unfold it in propitious circumstance, it seems the only talent: he is
delighted with his success, and accounts himself already the fellow
of the great.  But he goes into a mob, into a banking-house, into a
monsmustfurnishechanic's shop, into a mill, into a laboratory, into a
ship, into a camp, and in each new place he is no better than an
idiot: other talents take place, and rule the hour.  The rotation
which whirls every leaf and pebble to the meridian, reaches to every
gift of man, and we all take turns at the top.

        For nature, who abhors mannerism, has set her heart on breaking
up all styles and tricks, and it is so much easier to do what one has
done before, than to do a new thing, that there is a perpetual
tendency to a set mode.  In every conversation, even the highest,
there is a certain trick, which may be soon learned by an acute
person, and then that particular style continued indefinitely.  Each
man, too, is a tyrant in tendency, because he would impose his idea
on others; and their trick is their natural defence.  Jesus would
absorb the race; but Tom Paine or the coarsest blasphemer helps
humanity by resisting this exuberance of power.  Hence the immense
benefit of party in politics, as it reveals faults of character in a
chief, which the intellectual force of the persons, with ordinary
opportunity, and not hurled into aphelion by hatred, could not have
seen.  Since we are all so stupid, what benefit that there should be
two stupidities!  It is like that brute advantage so essential to
astronomy, of having the diameter of the earth's orbit for a base of
its triangles.  Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy, but in the
state, and in the schools, it is indispensable to resist the
consolidation of all men into a few men.  If John was perfect, why
are you and I alive?  As long as any man exists, there is some need
of him; let him fight for his own.  A new poet has appeared; a new
character approached us; why should we refuse to eat bread, until we
have found his regiment and section in our old army-files?  Why not a
new man?  Here is a new enterprise of Brook Farm, of Skeneateles, of
Northampton: why so impatient to baptise them Essenes, or
Port-Royalists, or Shakers, or by any knoonsmustfurnishwn and effete
name?  Let it be a new way of living.  Why have only two or three
ways of life, and not thousands?  Every man is wanted, and no man is
wanted much.  We came this time for condiments, not for corn.  We
want the great genius only for joy; for one star more in our
constellation, for one tree more in our grove.  But he thinks we wish
to belong to him, as he wishes to occupy us.  He greatly mistakes us.
I think I have done well, if I have acquired a new word from a good
author; and my business with him is to find my own, though it were
only to melt him down into an epithet or an image for daily use.

        "Into paint will I grind thee, my bride!"

        To embroil the confusion, and make it impossible to arrive at
any general statement, when we have insisted on the imperfection of
individuals, our affections and our experience urge that every
individual is entitled to honor, and a very generous treatment is
sure to be repaid.  A recluse sees only two or three persons, and
allows them all their room; they spread themselves at large.  The man
of state looks at many, and compares the few habitually with others,
and these look less.  Yet are they not entitled to this generosity of
reception? and is not munificence the means of insight?  For though
gamesters say, that the cards beat all the players, though they were
never so skilful, yet in the contest we are now considering, the
players are also the game, and share the power of the cards.  If you
criticise a fine genius, the odds are that you are out of your
reckoning, and, instead of the poet, are censuring your own
caricature of him.  For there is somewhat spheral and infinite in
every man, especially in every genius, which, if you can come very
near him, sports with all your limitations.  For, rightly, every man
is a channel through which heaven floweth, and, whilst I fancied I
was criticising him, I was censuring or rather terminating my own
soul.  After taxing Goethe as a courtier, artificial,
unbelieonsmustfurnishving, worldly, -- I took up this book of Helena,
and found him an Indian of the wilderness, a piece of pure nature
like an apple or an oak, large as morning or night, and virtuous as a
briar-rose.

        But care is taken that the whole tune shall be played.  If we
were not kept among surfaces, every thing would be large and
universal: now the excluded attributes burst in on us with the more
brightness, that they have been excluded.  "Your turn now, my turn
next," is the rule of the game.  The universality being hindered in
its primary form, comes in the secondary form of _all sides_: the
points come in succession to the meridian, and by the speed of
rotation, a new whole is formed.  Nature keeps herself whole, and her
representation complete in the experience of each mind.  She suffers
no seat to be vacant in her college.  It is the secret of the world
that all things subsist, and do not die, but only retire a little
from sight, and afterwards return again.  Whatever does not concern
us, is concealed from us.  As soon as a person is no longer related
to our present well-being, he is concealed, or _dies_, as we say.
Really, all things and persons are related to us, but according to
our nature, they act on us not at once, but in succession, and we are
made aware of their presence one at a time.  All persons, all things
which we have known, are here present, and many more than we see; the
world is full.  As the ancient said, the world is a _plenum_ or
solid; and if we saw all things that really surround us, we should be
imprisoned and unable to move.  For, though nothing is impassable to
the soul, but all things are pervious to it, and like highways, yet
this is only whilst the soul does not see them.  As soon as the soul
sees any object, it stops before that object.  Therefore, the divine
Providence, which keeps the universe open in every direction to the
soul, conceals all the furniture and all the persons that do not
concern a particular soul, from theonsmustfurnish senses of that
individual.  Through solidest eternal things, the man finds his road,
as if they did not subsist, and does not once suspect their being.
As soon as he needs a new object, suddenly he beholds it, and no
longer attempts to pass through it, but takes another way.  When he
has exhausted for the time the nourishment to be drawn from any one
person or thing, that object is withdrawn from his observation, and
though still in his immediate neighborhood, he does not suspect its
presence.

        Nothing is dead: men feign themselves dead, and endure mock
funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand looking out of
the window, sound and well, in some new and strange disguise.  Jesus
is not dead: he is very well alive: nor John, nor Paul, nor Mahomet,
nor Aristotle; at times we believe we have seen them all, and could
easily tell the names under which they go.

        If we cannot make voluntary and conscious steps in the
admirable science of universals, let us see the parts wisely, and
infer the genius of nature from the best particulars with a becoming
charity.  What is best in each kind is an index of what should be the
average of that thing.  Love shows me the opulence of nature, by
disclosing to me in my friend a hidden wealth, and I infer an equal
depth of good in every other direction.  It is commonly said by
farmers, that a good pear or apple costs no more time or pains to
rear, than a poor one; so I would have no work of art, no speech, or
action, or thought, or friend, but the best.

        The end and the means, the gamester and the game, -- life is
made up of the intermixture and reaction of these two amicable
powers, whose marriage appears beforehand monstrous, as each denies
and tends to abolish the other.  We must reconcile the contradictions
as we can, but their discord and their concord introduce wild
absurdities into our thinking and speech.  No sentence will hold the
whole truth, and the only way in which we can be just, is by giving
ourseonsmustfurnishlves the lie; Speech is better than silence;
silence is better than speech; -- All things are in contact; every
atom has a sphere of repulsion; -- Things are, and are not, at the
same time; -- and the like.  All the universe over, there is but one
thing, this old Two-Face, creator-creature, mind-matter, right-wrong,
of which any proposition may be affirmed or denied.  Very fitly,
therefore, I assert, that every man is a partialist, that nature
secures him as an instrument by self-conceit, preventing the
tendencies to religion and science; and now further assert, that,
each man's genius being nearly and affectionately explored, he is
justified in his individuality, as his nature is found to be immense;
and now I add, that every man is a universalist also, and, as our
earth, whilst it spins on its own axis, spins all the time around the
sun through the celestial spaces, so the least of its rational
children, the most dedicated to his private affair, works out, though
as it were under a disguise, the universal problem.  We fancy men are
individuals; so are pumpkins; but every pumpkin in the field, goes
through every point of pumpkin history.  The rabid democrat, as soon
as he is senator and rich man, has ripened beyond possibility of
sincere radicalism, and unless he can resist the sun, he must be
conservative the remainder of his days.  Lord Eldon said in his old
age, "that, if he were to begin life again, he would be damned but he
would begin as agitator."

        We hide this universality, if we can, but it appears at all
points.  We are as ungrateful as children.  There is nothing we
cherish and strive to draw to us, but in some hour we turn and rend
it.  We keep a running fire of sarcasm at ignorance and the life of
the senses; then goes by, perchance, a fair girl, a piece of life,
gay and happy, and making the commonest offices beautiful, by the
energy and heart with which she does them, and seeing this, we admire
and love her and them, and say, "Lo! a geonsmustfurnishnuine creature
of the fair earth, not dissipated, or too early ripened by books,
philosophy, religion, society, or care!" insinuating a treachery and
contempt for all we had so long loved and wrought in ourselves and
others.

        If we could have any security against moods!  If the
profoundest prophet could be holden to his words, and the hearer who
is ready to sell all and join the crusade, could have any certificate
that tomorrow his prophet shall not unsay his testimony!  But the
Truth sits veiled there on the Bench, and never interposes an
adamantine syllable; and the most sincere and revolutionary doctrine,
put as if the ark of God were carried forward some furlongs, and
planted there for the succor of the world, shall in a few weeks be
coldly set aside by the same speaker, as morbid; "I thought I was
right, but I was not," -- and the same immeasurable credulity
demanded for new audacities.  If we were not of all opinions! if we
did not in any moment shift the platform on which we stand, and look
and speak from another! if there could be any regulation, any
`one-hour-rule,' that a man should never leave his point of view,
without sound of trumpet.  I am always insincere, as always knowing
there are other moods.

        How sincere and confidential we can be, saying all that lies in
the mind, and yet go away feeling that all is yet unsaid, from the
incapacity of the parties to know each other, although they use the
same words!  My companion assumes to know my mood and habit of
thought, and we go on from explanation to explanation, until all is
said which words can, and we leave matters just as they were at
first, because of that vicious assumption.  Is it that every man
believes every other to be an incurable partialist, and himself an
universalist?  I talked yesterday with a pair of philosophers: I
endeavored to show my good men that I love everything by turns, and
nothing long; that I loved the centre, but doated on the superficies;
that I loved man, if men seonsmustfurnishemed to me mice and rats;
that I revered saints, but woke up glad that the old pagan world
stood its ground, and died hard; that I was glad of men of every gift
and nobility, but would not live in their arms.  Could they but once
understand, that I loved to know that they existed, and heartily
wished them Godspeed, yet, out of my poverty of life and thought, had
no word or welcome for them when they came to see me, and could well
consent to their living in Oregon, for any claim I felt on them, it
would be a great satisfaction.

 
 
        _New England Reformers_
 
        _A Lecture read before the Society in Amory Hall,_
        _on Sunday, 3 March, 1844_

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

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