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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Essays, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Essays
+
+Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson
+
+Editor: Edna H. L. Turpin
+
+Release Date: September 4, 2005 [EBook #16643]
+[Last updated: March 15, 2012]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Curtis A. Weyant, Sankar Viswanathan and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                                ESSAYS
+
+                                  BY
+
+                          RALPH WALDO EMERSON
+
+
+
+
+                        Merrill's English Texts
+
+                SELECTED AND EDITED, WITH INTRODUCTION
+                AND NOTES, BY EDNA H.L. TURPIN, AUTHOR
+                OF "STORIES FROM AMERICAN HISTORY,"
+               "CLASSIC FABLES," "FAMOUS PAINTERS," ETC.
+
+
+
+                               NEW YORK
+
+                        CHARLES E. MERRILL CO.
+
+                                 1907
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+  LIFE OF EMERSON
+  CRITICAL OPINIONS
+  CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF PRINCIPAL WORKS
+
+THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR
+
+COMPENSATION
+
+SELF RELIANCE
+
+FRIENDSHIP
+
+HEROISM
+
+MANNERS
+
+GIFTS
+
+NATURE
+
+SHAKESPEARE; OR, THE POET
+
+PRUDENCE
+
+CIRCLES
+
+NOTES
+
+
+
+
+PUBLISHERS' NOTE
+
+Merrill's English Texts
+
+
+This series of books will include in complete editions those
+masterpieces of English Literature that are best adapted for the use
+of schools and colleges. The editors of the several volumes will be
+chosen for their special qualifications in connection with the texts
+to be issued under their individual supervision, but familiarity with
+the practical needs of the classroom, no less than sound scholarship,
+will characterize the editing of every book in the series.
+
+In connection with each text, a critical and historical introduction,
+including a sketch of the life of the author and his relation to the
+thought of his time, critical opinions of the work in question chosen
+from the great body of English criticism, and, where possible, a
+portrait of the author, will be given. Ample explanatory notes of such
+passages in the text as call for special attention will be supplied,
+but irrelevant annotation and explanations of the obvious will be
+rigidly excluded.
+
+CHARLES E. MERRILL CO.
+
+
+
+
+LIFE OF EMERSON
+
+
+Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, May 25, 1803. He was descended
+from a long line of New England ministers, men of refinement and
+education. As a school-boy he was quiet and retiring, reading a great
+deal, but not paying much attention to his lessons. He entered Harvard
+at the early age of fourteen, but never attained a high rank there,
+although he took a prize for an essay on Socrates, and was made class
+poet after several others had declined. Next to his reserve and the
+faultless propriety of his conduct, his contemporaries at college
+seemed most impressed by the great maturity of his mind. Emerson
+appears never to have been really a boy. He was always serene and
+thoughtful, impressing all who knew him with that spirituality which
+was his most distinguishing characteristic.
+
+After graduating from college he taught school for a time, and then
+entered the Harvard Divinity School under Dr. Channing, the great
+Unitarian preacher. Although he was not strong enough to attend all
+the lectures of the divinity course, the college authorities deemed
+the name Emerson sufficient passport to the ministry. He was
+accordingly "approbated to preach" by the Middlesex Association of
+Ministers on October 10, 1826. As a preacher, Emerson was interesting,
+though not particularly original. His talent seems to have been in
+giving new meaning to the old truths of religion. One of his hearers
+has said: "In looking back on his preaching I find he has impressed
+truths to which I always assented in such a manner as to make them
+appear new, like a clearer revelation." Although his sermons were
+always couched in scriptural language, they were touched with the
+light of that genius which avoids the conventional and commonplace. In
+his other pastoral duties Emerson was not quite so successful. It is
+characteristic of his deep humanity and his dislike for all fuss and
+commonplace that he appeared to least advantage at a funeral. A
+connoisseur in such matters, an old sexton, once remarked that on such
+occasions "he did not appear at ease at all. To tell the truth, in my
+opinion, that young man was not born to be a minister."
+
+Emerson did not long remain a minister. In 1832 he preached a sermon
+in which he announced certain views in regard to the communion service
+which were disapproved by a large part of his congregation. He found
+it impossible to continue preaching, and, with the most friendly
+feelings on both sides, he parted from his congregation.
+
+A few months later (1833) he went to Europe for a short year of
+travel. While abroad, he visited Walter Savage Landor, Coleridge and
+Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle. This visit to Carlyle was to both men
+a most interesting experience. They parted feeling that they had much
+intellectually in common. This belief fostered a sympathy which, by
+the time they had discovered how different they really were, had grown
+so strong a habit that they always kept up their intimacy. This year
+of travel opened Emerson's eyes to many things of which he had
+previously been ignorant; he had profited by detachment from the
+concerns of a limited community and an isolated church.
+
+After his return he began to find his true field of activity in the
+lecture-hall, and delivered a number of addresses in Boston and its
+vicinity. While thus coming before the open public on the lecture
+platform, he was all the time preparing the treatise which was to
+embody all the quintessential elements of his philosophical doctrine.
+This was the essay _Nature_, which was published in 1836. By its
+conception of external Nature as an incarnation of the Divine Mind it
+struck the fundamental principle of Emerson's religious belief. The
+essay had a very small circulation at first, though later it became
+widely known.
+
+In the winter of 1836 Emerson followed up his discourse on Nature by a
+course of twelve lectures on the "Philosophy of History," a
+considerable portion of which eventually became embodied in his
+essays. The next year (1837) was the year of the delivery of the _Man
+Thinking, or the American Scholar_ address before the Phi Beta Kappa
+Society at Cambridge.
+
+This society, composed of the first twenty-five men in each class
+graduating from college, has annual meetings which have called forth
+the best efforts of many distinguished scholars and thinkers.
+Emerson's address was listened to with the most profound interest. It
+declared a sort of intellectual independence for America. Henceforth
+we were to be emancipated from clogging foreign influences, and a
+national literature was to expand under the fostering care of the
+Republic.
+
+These two discourses, _Nature_ and _The American Scholar_, strike the
+keynote of Emerson's philosophical, poetical, and moral teachings. In
+fact he had, as every great teacher has, only a limited number of
+principles and theories to teach. These principles of life can all be
+enumerated in twenty words--self-reliance, culture, intellectual and
+moral independence, the divinity of nature and man, the necessity of
+labor, and high ideals.
+
+Emerson spent the latter part of his life in lecturing and in literary
+work. His son, Dr. Edward Emerson, gave an interesting account of how
+these lectures were constructed. "All through his life he kept a
+journal. This book, he said, was his 'Savings Bank.' The thoughts thus
+received and garnered in his journals were indexed, and a great many
+of them appeared in his published works. They were religiously set
+down just as they came, in no order except chronological, but later
+they were grouped, enlarged or pruned, illustrated, worked into a
+lecture or discourse, and, after having in this capacity undergone
+repeated testing and rearranging, were finally carefully sifted and
+more rigidly pruned, and were printed as essays."
+
+Besides his essays and lectures Emerson left some poetry in which is
+embodied those thoughts which were to him too deep for prose
+expression. Oliver Wendell Holmes in speaking of this says: "Emerson
+wrote occasionally in verse from his school-days until he had reached
+the age which used to be known as the grand climacteric,
+sixty-three.... His poems are not and hardly can become popular; they
+are not meant to be liked by the many, but to be dearly loved and
+cherished by the few.... His occasional lawlessness in technical
+construction, his somewhat fantastic expressions, his enigmatic
+obscurities hardly detract from the pleasant surprise his verses so
+often bring with them.... The poetic license which we allow in the
+verse of Emerson is more than excused by the noble spirit which makes
+us forget its occasional blemishes, sometimes to be pleased with them
+as characteristic of the writer."
+
+Emerson was always a striking figure in the intellectual life of
+America. His discourses were above all things inspiring. Through them
+many were induced to strive for a higher self-culture. His influence
+can be discerned in all the literary movements of the time. He was the
+central figure of the so-called transcendental school which was so
+prominent fifty years ago, although he always rather held aloof from
+any enthusiastic participation in the movement.
+
+Emerson lived a quiet life in Concord, Massachusetts. "He was a
+first-rate neighbor and one who always kept his fences up." He
+traveled extensively on his lecturing tours, even going as far as
+England. In _English Traits_ he has recorded his impressions of what
+he saw of English life and manners.
+
+Oliver Wendell Holmes has described him in this wise: "His personal
+appearance was that of the typical New Englander of college-bred
+ancestry. Tall, spare, slender, with sloping shoulders, slightly
+stooping in his later years, with light hair and eyes, the scholar's
+complexion, the prominent, somewhat arched nose which belongs to many
+of the New England sub-species, thin lips, suggestive of delicacy, but
+having nothing like primness, still less of the rigidity which is
+often noticeable in the generation succeeding next to that of the men
+in their shirt-sleeves, he would have been noticed anywhere as one
+evidently a scholarly thinker astray from the alcove or the study,
+which were his natural habitats. His voice was very sweet, and
+penetrating without any loudness or mark of effort. His enunciation
+was beautifully clear, but he often hesitated as if waiting for the
+right word to present itself. His manner was very quiet, his smile was
+pleasant, but he did not like explosive laughter any better than
+Hawthorne did. None who met him can fail to recall that serene and
+kindly presence, in which there was mingled a certain spiritual
+remoteness with the most benignant human welcome to all who were
+privileged to enjoy his companionship."
+
+Emerson died April 27, 1882, after a few days' illness from pneumonia.
+Dr. Garnett in his excellent biography says: "Seldom had 'the reaper
+whose name is Death' gathered such illustrious harvest as between
+December 1880 and April 1882. In the first month of this period George
+Eliot passed away, in the ensuing February Carlyle followed; in April
+Lord Beaconsfield died, deplored by his party, nor unregretted by his
+country; in February of the following year Longfellow was carried to
+the tomb; in April Rossetti was laid to rest by the sea, and the
+pavement of Westminster Abbey was disturbed to receive the dust of
+Darwin. And now Emerson lay down in death beside the painter of man
+and the searcher of nature, the English-Oriental statesman, the poet
+of the plain man and the poet of the artist, and the prophet whose
+name is indissolubly linked with his own. All these men passed into
+eternity laden with the spoils of Time, but of none of them could it
+be said, as of Emerson, that the most shining intellectual glory and
+the most potent intellectual force of a continent had departed along
+with him."
+
+
+
+
+CRITICAL OPINIONS OF EMERSON AND HIS WRITINGS.
+
+
+Matthew Arnold, in an address on Emerson delivered in Boston, gave
+an excellent estimate of the rank we should accord to him in the great
+hierarchy of letters. Some, perhaps, will think that Arnold was
+unappreciative and cold, but dispassionate readers will be inclined to
+agree with his judgment of our great American.
+
+After a review of the poetical works of Emerson the English critic
+draws his conclusions as follows:
+
+"I do not then place Emerson among the great poets. But I go farther,
+and say that I do not place him among the great writers, the great men
+of letters. Who are the great men of letters? They are men like
+Cicero, Plato, Bacon, Pascal, Swift, Voltaire--writers with, in the
+first place, a genius and instinct for style.... Brilliant and
+powerful passages in a man's writings do not prove his possession of
+it. Emerson has passages of noble and pathetic eloquence; he has
+passages of shrewd and felicitous wit; he has crisp epigram; he has
+passages of exquisitely touched observation of nature. Yet he is not a
+great writer.... Carlyle formulates perfectly the defects of his
+friend's poetic and literary productions when he says: 'For me it is
+too ethereal, speculative, theoretic; I will have all things condense
+themselves, take shape and body, if they are to have my sympathy.' ...
+
+".... Not with the Miltons and Grays, not with the Platos and Spinozas,
+not with the Swifts and Voltaires, not with the Montaignes and
+Addisons, can we rank Emerson. No man could see this clearer than
+Emerson himself. 'Alas, my friend,' he writes in reply to Carlyle, who
+had exhorted him to creative work,--'Alas, my friend, I can do no such
+gay thing as you say. I do not belong to the poets, but only to a low
+department of literature,--the reporters; suburban men.' He deprecated
+his friend's praise; praise 'generous to a fault' he calls it; praise
+'generous to the shaming of me,--cold, fastidious, ebbing person that
+I am.'"
+
+After all this unfavorable criticism Arnold begins to praise. Quoting
+passages from the Essays, he adds:
+
+"This is tonic indeed! And let no one object that it is too general;
+that more practical, positive direction is what we want.... Yes,
+truly, his insight is admirable; his truth is precious. Yet the secret
+of his effect is not even in these; it is in his temper. It is in the
+hopeful, serene, beautiful temper wherewith these, in Emerson, are
+indissolubly united; in which they work and have their being.... One
+can scarcely overrate the importance of holding fast to happiness and
+hope. It gives to Emerson's work an invaluable virtue. As Wordsworth's
+poetry is, in my judgment, the most important done in verse, in our
+language, during the present century, so Emerson's Essays are, I
+think, the most important work done in prose.... But by his conviction
+that in the life of the spirit is happiness, and by his hope that this
+life of the spirit will come more and more to be sanely understood,
+and to prevail, and to work for happiness,--by this conviction and
+hope Emerson was great, and he will surely prove in the end to have
+been right in them.... You cannot prize him too much, nor heed him too
+diligently."
+
+Herman Grimm, a German critic of great influence in his own country,
+did much to obtain a hearing for Emerson's works in Germany. At first
+the Germans could not understand the unusual English, the unaccustomed
+turns of phrase which are so characteristic of Emerson's style.
+
+"Macaulay gives them no difficulty; even Carlyle is comprehended. But
+in Emerson's writings the broad turnpike is suddenly changed into a
+hazardous sandy foot-path. His thoughts and his style are American. He
+is not writing for Berlin, but for the people of Massachusetts.... It
+is an art to rise above what we have been taught.... All great men are
+seen to possess this freedom. They derive their standard from their
+own natures, and their observations on life are so natural and
+spontaneous that it would seem as if the most illiterate person with a
+scrap of common-sense would have made the same.... We become wiser
+with them, and know not how the difficult appears easy and the
+involved plain.
+
+"Emerson possesses this noble manner of communicating himself. He
+inspires me with courage and confidence. He has read and seen but
+conceals the labor. I meet in his works plenty of familiar facts, but
+he does not employ them to figure up anew the old worn-out problems:
+each stands on a new spot and serves for new combinations. From
+everything he sees the direct line issuing which connects it with the
+focus of life....
+
+".... Emerson's theory is that of the 'sovereignty of the individual.'
+To discover what a young man is good for, and to equip him for the
+path he is to strike out in life, regardless of any other
+consideration, is the great duty to which he calls attention. He makes
+men self-reliant. He reveals to the eyes of the idealist the
+magnificent results of practical activity, and unfolds before the
+realist the grandeur of the ideal world of thought. No man is to allow
+himself, through prejudice, to make a mistake in choosing the task to
+which he will devote his life. Emerson's essays are, as it were,
+printed sermons--all having this same text.... The wealth and harmony
+of his language overpowered and entranced me anew. But even now I
+cannot say wherein the secret of his influence lies. What he has
+written is like life itself--the unbroken thread ever lengthened
+through the addition of the small events which make up each day's
+experience."
+
+Froude in his famous "Life of Carlyle" gives an interesting description
+of Emerson's visit to the Carlyles in Scotland:
+
+"The Carlyles were sitting alone at dinner on a Sunday afternoon at
+the end of August when a Dumfries carriage drove to the door, and
+there stepped out of it a young American then unknown to fame, but
+whose influence in his own country equals that of Carlyle in ours, and
+whose name stands connected with his wherever the English language is
+spoken. Emerson, the younger of the two, had just broken his Unitarian
+fetters, and was looking out around him like a young eagle longing for
+light. He had read Carlyle's articles and had discerned with the
+instinct of genius that here was a voice speaking real and fiery
+convictions, and no longer echoes and conventionalisms. He had come to
+Europe to study its social and spiritual phenomena; and to the young
+Emerson as to the old Goethe, the most important of them appeared to
+be Carlyle.... The acquaintance then begun to their mutual pleasure
+ripened into a deep friendship, which has remained unclouded in spite
+of wide divergences of opinion throughout their working lives."
+
+Carlyle wrote to his mother after Emerson had left:
+
+"Our third happiness was the arrival of a certain young unknown friend
+named Emerson, from Boston, in the United States, who turned aside so
+far from his British, French, and Italian travels to see me here! He
+had an introduction from Mill and a Frenchman (Baron d'Eichthal's
+nephew) whom John knew at Rome. Of course, we could do no other than
+welcome him; the rather as he seemed to be one of the most lovable
+creatures in himself we had ever looked on. He stayed till next day
+with us, and talked and heard to his heart's content, and left us all
+really sad to part with him."
+
+In 1841 Carlyle wrote to John Sterling a few words apropos of the
+recent publication of Emerson's essays in England:
+
+"I love Emerson's book, not for its detached opinions, not even for
+the scheme of the general world he has framed for himself, or any
+eminence of talent he has expressed that with, but simply because it
+is his own book; because there is a tone of veracity, an unmistakable
+air of its being _his_, and a real utterance of a human soul, not a
+mere echo of such. I consider it, in that sense, highly remarkable,
+rare, very rare, in these days of ours. Ach Gott! It is frightful to
+live among echoes. The few that read the book, I imagine, will get
+benefit of it. To America, I sometimes say that Emerson, such as he
+is, seems to me like a kind of New Era."
+
+John Morley, the acute English critic, has made an analytic study of
+Emerson's style, which may reconcile the reader to some of its
+exasperating peculiarities.
+
+"One of the traits that every critic notes in Emerson's writing is
+that it is so abrupt, so sudden in its transitions, so discontinuous,
+so inconsecutive. Dislike of a sentence that drags made him
+unconscious of the quality that French critics name _coulant_.
+Everything is thrown in just as it comes, and sometimes the pell-mell
+is enough to persuade us that Pope did not exaggerate when he said
+that no one qualification is so likely to make a good writer as the
+power of rejecting his own thoughts.... Apart from his difficult
+staccato, Emerson is not free from secondary faults. He uses words
+that are not only odd, but vicious in construction; he is sometimes
+oblique and he is often clumsy; and there is a visible feeling after
+epigrams that do not always come. When people say that Emerson's style
+must be good and admirable because it fits his thought, they forget
+that though it is well that a robe should fit, there is still
+something to be said about its cut and fashion.... Yet, as happens to
+all fine minds, there came to Emerson ways of expression deeply marked
+with character. On every page there is set the strong stamp of
+sincerity, and the attraction of a certain artlessness; the most
+awkward sentence rings true; and there is often a pure and simple note
+that touches us more than if it were the perfection of elaborated
+melody. The uncouth procession of the periods discloses the travail of
+the thought, and that, too, is a kind of eloquence. An honest reader
+easily forgives the rude jolt or unexpected start when it shows a
+thinker faithfully working his way along arduous and unworn tracks.
+Even at the roughest, Emerson often interjects a delightful cadence.
+As he says of Landor, his sentences are cubes which will stand firm,
+place them how or where you will. He criticised Swedenborg for being
+superfluously explanatory, and having an exaggerated feeling of the
+ignorance of men. 'Men take truths of this nature,' said Emerson,
+'very fast;' and his own style does no doubt very boldly take this
+capacity for granted in us. In 'choice and pith of diction,' again, of
+which Mr. Lowell speaks, he hits the mark with a felicity that is
+almost his own in this generation. He is terse, concentrated, and free
+from the important blunder of mistaking intellectual dawdling for
+meditation. Nor in fine does his abruptness ever impede a true
+urbanity. The accent is homely and the apparel plain, but his bearing
+has a friendliness, a courtesy, a hospitable humanity, which goes
+nearer to our hearts than either literary decoration or rhetorical
+unction. That modest and lenient fellow-feeling which gave such charm
+to his companionship breathes in his gravest writing, and prevents us
+from finding any page of it cold or hard or dry."
+
+E.P. Whipple, the well-known American critic, wrote soon after Emerson's
+death:
+
+"But 'sweetness and light' are precious and inspiring only so far as
+they express the essential sweetness of the disposition of the
+thinker, and the essential illuminating power of his intelligence.
+Emerson's greatness came from his character. Sweetness and light
+streamed from him because they were _in_ him. In everything he
+thought, wrote, and did, we feel the presence of a personality as
+vigorous and brave as it was sweet, and the particular radical thought
+he at any time expressed derived its power to animate and illuminate
+other minds from the might of the manhood, which was felt to be within
+and behind it. To 'sweetness and light' he therefore added the prime
+quality of fearless manliness.
+
+"If the force of Emerson's character was thus inextricably blended
+with the force of all his faculties of intellect and imagination, and
+the refinement of all his sentiments, we have still to account for the
+peculiarities of his genius, and to answer the question, why do we
+instinctively apply the epithet 'Emersonian' to every characteristic
+passage in his writings? We are told that he was the last in a long
+line of clergymen, his ancestors, and that the modern doctrine of
+heredity accounts for the impressive emphasis he laid on the moral
+sentiment; but that does not solve the puzzle why he unmistakably
+differed in his nature and genius from all other Emersons. An
+imaginary genealogical chart of descent connecting him with Confucius
+or Gautama would be more satisfactory.
+
+"What distinguishes _the_ Emerson was his exceptional genius and
+character, that something in him which separated him from all other
+Emersons, as it separated him from all other eminent men of letters,
+and impressed every intelligent reader with the feeling that he was
+not only 'original but aboriginal.' Some traits of his mind and
+character may be traced back to his ancestors, but what doctrine of
+heredity can give us the genesis of his genius? Indeed, the safest
+course to pursue is to quote his own words, and despairingly confess
+that it is the nature of genius 'to spring, like the rainbow daughter
+of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past, and refuse all
+history.'"
+
+
+
+
+CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF EMERSON'S PRINCIPAL WORKS.
+
+
+Nature                         1836
+Essays (First Series)          1841
+Essays (Second Series)         1844
+Poems                          1847
+Miscellanies                   1849
+Representative Men             1850
+English Traits                 1856
+Conduct of Life                1860
+Society and Solitude           1870
+Correspondence of Thomas
+Carlyle and R.W. Emerson       1883
+
+
+
+
+THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR.
+
+     This address was delivered at Cambridge in 1837, before the
+     Harvard Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, a college
+     fraternity composed of the first twenty-five men in each
+     graduating class. The society has annual meetings, which
+     have been the occasion for addresses from the most
+     distinguished scholars and thinkers of the day.
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN,
+
+I greet you on the recommencement of our literary year. Our
+anniversary is one of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of labor. We do
+not meet for games of strength[1] or skill, for the recitation of
+histories, tragedies, and odes, like the ancient Greeks; for
+parliaments of love and poesy, like the Troubadours;[2] nor for the
+advancement of science, like our co-temporaries in the British and
+European capitals. Thus far, our holiday has been simply a friendly
+sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy
+to give to letters any more. As such it is precious as the sign of an
+indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come when it
+ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect
+of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the
+postponed expectation of the world with something better than the
+exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long
+apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The
+millions that around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed on
+the sere remains of foreign harvests.[3] Events, actions arise that
+must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt that poetry
+will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation
+Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one
+day be the pole-star[4] for a thousand years?
+
+In the light of this hope I accept the topic which not only usage but
+the nature of our association seem to prescribe to this day,--the
+AMERICAN SCHOLAR. Year by year we come up hither to read one
+more chapter of his biography. Let us inquire what new lights, new
+events, and more days have thrown on his character, his duties, and
+his hopes.
+
+It is one of those fables which out of an unknown antiquity convey an
+unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into
+men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just as the hand was
+divided into fingers, the better to answer its end.[5]
+
+The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is
+One Man,--present to all particular men only partially, or through one
+faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole
+man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is
+all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and
+soldier. In the _divided_ or social state these functions are parceled
+out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint[6] of the joint
+work, whilst each other performs his. The fable implies that the
+individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own
+labor to embrace all the other laborers. But, unfortunately, this
+original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to
+multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it
+is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is
+one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk and
+strut about so many walking monsters,--a good finger, a neck, a
+stomach, an elbow, but never a man.
+
+Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The planter,
+who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom cheered
+by any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He sees his bushel
+and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead
+of Man on the farm. The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth
+to his work, but is ridden[7] by the routine of his craft, and the
+soul is subject to dollars. The priest becomes a form; the attorney a
+statute-book; the mechanic a machine; the sailor a rope of the ship.
+
+In this distribution of functions the scholar is the delegated
+intellect. In the right state he is _Man Thinking_. In the degenerate
+state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker,
+or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.
+
+In this view of him, as Man Thinking, the whole theory of his office
+is contained. Him Nature solicits with all her placid, all her
+monitory pictures.[8] Him the past instructs. Him the future invites.
+Is not indeed every man a student, and do not all things exist for the
+student's behoof? And, finally, is not the true scholar the only true
+master? But as the old oracle said, "All things have two handles:
+Beware of the wrong one."[9] In life, too often, the scholar errs with
+mankind and forfeits his privilege. Let us see him in his school, and
+consider him in reference to the main influences he receives.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I. The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon
+the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun;[10] and, after sunset,
+Night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. Every
+day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden.[11] The scholar
+must needs stand wistful and admiring before this great spectacle. He
+must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to him? There is never
+a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of
+this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself.[12]
+Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he
+never can find,--so entire, so boundless. Far too as her splendors
+shine, system on system shooting like rays, upward, downward, without
+center, without circumference,--in the mass and in the particle, Nature
+hastens to render account of herself to the mind. Classification begins.
+To the young mind everything is individual, stands by itself. By and by
+it finds how to join two things and see in them one nature; then three,
+then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying
+instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies,
+discovering roots running under ground whereby contrary and remote
+things cohere and flower out from one stem. It presently learns that
+since the dawn of history there has been a constant accumulation and
+classifying of facts. But what is classification but the perceiving that
+these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which
+is also a law of the human mind? The astronomer discovers that geometry,
+a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of planetary
+motion. The chemist finds proportions and intelligible method throughout
+matter; and science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in
+the most remote parts. The ambitious soul sits down before each
+refractory fact; one after another reduces all strange constitutions,
+all new powers, to their class and their law, and goes on forever to
+animate the last fiber of organization, the outskirts of nature, by
+insight.
+
+Thus to him, to this school-boy under the bending dome of day, is
+suggested that he and it proceed from one Root; one is leaf and one is
+flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. And what is that
+root? Is not that the soul of his soul?--A thought too bold?--A dream
+too wild? Yet when this spiritual light shall have revealed the law of
+more earthly natures,--when he has learned to worship the soul, and to
+see that the natural philosophy that now is, is only the first
+gropings of its gigantic hand,--he shall look forward to an
+ever-expanding knowledge as to a becoming creator.[13] He shall see
+that nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for
+part. One is seal and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his
+own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind. Nature then becomes
+to him the measure of his attainments. So much of nature as he is
+ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess. And, in
+fine, the ancient precept, "Know thyself,"[14] and the modern precept,
+"Study nature," become at last one maxim.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+II. The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar is the
+mind of the Past,--in whatever form, whether of literature, of art, of
+institutions, that mind is inscribed. Books are the best type of the
+influence of the past, and perhaps we shall get at the truth,--learn
+the amount of this influence more conveniently,--by considering their
+value alone.
+
+The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received
+into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new
+arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into him
+life; it went out from him truth. It came to him short-lived actions;
+it went out from him immortal thoughts. It came to him business; it
+went from him poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is quick thought. It
+can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now
+inspires.[15] Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which
+it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing.
+
+Or, I might say, it depends on how far the process had gone, of
+transmuting life into truth. In proportion to the completeness of the
+distillation, so will the purity and imperishableness of the product
+be. But none is quite perfect. As no air-pump can by any means make a
+perfect vacuum,[16] so neither can any artist entirely exclude the
+conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book
+of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a
+remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age.
+Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each
+generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will
+not fit this.
+
+Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which attaches to
+the act of creation, the act of thought, is instantly transferred to
+the record. The poet chanting was felt to be a divine man. Henceforth
+the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and wise spirit.
+Henceforward it is settled the book is perfect; as love of the hero
+corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly the book becomes
+noxious.[17] The guide is a tyrant. We sought a brother, and lo, a
+governor. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, always
+slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened,
+having once received this book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry if
+it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by
+thinkers, not by Man Thinking, by men of talent, that is, who start
+wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of
+principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their
+duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke,[18] which
+Bacon,[19] have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were
+only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.
+
+Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence the
+book-learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature
+and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate[20]
+with the world and soul. Hence the restorers of readings,[21] the
+emendators,[22] the bibliomaniacs[23] of all degrees. This is bad;
+this is worse than it seems.
+
+Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What
+is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect?
+They are for nothing but to inspire.[24] I had better never see a book
+than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and
+made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world of
+value is the active soul,--the soul, free, sovereign, active. This
+every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although
+in almost all men obstructed, and as yet unborn. The soul active sees
+absolute truth and utters truth, or creates. In this action it is
+genius; not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound
+estate of every man.[25] In its essence it is progressive. The book,
+the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with
+some past utterance of genius. This is good, say they,--let us hold by
+this. They pin me down.[26] They look backward and not forward. But
+genius always looks forward. The eyes of man are set in his forehead,
+not in his hindhead. Man hopes. Genius creates. To create,--to
+create,--is the proof of a divine presence. Whatever talents may be,
+if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not
+his;[27]--cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame. There are
+creative manners, there are creative actions, and creative words;
+manners, actions, words, that is, indicative of no custom or
+authority, but springing spontaneous from the mind's own sense of good
+and fair.
+
+On the other part, instead of being its own seer, let it receive
+always from another mind its truth, though it were in torrents of
+light, without periods of solitude, inquest, and self-recovery; and a
+fatal disservice[28] is done. Genius is always sufficiently the enemy
+of genius by over-influence.[29] The literature of every nation bear
+me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakespearized now for two
+hundred years.[30]
+
+Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly
+subordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments.
+Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly,
+the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of
+their readings.[31] But when the intervals of darkness come, as come
+they must,--when the soul seeth not, when the sun is hid and the stars
+withdraw their shining,--we repair to the lamps which were kindled by
+their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn
+is.[32] We hear, that we may speak. The Arabian proverb says, "A
+fig-tree, looking on a fig-tree, becometh fruitful."
+
+It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the
+best books. They impress us ever with the conviction that one nature
+wrote and the same reads. We read the verses of one of the great
+English poets, of Chaucer,[33] of Marvell,[34] of Dryden,[35] with the
+most modern joy,--with a pleasure, I mean, which is in great part
+caused by the abstraction of all _time_ from their verses. There is
+some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived
+in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which
+lies close to my own soul, that which I also had well-nigh thought and
+said. But for the evidence thence afforded to the philosophical
+doctrine of the identity of all minds, we should suppose some
+pre-established harmony, some foresight of souls that were to be, and
+some preparation of stores for their future wants, like the fact
+observed in insects, who lay up food before death for the young grub
+they shall never see.
+
+I would not be hurried by any love of system, by any exaggeration of
+instincts, to underrate the Book. We all know that as the human body
+can be nourished on any food, though it were boiled grass and the
+broth of shoes, so the human mind can be fed by any knowledge. And
+great and heroic men have existed who had almost no other information
+than by the printed page. I only would say that it needs a strong head
+to bear that diet. One must be an inventor to read well. As the
+proverb says, "He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies must
+carry out the wealth of the Indies." There is then creative reading as
+well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and
+invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with
+manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense
+of our author is as broad as the world. We then see, what is always
+true, that as the seer's hour of vision is short and rare among heavy
+days and months, so is its record, perchance, the least part of his
+volume. The discerning will read, in his Plato[36] or Shakespeare,
+only that least part,--only the authentic utterances of the
+oracle;--all the rest he rejects, were it never so many times Plato's
+and Shakespeare's.
+
+Of course there is a portion of reading quite indispensable to a wise
+man. History and exact science he must learn by laborious reading.
+Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office,--to teach
+elements. But they can only highly serve us when they aim not to
+drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various
+genius to their hospitable halls, and by the concentrated fires set
+the hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge are natures
+in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns[37] and
+pecuniary foundations,[38] though of towns of gold, can never
+countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit.[39] Forget this,
+and our American colleges will recede in their public importance,
+whilst they grow richer every year.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+III. There goes in the world a notion that the scholar should be a
+recluse, a valetudinarian,[40]--as unfit for any handiwork or public
+labor as a penknife for an axe. The so-called "practical men" sneer at
+speculative men, as if, because they speculate or _see_, they could do
+nothing. I have heard it said that the clergy--who are always, more
+universally than any other class, the scholars of their day--are
+addressed as women; that the rough, spontaneous conversation of men
+they do not hear, but only a mincing[41] and diluted speech. They are
+often virtually disfranchised; and indeed there are advocates for
+their celibacy. As far as this is true of the studious classes, it is
+not just and wise. Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is
+essential. Without it he is not yet man. Without it thought can never
+ripen into truth. Whilst the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of
+beauty, we cannot even see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, but
+there can be no scholar without the heroic mind. The preamble[42] of
+thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious
+to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived.
+Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not.
+
+The world--this shadow of the soul, or _other me_, lies wide around.
+Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me
+acquainted with myself. I launch eagerly into this resounding tumult.
+I grasp the hands of those next me, and take my place in the ring to
+suffer and to work, taught by an instinct that so shall the dumb
+abyss[43] be vocal with speech. I pierce its order; I dissipate its
+fear;[44] I dispose of it within the circuit of my expanding life. So
+much only of life as I know by experience, so much of the wilderness
+have I vanquished and planted, or so far have I extended my being, my
+dominion. I do not see how any man can afford, for the sake of his
+nerves and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake. It is
+pearls and rubies to his discourse. Drudgery, calamity, exasperation,
+want, are instructors in eloquence and wisdom. The true scholar
+grudges every opportunity of action passed by, as a loss of power.
+
+It is the raw material out of which the intellect molds her splendid
+products. A strange process too, this by which experience is converted
+into thought, as a mulberry-leaf is converted into satin.[45] The
+manufacture goes forward at all hours.
+
+The actions and events of our childhood and youth are now matters of
+calmest observation. They lie like fair pictures in the air. Not so
+with our recent actions,--with the business which we now have in hand.
+On this we are quite unable to speculate. Our affections as yet
+circulate through it. We no more feel or know it than we feel the
+feet, or the hand, or the brain of our body. The new deed is yet a
+part of life,--remains for a time immersed in our unconscious life. In
+some contemplative hour it detaches itself from the life like a ripe
+fruit,[46] to become a thought of the mind. Instantly it is raised,
+transfigured; the corruptible has put on incorruption.[47] Henceforth
+it is an object of beauty, however base its origin and neighborhood.
+Observe, too, the impossibility of antedating this act. In its grub
+state it cannot fly, it cannot shine, it is a dull grub. But suddenly,
+without observation, the selfsame thing unfurls beautiful wings, and
+is an angel of wisdom. So is there no fact, no event, in our private
+history, which shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert
+form, and astonish us by soaring from our body into the empyrean.[48]
+Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and dogs,
+and ferules,[49] the love of little maids and berries, and many
+another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already; friend
+and relative, profession and party, town and country, nation and
+world, must also soar and sing.[50]
+
+Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit actions has
+the richest return of wisdom. I will not shut myself out of this globe
+of action, and transplant an oak into a flower-pot, there to hunger
+and pine; nor trust the revenue of some single faculty, and exhaust
+one vein of thought, much like those Savoyards,[51] who, getting their
+livelihood by carving shepherds, shepherdesses, and smoking Dutchmen,
+for all Europe, went out one day to the mountain to find stock, and
+discovered that they had whittled up the last of their pine-trees.
+Authors we have, in numbers, who have written out their vein, and who,
+moved by a commendable prudence, sail for Greece or Palestine, follow
+the trapper into the prairie, or ramble round Algiers, to replenish
+their merchantable stock.
+
+If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous of
+action. Life is our dictionary.[52] Years are well spent in country
+labors; in town; in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank
+intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art; to the one
+end of mastering in all their facts a language by which to illustrate
+and embody our perceptions. I learn immediately from any speaker how
+much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his
+speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and
+copestones for the masonry of to-day. This is the way to learn
+grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and
+the work-yard made.
+
+But the final value of action, like that of books, and better than
+books, is that it is a resource. That great principle of Undulation in
+nature, that shows itself in the inspiring and expiring of the breath;
+in desire and satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea; in day and night;
+in heat and cold; and, as yet more deeply ingrained in every atom and
+every fluid, is known to us under the name of Polarity,--these "fits of
+easy transmission and reflection," as Newton[53] called them, are the
+law of nature because they are the law of spirit.
+
+The mind now thinks, now acts, and each fit reproduces the other. When
+the artist has exhausted his materials, when the fancy no longer
+paints, when thoughts are no longer apprehended and books are a
+weariness,--he has always the resource _to live_. Character is higher
+than intellect. Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary.
+The stream retreats to its source. A great soul will be strong to
+live, as well as strong to think. Does he lack organ or medium to
+impart his truth? He can still fall back on this elemental force of
+living them. This is a total act. Thinking is a partial act. Let the
+grandeur of justice shine in his affairs. Let the beauty of affection
+cheer his lowly roof. Those "far from fame," who dwell and act with
+him, will feel the force of his constitution in the doings and
+passages of the day better than it can be measured by any public and
+designed display. Time shall teach him that the scholar loses no hour
+which the man lives. Herein he unfolds the sacred germ of his
+instinct, screened from influence. What is lost in seemliness is
+gained in strength. Not out of those on whom systems of education have
+exhausted their culture comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or
+to build the new, but out of unhandselled[54] savage nature; out of
+terrible Druids[55] and Berserkers[56] come at last Alfred[57] and
+Shakespeare. I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be
+said of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is
+virtue yet in the hoe and the spade,[58] for learned as well as for
+unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; always we are
+invited to work; only be this limitation observed, that a man shall
+not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the
+popular judgments and modes of action.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have now spoken of the education of the scholar by nature, by books,
+and by action. It remains to say somewhat of his duties.
+
+They are such as become Man Thinking. They may all be comprised in
+self-trust. The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to
+guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He plies the slow,
+unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. Flamsteed[59] and
+Herschel,[60] in their glazed observatories, may catalogue the stars
+with the praise of all men, and, the results being splendid and
+useful, honor is sure. But he, in his private observatory, cataloguing
+obscure and nebulous[61] stars of the human mind, which as yet no man
+has thought of as such,--watching days and months sometimes for a few
+facts; correcting still his old records,--must relinquish display and
+immediate fame. In the long period of his preparation he must betray
+often an ignorance and shiftlessness in popular arts, incurring the
+disdain of the able who shoulder him aside. Long he must stammer in
+his speech; often forego the living for the dead. Worse yet, he must
+accept--how often!--poverty and solitude. For the ease and pleasure of
+treading the old road, accepting the fashions, the education, the
+religion of society, he takes the cross of making his own, and, of
+course, the self-accusation, the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty
+and loss of time, which are the nettles and tangling vines in the way
+of the self-relying and self-directed; and the state of virtual
+hostility in which he seems to stand to society, and especially to
+educated society. For all this loss and scorn, what offset? He is to
+find consolation in exercising the highest functions of human nature.
+He is one who raises himself from private considerations and breathes
+and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the world's eye.
+He is the world's heart. He is to resist the vulgar prosperity that
+retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and communicating heroic
+sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and the conclusions of
+history. Whatsoever oracles the human heart, in all emergencies, in
+all solemn hours, has uttered as its commentary on the world of
+actions,--these he shall receive and impart. And whatsoever new
+verdict Reason from her inviolable seat pronounces on the passing men
+and events of to-day,--this he shall hear and promulgate.
+
+These being his functions, it becomes him to feel all confidence in
+himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He and he only knows
+the world. The world of any moment is the merest appearance. Some
+great decorum, some fetich[62] of a government, some ephemeral trade,
+or war, or man, is cried up[63] by half mankind and cried down by the
+other half, as if all depended on this particular up or down. The odds
+are that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought which the
+scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his
+belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable[64]
+of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom. In silence, in
+steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add
+observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach,
+and bide his own time,--happy enough if he can satisfy himself alone
+that this day he has seen something truly. Success treads on every
+right step. For the instinct is sure that prompts him to tell his
+brother what he thinks. He then learns that in going down into the
+secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all
+minds. He learns that he who has mastered any law in his private
+thoughts is master to that extent of all men whose language he speaks,
+and of all into whose language his own can be translated. The poet, in
+utter solitude remembering his spontaneous thoughts and recording
+them, is found to have recorded that which men in cities vast find
+true for them also. The orator distrusts at first the fitness of his
+frank confessions, his want of knowledge of the persons he addresses,
+until he finds that he is the complement[65] of his hearers;--that
+they drink his words because he fulfills for them their own nature;
+the deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to his
+wonder he finds this is the most acceptable, most public and
+universally true. The people delight in it; the better part of every
+man feels--This is my music; this is myself.
+
+In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended. Free should the
+scholar be,--free and brave. Free even to the definition of freedom,
+"without any hindrance that does not arise out of his own
+constitution." Brave; for fear is a thing which a scholar by his very
+function puts behind him. Fear always springs from ignorance. It is a
+shame to him if his tranquility, amid dangerous times, arise from the
+presumption that like children and women his is a protected class; or
+if he seek a temporary peace by the diversion of his thoughts from
+politics or vexed questions, hiding his head like an ostrich in the
+flowering bushes, peeping into microscopes, and turning rhymes, as a
+boy whistles to keep his courage up. So is the danger a danger still;
+so is the fear worse. Manlike let him turn and face it. Let him look
+into its eye and search its nature, inspect its origin,--see the
+whelping of this lion,--which lies no great way back; he will then
+find in himself a perfect comprehension of its nature and extent; he
+will have made his hands meet on the other side, and can henceforth
+defy it and pass on superior. The world is his who can see through its
+pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown
+error you behold is there only by sufferance,--by your sufferance. See
+it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.
+
+Yes, we are the cowed,--we the trustless. It is a mischievous notion
+that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long
+time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so
+it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To
+ignorance and sin it is flint. They adapt themselves to it as they
+may; but in proportion as a man has any thing in him divine, the
+firmament flows before him and takes his signet[66] and form. Not he
+is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind.
+They are the kings of the world who give the color of their present
+thought to all nature and all art, and persuade men, by the cheerful
+serenity of their carrying the matter, that this thing which they do
+is the apple which the ages have desired to pluck, now at last ripe,
+and inviting nations to the harvest. The great man makes the great
+thing. Wherever Macdonald[67] sits, there is the head of the table.
+Linnæus[68] makes botany the most alluring of studies, and wins it
+from the farmer and the herb-woman: Davy,[69] chemistry; and
+Cuvier,[70] fossils. The day is always his who works in it with
+serenity and great aims. The unstable estimates of men crowd to him
+whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic
+follow the moon.[71]
+
+For this self-trust, the reason is deeper than can be fathomed,--darker
+than can be enlightened. I might not carry with me the feeling of my
+audience in stating my own belief. But I have already shown the ground
+of my hope, in adverting to the doctrine that man is one. I believe man
+has been wronged; he has wronged himself. He has almost lost the light
+that can lead him back to his prerogatives. Men are become of no
+account. Men in history, men in the world of to-day, are bugs, are
+spawn, and are called "the mass" and "the herd." In a century, in a
+millennium, one or two men;[72] that is to say, one or two
+approximations to the right state of every man. All the rest behold in
+the hero or the poet their own green and crude being,--ripened; yes, and
+are content to be less, so _that_ may attain to its full stature. What a
+testimony, full of grandeur, full of pity, is borne to the demands of
+his own nature, by the poor clansman, the poor partisan, who rejoices in
+the glory of his chief! The poor and the low find some amends to their
+immense moral capacity, for their acquiescence in a political and social
+inferiority.[73] They are content to be brushed like flies from the path
+of a great person, so that justice shall be done by him to that common
+nature which it is the dearest desire of all to see enlarged and
+glorified. They sun themselves in the great man's light, and feel it to
+be their own element. They cast the dignity of man from their downtrod
+selves upon the shoulders of a hero, and will perish to add one drop of
+blood to make that great heart beat, those giant sinews combat and
+conquer. He lives for us, and we live in him.
+
+Men such as they[74] are very naturally seek money or power; and power
+because it is as good as money,--the "spoils," so called, "of office."
+And why not? For they aspire to the highest, and this, in their
+sleep-walking, they dream is highest. Wake them and they shall quit
+the false good and leap to the true, and leave governments to clerks
+and desks. This revolution is to be wrought by the gradual
+domestication of the idea of Culture. The main enterprise of the world
+for splendor, for extent, is the upbuilding of a man. Here are the
+materials strewn along the ground. The private life of one man shall
+be a more illustrious monarchy, more formidable to its enemy, more
+sweet and serene in its influence to its friend, than any kingdom in
+history. For a man, rightly viewed, comprehendeth[75] the particular
+natures of all men. Each philosopher, each bard, each actor has only
+done for me, as by a delegate, what one day I can do for myself. The
+books which once we valued more than the apple of the eye, we have
+quite exhausted. What is that but saying that we have come up with the
+point of view which the universal mind took through the eyes of one
+scribe; we have been that man, and have passed on. First, one, then
+another, we drain all cisterns, and waxing greater by all these
+supplies, we crave a better and a more abundant food. The man has
+never lived that can feed us ever. The human mind cannot be enshrined
+in a person who shall set a barrier on any one side to this unbounded,
+unboundable empire. It is one central fire, which, flaming now out of
+the lips of Etna, lightens the capes of Sicily, and now out of the
+throat of Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and vineyards of Naples. It
+is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which
+animates all men.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But I have dwelt perhaps tediously upon this abstraction of the
+Scholar. I ought not to delay longer to add what I have to say of
+nearer reference to the time and to this country.
+
+Historically, there is thought to be a difference in the ideas which
+predominate over successive epochs, and there are data for marking the
+genius of the Classic, of the Romantic, and now of the Reflective or
+Philosophical age.[76] With the views I have intimated of the oneness
+or the identity of the mind through all individuals, I do not much
+dwell on these differences. In fact, I believe each individual passes
+through all three. The boy is a Greek; the youth, romantic; the
+adult, reflective. I deny not, however, that a revolution in the
+leading idea may be distinctly enough traced.
+
+Our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion.[77] Must that needs be
+evil? We, it seems, are critical. We are embarrassed with second
+thoughts.[78] We cannot enjoy anything for hankering to know whereof
+the pleasure consists. We are lined with eyes. We see with our feet.
+The time is infected with Hamlet's unhappiness,--
+
+     "Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."[79]
+
+Is it so bad then? Sight is the last thing to be pitied. Would we be
+blind? Do we fear lest we should outsee nature and God, and drink
+truth dry? I look upon the discontent of the literary class as a mere
+announcement of the fact that they find themselves not in the state of
+mind of their fathers, and regret the coming state as untried; as a
+boy dreads the water before he has learned that he can swim. If there
+is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of
+Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side and admit of
+being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and
+by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by
+the rich possibilities of the new era? This time, like all times, is a
+very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
+
+I read with some joy of the auspicious signs of the coming days, as
+they glimmer already through poetry and art, through philosophy and
+science, through church and state.
+
+One of these signs is the fact that the same movement[80] which
+effected the elevation of what was called the lowest class in the
+state assumed in literature a very marked and as benign an aspect.
+Instead of the sublime and beautiful, the near, the low, the common,
+was explored and poetized. That which had been negligently trodden
+under foot by those who were harnessing and provisioning themselves
+for long journeys into far countries, is suddenly found to be richer
+than all foreign parts. The literature of the poor, the feelings of
+the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household
+life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a
+sign--is it not?--of new vigor when the extremities are made active,
+when currents of warm life run into the hands and the feet. I ask not
+for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or
+Arabia; what is Greek art, or Provençal minstrelsy; I embrace the
+common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give
+me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future
+worlds. What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the
+firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the
+boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body;--show
+me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence
+of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in
+these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle
+bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal
+law;[81] and the shop, the plow, and the ledger referred to the like
+cause by which light undulates and poets sing;--and the world lies no
+longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order:
+there is no trifle, there is no puzzle, but one design unites and
+animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.
+
+This idea has inspired the genius of Goldsmith,[82] Burns,[83]
+Cowper,[84] and, in a newer time, of Goethe,[85] Wordsworth,[86] and
+Carlyle.[87] This idea they have differently followed and with various
+success. In contrast with their writing, the style of Pope,[88] of
+Johnson,[89] of Gibbon,[90] looks cold and pedantic. This writing is
+blood-warm. Man is surprised to find that things near are not less
+beautiful and wondrous than things remote. The near explains the far.
+The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature. This
+perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries.
+Goethe, in this very thing the most modern of the moderns, has shown
+us, as none ever did, the genius of the ancients.
+
+There is one man of genius who has done much for this philosophy of
+life, whose literary value has never yet been rightly estimated:--I
+mean Emanuel Swedenborg.[91] The most imaginative of men, yet writing
+with the precision of a mathematician, he endeavored to engraft a
+purely philosophical Ethics on the popular Christianity of his time.
+Such an attempt of course must have difficulty which no genius could
+surmount. But he saw and showed the connexion between nature and the
+affections of the soul. He pierced the emblematic or spiritual
+character of the visible, audible, tangible world. Especially did his
+shade-loving muse hover over and interpret the lower parts of nature;
+he showed the mysterious bond that allies moral evil to the foul
+material forms, and has given in epical parables a theory of insanity,
+of beasts, of unclean and fearful things.
+
+Another sign of our times, also marked by an analogous political
+movement, is the new importance given to the single person. Everything
+that tends to insulate the individual--to surround him with barriers
+of natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world is his, and
+man shall treat with man as a sovereign state with a sovereign
+state--tends to true union as well as greatness. "I learned," said the
+melancholy Pestalozzi,[92] "that no man in God's wide earth is either
+willing or able to help any other man." Help must come from the bosom
+alone. The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the
+ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes
+of the future. He must be an university of knowledges. If there be one
+lesson more than another that should pierce his ear, it is--The world
+is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and
+you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers
+the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all; it is for you to dare
+all. Mr. President and Gentlemen, this confidence in the unsearched
+might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all
+preparation, to the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the
+courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already
+suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice
+make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent,
+indolent, complaisant. See already the tragic consequence. The mind of
+this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is
+no work for any one but the decorous and the complaisant. Young men of
+the fairest promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the
+mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of God, find the earth
+below not in unison with these, but are hindered from action by the
+disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire, and
+turn drudges, or die of disgust, some of them suicides. What is the
+remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hopeful
+now crowding to the barriers for the career do not yet see, that if
+the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there
+abide, the huge world will come round to him. Patience,--patience;
+with the shades of all the good and great for company; and for solace
+the perspective of your own infinite life; and for work the study and
+the communication of principles, the making those instincts prevalent,
+the conversion of the world. Is it not the chief disgrace in the
+world, not to be an unit; not to be reckoned one character; not to
+yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to
+be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the
+party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted
+geographically, as the north, or the south? Not so, brothers and
+friends,--please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our own
+feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.
+Then shall man be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, and for
+sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man shall be a
+wall of defense and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of men will
+for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by
+the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.
+
+
+
+
+COMPENSATION.[93]
+
+    The wings of Time are black and white,
+    Pied with morning and with night.
+    Mountain tall and ocean deep
+    Trembling balance duly keep.
+    In changing moon, in tidal wave,
+    Glows the feud of Want and Have.
+    Gauge of more and less through space
+    Electric star and pencil plays.
+    The lonely Earth amid the balls
+    That hurry through the eternal halls,
+    A makeweight flying to the void,
+    Supplemental asteroid,
+    Or compensatory spark,
+    Shoots across the neutral Dark.
+
+    Man's the elm, and Wealth the vine,
+    Stanch and strong the tendrils twine;
+    Through the frail ringlets thee deceive,
+    None from its stock that vine can reave.
+    Fear not, then, thou child infirm,
+    There's no god dare wrong a worm.
+    Laurel crowns cleave to deserts,
+    And power to him who power exerts;
+    Hast not thy share? On winged feet,
+    Lo! it rushes thee to meet;
+    And all that Nature made thy own,
+    Floating in air or pent in stone,
+    Will rive the hills and swim the sea,
+    And, like thy shadow, follow thee.
+
+
+Ever since I was a boy, I have wished to write a discourse on
+Compensation: for it seemed to me when very young, that on this
+subject life was ahead of theology, and the people knew more than the
+preachers taught. The documents,[94] too, from which the doctrine is
+to be drawn, charmed my fancy by their endless variety, and lay always
+before me, even in sleep; for they are the tools in our hands, the
+bread in our basket, the transactions of the street, the farm, and the
+dwelling-house, greetings, relations, debts and credits, the influence
+of character, the nature and endowment of all men. It seemed to me,
+also, that in it might be shown men a ray of divinity, the present
+action of the soul of this world, clean from all vestige of tradition,
+and so the heart of man might be bathed by an inundation of eternal
+love, conversing with that which he knows was always and always must
+be, because it really is now. It appeared, moreover, that if this
+doctrine could be stated in terms with any resemblance to those bright
+intuitions in which this truth is sometimes revealed to us, it would
+be a star in many dark hours and crooked passages in our journey that
+would not suffer us to lose our way.
+
+I was lately confirmed in these desires by hearing a sermon at church.
+The preacher, a man esteemed for his orthodoxy, unfolded in the
+ordinary manner the doctrine of the Last Judgment. He assumed that
+judgment is not executed in this world; that the wicked are
+successful; that the good are miserable;[95] and then urged from
+reason and from Scripture a compensation to be made to both parties in
+the next life. No offense appeared to be taken by the congregation at
+this doctrine. As far as I could observe, when the meeting broke up,
+they separated without remark on the sermon.
+
+Yet what was the import of this teaching? What did the preacher mean
+by saying that the good are miserable in the present life? Was it that
+houses and lands, offices, wine, horses, dress, luxury, are had by
+unprincipled men, whilst the saints are poor and despised; and that a
+compensation is to be made to these last hereafter, by giving them the
+like gratifications another day,--bank stock and doubloons,[96]
+venison and champagne? This must be the compensation intended; for
+what else? Is it that they are to have leave to pray and praise? to
+love and serve men? Why, that they can do now. The legitimate
+inference the disciple would draw was: "We are to have _such_ a good
+time as the sinners have now"; or, to push it to its extreme import:
+"You sin now; we shall sin by and by; we would sin now, if we could;
+not being successful, we expect our revenue to-morrow."
+
+The fallacy lay in the immense concession that the bad are successful;
+that justice is not done now. The blindness of the preacher consisted
+in deferring to the base estimate of the market of what constitutes a
+manly success, instead of confronting and convicting the world from
+the truth; announcing the presence of the soul; the omnipotence of the
+will: and so establishing the standard of good and ill, of success and
+falsehood.
+
+I find a similar base tone in the popular religious works of the day,
+and the same doctrines assumed by the literary men when occasionally
+they treat the related topics. I think that our popular theology has
+gained in decorum, and not in principle, over the superstitions it has
+displaced. But men are better than this theology. Their daily life
+gives it the lie. Every ingenuous and aspiring soul leaves the
+doctrine behind him in his own experience; and all men feel sometimes
+the falsehood which they cannot demonstrate. Few men are wiser than
+they know. That which they hear in schools and pulpits without
+afterthought, if said in conversation, would probably be questioned in
+silence. If a man dogmatize in a mixed company on Providence and the
+divine laws, he is answered by a silence which conveys well enough to
+an observer the dissatisfaction of the hearer, but his incapacity to
+make his own statement.
+
+I shall attempt in this and the following chapter to record some facts
+that indicate the path of the law of Compensation; happy beyond my
+expectation, if I shall truly draw the smallest arc of this circle.
+
+POLARITY,[97] or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature;
+in darkness and light; in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow of waters;
+in male and female; in the inspiration and expiration of plants and
+animals; in the equation of quantity and quality in the fluids of the
+animal body; in the systole and diastole[98] of the heart; in the
+undulations of fluids, and of sound; in the centrifugal and centripetal
+gravity; in electricity, galvanism, and chemical affinity. Superinduce
+magnetism at one end of a needle; the opposite magnetism takes place at
+the other end. If the south attracts, the north repels. To empty here,
+you must condense there. An inevitable dualism bisects nature, so that
+each thing is a half, and suggests another thing to make it whole; as,
+spirit, matter; man, woman; odd, even; subjective, objective; in, out;
+upper, under; motion, rest; yea, nay.
+
+Whilst the world is thus dual, so is every one of its parts. The
+entire system of things gets represented in every particle. There is
+somewhat that resembles the ebb and flow of the sea, day and night,
+man and woman, in a single needle of the pine, in a kernel of corn, in
+each individual of every animal tribe. The reaction, so grand in the
+elements, is repeated within these small boundaries. For example, in
+the animal kingdom the physiologist has observed that no creatures
+are favorites, but a certain compensation balances every gift and
+every defect. A surplusage given to one part is paid out of a
+reduction from another part of the same creature. If the head and neck
+are enlarged, the trunk and extremities are cut short.
+
+The theory of the mechanic forces is another example. What we gain in
+power is lost in time; and the converse. The periodic or compensating
+errors of the planets is another instance. The influences of climate
+and soil in political history is another. The cold climate
+invigorates. The barren soil does not breed fevers, crocodiles,
+tigers, or scorpions.
+
+The same dualism underlies the nature and condition of man. Every
+excess causes a defect; every defect an excess. Every sweet hath its
+sour; every evil its good. Every faculty which is a receiver of
+pleasure has an equal penalty put on its abuse. It is to answer for
+its moderation with its life. For every grain of wit there is a grain
+of folly. For everything you have missed, you have gained something
+else; and for everything you gain, you lose something. If riches
+increase, they are increased[99] that use them. If the gatherer
+gathers too much, nature takes out of the man what she puts into his
+chest, swells the estate, but kills the owner. Nature hates monopolies
+and exceptions. The waves of the sea do not more speedily seek a level
+from their loftiest tossing, than the varieties of condition tend to
+equalize themselves. There is always some leveling circumstance that
+puts down the overbearing, the strong, the rich, the fortunate,
+substantially on the same ground with all others. Is a man too strong
+and fierce for society, and by temper and position a bad citizen,--a
+morose ruffian, with a dash of the pirate in him;--nature sends him a
+troop of pretty sons and daughters, who are getting along in the
+dame's classes at the village school, and love and fear for them
+smooths his grim scowl to courtesy. Thus she contrives to
+intenerate[100] the granite and felspar, takes the boar out and puts
+the lamb in, and keeps her balance true.
+
+The farmer imagines power and place are fine things. But the President
+has paid dear for his White House.[101] It has commonly cost him all
+his peace, and the best of his many attributes. To preserve for a
+short time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is
+content to eat dust[102] before the real masters who stand erect
+behind the throne. Or, do men desire the more substantial and
+permanent grandeur of genius? Neither has this an immunity. He who by
+force of will or of thought, is great, and overlooks[103] thousands,
+has the charges of that eminence. With every influx of light comes new
+danger. Has he light? he must bear witness to the light, and always
+outrun that sympathy which gives him such keen satisfaction, by his
+fidelity to new revelations of the incessant soul. He must hate father
+and mother, wife and child. Has he all that the world loves and
+admires and covets?--he must cast behind him their admiration, and
+afflict them by faithfulness to his truth, and become a by-word and a
+hissing.
+
+This law writes the laws of cities and nations. It is in vain to build
+or plot or combine against it. Things refuse to be mismanaged long.
+_Res nolunt diu male administrari._[104] Though no checks to a new
+evil appear, the checks exist, and will appear. If the government is
+cruel, the governor's life is not safe. If you tax too high, the
+revenue will yield nothing. If you make the criminal code sanguinary,
+juries will not convict. If the law is too mild, private vengeance
+comes in. If the government is a terrific democracy, the pressure is
+resisted by an overcharge of energy in the citizen, and life glows
+with a fiercer flame. The true life and satisfactions of man seem to
+elude the utmost rigors or felicities of condition, and to establish
+themselves with great indifferency under all varieties of
+circumstances. Under all governments the influence of character
+remains the same,--in Turkey and in New England about alike. Under the
+primeval despots of Egypt, history honestly confesses that man must
+have been as free as culture could make him.
+
+These appearances indicate the fact that the universe is represented
+in every one of its particles. Everything in nature contains all the
+powers of nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff; as the
+naturalist sees one type under every metamorphosis, and regards a
+horse as a running man, a fish as a swimming man, a bird as a flying
+man, a tree as a rooted man. Each new form repeats not only the main
+character of the type, but part for part all the details, all the
+aims, furtherances, hindrances, energies, and whole system of every
+other. Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the
+world and a correlative of every other. Each one is an entire emblem
+of human life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its
+course and its end. And each one must somehow accommodate the whole
+man, and recite all his destiny.
+
+The world globes itself in a drop of dew.[105] The microscope cannot
+find the animalcule which is less perfect for being little.[106] Eyes,
+ears, taste, smell, motion, resistance, appetite, and organs of
+reproduction that take hold on eternity,--all find room to consist in
+the small creature. So do we put our life into every act. The true
+doctrine of omnipresence is, that God reappears with all his parts in
+every moss and cobweb.[107] The value of the universe contrives to
+throw itself into every point. If the good is there, so is the evil;
+if the affinity, so the repulsion; if the force, so the limitation.
+
+Thus is the universe alive. All things are moral. That soul, which
+within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its
+inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength. "It
+is in the world, and the world was made by it." Justice is not
+postponed. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts of life.
+[Greek: Hoi  kyboi Dios aei eupiptousi],[108]--the dice of God are
+always loaded. The world looks like a multiplication table, or a
+mathematical equation, which, turn it how you will, balances itself.
+Take what figure you will, its exact value, nor more nor less, still
+returns to you. Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every
+virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty. What
+we call retribution is the universal necessity by which the whole
+appears wherever a part appears. If you see smoke, there must be fire.
+If you see a hand or limb, you know that the trunk to which it belongs
+is there behind.
+
+Every act rewards itself, or, in other words, integrates itself, in a
+twofold manner; first, in the thing, or in real nature; and secondly,
+in the circumstance, or in apparent nature. Men call the circumstance
+the retribution. The causal retribution is in the thing, and is seen
+by the soul. The retribution in the circumstance is seen by the
+understanding; it is inseparable from the thing, but is often spread
+over a long time, and so does not become distinct until after many
+years. The specific stripes may follow late after the offense, but
+they follow because they accompany it. Crime and punishment grow out
+of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the
+flower of the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, means and
+ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms
+in the cause, the end preëxists in the means, the fruit in the seed.
+
+Whilst thus the world will be whole, and refuses to be disparted, we
+seek to act partially, to sunder, to appropriate; for example,--to
+gratify the senses, we sever the pleasure of the senses from the needs
+of the character. The ingenuity of man has always been dedicated to
+the solution of one problem,--how to detach the sensual sweet, the
+sensual strong, the sensual bright, etc., from the moral sweet, the
+moral deep, the moral fair; that is, again, to contrive to cut clean
+off this upper surface so thin as to leave it bottomless; to get a
+_one end_, without an _other end_. The soul says, Eat; the body would
+feast. The soul says, The man and woman shall be one flesh and one
+soul; the body would join the flesh only. The soul says, Have dominion
+over all things to the ends of virtue; the body would have the power
+over things to its own ends.
+
+The soul strives amain[109] to live and work through all things. It
+would be the only fact. All things shall be added unto it,--power,
+pleasure, knowledge, beauty. The particular man aims to be somebody;
+to set up for himself; to truck and higgle for a private good; and, in
+particulars, to ride, that he may ride; to dress, that he may be
+dressed; to eat, that he may eat; and to govern, that he may be seen.
+Men seek to be great; they would have offices, wealth, power, and
+fame. They think that to be great is to possess one side of
+nature,--the sweet, without the other side,--the bitter.
+
+This dividing and detaching is steadily counteracted. Up to this day,
+it must be owned, no projector has had the smallest success. The
+parted water reunites behind our hand. Pleasure is taken out of
+pleasant things, profit out of profitable things, power out of strong
+things, as soon as we seek to separate them from the whole. We can no
+more have things and get the sensual good, by itself, than we can get
+an inside that shall have no outside, or a light without a shadow.
+"Drive out nature with a fork, she comes running back."[110]
+
+Life invests itself with inevitable conditions, which the unwise seek
+to dodge, which one and another brags that he does not know; that they
+do not touch him;--but the brag is on his lips, the conditions are in
+his soul. If he escapes them in one part, they attack him in another
+more vital part. If he has escaped them in form, and in the
+appearance, it is because he has resisted his life, and fled from
+himself, and the retribution is so much death. So signal is the
+failure of all attempts to make this separation of the good from the
+tax, that the experiment would not be tried,--since to try it is to be
+mad,--but for the circumstance, that when the disease began in the
+will, of rebellion and separation, the intellect is at once infected,
+so that the man ceases to see God whole in each object, but is able to
+see the sensual allurement of an object, and not see the sensual hurt;
+he sees the mermaid's head, but not the dragon's tail; and thinks he
+can cut off that which he would have, from that which he would not
+have. "How secret art thou who dwellest in the highest heavens in
+silence, O thou only great God, sprinkling with an unwearied
+Providence certain penal blindnesses upon such as have unbridled
+desires!"[111]
+
+The human soul is true to these facts in the painting of fable, of
+history, of law, of proverbs, of conversation. It finds a tongue in
+literature unawares. Thus the Greeks called Jupiter,[112] Supreme
+Mind; but having traditionally ascribed to him many base actions, they
+involuntarily made amends to reason, by tying up the hands[113] of so
+bad a god. He is made as helpless as a king of England.[114]
+Prometheus[115] knows one secret which Jove must bargain for;
+Minerva,[116] another. He cannot get his own thunders; Minerva keeps
+the key of them.
+
+   "Of all the gods, I only know the keys
+    That ope the solid doors within whose vaults
+    His thunders sleep."
+
+A plain confession of the in-working of the All, and of its moral aim.
+The Indian mythology ends in the same ethics; and it would seem
+impossible for any fable to be invented to get any currency which was
+not moral. Aurora[117] forgot to ask youth for her lover, and though
+Tithonus is immortal, he is old, Achilles[118] is not quite
+invulnerable; the sacred waters did not wash the heel by which Thetis
+held him. Siegfried,[119] in the Niebelungen, is not quite immortal,
+for a leaf fell on his back whilst he was bathing in the dragon's
+blood, and that spot which it covered is mortal. And so it must be.
+There is a crack in everything God has made. It would seem, there is
+always this vindictive circumstance stealing in at unawares, even into
+the wild poesy in which the human fancy attempted to make bold
+holiday, and to shake itself free of the old laws,--this back-stroke,
+this kick of the gun, certifying that the law is fatal; that in nature
+nothing can be given, all things are sold.
+
+This is that ancient doctrine of Nemesis,[120] who keeps watch in the
+universe, and lets no offense go unchastised. The Furies,[121] they
+said, are attendants on justice, and if the sun in heaven should
+transgress his path, they would punish him. The poets related that
+stone walls, and iron swords, and leathern thongs had an occult
+sympathy with the wrongs of their owners; that the belt which Ajax
+gave Hector[122] dragged the Trojan hero over the field at the wheels
+of the car of Achilles, and the sword which Hector gave Ajax was that
+on whose point Ajax fell. They recorded, that when the Thasians[123]
+erected a statue to Theagenes, a victor in the games, one of his
+rivals went to it by night, and endeavored to throw it down by
+repeated blows, until at last he moved it from its pedestal, and was
+crushed to death beneath its fall.
+
+This voice of fable has in it somewhat divine. It came from thought
+above the will of the writer. That is the best part of each writer,
+which has nothing private in it;[124] that which he does not know,
+that which flowed out of his constitution, and not from his too
+active invention; that which in the study of a single artist you might
+not easily find, but in the study of many, you would abstract as the
+spirit of them all. Phidias it is not, but the work of man in that
+early Hellenic[125] world, that I would know. The name and
+circumstance of Phidias, however convenient for history, embarrass
+when we come to the highest criticism. We are to see that which man
+was tending to do in a given period, and was hindered, or, if you
+will, modified in doing, by the interfering volitions of Phidias, of
+Dante, of Shakespeare, the organ whereby man at the moment wrought.
+
+Still more striking is the expression of this fact in the proverbs of
+all nations, which are always the literature of reason, or the
+statements of an absolute truth, without qualification. Proverbs, like
+the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions.
+That which the droning world, chained to appearances, will not allow
+the realist to say in his own words, it will suffer him to say in
+proverbs without contradiction. And this law of laws which the pulpit,
+the senate, and the college deny, is hourly preached in all markets
+and workshops by flights of proverbs, whose teaching is as true and as
+omnipresent as that of birds and flies.
+
+All things are double, one against another.--Tit for tat;[126] an eye
+for an eye; a tooth for a tooth; blood for blood; measure for measure;
+love for love.--Give and it shall be given you.--- He that watereth
+shall be watered himself.--What will you have? quoth God; pay for it
+and take it.--Nothing venture, nothing have.--Thou shalt be paid
+exactly for what thou hast done, no more, no less.--Who doth not work
+shall not eat.--Harm watch, harm catch.--Curses always recoil on the
+head of him who imprecates them.--If you put a chain around the neck
+of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.--Bad counsel
+confounds the adviser.--The Devil is an ass.
+
+It is thus written, because it is thus in life. Our action is
+overmastered and characterized above our will by the law of nature. We
+aim at a petty end quite aside from the public good, but our act
+arranges itself by irresistible magnetism in a line with the poles of
+the world.
+
+A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will, or against
+his will, he draws his portrait to the eye of his companions by every
+word. Every opinion reacts on him who utters it. It is a thread-ball
+thrown at a mark, but the other end remains in the thrower's bag. Or,
+rather, it is a harpoon hurled at the whale, unwinding, as it flies, a
+coil of cord in the boat, and if the harpoon is not good, or not well
+thrown, it will go nigh to cut the steersman in twain, or to sink the
+boat.
+
+You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong. "No man had ever a point
+of pride that was not injurious to him," said Burke.[127] The
+exclusive in fashionable life does not see that he excludes himself
+from enjoyment in the attempt to appropriate it. The exclusionist in
+religion does not see that he shuts the door of heaven on himself, in
+striving to shut out others. Treat men as pawns[128] and ninepins, and
+you shall suffer as well as they. If you leave out their heart, you
+shall lose your own. The senses would make things of all persons; of
+women, of children, of the poor. The vulgar proverb, "I will get it
+from his purse or get it from his skin," is sound philosophy.
+
+All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are
+speedily punished. They are punished by fear. Whilst I stand in simple
+relations to my fellow-man, I have no displeasure in meeting him. We
+meet as water meets water, or as two currents of air mix, with perfect
+diffusion and interpenetration of nature. But as soon as there is any
+departure from simplicity, and attempt at halfness, or good for me
+that is not good for him, my neighbor feels the wrong; he shrinks from
+me as far as I have shrunk from him; his eyes no longer seek mine;
+there is war between us; there is hate in him and fear in me.
+
+All the old abuses in society, universal and particular, all unjust
+accumulations of property and power, are avenged in the same manner.
+Fear is an instructor of great sagacity, and the herald of all
+revolutions. One thing he teaches, that there is rottenness where he
+appears. He is a carrion crow, and though you see not well what he
+hovers for, there is death somewhere. Our property is timid, our laws
+are timid, our cultivated classes are timid. Fear for ages has boded
+and mowed and gibbered over government and property. That obscene[129]
+bird is not there for nothing. He indicates great wrongs which must be
+revised.
+
+Of the like nature is that expectation of change which instantly
+follows the suspension of our voluntary activity. The terror of
+cloudless noon, the emerald of Polycrates,[130] the awe of prosperity,
+the instinct which leads every generous soul to impose on itself tasks
+of a noble asceticism and vicarious virtue, are the tremblings of the
+balance of justice through the heart and mind of man.
+
+Experienced men of the world know very well that it is best to pay
+scot and lot[131] as they go along, and that a man often pays dear for
+a small frugality. The borrower runs in his own debt. Has a man gained
+anything who has received a hundred favors and rendered none? Has he
+gained by borrowing, through indolence or cunning, his neighbor's
+wares, or horses, or money? There arises on the deed the instant
+acknowledgment of benefit on the one part, and of debt on the other;
+that is, of superiority and inferiority. The transaction remains in
+the memory of himself and his neighbor; and every new transaction
+alters, according to its nature, their relation to each other. He may
+soon come to see that he had better have broken his own bones than to
+have ridden in his neighbor's coach, and that "the highest price he
+can pay for a thing is to ask for it."
+
+A wise man will extend this lesson to all parts of life, and know that
+it is the part of prudence to face every claimant, and pay every just
+demand on your time, your talents, or your heart. Always pay; for,
+first or last, you must pay your entire debt. Persons and events may
+stand for a time between you and justice, but it is only a
+postponement. You must pay at last your own debt. If you are wise, you
+will dread a prosperity which only loads you with more. Benefit is the
+end of nature. But for every benefit which you receive, a tax is
+levied. He is great who confers the most benefits. He is base--and
+that is the one base thing in the universe--to receive favors and
+render none. In the order of nature we cannot render benefits to those
+from whom we receive them, or only seldom.[132] But the benefit we
+receive must be rendered again, line for line, deed for deed, cent for
+cent, to somebody. Beware of too much good staying in your hand. It
+will fast corrupt and worm worms.[133] Pay it away quickly in some
+sort.
+
+Labor is watched over by the same pitiless laws. Cheapest, say the
+prudent, is the dearest labor. What we buy in a broom, a mat, a wagon,
+a knife, is some application of good sense to a common want. It is
+best to pay in your land a skillful gardener, or to buy good sense
+applied to gardening; in your sailor, good sense applied to
+navigation; in the house, good sense applied to cooking, sewing,
+serving; in your agent, good sense applied to accounts and affairs.
+So do you multiply your presence, or spread yourself throughout your
+estate. But because of the dual constitution of things, in labor as in
+life there can be no cheating. The thief steals from himself. The
+swindler swindles himself. For the real price of labor is knowledge
+and virtue, whereof wealth and credit are signs. These signs, like
+paper money, may be counterfeited or stolen, but that which they
+represent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited or
+stolen. These ends of labor cannot be answered but by real exertions
+of the mind, and in obedience to pure motives. The cheat, the
+defaulter, the gambler, cannot extort the knowledge of material and
+moral nature which his honest care and pains yield to the operative.
+The law of nature is, Do the thing, and you shall have the power: but
+they who do not the thing have not the power.
+
+Human labor, through all its forms, from the sharpening of a stake to
+the construction of a city or an epic, is one immense illustration of
+the perfect compensation of the universe. The absolute balance of Give
+and Take, the doctrine that everything has its price,--and if that
+price is not paid, not that thing but something else is obtained, and
+that it is impossible to get anything without its price,--is not less
+sublime in the columns of a ledger than in the budgets of states, in
+the laws of light and darkness, in all the action and reaction of
+nature. I cannot doubt that the high laws which each man sees
+implicated in those processes with which he is conversant, the stern
+ethics which sparkle on his chisel edge, which are measured out by his
+plumb and foot rule, which stand as manifest in the footing of the
+shop bill as in the history of a state,--do recommend to him his
+trade, and though seldom named, exalt his business to his imagination.
+
+The league between virtue and nature engages all things to assume a
+hostile front to vice. The beautiful laws and substances of the world
+persecute and whip the traitor. He finds that things are arranged for
+truth and benefit, but there is no den in the wide world to hide a
+rogue. Commit a crime,[134] and the earth is made of glass. Commit a
+crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as
+reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel
+and mole. You cannot recall the spoken word,[135] you cannot wipe out
+the foot-track, you cannot draw up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet
+or clew. Some damning circumstance always transpires. The laws and
+substances of nature--water, snow, wind, gravitation--become penalties
+to the thief.
+
+On the other hand, the law holds with equal sureness for all right
+action. Love, and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just,
+as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation. The good man has
+absolute good, which like fire turns everything to its own nature, so
+that you cannot do him any harm; but as the royal armies sent against
+Napoleon, when he approached, cast down their colors and from enemies
+became friends, so disasters of all kinds, as sickness, offense,
+poverty, prove benefactors:--
+
+              "Winds blow and waters roll
+    Strength to the brave, and power and deity,
+    Yet in themselves are nothing."
+
+The good are befriended even by weakness and defect. As no man had
+ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him, so no man had
+ever a defect that was not somewhere made useful to him. The stag in
+the fable[136] admired his horns and blamed his feet, but when the
+hunter came, his feet saved him, and afterwards, caught in the
+thicket, his horns destroyed him. Every man in his lifetime needs to
+thank his faults. As no man thoroughly understands a truth until he
+has contended against it, so no man has a thorough acquaintance with
+the hindrances or talents of men, until he has suffered from the one,
+and seen the triumph of the other over his own want of the same. Has
+he a defect of temper that unfits him to live in society? Thereby he
+is driven to entertain himself alone, and acquire habits of self-help;
+and thus, like the wounded oyster, he mends his shell with pearl.
+
+Our strength grows out of our weakness. The indignation which arms
+itself with secret forces does not awaken until we are pricked and
+stung and sorely assailed. A great man is always willing to be little.
+Whilst he sits on the cushion of advantages, he goes to sleep. When he
+is punished, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something;
+he has been put on his wits, on his manhood; he has gained facts;
+learns his ignorance; is cured of the insanity of conceit; has got
+moderation and real skill. The wise man throws himself on the side of
+his assailants. It is more his interest than it is theirs to find his
+weak point. The wound cicatrizes and falls off from him like a dead
+skin, and when they would triumph, lo! he has passed on invulnerable.
+Blame is safer than praise. I hate to be defended in a newspaper. As
+long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain
+assurance of success. But as soon as honeyed words of praise are
+spoken for me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies.
+In general, every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor. As
+the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the
+enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the
+temptation we resist.
+
+The same guards which protect us from disaster, defect, and enmity,
+defend us, if we will, from selfishness and fraud. Bolts and bars are
+not the best of our institutions, nor is shrewdness in trade a mark of
+wisdom. Men suffer all their life long, under the foolish superstition
+that they can be cheated. But it is as impossible for a man to be
+cheated by anyone but himself,[137] as for a thing to be and not to be
+at the same time. There is a third silent party to all our bargains.
+The nature and soul of things takes on itself the guaranty of the
+fulfillment of every contract, so that honest service cannot come to
+loss. If you serve an ungrateful master, serve him the more. Put God
+in your debt. Every stroke shall be repaid. The longer the payment is
+withholden,[138] the better for you; for compound interest on compound
+interest is the rate and usage of this exchequer.
+
+The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature,
+to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand. It makes no
+difference whether the actors be many or one, a tyrant or a mob. A
+mob[139] is a society of bodies voluntarily bereaving themselves of
+reason, and traversing its work. The mob is man voluntarily descending
+to the nature of the beast. Its fit hour of activity is night. Its
+actions are insane like its whole constitution; it persecutes a
+principle; it would whip a right; it would tar and feather justice, by
+inflicting fire and outrage upon the houses and persons of those who
+have these. It resembles the prank of boys, who run with fire engines
+to put out the ruddy aurora streaming to the stars. The inviolate
+spirit turns their spite against the wrongdoers. The martyr cannot be
+dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison, a
+more illustrious abode; every burned book or house enlightens the
+world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the
+earth from side to side. Hours of sanity and consideration are always
+arriving to communities, as to individuals, when the truth is seen,
+and the martyrs are justified.
+
+Thus do all things preach the indifferency of circumstances. The man
+is all. Everything has two sides, a good and an evil. Every advantage
+has its tax. I learn to be content. But the doctrine of compensation
+is not the doctrine of indifferency. The thoughtless say, on hearing
+these representations, What boots it to do well? there is one event to
+good and evil; if I gain any good, I must pay for it; if I lose any
+good, I gain some other; all actions are indifferent.
+
+There is a deeper fact in the soul than compensation, to wit, its own
+nature. The soul is not a compensation, but a life. The soul _is_.
+Under all this running sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and flow
+with perfect balance, lies the aboriginal abyss of real Being.
+Essence, or God, is not a relation, or a part, but the whole. Being is
+the vast affirmative, excluding negation, self-balanced, and
+swallowing up all relations, parts, and times within itself. Nature,
+truth, virtue, are the influx from thence. Vice is the absence or
+departure of the same. Nothing, Falsehood, may indeed stand as the
+great Night or shade, on which, as a background, the living universe
+paints itself forth, but no fact is begotten by it; it cannot work,
+for it is not. It cannot work any good; it cannot work any harm. It is
+harm inasmuch as it is worse not to be than to be.
+
+We feel defrauded of the retribution due to evil acts, because the
+criminal adheres to his vice and contumacy, and does not come to a
+crisis or judgment anywhere in visible nature. There is no stunning
+confutation of his nonsense before men and angels. Has he therefore
+outwitted the law? Inasmuch as he carries the malignity and the lie
+with him, he so far deceases from nature. In some manner there will be
+a demonstration of the wrong to the understanding also; but should we
+not see it, this deadly deduction makes square the eternal account.
+
+Neither can it be said, on the other hand, that the gain of rectitude
+must be bought by any loss. There is no penalty to virtue; no penalty
+to wisdom; they are proper additions of being. In a virtuous action, I
+properly _am_; in a virtuous act, I add to the world; I plant into
+deserts conquered from Chaos and Nothing, and see the darkness
+receding on the limits of the horizon. There can be no excess to love;
+none to knowledge; none to beauty, when these attributes are
+considered in the purest sense. The soul refuses limits, and always
+affirms an Optimism,[140] never a Pessimism.
+
+Man's life is a progress, and not a station. His instinct is trust.
+Our instinct uses "more" and "less" in application to man, of the
+_presence of the soul_, and not of its absence; the brave man is
+greater than the coward; the true, the benevolent, the wise, is more a
+man, and not less, than the fool and knave. There is no tax on the
+good of virtue; for that is the incoming of God himself, or absolute
+existence without any comparative. Material good has its tax, and if
+it came without desert or sweat, has no root in me, and the next wind
+will blow it away. But all the good of nature is the soul's, and may
+be had, if paid for in nature's lawful coin, that is, by labor which
+the heart and the head allow. I no longer wish to meet a good I do not
+earn; for example, to find a pot of buried gold, knowing that it
+brings with it new burdens. I do not wish more external
+goods,--neither possessions, nor honors, nor powers, nor persons. The
+gain is apparent; the tax is certain. But there is no tax on the
+knowledge that the compensation exists, and that it is not desirable
+to dig up treasure. Herein I rejoice with a serene eternal peace. I
+contract the boundaries of possible mischief. I learn the wisdom of
+St. Bernard,[141]--"Nothing can, work me damage except myself; the
+harm, that I sustain I carry about with me, and never am a real
+sufferer but by my own fault."
+
+In the nature of the soul is the compensation for the inequalities of
+condition. The radical tragedy of nature seems to be the distinction
+of More and Less. How can Less not feel the pain; how not feel
+indignation or malevolence towards More? Look at those who have less
+faculty, and one feels sad, and knows not well what to make of it. He
+almost shuns their eye; he fears they will upbraid God. What should
+they do? It seems a great injustice. But see the facts nearly, and
+these mountainous inequalities vanish. Love reduces them, as the sun
+melts the iceberg in the sea. The heart and soul of all men being one,
+this bitterness of _His_ and _Mine_ ceases. His is mine. I am my
+brother, and my brother is me. If I feel overshadowed and outdone by
+great neighbors, I can yet love; I can still receive; and he that
+loveth maketh his own the grandeur he loves. Thereby I make the
+discovery that my brother is my guardian, acting for me with the
+friendliest designs, and the estate I so admired and envied is my own.
+It is the nature of the soul to appropriate all things. Jesus[142] and
+Shakespeare are fragments of the soul, and by love I conquer and
+incorporate them in my own conscious domain. His[143] virtue,--is not
+that mine? His wit,--if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit.
+
+Such, also, is the natural history of calamity. The changes which
+break up at short intervals the prosperity of men are advertisements
+of a nature whose law is growth. Every soul is by this intrinsic
+necessity quitting its whole system of things, its friends, and home,
+and laws, and faith, as the shellfish crawls out of its beautiful but
+stony case, because it no longer admits of its growth, and slowly
+forms a new house. In proportion to the vigor of the individual, these
+revolutions are frequent, until in some happier mind they are
+incessant, and all worldly relations hang very loosely about him,
+becoming, as it were, a transparent fluid membrane through which the
+living form is seen, and not, as in most men, an indurated
+heterogeneous fabric of many dates, and of no settled character, in
+which the man is imprisoned. Then there can be enlargement, and the
+man of to-day scarcely recognizes the man of yesterday. And such
+should be the outward biography of man in time, a putting off of dead
+circumstances day by day, as he renews his raiment day by day. But to
+us, in our lapsed estate, resting, not advancing, resisting, not
+coöperating with the divine expansion, this growth comes by shocks.
+
+We cannot part with our friend. We cannot let our angels go. We do not
+see that they only go out, that archangels may come in. We are
+idolaters of the old. We do not believe in the riches of the soul, in
+its proper eternity and omnipresence. We do not believe there is any
+force in to-day to rival or recreate that beautiful yesterday. We
+linger in the ruins of the old tent, where once we had bread and
+shelter and organs, nor believe that the spirit can feed, cover, and
+nerve us again. We cannot again find aught so dear, so sweet, so
+graceful. But we sit and weep in vain. The voice of the Almighty
+saith, "Up and onward forevermore!" We cannot stay amid the ruins.
+Neither will we rely on the new; and so we walk ever with reverted
+eyes, like those monsters who look backwards.
+
+And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the
+understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a
+mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of
+friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure
+years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts. The
+death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but
+privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius;
+for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an
+epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up
+a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows
+the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character. It
+permits or constrains the formation of new acquaintances, and the
+reception of new influences that prove of the first importance to the
+next years; and the man or woman who would have remained a sunny
+garden flower, with no room for its roots and too much sunshine for
+its head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect of the gardener,
+is made the banyan[144] of the forest, yielding shade and fruit to
+wide neighborhoods of men.
+
+
+
+
+SELF-RELIANCE
+
+"Ne te quæsiveris extra."[145]
+
+    "Man is his own star; and the soul that can
+    Render an honest and a perfect man,
+    Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
+    Nothing to him falls early or too late.
+    Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
+    Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."[146]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+      Cast the bantling on the rocks,
+      Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat;
+      Wintered with the hawk and fox,
+      Power and speed be hands and feet.[147]
+
+I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which
+were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an
+admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The
+sentiment they instill is of more value than any thought they may
+contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for
+you in your private heart is true for all men,--that is genius.[148]
+Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal
+sense;[149] for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,--and our
+first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last
+Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest
+merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato,[150] and Milton[151] is, that they
+set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what
+they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of
+light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster
+of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice
+his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize
+our own rejected thoughts:[152] they come back to us with a certain
+alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson
+for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression
+with good-humored inflexibility then most when[153] the whole cry of
+voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with
+masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the
+time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from
+another.
+
+There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the
+conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide;[154]
+that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that
+though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn
+can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground
+which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new
+in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor
+does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one
+character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none.
+This sculpture in the memory is not without preëstablished harmony.
+The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of
+that particular ray. We but half express ourselves,[155] and are
+ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be
+safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be
+faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by
+cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his
+work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall
+give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the
+attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no
+hope.
+
+Trust thyself:[156] every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept
+the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your
+contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done
+so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age,
+betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated
+at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all
+their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind
+the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a
+protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides,
+redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing
+on Chaos[157] and the Dark.
+
+What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text, in the face and
+behavior of children, babes, and even brutes! That divided and rebel
+mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed
+the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these[158] have not.
+Their mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we
+look in their faces we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody:
+all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five[159]
+out of the adults who prattle and play to it. So God has armed youth
+and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and
+made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it
+will stand by itself. Do not think the youth has no force, because he
+cannot speak to you and me. Hark! in the next room his voice is
+sufficiently clear and emphatic. It seems he knows how to speak to his
+contemporaries. Bashful or bold, then, he will know how to make us
+seniors very unnecessary.
+
+The nonchalance[160] of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would
+disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the
+healthy attitude of human nature. A boy is in the parlor what the pit
+is in the playhouse;[161] independent, irresponsible, looking out from
+his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences
+them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad,
+interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never
+about consequences about interests; he gives an independent, genuine
+verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as
+it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has
+once acted or spoken with _éclat_[162] he is a committed person,
+watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections
+must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe[163] for this. Ah,
+that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who[164] can thus avoid
+all pledges, and having observed, observe again from the same
+unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always
+be formidable. He would utter opinions on all passing affairs, which
+being seen to be not private, but necessary, would sink like darts
+into the ear of men, and put them in fear.
+
+These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint
+and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in
+conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is
+a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better
+securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty
+and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity.
+Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators,
+but names and customs.
+
+Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.[165] He who would gather
+immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must
+explore if it be goodness.[166] Nothing is at last sacred but the
+integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall
+have the suffrage[167] of the world. I remember an answer which when
+quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was wont
+to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my
+saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live
+wholly from within? my friend suggested: "But these impulses may be
+from below, not from above." I replied: "They do not seem to me to be
+such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil."
+No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but
+names very readily transferable to that or this;[168] the only right
+is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A
+man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if
+everything were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think
+how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and
+dead institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and
+sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and
+speak the rude truth in all ways. If malice and vanity wear the coat
+of philanthropy, shall that pass? If an angry bigot assumes this
+bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from
+Barbadoes,[169] why should I not say to him: "Go love thy infant; love
+thy wood-chopper: be good-natured and modest: have that grace; and
+never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible
+tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is
+spite at home." Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but truth
+is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have
+some edge to it,--else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be
+preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules
+and whines. I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my
+genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post,
+_Whim_.[170] I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we
+cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I
+seek or why I exclude company. Then, again, do not tell me, as a good
+man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good
+situations. Are they _my_ poor? I tell thee, thou foolish
+philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give
+to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There
+is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought
+and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your
+miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools;
+the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now
+stand; alms to sots; and the thousand-fold Relief Societies;--though I
+confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a
+wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.
+
+Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the
+rule. There is the man _and_ his virtues. Men do what is called a good
+action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a
+fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are
+done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world,--as
+invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are penances.
+I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not
+for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so
+it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and
+unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and
+bleeding.[171] I ask primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse
+this appeal from the man to his actions. I know that for myself it
+makes no difference whether I do or forbear those actions which are
+reckoned excellent. I cannot consent to pay for a privilege where I
+have intrinsic right. Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am,
+and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows
+any secondary testimony.
+
+What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.
+This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may
+serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is
+the harder, because you will always find those who think they know
+what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to
+live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after
+our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps
+with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.[172]
+
+The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is,
+that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the
+impression of your character. If you maintain a dead church,
+contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for
+the government or against it, spread your table like base
+housekeepers,--under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the
+precise[173] man you are. And, of course, so much force is withdrawn
+from your proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you.[174] Do
+your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what
+a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect, I
+anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and
+topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I
+not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous
+word? Do I not know that, with[175] all this ostentation of examining
+the grounds of the institution, he will do no such thing? Do I not
+know that he is pledged to himself not to look but at one side,--the
+permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister? He is a
+retained attorney, and these airs of the bench[176] are the emptiest
+affectation. Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another
+handkerchief,[177] and attached themselves to some one of these
+communities of opinion.[178] This conformity makes them not false in a
+few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars.
+Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two,
+their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us,
+and we know not where to begin to set them right. Meantime nature is
+not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we
+adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by
+degrees the gentlest asinine expression. There is a mortifying
+experience in particular which does not fail to wreak itself also in
+the general history; I mean "the foolish face of praise," the forced
+smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in
+answer to conversation which does not interest us. The muscles, not
+spontaneously moved, but moved by a low usurping willfulness, grow
+tight about the outline of the face with the most disagreeable
+sensation.
+
+For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.[179] And
+therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face. The bystanders
+look askance on him in the public street or in the friend's parlor. If
+this aversation had its origin in contempt and resistance like his
+own, he might well go home with a sad countenance; but the sour faces
+of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are
+put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs.[180] Yet is
+the discontent of the multitude more formidable than that of the
+senate and the college. It is easy enough for a firm man who knows the
+world to brook the rage of the cultivated classes. Their rage is
+decorous and prudent, for they are timid as being very vulnerable
+themselves. But when to their feminine rage the indignation of the
+people is added, when the ignorant and the poor are aroused, when the
+unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom of society is made
+to growl and mow, it needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to
+treat it godlike as a trifle of no concernment.
+
+The other terror[181] that scares us from self-trust is our
+consistency;[182] a reverence for our past act or word, because the
+eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit[183] than
+our past acts, and we are loth to disappoint them.
+
+But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about
+this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat[184] you have
+stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict
+yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on
+your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring
+the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in
+a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the
+Deity; yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them
+heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color.
+Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and
+flee.[185]
+
+A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by
+little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a
+great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself
+with the shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words,
+and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though
+it contradict everything you said to-day.--"Ah, so you shall be sure
+to be misunderstood."--Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood?
+Pythagoras[186] was misunderstood, and Socrates,[187] and Jesus, and
+Luther,[188] and Copernicus,[189] and Galileo,[190] and Newton,[191]
+and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to
+be misunderstood.
+
+I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies of his will
+are rounded in by the law of his being, as the inequalities of
+Andes[192] and Himmaleh[193] are insignificant in the curve of the
+sphere. Nor does it matter how you gauge and try him. A character is
+like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza;[194]--read it forward,
+backward, or across, it still spells the same thing. In this pleasing,
+contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my
+honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it
+will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not, and see it not. My
+book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects. The
+swallow over my window should interweave that thread or straw he
+carries in his bill into my web also. We pass for what we are.
+Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate
+their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue
+or vice emit a breath every moment.
+
+There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so they be
+each honest and natural in their hour. For of one will, the actions
+will be harmonious, however unlike they seem. These varieties are lost
+sight of at a little distance, at a little height of thought. One
+tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line
+of a hundred tacks.[195] See the line from a sufficient distance, and
+it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action
+will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your
+conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already
+done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future. If
+I can be firm enough to-day to do right, and scorn eyes,[196] I must
+have done so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will,
+do right now. Always scorn appearances, and you always may. The force
+of character is cumulative. All the foregone days of virtue work their
+health into this. What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate
+and the field, which so fills the imagination? The consciousness of a
+train of great days and victories behind. They shed an united light on
+the advancing actor. He is attended as by a visible escort of angels.
+That is it which throws thunder into Chatham's[197] voice, and dignity
+into Washington's port, and America into Adams's[198] eye. Honor is
+venerable to us because it is no ephemeris. It is always ancient
+virtue. We worship it to-day because it is not of to-day. We love it
+and pay it homage, because it is not a trap for our love and homage,
+but is self-dependent, self-derived, and therefore of an old
+immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a young person.
+
+I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and
+consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward.
+Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the
+Spartan[199] fife. Let us never bow and apologize more. A great man is
+coming to eat at my house. I do not wish to please him; I wish that he
+should wish to please me. I will stand here for humanity, and though I
+would make it kind, I would make it true. Let us affront and reprimand
+the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl
+in the face of custom, and trade, and office, the fact which is the
+upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and
+Actor working wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no
+other time or place, but is the center of things. Where he is, there
+is nature. He measures you, and all men, and all events. Ordinarily,
+everybody in society reminds us of somewhat else, or of some other
+person. Character, reality, reminds you of nothing else; it takes
+place of the whole creation. The man must be so much, that he must
+make all circumstances indifferent. Every true man is a cause, a
+country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time
+fully to accomplish his design;--and posterity seem to follow his
+steps as a train of clients. A man Cæsar[200] is born, and for ages
+after we have a Roman Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds
+so grow and cleave to his genius, that he is confounded with virtue
+and the possible of man. An institution is the lengthened shadow of
+one man; as Monachism, of the hermit Antony;[201] the Reformation, of
+Luther; Quakerism, of Fox;[202] Methodism, of Wesley;[203] Abolition,
+of Clarkson.[204] Scipio,[205] Milton called "the height of Rome"; and
+all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few
+stout and earnest persons.
+
+Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him
+not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy,
+a bastard, or an interloper, in the world which exists for him. But
+the man in the street, finding no worth in himself which corresponds
+to the force which built a tower or sculptured a marble god, feels
+poor when he looks on these. To him a palace, a statue, a costly book,
+have an alien and forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seem
+to say like that, "Who are you, Sir?" Yet they all are his, suitors
+for his notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come out
+and take possession. The picture waits for my verdict: it is not to
+command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise. That popular
+fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried
+to the duke's house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke's bed,
+and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the
+duke, and assured that he had been insane,[206] owes its popularity to
+the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the
+world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason,
+and finds himself a true prince.
+
+Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In history, our imagination
+plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, power and estate, are a gaudier
+vocabulary than private John and Edward in a small house and common
+day's work; but the things of life are the same to both; the sum total
+of both is the same. Why all this deference to Alfred,[207] and
+Scanderbeg,[208] and Gustavus?[209] Suppose they were virtuous; did
+they wear out virtue? As great a stake depends on your private act
+to-day, as followed their public and renowned steps. When private men
+shall act with original views, the luster will be transferred from the
+actions of kings to those of gentlemen.
+
+The world has been instructed by its kings, who have so magnetized the
+eyes of nations. It has been taught by this colossal symbol the mutual
+reverence that is due from man to man. The joyful loyalty with which
+men have everywhere suffered the king, the noble, or the great
+proprietor to walk among them by a law of his own, make his own scale
+of men and things, and reverse theirs, pay for benefits not with money
+but with honor, and represent the law in his person, was the
+hieroglyphic[210] by which they obscurely signified their
+consciousness of their own right and comeliness, the right of every
+man.
+
+The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we
+inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee? What is the
+aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded? What
+is the nature and power of that science-baffling star, without
+parallax,[211] without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of
+beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of
+independence appear? The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the
+essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity
+or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all
+later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind
+which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin. For the
+sense of being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the
+soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time,
+from man, but one with them, and proceeds obviously from the same
+source whence their life and being also proceed. We first share the
+life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in
+nature, and forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the
+fountain of action and of thought. Here are the lungs of that
+inspiration which giveth man wisdom, and which cannot be denied
+without impiety and atheism. We lie in the lap of immense
+intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its
+activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do
+nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask
+whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all
+philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can
+affirm. Every man discriminates between the voluntary acts of his
+mind, and his involuntary perceptions, and knows that to his
+involuntary perceptions a perfect faith is due. He may err in the
+expression of them, but he knows that these things are so, like day
+and night, not to be disputed. My willful actions and acquisitions are
+but roving;--the idlest reverie, the faintest native emotion, command
+my curiosity and respect. Thoughtless people contradict as readily the
+statement of perceptions as of opinions, or rather much more readily;
+for, they do not distinguish between perception and notion. They fancy
+that I choose to see this or that thing. But perception is not
+whimsical, it is fatal. If I see a trait, my children will see it
+after me, and in course of time, all mankind,--although it may chance
+that no one has seen it before me. For my perception of it is as much
+a fact as the sun.
+
+The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is
+profane to seek to interpose helps. It must be that when God speaketh
+he should communicate, not one thing, but all things; should fill the
+world with his voice; should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls,
+from the center of the present thought; and new date and new create
+the whole. Whenever a mind is simple, and receives a divine wisdom,
+old things pass away,--means, teachers, texts, temples, fall; it lives
+now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour. All things are
+made sacred by relation to it,--one as much as another. All things
+are dissolved to their center by their cause, and, in the universal
+miracle, petty and particular miracles disappear. If, therefore, a man
+claims to know and speak of God, and carries you backward to the
+phraseology of some old moldered nation in another country, in another
+world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which is its
+fullness and completion? Is the parent better than the child into whom
+he has cast his ripened being?[212] Whence, then, this worship of the
+past?[213] The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and
+authority of the soul. Time and space are but physiological colors
+which the eye makes, but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where
+it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury, if it
+be anything more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and
+becoming.
+
+Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say
+"I think," "I am," but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before
+the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window
+make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what
+they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There
+is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.
+Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown
+flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its
+nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike.
+But man postpones, or remembers; he does not live in the present, but
+with a reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that
+surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be
+happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above
+time.
+
+This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong intellects dare not
+yet hear God himself, unless he speak the phraseology of I know not
+what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great a
+price on a few texts, on a few lives.[214] We are like children who
+repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as they
+grow older, of the men and talents and characters they chance to
+see,--painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke; afterwards,
+when they come into the point of view which those had who uttered
+those saying, they understand them, and are willing to let the words
+go; for, at any time, they can use words as good when occasion comes.
+If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man
+to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak. When we have new
+perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded
+treasures as old rubbish. When a man lives with God, his voice shall
+be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn.
+
+And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains unsaid;
+probably cannot be said; for all that we say is the far-off
+remembering of the intuition. That thought, by what I can now nearest
+approach to say it, is this. When good is near you, when you have
+life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way; you shall
+not discern the footprints of any other; you shall not see the face of
+man; you shall not hear any name;--the way, the thought, the good,
+shall be wholly strange and new. It shall exclude example and
+experience. You take the way from man, not to man. All persons that
+ever existed are its forgotten ministers. Fear and hope are alike
+beneath it. There is somewhat low even in hope. In the hour of vision,
+there is nothing that can be called gratitude, nor properly joy. The
+soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation,
+perceives the self-existence of Truth and Right, and calms itself with
+knowing that all things go well. Vast spaces of nature, the Atlantic
+Ocean, the South Sea,--long intervals of time, years, centuries,--are
+of no account. This which I think and feel underlay every former state
+of life and circumstances, as it does underlie my present, and what is
+called life, and what is called death.
+
+Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of
+repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new
+state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one
+fact the world hates, that the soul _becomes_; for that forever
+degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to
+shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas[215]
+equally aside. Why, then, do we prate of self-reliance? Inasmuch as
+the soul is present, there will be power not confident but agent.[216]
+To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather
+of that which relies, because it works and is. Who has more obedience
+than I masters me, though he should not raise his finger. Round him I
+must revolve by the gravitation of spirits. We fancy it rhetoric, when
+we speak of eminent virtue. We do not yet see that virtue is Height,
+and that a man or a company of men, plastic and permeable to
+principles, by the law of nature must overpower and ride all cities,
+nations, kings, rich men, poets, who are not.
+
+This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this, as on
+every topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed ONE.
+Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it
+constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it enters into
+all lower forms. All things real are so by so much virtue as they
+contain. Commerce, husbandry, hunting, whaling, war eloquence,
+personal weight, are somewhat, and engage my respect as examples of
+its presence and impure action. I see the same law working in nature
+for conservation and growth. Power is in nature the essential measure
+of right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which
+cannot help itself. The genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise
+and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the
+vital resources of every animal and vegetable, are demonstrations of
+the self-sufficing, and therefore self-relying soul.
+
+Thus all concentrates: let us not rove; let us sit at home with the
+cause. Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books
+and institutions, by a simple declaration of the divine fact. Bid the
+invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here
+within.[217] Let our simplicity judge them, and our docility to our
+own law demonstrate the poverty of nature and fortune beside our
+native riches.
+
+But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his
+genius admonished to stay at home to put itself in communication with
+the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the
+urns of other men. We must go alone. I like the silent church before
+the service begins, better than any preaching. How far off, how cool,
+how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a precinct or
+sanctuary! So let us always sit. Why should we assume the faults of
+our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our
+hearth, or are said to have the same blood? All men have my blood, and
+I have all men's.[218] Not for that will I adopt their petulance or
+folly, even to the extent of being ashamed of it. But your isolation
+must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation. At
+times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with
+emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want,
+charity, all knock at once at thy closet door, and say, "Come out unto
+us." But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The power men
+possess to annoy men, I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can
+come near me but through my act. "What we love that we have, but by
+desire we bereave ourselves of the love."
+
+If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith,
+let us at least resist our temptations; let us enter into the state of
+war, and wake Thor and Woden,[219] courage and constancy, in our Saxon
+breasts. This is to be done in our smooth times by speaking the truth.
+Check this lying hospitality and lying affection. Live no longer to
+the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we
+converse. Say to them, O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O
+friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward
+I am the truth's. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law
+less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but
+proximities.[220] I shall endeavor to nourish my parents, to support
+my family, to be the chaste husband of one wife,--but these relations
+I must fill after a new and unprecedented way. I appeal from your
+customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you,
+or you.[221] If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the
+happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should.
+I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is
+deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever
+inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints. If you are noble, I will
+love you; if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by
+hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truth
+with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own. I do this not
+selfishly, but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest, and mine,
+and all men's however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth.
+Does this sound harsh to-day? You will soon love what is dictated by
+your nature as well as mine, and, if we follow the truth, it will
+bring us out safe at last.[222] But so may you give these friends
+pain. Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their
+sensibility. Besides, all persons have their moments of reason, when
+they look out into the region of absolute truth; then will they
+justify me, and do the same thing.
+
+The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a
+rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism;[223] and the bold
+sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the
+law of consciousness abides. There are two confessionals, in one or
+the other of which we must be shriven. You may fulfill your round of
+duties by clearing yourself in the _direct_, or in the _reflex_ way.
+Consider whether you have satisfied your relations to father, mother,
+cousin, neighbor, town, cat, and dog; whether any of these can upbraid
+you. But I may also neglect this reflex standard, and absolve me to
+myself. I have my own stern claims and perfect circle. It denies the
+name of duty to many offices that are called duties. But if I can
+discharge its debts, it enables me to dispense with the popular code.
+If any one imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its
+commandment one day.
+
+And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the
+common motives of humanity, and has ventured to trust himself for a
+taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight,
+that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself,
+that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is to
+others!
+
+If any man consider the present aspects of what is called by
+distinction _society_, he will see the need of these ethics. The sinew
+and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous,
+desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune,
+afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and
+perfect persons. We want men and women who shall renovate life and our
+social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot
+satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to
+their practical force,[224] and do lean and beg day and night
+continually. Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations,
+our marriages, our religion, we have not chosen, but society has
+chosen for us. We are parlor soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of
+fate, where strength is born.
+
+If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all
+heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is _ruined_. If the
+finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in
+an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of
+Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is
+right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life.
+A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the
+professions, who _teams it, farms it_,[225] _peddles_, keeps a school,
+preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so
+forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet,
+is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his
+days, and feels no shame in not "studying a profession," for he does
+not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a
+hundred chances. Let a Stoic[226] open the resources of man, and tell
+men they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves;
+that with the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear; that a
+man is the word made flesh,[227] born to shed healing to the
+nations,[228] that he should be ashamed of our compassion, and that
+the moment he acts from himself, tossing the laws, the books,
+idolatries and customs out of the window, we pity him no more, but
+thank and revere him,--and that teacher shall restore the life of man
+to splendor, and make his name dear to all history.
+
+It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution
+in all the offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their
+education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their
+association; in their property; in their speculative views.
+
+1. In what prayers do men allow themselves![229] That which they call
+a holy office is not so much as brave and manly. Prayer looks abroad
+and asks for some foreign addition to come through some foreign
+virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural,
+and mediatorial and miraculous. Prayer that craves a particular
+commodity,--anything less than all good,--is vicious. Prayer is the
+contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It
+is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul.[230] It is the
+spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to
+effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and
+not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one
+with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action. The
+prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of
+the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard
+throughout nature, though for cheap ends. Caratach,[231] in Fletcher's
+Bonduca, when admonished to inquire the mind of the god Audate,
+replies,--
+
+   "His hidden meaning lies in our endeavors;
+    Our valors are our best gods."
+
+Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want
+of self-reliance; it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you
+can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and
+already the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base.
+We come to them who weep foolishly, and sit down and cry for company,
+instead of imparting to them truth and health in rough electric
+shocks, putting them once more in communication with their own reason.
+The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods
+and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him
+all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our
+love goes out to him and embraces him, because he did not need it. We
+solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him, because he
+held on his way and scorned our disapprobation. The gods love him
+because men hated him. "To the persevering mortal," said
+Zoroaster,[232] "the blessed Immortals are swift."
+
+As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a
+disease of the intellect. They say with those foolish Israelites, "Let
+not God speak to us, lest we die. Speak thou, speak any man with us, and
+we will obey."[233] Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God in my
+brother, because he has shut his own temple doors, and recites fables
+merely of his brother's, or his brother's brother's God. Every new mind
+is a new classification. If it prove a mind of uncommon activity and
+power, a Locke,[234] a Lavoisier,[235] a Hutton,[236] a Betham,[237] a
+Fourier,[238] it imposes its classification on other men, and lo! a new
+system. In proportion to the depth of the thought, and so to the number
+of the objects it touches and brings within reach of the pupil, is his
+complacency. But chiefly is this apparent in creeds and churches, which
+are also classifications of some powerful mind acting on the elemental
+thought of duty, and man's relation to the Highest. Such is
+Calvinism,[239] Quakerism,[240] Swedenborgism.[241] The pupil takes the
+same delight in subordinating everything to the new terminology, as a
+girl who has just learned botany in seeing a new earth and new seasons
+thereby. It will happen for a time, that the pupil will find his
+intellectual power has grown by the study of his master's mind. But in
+all unbalanced minds, the classification is idolized, passes for the
+end, and not for a speedily exhaustible means, so that the walls of the
+system blend to their eye in the remote horizon with the walls of the
+universe; the luminaries of heaven seem to them hung on the arch their
+master built. They cannot imagine how you aliens have any right to
+see,--how you can see; "It must be somehow that you stole the light from
+us." They do not yet perceive that light, unsystematic, indomitable,
+will break into any cabin, even into theirs. Let them chirp awhile and
+call it their own. If they are honest and do well, presently their neat
+new pinfold will be too strait and low, will crack, will lean, will rot
+and vanish, and the immortal light, all young and joyful, million-orbed,
+million-colored, will beam over the universe as on the first morning.
+
+2. It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Traveling,
+whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all
+educated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable
+in the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like an
+axis of the earth. In manly hours, we feel that duty is our place. The
+soul is no traveler; the wise man stays at home, and when his
+necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or
+into foreign lands, he is at home still; and shall make men sensible
+by the expression of his countenance, that he goes the missionary of
+wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign, and not
+like an interloper or a valet.
+
+I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for
+the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is
+first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding
+somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get
+somewhat which he does not carry,[242] travels away from himself, and
+grows old even in youth among old things. In Thebes,[243] in
+Palmyra,[244] his will and mind have become old and dilapidated as
+they. He carries ruins to ruins.
+
+Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the
+indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can
+be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk,
+embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples,
+and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting,
+identical, that I fled from.[245] I seek the Vatican,[246] and the
+palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but
+I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.
+
+3. But the rage of traveling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness
+affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond,
+and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel
+when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is
+imitation but the traveling of the mind? Our houses are built with
+foreign taste; our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments; our
+opinions, our tastes, our faculties, lean, and follow the Past and the
+Distant. The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished. It
+was in his own mind that the artist sought his model. It was an
+application of his own thought to the thing to be done and the
+conditions to be observed. And why need we copy the Doric[247] or the
+Gothic[248] model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought, and
+quaint expression are as near to us as to any, and if the American
+artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by
+him considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the
+wants of the people, the habit and form of the government, he will
+create a house in which all these will find themselves fitted, and
+taste and sentiment will be satisfied also.
+
+Insist on yourself; never imitate.[249] Your own gift you can present
+every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation;
+but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous,
+half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can
+teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has
+exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught
+Shakespeare?[250] Where is the master who could have instructed
+Franklin,[251] or Washington, or Bacon,[252] or Newton?[253] Every great
+man is a unique. The Scipionism of Scipio[254] is precisely that part he
+could not borrow. Shakespeare will never be made by the study of
+Shakespeare. Do that which is assigned to you, and you cannot hope too
+much or dare too much. There is at this moment for you an utterance
+brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias,[255] or
+trowel of the Egyptians,[256] or the pen of Moses,[257] or Dante,[258]
+but different from all these. Not possibly will the soul all rich, all
+eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if
+you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can reply to them in
+the same pitch of voice; for the ear and the tongue are two organs of
+one nature. Abide in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy
+heart, and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld[259] again.
+
+4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so does our
+spirit of society. All men plume themselves on the improvement of
+society, and no man improves.
+
+Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on
+the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is
+civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this
+change is not amelioration. For everything that is given, something is
+taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. What a
+contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American,
+with a watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the
+naked New Zealander,[260] whose property is a club, a spear, a mat,
+and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the
+health of the two men, and you shall see that the white man has lost
+his aboriginal strength. If the traveler tell us truly, strike the
+savage with a broad ax, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and
+heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow
+shall send the white to his grave.
+
+The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.
+He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He
+has a fine Geneva[261] watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the
+hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac[262] he has, and so
+being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street
+does not know a star in the sky. The solstice[263] he does not
+observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar
+of the year is without a dial in his mind. His notebooks impair his
+memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance office increases
+the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery
+does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some
+energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some
+vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom
+where is the Christian?
+
+There is no more deviation in the moral standard than in the standard
+of height or bulk. No greater men are now than ever were. A singular
+equality may be observed between great men of the first and of the
+last ages; nor can all the science, art, religion, and philosophy of
+the nineteenth century avail to educate greater men than
+Plutarch's[264] heroes, three or four and twenty centuries ago. Not in
+time is the race progressive. Phocion,[265] Socrates, Anaxagoras,[266]
+Diogenes,[267] are great men, but they leave no class. He who is
+really of their class will not be called by their name, but will be
+his own man, and, in his turn, the founder of a sect. The arts and
+inventions of each period are only its costume, and do not invigorate
+men. The harm of the improved machinery may compensate its good.
+Hudson[268] and Bering[269] accomplished so much in their fishing
+boats, as to astonish Parry[270] and Franklin,[271] whose equipment
+exhausted the resources of science and art. Galileo, with an
+opera-glass, discovered a more splendid series of celestial phenomena
+than any one since. Columbus[272] found the New World in an undecked
+boat. It is curious to see the periodical disuse and perishing of
+means and machinery, which were introduced with loud laudation a few
+years or centuries before. The great genius returns to essential man.
+We reckoned the improvements of the art of war among the triumphs of
+science, and yet Napoleon[273] conquered Europe by the bivouac, which
+consisted of falling back on naked valor, and disencumbering it of all
+aids. The Emperor held it impossible to make a perfect army, says Las
+Casas,[274] "without abolishing our arms, magazines, commissaries, and
+carriages, until, in imitation of the Roman custom, the soldier should
+receive his supply of corn, grind it in his handmill, and bake his
+bread himself."
+
+Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is
+composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to
+the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a
+nation to-day, next year die, and their experience with them.
+
+And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments
+which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have looked away
+from themselves and at things so long, that they have come to esteem
+the religious, learned, and civil institutions as guards of property,
+and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be
+assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what
+each has, and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes
+ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially
+he hates what he has, if he see that it is accidental,--came to him by
+inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having;
+it does not belong to him, has no root in him, and merely lies there,
+because no revolution or no robber takes it away. But that which a man
+is, does always by necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is
+living property, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or
+revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually
+renews itself wherever the man breathes. "Thy lot or portion of life,"
+said the Caliph Ali,[275] "is seeking after thee; therefore be at rest
+from seeking after it." Our dependence on these foreign goods leads us
+to our slavish respect for numbers. The political parties meet in
+numerous conventions; the greater the concourse, and with each new
+uproar of announcement, The delegation from Essex![276] The Democrats
+from New Hampshire! The Whigs of Maine! the young patriot feels
+himself stronger than before by a new thousand of eyes and arms. In
+like manner the reformers summon conventions, and vote and resolve in
+multitude. Not so, O friends! will the god deign to enter and inhabit
+you, but by a method precisely the reverse. It is only as a man puts
+off all foreign support, and stands alone, that I see him to be strong
+and to prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to his banner. Is not a
+man better than a town? Ask nothing of men, and in the endless
+mutation, thou only firm column must presently appear the upholder of
+all that surrounds thee. He who knows that power is inborn, that he is
+weak because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and so
+perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly
+rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs,
+works miracles; just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than
+a man who stands on his head.
+
+So use all that is called Fortune.[277] Most men gamble with her, and
+gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as
+unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the
+chancelors of God. In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained
+the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her
+rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your
+sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable
+event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for
+you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
+Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
+
+
+
+
+FRIENDSHIP.[278]
+
+
+1. We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. Barring all
+the selfishness that chills like east winds the world, the whole human
+family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether. How many
+persons we meet in houses, whom we scarcely speak to, whom yet we
+honor, and who honor us! How many we see in the street, or sit with in
+church, whom, though silently, we warmly rejoice to be with! Read the
+language of these wandering eyebeams. The heart knoweth.
+
+2. The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is a certain
+cordial exhilaration. In poetry, and in common speech, the emotions of
+benevolence and complacency which are felt toward others, are likened
+to the material effects of fire; so swift, or much more swift, more
+active, more cheering are these fine inward irradiations. From the
+highest degree of passionate love, to the lowest degree of good will,
+they make the sweetness of life.
+
+3. Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection. The
+scholar sits down to write, and all his years of meditation do not
+furnish him with one good thought or happy expression; but it is
+necessary to write a letter to a friend, and, forthwith, troops of
+gentle thoughts invest themselves, on every hand, with chosen words.
+See in any house where virtue and self-respect abide, the palpitation
+which the approach of a stranger causes. A commended stranger is
+expected and announced, and an uneasiness between pleasure and pain
+invades all the hearts of a household. His arrival almost brings fear
+to the good hearts that would welcome him. The house is dusted, all
+things fly into their places, the old coat is exchanged for the new,
+and they must get up a dinner if they can. Of a commended stranger,
+only the good report is told by others, only the good and new is heard
+by us. He stands to us for humanity. He is, what we wish. Having
+imagined and invested him, we ask how we should stand related in
+conversation and action with such a man, and are uneasy with fear. The
+same idea exalts conversation with him. We talk better than we are
+wont. We have the nimblest fancy, a richer memory, and our dumb devil
+has taken leave for the time. For long hours we can continue a series
+of sincere, graceful, rich communications, drawn from the oldest,
+secretest experience, so that they who sit by, of our own kinsfolk and
+acquaintance, shall feel a lively surprise at our unusual powers. But
+as soon as the stranger begins to intrude his partialities, his
+definitions, his defects, into the conversation, it is all over. He
+has heard the first, the last and best, he will ever hear from us. He
+is no stranger now. Vulgarity, ignorance, misapprehension, are old
+acquaintances. Now, when he comes, he may get the order, the dress,
+and the dinner, but the throbbing of the heart, and the communications
+of the soul, no more.
+
+4. What is so pleasant as these jets of affection which relume[279] a
+young world for me again? What is so delicious as a just and firm
+encounter of two, in a thought, in a feeling? How beautiful, on their
+approach to this beating heart, the steps and forms of the gifted and
+the true! The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is
+metamorphosed; there is no winter, and no night; all tragedies, all
+ennuis vanish; all duties even; nothing fills the proceeding eternity
+but the forms all radiant of beloved persons. Let the soul be assured
+that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it
+would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years.
+
+5. I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old
+and the new. Shall I not call God, the Beautiful, who daily showeth
+himself so to me in his gifts? I chide society, I embrace solitude, and
+yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, the lovely, and the
+noble-minded, as from time to time they pass my gate.[280] Who hears me,
+who understands me, becomes mine,--a possession for all time. Nor is
+nature so poor, but she gives me this joy several times, and thus we
+weave social threads of our own, a new web of relations; and, as many
+thoughts in succession substantiate themselves, we shall by-and-by stand
+in a new world of our own creation, and no longer strangers and pilgrims
+is a traditionary globe. My friends have come[281] to me unsought. The
+great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of
+virtue with itself, I find them, or rather, not I, but the Deity in me
+and in them, both deride and cancel the thick walls of individual
+character, relation, age, sex and circumstance, at which he usually
+connives, and now makes many one. High thanks I owe you, excellent
+lovers, who carry out the world for me to new and noble depths, and
+enlarge the meaning of all my thoughts. These are new poetry of the
+first Bard[282]--poetry without stop--hymn, ode and epic,[283] poetry
+still flowing, Apollo[284] and the Muses[285] chanting still. Will these
+two separate themselves from me again, or some of them? I know not, but
+I fear it not; for my relation to them is so pure, that we hold by
+simple affinity, and the Genius[286] of my life being thus social, the
+same affinity will exert its energy on whomsoever is as noble as these
+men and women, wherever I may be.
+
+6. I confess to an extreme tenderness of nature on this point. It is
+almost dangerous to me to "crush the sweet poison,[287] of misused
+wine" of the affections. A new person is to me a great event, and
+hinders me from sleep. I have had such fine fancies lately about two
+or three persons, as have given me delicious hours, but the joy ends
+in the day: it yields no fruit. Thought is not born of it; my action
+is very little modified. I must feel pride in my friend's
+accomplishments as if they were mine, and a property in his virtues.
+I feel as warmly when he is praised, as the lover when he hears
+applause of his engaged maiden. We over-estimate the conscience of our
+friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer,
+his temptations less. Everything that is his,--his name, his form, his
+dress, books and instruments,--fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds
+new and larger from his mouth.
+
+7. Yet the systole and diastole[288] of the heart are not without
+their analogy in the ebb and flow of love. Friendship, like the
+immortality[289] of the soul, is too good to be believed. The lover,
+beholding his maiden, half knows that she is not verily that which he
+worships; and in the golden hour of friendship, we are surprised with
+shades of suspicion and unbelief. We doubt that we bestow on our hero
+the virtues in which he shines, and afterward worship the form to
+which we have ascribed this divine inhabitation. In strictness, the
+soul does not respect men as it respects itself. In strict science,
+all persons underlie the same condition of an infinite remoteness.
+Shall we fear to cool our love by mining for the metaphysical
+foundation of this Elysian temple?[290] Shall I not be as real as the
+things I see? If I am, I shall not fear to know them for what they
+are. Their essence is not less beautiful than their appearance, though
+it needs finer organs for its apprehension. The root of the plant is
+not unsightly to science, though for chaplets and festoons we cut the
+stem short. And I must hazard the production of the bald fact amid
+these pleasing reveries, though it should prove an Egyptian skull at
+our banquet.[291] A man who stands united with his thought, conceives
+magnificently to himself. He is conscious of a universal success,[292]
+even though bought by uniform particular failures. No advantages, no
+powers, no gold or force can be any match for him. I cannot choose but
+rely on my own poverty, more than on your wealth. I cannot make your
+consciousness tantamount to mine. Only the star dazzles; the planet
+has a faint, moon-like ray. I hear what you say of the admirable parts
+and tried temper of the party you praise, but I see well that for all
+his purple cloaks I shall not like him, unless he is at least a poor
+Greek like me. I cannot deny it, O friend, that the vast shadow of the
+Phenomenal includes thee, also, in its pied and painted
+immensity,--thee, also, compared with whom all else is shadow. Thou
+art not Being, as Truth is, as Justice is,--thou art not my soul, but
+a picture and effigy of that. Thou hast come to me lately, and already
+thou art seizing thy hat and cloak. It is not that the soul puts forth
+friends, as the tree puts forth leaves, and presently, by the
+germination of new buds, extrudes the old leaf?[293] The law of nature
+is alternation forevermore. Each electrical state superinduces the
+opposite. The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter
+into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone, for a
+season, that it may exalt its conversation or society. This method
+betrays itself along the whole history of our personal relations. The
+instinct of affection revives the hope of union with our mates, and
+the returning sense of insulation recalls us from the chase. Thus
+every man passes his life in the search after friendship, and if he
+should record his true sentiment, he might write a letter like this,
+to each new candidate for his love:--
+
+     DEAR FRIEND:--
+
+     If I was sure of thee, sure of thy capacity, sure to match
+     my mood with thine, I should never think again of trifles,
+     in relation to thy comings and goings. I am not very wise;
+     my moods are quite attainable; and I respect thy genius; it
+     is to me as yet unfathomed; yet dare I not presume in thee a
+     perfect intelligence of me, and so thou art to me a
+     delicious torment. Thine ever, or never.
+
+8. Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for curiosity, and
+not for life. They are not to be indulged. This is to weave cobweb,
+and not cloth. Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions,
+because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams,[294] instead
+of the tough fiber of the human heart. The laws of friendship are
+great, austere, and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of
+morals. But we have aimed at a swift and petty benefit, to suck a
+sudden sweetness. We snatch at the slowest fruit in the whole garden
+of God, which many summers and many winters must ripen. We seek our
+friend not sacredly but with an adulterate passion which would
+appropriate him to ourselves. In vain. We are armed all over with
+subtle antagonisms, which, as soon as we meet, begin to play, and
+translate all poetry into stale prose. Almost all people descend to
+meet. All association must be a compromise, and, what is worst, the
+very flower and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures
+disappears as they approach each other. What a perpetual
+disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and gifted!
+After interviews have been compassed with long foresight, we must be
+tormented presently by baffled blows, by sudden, unseasonable
+apathies, by epilepsies of wit and of animal spirits, in the heyday of
+friendship and thought. Our faculties do not play us true, and both
+parties are relieved by solitude.
+
+9. I ought to be equal to every relation. It makes no difference how
+many friends I have, and what content I can find in conversing with
+each, if there be one to whom I am not equal. If I have shrunk unequal
+from one contest instantly, the joy I find in all the rest becomes
+mean and cowardly. I should hate myself, if then I made my other
+friends my asylum.
+
+    "The valiant warrior[295] famoused for fight,
+       After a hundred victories, once foiled,
+     Is from the book of honor razed quite,
+       And all the rest forgot for which he toiled."
+
+10. Our impatience is thus sharply rebuked. Bashfulness and apathy are
+a tough husk in which a delicate organization is protected from
+premature ripening. It would be lost if it knew itself before any of
+the best souls were yet ripe enough to know and own it. Respect the
+_naturlangsamkeit_[296] which hardens the ruby in a million years,
+and works in duration, in which Alps and Andes come and go as
+rainbows. The good spirit of our life has no heaven which is the price
+of rashness. Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but
+for the total worth of man. Let us not have this childish luxury in
+our regards, but the austerest worth; let us approach our friend with
+an audacious trust in the truth of his heart, in the breadth,
+impossible to be overturned, of his foundations.
+
+11. The attractions of this subject are not to be resisted, and I
+leave, for the time, all account of subordinate social benefit, to
+speak of that select and sacred relation which is a kind of absolute,
+and which even leaves the language of love suspicious and common, so
+much is this purer, and nothing is so much divine.
+
+12. I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest
+courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work,
+but the solidest thing we know. For now, after so many ages of
+experience, what do we know of nature, or of ourselves? Not one step
+has man taken toward the solution of the problem of his destiny. In
+one condemnation of folly stand the whole universe of men. But the
+sweet sincerity of joy and peace, which I draw from this alliance
+with my brother's soul, is the nut itself whereof all nature and all
+thought is but the husk and shell. Happy is the house that shelters a
+friend! It might well be built, like a festal bower or arch, to
+entertain him a single day. Happier, if he know the solemnity of that
+relation, and honor its law! He who offers himself a candidate for
+that covenant comes up, like an Olympian,[297] to the great games,
+where the first-born of the world are the competitors. He proposes
+himself for contest where Time, Want, Danger are in the lists, and he
+alone is victor who has truth enough in his constitution to preserve
+the delicacy of his beauty from the wear and tear of all these. The
+gifts of fortune may be present or absent, but all the hap in that
+contest depends on intrinsic nobleness, and the contempt of trifles.
+There are two elements that go to the composition of friendship, each
+so sovereign, that I can detect no superiority in either, no reason
+why either should be first named. One is Truth. A friend is a person
+with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud. I am
+arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal that I may
+drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and
+second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with
+the simplicity and wholeness, with which one chemical atom meets
+another. Sincerity is the luxury allowed, but diadems and authority,
+only to the highest rank, _that_ being permitted to speak truth as
+having none above it to court or conform unto. Every man alone is
+sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins. We
+parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by
+gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him
+under a hundred folds. I knew a man who,[298] under a certain
+religious frenzy, cast off this drapery, and omitting all compliments
+and commonplace, spoke to the conscience of every person he
+encountered, and that with great insight and beauty. At first he was
+resisted, and all men agreed he was mad. But persisting, as indeed he
+could not help doing, for some time in this course, he attained to the
+advantage of bringing every man of his acquaintance into true
+relations with him. No man would think of speaking falsely with him,
+or of putting him off with any chat of markets or reading-rooms. But
+every man was constrained by so much sincerity to the like plain
+dealing and what love of nature, what poetry, what symbol of truth he
+had, he did certainly show him. But to most of us society shows not
+its face and eye, but its side and its back. To stand in true
+relations with men in a false age, is worth a fit of insanity, is it
+not? We can seldom go erect. Almost every man we meet requires some
+civility,--requires to be humored; he has some fame, some talent, some
+whim of religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be
+questioned, and which spoils all conversation with him. But a friend
+is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me. My friend gives
+me entertainment without requiring any stipulation on my part. A
+friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox[299] in nature. I who alone
+am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with
+equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being in all
+its height, variety and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so
+that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
+
+13. The other element of friendship is tenderness. We are holden to
+men by every sort of tie, by blood, by pride, by fear, by hope, by
+lucre, by lust, by hate, by admiration, by every circumstance and
+badge and trifle, but we can scarce believe that so much character can
+subsist in another as to draw us by love. Can another be so blessed,
+and we so pure, that we can offer him tenderness? When a man becomes
+dear to me, I have touched the goal of fortune. I find very little
+written directly to the heart of this matter in books. And yet I have
+one text which I cannot choose but remember. My author says,[300]--"I
+offer myself faintly and bluntly to those whose I effectually am, and
+tender myself least to him to whom I am the most devoted." I wish that
+friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must
+plant itself on the ground, before it vaults over the moon. I wish it
+to be a little of a citizen, before it is quite a cherub.[301] We
+chide the citizen because he makes love a commodity. It is an exchange
+of gifts, of useful loans; it is good neighborhood; it watches with
+the sick; it holds the pall at the funeral; and quite loses sight of
+the delicacies and nobility of the relation. But though we cannot find
+the god under this disguise of a sutler, yet, on the other hand, we
+cannot forgive the poet if he spins his thread too fine, and does not
+substantiate his romance by the municipal virtues of justice,
+punctuality, fidelity and pity. I hate the prostitution of the name of
+friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances. I much prefer the
+company of plow-boys and tin-peddlers, to the silken and perfumed
+amity which only celebrates its days of encounter by a frivolous
+display, by rides in a curricle,[302] and dinners at the best taverns.
+The end of friendship is a commerce the most strict and homely that
+can be joined; more strict than any of which we have experience. It is
+for aid and comfort through all the relations and passages of life and
+death. It is fit for serene days, and graceful gifts, and country
+rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty,
+and persecution. It keeps company with the sallies of the wit and the
+trances of religion. We are to dignify to each other the daily needs
+and offices of man's life, and embellish it by courage, wisdom and
+unity. It should never fall into something usual and settled, but
+should be alert and inventive, and add rhyme and reason to what was
+drudgery.
+
+14. Friendship may be said to require natures so rare and costly, each
+so well-tempered, and so happily adapted, and withal so
+circumstanced, (for even in that particular, a poet says, love demands
+that the parties be altogether paired,) that its satisfaction can very
+seldom be assured. It cannot subsist in its perfection, say some of
+those who are learned in this warm lore of the heart, betwixt more
+than two. I am not quite so strict in my terms, perhaps because I have
+never known so high a fellowship as others. I please my imagination
+more with a circle of godlike men and women variously related to each
+other, and between whom subsists a lofty intelligence. But I find this
+law of _one to one_,[303] peremptory for conversation, which is the
+practice and consummation of friendship. Do not mix waters too much.
+The best mix as ill as good and bad. You shall have very useful and
+cheering discourse at several times with two several men, but let all
+three of you come together, and you shall not have one new and hearty
+word. Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a
+conversation of the most sincere and searching sort. In good company
+there is never such discourse between two, across the table, as takes
+place when you leave them alone. In good company, the individuals at
+once merge their egotism into a social soul exactly co-extensive with
+the several consciousnesses there present. No partialities of friend
+to friend, no fondnesses of brother to sister, of wife to husband, are
+there pertinent, but quite otherwise. Only he may then speak who can
+sail on the common thought of the party, and not poorly limited to
+his own. Now this convention, which good sense demands, destroys the
+high freedom of great conversation, which requires an absolute running
+of two souls into one.
+
+15. No two men but being left alone with each other, enter into
+simpler relations. Yet it is affinity that determines _which_ two
+shall converse. Unrelated men give little joy to each other; will
+never suspect the latent powers of each. We talk sometimes of a great
+talent for conversation, as if it were a permanent property in some
+individuals. Conversation is an evanescent relation,--no more. A man
+is reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all that, say
+a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his silence with as
+much reason as they would blame the insignificance of a dial in the
+shade. In the sun it will mark the hour. Among those who enjoy his
+thought, he will regain his tongue.
+
+16. Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and
+unlikeness, that piques each with the presence of power and of consent
+in the other party. Let me be alone to the end of the world, rather
+than that my friend should overstep by a word or a look his real
+sympathy. I am equally balked by antagonism and by compliance. Let him
+not cease an instant to be himself. The only joy I have in his being
+mine, is that the _not mine_ is _mine_. I hate, where I looked for a
+manly furtherance, or at least a manly resistance, to find a mush of
+concession. Better be a nettle in the side of your friend, than his
+echo. The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do
+without it. That high office requires great and sublime parts. There
+must be very two before there can be very one. Let it be an alliance
+of two large formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared,
+before yet they recognize the deep identity which beneath these
+disparities unites them.
+
+17. He only is fit for this society who is magnanimous; who is sure
+that greatness and goodness are always economy; who is not swift to
+intermeddle with his fortunes. Let him not intermeddle with this.
+Leave to the diamond its ages to grow, nor expect to accelerate the
+births of the eternal. Friendship demands a religious treatment. We
+talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected. Reverence
+is a great part of it. Treat your friend as a spectacle. Of course he
+has merits that are not yours, and that you cannot honor, if you must
+needs hold him close to your person. Stand aside; give those merits
+room; let them mount and expand. Are you the friend of your friend's
+buttons, or of his thought? To a great heart he will still be a
+stranger in a thousand particulars, that he may come near in the
+holiest ground. Leave it to girls and boys to regard a friend as
+property, and to suck a short and all-confounding pleasure instead of
+the noblest benefits.
+
+18. Let us buy our entrance to this guild by a long probation. Why
+should we desecrate noble and beautiful souls by intruding on them?
+Why insist on rash personal relations with your friend? Why go to his
+house, or know his mother and brother and sisters? Why be visited by
+him at your own? Are these things material to our covenant? Leave this
+touching and clawing. Let him be to me a spirit. A message, a thought,
+a sincerity, a glance from him I want, but not news, nor pottage. I
+can get politics, and chat, and neighborly conveniences, from cheaper
+companions. Should not the society of my friend be to me poetic, pure,
+universal, and great as nature itself? Ought I to feel that our tie is
+profane in comparison with yonder bar of cloud that sleeps on the
+horizon, or that clump of waving grass that divides the brook? Let us
+not vilify but raise it to that standard. That great defying eye, that
+scornful beauty of his mien and action, do not pique yourself on
+reducing, but rather fortify and enhance. Worship his superiorities;
+wish him not less by a thought, but hoard and tell them all. Guard him
+as thy counterpart. Let him be to thee forever a sort of beautiful
+enemy, untamable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial conveniency to
+be soon outgrown and cast aside. The hues of the opal, the light of
+the diamond, are not to be seen, if the eye is too near. To my friend
+I write a letter, and from him I receive a letter. That seems to you a
+little. It suffices me. It is a spiritual gift worthy of him to give
+and of me to receive. It profanes nobody. In these warm lines the
+heart will trust itself, as it will not to the tongue, and pour out
+the prophecy of a godlier existence than all the annals of heroism
+have yet made good.
+
+19. Respect so far the holy laws of this fellowship as not to
+prejudice its perfect flower by your impatience for its opening. We
+must be our own before we can be another's. There is at least this
+satisfaction in crime, according to the Latin proverb;--you can speak
+to your accomplice on even terms. _Crimen quos[304] inquinat, æquat_.
+To those whom we admire and love, at first we cannot. Yet the least
+defect of self-possession vitiates, in my judgment, the entire
+relation. There can never be deep peace between two spirits, never
+mutual respect until, in their dialogue, each stands for the whole
+world.
+
+20. What is so great as friendship, let us carry with what grandeur of
+spirit we can. Let us be silent,--so we may hear the whisper of the
+gods. Let us not interfere. Who set you to cast about what you should
+say to the select souls, or how to say anything to such? No matter how
+ingenious, no matter how graceful and bland. There are innumerable
+degrees of folly and wisdom, and for you to say aught is to be
+frivolous. Wait, and thy heart shall speak. Wait until the necessary
+and everlasting overpowers you, until day and night avail themselves
+of your lips. The only reward of virtue, is virtue; the only way to
+have a friend is to be one. You shall not come nearer a man by getting
+into his house. If unlike, his soul only flees the faster from you,
+and you shall catch never a true glance of his eye. We see the noble
+afar off, and they repel us; why should we intrude? Late,--very
+late,--we perceive that no arrangements, no introductions, no
+consuetudes or habits of society, would be of any avail to establish
+us in such relations with them as we desire,--but solely the uprise of
+nature in us to the same degree it is in them; then shall we meet as
+water with water; and if we should not meet them then, we shall not
+want them, for we are already they. In the last analysis, love is only
+the reflection of a man's own worthiness from other men. Men have
+sometimes exchanged names with their friends, as if they would signify
+that in their friend each loved his own soul.
+
+21. The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less
+easy to establish it with flesh and blood. We walk alone in the world.
+Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope
+cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of
+the universal power, souls are now acting, enduring and daring, which
+can love us, and which we can love. We may congratulate ourselves that
+the period of nonage,[305] of follies, of blunders, and of shame, is
+passed in solitude, and when we are finished men, we shall grasp
+heroic hands in heroic hands. Only be admonished by what you already
+see, not to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no
+friendship can be. Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish
+alliances which no God attends. By persisting in your path, though
+you forfeit the little you gain the great. You demonstrate yourself,
+so as to put yourself out of the reach of false relations, and you
+draw to you the first-born of the world, those rare pilgrims whereof
+only one or two wander in nature at once, and before whom the vulgar
+great show as specters and shadows merely.
+
+22. It is foolish to be afraid of making our ties too spiritual, as if
+so we could lose any genuine love. Whatever correction of our popular
+views we make from insight, nature will be sure to bear us out in, and
+though it seem to rob us of some joy, will repay us with a greater.
+Let us feel, if we will, the absolute insulation of man. We are sure
+that we have all in us. We go to Europe, or we pursue persons, or we
+read books, in the instinctive faith that these will call it out and
+reveal us to ourselves. Beggars all. The persons are such as we; the
+Europe, an old faded garment of dead persons; the books, their ghosts.
+Let us drop this idolatry. Let us give over this mendicancy. Let us
+even bid our dearest friends farewell, and defy them, saying, "Who are
+you? Unhand me. I will be dependent no more." Ah! seest thou not, O
+brother, that thus we part only to meet again on a higher platform,
+and only be more each other's, because we are more our own? A friend
+is Janus-faced:[306] he looks to the past and the future. He is the
+child of all my foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and
+the harbinger[307] of a greater friend.
+
+23. I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them
+where I can find them, but I seldom use them. We must have society on
+our own terms, and admit or exclude it on the slightest cause. I
+cannot afford to speak much with my friend. If he is great, he makes
+me so great that I cannot descend to converse. In the great days,
+presentiments hover before me, far before me in the firmament. I ought
+then to dedicate myself to them. I go in that I may seize them, I go
+out that I may seize them. I fear only that I may lose them receding
+into the sky in which now they are only a patch of brighter light.
+Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and
+study their visions, lest I lose my own. It would indeed give me a
+certain household joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual
+astronomy, or search of stars, and come down to warm sympathies with
+you; but then I know well I shall mourn always the vanishing of my
+mighty gods. It is true, next week I shall have languid moods, when I
+can well afford to occupy myself with foreign objects; then I shall
+regret the lost literature of your mind, and wish you were by my side
+again. But if you come, perhaps you will fill my mind only with new
+visions, not with yourself but with your lusters, and I shall not be
+able any more than now to converse with you. So I will owe to my
+friends this evanescent intercourse. I will receive from them, not
+what they have, but what they are. They shall give me that which
+properly they cannot give, but which emanates from them. But they
+shall not hold me by any relations less subtile and pure. We will meet
+as though we met not, and part as though we parted not.
+
+24. It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a
+friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the
+other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is
+not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall
+wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the
+reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold
+companion. If he is unequal, he will presently pass away; but thou art
+enlarged by thy own shining, and no longer a mate for frogs and worms,
+dost soar and burn with the gods of the empyrean.[308] It is thought a
+disgrace to love unrequited. But the great will see that true love
+cannot be unrequited. True love transcends the unworthy object, and
+dwells and broods on the eternal, and when the poor interposed mask
+crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth, and feels its
+independency the surer. Yet these things may hardly be said without a
+sort of treachery to the relation. The essence of friendship is
+entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or
+provide for infirmity. It treats its object as a god, that it may
+deify both.
+
+
+
+
+HEROISM[309]
+
+    "Paradise is under the shadow of swords,"[310]
+                                          _Mahomet._
+
+
+1. In the elder English dramatists,[311] and mainly in the plays of
+Beaumont and Fletcher,[312] there is a constant recognition of
+gentility, as if a noble behavior were as easily marked in the society
+of their age, as color is in our American population. When any Rodrigo,
+Pedro, or Valerio[313] enters, though he be a stranger, the duke or
+governor exclaims, This is a gentleman,--and proffers civilities without
+end; but all the rest are slag and refuse. In harmony with this delight
+in personal advantages, there is in their plays a certain heroic cast of
+character and dialogue,--as in Bonduca, Sophocles, the Mad Lover, the
+Double Marriage,[314]--wherein the speaker is so earnest and cordial,
+and on such deep grounds of character, that the dialogue, on the
+slightest additional incident in the plot, rises naturally into poetry.
+Among many texts, take the following. The Roman Martius has conquered
+Athens--all but the invincible spirits of Sophocles, the duke of Athens,
+and Dorigen, his wife. The beauty of the latter inflames Martius, and he
+seeks to save her husband; but Sophocles will not ask his life, although
+assured, that a word will save him, and the execution of both proceeds.
+
+"_Valerius._ Bid thy wife farewell.
+
+_Soph._ No, I will take no leave. My Dorigen,
+Yonder, above, 'bout Ariadne's crown.[315]
+My spirit shall hover for thee. Prithee, haste.
+
+_Dor._ Stay, Sophocles--with this, tie up my sight;
+Let not soft nature so transformed be,
+And lose her gentler sexed humanity,
+To make me see my lord bleed. So, 'tis well;
+Never one object underneath the sun
+Will I behold before my Sophocles:
+Farewell; now teach the Romans how to die.
+
+_Mar._ Dost know what 'tis to die?
+
+_Soph._ Thou dost not, Martius,
+And therefore, not what 'tis to live; to die
+Is to begin to live. It is to end
+An old, stale, weary work, and to commence
+A newer and a better. 'Tis to leave
+Deceitful knaves for the society
+Of gods and goodness. Thou, thyself, must part
+At last, from all thy garlands, pleasures, triumphs,
+And prove thy fortitude what then 'twill do.
+
+_Val._ But art not grieved nor vexed to leave thy life thus?
+
+_Soph._ Why should I grieve or vex for being sent
+To them I ever loved best? Now, I'll kneel,
+But with my back toward thee; 'tis the last duty
+This trunk can do the gods.
+
+_Mar._ Strike, strike, Valerius,
+Or Martius' heart will leap out at his mouth:
+This is a man, a woman! Kiss thy lord,
+And live with all the freedom you were wont.
+O love! thou doubly hast afflicted me
+With virtue and with beauty. Treacherous heart,
+My hand shall cast thee quick into my urn,
+Ere thou transgress this knot of piety.
+
+_Val._ What ails my brother?
+
+_Soph._ Martius, oh Martius,
+Thou now hast found a way to conquer me.
+
+_Dor._ O star of Rome! what gratitude can speak
+Fit words to follow such a deed as this?
+
+_Mar._ This admirable duke, Valerius,
+With his disdain of fortune and of death,
+Captived himself, has captived me,
+And though my arm hath ta'en his body here,
+His soul hath subjugated Martius' soul.
+By Romulus,[316] he is all soul, I think;
+He hath no flesh, and spirit cannot be gyved;
+Then we have vanquished nothing; he is free,
+And Martius walks now in captivity."
+
+2. I do not readily remember any poem, play, sermon, novel, or
+oration, that our press vents in the last few years, which goes to the
+same tune. We have a great many flutes and flageolets, but not often
+the sound of any fife. Yet, Wordsworth's Laodamia, and the ode of
+"Dion,"[317] and some sonnets, have a certain noble music; and
+Scott[318] will sometimes draw a stroke like the portrait of Lord
+Evandale, given by Balfour of Burley.[319] Thomas Carlyle,[320] with
+his natural taste for what is manly and daring in character, has
+suffered no heroic trait in his favorites to drop from his
+biographical and historical pictures. Earlier, Robert Burns[321] has
+given us a song or two. In the Harleian Miscellanies,[322] there is an
+account of the battle of Lutzen,[323] which deserves to be read. And
+Simon Ockley's[324] History of the Saracens recounts the prodigies of
+individual valor with admiration, all the more evident on the part of
+the narrator, that he seems to think that his place in Christian
+Oxford[325] requires of him some proper protestations of abhorrence.
+But if we explore the literature of Heroism, we shall quickly come to
+Plutarch,[326] who is its Doctor and historian. To him we owe the
+Brasidas,[327] the Dion,[328] the Epaminondas,[329] the Scipio[330] of
+old, and I must think we are more deeply indebted to him than to all
+the ancient writers. Each of his "Lives" is a refutation to the
+despondency and cowardice of our religious and political theorists. A
+wild courage, a Stoicism[331] not of the schools, but of the blood,
+shines in every anecdote, and has given that book its immense fame.
+
+3. We need books of this tart cathartic virtue, more than books of
+political science, or of private economy. Life is a festival only to
+the wise. Seen from the nook and chimney-side of prudence, it wears a
+ragged and dangerous front. The violations of the laws of nature by
+our predecessors and our contemporaries are punished in us also. The
+disease and deformity around us certify the infraction of natural,
+intellectual, and moral laws, and often violation on violation to
+breed such compound misery. A lockjaw that bends a man's head back to
+his heels, hydrophobia that makes him bark at his wife and babes,
+insanity that makes him eat grass; war, plague, cholera, famine
+indicate a certain ferocity in nature, which, as it had its inlet by
+human crime, must have its outlet by human suffering. Unhappily,
+almost no man exists who has not in his own person become, to some
+amount, a stockholder in the sin, and so made himself liable to a
+share in the expiation.
+
+4. Our culture, therefore, must not omit the arming of the man. Let
+him hear in season that he is born into the state of war, and that the
+commonwealth and his own well-being require that he should not go
+dancing in the weeds of peace, but warned, self-collected, and neither
+defying nor dreading the thunder, let him take both reputation and
+life in his hand, and, with perfect urbanity, dare the gibbet and the
+mob by the absolute truth of his speech, and the rectitude of his
+behavior.
+
+5. Toward all this external evil, the man within the breast assumes a
+warlike attitude, and affirms his ability to cope single-handed with
+the infinite army of enemies. To this military attitude of the soul we
+give the name of Heroism. Its rudest form is the contempt for safety
+and ease, which makes the attractiveness of war. It is a self-trust
+which slights the restraints of prudence, in the plenitude of its
+energy and power to repair the harms it may suffer. The hero is a mind
+of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will, but
+pleasantly, and, as it were, merrily, he advances to his own music,
+alike in frightful alarms, and in the tipsy mirth of universal
+dissoluteness. There is somewhat not philosophical in heroism; there
+is somewhat not holy in it; it seems not to know that other souls are
+of one texture with it; it has pride; it is the extreme of individual
+nature. Nevertheless, we must profoundly revere it. There is somewhat
+in great actions, which does not allow us to go behind them. Heroism
+feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right; and although a
+different breeding, different religion, and greater intellectual
+activity, would have modified or even reversed the particular action,
+yet for the hero, that thing he does is the highest deed, and is not
+open to the censure of philosophers or divines. It is the avowal of
+the unschooled man, that he finds a quality in him that is negligent
+of expense, of health, of life, of danger, of hatred, of reproach, and
+knows that his will is higher and more excellent than all actual and
+all possible antagonists.
+
+6. Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind, and in
+contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism
+is an obedience[332] to a secret impulse of an individual's character.
+Now to no other man can its wisdom appear as it does to him, for every
+man must be supposed to see a little further on his own proper path
+than any one else. Therefore, just and wise men take umbrage at his
+act, until after some little time be past: then they see it to be in
+unison with their acts. All prudent men see that the action is clean
+contrary to a sensual prosperity; for every heroic act measures itself
+by its contempt of some external good. But it finds its own success
+at last, and then the prudent also extol.
+
+7. Self-trust is the essence of heroism. It is the state of the soul
+at war, and its ultimate objects are the last defiance of falsehood
+and wrong, and the power to bear all that can be inflicted by evil
+agents. It speaks the truth, and it is just, generous, hospitable,
+temperate, scornful of petty calculations, and scornful of being
+scorned. It persists; it is of an undaunted boldness, and of a
+fortitude not to be wearied out. Its jest is the littleness of common
+life. That false prudence which dotes on health and wealth is the butt
+and merriment of heroism. Heroism, like Plotinus,[333] is almost
+ashamed of its body. What shall it say, then, to the sugar-plums, and
+cats'-cradles, to the toilet, compliments, quarrels, cards, and
+custard, which rack the wit of all human society. What joys has kind
+nature provided for us dear creatures! There seems to be no interval
+between greatness and meanness. When the spirit is not master of the
+world then it is its dupe. Yet the little man takes the great hoax so
+innocently, works in it so headlong and believing, is born red, and
+dies gray, arranging his toilet, attending on his own health, laying
+traps for sweet food and strong wine, setting his heart on a horse or
+a rifle, made happy with a little gossip or a little praise, that the
+great soul cannot choose but laugh at such earnest nonsense. "Indeed,
+these humble considerations[334] make me out of love with greatness.
+What a disgrace is it to me to take note how many pairs of silk
+stockings thou hast, namely, these and those that were the
+peach-colored ones; or to bear the inventory of thy shirts, as one for
+superfluity, and one other for use!"
+
+8. Citizens, thinking after the laws of arithmetic, consider the
+inconvenience of receiving strangers at their fireside, reckon
+narrowly the loss of time and the unusual display: the soul of a
+better quality thrusts back the unreasonable economy into the vaults
+of life, and says, I will obey the God, and the sacrifice and the fire
+he will provide. Ibn Hankal,[335] the Arabian geographer, describes a
+heroic extreme in the hospitality of Sogd, in Bokhar,[336] "When I was
+in Sogd I saw a great building, like a palace, the gates of which were
+open and fixed back to the wall with large nails. I asked the reason,
+and was told that the house had not been shut, night or day, for a
+hundred years. Strangers may present themselves at any hour, and in
+whatever number; the master has amply provided for the reception of
+the men and their animals, and is never happier than when they tarry
+for some time. Nothing of the kind have I seen in any other country."
+The magnanimous know very well that they who give time, or money, or
+shelter, to the stranger--so it be done for love, and not for
+ostentation--do, as it were, put God under obligation to them, so
+perfect are the compensations of the universe. In some way the time
+they seem to lose is redeemed, and the pains they seem to take
+remunerate themselves. These men fan the flame of human love, and
+raise the standard of civil virtue among mankind. But hospitality must
+be for service, and not for show, or it pulls down the host. The brave
+soul rates itself too high to value itself by the splendor of its
+table and draperies. It gives what it hath, and all it hath, but its
+own majesty can lend a better grace to bannocks[337] and fair water
+than belong to city feasts.
+
+9. The temperance of the hero proceeds from the same wish to do no
+dishonor to the worthiness he has. But he loves it for its elegancy,
+not for its austerity. It seems not worth his while to be solemn, and
+denounce with bitterness flesh-eating or wine-drinking, the use of
+tobacco, or opium, or tea, or silk, or gold. A great man scarcely
+knows how he dines, how he dresses; but without railing or precision,
+his living is natural and poetic. John Eliot,[338] the Indian Apostle,
+drank water, and said of wine,--"It is a noble, generous liquor, and
+we should be humbly thankful for it, but, as I remember, water was
+made before it." Better still is the temperance of king David[339] who
+poured out on the ground unto the Lord the water which three of his
+warriors had brought him to drink, at the peril of their lives.
+
+10. It is told of Brutus,[340] that when he fell on his sword, after
+the battle of Philippi,[341] he quoted a line of Euripides,[342]--"O
+virtue! I have followed thee through life, and I find thee at last but
+a shade." I doubt not the hero is slandered by this report. The heroic
+soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness. It does not ask to
+dine nicely, and to sleep warm. The essence of greatness is the
+perception that virtue is enough. Poverty is its ornament. It does not
+need plenty, and can very well abide its loss.
+
+11. But that which takes my fancy most, in the heroic class, is the
+good humor and hilarity they exhibit. It is a height to which common
+duty can very well attain, to suffer and to dare with solemnity. But
+these rare souls set opinion, success, and life, at so cheap a rate,
+that they will not soothe their enemies by petitions, or the show of
+sorrow, but wear their own habitual greatness. Scipio,[343] charged
+with peculation, refuses to do himself so great a disgrace as to wait
+for justification, though he had the scroll of his accounts in his
+hands, but tears it to pieces before the tribunes. Socrates'[344]
+condemnation of himself to be maintained in all honor in the
+Prytaneum,[345] during his life, and Sir Thomas More's[346]
+playfulness at the scaffold, are of the same strain. In Beaumont and
+Fletcher's "Sea Voyage," Juletta tells the stout captain and his
+company,
+
+_Jul._ Why, slaves, 'tis in our power to hang ye.
+
+_Master._                         Very likely,
+'Tis in our powers, then, to be hanged, and scorn ye.
+
+These replies are sound and whole. Sport is the bloom and glow of a
+perfect health. The great will not condescend to take anything
+seriously; all must be as gay as the song of a canary, though it were
+the building of cities, or the eradication of old and foolish
+churches and nations, which have cumbered the earth long thousands of
+years. Simple hearts put all the history and customs of this world
+behind them, and play their own play in innocent defiance of the
+Blue-Laws[347] of the world; and such would appear, could we see the
+human race assembled in vision, like little children frolicking
+together; though, to the eyes of mankind at large, they wear a stately
+and solemn garb of works and influences.
+
+12. The interest these fine stories have for us, the power of a
+romance over the boy who grasps the forbidden book under his bench at
+school, our delight in the hero, is the main fact to our purpose. All
+these great and transcendent properties are ours. If we dilate in
+beholding the Greek energy, the Roman pride, it is that we are already
+domesticating the same sentiment. Let us find room for this great
+guest in our small houses. The first step of worthiness will be to
+disabuse us of our superstitious associations with places and times,
+with number and size. Why should these words, Athenian, Roman, Asia,
+and England, so tingle in the ear? Where the heart is, there the
+muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame.
+Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry
+places, and the ear loves names of foreign and classic topography. But
+here we are; and, if we will tarry a little, we may come to learn that
+here is best. See to it only that thyself is here;--and art and
+nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall
+not be absent from the chamber where thou sittest. Epaminondas,[348]
+brave and affectionate, does not seem to us to need Olympus[349] to
+die upon, nor the Syrian sunshine. He lies very well where he is. The
+Jerseys[350] were handsome ground enough for Washington to tread, and
+London streets for the feet of Milton.[351] A great man makes his
+climate genial in the imagination of men, and its air the beloved
+element of all delicate spirits. That country is the fairest, which is
+inhabited by the noblest minds. The pictures which fill the
+imagination in reading the actions of Pericles,[352] Xenophon,[353]
+Columbus,[354] Bayard,[355] Sidney,[356] Hampden,[357] teach us how
+needlessly mean our life is, that we, by the depth of our living,
+should deck it with more than regal or national splendor, and act on
+principles that should interest man and nature in the length of our
+days.
+
+13. We have seen or heard of many extraordinary young men, who never
+ripened, or whose performance in actual life was not extraordinary.
+When we see their air and mien, when we hear them speak of society, or
+books, or religion, we admire their superiority; they seem to throw
+contempt on our entire polity and social state; theirs is the tone of
+a youthful giant, who is sent to work revolutions. But they enter an
+active profession, and the forming Colossus[358] shrinks to the common
+size of man. The magic they used was the ideal tendencies, which
+always make the Actual ridiculous; but the tough world had its revenge
+the moment they put their horses of the sun to plow in its furrow.
+They found no example and no companion, and their heart fainted. What
+then? The lesson they gave in their first aspirations, is yet true;
+and a better valor and a purer truth shall one day organize their
+belief. Or why should a woman liken herself to any historical woman,
+and think, because Sappho,[359] or Sévigné,[360] or De Staël,[361] or
+the cloistered souls who have had genius and cultivation, do not
+satisfy the imagination and the serene Themis,[362] none
+can,--certainly not she. Why not? She has a new and unattempted
+problem to solve, perchance that of the happiest nature that ever
+bloomed. Let the maiden, with erect soul, walk serenely on her way,
+accept the hint of each new experience, search, in turn, all the
+objects that solicit her eye, that she may learn the power and the
+charm of her new-born being which is the kindling of a new dawn in the
+recesses of space. The fair girl, who repels interference by a decided
+and proud choice of influences, so careless of pleasing, so wilful and
+lofty, inspires every beholder with somewhat of her own nobleness. The
+silent heart encourages her; O friend, never strike sail to a fear!
+Come into port greatly, or sail with God the seas. Not in vain you
+live, for every passing eye is cheered and refined by the vision.
+
+14. The characteristic of a genuine heroism is its persistency. All
+men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when
+you have chosen your part, abide by it, and do not weakly try to
+reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common,
+nor the common the heroic. Yet we have the weakness to expect the
+sympathy of people in those actions whose excellence is that they
+outrun sympathy, and appeal to a tardy justice. If you would serve
+your brother, because it is fit for you to serve him, do not take back
+your words when you find that prudent people do not commend you.
+Adhere to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done
+something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a
+decorous age. It was a high counsel[363] that I once heard given to a
+young person,--"Always do what you are afraid to do." A simple manly
+character need never make an apology, but should regard its past
+action with the calmness of Phocion,[364] when he admitted that the
+event of the battle was happy, yet did not regret his dissuasion from
+the battle.
+
+15. There is no weakness or exposure for which we cannot find
+consolation in the thought,--this is a part of my constitution, part
+of my relation and office to my fellow-creature. Has nature covenanted
+with me that I should never appear to disadvantage, never make a
+ridiculous figure? Let us be generous of our dignity as well as of our
+money. Greatness once and forever has done with opinion. We tell our
+charities, not because we wish to be praised for them, not because we
+think they have great merit, but for our justification. It is a
+capital blunder; as you discover, when another man recites his
+charities.
+
+16. To speak the truth, even with some austerity, to live with some
+rigor of temperance, or some extremes of generosity, seems to be an
+asceticism which common good-nature would appoint to those who are at
+ease and in plenty, in sign that they feel a brotherhood with the
+great multitude of suffering men. And not only need we breathe and
+exercise the soul by assuming the penalties of abstinence, of debt, of
+solitude, of unpopularity, but it behooves the wise man to look with a
+bold eye into those rarer dangers which sometimes invade men, and to
+familiarize himself with disgusting forms of disease, with sounds of
+execration, and the vision of violent death.
+
+17. Times of heroism are generally times of terror, but the day never
+shines in which this element may not work. The circumstances of man,
+we say, are historically somewhat better in this country, and at this
+hour, than perhaps ever before. More freedom exists for culture. It
+will not now run against an ax at the first step out of the beaten
+track of opinion. But whoso is heroic will always find crises to try
+his edge. Human virtue demands her champions and martyrs, and the
+trial of persecution always proceeds. It is but the other day that the
+brave Lovejoy[365] gave his breast to the bullets of a mob, for the
+rights of free speech and opinion, and died when it was better not to
+live.
+
+18. I see not any road to perfect peace which a man can walk, but to
+take counsel of his own bosom. Let him quit too much association, let
+him go home much, and establish himself in those courses he approves.
+The unremitting retention of simple and high sentiments in obscure
+duties is hardening the character to that temper which will work with
+honor, if need be, in the tumult, or on the scaffold. Whatever
+outrages have happened to men may befall a man again; and very easily
+in a republic, if there appear any signs of a decay of religion.
+Coarse slander, fire, tar and feathers, and the gibbet, the youth may
+freely bring home to his mind, and with what sweetness of temper he
+can, and inquire how fast he can fix his sense of duty, braving such
+penalties, whenever it may please the next newspaper and a sufficient
+number of his neighbors to pronounce his opinions incendiary.
+
+19. It may calm the apprehension of calamity in the most susceptible
+heart to see how quick a bound nature has set to the utmost infliction
+of malice. We rapidly approach a brink over which no enemy can follow
+us.
+
+                "Let them rave:[366]
+    Thou art quiet in thy grave."
+
+In the gloom of our ignorance of what shall be, in the hour when we
+are deaf to the higher voices, who does not envy them who have seen
+safely to an end their manful endeavor? Who that sees the meanness of
+our politics, but inly congratulates Washington that he is long
+already wrapped in his shroud, and forever safe; that he was laid
+sweet in his grave, the hope of humanity not yet subjugated in him?
+Who does not sometimes envy the good and brave, who are no more to
+suffer from the tumults of the natural world, and await with curious
+complacency the speedy term of his own conversation with finite
+nature? And yet the love that will be annihilated sooner than
+treacherous has already made death impossible, and affirms itself no
+mortal, but a native of the deeps of absolute and inextinguishable
+being.
+
+
+
+
+MANNERS[367]
+
+
+1. Half the world, it is said, knows not how the other half live. Our
+Exploring Expedition saw the Feejee Islanders[368] 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[369]
+(west of old Thebes) is philosophical to a fault. To set up their
+housekeeping, nothing is requisite but two or three earthen pots, a
+stone to grind meal, and a mat which is the bed. The house, namely, a
+tomb, is ready without rent or taxes. No rain can pass through the
+roof, and there is no door, for there is no want of one, as there is
+nothing to lose. If the house do not please them, they walk out and
+enter another, as there are several hundreds at their command. "It is
+somewhat singular," adds Berzoni, to whom we owe this account, "to
+talk of Happiness among people who live in sepulchers, among corpses
+and rags of an ancient nation which they knew nothing of." In the
+deserts of Borgoo[370] 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[371] have no proper names; individuals are called
+after their height, thickness, or other accidental quality, and have
+nick-names 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;[372] 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.
+
+2. What fact more conspicuous in modern history, than the creation of
+the gentleman? Chivalry[373] is that, and loyalty is that, and, in
+English literature, half the drama, and all the novels, from Sir
+Philip Sidney[374] to Sir Walter Scott,[375] 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,[376]
+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.
+
+3. There is something equivocal in all the words in use to express the
+excellence of manners and social cultivation, because the qualities
+are fluxional, and the last effect is assumed by the senses as the
+cause. The word _gentleman_ has not any correlative abstract[377] to
+express the quality. _Gentility_ is mean, and _gentilesse_[378] 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 and 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,[379] rattles in our
+ear like a flourish of trumpets. But personal force never goes out of
+fashion. That is still paramount to-day, and, in the moving crowd of
+good society, the men of valor and reality are known, and rise to
+their natural place. The competition is transferred from war to
+politics and trade, but the personal force appears readily enough in
+these new arenas.
+
+4. Power first, or no leading class. In politics and in trade,
+bruisers and pirates are of better promise than talkers and clerks.
+God knows[380] 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.[381] The ruling class must
+have more, but they must have these, giving in every company the sense
+of power,[382] 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,[383] or a sea-fight. The intellect relies on
+memory to make some supplies to face these extemporaneous squadrons.
+But memory is a base mendicant with basket and badge, in the presence
+of these sudden masters. The rulers of society must be up to the work
+of the world, and equal to their versatile office: men of the right
+Cæsarian pattern,[384] who have great range of affinity. I am far from
+believing the timid maxim[385] of Lord Falkland,[386] ("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,[387] Sapor,[388]
+the Cid,[389] Julius Cæsar,[390] Scipio,[391] Alexander,[392]
+Pericles,[393] and the lordliest personages. They sat very carelessly
+in their chairs, and were too excellent themselves to value any
+condition at a high rate.
+
+5. 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,[394] Socrates,[395] and Epaminondas[396] 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.[397] 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.
+
+6. 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[398] 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
+traveling, 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
+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.
+
+7. 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,[399] child of the revolution, destroyer of the old
+noblesse,[400] never ceased to court the Faubourg St. Germain:[401]
+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 a 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,[402] the Nelson,[403] the Napoleon,
+see that this is the festivity and permanent celebration of such as
+they; that fashion is funded talent; is Mexico,[404] Marengo,[405] and
+Trafalgar[406][407] beaten out thin; that the brilliant names of
+fashion run back to just such busy names as their own, fifty or sixty
+years ago. They are the sowers, their sons shall be the reapers, and
+_their_ sons, in the ordinary course of things, must yield the
+possession of the harvest, to new competitors with keener eyes and
+stronger frames. The city is recruited from the country. In the year
+1805, it is said, every legitimate monarch in Europe was imbecile. The
+city would have died out, rotted, and exploded, long ago, but that it
+was reinforced from the fields. It is only country which came to town
+day before yesterday, that is city and court to-day.
+
+8. 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.[408] 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 lease 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.[409]
+
+9. 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,"[410] 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
+cotillions. For there is nothing settled in manners, but the laws of
+behavior yield to the energy of the individual. The maiden at her
+first ball, the countryman at a city dinner, believes that there is a
+ritual according to which every act and compliment must be performed,
+or the failing party must be cast out of this presence. Later, they
+learn that good sense and character make their own forms every moment,
+and speak or abstain, to 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 appear. If the fashionist have not this
+quality, he is nothing. We are such lovers of self-reliance, that we
+excuse in 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![411]--" But Vich Ian Vohr
+must always carry his belongings in some fashion, if not added as
+honor, then severed as disgrace.
+
+10. There will always be in society certain persons who are
+mercuries[412] 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[413] for the sifting of character?
+
+11. 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,[414] who shall subordinate these appendages. I may go into
+a cottage, and find a farmer who feels that he is the man I have come
+to see, and fronts me accordingly. It was therefore a very natural
+point of old feudal etiquette, that a gentleman who received a visit,
+though it were of his sovereign, should not leave his roof, but should
+wait his arrival at the door of his house. No house, though it were
+the Tuileries,[415] or the Escurial,[416] is good for anything without
+a master. And yet we are not often gratified by this hospitality.
+Everybody we know surrounds himself with a fine house, fine books,
+conservatory, gardens, equipage, and all manner of toys, as screens to
+interpose between himself and his guests. Does it not seem as if man
+was of a very sly, elusive nature, and dreaded nothing so much as a
+full renconter 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 eyes we
+have no care to stand, then again we run to our curtain, and hide
+ourselves as Adam[417] at the voice of the Lord God in the garden.
+Cardinal Caprara,[418] the Pope's[419] 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 free-born eyes,
+but fenced himself with etiquette, and within triple barriers of
+reserve: and, as all the world knows from Madame de Stael,[420] 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
+skillful masters of good manners. No rent roll nor army-list can
+dignify skulking and dissimulations: and the first point of courtesy
+must always be truth, as really all forms of good-breeding point that
+way.
+
+12. I have just been reading, in Mr. Hazlitt's[421] translation,
+Montaigne's[422] 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.
+
+13. 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.[423] 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;[424] 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 neighbors's needs. Must
+we have a good understanding with one another's palates? as foolish
+people who have lived long together, know when each wants salt or
+sugar. I pray my companion, if he wishes for bread, to ask me for
+bread, and if he wishes for sassafras or arsenic, to ask me for them,
+and not to hold out his plate, as if I knew already. Every natural
+function can be dignified by deliberation and privacy. Let us leave
+hurry to slaves. The compliments and ceremonies of our breeding should
+recall,[425] however remotely, the grandeur of our destiny.
+
+14. 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 work yard, 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.[426] 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.
+
+15. 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,[427] 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.
+
+16. 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,[428] 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[429] 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[430]: it is a debt of honor: if an accident
+should happen to me, he has nothing to show." "Then," said the
+creditor, "I change my debt into a debt of honor," and tore the note
+in pieces. Fox thanked the man for his confidence, and paid him,
+saying, "his debt was of older standing, and Sheridan must wait."
+Lover of liberty, friend of the Hindoo, friend of the African slave,
+he possessed a great personal popularity; and Napoleon said of him on
+the occasion of his visit to Paris, in 1805, "Mr. Fox will always hold
+the first place in an assembly at the Tuileries."
+
+17. 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,[431] to her horned company. This
+gentleman is this afternoon arrived from Denmark; and that is my Lord
+Ride, who came yesterday from Bagdad; here is Captain Friese, from
+Cape Turnagain, and Captain Symmes,[432] 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 Signer Torre del
+Greco, who extinguished Vesuvius by pouring into it the Bay of Naples;
+Spahr, the Persian ambassador; and Tul Wil Shan, the exiled nabob of
+Nepaul, whose saddle is the new moon.--But these are monsters of one
+day, and to-morrow will be dismissed to their holes and dens; for, in
+these rooms every chair is waited for. The artist, the scholar, and,
+in general, the clerisy,[433] 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,[434] being steeped in Cologne water,[435] and
+perfumed, and dined, and introduced, and properly grounded in all the
+biography, and politics, and anecdotes of the boudoirs.
+
+18. 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;[436] some Philhellene;[437] 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 centers 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
+worshiped 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[438]
+    Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs;
+    And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth,
+    In form and shape compact and beautiful;
+    So, on our heels a fresh perfection treads;
+    A power, more strong in beauty, born of us,
+    And fated to excel us, as we pass
+    In glory that old Darkness:
+     ... for, 'tis the eternal law,
+    That first in beauty shall be first in might."
+
+19. 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, leisurely 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 offense. 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;[439]
+but neither does Scott's dialogue bear criticism. His lords brave each
+other in smart epigrammatic speeches, but the dialogue is in costume,
+and does not please on the second reading; it is not warm with life.
+In Shakespeare 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;[440] yet with
+the port of an emperor,--if need be, calm, serious, and fit to stand
+the gaze of millions.
+
+20. 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
+scepter 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,[441] Juno,[442] or Polymnia;[443] 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,[444] 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[445] or Firdousi[446] 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.[447] 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 fullness of her heart, warming them by her
+sentiments; believing, as she did, that by dealing nobly with all, all
+would show themselves noble."
+
+21. I know that this Byzantine[448] pile of chivalry of 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,[449] 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.
+
+22. 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 ind 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 lone holiday from the
+national caution? Without the rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar.
+The king of Schiraz[450] could not afford to be so bountiful as the
+poor Osman[451] 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[452] 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 center 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?
+
+23. 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,[453] one day," said Silenus,[454]
+"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,[455] much more all Olympus, to know whether
+it was fundamentally bad or good."
+
+
+
+
+GIFTS[456]
+
+    Gifts of one who loved me--
+    'Twas high time they came;
+    When he ceased to love me,
+    Time they stopped for shame.
+
+
+1. 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,[457] 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:[458] 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,[459]
+because they are the flower of commodities, and admit of fantastic
+values being attached to them. If a man should send to me to come a
+hundred miles to visit him, and should set before me a basket of fine
+summer-fruit, I should think there was some proportion between the
+labor and the reward.
+
+2. 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[460] 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.[461] 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[462] 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. That 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,[463] or
+payment of blackmail.[464]
+
+3. 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 forgiver. 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[465] 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.
+
+4. 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,[466]
+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,[467] this of
+being served, and the debtor naturally wishes to give you a slap. A
+golden text for these gentlemen is that which I admire in the
+Buddhist,[468] who never thanks, and who says, "Do not flatter your
+benefactors."
+
+5. 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.
+
+6. 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 for you, and
+delight in you all the time.
+
+
+
+
+NATURE[469]
+
+    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.
+
+
+1. There are days[470] 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[471] may be looked for with a little more assurance in that
+pure October weather, which we distinguish by the name of Indian
+Summer.[472] 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 entrance 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 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.
+
+2. 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 traveler 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[473] and Uriel,[474]
+the upper sky would be all that would remain of our furniture.
+
+3. 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-fields;
+the mimic waving of acres of houstonia, whose innumerable florets
+whiten and ripple before the eye; the reflections of trees and flowers
+in glassy lakes; the musical steaming odorous south wind, which
+converts all trees to wind-harps;[475] the crackling and spurting of
+hemlock in the flames; or of pine-logs, which yield glory to the walls
+and faces in the sitting-room,--these are the music and pictures of
+the most ancient religion. My house stands in low land, with limited
+outlook, and on the skirt of the village.[476] But I go with my
+friend[477] to the shore of our little river,[478] and with one stroke
+of the paddle, I leave the village politics and personalities, yes,
+and the world of villages and personalities behind, and pass into a
+delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted
+man to enter without novitiate and probation.[479] 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,[480] a royal revel, the proudest, most heart-rejoicing
+festival that valor and beauty, power and taste, ever decked and
+enjoyed, establishes itself on the instant. These sunset clouds, these
+delicately emerging stars, with their private and ineffable glances,
+signify it and proffer it. I am taught the poorness of our invention,
+the ugliness of towns and palaces. Art and luxury have early learned
+that they must work as enhancement and sequel to this original beauty.
+I am overinstructed for my return. Henceforth I shall be hard to
+please. I cannot go back to toys. I am grown expensive and
+sophisticated. I can no longer live without elegance: but a countryman
+shall be my master of revels. He who knows the most, he who knows what
+sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the
+heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal
+man. Only as far as 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,[481] 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,[482] or Paphos,[483] or Ctesiphon.[484]
+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
+baubles. When the rich tax the poor with servility and obsequiousness,
+they should consider the effect of man 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,[485] for example, which converts the mountains into an
+Æolian harp,[486] and this supernatural _tiralira_ restores to him the
+Dorian[487] mythology, Apollo,[488] Diana,[489] 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 gift of wealthy 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.
+
+4. The moral sensibility which makes Edens[490] and Tempes[491] 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,[492] or the Madeira Islands.[493] 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,[494] with all the
+spiritual magnificence which they shed on the Campagna,[495] 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.
+
+5. But it is very easy to outrun the sympathy of readers on this
+topic, which school-men 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[496] 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 woodcraft and I suppose that such a gazetteer as
+wood-cutters and Indians should furnish facts for would take place in
+the most sumptuous drawing-rooms of all the "Wreaths" and "Flora's
+chaplets"[497] of the book-shops; 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,[498] 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[499] 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 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.
+
+6. But taking timely warning, and leaving many things unsaid on this
+topic, but 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,[500] 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[501] and Ptolemaic schemes[502] for her large
+style. We know 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,[503] Fauna,[504] Ceres,[505] and Pomona,[506] to
+come in. How far off yet is the trilobite! how far the quadruped! how
+inconceivably remote is man! All duly arrive,[507] and then race after
+race of men. It is a long way from granite to the oyster; farther yet to
+Plato,[508] and the preaching of the immortality of the soul. Yet all
+must come, as surely as the first atom has two sides.
+
+7. 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 thumb-nail, 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.
+
+8. 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 toward
+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.
+
+9. Things are so strictly related, that according to the skill of the
+eye, from any one object the parts and properties of any other may be
+predicted. If we had eyes to see it, a bit of stone from the city wall
+would certify us of the necessity that man must exist, as readily as
+the city. That identity makes us all one, and reduces to nothing great
+intervals on our customary scale. We talk of deviations from natural
+life, as if artificial life were not also natural. The smoothest
+curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude
+and aboriginal as a white bear, omnipotent to its own ends, and is
+directly related, there amid essences and billets-doux, to Himalaya
+mountain-chains[509] 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 wood-chucks, and the
+oak and the elm shall gladly serve us, though we sit in chairs of
+ivory on carpets of silk.
+
+10. This guiding identity runs through all the surprises and contrasts
+of the piece, and characterizes every law. Man carries the world in
+his head, the whole astronomy and chemistry suspended in a thought.
+Because the history of nature is charactered in his brain, therefore
+is he the prophet and discoverer of her secrets. Every known fact in
+natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it
+was actually verified. A man does not tie his shoe without recognizing
+laws which bind the farthest regions of nature: moon, plant, gas,
+crystal, are concrete geometry and numbers. Common sense knows its
+own, and recognizes the fact at first sight in chemical experiment.
+The common sense of Franklin,[510] Dalton,[511] Davy[512] and
+Black,[513] is the same common sense which made the arrangements which
+now it discovers.
+
+11. If the identity expresses organized rest, the counter action runs
+also into organization. The astronomers said,[514] "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[515] 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 of 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 aims; 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 ginger-bread dog,
+individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every
+new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue, which this
+day of continual petty 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 luster plays round the top of every toy to his
+eye, to insure his fidelity, and he is deceived to his good. We are
+made alive and kept alive by the same arts. Let the Stoics[516] 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 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.
+
+12. But the craft with which the world is made runs also into the mind
+and character of men. No man is quite sane; each has a vein of folly in
+his composition, a slight determination of blood to the head, to make
+sure of holding him hard to some one point which nature had taken to
+heart. Great causes are never tried on their merits; but the cause is
+reduced to particulars to suit the size of the partisans, and the
+contention is ever hottest on minor matters. Not less remarkable is the
+overfaith of each man in the importance of what he has to do or say. The
+poet, the prophet, has a higher value for what he utters than any
+hearer, and therefore it gets spoken. The strong, self-complacent
+Luther[517] declares with an emphasis, not to be mistaken, that "God
+himself cannot do without wise men." Jacob Behmen[518] and George
+Fox[519] betray their egotism in the pertinacity of their controversial
+tracts, and James Naylor[520] once suffered himself to be worshiped 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 is of none, or I shall not do it
+with impunity.
+
+13. 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[521] 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
+water-side, 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?
+
+14. 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
+fore-looking to such pavilions and gardens of festivity beyond. It is
+an odd jealousy; but the poet finds himself not near enough to this
+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[522] 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 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 landscapes 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.
+
+15. What shall we say of this omnipresent appearance of that first
+projectile impulse, of this flattery and balking of so many
+well-meaning creatures? Must we not suppose somewhere in the universe
+a slight treachery and derision? Are we not engaged to a serious
+resentment of this use that is made of us? Are we tickled trout, and
+fools of nature? One looks 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[523] 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 preëxisting within us in their
+highest form.
+
+16. 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[524] or self-heal. After every foolish day we sleep off the
+fumes and furies of its hours; and though we are always engaged with
+particulars, and often enslaved to them, we bring with us to every
+experiment the innate universal laws. These, while they exist in the
+mind as ideas, stand around us in nature forever embodied, a present
+sanity to expose and cure the insanity of men. Our servitude to
+particulars betrays us into a hundred foolish expectations. We
+anticipate a new era from the invention of a locomotive, or a balloon;
+the new engine brings with it the old checks. They say that by
+electro-magnetism, your salad shall be grown from the seed whilst your
+fowl is roasting for dinner: it is a symbol of our modern aims and
+endeavors,--of our condensation and acceleration of objects: but
+nothing is gained: nature cannot be cheated: man's life is but seventy
+salads long, grow they swift or grow they slow. In these checks and
+impossibilities, however, we find our advantage, not less than in
+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
+center to the poles of nature, and have some stake in every
+possibility, lends that sublime luster 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
+distills 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.
+
+
+
+
+SHAKSPEARE;[525] OR, THE POET
+
+[Transcriber's Note: Shakspeare is spelled as "Shakspeare" as well as
+"Shakespeare" in this book. The original spellings have been retained.]
+
+
+1. Great men are more distinguished by range and extent, than by
+originality. If we require the originality which consists in weaving,
+like a spider, their web from their own bowels; in finding clay, and
+making bricks, and building the house; no great men are original. Nor
+does valuable originality consist in unlikeness to other men. The hero
+is in the press of knights, and the thick of events; and, seeing what
+men want, and sharing their desire, he adds the needful length of
+sight and of arm, to come to the desired point. The greatest genius is
+the most indebted man. A poet is no rattlebrain, saying what comes
+uppermost and, because he says everything, saying, at last, something
+good; but a heart in unison with his time and country. There is
+nothing whimsical and fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad
+earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions, and pointed with
+the most determined aim which any man or class knows of in his times.
+
+2. The Genius[526] of our life is jealous of individuals and will not
+have any individual great, except through the general. There is no
+choice to genius. A great man does not wake up on some fine morning,
+and say, "I am full of life, I will go to sea, and find an Antarctic
+continent: to-day I will square the circle: I will ransack botany, and
+find a new food for man: I have a new architecture in my mind: I
+foresee a new mechanic power:" no, but he finds himself in the river
+of the thoughts and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities
+of his contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes of men look one
+way, and their hands all point in the direction in which he should go.
+The church has reared him amidst rites and pomps, and he carries out
+the advice which her music gave him, and builds a cathedral needed by
+her chants and processions. He finds a war raging: it educates him, by
+trumpet, in barracks, and he betters the instruction. He finds two
+counties groping to bring coal, or flour, or fish, from the place of
+production to the place of consumption, and he hits on a railroad.
+Every master has found his materials collected, and his power lay in
+his sympathy with his people, and in his love of the materials he
+wrought in. What an economy of power! and what a compensation for the
+shortness of life! All is done to his hand. The world has brought him
+thus far on his way. The human race has gone out before him, sunk the
+hills, filled the hollows, and bridged the rivers. Men, nations,
+poets, artisans, women, all have worked for him, and he enters into
+their labors. Choose any other thing, out of the line of tendency, out
+of the national feeling and history, and he would have all to do for
+himself: his powers would be expended in the first preparations. Great
+genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at
+all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and
+suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the
+mind.
+
+3. Shakspeare's youth[527] fell in a time when the English people were
+importunate for dramatic entertainments. The court took offense easily
+at political allusions, and attempted to suppress them. The
+Puritans,[528] a growing and energetic party and the religious among
+the Anglican Church,[529] would suppress them. But the people wanted
+them. Inn-yards, houses without roofs, and extemporaneous inclosures
+at country fairs, were the ready theaters of strolling players. The
+people had tasted this new joy; and, as we could not hope to suppress
+newspapers now,--no, not by the strongest party,--neither then could
+king, prelate, or puritan,--alone or united, suppress an organ, which
+was ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, Punch,[530] and library,
+at the same time. Probably king, prelate, and puritan, all found their
+own account in it. It had become, by all causes, a national
+interest,--by no means conspicuous, so that some great scholar would
+have thought of treating it in an English history,--but not a whit
+less considerable, because it was cheap, and of no account, like a
+baker's shop. The best proof of its vitality is the crowd of writers
+which suddenly broke into this field; Kyd, Marlow, Greene,[531]
+Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Peele, Ford,
+Massinger, Beaumont, and Fletcher.
+
+4. The secure possession, by the stage, of the public mind, is of the
+first importance to the poet who works for it. He loses no time in
+idle experiments. Here is audience and expectation prepared. In the
+case of Shakspeare there is much more. At the time when[532] he left
+Stratford, and went up to London, a great body of stage-plays, of all
+dates and writers, existed in manuscript, and were in turn produced on
+the boards. Here is the Tale of Troy,[533] which the audience will
+bear hearing some part of, every week; the Death of Julius Cæsar,[534]
+and other stories out of Plutarch,[535] which they never tire of; a
+shelf full of English history, from the chronicles of Brut[536] and
+Arthur,[537] down to the royal Henries,[538] which men hear eagerly;
+and a string of doleful tragedies, merry Italian tales,[539] and
+Spanish voyages,[540] which all the London prentices know. All the
+mass has been treated, with more or less skill, by every playwright,
+and the prompter has the soiled and tattered manuscripts. It is now no
+longer possible to say who wrote them first. They have been the
+property of the Theater so long, and so many rising geniuses have
+enlarged or altered them, inserting a speech, or a whole scene, or
+adding a song, that no man can any longer claim copyright in this work
+of numbers. Happily, no man wishes to. They are not yet desired in
+that way. We have few readers, many spectators and hearers. They had
+best lie where they are.
+
+5. Shakspeare, in common with his comrades, esteemed the mass of old
+plays, waste stock, in which any experiment could be freely tried.
+Had the _prestige_[541] which hedges about a modern tragedy existed,
+nothing could have been done. The rude warm blood of the living
+England circulated in the play, as in street-ballads, and gave body
+which he wanted to his airy and majestic fancy. The poet needs a
+ground in popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again,
+may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the
+people, supplies a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so
+much work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full
+strength for the audacities of his imagination. In short, the poet
+owes to his legend what sculpture owed to the temple. Sculpture in
+Egypt, and in Greece, grew up in subordination to architecture. It was
+the ornament of the temple wall: at first, a rude relief carved on
+pediments, then the relief became bolder, and a head or arm was
+projected from the wall, the groups being still arranged with
+reference to the building, which serves also as a frame to hold the
+figures; and when, at last, the greatest freedom of style and
+treatment was reached, the prevailing genius of architecture still
+enforced a certain calmness and continence in the statue. As soon as
+the statue was begun for itself, and with no reference to the temple
+or palace, the art began to decline: freak, extravagance, and
+exhibition, took the place of the old temperance. This balance-wheel,
+which the sculptor found in architecture, the perilous irritability of
+poetic talent found in the accumulated dramatic materials to which the
+people were already wonted, and which had a certain excellence which
+no single genius,[542] however extraordinary, could hope to create.
+
+6. In point of fact, it appears that Shakspeare did owe debts in all
+directions, and was able to use whatever he found; and the amount of
+indebtedness may be inferred from Malone's[543] laborious computations
+in regard to the First, Second, and Third parts of Henry VI., in
+which, "out of 6043 lines, 1771 were written by some author preceding
+Shakspeare; 2373 by him, on the foundation laid by his predecessors;
+and 1899 were entirely his own." And the proceeding investigation
+hardly leaves a single drama of his absolute invention. Malone's
+sentence is an important piece of external history. In Henry VIII, I
+think I see plainly the cropping out of the original rock on which his
+own finer stratum was laid. The first play was written by a superior,
+thoughtful man, with a vicious ear. I can mark his lines, and know
+well their cadence. See Wolsey's soliloquy,[544] and the following
+scene from Cromwell,[545] where,--instead of the meter of Shakspeare,
+whose secret is, that the thought constructs the tune, so that reading
+for the sense will best bring out the rhythm,--here the lines are
+constructed on a given tune, and the verse has even a trace of pulpit
+eloquence. But the play contains, through all its length, unmistakable
+traits of Shakspeare's hand, and some passages, as the account of the
+coronation,[546] are like autographs. What is odd, the compliment to
+Queen Elizabeth[547] is in bad rhythm.[548]
+
+7. Shakspeare knew that tradition supplies a better fable than any
+invention can. If he lost any credit of design, he augmented his
+resources; and, at that day, our petulant demand for originality was
+not so much pressed. There was no literature for the million. The
+universal reading, the cheap press, were unknown. A great poet, who
+appears in illiterate times, absorbs into his sphere all the light
+which is anywhere radiating. Every intellectual jewel, every flower of
+sentiment, it is his fine office to bring to his people; and he comes
+to value his memory[549] equally with his invention. He is therefore
+little solicitous whence his thoughts have been derived; whether
+through translation, whether through tradition, whether by travel in
+distant countries, whether by inspiration; from whatever source, they
+are equally welcome to his uncritical audience. Nay, he borrows very
+near home. Other men say wise things as well as he; only they say a
+good many foolish things, and do not know when they have spoken
+wisely. He knows the sparkle of the true stone, and puts it in high
+place, wherever he finds it. Such is the happy position of Homer,[550]
+perhaps; of Chaucer,[551] of Saadi.[552] They felt that all wit was
+their wit. And they are librarians and historiographers, as well as
+poets. Each romancer was heir and dispenser of all the hundred tales
+of the world,--
+
+   "Presenting Thebes'[553] and Pelops' line
+    And the tale of Troy divine."
+
+The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our early literature;
+and, more recently, not only Pope[554] and Dryden[555] have been
+beholden to him, but, in the whole society of English writers, a large
+unacknowledged debt is easily traced. One is charmed with the opulence
+which feeds so many pensioners. But Chaucer is a huge borrower.[556]
+Chaucer, it seems, drew continually, through Lydgat[557] and
+Caxton,[558] from Guido di Colonna,[559] whose Latin romance of the
+Trojan war was in turn a compilation from Dares Phrygius,[560]
+Ovid,[561] and Statius.[562] Then Petrarch,[563] Boccaccio,[564] and
+the Provençal poets,[565] and his benefactors: the Romaunt of the
+Rose[566] is only judicious translation from William of Lorris and
+John of Meung: Troilus and Creseide,[567] from Lollius of Urbino: The
+Cock and the Fox,[568] from the _Lais_ of Marie: The House of
+Fame,[569] from the French or Italian: and poor Gower[570] he uses as
+if he were only a brick-kiln or stone-quarry, out of which to build
+his house. He steals by this apology,--that what he takes has no worth
+where he finds it, and the greatest where he leaves it. It has come to
+be practically a sort of rule in literature, that a man, having once
+shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to
+steal from the writings of others at discretion. Thought is the
+property of him who can entertain it; and of him who can adequately
+place it. A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts;
+but, as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our
+own.
+
+8. Thus, all originality is relative. Every thinker is retrospective.
+The learned member of the legislature, at Westminister,[571] or at
+Washington, speaks and votes for thousands. Show us the constituency,
+and the now invisible channels by which the senator is made aware of
+their wishes, the crowd of practical and knowing men, who, by
+correspondence or conversation, are feeding him with evidence,
+anecdotes, and estimates, and it will bereave his fine attitude and
+resistance of something of their impressiveness. As Sir Robert
+Peel[572] and Mr. Webster[573] vote, so Locke[574] and Rousseau[575]
+think for thousands; and so there were foundations all around
+Homer,[576] Menu,[577] Saada,[578] or Milton,[579] from which they
+drew; friends, lovers, books, traditions, proverbs,--all
+perished,--which, if seen, would go to reduce the wonder. Did the bard
+speak with authority? Did he feel himself overmatched by any
+companion? The appeal is to the consciousness of the writer. Is there
+at last in his breast a Delphi[580] whereof to ask concerning any
+thought or thing whether it be verily so, yea or nay? and to have
+answer, and rely on that? All the debts which such a man could
+contract to other wit, would never disturb his consciousness of
+originality: for the ministrations of books, and of other minds, are a
+whiff of smoke to that most private reality with which he has
+conversed.
+
+9. It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius, in
+the world, was no man's work, but came by wide social labor, when a
+thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse. Our English
+Bible[581] is a wonderful specimen of the strength and music of the
+English language. But it was not made by one man, or at one time; but
+centuries and churches brought it to perfection. There never was a
+time when there was not some translation existing. The Liturgy,[582]
+admired for its energy and pathos, is an anthology of the piety of
+ages and nations, a translation of the prayers and forms of the
+Catholic church,--these collected, too, in long periods, from the
+prayers and meditations of every saint and sacred writer all over the
+world. Grotius[583] makes the like remark in respect to the Lord's
+Prayer, that the single clauses of which it is composed were already
+in use, in the time of Christ, in the rabbinical forms.[584] He picked
+out the grains of gold. The nervous language of the Common Law,[585]
+the impressive forms of our courts, and the precision and substantial
+truth of the legal distinctions, are the contribution of all the
+sharp-sighted, strong-minded men who have lived in the countries where
+these laws govern. The translation of Plutarch gets its excellence by
+being translation on translation. There never was a time when there
+was none. All the truly idiomatic and national phrases are kept, and
+all others successively picked out, and thrown away. Something like
+the same process had gone on, long before, with the originals of these
+books. The world takes liberties with world-books. Vedas,[586] Æsop's
+Fables,[587] Pilpay,[588] Arabian Nights,[589] Cid,[590] Iliad,[591]
+Robin Hood,[592] Scottish Minstrelsy,[593] are not the work of single
+men. In the composition of such works, the time thinks, the market
+thinks, the mason, the carpenter, the merchant, the farmer, the fop,
+all think for us. Every book supplies its time with one good word;
+every municipal law, every trade, every folly of the day, and the
+generic catholic genius who is not afraid or ashamed to owe his
+originality to the originality of all, stands with the next age as the
+recorder and embodiment of his own.
+
+10. We have to thank the researches of antiquaries, and the Shakspeare
+Society,[594] for ascertaining the steps of the English drama, from
+the Mysteries[595] celebrated in churches and by churchmen, and the
+final detachment from the church, and the completion of secular plays,
+from Ferrex and Porrex,[596] and Gammer Gurton's Needle,[597] down to
+the possession of the stage by the very pieces which Shakspeare
+altered, remodelled, and finally made his own. Elated with success,
+and piqued by the growing interest of the problem, they have left no
+book-stall unsearched, no chest in a garret unopened, no file of old
+yellow accounts to decompose in damp and worms, so keen was the hope
+to discover whether the boy Shakspeare poached[598] or not, whether he
+held horses at the theater-door, whether he kept school, and why he
+left in his will only his second-best bed to Ann Hathaway, his wife.
+
+11. There is somewhat touching in the madness with which the passing
+age mischooses the object on which all candles shine, and all eyes are
+turned; the care with which it registers every trifle touching Queen
+Elizabeth,[599] and King James,[600] and the Essexes,[601]
+Leicesters,[602] Burleighs,[603] and Buckinghams;[604] and lets pass
+without a single valuable note the founder of another dynasty, which
+alone will cause the Tudor dynasty[605] to be remembered,--the man who
+carries the Saxon race in him by the inspiration which feeds him, and
+on whose thoughts the foremost people of the world are now for some
+ages to be nourished, and minds to receive this and not another bias.
+A popular player,--nobody suspected he was the poet of the human race;
+and the secret was kept as faithfully from poets and intellectual men,
+as from courtiers and frivolous people. Bacon,[606] who took the
+inventory of the human understanding for his times, never mentioned
+his name. Ben Jonson,[607] though we have strained his few words of
+regard and panegyric, had no suspicion of the elastic fame whose first
+vibrations he was attempting. He no doubt thought the praise he has
+conceded to him generous, and esteemed himself, out of all question,
+the better poet of the two.
+
+12. If it need wit to know wit, according to the proverb, Shakspeare's
+time should be capable of recognizing it. Sir Henry Wotton[608] was
+born four years after Shakspeare, and died twenty-three years after
+him; and I find, among his correspondents and acquaintances, the
+following persons:[609] Theodore Beza, Isaac Casaubon, Sir Philip
+Sidney, Earl of Essex, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Milton,
+Sir Henry Vane, Isaac Walton, Dr. Donne, Abraham Cowley, Berlarmine,
+Charles Cotton, John Pym, John Hales, Kepler, Vieta, Albericus
+Gentilis, Paul Sarpi, Arminius; with all of whom exists some token of
+his having communicated, without enumerating many others, whom
+doubtless[610] he saw,--Shakspeare, Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont,
+Massinger, two Herberts, Marlow, Chapman and the rest. Since the
+constellation of great men who appeared in Greece in the time of
+Pericles,[611] there was never any such society;--yet their genius
+failed them to find out the best head in the universe. Our poet's mask
+was impenetrable. You cannot see the mountain near. It took a century
+to make it suspected; and not until two centuries had passed, after
+his death, did any criticism which we think adequate begin to appear.
+It was not possible to write the history of Shakspeare till now; for
+he is the father of German literature: it was on the introduction of
+Shakspeare into German, by Lessing,[612] and the translation of his
+works by Wieland[613] and Schlegel,[614] that the rapid burst of
+German literature was most intimately connected. It was not until the
+nineteenth century, whose speculative genius is a sort of living
+Hamlet,[615] that the tragedy of Hamlet could find such wondering
+readers. Now, literature, philosophy, and thought, are Shakspearized.
+His mind is the horizon beyond which, at present, we do not see. Our
+ears are educated to music by his rhythm. Coleridge[616] and
+Goethe[617] are the only critics who have expressed our convictions
+with any adequate fidelity; but there is in all cultivated minds a
+silent appreciation of his superlative power and beauty, which, like
+Christianity, qualifies the period.
+
+[Transcriber's Note: Number runs from 12 to 14. Number 13 omitted]
+
+14. The Shakspeare Society have inquired in all directions,
+advertised the missing facts, offered money for any information that
+will lead to proof; and with what result? Beside some important
+illustration of the history of the English stage, to which I have
+adverted, they have gleaned a few facts touching the property, and
+dealings in regard to property, of the poet. It appears that, from
+year to year, he owned a larger share in the Blackfriars'
+Theater:[618] its wardrobe and other appurtenances were his: and he
+bought an estate in his native village, with his earnings, as writer
+and shareholder; that he lived in the best house in Stratford;[619]
+was intrusted by his neighbors with their commissions in London, as of
+borrowing money, and the like; and he was a veritable farmer. About
+the time when he was writing Macbeth,[620] he sues Philip Rogers, in
+the borough-court of Stratford, for thirty-five shillings, ten pence,
+for corn delivered to him at different times; and, in all respects,
+appears as a good husband with no reputation for eccentricity or
+excess. He was a good-natured sort of man, an actor and shareholder in
+the theater, not in any striking manner distinguished from other
+actors and managers. I admit the importance of this information. It is
+well worth the pains that have been taken to procure it.
+
+15. But whatever scraps of information concerning his condition these
+researches may have rescued, they can shed no light upon that infinite
+invention which is the concealed magnet of his attraction for us. We
+are very clumsy writers of history. We tell the chronicle of
+parentage, birth, birth-place, schooling, schoolmates, earning of
+money, marriage, publication of books, celebrity, death; and when we
+have come to an end of this gossip no ray of relation appears between
+it and the goddess-born; and it seems as if, had we dipped at random
+into the "Modern Plutarch," and read any other life there, it would
+have fitted the poems as well. It is the essence of poetry to spring,
+like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish
+the past, and refuse all history. Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and
+Collier,[621] have wasted their oil. The famed theaters, Covent
+Garden, Drury Lane, the Park, and Tremont,[622] have vainly assisted.
+Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean, and Macready,[623] dedicate their
+lives to this genius; him they crown, elucidate, obey, and express.
+The genius knows them not. The recitation begins; one golden word
+leaps out immortal from all this painted pedantry, and sweetly
+torments us with invitations to its own inaccessible homes. I
+remember, I went once to see the Hamlet of a famed performer,[624] the
+pride of the English stage; and all I then heard, and all I now
+remember, of the tragedian, was that in which the tragedian had no
+part; simply, Hamlet's question to the ghost,--
+
+                            "What may this mean,[625]
+    That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
+    Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon?"
+
+That imagination which dilates the closet he writes in to the world's
+dimension, crowds it with agents in rank and order, as quickly
+reduces the big reality to be the glimpses of the moon. These tricks
+of his magic spoil for us the illusions of the green-room. Can any
+biography shed light on the localities into which the Midsummer
+Night's Dream[626] admits me? Did Shakspeare confide to any notary or
+parish recorder, sacristan, or surrogate, in Stratford, the genesis of
+that delicate creation? The forest of Arden,[627] the nimble air of
+Scone Castle,[628] the moonlight of Portia's villa,[629] "the antres
+vast[630] and desarts idle," of Othello's captivity,--where is the
+third cousin, or grand-nephew, the chancellor's file of accounts, or
+private letter, that has kept one word of those transcendent secrets?
+In fine, in this drama, as in all great works of art,--in the
+Cyclopean architecture[631] of Egypt and India; in the Phidian
+sculpture;[632] the Gothic ministers;[633] the Italian painting;[634]
+the Ballads of Spain and Scotland,[635]--the Genius draws up the
+ladder after him, when the creative age goes up to heaven, and gives
+way to a new, which sees the works, and ask in vain for a history.
+
+16. Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shakspeare; and even he can
+tell nothing, except to the Shakspeare in us; that is, to our most
+apprehensive and sympathetic hour. He cannot step from off his
+tripod,[636] and give us anecdotes of his inspirations. Read the antique
+documents extricated, analyzed, and compared, by the assiduous Dyce and
+Collier; and now read one of those skyey sentences,--aerolites,--which
+seem to have fallen out of heaven, and which, not your experience, but
+the man within the breast, has accepted, as words of fate; and tell me
+if they match; if the former account in any manner for the latter; or,
+which gives the most historical insight into the man.
+
+17. Hence, though our external history is so meager, yet, with
+Shakspeare for biographer, instead of Aubrey[637] and Rowe,[638] we
+have really the information which is material, that which describes
+character and fortune, that which, if we were about to meet the man
+and deal with him, would most import us to know. We have his recorded
+convictions on those questions which knock for answer at every
+heart,--on life and death, on love, on wealth and poverty, on the
+prizes of life, and the ways whereby we come at them; on the
+characters of men, and the influences, occult and open, which affect
+their fortunes; and on those mysterious and demoniacal powers which
+defy our science, and which yet interweave their malice and their gift
+in our brightest hours. Who ever read the volume of the Sonnets,
+without finding that the poet had there revealed, under masks that are
+no masks to the intelligent, the lore of friendship and of love; the
+confusion of sentiments in the most susceptible, and, at the same
+time, the most intellectual of men? What trait of his private mind has
+he hidden in his dramas? One can discern, in his ample pictures of the
+gentleman and the king, what forms and humanities pleased him; his
+delight in troops of friends, in large hospitality, in cheerful
+giving. Let Timon,[639] let Warwick,[640] let Antonio[641] the
+merchant, answer for his great heart. So far from Shakspeare's being
+the least known, he is the one person, in all modern history, known to
+us. What point of morals, of manners, of economy, of philosophy, of
+religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he not settled? What
+mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What office, or
+function, or district of man's work, has he not remembered? What king
+has he not taught state, as Talma[642] taught Napoleon? What maiden
+has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he not
+out-loved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not
+instructed in the rudeness of his behavior?
+
+18. Some able and appreciating critics think no criticism on
+Shakspeare valuable, that does not rest purely on the dramatic merit;
+that he is falsely judged as poet and philosopher. I think as highly
+as these critics of his dramatic merit, who still think it secondary.
+He was a full man, who liked to talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and
+images, which, seeking vent, found the drama next at hand. Had he been
+less, we should have had to consider how well he filled his place, how
+good a dramatist he was,--and he is the best in the world. But it
+turns out, that what he has to say is of that weight, as to withdraw
+some attention from the vehicle; and he is like some saint whose
+history is to be rendered into all languages, into verse and prose,
+into songs and pictures, and cut up into proverbs; so that the
+occasion which gave the saint's meaning the form of a conversation, or
+of a prayer, or of a code of laws, is immaterial, compared with the
+universality of its application. So it fares with the wise Shakspeare
+and his book of life. He wrote the airs for all our modern music: he
+wrote the text of modern life; the text of manners: he drew the man of
+England and Europe; the father of the man in America: he drew the man,
+and described the day, and what is done in it: he read the hearts of
+men and women, their probity, and their second thought, and wiles; the
+wiles of innocence, and the transitions by which virtues and vices
+slide into their contraries: he could divide the mother's part from
+the father's part in the face of the child, or draw the fine
+demarcations of freedom and of fate: he knew the laws of repression
+which make the police of nature: and all the sweets and all the
+terrors of human lot lay in his mind as truly but as softly as the
+landscape lies on the eye. And the importance of this wisdom of life
+sinks the form, as of Drama or Epic, out of notice. 'Tis like making a
+question concerning the paper on which a king's message is written.
+
+19. Shakspeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as
+he is out of the crowd. He is inconceivably wise; the others,
+conceivably. A good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato's brain,
+and think from thence; but not into Shakspeare's. We are still out of
+doors. For executive faculty, for creation, Shakspeare is unique. No
+man can imagine it better. He was the farthest reach of subtlety
+compatible with an individual self,--the subtilest of authors, and
+only just within the possibility of authorship. With this wisdom of
+life, is the equal endowment of imaginative and of lyric power. He
+clothed the creatures of his legend with form and sentiments, as if
+they were people who had lived under his roof; and few real men have
+left such distinct characters as these fictions. And they spoke in
+language as sweet as it was fit. Yet his talents never seduced him
+into an ostentation, nor did he harp on one string. An omnipresent
+humanity[643] coördinates all his faculties. Give a man of talents a
+story to tell, and his partiality will presently appear. He has
+certain observations, opinions, topics, which have some accidental
+prominence, and which he disposes all to exhibit. He crams this part,
+and starves that other part, consulting not the fitness of the thing,
+but his fitness and strength. But Shakspeare has no peculiarity, no
+importunate topic; but all is duly given; no veins, no curiosities: no
+cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no mannerist is he: he has no
+discoverable egotism: the great he tells greatly; the small,
+subordinately. He is wise without emphasis or assertion; he is strong,
+as nature is strong, who lifts the land into mountain slopes without
+effort, and by the same rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and
+likes as well to do the one as the other. This makes that equality of
+power in farce, tragedy, narrative, and love-songs; a merit so
+incessant, that each reader is incredulous of the perception of other
+readers.
+
+20. This power of expression, or of transferring the inmost truth of
+things into music and verse, makes him the type of the poet, and has
+added a new problem to metaphysics. This is that which throws him into
+natural history, as a main production of the globe, and as announcing
+new eras and ameliorations. Things were mirrored in his poetry without
+loss or blur; he could paint the fine with precision, the great with
+compass: the tragic and the comic indifferently, and without any
+distortion or favor. He carried his powerful execution into minute
+details, to a hair point; finishes an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as
+he draws a mountain; and yet these, like nature's, will bear the
+scrutiny of the solar microscope.
+
+21. In short, he is the chief example to prove that more or less of
+production, more or fewer pictures, is a thing indifferent. He had the
+power to make one picture. Daguerre[644] learned how to let one flower
+etch its image on his plate of iodine; and then proceeds at leisure to
+etch a million. There are always objects; but there was never
+representation. Here is perfect representation, at last; and now let
+the world of figures sit for their portraits. No recipe can be given
+for the making of a Shakspeare; but the possibility of the translation
+of things into song is demonstrated.
+
+22. His lyric power lies in the genius of the piece. The sonnets,
+though their excellence is lost in the splendor of the dramas, are as
+inimitable as they: and it is not a merit of lines, but a total merit
+of the piece; like the tone of voice of some incomparable person, so
+is this a speech of poetic beings, and any clause as unproducible now
+as a whole poem.
+
+23. Though the speeches in the plays, and single lines, have a beauty
+which tempts the ear to pause on them for their euphuism,[645] yet the
+sentence is so loaded with meaning, and so linked with its foregoers
+and followers, that the logician is satisfied. His means are as
+admirable as his ends; every subordinate invention, by which he helps
+himself to connect some irreconcilable opposites, is a poem too. He is
+not reduced to dismount and walk, because his horses are running off
+with him in some distant direction; he always rides.
+
+24. The finest poetry was first experienced: but the thought has
+suffered a transformation since it was an experience. Cultivated men
+often attain a good degree of skill in writing verses; but it is easy
+to read, through their poems, their personal history: any one
+acquainted with parties can name every figure: this is Andrew, and
+that is Rachael. The sense thus remains prosaic. It is a caterpillar
+with wings, and not yet a butterfly. In the poet's mind, the fact has
+gone quite over into the new element of thought, and has lost all that
+is exuvial. This generosity bides with Shakspeare. We say, from the
+truth and closeness of his pictures, that he knows the lesson by
+heart. Yet there is not a trace of egotism.
+
+25. One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his
+cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet,--for beauty is his
+aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation, but for its grace: he
+delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely light that
+sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds
+over the universe. Epicurus[646] relates, that poetry hath such charms
+that a lover might forsake his mistress to partake of them. And the
+true bards have been noted for their firm and cheerful temper. Homer
+lies in sunshine; Chaucer is glad and erect; and Saadi says, "It was
+rumored abroad that I was penitent; but what had I to do with
+repentance?" Not less sovereign and cheerful,--much more sovereign and
+cheerful, is the tone of Shakspeare. His name suggests joy and
+emancipation to the heart of men. If he should appear in any company
+of human souls, who would not march in his troop? He touches nothing
+that does not borrow health and longevity from his festal style.
+
+26. And now, how stands the account of man with this bard and
+benefactor, when in solitude, shutting our ears to the reverberations
+of his fame, we seek to strike the balance? Solitude has austere
+lessons; it can teach us to spare both heroes and poets; and it weighs
+Shakspeare also, and finds him to share the halfness and imperfection
+of humanity.
+
+27. Shakspeare, Homer, Dante,[647] Chaucer, saw the splendor of
+meaning that plays over the visible world; knew that a tree had
+another use than for apples, and corn another than for meal, and the
+ball of the earth, than for tillage and roads: that these things bore
+a second and finer harvest to the mind, being emblems of its
+thoughts, and conveying in all their natural history a certain mute
+commentary on human life. Shakspeare employed them as colors to
+compose his picture. He rested in their beauty; and never took the
+step which seemed inevitable to such genius, namely, to explore the
+virtue which resides in these symbols, and imparts this power,--what
+is that which they themselves say? He converted the elements, which
+waited on his command, into entertainments. He was master of the
+revels[648] to mankind. Is it not as if one should have, through
+majestic powers of science, the comets given into his hand, or the
+planets and their moons, and should draw them from their orbits to
+glare with the municipal fireworks on a holiday night, and advertise
+in all towns, "very superior pyrotechny this evening!" Are the agents
+of nature, and the power to understand them, worth no more than a
+street serenade, or the breath of a cigar? One remembers again the
+trumpet-text in the Koran,[649]--"The heavens and the earth, and all
+that is between them, think ye we have created them in jest?" As long
+as the question is of talent and mental power, the world of men has
+not his equal to show. But when the question is to life, and its
+materials, and its auxiliaries, how does he profit me? What does it
+signify? It is but a Twelfth Night,[650] or Midsummer Night's Dream,
+or a Winter Evening's Tale: what signifies another picture more or
+less? The Egyptian verdict[651] of the Shakspeare Societies comes to
+mind, that he was a jovial actor and manager. I cannot marry this
+fact to his verse. Other admirable men have led lives in some sort of
+keeping with their thought; but this man, in wide contrast. Had he
+been less, had he reached only the common measure of great authors, of
+Bacon, Milton, Tasso,[652] Cervantes,[653] we might leave the fact in
+the twilight of human fate: but, that this man of men, he who gave to
+the science of mind a new and larger subject than had ever existed,
+and planted the standard of humanity some furlongs forward into
+Chaos,--that he should not be wise for himself,--it must even go into
+the world's history, that the best poet led an obscure and profane
+life, using his genius for the public amusement.
+
+28. Well, other men, priest and prophet, Israelite,[654] German,[655]
+and Swede,[656] beheld the same objects: they also saw through them
+that which was contained. And to what purpose? The beauty straightway
+vanished; they read commandments, all-excluding mountainous duty; an
+obligation, a sadness, as of piled mountains, fell on them, and life
+became ghastly, joyless, a pilgrim's progress,[657] a probation,
+beleaguered round with doleful histories, of Adam's fall[658] and
+curse, behind us; with doomsdays and purgatorial[659] and penal fires
+before us; and the heart of the seer and the heart of the listener
+sank in them.
+
+29. It must be conceded that these are half-views of half-men. The
+world still wants its poet-priest, a reconciler, who shall not trifle
+with Shakspeare the player, nor shall grope in graves with Swedenborg
+the mourner; but who shall see, speak, and act, with equal
+inspiration. For knowledge will brighten the sunshine; right is more
+beautiful than private affection; and love is compatible with
+universal wisdom.
+
+
+
+
+PRUDENCE.[660]
+
+
+What right have I to write on Prudence, whereof I have little, and
+that of the negative sort? My prudence consists in avoiding and going
+without, not in the inventing of means and methods, not in adroit
+steering, not in gentle repairing. I have no skill to make money spend
+well, no genius in my economy, and whoever sees my garden discovers
+that I must have some other garden. Yet I love facts, and hate
+lubricity[661] and people without perception. Then I have the same
+title to write on prudence that I have to write on poetry or holiness.
+We write from aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience.
+We paint those qualities which we do not possess. The poet admires the
+man of energy and tactics; the merchant breeds his son for the church
+or the bar; and where a man is not vain and egotistic you shall find
+what he has not by his praise. Moreover it would be hardly honest in
+me not to balance these fine lyric words of Love and Friendship[662]
+with words of coarser sound, and whilst my debt to my senses is real
+and constant, not to own it in passing.
+
+Prudence is the virtue of the senses. It is the science of
+appearances. It is the outmost action of the inward life. It is God
+taking thought for oxen. It moves matter after the laws of matter. It
+is content to seek health of body by complying with physical
+conditions, and health of mind by the laws of the intellect.
+
+The world of the senses is a world of shows; it does not exist for
+itself, but has a symbolic character; and a true prudence or law of
+shows recognizes the co-presence of other laws and knows that its own
+office is subaltern; knows that it is surface and not centre where it
+works. Prudence is false when detached. It is legitimate when it is
+the Natural History of the soul incarnate, when it unfolds the beauty
+of laws within the narrow scope of the senses.
+
+There are all degrees of proficiency in knowledge of the world. It is
+sufficient to our present purpose to indicate three. One class lives
+to the utility of the symbol, esteeming health and wealth a final
+good. Another class live above this mark of the beauty of the symbol,
+as the poet and artist and the naturalist and man of science. A third
+class live above the beauty of the symbol to the beauty of the thing
+signified; these are wise men. The first class have common sense; the
+second, taste; and the third, spiritual perception. Once in a long
+time, a man traverses the whole scale, and sees and enjoys the symbol
+solidly, then also has a clear eye for its beauty, and lastly, whilst
+he pitches his tent on this sacred volcanic isle of nature, does not
+offer to build houses and barns thereon reverencing the splendor of
+the God which he sees bursting through each chink and cranny.
+
+The world is filled with the proverbs[663] and acts and winkings of a
+base prudence, which is a devotion to matter, as if we possessed no
+other faculties than the palate, the nose, the touch, the eye and ear;
+a prudence which adores the Rule of Three, which never subscribes,
+which gives never, which seldom lends, and asks but one question of
+any project,--Will it bake bread? This is a disease like a thickening
+of the skin until the vital organs are destroyed. But culture,
+revealing the high origin of the apparent world and aiming at the
+perfection of the man as the end, degrades everything else, as health
+and bodily life, into means. It sees prudence not to be a several
+faculty, but a name for wisdom and virtue conversing with the body and
+its wants. Cultivated men always feel and speak so as if a great
+fortune, the achievement of a civil or social measure, great personal
+influence, a graceful and commanding address, had their value as
+proofs of the energy of the spirit. If a man lose his balance and
+immerse himself in any trades or pleasures for their own sake, he may
+be a good wheel or pin,[664] but he is not a cultivated man.
+
+The spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and
+cowards, and is the subject of all comedy. It is nature's joke, and
+therefore literature's. The true prudence limits this sensualism by
+admitting the knowledge of an internal and real world. This
+recognition once made,--the order of the world and the distribution
+of affairs and times being studied with the co-perception of their
+subordinate place, will reward any degree of attention. For, our
+existence, thus apparently attached in nature to the sun and the
+returning moon and the periods which they mark; so susceptible to
+climate and to country, so alive to social good and evil, so fond of
+splendor and so tender to hunger and cold and debt,--reads all its
+primary lessons out of these books.
+
+Prudence does not go behind nature and ask whence it is? It takes the
+laws of the world whereby man's being is conditioned, as they are, and
+keeps these laws that it may enjoy their proper good. It respects
+space and time, climate, want, sleep, the law of polarity,[665] growth
+and death. There revolve, to give bound and period to his being on all
+sides, the sun and moon, the great formalists in the sky: here lies
+stubborn matter, and will not swerve from its chemical routine. Here
+is a planted globe, pierced and belted with natural laws and fenced
+and distributed externally with civil partitions and properties which
+impose new restraints on the young inhabitant.
+
+We eat of the bread which grows in the field. We live by the air which
+blows around us and we are poisoned by the air that is too cold or too
+hot, too dry or too wet. Time, which shows so vacant, indivisible and
+divine in its coming, is slit and peddled into trifles and tatters. A
+door is to be painted, a lock to be repaired. I want wood or oil, or
+meal, or salt; the house smokes, or I have a headache; then the tax;
+and an affair to be transacted with a man without heart or brains, and
+the stinging recollection of an injurious or very awkward word,--these
+eat up the hours. Do what we can, summer will have its flies.[666] If
+we walk in the woods we must feed mosquitoes. If we go a-fishing we
+must expect a wet coat. Then climate is a great impediment to idle
+persons. We often resolve to give up the care of the weather, but
+still we regard the clouds and the rain.
+
+We are instructed by these petty experiences which usurp the hours and
+years. The hard soil and four months of snow make the inhabitant of the
+northern temperate zone wiser and abler than his fellow who enjoys the
+fixed smile of the tropics. The islander may ramble all day at will. At
+night he may sleep on a mat under the moon, and wherever a wild
+date-tree grows, nature has, without a prayer even, spread a table for
+his morning meal. The northerner is perforce a householder. He must
+brew, bake, salt and preserve his food. He must pile wood and coal. But
+as it happens that not one stroke can labor lay to without some new
+acquaintance with nature; and as nature is inexhaustibly significant,
+the inhabitants of these climates[667] have always excelled the
+southerner in force. Such is the value of these matters that a man who
+knows other things can never know too much of these. Let him have
+accurate perceptions. Let him, if he have hands, handle; if eyes,
+measure and discriminate; let him accept and hive every fact of
+chemistry, natural history and economics; the more he has, the less is
+he willing to spare any one. Time is always bringing the occasions that
+disclose their value. Some wisdom comes out of every natural and
+innocent action. The domestic man, who loves no music so well as his
+kitchen clock and the airs which the logs sing to him as they burn on
+the hearth, has solaces which others never dream of. The application of
+means to ends ensures victory and the songs of victory not less in a
+farm or a shop than in the tactics of party or of war. The good husband
+finds method as efficient in the packing of fire-wood in a shed or in
+the harvesting of fruits in the cellar, as in Peninsular campaigns[668]
+or the files of the Department of State. In the rainy day he builds a
+work-bench, or gets his tool-box set in the corner of the barn-chamber,
+and stored with nails, gimlet, pincers, screwdriver and chisel. Herein
+he tastes an old joy of youth and childhood, the cat-like love of
+garrets, presses and corn-chambers, and of the conveniences of long
+housekeeping. His garden or his poultry-yard--very paltry places it may
+be--tells him many pleasant anecdotes. One might find argument for
+optimism in the abundant flow of this saccharine element of pleasure in
+every suburb and extremity of the good world. Let a man keep the
+law--any law,--and his way will be strown with satisfactions. There is
+more difference in the quality of our pleasures than in the amount.
+
+On the other hand, nature punishes any neglect of prudence. If you
+think the senses final, obey their law. If you believe in the soul, do
+not clutch at sensual sweetness before it is ripe on the slow tree of
+cause and effect. It is vinegar to the eyes to deal with men of loose
+and imperfect perception. Dr. Johnson is reported to have
+said,[669]--"If the child says he looked out of this window, when he
+looked out of that,--whip him." Our American character is marked by a
+more than average delight in accurate perception, which is shown by
+the currency of the by-word, "No mistake."
+
+But the discomfort of unpunctuality, of confusion of thought about
+facts, inattention to the wants of to-morrow, is of no nation. The
+beautiful laws of time and space, once dislocated by our inaptitude,
+are holes and dens. If the hive be disturbed by rash and stupid hands,
+instead of honey it will yield us bees. Our words and actions to be
+fair must be timely. A gay and pleasant sound is the whetting of the
+scythe in the mornings of June; yet what is more lonesome and sad than
+the sound of a whetstone or mower's rifle[670] when it is too late in
+the season to make hay? Scatter brained and "afternoon men" spoil much
+more than their own affairs in spoiling the temper of those who deal
+with them. I have seen a criticism on some paintings, of which I am
+reminded when I see the shiftless and unhappy men who are not true to
+their senses. The last Grand Duke of Weimar,[671] a man of superior
+understanding, said: "I have sometimes remarked in the presence of
+great works of art, and just now especially in Dresden, how much a
+certain property contributes to the effect which gives life to the
+figures, and to the life an irresistible truth. This property is the
+hitting, in all the figures we draw, the right centre of gravity. I
+mean the placing the figures firm upon their feet, making the hands
+grasp, and fastening the eyes on the spot where they should look. Even
+lifeless figures, as vessels and stools--let them be drawn ever so
+correctly--lose all effect so soon as they lack the resting upon their
+centre of gravity, and have a certain swimming and oscillating
+appearance. The Raphael in the Dresden gallery[672] (the only great
+affecting picture which I have seen) is the quietest and most
+passionless piece you can imagine; a couple of saints who worship the
+Virgin and child. Nevertheless it awakens a deeper impression than the
+contortions of ten crucified martyrs. For, beside all the resistless
+beauty of form, it possesses in the highest degree the property of the
+perpendicularity of all the figures." This perpendicularity we demand
+of all the figures in this picture of life. Let them stand on their
+feet, and not float and swing. Let us know where to find them. Let
+them discriminate between what they remember and what they dreamed.
+Let them call a spade a spade.[673] Let them give us facts, and honor
+their own senses with trust.
+
+But what man shall dare task another with imprudence? Who is prudent?
+The men we call greatest are least in this kingdom. There is a certain
+fatal dislocation in our relation to nature, distorting all our modes
+of living and making every law our enemy, which seems at last to have
+aroused all the wit and virtue in the world to ponder the question of
+Reform. We must call the highest prudence to counsel, and ask why
+health and beauty and genius should now be the exception rather than
+the rule of human nature? We do not know the properties of plants and
+animals and the laws of nature, through our sympathy with the same;
+but this remains the dream of poets. Poetry and prudence should be
+coincident. Poets should be lawgivers; that is, the boldest lyric
+inspiration should not chide and insult, but should announce and lead
+the civil code and the day's work. But now the two things seem
+irreconcilably parted. We have violated law upon law until we stand
+amidst ruins, and when by chance we espy a coincidence between reason
+and the phenomena, we are surprised. Beauty should be the dowry of
+every man and woman, as invariably as sensation; but it is rare.
+Health or sound organization should be universal. Genius should be the
+child of genius, and every child should be inspired; but now it is not
+to be predicted of any child, and nowhere is it pure. We call partial
+half lights, by courtesy, genius; talent which converts itself to
+money; talent which glitters to-day that it may dine and sleep well
+to-morrow; and society is officered by _men of parts_,[674] as they
+are properly called, and not by divine men. These use their gifts to
+refine luxury, not to abolish it. Genius is always ascetic; and piety,
+and love. Appetite shows to the finer souls as a disease, and they
+find beauty in rites and bounds that resist it.
+
+We have found out[675] fine names to cover our sensuality withal, but
+no gifts can raise intemperance. The man of talent affects to call his
+transgressions of the laws of the senses trivial and to count them
+nothing considered with his devotion to his art. His art rebukes him.
+That never taught him lewdness, nor the love of wine, nor the wish to
+reap where he had not sowed. His art is less for every deduction from
+his holiness, and less for every defect of common sense. On him who
+scorned the world, as he said, the scorned world wreaks its revenge.
+He that despiseth small things will perish by little and little.
+Goethe's Tasso[676] is very likely to be a pretty fair historical
+portrait, and that is true tragedy. It does not seem to me so genuine
+grief when some tyrannous Richard III.[677] oppresses and slays a
+score of innocent persons, as when Antonio and Tasso, both apparently
+right, wrong each other. One living after the maxims of this world and
+consistent and true to them, the other fired with all divine
+sentiments, yet grasping also at the pleasures of sense, without
+submitting to their law. That is a grief we all feel, a knot we cannot
+untie. Tasso's is no infrequent case in modern biography. A man of
+genius, of an ardent temperament, reckless of physical laws,
+self-indulgent, becomes presently unfortunate, querulous, a
+"discomfortable cousin," a thorn to himself and to others.
+
+The scholar shames us by his bifold[678] life. Whilst something higher
+than prudence is active, he is admirable; when common sense is wanted,
+he is an encumbrance. Yesterday, Cæsar[679] was not so great; to-day,
+Job[680] not so miserable. Yesterday, radiant with the light of an
+ideal world in which he lives, the first of men, and now oppressed by
+wants and by sickness, for which he must thank himself, none is so
+poor to do him reverence. He resembles the opium eaters whom
+travellers describe as frequenting the bazaars of Constantinople, who
+skulk about all day, the most pitiful drivellers, yellow, emaciated,
+ragged, sneaking; then at evening, when the bazaars are open, they
+slink to the opium-shop, swallow their morsel and become tranquil,
+glorious and great. And who has not seen the tragedy of imprudent
+genius struggling for years with paltry pecuniary difficulties, at
+last sinking, chilled, exhausted and fruitless, like a giant
+slaughtered by pins?
+
+Is it not better that a man should accept the first pains and
+mortifications of this sort, which nature is not slack in sending him,
+as hints that he must expect no other good than the just fruit of his
+own labor and self-denial? Health, bread, climate, social position,
+have their importance, and he will give them their due. Let him esteem
+Nature a perpetual counsellor, and her perfections the exact measure
+of our deviations. Let him make the night night, and the day day. Let
+him control the habit of expense. Let him see that as much wisdom may
+be expended on a private economy as on an empire, and as much wisdom
+may be drawn from it. The laws of the world are written out for him on
+every piece of money in his hand. There is nothing he will not be the
+better for knowing, were it only the wisdom of Poor Richard,[681] or
+the State-street[682] prudence of buying by the acre to sell by the
+foot; or the thrift of the agriculturist, to stick[683] in a tree
+between whiles, because it will grow whilst he sleeps; or the prudence
+which consists in husbanding little strokes of the tool, little
+portions of time, particles of stock and small gains. The eye of
+prudence may never shut. Iron, if kept at the ironmonger's, will rust;
+beer, if not brewed in the right state of the atmosphere, will sour;
+timber of ships will rot at sea, or if laid up high and dry, will
+strain, warp and dry-rot. Money, if kept by us, yields no rent and is
+liable to loss; if invested, is liable to depreciation of the
+particular kind of stock. Strike, says the smith, the iron is white.
+Keep the rake, says the haymaker, as nigh the scythe as you can, and
+the cart as nigh the rake. Our Yankee trade is reputed to be very much
+on the extreme of this prudence. It saves itself by its activity. It
+takes bank notes,--good, bad, clean, ragged, and saves itself by the
+speed with which it passes them off. Iron cannot rust, nor beer sour,
+nor timber rot, nor calicoes go out of fashion, nor money stocks
+depreciate, in the few swift moments in which the Yankee suffers any
+one of them to remain in his possession. In skating over thin ice our
+safety is in our speed.
+
+Let him learn a prudence of a higher strain. Let him learn that
+everything in nature, even motes and feathers, go by law and not by
+luck, and that what he sows he reaps. By diligence and self-command
+let him put the bread he eats at his own disposal, and not at that of
+others, that he may not stand in bitter and false relations to other
+men; for the best good of wealth is freedom. Let him practise the
+minor virtues.[684] How much of human life is lost in waiting! Let him
+not make his fellow creatures wait. How many words and promises are
+promises of conversation! Let his be words of fate. When he sees a
+folded and sealed scrap of paper float around the globe in a pine ship
+and come safe to the eye for which it was written, amidst a swarming
+population, let him likewise feel the admonition to integrate his
+being across all these distracting forces, and keep a slender human
+word among the storms, distances and accidents that drive us hither
+and thither, and, by persistency, make the paltry force of one man
+reappear to redeem its pledge after months and years in the most
+distant climates.
+
+We must not try to write the laws of any one virtue, looking at that
+only. Human nature loves no contradictions, but is symmetrical. The
+prudence which secures an outward well-being is not to be studied by
+one set of men, whilst heroism and holiness are studied by another,
+but they are reconcilable. Prudence concerns the present time,
+persons, property and existing forms. But as every fact hath its roots
+in the soul, and, if the soul were changed, would cease to be, or
+would become some other thing, therefore the proper administration of
+outward things will always rest on a just apprehension of their cause
+and origin; that is, the good man will be the wise man, and the
+single-hearted the politic man. Every violation of truth is not only a
+sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human
+society. On the most profitable lie the course of events presently
+lays a destructive tax; whilst frankness proves to be the best
+tactics, for it invites frankness, puts the parties on a convenient
+footing and makes their business a friendship. Trust men and they will
+be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves
+great, though they make an exception in your favor to all their rules
+of trade.
+
+So, in regard to disagreeable and formidable things, prudence does not
+consist in evasion or in flight, but in courage. He who wishes to walk
+in the most peaceful parts of life with any serenity must screw
+himself up to resolution. Let him front the object of his worst
+apprehension, and his stoutness will commonly make his fears
+groundless. The Latin proverb says,[685] "in battles the eye is first
+overcome." The eye is daunted and greatly exaggerates the perils of
+the hour. Entire self-possession may make a battle very little more
+dangerous to life than a match at foils or at football. Examples are
+cited by soldiers of men who have seen the cannon pointed and the fire
+given to it, and who have stepped aside from the path of the ball. The
+terrors of the storm are chiefly confined to the parlor and the cabin.
+The drover, the sailor, buffets it all day, and his health renews
+itself at as vigorous a pulse under the sleet as under the sun of
+June.
+
+In the occurrence of unpleasant things among neighbors, fear comes
+readily to heart and magnifies the consequence of the other party; but
+it is a bad counsellor. Every man is actually weak and apparently
+strong. To himself he seems weak; to others formidable. You are afraid
+of Grim; but Grim also is afraid of you. You are solicitous of the
+good will of the meanest person, uneasy at his ill will. But the
+sturdiest offender of your peace and of the neighborhood, if you rip
+up _his_ claims, is as thin and timid as any; and the peace of society
+is often kept, because, as children say, one is afraid and the other
+dares not. Far off, men swell, bully and threaten: bring them hand to
+hand, and they are a feeble folk.
+
+It is a proverb that "courtesy costs nothing"; but calculation might
+come to value love for its profit. Love is fabled to be blind, but
+kindness is necessary to perception; love is not a hood, but an
+eye-water. If you meet a sectary or a hostile partisan, never
+recognize the dividing lines, but meet on what common ground
+remains,--if only that the sun shines and the rain rains for
+both,--the area will widen very fast, and ere you know it, the
+boundary mountains on which the eye had fastened have melted into air.
+If he set out to contend,[686] almost St. Paul will lie, almost St.
+John will hate. What low, poor, paltry, hypocritical people an
+argument on religion will make of the pure and chosen souls. Shuffle
+they will and crow, crook and hide, feign to confess here, only that
+they may brag and conquer there, and not a thought has enriched either
+party, and not an emotion of bravery, modesty, or hope. So neither
+should you put yourself in a false position to your contemporaries by
+indulging a vein of hostility and bitterness. Though your views are in
+straight antagonism[687] to theirs, assume an identity of sentiment,
+assume that you are saying precisely that which all think, and in the
+flow of wit and love roll out your paradoxes in solid column, with not
+the infirmity of a doubt. So at least shall you get an adequate
+deliverance. The natural emotions of the soul are so much better than
+the voluntary ones that you will never do yourself justice in dispute.
+The thought is not then taken hold of by the right handle, does not
+show itself proportioned and in its true bearings, but bears extorted,
+hoarse, and half witness. But assume a consent and it shall presently
+be granted, since really and underneath their all external
+diversities, all men are of one heart and mind.
+
+Wisdom will never let us stand with any man or men on an unfriendly
+footing. We refuse sympathy and intimacy with people, as if we waited
+for some better sympathy and intimacy to come. But whence and when?
+To-morrow will be like to-day. Life wastes itself whilst we are
+preparing to live. Our friends and fellow-workers die off from us.
+Scarcely can we say we see new men, new women, approaching us. We are
+too old to regard fashion, too old to expect patronage of any greater
+or more powerful. Let us suck the sweetness of those affections and
+consuetudes[688] that grow near us. These old shoes are easy to the
+feet. Undoubtedly we can easily pick faults in our company, can easily
+whisper names prouder and that tickle the fancy more. Every man's
+imagination hath its friends; and pleasant would life be with such
+companions. But if you cannot have them on good mutual terms, you
+cannot have them. If not the Deity but our ambition hews and shapes
+the new relations, their virtue escapes, as strawberries lose their
+flavor in garden beds.
+
+Thus truth, frankness, courage, love, humility, and all the virtues
+range themselves on the side of prudence, or the art of securing a
+present well-being. I do not know if all matter will be found to be
+made of one element, as oxygen or hydrogen, at last, but the world of
+manners and actions is wrought of one stuff, and begin where we
+will[689] we are pretty sure in a short space to be mumbling our ten
+commandments.
+
+
+
+
+CIRCLES.[690]
+
+
+The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second;
+and throughout nature this primary picture is repeated without end. It
+is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine[691]
+described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere
+and its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the
+copious sense of this first of forms. One moral we have already
+deduced in considering the circular or compensatory character of every
+human action. Another analogy we shall now trace, that every action
+admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth
+that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in
+nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another
+dawn risen on mid-noon,[692] and under every deep a lower deep opens.
+
+This fact, as far as it symbolizes the moral fact of the Unattainable,
+the flying Perfect, around which the hands of man can never meet, at
+once the inspirer and the condemner of every success, may conveniently
+serve us to connect many illustrations of human power in every
+department.
+
+There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile.
+Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe seen by God is a
+transparent law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the fact and
+holds its fluid. Our culture is the predominance of an idea which
+draws after it all this train of cities and institutions. Let us rise
+into another idea; they will disappear. The Greek sculpture[693] is
+all melted away, as if it had been statues of ice: here and there a
+solitary figure or fragment remaining, as we see flecks and scraps of
+snow left in cold dells and mountain clefts in June and July. For the
+genius that created it creates now somewhat else. The Greek
+letters[694] last a little longer, but are already passing under the
+same sentence and tumbling into the inevitable pit which the creation
+of new thought opens for all that is old. The new continents are built
+out of the ruins of an old planet; the new races fed out of the
+decomposition of the foregoing. New arts destroy the old.[695] See the
+investment of capital in aqueducts, made useless by hydraulics;
+fortifications, by gunpowder; roads and canals, by railways; sails, by
+steam; steam, by electricity.
+
+You admire this tower of granite, weathering the hurts of so many
+ages. Yet a little waving hand built this huge wall, and that which
+builds is better than that which is built. The hand that built can
+topple it down much faster. Better than the hand and nimbler was the
+invisible thought which wrought through it; and thus ever, behind the
+coarse effect, is a fine cause, which, being narrowly seen, is itself
+the effect of a finer cause. Everything looks permanent until its
+secret is known. A rich estate appears to women and children a firm
+and lasting fact; to a merchant, one easily created out of any
+materials, and easily lost. An orchard, good tillage, good grounds,
+seem a fixture, like a gold mine, or a river, to a citizen; but to a
+large farmer, not much more fixed than the state of the crop. Nature
+looks provokingly stable and secular, but it has a cause like all the
+rest; and when once I comprehend that, will these fields stretch so
+immovably wide, these leaves hang so individually considerable?
+Permanence is a word of degrees. Every thing is medial. Moons are no
+more bounds to spiritual power than bat-balls.
+
+The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look,
+he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his
+facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea
+which commands his own. The life of man is a self-evolving circle,[696]
+which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to
+new and larger circles, and that without end. The extent to which this
+generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the
+force or truth of the individual soul. For it is the inert effort of
+each thought, having formed itself into a circular wave of circumstance,
+as for instance an empire, rules of an art, a local usage, a religious
+rite, to heap itself on that ridge and to solidify and hem in the life.
+But if the soul is quick and strong it bursts over that boundary on all
+sides and expands another orbit on the great deep, which also runs up
+into a high wave, with attempt again to stop and to bind. But the heart
+refuses to be imprisoned;[697] in its first and narrowest pulses it
+already tends outward with a vast force and to immense and innumerable
+expansions.
+
+Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series. Every general
+law only a particular fact of some more general law presently to
+disclose itself. There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no
+circumference to us. The man finishes his story,--how good! how final!
+how it puts a new face on all things! He fills the sky. Lo, on the
+other side rises also a man and draws a circle around the circle we
+had just pronounced the outline of the sphere. Then already is our
+first speaker not man, but only a first speaker. His only redress is
+forthwith to draw a circle outside of his antagonist. And so men do by
+themselves. The result of to-day, which haunts the mind and cannot be
+escaped will presently be abridged into a word, and the principle that
+seemed to explain nature will itself be included as one example of a
+bolder generalization. In the thought of to-morrow there is a power to
+upheave all thy creed, all the creeds, all the literatures of the
+nations, and marshal thee to a heaven which no epic dream has yet
+depicted. Every man is not so much a workman in the world as he is a
+suggestion of that he should be. Men walk as prophecies of the next
+age.
+
+Step by step we scale this mysterious ladder; the steps are actions,
+the new prospect is power. Every several result is threatened and
+judged by that which follows. Every one seems to be contradicted by
+the new; it is only limited by the new. The new statement is always
+hated by the old, and, to those dwelling in the old, comes like an
+abyss of scepticism. But the eye soon gets wonted to it, for the eye
+and it are effects of one cause; then its innocency and benefit
+appear, and presently, all its energy spent, it pales and dwindles
+before the revelation of the new hour.
+
+Fear not the new generalization. Does the fact look crass[698] and
+material, threatening to degrade thy theory of spirit? Resist it not;
+it goes to refine and raise thy theory of matter just as much.
+
+There are no fixtures to men, if we appeal to consciousness. Every man
+supposes himself not to be fully understood; and if there is any truth
+in him, if he rests at last on the divine soul, I see not how it can
+be otherwise. The last chamber, the last closet, he must feel was
+never opened; there is always a residuum unknown, unanalyzable. That
+is, every man believes that he has a greater possibility.
+
+Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of thoughts
+and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the
+same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write,
+whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world: but
+yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see
+so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was
+that wrote so many continuous pages. Alas for this infirm faith, this
+will not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am God in nature;
+I am a weed by the wall.
+
+The continual effort to raise himself above himself,[699] to work a
+pitch above his last height, betrays itself in a man's relations. We
+thirst for approbation, yet cannot forgive the approver. The sweet of
+nature is love; yet if I have a friend I am tormented by my
+imperfections. The love of me accuses the other party. If he were high
+enough[700] to slight me, then could I love him, and rise by my
+affection to new heights. A man's growth is seen in the successive
+choirs of his friends. For every friend whom he loses for truth, he
+gains a better. I thought as I walked in the woods and mused on any
+friends, why should I play with them this game of idolatry? I know and
+see too well, when not voluntarily blind, the speedy limits of persons
+called high and worthy. Rich, noble and great they are by the
+liberality of our speech, but truth is sad. O blessed Spirit, whom I
+forsake for these, they are not thee! Every personal consideration
+that we allow costs us heavenly state. We sell the thrones of angels
+for a short and turbulent pleasure.
+
+How often must we learn this lesson? Men cease to interest us when we
+find their limitations. The only sin is limitation. As soon as you
+once come up with a man's limitations, it is all over with him. Has
+he talents? has he enterprises? has he knowledge? It boots not.
+Infinitely alluring and attractive was he to you yesterday, a great
+hope, a sea to swim in; now, you have found his shores, found it a
+pond, and you care not if you never see it again.
+
+Each new step we take in thought reconciles twenty seemingly
+discordant facts, as expressions of one law. Aristotle and Plato[701]
+are reckoned the respective heads of two schools. A wise man will see
+that Aristotle platonizes. By going one step farther back in thought,
+discordant opinions are reconciled by being seen to be two extremes of
+one principle, and we can never go so far back as to preclude a still
+higher vision.
+
+Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then
+all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out
+in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end.
+There is not a piece of science but its flank may be turned to-morrow;
+there is not any literary reputation, not the so-called eternal names
+of fame, that may not be revised and condemned. The very hopes of man,
+the thoughts of his heart, the religion of nations, the manners and
+morals of mankind are all at the mercy of a new generalization.
+Generalization is always a new influx of the divinity into the mind.
+Hence the thrill that attends it.
+
+Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot
+have his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you
+will, he stands. This can only be by his preferring truth to his past
+apprehension of truth, and his alert acceptance of it from whatever
+quarter; the intrepid conviction that his laws, his relations to
+society, his Christianity, his world, may at any time be superseded
+and decease.
+
+There are degrees in idealism. We learn first to play with it
+academically, as the magnet was once a toy. Then we see in the heyday
+of youth and poetry that it may be true, that it is true in gleams and
+fragments. Then, its countenance waxes stern and grand, and we see
+that it must be true. It now shows itself ethical and practical. We
+learn that God is; that he is in me; and that all things are shadows
+of him. The idealism of Berkeley[702] is only a crude statement of the
+idealism of Jesus, and that again is a crude statement of the fact
+that all nature is the rapid efflux of goodness executing and
+organizing itself. Much more obviously is history and the state of the
+world at any one time directly dependent on the intellectual
+classification then existing in the minds of men. The things which are
+dear to men at this hour are so on account of the ideas which have
+emerged on their mental horizon, and which cause the present order of
+things, as a tree bears its apples. A new degree of culture would
+instantly revolutionize the entire system of human pursuits.
+
+Conversation is a game of circles. In conversation we pluck up the
+_termini_[703] which bound the common of silence on every side. The
+parties are not to be judged by the spirit they partake and even
+express under this Pentecost.[704] To-morrow they will have receded
+from this high-water mark. To-morrow you shall find them stooping
+under the old pack-saddles. Yet let us enjoy the cloven flame whilst
+it glows on our walls. When each new speaker strikes a new light,
+emancipates us from the oppression of the last speaker to oppress us
+with the greatness and exclusiveness of his own thought, then yields
+us to another redeemer, we seem to recover our rights, to become men.
+O, what truths profound and executable only in ages and orbs, are
+supposed in the announcement of every truth! In common hours, society
+sits cold and statuesque. We all stand waiting, empty,--knowing,
+possibly, that we can be full, surrounded by mighty symbols which are
+not symbols to us, but prose and trivial toys. Then cometh the god and
+converts the statues into fiery men, and by a flash of his eye burns
+up the veil which shrouded all things, and the meaning of the very
+furniture, of cup and saucer, of chair and clock and tester, is
+manifest. The facts which loomed so large in the fogs of
+yesterday,--property, climate, breeding, personal beauty and the like,
+have strangely changed their proportions. All that we reckoned settled
+shakes and rattles; and literatures, cities, climates, religions,
+leave their foundations and dance before our eyes. And yet here again
+see the swift circumscription! Good as is discourse, silence is
+better, and shames it. The length of the discourse indicates the
+distance of thought betwixt the speaker and the hearer. If they were
+at a perfect understanding in any part, no words would be necessary
+thereon. If at one in all parts, no words would be suffered.
+
+Literature is a point outside of our hodiernal[705] circle through
+which a new one may be described. The use of literature is to afford
+us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a
+purchase by which we may move it. We fill ourselves with ancient
+learning, install ourselves the best we can in Greek, in Punic,[706]
+in Roman houses, only that we may wiselier see French, English and
+American houses and modes of living. In like manner[707] we see
+literature best from the midst of wild nature, or from the din of
+affairs, or from a high religion. The field cannot be well seen from
+within the field. The astronomer must have his diameter of the earth's
+orbit as a base to find the parallax of any star.
+
+Therefore we value the poet. All the argument and all the wisdom is
+not in the encyclopædia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body
+of Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play. In my daily work I incline
+to repeat my old steps, and do not believe in remedial force, in the
+power of change and reform. But some Petrarch[708] or Ariosto,[709]
+filled with the new wine of his imagination, writes me an ode or a
+brisk romance, full of daring thought and action. He smites and
+arouses me with his shrill tones, breaks up my whole chain of habits,
+and I open my eye on my own possibilities. He claps wings to the sides
+of all the solid old lumber of the world, and I am capable once more
+of choosing a straight path in theory and practice.
+
+We have the same need to command a view of the religion of the world.
+We can never see Christianity from the catechism:--from the pastures,
+from a boat in the pond, from amidst the songs of wood-birds we
+possibly may. Cleansed by the elemental light and wind, steeped in the
+sea of beautiful forms which the field offers us, we may chance to
+cast a right glance back upon biography. Christianity is rightly dear
+to the best of mankind; yet was there never a young philosopher whose
+breeding had fallen into the Christian church by whom that brave text
+of Paul's was not specially prized, "Then shall also the Son be
+subject unto Him who put all things under him, that God may be all in
+all."[710] Let the claims and virtues of persons be never so great and
+welcome, the instinct of man presses eagerly onward to the impersonal
+and illimitable, and gladly arms itself against the dogmatism of
+bigots with this generous word out of the book itself.
+
+The natural world may be conceived of as a system of concentric
+circles, and we now and then detect in nature slight dislocations
+which apprize us that this surface on which we now stand is not fixed,
+but sliding. These manifold tenacious qualities,[711] this chemistry
+and vegetation, these metals and animals, which seem to stand there
+for their own sake, are means and methods only, are words of God, and
+as fugitive as other words. Has the naturalist or chemist learned his
+craft, who has explored the gravity of atoms and the elective
+affinities, who has not yet discerned the deeper law whereof this is
+only a partial or approximate statement, namely that like draws to
+like, and that the goods which belong to you gravitate to you and need
+not be pursued with pains and cost? Yet is that statement approximate
+also, and not final. Omnipresence is a higher fact. Not through subtle
+subterranean channels need friend and fact be drawn to their
+counterpart, but, rightly considered, these things proceed from the
+eternal generation of the soul. Cause and effect are two sides of one
+fact.
+
+The same law of eternal procession ranges all that we call the
+virtues, and extinguishes each in the light of a better. The great man
+will not be prudent in the popular sense; all his prudence will be so
+much deduction from his grandeur. But it behooves each to see, when he
+sacrifices prudence, to what god he devotes it; if to ease and
+pleasure, he had better be prudent still; if to a great trust, he can
+well spare his mule and panniers who has a winged chariot instead.
+Geoffrey draws on his boots to go through the woods, that his feet may
+be safer from the bite of snakes; Aaron never thinks of such a peril.
+In many years neither is harmed by such an accident. Yet it seems to
+me that with every precaution you take against such an evil you put
+yourself into the power of the evil. I suppose that the highest
+prudence is the lowest prudence. Is this too sudden a rushing from
+the centre to the verge of our orbit? Think how many times we shall
+fall back into pitiful calculations before we take up our rest in the
+great sentiment, or make the verge of to-day the new centre. Besides,
+your bravest sentiment is familiar to the humblest men. The poor and
+the low have their way of expressing the last facts of philosophy as
+well as you. "Blessed be nothing" and "The worse things are, the
+better they are" are proverbs which express the transcendentalism of
+common life.
+
+One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's
+ugliness; one man's wisdom another's folly; as one beholds the same
+objects from a higher point of view. One man thinks justice consists
+in paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who
+is very remiss in this duty and makes the creditor wait tediously. But
+that second man has his own way of looking at things; asks himself
+which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the
+poor? the debt of money, or the debt of thought to mankind, of genius
+to nature? For you, O broker, there is no other principle but
+arithmetic. For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth
+of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred; nor can I
+detach one duty, like you, from all other duties, and concentrate my
+forces mechanically on the payment of moneys. Let me live onward; you
+shall find that, though slower, the progress of my character will
+liquidate all these debts without injustice to higher claims. If a
+man should dedicate himself to the payment of notes, would not this be
+injustice? Owes he no debt but money? And are all claims on him to be
+postponed to a landlord's or a banker's?
+
+There is no virtue which is final; all are initial. The virtues of
+society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery
+that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed
+such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.
+
+    Forgive his crimes, forgive his virtues too,
+    Those smaller faults, half converts to the right.[712]
+
+It is the highest power of divine moments that they abolish our
+contritions also. I accuse myself of sloth and unprofitableness day by
+day; but when these waves of God flow into me I no longer reckon lost
+time. I no longer poorly compute my possible achievement by what
+remains to me of the month or the year; for these moments confer a
+sort of omnipresence and omnipotence which asks nothing of duration,
+but sees that the energy of the mind is commensurate with the work to
+be done, without time.
+
+And thus, O circular philosopher, I hear some reader exclaim, you have
+arrived at a fine pyrrhonism,[713] at an equivalence and indifferency
+of all actions, and would fain teach us that _if we are true_,
+forsooth, our crimes may be lively stones out of which we shall
+construct the temple of the true God.
+
+I am not careful to justify myself. I own I am gladdened[714] by
+seeing the predominance of the saccharine principle throughout
+vegetable nature, and not less by beholding in morals that
+unrestrained inundation of the principle of good into every chink and
+hole that selfishness has left open, yea into selfishness and sin
+itself; so that no evil is pure, nor hell itself without its extreme
+satisfactions. But lest I should mislead any when I have my own head
+and obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am only an
+experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least
+discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle anything as
+true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none
+are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my
+back.
+
+Yet this incessant movement and progression which all things partake
+could never become sensible to us but by contrast to some principle of
+fixture or stability in the soul. Whilst the eternal generation of
+circles proceeds, the eternal generator abides. That central life is
+somewhat superior to creation, superior to knowledge and thought, and
+contains all its circles. For ever it labors to create a life and
+thought as large and excellent as itself; but in vain; for that which
+is made instructs how to make a better.
+
+Thus there is no sleep, no pause, no preservation, but all things
+renew, germinate and spring. Why should we import rags and relics into
+the new hour? Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only
+disease: all others run into this one. We call it by many
+names,--fever, intemperance, insanity, stupidity and crime: they are
+all forms of old age: they are rest, conservatism, appropriation,
+inertia; not newness, not the way onward. We grizzle every day. I see
+no need of it. Whilst we converse with what is above us, we do not
+grow old, but grow young. Infancy, youth, receptive, aspiring, with
+religious eye looking upward, counts itself nothing and abandons
+itself to the instruction flowing from all sides. But the man and
+woman of seventy assume to know all; throw up their hope; renounce
+aspiration; accept the actual for the necessary and talk down to the
+young. Let them then become organs of the Holy Ghost; let them be
+lovers; let them behold truth; and their eyes are uplifted, their
+wrinkles smoothed, they are perfumed again with hope and power. This
+old age ought not to creep on a human mind. In nature every moment is
+new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is
+sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.
+No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher
+love. No truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light
+of new thoughts. People wish to be settled: only as far as they are
+unsettled is there any hope for them.
+
+Life is a series of surprises. We do not guess to-day the mood, the
+pleasure, the power of to-morrow, when we are building up our being.
+Of lower states,--of acts of routine and sense, we can tell somewhat,
+but the masterpieces of God, the total growths and universal movements
+of the soul, he hideth; they are incalculable. I can know that truth
+is divine and helpful; but how it shall help me I can have no guess,
+for _so to be_ is the sole inlet of _so to know_. The new position of
+the advancing man has all the powers of the old, yet has them all new.
+It carries in its bosom all the energies of the past, yet is itself an
+exhalation of the morning. I cast away in this new moment all my once
+hoarded knowledge, as vacant and vain. Now for the first time seem I
+to know any thing rightly. The simplest words,--we do not know what
+they mean except when we love and aspire.
+
+The difference between talents and character is adroitness to keep the
+old and trodden round, and power and courage to make a new road to new
+and better goals. Character makes an overpowering present, a cheerful,
+determined hour, which fortifies all the company by making them see
+that much is possible and excellent that was not thought of. Character
+dulls the impression of particular events. When we see the conqueror
+we do not think much of any one battle or success. We see that we had
+exaggerated the difficulty. It was easy to him. The great man is not
+convulsible or tormentable. He is so much that events pass over him
+without much impression. People say sometimes, "See what I have
+overcome; see how cheerful I am; see how completely I have triumphed
+over these black events." Not if they still remind me of the black
+event,--they have not yet conquered. Is it conquest to be a gay and
+decorated sepulchre, or a half-crazed widow, hysterically laughing?
+True conquest is the causing the black event to fade and disappear as
+an early cloud of insignificant result in a history so large and
+advancing.
+
+The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget
+ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our
+sempiternal[715] memory and to do something without knowing how or
+why; in short to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved
+without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful. It is by
+abandonment. The great moments of history are the facilities of
+performance through the strength of ideas, as the works of genius and
+religion. "A man," said Oliver Cromwell,[716] "never rises so high as
+when he knows not whither he is going." Dreams and drunkenness, the
+use of opium and alcohol are the semblance and counterfeit of this
+oracular genius, and hence their dangerous attraction for men. For the
+like reason they ask the aid of wild passions, as in the gaming and
+war, ape in some manner these flames and generosities of the heart.
+
+
+
+
+NOTES
+
+THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR
+
+
+[Footnote 1: Games of strength. The public games of Greece were
+athletic and intellectual contests of various kinds. There were four
+of importance: the Olympic, held every four years; the Pythian, held
+every third Olympic year; and the Nemean and Isthmian, held alternate
+years between the Olympic periods. These great national festivals
+exercised a strong influence in Greece. They were a secure bond of
+union between the numerous independent states and did much to help the
+nation to repel its foreign invaders. In Greece the accomplished
+athlete was reverenced almost as a god, and cases have been recorded
+where altars were erected and sacrifices made in his honor. The
+extreme care and cultivation of the body induced by this national
+spirit is one of the most significant features of Greek culture, and
+one which might wisely be imitated in the modern world.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Troubadours. In southern France during the eleventh
+century, wandering poets went from castle to castle reciting or
+singing love-songs, composed in the old Provençal dialect, a sort of
+vulgarized Latin. The life in the great feudal chateaux was so dull
+that the lords and ladies seized with avidity any amusement which
+promised to while away an idle hour. The troubadours were made much of
+and became a strong element in the development of the Southern spirit.
+So-called Courts of Love were formed where questions of an amorous
+nature were discussed in all their bearings; learned opinions were
+expressed on the most trivial matters, and offenses were tried.
+
+Some of the Provençal poetry is of the highest artistic significance,
+though the mass of it is worthless high-flown trash.]
+
+[Footnote 3: At the time this oration was delivered (1837), many of
+the authors who have since given America a place in the world's
+literature were young men writing their first books. "We were," says
+James Russell Lowell, "still socially and intellectually moored to
+English thought, till Emerson cut the cable and gave us a chance at
+the dangers and glories of blue water."]
+
+[Footnote 4: Pole-star. Polaris is now the nearest conspicuous star to
+the north pole of the celestial equator. Owing to the motion of the
+pole of the celestial equator around that of the ecliptic, this star
+will in course of time recede from its proud position, and the
+brilliant star Vega in the constellation Harp will become the
+pole-star.]
+
+[Footnote 5: It is now a well-recognized fact in the development of
+animal life that as any part of the body falls into disuse it in time
+disappears. Good examples of this are the disappearance of powerful
+fangs from the mouth of man, the loss of power in the wings of
+barnyard fowls; and, _vice versa_, as new uses for a member arise, its
+structure changes to meet the new needs. An example of this is the
+transformation from the hoof of a horse through the cloven hoofs of
+the cow to the eventual development of highly expert fingers in the
+monkey and man. Emerson assumed the doctrine of evolution to be
+sufficiently established by the anatomical evidence of gradual
+development. In his own words: "Man is no up-start in the creation.
+His limbs are only a more exquisite organization--say rather the
+finish--of the rudimental forms that have been already sweeping the
+sea and creeping in the mud. The brother of his hand is even now
+cleaving the arctic sea in the fin of the whale, and innumerable ages
+since was pawing the marsh in the flipper of the saurian." A view
+afterwards condensed into his memorable couplet:
+
+   "Striving to be man, the worm
+    Mounts through all the spires of form."
+]
+
+[Footnote 6: Stint. A prescribed or allotted task, a share of labor.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Ridden. Here used in the sense of dominated.]
+
+[Footnote 8: Monitory pictures. Instructive warning pictures.]
+
+[Footnote 9: The Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus is the author of
+this saying, not "the old oracle." It occurs in the Encheiridion, or
+manual, a work put together by a pupil of Epictetus. The original
+saying of Epictetus is as follows: "Every thing has two handles, the
+one by which it may be borne, the other by which it may not. If your
+brother acts unjustly, do not lay hold of the act by that handle
+wherein he acts unjustly, for this is the handle which cannot be
+borne: but lay hold of the other, that he is your brother, that he was
+nurtured with you, and you will lay hold of the thing by that handle
+by which it can be borne."]
+
+[Footnote 10: Every day, the sun (shines).]
+
+[Footnote 11: Beholden. Emerson here uses this past participle with
+its original meaning instead of in its present sense of "indebted."]
+
+[Footnote 12: Here we have a reminder of Emerson's pantheism. He means
+the inexplicable continuity "of what I call God, and fools nature," as
+Browning expressed it.]
+
+[Footnote 13: His expanding knowledge will become a creator.]
+
+[Footnote 14: Know thyself. Plutarch ascribes this saying to Plato. It
+is also ascribed to Pythagoras, Chilo, Thales, Cleobulus, Bias, and
+Socrates; also to Phemonië, a mythical Greek poetess of the
+ante-Homeric period. Juvenal (Satire XI. 27) says that this precept
+descended from heaven. "Know thyself" and "Nothing too much" were
+inscribed upon the Delphic oracle.
+
+   "Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
+    The proper study of mankind is man."
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 15: Observe the brisk movement of these sentences. How they
+catch and hold the attention, giving a new impulse to the reader's
+interest!]
+
+[Footnote 16: Nature abhors a vacuum.]
+
+[Footnote 17: Noxious. Harmful.]
+
+[Footnote 18: John Locke (1632-1704), an English philosopher whose
+work was of especial significance in the development of modern
+philosophy. The work he is best known by is the exhaustive "Essay on
+the Human Understanding," in which he combated the theory of
+Descartes, that every man has certain "innate ideas." The innate-idea
+theory was first proved by the philosopher Descartes in this way.
+Descartes began his speculations from a standpoint of absolute doubt.
+Then he said, "I think, therefore I am," and from this formula he
+built up a number of ideas innate to the human mind, ideas which we
+cannot but hold. Locke's "Essay on the Human Understanding" did much
+to discredit Descartes' innate ideas, which had been very generally
+accepted in Europe before.]
+
+[Footnote 19: Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam, Viscount Saint Alban's
+(1561-1626), a famous English statesman and philosopher. He occupied
+high public offices, but in 1621 was convicted of taking bribes in his
+office of Lord Chancellor. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to
+imprisonment and a fine of forty thousand pounds. Both these sentences
+were remitted, however. In the seventeenth century, judicial
+corruption was so common that Bacon's offence was not considered so
+gross as it would now be. As a philosopher Bacon's rank has been much
+disputed. While some claim that to his improved method of studying
+nature are chiefly to be attributed the prodigious strides taken by
+modern science, others deny him all merit in this respect. His best
+known works are: "The Novum Organum," a philosophical treatise; "The
+Advancement of Learning," a remarkable argument in favor of
+scholarship; and the short essays on subjects of common interest,
+usually printed under the simple title "Bacon's Essays."]
+
+[Footnote 20: Third Estate. The thirteenth century was the age when
+the national assemblies of most European countries were putting on
+their definite shape. In most of them the system of _estates_
+prevailed. These in most countries were three--nobles, clergy, and
+commons, the commons being the third estate. During the French
+Revolution the Third Estate, or Tiers Etat, asserted its rights and
+became a powerful factor in French politics, choosing its own leaders
+and effecting the downfall of its oppressors.]
+
+[Footnote 21: Restorers of readings. Men who spend their lives trying
+to improve and correct the texts of classical authors, by comparing
+the old editions with each other and picking out the version which
+seem most in accordance with the authors' original work.]
+
+[Footnote 22: Emendators. The same as restorers of readings.]
+
+[Footnote 23: Bibliomaniacs. Men with a mania for collecting rare and
+beautiful books. Not a bad sort of mania, though Emerson never had any
+sympathy for it.]
+
+[Footnote 24: To many readers Emerson's own works richly fulfill this
+obligation. He himself lived continually in such a lofty mental
+atmosphere that no one can come within the circle of his influence
+without being stimulated and elevated.]
+
+[Footnote 25: Genius, the possession of a thoroughly active soul,
+ought not to be the special privilege of favorites of fortune, but the
+right of every sound man.]
+
+[Footnote 26: They stunt my mental growth. A man should not accept
+another man's conclusions, but merely use them as steps on his upward
+path.]
+
+[Footnote 27: If you do not employ such talent as you have in original
+labor, in bearing the mental fruit of which you are capable, then you
+do not vindicate your claim to a share in the divine nature.]
+
+[Footnote 28: Disservice. Injury.]
+
+[Footnote 29: In original composition of any sort our efforts
+naturally flow in the channels worn for us by the first dominating
+streams of early genius. The conventional is the continual foe of all
+true art.]
+
+[Footnote 30: Emerson is continually stimulating us to look at things
+in new ways. Here, for instance, at once the thought comes: "Is it not
+perhaps possible that the transcendent genius of Shakespeare has been
+rather noxious than beneficent in its influence on the mind of the
+world? Has not the all-pervading Shakespearian influence flooded and
+drowned out a great deal of original genius?"]
+
+[Footnote 31: That is,--when in his clear, seeing moments he can
+distil some drops of truth from the world about him, let him not waste
+his time in studying other men's records of what they have seen.]
+
+[Footnote 32: While Emerson's verse is frequently unmusical, in his
+prose we often find passages like this instinct with the fairest
+poetry.]
+
+[Footnote 33: Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400). The father of English
+poetry. Chaucer's chief work is the "Canterbury Tales," a series of
+stories told by pilgrims traveling in company to Canterbury.
+Coleridge, the poet, wrote of Chaucer: "I take unceasing delight in
+Chaucer; his manly cheerfulness is especially delicious to me in my
+old age. How exquisitely tender he is, yet how free from the least
+touch of sickly melancholy or morbid drooping." Chaucer's poetry is
+above all things fresh. It breathes of the morning of literature. Like
+Homer he had at his command all the riches of a new language undefiled
+by usage from which to choose.
+
+   "Dan Chaucer, well of English undefyled,
+    On Fame's eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled."
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 34: Andrew Marvell (1620-1678). An eminent English patriot
+and satirist. As a writer he is chiefly known by his "Rehearsal
+Transposed," written in answer to a fanatical defender of absolute
+power. When a young man he was assistant to the poet Milton, who was
+then Latin secretary to Oliver Cromwell. Marvell's wit and
+distinguished abilities rendered him formidable to the corrupt
+administration of Charles II., who attempted without success to buy
+his friendship. Emerson's literary perspective is a bit unusual when
+he speaks of Marvell as "one of the great English poets." Marvell
+hardly ranks with Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton.]
+
+[Footnote 35: John Dryden (1631-1700). A celebrated English poet.
+Early in life he wrote almost entirely for the stage and achieved
+great success. In the latter part of his life, however, according to
+Macaulay, he "turned his powers in a new direction with success the
+most splendid and decisive. The first rank in poetry was beyond his
+reach, but he secured the most honorable place in the second.... With
+him died the secret of the old poetical diction of England,--the art
+of producing rich effects by familiar words."]
+
+[Footnote 36: Plato (429-347 B.C.). One of the most illustrious
+philosophers of all time. Probably no other philosopher has
+contributed so much as Plato to the moral and intellectual training of
+the human race. This pre-eminence is due not solely to his
+transcendent intellect, but also in no small measure to his poetic
+power and to that unrivaled grace of style which led the ancients to
+say that if Jove should speak Greek he would speak like Plato. He was
+a remarkable example of that universal culture of body and mind which
+characterized the last period of ancient Greece. He was proficient in
+every branch of art and learning and was such a brilliant athlete that
+he contended in the Isthmian and Pythian games.]
+
+[Footnote 37: Gowns. The black gown worn occasionally in America and
+always in England at the universities; the distinctive academic dress
+is a cap and gown.]
+
+[Footnote 38: Pecuniary foundations. Gifts of money for the support of
+institutions of learning.]
+
+[Footnote 39: Wit is here used in its early sense of intellect, good
+understanding.]
+
+[Footnote 40: Valetudinarian. A person of a weak, sickly
+constitution.]
+
+[Footnote 41: Mincing. Affected.]
+
+[Footnote 42: Preamble. A preface or introduction.]
+
+[Footnote 43: Dumb abyss. That vast immensity of the universe about us
+which we can never understand.]
+
+[Footnote 44: I comprehend its laws; I lose my fear of it.]
+
+[Footnote 45: Silkworms feed on mulberry-leaves. Emerson describes
+what science calls "unconscious cerebration."]
+
+[Footnote 46: Ripe fruit. Emerson's ripe fruit found its way into his
+diary, where it lay until he needed it in the preparation of some
+lecture or essay.]
+
+[Footnote 47: I. Corinthians xv. 53.]
+
+[Footnote 48: Empyrean. The region of pure light and fire; the ninth
+heaven of ancient astronomy.
+
+   "The deep-domed empyrean
+    Rings to the roar of an angel onset."
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 49: Ferules. According to the methods of education fifty
+years ago, it was quite customary for the teacher to punish a
+school-child with his ferule or ruler.]
+
+[Footnote 50: Oliver Wendell Holmes cites this last sentence as the
+most extreme development of the distinctively Emersonian style. Such
+things must be read not too literally but rapidly, with alert
+attention to what the previous train of thought has been.]
+
+[Footnote 51: Savoyards. The people of Savoy, south of Lake Geneva in
+Switzerland.]
+
+[Footnote 52: Emerson's style is characterized by the frequent use of
+pithy epigrams like this.]
+
+[Footnote 53: Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727). A great English
+philosopher and mathematician. He is famous as having discovered the
+law of gravitation.]
+
+[Footnote 54: Unhandselled. Uncultivated, without natural advantages.
+A handsel is a gift.]
+
+[Footnote 55: Druids. The ancient priesthood of the Britons in Cæsar's
+time. They had immense power among these primitive peoples. They were
+the judges as well as the priests and decided all questions. It is
+believed that they made human sacrifices to their gods in the depths
+of the primeval forest, but not much is known of their rites.]
+
+[Footnote 56: Berserkers. Berserker was a redoubtable hero in
+Scandinavian mythology, the grandson of the eight-handed Starkodder
+and the beautiful Alfhilde. He had twelve sons who inherited the
+wild-battle frenzy, or berserker rage. The sagas, the great
+Scandinavian epics, are full of stories of heroes who are seized with
+this fierce longing for battle, murder, and sudden death. The name
+means bear-shirt and has been connected with the old _were-wolf_
+tradition, the myth that certain people were able to change into
+man-devouring wolves with a wolfish mad desire to rend and kill.]
+
+[Footnote 57: Alfred, surnamed the Great (848-901), king of the West
+Saxons in England. When he ascended the throne his country was in a
+deplorable condition from the repeated inroads of northern invaders.
+He eventually drove them out and established a secure government.
+England owes much to the efforts of Alfred. He not only fought his
+country's battles, but also founded schools, translated Latin books
+into his native tongue, and did much for the intellectual improvement
+of his people.]
+
+[Footnote 58: The hoe and the spade. "In spite of Emerson's habit of
+introducing the names of agricultural objects into his writing ('Hay,
+corn, roots, hemp, flax, apples, wool, and wood' is a line from one of
+his poems), his familiarity therewith is evidently not so great as he
+would lead one to imagine. 'Take care, papa,' cried his little son,
+seeing him at work with a spade, 'you will dig your leg.'"]
+
+[Footnote 59: John Flamsteed (1646-1719). An eminent English
+astronomer. He appears to have been the first to understand the theory
+of the equation of time. He passed his life in patient observation and
+determined the position of 2884 stars.]
+
+[Footnote 60: Sir William Herschel (1738-1822). One of the greatest
+astronomers that any age or nation has produced. Brought up to the
+profession of music, it was not until he was thirty years old that he
+turned his attention to astronomy. By rigid economy he obtained a
+telescope, and in 1781 discovered the planet Uranus. This great
+discovery gave him great fame and other substantial advantages. He was
+made private astronomer to the king and received a pension. His
+discoveries were so far in advance of his time, they had so little
+relation with those of his predecessors, that he may almost be said
+to have created a new science by revealing the immensity of the scale
+on which the universe is constructed.]
+
+[Footnote 61: Nebulous. In astronomy a nebula is a luminous patch in
+the heavens far beyond the solar system, composed of a mass of stars
+or condensed gases.]
+
+[Footnote 62: Fetich. The word seems to have been applied by
+Portuguese sailors and traders on the west coast of Africa to objects
+worshiped by the natives, which were regarded as charms or talismans.
+Of course the word here means an object of blind admiration and
+devotion.]
+
+[Footnote 63: Cry up, to praise, extol.]
+
+[Footnote 64: Ancient and honorable. Isaiah ix. 15.]
+
+[Footnote 65: Complement. What is needed to complete or fill up some
+quantity or thing.]
+
+[Footnote 66: Signet. Seal. Emerson is not always felicitous in his
+choice of metaphors.]
+
+[Footnote 67: Macdonald. In Cervantes' "Don Quixote," Sancho Panza,
+the squire to the "knight of the metaphysical countenance," tells a
+story of a gentleman who had asked a countryman to dine with him. The
+farmer was pressed to take his seat at the head of the table, and when
+he refused out of politeness to his host, the latter became impatient
+and cried: "Sit there, clod-pate, for let me sit wherever I will, that
+will still be the upper end, and the place of worship to thee." This
+saying is commonly attributed to Rob Roy, but Emerson with his usual
+inaccuracy in such matters places it in the mouth of Macdonald,--which
+Macdonald is uncertain.]
+
+[Footnote 68: Carolus Linnæus (1707-1778). A great Swedish botanist.
+He did much to make botany the orderly science it now is.]
+
+[Footnote 69: Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829). The most famous of English
+chemists. The most important to mankind of his many discoveries was
+the safety-lamp to be used in mines where there is danger of explosion
+from fire-damp.]
+
+[Footnote 70: Baron George Cuvier (1769-1832). An illustrious French
+philosopher, statesman, and writer who made many discoveries in the
+realm of natural history, geology and philosophy.]
+
+[Footnote 71: The moon. The tides are caused by the attraction of the
+moon and the sun. The attraction of the moon for the water nearest the
+moon is somewhat greater than the attraction of the earth's center.
+This causes a slight bulging of the water toward the moon and a
+consequent high tide.]
+
+[Footnote 72: Emerson frequently omits the principal verb of his
+sentences as here: "In a century _there may exist_ one or two men."]
+
+[Footnote 73: This obscurely constructed sentence means: "For their
+acquiescence in a political and social inferiority the poor and low
+find some compensation in the immense moral capacity thereby gained."]
+
+[Footnote 74: "They" refers to the hero or poet mentioned some twenty
+lines back.]
+
+[Footnote 75: Comprehendeth. Here used in the original sense _to
+include_. The perfect man should be so thoroughly developed at every
+point that he will possess a share in the nature of every man.]
+
+[Footnote 76: By the Classic age is generally meant the age of Greece
+and Rome; and by the Romantic is meant the middle ages.]
+
+[Footnote 77: Introversion. Introspection is the more usual word to
+express the analytic self-searching so common in these days.]
+
+[Footnote 78: Second thoughts. Emerson uses the word here in the same
+sense as the French _arrière-pensée_, a mental reservation.]
+
+[Footnote 79:
+
+   "And thus the native hue of resolution
+    Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."
+                           _Hamlet_, Act III, Sc. 1.
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 80: Movement. The French Revolution.]
+
+[Footnote 81: Let every common object be credited with the diviner
+attributes which will class it among others of the same importance.]
+
+[Footnote 82: Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774). An eminent English poet
+and writer. He is best known by the comedy "She Stoops to Conquer,"
+the poem "The Deserted Village," and the "Vicar of Wakefield." "Of all
+romances in miniature," says Schlegel, the great German critic, "the
+'Vicar of Wakefield' is the most exquisite." It is probably the most
+popular English work of fiction in Germany.]
+
+[Footnote 83: Robert Burns (1759-1796). A celebrated Scottish poet.
+The most striking characteristics of Burns' poetry are simplicity and
+intensity, in which he is scarcely, if at all, inferior to any of the
+greatest poets that have ever lived.]
+
+[Footnote 84: William Cowper (1731-1800). One of the most popular of
+English poets. His poem "The Task" was probably more read in his day
+than any poem of equal length in the language. Cowper also made an
+excellent translation of Homer.]
+
+[Footnote 85: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). The most
+illustrious name in German literature; a great poet, dramatist,
+novelist, philosopher, and critic. The Germans regard Goethe with the
+same veneration we accord to Shakespeare. The colossal drama "Faust"
+is the most splendid product of his genius, though he wrote a large
+number of other plays and poems.]
+
+[Footnote 86: William Wordsworth (1770-1850). By many considered the
+greatest of modern English poets. His descriptions of the ever-varying
+moods of nature are the most exquisite in the language. Matthew Arnold
+in his essay on Emerson says: "As Wordsworth's poetry is, in my
+judgment, the most important work done in verse in our language during
+the present century, so Emerson's 'Essays' are, I think, the most
+important work done in prose."]
+
+[Footnote 87: Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). A famous English essayist,
+historian, and speculative philosopher. It is scarcely too much to say
+that no other author of this century has exerted a greater influence
+not merely upon the literature but upon the mind of the English nation
+than Carlyle. Emerson was an intimate friend of Carlyle, and during
+the greater part of his life maintained a correspondence with the
+great Englishman. An interesting description of their meeting will be
+found among the "Critical Opinions" at the beginning of the work.]
+
+[Footnote 88: Alexander Pope (1688-1744). The author of the "Essay on
+Criticism," "Rape of the Lock," the "Essay on Man," and other famous
+poems. Pope possessed little originality or creative imagination, but
+he had a vivid sense of the beautiful and an exquisite taste. He owed
+much of his popularity to the easy harmony of his verse and the
+keenness of his satire.]
+
+[Footnote 89: Samuel Johnson (1709-1784). One of the eminent writers
+of the eighteenth century. He wrote "Lives of the Poets," poems, and
+probably the most remarkable work of the kind ever produced by a
+single person, an English dictionary.]
+
+[Footnote 90: Edward Gibbon (1737-1794). One of the most distinguished
+of English historians. His great work is the "Decline and Fall of the
+Roman Empire." Carlyle called Gibbon, "the splendid bridge from the
+old world to the new."]
+
+[Footnote 91: Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). A great Swedish
+theologian, naturalist, and mathematician, and the founder of a
+religious sect which has since his death become prominent among the
+philosophical schools of Christianity.]
+
+[Footnote 92: Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827). A Swiss teacher
+and educational reformer of great influence in his time.]
+
+
+COMPENSATION
+
+[Footnote 93: These lines are printed under the title of
+_Compensation_ in Emerson's collected poems. He has also another poem
+of eight lines with the same title.]
+
+[Footnote 94: Documents, data, facts.]
+
+[Footnote 95: This doctrine, which a little observation would confute,
+is still taught by some.]
+
+[Footnote 96: Doubloons, Spanish and South American gold coins of the
+value of about $15.60 each.]
+
+[Footnote 97: Polarity, that quality or condition of a body by virtue
+of which it exhibits opposite or contrasted properties in opposite or
+contrasted directions.]
+
+[Footnote 98: Systole and diastole, the contraction and dilation of
+the heart and arteries.]
+
+[Footnote 99: They are increased and consequently want more.]
+
+[Footnote 100: Intenerate, soften.]
+
+[Footnote 101: White House, the popular name of the presidential
+mansion at Washington.]
+
+[Footnote 102: Explain the phrase _eat dust_.]
+
+[Footnote 103: Overlook, oversee, superintend.]
+
+[Footnote 104: Res nolunt, etc. Translated in the previous sentence.]
+
+[Footnote 105: The world ... dew. Explain the thought. What gives the
+earth its shape?]
+
+[Footnote 106: The microscope ... little. This statement is not in
+accordance with the facts, if we are to understand _perfect_ in the
+sense which the next sentence would suggest.]
+
+[Footnote 107: Emerson has been considered a pantheist.]
+
+[Footnote 108: _[Greek: Hoi kyboi]_, etc. The translation follows in
+the text. This old proverb is quoted by Sophocles, (Fragm. LXXIV.2) in
+the form:
+
+     [Greek: Aei gar eu piptousin oi Dios kyboi],
+
+Emerson uses it in _Nature_ in the form "Nature's dice are always
+loaded."]
+
+[Footnote 109: Amain, with full force, vigorously.]
+
+[Footnote 110: The proverb is quoted by Horace, Epistles, I, X.24:
+
+     "Naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret."
+
+A similar thought is expressed by Juvenal, Seneca, Cicero, and
+Aristophanes.]
+
+[Footnote 111: Augustine, Confessions, B. I.]
+
+[Footnote 112: Jupiter, the supreme god of the Romans, the Zeus of the
+Greeks.]
+
+[Footnote 113: Tying up the hands. The expression is used
+figuratively, of course.]
+
+[Footnote 114: The supreme power in England is vested in Parliament.]
+
+[Footnote 115: Prometheus stole fire from heaven to benefit the race
+of men. In punishment for this Jupiter chained him to a rock and set
+an eagle to prey upon his liver. Some unknown and terrible danger
+threatened Jupiter, the secret of averting which only Prometheus knew.
+For this secret Jupiter offered him his freedom.]
+
+[Footnote 116: Minerva, goddess of wisdom, who sprang full-armed from
+the brain of Jupiter. The secret which she held is told in the
+following lines.]
+
+[Footnote 117: Aurora, goddess of the dawn. Enamored of Tithonus, she
+persuaded Jupiter to grant him immortality, but forgot to ask for him
+immortal youth. Read Tennyson's poem on _Tithonus_.]
+
+[Footnote 118: Achilles, the hero of Homer's _Iliad_. His mother
+Thetis, to render him invulnerable, plunged him into the waters of the
+Styx. The heel by which she held him was not washed by the waters and
+remained vulnerable. Here he received a mortal wound.]
+
+[Footnote 119: Siegfried, hero of the Nibelungenlied, the old German
+epic poem. Having slain a dragon, he bathed in its blood and became
+covered with an invulnerable horny hide, only one small spot between
+his shoulders which was covered by a leaf remaining vulnerable. Into
+this spot the treacherous Hagen plunged his lance.]
+
+[Footnote 120: Nemesis, a Greek female deity, goddess of retribution,
+who visited the righteous anger of the gods upon mortals.]
+
+[Footnote 121: The Furies or Eumenides, stern and inexorable ministers
+of the vengeance of the gods.]
+
+[Footnote 122: Ajax and Hector, Greek and Trojan heroes in the Trojan
+War. See Homer's _Iliad_. Achilles slew Hector and, lashing him to his
+chariot with the belt which Ajax had given Hector, dragged him round
+the walls of Troy. Ajax committed suicide with the sword which Hector
+had presented to him.]
+
+[Footnote 123: Thasians, inhabitants of the island of Thasus. The
+story here told of the rival of the athlete Theagenes is found in
+Pausanias' _Description of Greece_, Book VI. chap. XI.]
+
+[Footnote 124: Shakespeare, the greatest of English writers, seems to
+have succeeded entirely or almost entirely in removing the personal
+element from his writings.]
+
+[Footnote 125: Hellenic, Greek.]
+
+[Footnote 126: Tit for tat, etc. This paragraph is composed of a
+series of proverbs.]
+
+[Footnote 127: Edmund Burke (1729?-1797), illustrious Irish statesman,
+orator, and author.]
+
+[Footnote 128: Pawns, the pieces of lowest rank in chess.]
+
+[Footnote 129: What is the meaning of _obscene_ here? Compare the
+Latin.]
+
+[Footnote 130: Polycrates, a tyrant of Samos, who was visited with
+such remarkable prosperity that he was advised by a friend to break
+the course of it by depriving himself of some valued possession. In
+accordance with this advice he cast into the sea an emerald ring which
+he considered his rarest treasure. A few days later a fisherman
+presented the monarch with a large fish inside of which the ring was
+found. Soon after this Polycrates fell into the power of an enemy and
+was nailed to a cross.]
+
+[Footnote 131: Scot and lot, "formerly, a parish assessment laid on
+subjects according to their ability. Now, a phrase for obligations of
+every kind regarded collectively." (Webster.)]
+
+[Footnote 132: Read Emerson's essay on _Gifts_.]
+
+[Footnote 133: Worm worms, breed worms.]
+
+[Footnote 134: Compare the old proverb "Murder will out." See Chaucer,
+_N.P.T._, 232 and 237, and _Pr. T._, 124.]
+
+[Footnote 135:
+
+"Et semel emissum volat irrevocabile verbum."
+                       HORACE, _EPIST._, I. XVIII. 65.
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 136: Stag in the fable. See _Æsop_, LXVI. 184, _Cerva et
+Leo_; Phædrus I. 12. _Cervus ad fontem_; La Fontaine, vi. 9, _Le Cerf
+se Voyant dans l'eau_.]
+
+[Footnote 137: See the quotation from St. Bernard farther on.]
+
+[Footnote 138: Withholden, old participle of _withhold_, now
+_withheld_.]
+
+[Footnote 139: What is the etymology of the word _mob_?]
+
+[Footnote 140: Optimism and Pessimism. The meanings of these two
+opposites are readily made out from the Latin words from which they
+come.]
+
+[Footnote 141: St. Bernard de Clairvaux (1091-1153), French
+ecclesiastic.]
+
+[Footnote 142: Jesus. Holmes writes of Emerson: "Jesus was for him a
+divine manifestation, but only as other great human souls have been in
+all ages and are to-day. He was willing to be called a Christian just
+as he was willing to be called a Platonist.... If he did not worship
+the 'man Christ Jesus' as the churches of Christendom have done, he
+followed his footsteps so nearly that our good Methodist, Father
+Taylor, spoke of him as more like Christ than any man he had known."]
+
+[Footnote 143: The first _his_ refers to Jesus, the second to
+Shakespeare.]
+
+[Footnote 144: Banyan. What is the characteristic of this tree that
+makes it appropriate for this figure?]
+
+
+SELF-RELIANCE
+
+[Footnote 145: Ne te, etc. "Do not seek for anything outside of
+thyself." From Persius, _Sat._ I. 7. Compare Macrobius, _Com. in Somn.
+Scip._, I. ix. 3, and Boethius, _De Consol. Phil._, IV. 4.]
+
+[Footnote 146: _Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's
+Fortune_.]
+
+[Footnote 147: These lines appear in Emerson's _Quatrains_ under the
+title _Power_.]
+
+[Footnote 148: Genius. See the paragraph on genius in Emerson's
+lecture on _The Method of Nature_, one sentence of which runs: "Genius
+is its own end, and draws its means and the style of its architecture
+from within, going abroad only for audience, and spectator."]
+
+[Footnote 149: "The man that stands by himself, the universe stands by
+him also."--EMERSON, _Behavior_.]
+
+[Footnote 150: Plato (429-347 B.C.), (See note 36.)]
+
+[Footnote 151: Milton (1608-1674), the great English epic poet, author
+of _Paradise Lost._
+
+   "O mighty-mouth'd inventor of harmonies,
+    O skill'd to sing of Time or Eternity,
+    God-gifted organ-voice of England,
+    Milton, a name to resound for ages."--TENNYSON.
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 152: "The great poet makes feel our own wealth."--EMERSON,
+_The Over-Soul_.]
+
+[Footnote 153: Then most when, most at the time when.]
+
+[Footnote 154: "The imitator dooms himself to hopeless
+mediocrity."--EMERSON, _Address to the Senior Class in Divinity
+College, Cambridge_.]
+
+[Footnote 155:
+
+   "For words, like Nature, half reveal
+    And half conceal the soul within."
+                      TENNYSON, _In Memoriam_, V. I.
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 156: Trust thyself. This is the theme of the present essay,
+and is a lesson which Emerson is never tired of teaching. In _The
+American Scholar_ he says:
+
+"In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended." In the essay on
+_Greatness_:
+
+"Self-respect is the early form in which greatness appears.... Stick
+to your own.... Follow the path your genius traces like the galaxy of
+heaven for you to walk in."
+
+Carlyle says:
+
+     "The fearful unbelief is unbelief in yourself."
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 157: Chaos ([Greek: Chaos]), the confused, unorganized
+condition in which the world was supposed to have existed before it
+was reduced to harmony and order; hence, utter confusion and
+disorder.]
+
+[Footnote 158: These, _i.e._, children, babes, and brutes.]
+
+[Footnote 159: Four or five. Supply the noun.]
+
+[Footnote 160: Nonchalance, a French word meaning _indifference_,
+_coolness_.]
+
+[Footnote 161: Pit in the playhouse, formerly, the seats on the floor
+below the level of the stage. These cheap seats were occupied by a
+class who did not hesitate to express their opinions of the
+performances.]
+
+[Footnote 162: Eclat, a French word meaning _brilliancy of success_,
+_striking effect_.]
+
+[Footnote 163: "Lethe, the river of oblivion."--_Paradise Lost_.
+Oblivion, forgetfulness.]
+
+[Footnote 164: Who. What is the construction?]
+
+[Footnote 165: Nonconformist, one who does not conform to established
+usages or opinions. Emerson considers conformity and consistency as
+the two terrors that scare us from self-trust. (See note 182.)]
+
+[Footnote 166: Explore if it be goodness, investigate for himself and
+see if it be really goodness.
+
+    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good."
+                                    PAUL, _I. Thes._ v. 21.
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 167: Suffrage, approval.
+
+    "What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted?
+    Thrice is he arm'd that hath his quarrel just;
+    And he but naked, though lock'd up in steel,
+    Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted."
+                      SHAKESPEARE, _II. Henry VI._, III. 2.
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 168: "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking
+makes it so." _Hamlet_, II. 2.]
+
+[Footnote 169: Barbadoes, an island in the Atlantic Ocean, one of the
+Lesser Antilles. The negroes, composing by far the larger part of the
+population, were formerly slaves.]
+
+[Footnote 170: He had rather have his actions ascribed to whim and
+caprice than to spend the day in explaining them.]
+
+[Footnote 171: Diet and bleeding, special diet and medical care, used
+figuratively, of course.]
+
+[Footnote 172: Read Emerson's essay on _Greatness_.]
+
+[Footnote 173: The precise man, precisely what kind of man.]
+
+[Footnote 174: "By their fruits ye shall know them."--_Matthew_, vii.
+16 and 20.]
+
+[Footnote 175: With, notwithstanding, in spite of.]
+
+[Footnote 176: Of the bench, of an impartial judge.]
+
+[Footnote 177: Bound their eyes with ... handkerchief, in this game of
+blindman's-buff.]
+
+[Footnote 178: "Pin thy faith to no man's sleeve; hast thou not two
+eyes of thy own?"--CARLYLE.]
+
+[Footnote 179: Give examples of men who have been made to feel the
+displeasure of the world for their nonconformity.]
+
+[Footnote 180: "Nihil tam incertum nec tam inæstimabile est quam animi
+multitudinis."--LIVY, xxxi. 34.
+
+    "Mobile mutatur semper cum principe vulgus."
+                    CLAUDIANUS, _De IV. Consul. Honorii_, 302.
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 181: _The other terror._ The first, conformity, has just
+been treated.]
+
+[Footnote 182: Consistency. Compare, on the other hand, the well-known
+saying, "Consistency, thou art a jewel."]
+
+[Footnote 183: Orbit, course in life.]
+
+[Footnote 184: Somewhat, something.]
+
+[Footnote 185: See _Genesis_, xxxix. 12.]
+
+[Footnote 186: Pythagoras (fl. about 520 B.C.), a Greek philosopher.
+His society was scattered and persecuted by the fury of the populace.]
+
+[Footnote 187: Socrates (470?-399 B.C.), the great Athenian
+philosopher, whose teachings are the subject of most of Plato's
+writings, was accused of corrupting the youth, and condemned to drink
+hemlock.]
+
+[Footnote 188: Martin Luther (1483-1546) preached against certain
+abuses of the Roman Catholic Church and was excommunicated by the
+Pope. He became the leader of the Protestant Reformation.]
+
+[Footnote 189: Copernicus (1473-1543) discovered the error of the old
+Ptolemaic system of astronomy and showed that the sun is the centre of
+our planetary system. Fearing the persecution of the church, he
+hesitated long to publish his discovery, and it was many years after
+his death before the world accepted his theory.]
+
+[Footnote 190: Galileo (1564-1642), the famous Italian astronomer and
+physicist, discoverer of the satellites of Jupiter and the rings of
+Saturn, was thrown into prison by the Inquisition.]
+
+[Footnote 191: Sir Isaac Newton. (See note 53.)]
+
+[Footnote 192: Andes, the great mountain system of South America.]
+
+[Footnote 193: Himmaleh, Himalaya, the great mountain system of Asia.]
+
+[Footnote 194: Alexandrian stanza. The Alexandrian line consists of
+twelve syllables (iambic hexameter). Neither the acrostic nor the
+Alexandrine has the property assigned to it here. A palindrame reads
+the same forward as backward, as:
+
+                "Madam, I'm Adam";
+    "Signa te signa; temere me tangis et angis";
+
+or the inscription on the church of St. Sophia, Constantinople:
+
+    [Greek: "Nipson anomêmata mê monan opsin,"]
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 195: The reference is to sailing vessels, of course.]
+
+[Footnote 196: Scorn eyes, scorn observers.]
+
+[Footnote 197: Chatham, William Pitt, Earl of Chatham (1708-1778),
+this distinguished statesman and orator. He became very popular as a
+statesman and was known as "The Great Commoner."]
+
+[Footnote 198: Adams. The reference is presumably to Samuel Adams
+(1722-1803), a popular leader and orator in the cause of American
+freedom. He was a member of the Continental Congress and a signer of
+the Declaration of Independence. Emerson may have in mind, however,
+John Adams (1735-1826), second president of the United States.]
+
+[Footnote 199: Spartan. The ancient Spartans were noted for their
+courage and fortitude.]
+
+[Footnote 200: Julius Cæsar (100-44 B.C.), the great Roman general,
+statesman, orator, and author.]
+
+[Footnote 201: St. Anthony (251-356), Egyptian founder of monachism,
+the system of monastic seclusion.]
+
+[Footnote 202: George Fox (1624-1691), English founder of the Society
+of Friends or Quakers.]
+
+[Footnote 203: John Wesley (1703-1791), English founder of the
+religious sect known as Methodists.]
+
+[Footnote 204: Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846), English philanthropist and
+abolitionist.]
+
+[Footnote 205: Scipio (235-184 B.C.), the great Roman general who
+defeated Hannibal and decided the fate of Carthage. The quotation is
+from _Paradise Lost_, Book IX., line 610.]
+
+[Footnote 206: In the story of _Abou Hassan_ or _The Sleeper Awakened_
+in the _Arabian Nights_ Abou Hassan awakes and finds himself treated
+in every respect as the Caliph Haroun Al-raschid. Shakespeare has made
+use of a similar trick in _Taming of the Shrew_, where Christopher Sly
+is put to bed drunk in the lord's room and on awaking is treated as a
+lord.]
+
+[Footnote 207: Alfred the Great (849-901), King of the West Saxons. He
+was a wise king, a great scholar, and a patron of learning.]
+
+[Footnote 208: Scanderbeg, George Castriota (1404-1467), an Albanian
+chief who embraced Christianity and carried on a successful war
+against the Turks.]
+
+[Footnote 209: Gustavus Adolphus (1594-1632), King of Sweden, the hero
+of Protestantism in the Thirty Years' War.]
+
+[Footnote 210: Hieroglyphic, a character in the picture-writing of the
+ancient Egyptian priests; hence, hidden sign.]
+
+[Footnote 211: Parallax, an angle used in astronomy in calculating the
+distance of a heavenly body. The parallax decreases as the distance of
+the body increases.]
+
+[Footnote 212: The child has the advantage of the experience of all
+his ancestors. Compare Tennyson's line in _Locksley Hall_:
+
+    "I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time."
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 213: "Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past,
+or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded
+wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also."--EMERSON, _Introd. to Nature,
+Addresses, etc._]
+
+[Footnote 214: Explain the thought in this sentence.]
+
+[Footnote 215: Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus.]
+
+[Footnote 216: Agent, active, acting.]
+
+[Footnote 217: An allusion to the Mohammedan custom of removing the
+shoes before entering a mosque.]
+
+[Footnote 218: Of a truth, men are mystically united; a mystic bond of
+brotherhood makes all men one.]
+
+[Footnote 219: Thor and Woden. Woden or Odin was the chief god of
+Scandinavian mythology. Thor, his elder son, was the god of thunder.
+From these names come the names of the days Wednesday and Thursday.]
+
+[Footnote 220: Explain the meaning of this sentence.]
+
+[Footnote 221: You, or you, addressing different persons.]
+
+[Footnote 222: "The truth shall make you free."--_John_, viii. 32.]
+
+[Footnote 223: Antinomianism, the doctrine that the moral law is not
+binding under the gospel dispensation, faith alone being necessary to
+salvation.]
+
+[Footnote 224: "There is no sorrow I have thought more about than
+that--to love what is great, and try to reach it, and yet to fail."
+        GEORGE ELIOT, _Middlemarch_, lxxvi.]
+
+[Footnote 225: Explain the use of _it_ in these expressions.]
+
+[Footnote 226: Stoic, a disciple of the Greek philosopher Zeno, who
+taught that men should be free from passion, unmoved by joy and grief,
+and should submit without complaint to the inevitable.]
+
+[Footnote 227: Word made flesh, see _John_, i. 14.]
+
+[Footnote 228: Healing to the nations, see _Revelation_, xxii. 2.]
+
+[Footnote 229: In what prayers do men allow themselves to indulge?]
+
+[Footnote 230:
+
+    "Prayer is the soul's sincere desire,
+     Uttered or unexpressed,
+     The motion of a hidden fire
+     That trembles in the breast."
+                    MONTGOMERY, _What is Prayer?_
+]
+
+[Footnote 231: Caratach (Caractacus) is a historical character in
+Fletcher's (1576-1625) tragedy of _Bonduca_(Boadicea).]
+
+[Footnote 232: Zoroaster, a Persian philosopher, founder of the
+ancient Persian religion. He flourished long before the Christian
+era.]
+
+[Footnote 233: "Speak thou with us, and we will hear: but let not God
+speak with us, lest we die."--_Exodus_, xx. 19. Compare also the
+parallel passage in _Deuteronomy_, v. 25-27.]
+
+[Footnote 234: John Locke. (See note 18.)]
+
+[Footnote 235: Lavoisier (1743-1794), celebrated French chemical
+philosopher, discoverer of the composition of water.]
+
+[Footnote 236: James Hutton (1726-1797), great Scotch geologist,
+author of the _Theory of the Earth_.]
+
+[Footnote 237: Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), English philosopher,
+jurist, and legislative reformer.]
+
+[Footnote 238: Fourier (1772-1837), French socialist, founder of the
+system of Fourierism.]
+
+[Footnote 239: Calvinism, the doctrines of John Calvin (1509-1564).
+French theologian and Protestant reformer. A cardinal doctrine of
+Calvinism is predestination.]
+
+[Footnote 240: Quakerism, the doctrines of the Quakers or Friends, a
+society founded by George Fox (1624-1691).]
+
+[Footnote 241: Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), Swedish theosophist,
+founder of the New Jerusalem Church. He is taken by Emerson in his
+_Representative Men_ as the type of the mystic, and is often mentioned
+in his other works.]
+
+[Footnote 242: "Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful,
+we must carry it with us, or we find it not."--EMERSON, _Art_.]
+
+[Footnote 243: Thebes, a celebrated ruined city of Upper Egypt.]
+
+[Footnote 244: Palmyra, a ruined city of Asia situated in an oasis of
+the Syrian desert, supposed to be the Tadmor built by Solomon in the
+wilderness (_II. Chr._, viii. 4).]
+
+[Footnote 245:
+
+    "Vain, very vain, my weary search to find
+     That bliss which only centers in the mind....
+     Still to ourselves in every place consign'd,
+     Our own felicity we make or find."
+                              GOLDSMITH (and JOHNSON),
+                              _The Traveler_, 423-32.
+
+    "He that has light within his own clear breast
+     May sit i' th' center, and enjoy bright day;
+     But he that hides a dark soul, and foul thoughts,
+     Benighted walks under the mid-day sun;
+     Himself in his own dungeon."
+                             MILTON, _Comus_, 381-5.
+
+Compare also _Paradise Lost_, I, 255-7.]
+
+[Footnote 246: Vatican, the palace of the pope in Rome, with its
+celebrated library, museum, and art gallery.]
+
+[Footnote 247: Doric, the oldest, strongest, and simplest of the three
+styles of Grecian architecture.]
+
+[Footnote 248: Gothic, a pointed style of architecture, prevalent in
+western Europe in the latter part of the middle ages.]
+
+[Footnote 249: Never imitate. Emerson insists on this doctrine.]
+
+[Footnote 250: Shakespeare (1564-1616), the great English poet and
+dramatist. He is mentioned in Emerson's writings more than any other
+character in history, and is taken as the type of the poet in his
+_Representative Men_.
+
+"O mighty poet! Thy works are not as those of other men, simply and
+merely great works of art; but are also like the phenomena of nature,
+like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers,--like frost and
+snow, rain and dew, hailstorm and thunder, which are to be studied
+with entire submission of our own faculties, and in the perfect faith
+that in them there can be no too much or too little, nothing useless
+or inert,--but that, the further we press in our discoveries, the more
+we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where
+the careless eye had seen nothing but accident!"--DE QUINCY.]
+
+[Footnote 251: Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), American philosopher,
+statesman, diplomatist, and author. He discovered the identity of
+lightning with electricity, invented the lightning-rod, went on
+several diplomatic missions to Europe, was one of the committee that
+drew up the Declaration of Independence, signed the treaty of Paris,
+and compiled _Poor Richard's Almanac_.]
+
+[Footnote 252: Francis Bacon (1561-1626), a famous English philosopher
+and statesman. He became Lord Chancellor under Elizabeth. He is best
+known by his _Essays_; he wrote also the _Novum Organum_ and the
+_Advancement of Learning_.]
+
+[Footnote 253: Sir Isaac Newton. (See note 53.)]
+
+[Footnote 254: Scipio. (See note 205.)]
+
+[Footnote 255: Phidias (500?-432? B.C.), famous Greek sculptor.]
+
+[Footnote 256: Egyptians. He has in mind the pyramids.]
+
+[Footnote 257: The Pentateuch is attributed to Moses.]
+
+[Footnote 258: Dante (1265-1321), the greatest of Italian poets,
+author of the _Divina Commedia_.]
+
+[Footnote 259: Foreworld, a former ideal state of the world.]
+
+[Footnote 260: New Zealander, inhabitant of New Zealand, a group of
+two islands lying southeast of Australia.]
+
+[Footnote 261: Geneva, a city of Switzerland, situated at the
+southwestern extremity of Lake Geneva.]
+
+[Footnote 262: Greenwich nautical almanac. The meridian of the Royal
+Observatory at Greenwich, near London, is the prime meridian for
+reckoning the longitude of the world. The nautical almanac is a
+publication containing astronomical data for the use of navigators and
+astronomers. What is the name of the corresponding publication of the
+U.S. Observatory at Washington?]
+
+[Footnote 263: Get the meaning of these astronomical terms.]
+
+[Footnote 264: Plutarch. (50?-120? A.D.), Greek philosopher and
+biographer, author of _Parallel Lives_, a series of Greek and Roman
+biographies. Next after Shakespeare and Plato he is the author most
+frequently mentioned by Emerson. Read the essay of Emerson on
+Plutarch.]
+
+[Footnote 265: Phocion (402-317 B.C.), Athenian statesman and general.
+(See note 364.)]
+
+[Footnote 266: Anaxagoras (500-426 B.C.), Greek philosopher of
+distinction.]
+
+[Footnote 267: Diogenes (400?-323?), Greek cynic philosopher who
+affected great contempt for riches and honors and the comforts of
+civilized life, and is said to have taken up his residence in a tub.]
+
+
+[Footnote 268: Henry Hudson (---- - 1611), English navigator and
+explorer, discoverer of the bay and river which bear his name.]
+
+[Footnote 269: Bering or Behring (1680-1741), Danish navigator,
+discoverer of Behring Strait.]
+
+[Footnote 270: Sir William Edward Parry (1790-1855), English navigator
+and Arctic explorer.]
+
+[Footnote 271: Sir John Franklin (1786-1846?), celebrated English
+navigator and Arctic explorer, lost in the Arctic seas.]
+
+[Footnote 272: Christopher Columbus (1445?-1506), Genoese navigator
+and discoverer of America. His ship, the Santa Maria, appears small
+and insignificant in comparison with the modern ocean ship.]
+
+[Footnote 273: Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), Emperor of France, one
+of the greatest military geniuses the world has ever seen. He was
+defeated in the battle of Waterloo by the Duke of Wellington, and died
+in exile on the isle of St. Helena. Emerson takes him as a type of the
+man of the world in his _Representative Men_: "I call Napoleon the
+agent or attorney of the middle class of modern society.... He was the
+agitator, the destroyer of prescription, the internal improver, the
+liberal, the radical, the inventor of means, the opener of doors and
+markets, the subverter of monopoly and abuse.... He had the virtues of
+the masses of his constituents: he had also their vices. I am sorry
+that the brilliant picture has its reverse."]
+
+[Footnote 274: Comte de las Cases (not Casas) (1766-1842), author of
+_Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène_.]
+
+[Footnote 275: Ali, Arabian caliph, surnamed the "Lion of God," cousin
+and son-in-law of Mohammed. He was assassinated about 661.]
+
+[Footnote 276: The county of Essex in England has several namesakes in
+America.]
+
+[Footnote 277: Fortune. In Roman mythology Fortune, the goddess of
+fortune or chance, is represented as standing on a ball or wheel.
+
+    "Nec metuis dubio Fortunæ stantis in orbe
+      Numen, et exosæ verba superba deæ?"
+                      OVID, _Tristia_, v., 8, 8.
+
+]
+
+
+FRIENDSHIP
+
+[Footnote 278: Most of Emerson's _Essays_ were first delivered as
+lectures, in practically the form in which they afterwards appeared in
+print. The form and style, it is true, were always carefully revised
+before publication; this Emerson called 'giving his thoughts a Greek
+dress.' His essay on _Friendship_, published in the First Series of
+_Essays_ in 1841 was not, so far as we know, delivered as a lecture;
+parts of it, however, were taken from lectures which Emerson delivered
+on _Society_, _The Heart_, and _Private Life_.
+
+In connection with his essay on _Friendship_, the student should read
+the two other notable addresses on the same subject, one the speech by
+Cicero, the famous Roman orator, and the other the essay by Lord
+Bacon, the great English author.]
+
+[Footnote 279: Relume. Is this a common word? Define it.]
+
+[Footnote 280: Pass my gate. The walk opposite Emerson's house on the
+'Great Road' to Boston was a favorite winter walk for Concord people.
+Along it passed the philosophic Alcott and the imaginative Hawthorne,
+as well as famous townsmen, and school children.]
+
+[Footnote 281: My friends have come to me, etc.: Compare with
+Emerson's views here expressed the noble passage in his essay on _The
+Over-Soul_: "Every friend whom not thy fantastic will but the great
+and tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his embrace. And
+this because the heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a
+wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood
+rolls uninterruptedly in endless circulation through all men, as the
+water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one."]
+
+[Footnote 282: Bard. Poet: originally one who composed and sang to the
+music of a harp verses in honor of heroes and heroic deeds.]
+
+[Footnote 283: Hymn, ode, and epic. Define each of these three kinds
+of poetry.]
+
+[Footnote 284: Apollo. In classic mythology, the sun god who presided
+over music, poetry, and art; he was the guardian and leader of the
+Muses.]
+
+[Footnote 285: Muses. In classic mythology, the nine sisters who
+presided over music, poetry, art, and science. They were Clio the muse
+of history, Euterpe of music, especially the flute, Thalia of comedy,
+Melpomene of tragedy, Terpsichore of dancing, Erato of erotic poetry,
+mistress of the lyre, Polyhymnia of sacred poetry, Urania of
+astronomy, Calliope of eloquence and epic poetry.]
+
+[Footnote 286: Genius. According to an old belief, a spirit that
+watched over a person to control, guide and aid him.]
+
+[Footnote 287: "Crush the sweet poison," etc. This is a quotation from
+_Comus_, a poem by Milton.]
+
+[Footnote 288: Systole and diastole. (See note 98.)]
+
+[Footnote 289: Friendship, like the immortality, etc. See on what a
+high plane Emerson places this relation of friendship. In 1840 he
+wrote in a letter: "I am a worshiper of friendship, and cannot find
+any other good equal to it. As soon as any man pronounces the words
+which approve him fit for that great office, I make no haste; he is
+holy; let me be holy also; our relations are eternal; why should we
+count days and weeks?"]
+
+[Footnote 290: Elysian temple. Temple of bliss. In Greek mythology,
+Elysium was the abode of the blessed after death.]
+
+[Footnote 291: An Egyptian skull. Plutarch says that at an Egyptian
+feast a skull was displayed, either as a hint to make the most of the
+pleasure which can be enjoyed but for a brief space, or as a warning
+not to set one's heart upon transitory things.]
+
+[Footnote 292: Conscious of a universal success, etc. Emerson wrote in
+his journal: "My entire success, such as it is, is composed wholly of
+particular failures."]
+
+[Footnote 293: Extends the old leaf. Compare Emerson's lines:
+
+   "When half-gods go
+    The gods arrive."
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 294: A texture of wine and dreams. What does Emerson mean by
+this phrase? Explain the whole sentence.]
+
+[Footnote 295: "The valiant warrior," etc. The quotation is from
+Shakespeare's _Sonnet_, XXV.]
+
+[Footnote 296: Naturlangsamkeit. A German word meaning slowness. The
+slowness of natural development.]
+
+[Footnote 297: Olympian. One who took part in the great Greek games
+held every four years on the plain of Olympia. The racing, wrestling
+and other contests of strength and skill were accompanied by
+sacrifices to the gods, processions, and banquets. There was a sense
+of dignity and almost of worship about the games. The Olympic games
+have been recently revived, and athletes from all countries of the
+world contest for the prizes--simple garlands of wild olive.]
+
+[Footnote 298: I knew a man who, etc. The allusion is to Jonas Very, a
+mystic and poet, who lived at Salem, Massachusetts.]
+
+[Footnote 299: Paradox. Define this word. Explain its application to a
+friend.]
+
+[Footnote 300: My author says, etc. The quotation is from _A
+Consideration upon Cicero_, by the French author, Montaigne. Montaigne
+was one of Emerson's favorite authors from his boyhood: of the essays
+he says, "I felt as if I myself, had written this book in some former
+life, so sincerely it spoke my thoughts."]
+
+[Footnote 301: Cherub. What is the difference between a cherub and a
+seraph?]
+
+[Footnote 302: Curricle. A two-wheeled carriage, especially popular in
+the eighteenth century.]
+
+[Footnote 303: This law of one to one. Emerson felt that this same law
+applied to nature. He wrote in his journal: "Nature says to man, 'one
+to one, my dear.'"]
+
+[Footnote 304: Crimen quos, etc. The Latin saying is translated in
+the preceding sentence.]
+
+[Footnote 305: Nonage. We use more commonly the word, "minority."]
+
+[Footnote 306: Janus-faced. The word here means simply two-faced,
+without the idea of deceit usually attached to it. In Roman mythology,
+Janus, the doorkeeper of heaven was the protector of doors and
+gateways and the patron of the beginning and end of undertakings. He
+was the god of the rising and setting of the sun, and was represented
+with two faces, one looking to the east and the other to the west. His
+temple at Rome was kept open in time of war and closed in time of
+peace.]
+
+[Footnote 307: Harbinger. A forerunner; originally an officer who rode
+in advance of a royal person to secure proper lodgings and
+accommodations.]
+
+[Footnote 308: Empyrean. Highest and purest heaven; according to the
+ancients, the region of pure light and fire.]
+
+
+HEROISM
+
+[Footnote 309: Title. Probably this essay is, essentially at least,
+the lecture on _Heroism_ delivered in Boston in the winter of 1837, in
+the course of lectures on _Human Culture_.]
+
+[Footnote 310: Motto. This saying of Mahomet's was the only motto
+prefixed to the essay in the first edition. In later editions, Emerson
+prefixed, according to his custom, some original lines;
+
+   "Ruby wine is drunk by knaves,
+    Sugar spends to fatten slaves,
+    Rose and vine-leaf deck buffoons,
+    Thunder clouds are Jove's festoons,
+    Drooping oft in wreaths of dread
+    Lightning-knotted round his head:
+    The hero is not fed on sweets,
+    Daily his own heart he eats;
+    Chambers of the great are jails,
+    And head-winds right for royal sails."
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 311: Elder English dramatists. The dramatists who preceded
+Shakespeare. In his essay on _Shakespeare; or, the Poet_, Emerson
+enumerates the foremost of these,--"Kyd, Marlowe, Greene, Jonson,
+Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Peele, Ford, Massinger,
+Beaumont and Fletcher."]
+
+[Footnote 312: Beaumont and Fletcher. Francis Beaumont and John
+Fletcher were two dramatists of the Elizabethan age. They wrote
+together and their styles were so similar that critics are unable to
+identify the share of each in their numerous plays.]
+
+[Footnote 313: Rodrigo, Pedro, or Valerio. Favorite names for heroes
+among the dramatists. Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar, known usually by the
+title of the Cid, was the national hero of Spain, famous for his
+exploits against the Moors. Don Pedro was the Prince of Arragon in
+Shakespeare's play, _Much Ado About Nothing_.]
+
+[Footnote 314: Bonduca, Sophocles, the Mad Lover, and Double Marriage.
+The first, third and fourth are names of plays by Beaumont and
+Fletcher. In the case of the second, Emerson, by a lapse of memory,
+gives the name of one of the chief characters instead of the name of
+the play--_The Triumph of Honor_ in a piece called _Four Plays in
+One_. It is from this play by Beaumont and Fletcher that the passage
+in the essay is quoted.]
+
+[Footnote 315: Adriadne's crown. According to Greek mythology, the
+crown of Adriadne was, for her beauty and her sufferings, put among
+the stars. She was the daughter of Minos, King of Crete; she gave
+Theseus the clue by means of which he escaped from the labyrinth and
+she was afterwards abandoned by him.]
+
+[Footnote 316: Romulus. The reputed founder of the city of Rome.]
+
+[Footnote 317: Laodamia, Dion. Read these two poems by Wordsworth, the
+great English poet, and tell why you think Emerson mentioned them
+here.]
+
+[Footnote 318: Scott. Sir Walter Scott, a famous Scotch author.]
+
+[Footnote 319: Lord Evandale, Balfour of Burley. These are characters
+in Scott's novel, _Old Mortality_. The passage referred to by Emerson
+is in the forty-second chapter.]
+
+[Footnote 320: Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle was a great admirer of heroes,
+asserting that history is the biography of great men. One of his most
+popular books is _Heroes and Hero-Worship_, on a plan similar to that
+of Emerson's _Representative Men_.]
+
+[Footnote 321: Robert Burns. A Scotch lyric poet. Emerson was probably
+thinking of the patriotic song, _Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled_.]
+
+[Footnote 322: Harleian Miscellanies. A collection of manuscripts
+published in the eighteenth century, and named for Robert Harley, the
+English statesman who collected them.]
+
+[Footnote 323: Lutzen. A small town in Prussia. The battle referred to
+was fought in 1632 and in it the Swedes under Gustavus Adolphus gained
+a great victory over vastly superior numbers. Nearly two hundred years
+later another battle was fought at Lutzen, in which Napoleon gained a
+victory over the allied Russians and Prussians.]
+
+[Footnote 324: Simon Ockley. An English scholar of the seventeenth
+century whose chief work was a _History of the Saracens_.]
+
+[Footnote 325: Oxford. One of the two great English universities.]
+
+[Footnote 326: Plutarch. (See note 264.)]
+
+[Footnote 327: Brasidas. This hero, described by Plutarch, was a
+Spartan general who lived about four hundred years before Christ.]
+
+[Footnote 328: Dion. A Greek philosopher who ruled the city of
+Syracuse in the fourth century before Christ.]
+
+[Footnote 329: Epaminondas. A Greek general and statesman of the
+fourth century before Christ.]
+
+[Footnote 330: Scipio. (See note 205.)]
+
+[Footnote 331: Stoicism. The stern and severe philosophy taught by the
+Greek philosopher Zeno; he taught that men should always seek virtue
+and be indifferent to pleasure and happiness. This belief, carried to
+the extreme of severity, exercised a great influence on many noble
+Greeks and Romans.]
+
+[Footnote 332: Heroism is an obedience, etc. In one of his poems
+Emerson says:
+
+   "So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
+    So near is God to man,
+    When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,'
+    The youth replies, 'I can.'"
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 333: Plotinus. An Egyptian philosopher who taught in Rome
+during the third century. It was said that he so exalted the mind that
+he was ashamed of his body.]
+
+[Footnote 334: Indeed these humble considerations, etc. The passage,
+like many which Emerson quotes, is rendered inexactly. The Prince says
+to Poins: "Indeed these humble considerations make me out of love with
+my greatness. What a disgrace it is to me to remember thy name! or to
+know thy face to-morrow! or to take note how many pairs of silk
+stockings thou hast, that is, these and those that were thy
+peach-colored ones! or to bear the inventory of thy shirts, as, one
+for superfluity and another for use!" Shakespeare's _Henry IV._, Part
+II. 2, 2.]
+
+[Footnote 335: Ibn Hankal. Ibn Hankul, an Arabian geographer and
+traveler of the tenth century. He wrote an account of his twenty
+years' travels in Mohammedan countries; in 1800 this was translated
+into English by Sir William Jones under the title of _The Oriental
+Geography of Ibn Hankal_. In that volume this anecdote is told in
+slightly different words.]
+
+[Footnote 336: Bokhara. Where is Bokhara? It corresponds to the
+ancient Sogdiana.]
+
+[Footnote 337: Bannocks. Thick cakes, made usually of oatmeal. What
+does Emerson mean by this sentence? Probably no person ever met his
+visitors, many of whom were "exacting and wearisome," and must have
+been unwelcome, with more perfect courtesy and graciousness than
+Emerson.]
+
+[Footnote 338: John Eliot. Give as full an account as you can of the
+life and works of this noble Apostle to the Indians of the seventeenth
+century.]
+
+[Footnote 339: King David, etc. See First Chronicles, 11, 15-19.]
+
+[Footnote 340: Brutus. Marcus Junius Brutus, a Roman patriot of the
+first century before Christ, who took part in the assassination of
+Julius Cæsar.]
+
+[Footnote 341: Philippi. A city of Macedonia near which in the year 42
+B.C. were fought two battles in which the republican army under Brutus
+and Cassius was defeated by Octavius and Antony, friends of Cæsar.]
+
+[Footnote 342: Euripides. A Greek tragic poet of the fifth century
+before Christ.]
+
+[Footnote 343: Scipio. (See note 205.) Plutarch in his _Morals_ gives
+another version of the story: "When Paetilius and Quintus accused him
+of many crimes before the people; 'on this very day,' he said, 'I
+conquered Hannibal and Carthage. I for my part am going with my crown
+on to the Capitol to sacrifice; and let him that pleaseth stay and
+pass his vote upon me.' Having thus said, he went his way; and the
+people followed him, leaving his accusers declaiming to themselves."]
+
+[Footnote 344: Socrates. (See note 187.)]
+
+[Footnote 345: Prytaneum. A public hall at Athens.]
+
+[Footnote 346: Sir Thomas More. An English statesman and author who
+was beheaded in 1535 on a charge of high treason. The incident to
+which Emerson refers is one which showed his "pleasant wit"
+undisturbed by the prospect of death. As the executioner was about to
+strike, More moved his head carefully out of reach of the ax. "Pity
+that should be cut," he said, "that has never committed treason."]
+
+[Footnote 347: Blue Laws. Any rigid Sunday laws or religious
+regulations. The term is usually applied to the early laws of New
+Haven and Connecticut which regulated personal and religious conduct.]
+
+[Footnote 348: Epaminondas. (See note 329.)]
+
+[Footnote 349: Olympus. A mountain of Greece, the summit of which,
+according to Greek mythology, was the home of the gods.]
+
+[Footnote 350: Jerseys. Consult a history of the United States for a
+full account of Washington's campaign in New Jersey.]
+
+[Footnote 351: Milton. (See note 151.)]
+
+[Footnote 352: Pericles. A famous Greek statesman of the fifth century
+before Christ, in whose age Athens was preëminent in naval and
+military affairs and in letters and art.]
+
+[Footnote 353: Xenophon. A Greek historian of the fourth century
+before Christ.]
+
+[Footnote 354: Columbus. Give an account of his life.]
+
+[Footnote 355: Bayard. Chevalier de Bayard was a French gentleman of
+the fifteenth century. He is the French national hero, and is called
+"The Knight without fear and without reproach."]
+
+[Footnote 356: Sidney. Probably Sir Philip Sidney, an English
+gentleman and scholar of the sixteenth century who is the English
+national hero as Bayard is the French; another brave Englishman was
+Algernon Sidney, a politician and patriot of the seventeenth century.]
+
+[Footnote 357: Hampden. John Hampden was an English statesman and
+patriot who was killed in the civil war of the seventeenth century.]
+
+[Footnote 358: Colossus. The Colossus of Rhodes was a gigantic
+statue--over a hundred feet in height--of the Rhodian sun god. It was
+one of the seven wonders of the world; it was destroyed by an
+earthquake about two hundred years before Christ.]
+
+[Footnote 359: Sappho. A Greek poet of the seventh century before
+Christ. Her fame remains, though most of her poems have been lost.]
+
+[Footnote 360: Sevigné. Marquise de Sevigné was a French author of the
+seventeenth century.]
+
+[Footnote 361: De Staël. Madame de Staël was a French writer whose
+books and political opinions were condemned by Napoleon.]
+
+[Footnote 362: Themis. A Greek goddess. The personification of law,
+order, and justice.]
+
+[Footnote 363: A high counsel, etc. Such was the advice given to the
+Emerson boys by their aunt, Miss. Mary Moody Emerson: "Scorn trifles,
+lift your aims; do what you are afraid to do; sublimity of character
+must come from sublimity of motive." Upon her monument are inscribed
+Emerson's words about her: "She gave high counsels. It was the
+privilege of certain boys to have this immeasurably high standard
+indicated to their childhood, a blessing which nothing else in
+education could supply."]
+
+[Footnote 364: Phocion. A Greek general and statesman of the fourth
+century before Christ who advised the Athenians to make peace with
+Philip of Macedon. He was put to death on a charge of treason.]
+
+[Footnote 365: Lovejoy. Rev. Elijah Lovejoy, a Presbyterian clergyman
+of Maine who published a periodical against slavery. In 1837 an
+Illinois mob demanded his printing press, which he refused to give up.
+The building containing it was set on fire and when Lovejoy came out
+he was shot.]
+
+[Footnote 366: Let them rave, etc. These lines are misquoted, being
+evidently given from memory, from Tennyson's _Dirge_. In the poem
+occur these lines:
+
+          "Let them rave.
+    Thou wilt never raise thine head
+    From the green that folds thy grave--
+          Let them rave."
+
+]
+
+
+MANNERS
+
+[Footnote 367: The essay on _Manners_ is from the Second Series of
+_Essays_, published in 1844, three years after the First Series. The
+essays in this volume, like those in the first, were, for the most
+part, made up of Emerson's lectures, rearranged and corrected. The
+lecture on _Manners_ had been delivered in the winter of 1841. He had
+given another lecture on the same subject about four years before, and
+several years later he treated of the same subject in his essay on
+_Behavior_ in _The Conduct of Life_. You will find it interesting to
+read _Behavior_ in connection with this essay.]
+
+[Footnote 368: Feejee islanders. Since this essay was written, the
+people of the Feejee, or Fiji, Islands have become Christianized, and,
+to a large extent, civilized.]
+
+[Footnote 369: Gournou. This description is found in _A Narrative of
+the Operations and Recent Discoveries within the Pyramids_, by
+Belzoni, an Italian traveler and explorer.]
+
+[Footnote 370: Borgoo. A province of Africa.]
+
+[Footnote 371: Tibboos, Bornoos. Tribes of Central Africa, mentioned
+in Heeren's _Historical Researches_.]
+
+[Footnote 372: Honors himself with architecture. Architecture was a
+subject in which Emerson was deeply interested. Read his poem, _The
+Problem_.]
+
+[Footnote 373: Chivalry. Chivalry may be considered "as embodying the
+Middle Age conception of the ideal life of ... the Knights"; the word
+is often used to express "the ideal qualifications of a knight, as
+courtesy, generosity, valor, and dexterity in arms." Fully to
+understand the order of Knighthood and the ideals of chivalry, you
+must read the history of Europe in the Middle Ages.]
+
+[Footnote 374: Sir Philip Sidney. (See note 356.)]
+
+[Footnote 375: Sir Walter Scott. (1771-1832). His historical novels
+dealing with the Middle Ages have some fine pictures of the chivalrous
+characters in which he delighted.]
+
+[Footnote 376: Masonic sign. A sign of secret brotherhood, like the
+sign given by one Mason to another.]
+
+[Footnote 377: Correlative abstract. Corresponding abstract name. Sir
+Philip Sidney, himself the ideal gentleman, used the word
+"gentlemanliness." He said: "Gentlemanliness is high-erected thoughts
+seated in a heart of courtesy."]
+
+[Footnote 378: Gentilesse. Gentle birth and breeding. Emerson was very
+fond of the passage on "gentilesse" in Chaucer's _Wife of Bath's
+Tale_.]
+
+[Footnote 379: Feudal Ages. The Middle Ages in Europe during which the
+feudal system prevailed. According to this, land was held by its
+owners on condition of certain duties, especially military service,
+performed for a superior lord.]
+
+[Footnote 380: God knows, etc. Why is this particularly true of a
+republic such as the United States?]
+
+[Footnote 381: The incomparable advantage of animal spirits. Why does
+Emerson regard this as of such importance? In his journals he
+frequently comments on his own lack of animal spirits, and says that
+it unfits him for general society and for action.]
+
+[Footnote 382: The sense of power. "I like people who can do things,"
+wrote Emerson in his journal.]
+
+[Footnote 383: Lundy's Lane. Give a full account of this battle in the
+War of 1812.]
+
+[Footnote 384: Men of the right Cæsarian pattern. Men versatile as was
+Julius Cæsar, the Roman, famous as a general, statesman, orator, and
+writer.]
+
+[Footnote 385: Timid maxim. Why does Emerson term this saying
+"timid"?]
+
+[Footnote 386: Lord Falkland. Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, was an
+English politician who espoused the royalist side; he was killed in
+battle in the Civil War.]
+
+[Footnote 387: Saladin. A famous sultan of Egypt and Syria who lived
+in the twelfth century. Scott describes him as possessing an ideal
+knightly character and introduces him, disguised as a physician and
+also as a wandering soldier in his historical romance, _The
+Talisman_.]
+
+[Footnote 388: Sapor. A Persian monarch of the fourth century who
+defeated the Romans in battle.]
+
+[Footnote 389: The Cid. See "Rodrigo," in _Heroism_, 313.]
+
+[Footnote 390: Julius Cæsar. See note on "Cæsarian," 384.]
+
+[Footnote 391: Scipio. (See note 205.)]
+
+[Footnote 392: Alexander. Alexander, King of Macedon, surnamed the
+Great. In the fourth century before Christ he made himself master of
+the known world.]
+
+[Footnote 393: Pericles. See note on _Heroism_, 352.]
+
+[Footnote 394: Diogenes. (See note 267.)]
+
+[Footnote 395: Socrates. (See note 187.)]
+
+[Footnote 396: Epaminondas. (See note 329.)]
+
+[Footnote 397: My contemporaries. Emerson probably had in mind, among
+others, his friend, the gentle philosopher, Thoreau.]
+
+[Footnote 398: Fine manners. "I think there is as much merit in
+beautiful manners as in hard work," said Emerson in his journal.]
+
+[Footnote 399: Napoleon. (See note 273.)]
+
+[Footnote 400: Noblesse. Nobility. Why does Emerson use here the
+French word?]
+
+[Footnote 401: Faubourg St. Germain. A once fashionable quarter of
+Paris, on the south bank of the Seine; it was long the headquarters of
+the French royalists.]
+
+[Footnote 402: Cortez. Consult a history of the United States for an
+account of this Spanish soldier, the conqueror of Mexico.]
+
+[Footnote 403: Nelson. Horatio Nelson, an English admiral, who won
+many great naval victories and was killed in the battle of Trafalgar
+in 1805.]
+
+[Footnote 404: Mexico. The scene of Cortez's victories.]
+
+[Footnote 405: Marengo. The scene of a battle in Italy in 1800, in
+which Napoleon defeated the Austrians with a larger army and made
+himself master of northern Italy.]
+
+[Footnote 406: Trafalgar. A cape on the southern coast of Spain, the
+scene of Nelson's last great victory, in which the allied French and
+Spanish fleets were defeated.]
+
+[Footnote 407: Mexico, Marengo, and Trafalgar. Is this the order in
+which you would expect these words to occur? Why not?]
+
+[Footnote 408: Estates of the realm. Orders or classes of people with
+regard to political rights and powers. In modern times, the nobility,
+the clergy, and the people are called "the three estates."]
+
+[Footnote 409: Tournure. Figure; turn of dress,--and so of mind.]
+
+[Footnote 410: Coventry. It is said that the people of Coventry, a
+city in England, at one time so disliked soldiers that to send a
+military man there meant to exclude him from social intercourse; hence
+the expression "to send to Coventry" means to exclude from society.]
+
+[Footnote 411: "If you could see Vich Ian Vohr with his tail on." Vich
+Ian Vohr is a Scotch chieftain in Scott's novel, _Waverley_. One of
+his dependents says to Waverley, the young English officer: "If you
+Saxon duinhé-wassal [English gentleman] saw but the Chief with his
+tail on." "With his tail on?" echoed Edward in some surprise.
+"Yes--that is, with all his usual followers when he visits those of
+the same rank." See _Waverley_, chapter 16.]
+
+[Footnote 412: Mercuries. The word here means simply messengers.
+According to Greek mythology, Mercury was the messenger of the gods.]
+
+[Footnote 413: Herald's office. In England the Herald's College, or
+College of Arms, is a royal corporation the chief business of which is
+to grant armorial bearings, or coats of arms, and to trace and
+preserve genealogies. What does Emerson mean by comparing certain
+circles of society to this corporation?]
+
+[Footnote 414: Amphitryon. Host; it came to have this meaning from an
+incident in the story of Amphitryon, a character in Greek legend. At
+one time Jupiter assumed the form of Amphitryon and gave a banquet.
+The real Amphitryon came in and asserted that he was master of the
+house. In the French play, founded on this story, the question is
+settled by the assertion of the servants and guests that "he who gives
+the feast is the host."]
+
+[Footnote 415: Tuileries. An old royal residence in Paris which was
+burned in 1871.]
+
+[Footnote 416: Escurial, or escorial. A celebrated royal edifice near
+Madrid in Spain.]
+
+[Footnote 417: Hide ourselves as Adam, etc. See Genesis iii. 8.]
+
+[Footnote 418: Cardinal Caprara. An Italian cardinal, Bishop of Milan,
+who negotiated the famous concordat of 1801, an agreement between the
+Church and State regulating the relations between civil and
+ecclesiastical powers.]
+
+[Footnote 419: The pope. Pope Pius VII.]
+
+[Footnote 420: Madame de Staël. (See note 361.)]
+
+[Footnote 421: Mr. Hazlitt. William Hazlitt, an English writer.]
+
+[Footnote 422: Montaigne. A French essayist of the sixteenth century.]
+
+[Footnote 423: The hint of tranquillity and self-poise. It is
+suggested that Emerson had here in mind a favorite passage of the
+German author, Richter, in which Richter says of the Greek statues:
+"The repose not of weariness but of perfection looks from their eyes
+and rests upon their lips."]
+
+[Footnote 424: A Chinese etiquette. What does Emerson mean by this
+expression?]
+
+[Footnote 425: Recall. In the first edition, Emerson had here the word
+"signify." Which is the better word and why?]
+
+[Footnote 426: Measure. What meaning has this word here? Is this the
+sense in which we generally use it?]
+
+[Footnote 427: Creole natures. What is a creole? What does Emerson
+mean by "Creole natures"?]
+
+[Footnote 428: Mr. Fox. Charles James Fox, an English statesman and
+orator of the eighteenth century.]
+
+[Footnote 429: Burke. Both Fox and Burke opposed the taxation of the
+American colonies and sympathized with their resistance; it was on the
+subject of the French Revolution that the two friends clashed.]
+
+[Footnote 430: Sheridan. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, an Irish
+dramatist, member of the famous Literary Club to which both Fox and
+Burke belonged.]
+
+[Footnote 431: Circe. According to Greek legend, Circe was a beautiful
+enchantress. Men who partook of the draught she offered, were turned
+to swine.]
+
+[Footnote 432: Captain Symmes. The only real personage of this group.
+He asserted that there was an opening to the interior of the earth
+which was stocked with plants and animals.]
+
+[Footnote 433: Clerisy. What word would we be more apt to use here?]
+
+[Footnote 434: St. Michael's (Square). St. Michael's was an order
+instituted by Louis XI. of France.]
+
+[Footnote 435: Cologne water. A perfumed water first made at the city
+of Cologne in Germany, from which it took its name.]
+
+[Footnote 436: Poland. This kingdom of Europe was, in the eighteenth
+century, taken possession of and divided among its powerful neighbors,
+Russia, Prussia, and Austria.]
+
+[Footnote 437: Philhellene. Friend of Greece.]
+
+[Footnote 438: As Heaven and Earth are fairer far, etc. This passage
+is quoted from Book II. of Keats' _Hyperion_.]
+
+[Footnote 439: Waverley. The Waverley novels, a name applied to all of
+Scott's novels from _Waverley_, the title of the first one.]
+
+[Footnote 440: Robin Hood. An English outlaw and popular hero, the
+subject of many ballads.]
+
+[Footnote 441: Minerva. In Roman mythology, the goddess of wisdom
+corresponding to the Greek Pallas-Athene.]
+
+[Footnote 442: Juno. In Roman mythology, the wife of the supreme god
+Jupiter.]
+
+[Footnote 443: Polymnia. In Greek mythology, one of the nine muses who
+presided over sacred poetry; the name is more usually written
+Polyhymia.]
+
+[Footnote 444: Delphic Sibyl. In ancient mythology, the Sibyls were
+certain women who possessed the power of prophecy. One of these who
+made her abode at Delphi in Greece was called the Delphian, or
+Delphic, sibyl.]
+
+[Footnote 445: Hafiz. A Persian poet of the fourteenth century.]
+
+[Footnote 446: Firdousi. A Persian poet of the tenth century.]
+
+[Footnote 447: She was an elemental force, etc. Of this passage Oliver
+Wendell Holmes said that Emerson "speaks of woman in language that
+seems to pant for rhythm and rhyme."]
+
+[Footnote 448: Byzantine. An ornate style of architecture developed in
+the fourth and fifth centuries, marked especially by its use of gold
+and color.]
+
+[Footnote 449: Golden Book. In a book, called "the Golden Book," were
+recorded the names of all the children of Venetian noblemen.]
+
+[Footnote 450: Schiraz. A province of Persia famous especially for its
+roses, wine, and nightingales, and described by the poets as a place
+of ideal beauty.]
+
+[Footnote 451: Osman. The name given by Emerson in his journal and
+essays to his ideal man, one subject to the same conditions as
+himself.]
+
+[Footnote 452: Koran. The sacred book of the Mohammedans.]
+
+[Footnote 453: Jove. Jupiter, the supreme god of Roman mythology.]
+
+[Footnote 454: Silenus. In Greek mythology, the leader of the satyrs.
+This fable, which Emerson credits to tradition, was original.]
+
+[Footnote 455: Her owl. The owl was the bird sacred to Minerva, the
+goddess of wisdom.]
+
+
+GIFTS
+
+[Footnote 456: This essay was first printed in the periodical called
+_The Dial_.
+
+It was a part of Emerson's philosophic faith that there is no such
+thing as giving,--everything that belongs to a man or that he ought to
+have, will come to him. But in the ordinarily accepted sense of the
+word, Emerson was a gracious giver and receiver. In his family the old
+New England custom of New Year's presents was kept up to his last
+days. His presents were accompanied with verses to be read before the
+gift was opened.]
+
+[Footnote 457: Into chancery. The phrase "in chancery," means in
+litigation, as an estate, in a court of equity.]
+
+[Footnote 458: Cocker. Spoil, indulge,--a word now little used.]
+
+[Footnote 459: Fruits are acceptable gifts. Emerson took especial
+pleasure in the beauty of fruits and the thought of how they had been
+evolved from useless, insipid seed cases.]
+
+[Footnote 460: To let the petitioner, etc. We can hardly imagine
+Emerson's asking a gift or favor. He often quoted the words of Landor,
+an English writer: "The highest price you can pay for a thing is to
+ask for it."]
+
+[Footnote 461: Furies. In Roman mythology, three goddesses who sought
+out and punished evil-doers.]
+
+[Footnote 462: A man's biography, etc. Emerson wrote in his journal:
+"Long ago I wrote of _gifts_ and neglected a capital example. John
+Thoreau, Jr. [who, like his brother Henry, was a lover of nature] one
+day put a bluebird's box on my barn,--fifteen years ago it must
+be,--and there it still is, with every summer a melodious family in it
+adorning the place and singing its praises. There's a gift for you
+which cost the giver no money, but nothing which he bought could have
+been as good."]
+
+[Footnote 463: Sin offering. Under the Hebrew law, a sacrifice or
+offering for sin. See Leviticus xxiii. 19. Explain what Emerson means
+here by the word.]
+
+[Footnote 464: Blackmail. What is "blackmail"? How may Christmas
+gifts, for instance, become a species of blackmail?]
+
+[Footnote 465: Brother, if Jove, etc. In the Greek legend, Epimetheus
+gives this advice to his brother Prometheus. The lines are taken from
+a translation of _Works and Days_, by the Greek poet, Hesiod.]
+
+[Footnote 466: Timons. Here used in the sense of wealthy givers.
+Timon, the hero of Shakespeare's play, _Timon of Athens_, wasted his
+fortune in lavish gifts and entertainments, and in his poverty was
+exposed to the ingratitude of those whom he had served. He became
+morose and died in miserable retirement.]
+
+[Footnote 467: It is a very onerous business, etc. One of Emerson's
+favorite passages in the essays of Montaigne, a French writer, was
+this: "Oh, how am I obliged to Almighty God, who has been pleased that
+I should immediately receive all I have from his bounty, and
+particularly reserved all my obligation to himself! How instantly do I
+beg of his holy compassion that I may never owe a real thanks to
+anyone. O happy liberty in which I have thus far lived! May it
+continue with me to the last. I endeavor to have no need of any one."
+
+When Emerson, in his old age, had his house injured by fire, his
+friends contributed funds to repair it and to send him to England. The
+gift was proffered graciously and accepted gratefully.]
+
+[Footnote 468: Buddhist. A follower of Buddha, a Hindoo religious
+teacher of the fifth century before Christ.]
+
+
+NATURE
+
+[Footnote 469: Nature. Emerson's first published volume was a little
+book of essays, entitled _Nature_, which appeared in 1836. In the
+years which followed, he thought more deeply on the subject and,
+according to his custom, made notes about it and entries in his
+journals. In the winter of 1843 he delivered a lecture on _Relation to
+Nature_, and it is probable that this essay is built up from that. The
+plan of it, however, had been long in his mind: In 1840 he wrote in
+his journal: "I think I must do these eyes of mine the justice to
+write a new chapter on Nature. This delight we all take in every show
+of night or day or field or forest or sea or city, down to the lowest
+particulars, is not without sequel, though we be as yet only wishers
+and gazers, not at all knowing what we want. We are predominated here
+as elsewhere by an upper wisdom, and resemble those great discoverers
+who are haunted for years, sometimes from infancy, with a passion for
+the fact, or class of facts in which the secret lies which they are
+destined to unlock, and they let it not go until the blessing is won.
+So these sunsets and starlights, these swamps and rocks, these bird
+notes and animal forms off which we cannot get our eyes and ears, but
+hover still, as moths round a lamp, are no doubt a Sanscrit cipher
+covering the whole religious history of the universe, and presently we
+shall read it off into action and character. The pastures are full of
+ghosts for me, the morning woods full of angels."]
+
+[Footnote 470: There are days, etc. The passage in Emerson's journal
+is hardly less beautiful. Under date of October 30, 1841, he wrote:
+"On this wonderful day when heaven and earth seem to glow with
+magnificence, and all the wealth of all the elements is put under
+contribution to make the world fine, as if Nature would indulge her
+offspring, it seemed ungrateful to hide in the house. Are there not
+dull days enough in the year for you to write and read in, that you
+should waste this glittering season when Florida and Cuba seem to have
+left their glittering seats and come to visit us with all their
+shining hours, and almost we expect to see the jasmine and cactus
+burst from the ground instead of these last gentians and asters which
+have loitered to attend this latter glory of the year? All insects are
+out, all birds come forth, the very cattle that lie on the ground seem
+to have great thoughts, and Egypt and India look from their eyes."]
+
+[Footnote 471: Halcyons. Halcyon days, ones of peace and tranquillity;
+anciently, days of calm weather in mid-winter, when the halcyon, or
+kingfisher, was supposed to brood. It was fabled that this bird laid
+its eggs in a nest that floated on the sea, and that it charmed the
+winds and waves to make them calm while it brooded.]
+
+[Footnote 472: Indian Summer. Calm, dry, hazy weather which comes in
+the autumn in America. The Century Dictionary says it was called
+Indian Summer because the season was most marked in the sections of
+the upper eastern Mississippi valley inhabited by Indians about the
+time the term became current.]
+
+[Footnote 473: Gabriel. One of the seven archangels. The Hebrew name
+means "God is my strong one."]
+
+[Footnote 474: Uriel. Another of the seven archangels; the name means
+"Light of God."]
+
+[Footnote 475: Converts all trees to wind-harps. Compare with this
+passage the lines in Emerson's poem, _Woodnotes_:
+
+   "And the countless leaves of the pines are strings
+    Tuned to the lay the wood-god sings."
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 476: The village. Concord, Massachusetts. Emerson's home the
+greater part of the time from 1832 till his death.]
+
+[Footnote 477: I go with my friend, etc. With Henry Thoreau, the lover
+of Nature.]
+
+[Footnote 478: Our little river. The Concord river.]
+
+[Footnote 479: Novitiate and probation. Explain the meaning of these
+words, in the Roman Catholic Church. What does Emerson mean by them
+here?]
+
+[Footnote 480: Villegiatura. The Italian name for a season spent in
+country pleasures.]
+
+[Footnote 481: Hanging gardens. The hanging gardens of Babylon were
+one of the seven wonders of the world.]
+
+[Footnote 482: Versailles. A royal residence near Paris, with
+beautiful formal gardens.]
+
+[Footnote 483: Paphos. A beautiful city on the island of Cyprus, where
+was situated a temple of Astarte, or Venus.]
+
+[Footnote 484: Ctesiphon. One of the chief cities of ancient Persia,
+the site of a magnificent royal palace.]
+
+[Footnote 485: Notch Mountains. Probably the White Mountains near
+Crawford Notch, a deep, narrow valley which is often called "The
+Notch."]
+
+[Footnote 486: Æolian harp. A stringed instrument from which sound is
+drawn by the passing of the wind over its strings. It was named for
+Æolus, the god of the winds, in Greek mythology.]
+
+[Footnote 487: Dorian. Dorus was one of the four divisions of Greece:
+the word is here used in a general sense for Grecian.]
+
+[Footnote 488: Apollo. In Greek and Roman mythology, the sun god, who
+presided over music, poetry, and healing.]
+
+[Footnote 489: Diana. In Roman mythology, the goddess of the moon
+devoted to the chase.]
+
+[Footnote 490: Edens. Beautiful, sinless places,--like the garden of
+Eden.]
+
+[Footnote 491: Tempes. Places like the lovely valley of Tempe in
+Thessaly, Greece.]
+
+[Footnote 492: Como Lake. A lake of northern Italy, celebrated for its
+beauty.]
+
+[Footnote 493: Madeira Islands. Where are these islands, famous for
+picturesque beauty and balmy atmosphere?]
+
+[Footnote 494: Common. What is a common?]
+
+[Footnote 495: Campagna. The plain near Rome.]
+
+[Footnote 496: Dilettantism. Define this word and explain its use
+here.]
+
+[Footnote 497: "Wreaths" and "Flora's Chaplets." About the time that
+Emerson was writing his essays, volumes of formal, artificial verses
+were very fashionable, more as parlor ornaments than as literature.
+Two such volumes were _A Wreath of Wild Flowers from New England_ and
+_The Floral Offering_ by Mrs. Frances Osgood, a New England writer.]
+
+[Footnote 498: Pan. In Greek mythology, the god of woods, fields,
+flocks, and shepherds.]
+
+[Footnote 499: The multitude of false cherubs, etc. Explain the
+meaning of this sentence. If true money were valueless, would people
+make false money?]
+
+[Footnote 500: Proteus. In Greek mythology, a sea god who had the
+power of assuming different shapes. If caught and held fast, however,
+he was forced to assume his own shape and answer the questions put to
+him.]
+
+[Footnote 501: Mosaic ... Schemes. The conception of the world as
+given in Genesis on which the law of Moses, the great Hebrew lawgiver,
+was founded.]
+
+[Footnote 502: Ptolemaic schemes. The system of geography and
+astronomy taught in the second century by Ptolemy of Alexandria; it
+was accepted till the sixteenth century, when the Copernican system
+was established. Ptolemy believed that the sun, planets, and stars
+revolve around the earth; Copernicus taught that the planets revolve
+around the sun.]
+
+[Footnote 503: Flora. In Roman mythology, the goddess of the spring
+and of flowers.]
+
+[Footnote 504: Fauna. In Roman mythology, the goddess of fields and
+shepherds; she represents the fruitfulness of the earth.]
+
+[Footnote 505: Ceres. The Roman goddess of grain and harvest,
+corresponding to the Greek goddess, Demeter.]
+
+[Footnote 506: Pomona. The Roman goddess of fruit trees and gardens.]
+
+[Footnote 507: All duly arrive. Emerson deducts from nature the
+doctrine of evolution. What is its teaching?]
+
+[Footnote 508: Plato. (See note 36.)]
+
+[Footnote 509: Himalaya Mountain chains. (See note 193.)]
+
+[Footnote 510: Franklin. Give an account of Benjamin Franklin, the
+famous American scientist and patriot. What did he prove about
+lightening?]
+
+[Footnote 511: Dalton. John Dalton was an English chemist who, about
+the beginning of the nineteenth century, perfected the atomic theory,
+that is, the theory that all chemical combinations take place in
+certain ways between the atoms, or ultimate particles, of bodies.]
+
+[Footnote 512: Davy. (See note 69.)]
+
+[Footnote 513: Black. Joseph Black, a Scotch chemist who made valuable
+discoveries about latent heat and carbon dioxide, or carbonic acid
+gas.]
+
+[Footnote 514: The astronomers said, etc. Beginning with this passage,
+several pages of this essay was published in 1844, under the title of
+_Tantalus_, in the next to the last number of _The Dial_, which
+Emerson edited.]
+
+[Footnote 515: Centrifugal, centripetal. Define these words.]
+
+[Footnote 516: Stoics. See "Stoicism," 331.]
+
+[Footnote 517: Luther. (See note 188.)]
+
+[Footnote 518: Jacob Behmen. A German mystic of the sixteenth century;
+his name is usually written Boehme.]
+
+[Footnote 519: George Fox. (See note 202.)]
+
+[Footnote 520: James Naylor. An English religious enthusiast of the
+seventeenth century; he was first a Puritan and later a Quaker.]
+
+[Footnote 521: Operose. Laborious.]
+
+[Footnote 522: Outskirt and far-off reflection, etc. Compare with this
+passage Emerson's poem, _The Forerunners_.]
+
+[Footnote 523: Oedipus. In Greek mythology, the King of Thebes who
+solved the riddle of the Sphinx, a fabled monster.]
+
+[Footnote 524: Prunella. A widely scattered plant, called self-heal,
+because a decoction of its leaves and stems was, and to some extent
+is, valued as an application to wounds. An editor comments on the fact
+that during the last years of Emerson's life "the little blue
+self-heal crept into the grass before his study window."]
+
+
+SHAKESPEARE; OR, THE POET
+
+[Footnote 525: Shakespeare; or the Poet is one of seven essays on
+great men in various walks of life, published in 1850 under the title
+of _Representative Men_. These essays were first delivered as lectures
+in Boston in the winter of 1845, and were repeated two years later
+before English audiences. They must have been especially interesting
+to those Englishmen who had, seven years before, heard Emerson's
+friend, Carlyle, deliver his six lectures on great men whom he
+selected as representative ones. These lectures were published under
+the title of _Heroes and Hero-Worship_. You should read the latter
+part of Carlyle's lecture on _The Hero as Poet_ and compare what he
+says about Shakespeare with Emerson's words. Both Emerson and Carlyle
+reverenced the great English poet as "the master of mankind." Even in
+serious New England, the plays of Shakespeare were found upon the
+bookshelf beside religious tracts and doctrinal treatises. There the
+boy Emerson found them and learned to love them, and the man Emerson
+loved them but the more. It was as a record of personal experiences
+that he wrote in his journal: "Shakespeare fills us with wonder the
+first time we approach him. We go away, and work and think, for years,
+and come again,--he astonishes us anew. Then, having drank deeply and
+saturated us with his genius, we lose sight of him for another period
+of years. By and by we return, and there he stands immeasurable as at
+first. We have grown wiser, but only that we should see him wiser than
+ever. He resembles a high mountain which the traveler sees in the
+morning and thinks he shall quickly near it and pass it and leave it
+behind. But he journeys all day till noon, till night. There still is
+the dim mountain close by him, having scarce altered its bearings
+since the morning light."]
+
+[Footnote 526: Genius. Here instead of speaking as in _Friendship_,
+see note 286, of the genius or spirit supposed to preside over each
+man's life, Emerson mentions the guardian spirit of human kind.]
+
+[Footnote 527: Shakespeare's youth, etc. It is impossible to
+appreciate or enjoy this essay without having some clear general
+information about the condition of the English people and English
+literature in the glorious Elizabethan age in which Shakespeare lived.
+Consult, for this information, some brief history of England and a
+comprehensive English literature.]
+
+[Footnote 528: Puritans. Strict Protestants who became so powerful in
+England that in the time of the Commonwealth they controlled the
+political and religious affairs of the country.]
+
+[Footnote 529: Anglican Church. The Established Church of England; the
+Episcopal church.]
+
+[Footnote 530: Punch. The chief character in a puppet show, hence the
+puppet show itself.]
+
+[Footnote 531: Kyd, Marlowe, Greene, etc. For an account of these
+dramatists consult a text book on English literature. The English
+drama seems to have begun in the Middle Ages with what were called
+Miracle plays, which were scenes from Bible history; about the same
+time were performed the Mystery plays, which dramatized the lives of
+saints. These were followed by the Moralities, plays in which were
+personified abstract virtues and vices. The first step in the creation
+of the regular drama was taken by Heywood, who composed some farcical
+plays called Interludes. The people of the sixteenth century were fond
+of pageants, shows in which classical personages were introduced, and
+Masques, which gradually developed from pageants into dramas
+accompanied with music. About the middle of the sixteenth century,
+rose the English drama,--comedy, tragedy, and historical plays. The
+chief among the group of dramatists who attained fame before
+Shakespeare began to write were Kyd, Marlowe, Greene, and Peele. Ben
+Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher rank next to Shakespeare among his
+contemporaries, and among the other dramatists of the period were
+Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Ford, and Massinger.]
+
+[Footnote 532: At the time when, etc. Probably about 1585.]
+
+[Footnote 533: Tale of Troy. Drama founded on the Trojan war. The
+subject of famous poems by Latin and Greek poets.]
+
+[Footnote 534: Death of Julius Cæsar. An account of the plots which
+ended in the assassination of the great Roman general.]
+
+[Footnote 535: Plutarch. See note on _Heroism_(264). Shakespeare, like
+the earlier dramatists, drew freely on Plutarch's _Lives_ for
+material.]
+
+[Footnote 536: Brut. A poetical version of the legendary history of
+Britain, by Layamon. Its hero is Brutus, a mythical King of Britain.]
+
+[Footnote 537: Arthur. A British King of the sixth century, around
+whose life and deeds so many legends have grown up that some
+historians say he, too, was a myth. He is the center of the great
+cycle of romances told in prose in Mallory's _Morte d'Arthur_ and in
+poetry in Tennyson's _Idylls of the King_.]
+
+[Footnote 538: The royal Henries. Among the dramas popular in
+Shakespeare's day which he retouched or rewrote are the historical
+plays. Henry IV., First and Second Parts; Henry V; Henry VI., First,
+Second, and Third Parts; and Henry VIII.]
+
+[Footnote 539: Italian tales. Italian literature was very popular in
+Shakespeare's day, and authors drew freely from it for material,
+especially from the _Decameron_, a famous collection of a hundred
+tales, by Boccaccio, a poet of the fourteenth century.]
+
+[Footnote 540: Spanish voyages. In the sixteenth century, Spain was
+still a power upon the high seas, and the tales of her conquests and
+treasures in the New World were like tales of romance.]
+
+[Footnote 541: Prestige. Can you give an English equivalent for this
+French word?]
+
+[Footnote 542: Which no single genius, etc. In the same way, some
+critics assure us, the poems credited to the Greek poet, Homer, were
+built up by a number of poets.]
+
+[Footnote 543: Malone. An Irish critic and scholar of the eighteenth
+century, best known by his edition of Shakespeare's plays.]
+
+[Footnote 544: Wolsey's Soliloquy. See Shakespeare's _Henry VIII._
+III, 2. Cardinal Wolsey was prime minister of England in the reign of
+Henry VIII.]
+
+[Footnote 545: Scene with Cromwell. See _Henry VIII._ III, 2. Thomas
+Cromwell was the son of an English blacksmith; he rose to be lord high
+chamberlain of England in the reign of Henry VIII., but, incurring the
+King's displeasure, was executed on a charge of treason.]
+
+[Footnote 546: Account of the coronation. See _Henry VIII._ IV, 1.]
+
+[Footnote 547: Compliment to Queen Elizabeth. See _Henry VIII._ V, 5.]
+
+[Footnote 548: Bad rhythm. Too much importance must not be attached to
+these matters in deciding authorship, as critics disagree about them.]
+
+[Footnote 549: Value his memory, etc. The Greeks, in appreciation of
+the value of memory to the poet, represented the Muses as the
+daughters of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory.]
+
+[Footnote 550: Homer. A Greek poet to whom is assigned the authorship
+of the two greatest Greek poems, the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_; he is
+said to have lived about a thousand years before Christ.]
+
+[Footnote 551: Chaucer. (See note 33.)]
+
+[Footnote 552: Saadi. A Persian poet, supposed to have lived in the
+thirteenth century. His best known poems are his odes.]
+
+[Footnote 553: Presenting Thebes, etc. This quotation is from Milton's
+poem, _Il Penseroso_. Milton here names the three most popular
+subjects of Greek tragedy,--the story of Oedipus, the ill-fated King
+of Thebes who slew his father; the tale of the descendants of Pelops,
+King of Pisa, who seemed born to woe--Agamemnon was one of his
+grandsons; the third subject was the tale of Troy and the heroes of
+the Trojan war,--called "divine" because the Greeks represented even
+the gods as taking part in the contest.]
+
+[Footnote 554: Pope. (See note 88.)]
+
+[Footnote 555: Dryden. (See note 35.)]
+
+[Footnote 556: Chaucer is a huge borrower. Taine, the French critic,
+says on this subject: "Chaucer was capable of seeking out in the old
+common forest of the Middle Ages, stories and legends, to replant them
+in his own soil and make them send out new shoots.... He has the right
+and power of copying and translating because by dint of retouching he
+impresses ... his original work. He recreates what he imitates."]
+
+[Footnote 557: Lydgate. John Lydgate was an English poet who lived a
+generation later than Chaucer; in his _Troy Book_ and other poems he
+probably borrowed from the sources used by Chaucer; he called himself
+"Chaucer's disciple."]
+
+[Footnote 558: Caxton. William Caxton, the English author, more famous
+as the first English printer, was not born until after Chaucer's
+death. The work from which Emerson supposes the poet to have borrowed
+Caxton's translation of _Recueil des Histoires de Troye_, the first
+printed English book, appeared about 1474.]
+
+[Footnote 559: Guido di Colonna. A Sicilian poet and historian of the
+thirteenth century. Chaucer in his _House of Fame_ placed in his
+vision "on a pillar higher than the rest, Homer and Livy, Dares the
+Phrygian, Guido Colonna, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and the other
+historians of the war of Troy."]
+
+[Footnote 560: Dares Phrygius. A Latin account of the fall of Troy,
+written about the fifth century, which pretends to be a translation of
+a lost work on the fall of Troy by Dares, a Trojan priest mentioned in
+Homer's _Iliad_.]
+
+[Footnote 561: Ovid. A Roman poet who lived about the time of Christ,
+whose best-known work is the _Metamorphoses_, founded on classical
+legends.]
+
+[Footnote 562: Statius. A Roman poet of the first century after
+Christ.]
+
+[Footnote 563: Petrarch. An Italian poet of the fourteenth century.]
+
+[Footnote 564: Boccaccio. An Italian novelist and poet of the
+fourteenth century. See note on "Italian tales," 539. It is supposed
+that the plan of the _Decameron_ suggested the similar but far
+superior plan of Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_.]
+
+[Footnote 565: Provençal poets. The poets of Provençe, a province of
+the southeastern part of France. In the Middle Ages it was celebrated
+for its lyric poets, called troubadours.]
+
+[Footnote 566: Romaunt of the Rose, etc. Chaucer's _Romaunt of the
+Rose_, written during the period of French influence, is an incomplete
+and abbreviated translation of a French poem of the thirteenth
+century, _Roman de la Rose_, the first part of which was written by
+William of Loris and the latter by John of Meung, or Jean de Meung.]
+
+[Footnote 567: Troilus and Creseide, etc. Chaucer ascribes the Italian
+poem which he followed in his _Troilus and Creseide_ to an unknown
+"Lollius of Urbino"; the source of the poem, however, is _Il
+Filostrato_, by Boccaccio, the Italian poet already mentioned.
+Chaucer's poem is far more than a translation; more than half is
+entirely original, and it is a powerful poem, showing profound
+knowledge of the Italian poets, whose influence with him superseded
+the French poets.]
+
+[Footnote 568: The Cock and the Fox. _The Nun's Priest's Tale_ in the
+_Canterbury Tales_ was an original treatment of the _Roman de Renart_,
+of Marie of France, a French poet of the twelfth century.]
+
+[Footnote 569: House of Fame, etc. The plan of the _House of Fame_,
+written during the period of Chaucer's Italian influence, shows the
+influence of Dante; the general idea of the poem is from Ovid, the
+Roman poet.]
+
+[Footnote 570: Gower. John Gower was an English poet, Chaucer's
+contemporary and friend; the two poets went to the same sources for
+poetic materials, but Chaucer made no such use of Gower's works as we
+would infer from this passage. Emerson relied on his memory for facts,
+and hence made mistakes, as here in the instances of Lydgate, Caxton,
+and Gower.]
+
+[Footnote 571: Westminster, Washington. What legislative body
+assembles at Westminster Palace, London? What at Washington?]
+
+[Footnote 572: Sir Robert Peel. An English statesman who died in 1850,
+not long after _Representative Men_ was published.]
+
+[Footnote 573: Webster. Daniel Webster, an American statesman and
+orator who was living when this essay was written.]
+
+[Footnote 574: Locke. John Locke. (See note 18.)]
+
+[Footnote 575: Rousseau. Jean Jacques Rousseau, a French philosopher
+of the eighteenth century.]
+
+[Footnote 576: Homer. (See note 550.)]
+
+[Footnote 577: Menn. Menn, or Mann, was in Sanscrit one of fourteen
+legendary beings; the one referred to by Emerson, Mann Vaivasvata was
+supposed to be the author of the laws of Mann, a collection made about
+the second century.]
+
+[Footnote 578: Saadi or Sadi. (See note 552.)]
+
+[Footnote 579: Milton. Of this great English poet and prose writer of
+the seventeenth century, Emerson says: "No man can be named whose mind
+still acts on the cultivated intellect of England and America with an
+energy comparable to that of Milton. As a poet Shakespeare undoubtedly
+transcends and far surpasses him in his popularity with foreign
+nations: but Shakespeare is a voice merely: who and what he was that
+sang, that sings, we know not."]
+
+[Footnote 580: Delphi. Here, source of prophecy. Delphi was a city in
+Greece, where was the oracle of Apollo, the most famous of the oracles
+of antiquity.]
+
+[Footnote 581: Our English Bible. The version made in the reign of
+King James I. by forty-seven learned divines is a monument of noble
+English.]
+
+[Footnote 582: Liturgy. An appointed form of worship used in a
+Christian church,--here, specifically, the service of the Episcopal
+church. Emerson's mother had been brought up in that church, and
+though she attended her husband's church, she always loved and read
+her Episcopal prayer book.]
+
+[Footnote 583: Grotius. Hugo Grotius was a Dutch jurist, statesman,
+theologian, and poet of the seventeenth century.]
+
+[Footnote 584: Rabbinical forms. The forms used by the rabbis, Jewish
+doctors or expounders of the law.]
+
+[Footnote 585: Common law. In a general sense, the system of law
+derived from England, in general use among English-speaking people.]
+
+[Footnote 586: Vedas. The sacred books of the Brahmins.]
+
+[Footnote 587: Æsop's Fables. Fables ascribed to Æsop, a Greek slave
+who lived in the sixth century before Christ.]
+
+[Footnote 588: Pilpay, or Bidpai. Indian sage to whom were ascribed
+some fables. From an Arabic translation, these passed into European
+languages and were used by La Fontaine, the French fabulist.]
+
+[Footnote 589: Arabian Nights. _The Arabian Nights' Entertainment or A
+Thousand and One Nights_ is a collection of Oriental tales, the plan
+and name of which are very ancient.]
+
+[Footnote 590: Cid. _The Romances of the Cid_, the story of the
+Spanish national hero, mentioned in note on _Heroism_139:5, was
+written about the thirteenth century by an unknown author; it supplied
+much of the material for two Spanish chronicles and Spanish and French
+tragedies written later on the same subject.]
+
+[Footnote 591: Iliad. The poem in which the Greek, poet, Homer,
+describes the siege and fall of Troy. Emerson here expresses the view
+adopted by many scholars that it was the work, not of one, but of many
+men.]
+
+[Footnote 592: Robin Hood. The ballads about Robin Hood, an English
+outlaw and popular hero of the twelfth century.]
+
+[Footnote 593: Scottish Minstrelsy. _The Minstrelsy of the Scottish
+Border_, a collection of original and collected poems, published by
+Sir Walter Scott in 1802.]
+
+[Footnote 594: Shakespeare Society. The Shakespeare Society, founded
+in 1841, was dissolved in 1853. In 1874 The New Shakespeare Society
+was founded.]
+
+[Footnote 595: Mysteries. See "Kyd, Marlowe, etc." 531.]
+
+[Footnote 596: Ferrex and Porrex, or Gorboduc. The first regular
+English tragedy, by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, printed in
+1565.]
+
+[Footnote 597: Gammer Gurtor's Needle. One of the first English
+comedies, written by Bishop Still and printed in 1575.]
+
+[Footnote 598: Whether the boy Shakespeare poached, etc. For a fuller
+account of the facts of Shakespeare's life, of which some traditions
+and facts are mentioned here, consult some good biography of the
+poet.]
+
+[Footnote 599: Queen Elizabeth. Dining her reign, 1558-1603, the
+English drama rose and attained its height, and there was produced a
+prose literature hardly inferior to the poetic.]
+
+[Footnote 600: King James. King James VI. of Scotland and I. of
+England who was Elizabeth's kinsman and successor; he reigned in
+England from 1603 to 1625.]
+
+[Footnote 601: Essexes. Walter Devereux was a brave English gentleman
+whom Elizabeth made Earl of Essex in 1572. His son Robert, the second
+Earl of Essex, was a favorite of Queen Elizabeth's.]
+
+[Footnote 602: Leicester. The Earl of Leicester, famous in
+Shakespeare's time, was Robert Dudley, an English courtier,
+politician, and general, the favorite of Queen Elizabeth.]
+
+[Footnote 603: Burleighs or Burghleys: William Cecil, baron of
+Burghley, was an English statesman, who, for forty years, was
+Elizabeth's chief minister.]
+
+[Footnote 604: Buckinghams. George Villiers, the first duke of
+Buckingham, was an English courtier and politician, a favorite of
+James I. and Charles I.]
+
+[Footnote 605: Tudor dynasty. The English dynasty of sovereigns
+descended on the male side from Owen Tudor. It began with Henry VII.
+and ended with Elizabeth.]
+
+[Footnote 606: Bacon. Consult English literature and history for an
+account of the great statesman and author, Francis Bacon, "the wisest,
+brightest, meanest of mankind."]
+
+[Footnote 607: Ben Jonson, etc. In his _Timber or Discoveries_, Ben
+Jonson, a famous classical dramatist contemporary with Shakespeare,
+says: "I loved the man and do honor his memory on this side idolatry
+as much as any. He was indeed honest and of an open and free nature:
+had an excellent fancy; brave notions and gentle expressions: wherein
+he flowed with that facility that sometimes it was necessary he should
+be stopped.... His wit was in his own power; would the rule of it had
+been so, too. Many times he fell into those things could not escape
+laughter.... But he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was
+ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned."]
+
+[Footnote 608: Sir Henry Wotton. An English diplomatist and author of
+wide culture.]
+
+[Footnote 609: The following persons, etc. The persons enumerated were
+all people of note of the seventeenth century. Sir Philip Sidney, Earl
+of Essex, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Milton, Sir Henry Vane,
+Isaac Walton, Dr. John Donne, Abraham Cowley, Charles Cotton, John
+Pym, and John Hales were Englishmen, scholars, statesmen, and authors.
+Theodore Beza was a French theologian; Isaac Casaubon was a
+French-Swiss scholar; Roberto Berlarmine was an Italian cardinal;
+Johann Kepler was a German astronomer; Francis Vieta was a French
+mathematician; Albericus Gentilis was an Italian jurist; Paul Sarpi
+was an Italian historian; Arminius was a Dutch theologian.]
+
+[Footnote 610: Many others whom doubtless, etc. Emerson here
+enumerates some famous English authors of the same period, not
+mentioned in the preceeding list.]
+
+[Footnote 611: Pericles. See note on _Heroism_, 352.]
+
+[Footnote 612: Lessing. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, a German critic and
+poet of the eighteenth century.]
+
+[Footnote 613: Wieland. Christopher Martin Wieland was a German
+contemporary of Lessing's, who made a prose translation into German of
+Shakespeare's plays.]
+
+[Footnote 614: Schlegel. August Wilhelm von Schlegel, a German critic
+and poet, who about the first of the nineteenth century translated
+some of Shakespeare's plays into classical German.]
+
+[Footnote 615: Hamlet. The hero of Shakespeare's play of the same
+name.]
+
+[Footnote 616: Coleridge. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an English poet,
+author of critical lectures and notes on Shakespeare.]
+
+[Footnote 617: Goethe. (See note 85.)]
+
+[Footnote 618: Blackfriar's Theater. A famous London theater in which
+nearly all the great dramas of the Elizabethan age were performed.]
+
+[Footnote 619: Stratford. Stratford-on-Avon, a little town in
+Warwickshire, England, where Shakespeare was born and where he spent
+his last years.]
+
+[Footnote 620: Macbeth. One of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies,
+written about 1606.]
+
+[Footnote 621: Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and Collier. English scholars
+of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who edited the works of
+Shakespeare.]
+
+[Footnote 622: Covent Garden, Drury Lane, the Park, and Tremont: The
+leading London theaters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.]
+
+[Footnote 623: Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean, and Macready, famous
+British actors of the Shakespearian parts.]
+
+[Footnote 624: The Hamlet of a famed performer, etc. Macready. Emerson
+said to a friend: "I see you are one of the happy mortals who are
+capable of being carried away by an actor of Shakespeare. Now,
+whenever I visit the theater to witness the performance of one of his
+dramas, I am carried away by the poet."]
+
+[Footnote 625: What may this mean, etc. _Hamlet_, I. 4.]
+
+[Footnote 626: Midsummer Night's Dream. One of Shakespeare's plays.]
+
+[Footnote 627: The forest of Arden. In which is laid, the scene of
+Shakespeare's play, _As You Like It_.]
+
+[Footnote 628: The nimble air of Scone Castle. It was of the air of
+Inverness, not of Scone, that "the air nimbly and sweetly recommends
+itself unto our gentle senses."--_Macbeth_, I. 6.]
+
+[Footnote 629: Portia's villa. See the moonlight scene, _Merchant of
+Venice_, V. 1.]
+
+[Footnote 630: The antres vost, etc. See _Othello_, I. 3. "Antres" is
+an old word, meaning caves, caverns.]
+
+[Footnote 631: Cyclopean architecture. In Greek mythology, the Cyclops
+were a race of giants. The term 'Cyclopean' is applied here to the
+architecture of Egypt and India, because of the majestic size of the
+buildings, and the immense size of the stones used, as if it would
+require giants to perform such works.]
+
+[Footnote 632: Phidian sculpture. Phidias was a famous Greek sculptor
+who lived in the age of Pericles and beautified Athens with his
+works.]
+
+[Footnote 633: Gothic minsters. Churches or cathedrals, built in the
+Gothic, or pointed, style of architecture which prevailed during the
+Middle Ages; it owed nothing to the Goths, and this term was
+originally used in reproach, in the sense of "barbarous."]
+
+[Footnote 634: The Italian painting. In Italy during the fifteenth and
+sixteenth centuries pictorial art was carried to a degree of
+perfection unknown in any other time or country.]
+
+[Footnote 635: Ballads of Spain and Scotland. The old ballads of these
+countries are noted for beauty and spirit.]
+
+[Footnote 636: Tripod. Define this word, and explain its
+appropriateness here.]
+
+[Footnote 637: Aubrey. John Aubrey, an English antiquarian of the
+seventeenth century.]
+
+[Footnote 638: Rowe. Nicholas Rowe, an English author of the
+seventeenth century, who wrote a biography of Shakespeare.]
+
+[Footnote 639: Timon. See note on _Gifts_, 466.]
+
+[Footnote 640: Warwick. An English politician and commander of the
+fifteenth century, called "the King Maker." He appears in
+Shakespeare's plays, _Henry IV._, _V._, and _VI._]
+
+[Footnote 641: Antonio. The Venetian Merchant in Shakespeare's play,
+_The Merchant of Venice_.]
+
+[Footnote 642: Talma. François Joseph Talma was a French tragic actor,
+to whom Napoleon showed favor.]
+
+[Footnote 643: An omnipresent humanity, etc. See what Carlyle has to
+say on this subject in his _Hero as Poet_.]
+
+[Footnote 644: Daguerre. Louis Jacques Daguerre, a French painter, one
+of the inventors of the daguerreotype process, by means of which an
+image is fixed on a metal plate by the chemical action of light.]
+
+[Footnote 645: Euphuism. The word here has rather the force of
+euphemism, an entirely different word. Euphuism was an affected ornate
+style of expression, so called from _Euphues_, by John Lyly, a
+sixteenth century master of that style.]
+
+[Footnote 646: Epicurus. A Greek philosopher of the third century
+before Christ. He was the founder of the Epicurean school of
+philosophy which taught that pleasure should be man's chief aim and
+that the highest pleasure is freedom.]
+
+[Footnote 647: Dante. (See note 258.)]
+
+[Footnote 648: Master of the revels, etc. Emerson always expressed
+thankfulness for "the spirit of joy which Shakespeare had shed over
+the universe." See what Carlyle says in _The Hero as Poet_, about
+Shakespeare's "mirthfulness and love of laughter."]
+
+[Footnote 649: Koran. The Sacred book of the Mohammedans.]
+
+[Footnote 650: Twelfth Night, etc. The names of three bright, merry,
+or serene plays by Shakespeare.]
+
+[Footnote 651: Egyptian verdict. Emerson used Egyptian probably in the
+sense of "gipsy." He compares such opinions to the fortunes told by
+the gipsies.]
+
+[Footnote 652: Tasso. An Italian poet of the sixteenth century.]
+
+[Footnote 653: Cervantes. A Spanish poet and romancer of the sixteenth
+century, the author of _Don Quixote_.]
+
+[Footnote 654: Israelite. Such Hebrew prophets as Isaiah and
+Jeremiah.]
+
+[Footnote 655: German. Such as Luther.]
+
+[Footnote 656: Swede. Such as Swedenborg, the mystic philosopher of
+the eighteenth century of whom Emerson had already written in
+_Representative Men_.]
+
+[Footnote 657: A pilgrim's progress. As described by John Bunyan, the
+English writer, in his famous _Pilgrim's Progress_.]
+
+[Footnote 658: Doleful histories of Adam's fall, etc. The subject of
+_Paradise Lost,_ the great poem by John Milton.]
+
+[Footnote 659: With doomsdays and purgatorial, etc. As described by
+Dante in his _Divine Commedia_, an epic about hell, purgatory, and
+paradise.]
+
+
+PRUDENCE
+
+[Footnote 660: The essay on _Prudence_ was given as a lecture in
+the course on _Human Culture_, in the winter of 1837-8. It was
+published in the first series of _Essays_, which appeared in 1841.]
+
+[Footnote 661: Lubricity. The word means literally the state or
+quality of being slippery; Emerson uses it several times, in its
+derived sense of "instability."]
+
+[Footnote 662: Love and Friendship. The subjects of the two essays
+preceding _Prudence_, in the volume of 1841.]
+
+[Footnote 663: The world is filled with the proverbs, etc. Compare
+with this passage Emerson's words in _Compensation_ on "the flights of
+proverbs, whose teaching is as true and as omnipresent as that of
+birds and flies."]
+
+[Footnote 664: A good wheel or pin. That is, a part of a machine.]
+
+[Footnote 665: The law of polarity. Having two opposite poles, the
+properties of the one of which are the opposite of the other.]
+
+[Footnote 666: Summer will have its flies. Emerson discoursed
+with philosophic calm about the impediments and disagreeableness which
+beset every path; he also accepted them with serenity when he
+encountered them in his daily life.]
+
+[Footnote 667: The inhabitants of the climates, etc. As a
+northerner, Emerson naturally felt that the advantage and superiority
+were with his own section. He expressed in his poems _Voluntaries_ and
+_Mayday_ views similar to those declared here.]
+
+[Footnote 668: Peninsular campaign. Emerson here refers to
+the military operations carried on from 1808 to 1814 in Portugal,
+Spain, and southern France against the French, by the British,
+Spanish, and Portuguese forces commanded by Wellington. What was the
+"Peninsular campaign" in American history?]
+
+[Footnote 669: Dr. Johnson is reported to have said, etc. Dr.
+Samuel Johnson was an eminent English scholar of the eighteenth
+century. In this, as in many other instances, Emerson quotes from his
+memory instead of from the book. The words of Dr. Johnson, as reported
+by his biographer Boswell, are: "Accustom your children constantly to
+this; if a thing happened at one window, and they, when relating it,
+say it happened at another, do not let it pass, but instantly check
+them; you do not know where deviation from truth will end."]
+
+[Footnote 670: Rifle. A local name in England and New England
+for an instrument, on the order of a whetstone, used for sharpening
+scythes; it is made of wood, covered with fine sand or emery.]
+
+[Footnote 671: Last grand duke of Weimar. Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach is a
+grand duchy of Germany. The grand duke referred to was Charles
+Augustus, who died in 1828. He was the friend and patron of the great
+German authors, Goethe, Schiller, Herder, and Wieland.]
+
+[Footnote 672: The Raphael in the Dresden gallery. The Sistine
+Madonna, the most famous picture of the great Italian artist,
+Raphael.]
+
+[Footnote 673: Call a spade a spade. Plutarch, the Greek historian,
+said, "These Macedonians ... call a spade a spade."]
+
+[Footnote 674: Parts. A favorite eighteenth century term for
+abilities, talents.]
+
+[Footnote 675: We have found out, etc. Emerson always insisted that
+morals and intellect should be united. He urged that power and
+insight are lessened by shortcomings in morals.]
+
+[Footnote 676: Goethe's Tasso. A play by the German poet
+Goethe, founded on the belief that the imprisonment of Tasso was due
+to his aspiration to the hand of Leonora d'Este, sister of the duke of
+Ferrara. Tasso was a famous Italian poet of the seventeenth century.]
+
+[Footnote 677: Richard III. An English king, the last of the
+Plantagenet line, the hero--or villain--of Shakespeare's historical
+play, Richard III.]
+
+[Footnote 678: Bifold. Give a simpler word that means the same.]
+
+[Footnote 679: Cæsar. Why is Cæsar the great Roman ruler, given as a
+type of greatness?]
+
+[Footnote 680: Job. Why is Job, the hero of the Old Testament book of
+the same name, given as a type of misery?]
+
+[Footnote 681: Poor Richard. _Poor Richard's Almanac_,
+published (1732-1757) by Benjamin Franklin was a collection of maxims
+inculcating prudence and thrift. These were given as the sayings of
+"Poor Richard."]
+
+[Footnote 682: State Street. A street in Boston, Massachusetts, noted
+as a financial center.]
+
+[Footnote 683: Stick in a tree between whiles, etc. "Jock, when ye hae
+naething else to do, ye may be aye sticking in a tree; it will be
+growing, Jock, when ye're sleeping."--Scott's _Heart of Midlothian_.
+It is said that these were the words of a dying Scotchman to his son.]
+
+[Footnote 684: Minor virtues. Emerson suggests that punctuality and
+regard for a promise are two of these. Can you name others?]
+
+[Footnote 685: The Latin proverb says, etc. This is quoted from
+Tacitus, the famous Roman historian.]
+
+[Footnote 686: If he set out to contend, etc. In contention,
+Emerson holds, the best men would lose their characteristic virtues,
+--the fearless apostle Paul, his devotion to truth; the gentle
+disciple John, his loving charity.]
+
+[Footnote 687: Though your views are in straight antagonism, &c. This
+was Emerson's own method, and by it he won a courteous hearing from
+those to whom his views were most objectionable.]
+
+[Footnote 688: Consuetudes. Give a simpler word that has the same
+meaning.]
+
+[Footnote 689: Begin where we will, etc. Explain what Emerson means by
+this expression.]
+
+
+CIRCLES
+
+[Footnote 690: This essay first appeared in the first series of
+_Essays_, published in 1841. Unlike most of the other essays in the
+volume, no earlier form of it exists, and it was probably not
+delivered first as a lecture.
+
+Dr. Richard Garnett says in his _Life of Emerson_: "The object of this
+fine essay quaintly entitled _Circles_ is to reconcile this rigidity
+of unalterable law with the fact of human progress. Compensation
+illustrates one property of a circle, which always returns to the
+point where it began, but it is no less true that around every circle
+another can be drawn.... Emerson followed his own counsel; he always
+keeps a reserve of power. His theory of _Circles_ reappears without
+the least verbal indebtedness to himself in the splendid essay on
+_Love_."]
+
+[Footnote 691: St. Augustine. A celebrated father of the
+Latin church, who flourished in the fourth century. His most famous
+work is his _Confessions_, an autobiographical volume of religious
+meditations.]
+
+[Footnote 692: Another dawn risen on mid-noon. "Another morn has risen
+on mid-noon." Milton, _Paradise Lost_, Book V.]
+
+[Footnote 693: Greek sculpture. The greatest development of
+the art of sculpture that the world has ever known was that which took
+place in Greece, with Athens as the center, in the fifth century
+before Christ. The masterpieces which remain are the models on which
+modern art formed itself.]
+
+[Footnote 694: Greek letters. In literature--in drama, philosophy and
+history--Greece attained an excellence as signal as in art. Emerson as
+a scholar, felt that the literature of Greece was more permanent than
+its art. Would an artist be apt to take this view?]
+
+[Footnote 695: New arts destroy the old, etc. Tell the ways in which
+the improvements and inventions mentioned by Emerson have been
+superseded by others; give the reasons. Mention other similar cases of
+more recent date.]
+
+[Footnote 696: The life of man is a self-evolving circle, etc. "Throw a
+stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the
+beautiful type of all influence."--EMERSON, in _Nature_.]
+
+[Footnote 697: The heart refuses to be imprisoned. It is a
+superstition current in many countries that an evil spirit cannot
+escape from a circle drawn round it.]
+
+[Footnote 698: Crass. Gross; coarse.]
+
+[Footnote 699: The continual effort to raise himself above
+himself, etc.
+
+    "Unless above himself he can
+    Erect himself, how poor a thing is man!"
+                                 SAMUEL DANIEL.
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 700: If he were high enough, etc.
+
+    Have I a lover
+    Who is noble and free?--
+    I would he were nobler
+    Than to love me.--EMERSON, _The Sphinx._
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 701: Aristotle and Plato. Plato was a famous Greek
+philosopher who flourished in the fourth century before Christ. He was
+the disciple of Socrates, the teacher of Aristotle, and the founder of
+the academic school of philosophy. His exposition of idealism was
+founded on the teachings of Socrates. Aristotle, another famous Greek
+philosopher, was for twenty years the pupil of Plato. He founded the
+peripatetic school of philosophy, and his writing dealt with all the
+then known branches of science.]
+
+[Footnote 702: Berkeley. George Berkeley was a British clergyman of
+the eighteenth century. He was the author of works on philosophy which
+are marked by extreme subjective idealism.]
+
+[Footnote 703: Termini. Boundaries or marks to indicate boundaries. In
+Roman mythology, Terminus was the god who presided over boundaries or
+landmarks. He is represented with a human head, but without feet or
+arms,--to indicate that he never moved from his place.]
+
+[Footnote 704: Pentecost. One of three great Jewish festivals. On the
+day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descended upon the infant Christian
+church, with the gift of tongues. See Acts ii. 1-20.]
+
+[Footnote 705: Hodiernal. Belonging to our present day.]
+
+[Footnote 706: Punic. Of Carthage, a famous ancient city, and
+state of northern Africa. Carthage was the rival of Rome, but was,
+after long warfare, overcome in the second century before Christ.]
+
+[Footnote 707: In like manner, etc. Emerson always urged that in order
+to get the best from all, one must pass from affairs to thought,
+society to solitude, books to nature.
+
+    "See thou bring not to field or stone
+       The fancies found in books;
+     Leave authors' eyes, and fetch your own,
+       To brave the landscape's look."--EMERSON,
+                                        _Waldeinsamkeit_.
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 708: Petrarch. (See note 563.)]
+
+[Footnote 709: Ariosto. A famous Italian author of the sixteenth
+century, who wrote comedies, satires, and a metrical romance, _Orlando
+Furioso_.]
+
+[Footnote 710: "Then shall also the Son", etc. See 1 Corinthians xv.
+28: Does Emerson quote the passage verbatim?]
+
+[Footnote 711: These manifold tenacious qualities, etc. It is
+remarked of Emerson that the idea of the symbolism of nature which he
+received from Plato, was the source of much of his pleasure in
+Swedenborg, the Swedish mystic philosopher. Emerson says in his volume
+on _Nature_: "The noblest ministry of nature is to stand as an
+apparition of God."]
+
+[Footnote 712: "Forgive his crimes," etc. This is quoted from _Night
+Thoughts_ by the English didactic poet, Edward Young.]
+
+[Footnote 713: Pyrrhonism. A doctrine held by a follower of Pyrrho, a
+Greek philosopher of the third century before Christ, who founded the
+sceptical school. He taught that it is impossible to attain truth, and
+that men should be indifferent to all external circumstances.]
+
+[Footnote 714: I own I am gladdened, etc. Emerson always held fast to
+the consoling thought that there was no evil without good, none out of
+which Good did not or could not come.]
+
+[Footnote 715: Sempiternal. Everlasting; eternal.]
+
+[Footnote 716: Oliver Cromwell. An Englishman of the middle classes
+who became the military and civil leader of the English Revolution of
+the seventeenth century. He refused the title of king; but as Lord
+Protector of the English commonwealth, he exercised royal power.]
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Essays, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Essays, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Essays
+
+Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson
+
+Editor: Edna H. L. Turpin
+
+Release Date: September 4, 2005 [EBook #16643]
+[Last updated: March 15, 2012]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Curtis A. Weyant, Sankar Viswanathan and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                                ESSAYS
+
+                                  BY
+
+                          RALPH WALDO EMERSON
+
+
+
+
+                        Merrill's English Texts
+
+                SELECTED AND EDITED, WITH INTRODUCTION
+                AND NOTES, BY EDNA H.L. TURPIN, AUTHOR
+                OF "STORIES FROM AMERICAN HISTORY,"
+               "CLASSIC FABLES," "FAMOUS PAINTERS," ETC.
+
+
+
+                               NEW YORK
+
+                        CHARLES E. MERRILL CO.
+
+                                 1907
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+  LIFE OF EMERSON
+  CRITICAL OPINIONS
+  CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF PRINCIPAL WORKS
+
+THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR
+
+COMPENSATION
+
+SELF RELIANCE
+
+FRIENDSHIP
+
+HEROISM
+
+MANNERS
+
+GIFTS
+
+NATURE
+
+SHAKESPEARE; OR, THE POET
+
+PRUDENCE
+
+CIRCLES
+
+NOTES
+
+
+
+
+PUBLISHERS' NOTE
+
+Merrill's English Texts
+
+
+This series of books will include in complete editions those
+masterpieces of English Literature that are best adapted for the use
+of schools and colleges. The editors of the several volumes will be
+chosen for their special qualifications in connection with the texts
+to be issued under their individual supervision, but familiarity with
+the practical needs of the classroom, no less than sound scholarship,
+will characterize the editing of every book in the series.
+
+In connection with each text, a critical and historical introduction,
+including a sketch of the life of the author and his relation to the
+thought of his time, critical opinions of the work in question chosen
+from the great body of English criticism, and, where possible, a
+portrait of the author, will be given. Ample explanatory notes of such
+passages in the text as call for special attention will be supplied,
+but irrelevant annotation and explanations of the obvious will be
+rigidly excluded.
+
+CHARLES E. MERRILL CO.
+
+
+
+
+LIFE OF EMERSON
+
+
+Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, May 25, 1803. He was descended
+from a long line of New England ministers, men of refinement and
+education. As a school-boy he was quiet and retiring, reading a great
+deal, but not paying much attention to his lessons. He entered Harvard
+at the early age of fourteen, but never attained a high rank there,
+although he took a prize for an essay on Socrates, and was made class
+poet after several others had declined. Next to his reserve and the
+faultless propriety of his conduct, his contemporaries at college
+seemed most impressed by the great maturity of his mind. Emerson
+appears never to have been really a boy. He was always serene and
+thoughtful, impressing all who knew him with that spirituality which
+was his most distinguishing characteristic.
+
+After graduating from college he taught school for a time, and then
+entered the Harvard Divinity School under Dr. Channing, the great
+Unitarian preacher. Although he was not strong enough to attend all
+the lectures of the divinity course, the college authorities deemed
+the name Emerson sufficient passport to the ministry. He was
+accordingly "approbated to preach" by the Middlesex Association of
+Ministers on October 10, 1826. As a preacher, Emerson was interesting,
+though not particularly original. His talent seems to have been in
+giving new meaning to the old truths of religion. One of his hearers
+has said: "In looking back on his preaching I find he has impressed
+truths to which I always assented in such a manner as to make them
+appear new, like a clearer revelation." Although his sermons were
+always couched in scriptural language, they were touched with the
+light of that genius which avoids the conventional and commonplace. In
+his other pastoral duties Emerson was not quite so successful. It is
+characteristic of his deep humanity and his dislike for all fuss and
+commonplace that he appeared to least advantage at a funeral. A
+connoisseur in such matters, an old sexton, once remarked that on such
+occasions "he did not appear at ease at all. To tell the truth, in my
+opinion, that young man was not born to be a minister."
+
+Emerson did not long remain a minister. In 1832 he preached a sermon
+in which he announced certain views in regard to the communion service
+which were disapproved by a large part of his congregation. He found
+it impossible to continue preaching, and, with the most friendly
+feelings on both sides, he parted from his congregation.
+
+A few months later (1833) he went to Europe for a short year of
+travel. While abroad, he visited Walter Savage Landor, Coleridge and
+Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle. This visit to Carlyle was to both men
+a most interesting experience. They parted feeling that they had much
+intellectually in common. This belief fostered a sympathy which, by
+the time they had discovered how different they really were, had grown
+so strong a habit that they always kept up their intimacy. This year
+of travel opened Emerson's eyes to many things of which he had
+previously been ignorant; he had profited by detachment from the
+concerns of a limited community and an isolated church.
+
+After his return he began to find his true field of activity in the
+lecture-hall, and delivered a number of addresses in Boston and its
+vicinity. While thus coming before the open public on the lecture
+platform, he was all the time preparing the treatise which was to
+embody all the quintessential elements of his philosophical doctrine.
+This was the essay _Nature_, which was published in 1836. By its
+conception of external Nature as an incarnation of the Divine Mind it
+struck the fundamental principle of Emerson's religious belief. The
+essay had a very small circulation at first, though later it became
+widely known.
+
+In the winter of 1836 Emerson followed up his discourse on Nature by a
+course of twelve lectures on the "Philosophy of History," a
+considerable portion of which eventually became embodied in his
+essays. The next year (1837) was the year of the delivery of the _Man
+Thinking, or the American Scholar_ address before the Phi Beta Kappa
+Society at Cambridge.
+
+This society, composed of the first twenty-five men in each class
+graduating from college, has annual meetings which have called forth
+the best efforts of many distinguished scholars and thinkers.
+Emerson's address was listened to with the most profound interest. It
+declared a sort of intellectual independence for America. Henceforth
+we were to be emancipated from clogging foreign influences, and a
+national literature was to expand under the fostering care of the
+Republic.
+
+These two discourses, _Nature_ and _The American Scholar_, strike the
+keynote of Emerson's philosophical, poetical, and moral teachings. In
+fact he had, as every great teacher has, only a limited number of
+principles and theories to teach. These principles of life can all be
+enumerated in twenty words--self-reliance, culture, intellectual and
+moral independence, the divinity of nature and man, the necessity of
+labor, and high ideals.
+
+Emerson spent the latter part of his life in lecturing and in literary
+work. His son, Dr. Edward Emerson, gave an interesting account of how
+these lectures were constructed. "All through his life he kept a
+journal. This book, he said, was his 'Savings Bank.' The thoughts thus
+received and garnered in his journals were indexed, and a great many
+of them appeared in his published works. They were religiously set
+down just as they came, in no order except chronological, but later
+they were grouped, enlarged or pruned, illustrated, worked into a
+lecture or discourse, and, after having in this capacity undergone
+repeated testing and rearranging, were finally carefully sifted and
+more rigidly pruned, and were printed as essays."
+
+Besides his essays and lectures Emerson left some poetry in which is
+embodied those thoughts which were to him too deep for prose
+expression. Oliver Wendell Holmes in speaking of this says: "Emerson
+wrote occasionally in verse from his school-days until he had reached
+the age which used to be known as the grand climacteric,
+sixty-three.... His poems are not and hardly can become popular; they
+are not meant to be liked by the many, but to be dearly loved and
+cherished by the few.... His occasional lawlessness in technical
+construction, his somewhat fantastic expressions, his enigmatic
+obscurities hardly detract from the pleasant surprise his verses so
+often bring with them.... The poetic license which we allow in the
+verse of Emerson is more than excused by the noble spirit which makes
+us forget its occasional blemishes, sometimes to be pleased with them
+as characteristic of the writer."
+
+Emerson was always a striking figure in the intellectual life of
+America. His discourses were above all things inspiring. Through them
+many were induced to strive for a higher self-culture. His influence
+can be discerned in all the literary movements of the time. He was the
+central figure of the so-called transcendental school which was so
+prominent fifty years ago, although he always rather held aloof from
+any enthusiastic participation in the movement.
+
+Emerson lived a quiet life in Concord, Massachusetts. "He was a
+first-rate neighbor and one who always kept his fences up." He
+traveled extensively on his lecturing tours, even going as far as
+England. In _English Traits_ he has recorded his impressions of what
+he saw of English life and manners.
+
+Oliver Wendell Holmes has described him in this wise: "His personal
+appearance was that of the typical New Englander of college-bred
+ancestry. Tall, spare, slender, with sloping shoulders, slightly
+stooping in his later years, with light hair and eyes, the scholar's
+complexion, the prominent, somewhat arched nose which belongs to many
+of the New England sub-species, thin lips, suggestive of delicacy, but
+having nothing like primness, still less of the rigidity which is
+often noticeable in the generation succeeding next to that of the men
+in their shirt-sleeves, he would have been noticed anywhere as one
+evidently a scholarly thinker astray from the alcove or the study,
+which were his natural habitats. His voice was very sweet, and
+penetrating without any loudness or mark of effort. His enunciation
+was beautifully clear, but he often hesitated as if waiting for the
+right word to present itself. His manner was very quiet, his smile was
+pleasant, but he did not like explosive laughter any better than
+Hawthorne did. None who met him can fail to recall that serene and
+kindly presence, in which there was mingled a certain spiritual
+remoteness with the most benignant human welcome to all who were
+privileged to enjoy his companionship."
+
+Emerson died April 27, 1882, after a few days' illness from pneumonia.
+Dr. Garnett in his excellent biography says: "Seldom had 'the reaper
+whose name is Death' gathered such illustrious harvest as between
+December 1880 and April 1882. In the first month of this period George
+Eliot passed away, in the ensuing February Carlyle followed; in April
+Lord Beaconsfield died, deplored by his party, nor unregretted by his
+country; in February of the following year Longfellow was carried to
+the tomb; in April Rossetti was laid to rest by the sea, and the
+pavement of Westminster Abbey was disturbed to receive the dust of
+Darwin. And now Emerson lay down in death beside the painter of man
+and the searcher of nature, the English-Oriental statesman, the poet
+of the plain man and the poet of the artist, and the prophet whose
+name is indissolubly linked with his own. All these men passed into
+eternity laden with the spoils of Time, but of none of them could it
+be said, as of Emerson, that the most shining intellectual glory and
+the most potent intellectual force of a continent had departed along
+with him."
+
+
+
+
+CRITICAL OPINIONS OF EMERSON AND HIS WRITINGS.
+
+
+Matthew Arnold, in an address on Emerson delivered in Boston, gave
+an excellent estimate of the rank we should accord to him in the great
+hierarchy of letters. Some, perhaps, will think that Arnold was
+unappreciative and cold, but dispassionate readers will be inclined to
+agree with his judgment of our great American.
+
+After a review of the poetical works of Emerson the English critic
+draws his conclusions as follows:
+
+"I do not then place Emerson among the great poets. But I go farther,
+and say that I do not place him among the great writers, the great men
+of letters. Who are the great men of letters? They are men like
+Cicero, Plato, Bacon, Pascal, Swift, Voltaire--writers with, in the
+first place, a genius and instinct for style.... Brilliant and
+powerful passages in a man's writings do not prove his possession of
+it. Emerson has passages of noble and pathetic eloquence; he has
+passages of shrewd and felicitous wit; he has crisp epigram; he has
+passages of exquisitely touched observation of nature. Yet he is not a
+great writer.... Carlyle formulates perfectly the defects of his
+friend's poetic and literary productions when he says: 'For me it is
+too ethereal, speculative, theoretic; I will have all things condense
+themselves, take shape and body, if they are to have my sympathy.' ...
+
+".... Not with the Miltons and Grays, not with the Platos and Spinozas,
+not with the Swifts and Voltaires, not with the Montaignes and
+Addisons, can we rank Emerson. No man could see this clearer than
+Emerson himself. 'Alas, my friend,' he writes in reply to Carlyle, who
+had exhorted him to creative work,--'Alas, my friend, I can do no such
+gay thing as you say. I do not belong to the poets, but only to a low
+department of literature,--the reporters; suburban men.' He deprecated
+his friend's praise; praise 'generous to a fault' he calls it; praise
+'generous to the shaming of me,--cold, fastidious, ebbing person that
+I am.'"
+
+After all this unfavorable criticism Arnold begins to praise. Quoting
+passages from the Essays, he adds:
+
+"This is tonic indeed! And let no one object that it is too general;
+that more practical, positive direction is what we want.... Yes,
+truly, his insight is admirable; his truth is precious. Yet the secret
+of his effect is not even in these; it is in his temper. It is in the
+hopeful, serene, beautiful temper wherewith these, in Emerson, are
+indissolubly united; in which they work and have their being.... One
+can scarcely overrate the importance of holding fast to happiness and
+hope. It gives to Emerson's work an invaluable virtue. As Wordsworth's
+poetry is, in my judgment, the most important done in verse, in our
+language, during the present century, so Emerson's Essays are, I
+think, the most important work done in prose.... But by his conviction
+that in the life of the spirit is happiness, and by his hope that this
+life of the spirit will come more and more to be sanely understood,
+and to prevail, and to work for happiness,--by this conviction and
+hope Emerson was great, and he will surely prove in the end to have
+been right in them.... You cannot prize him too much, nor heed him too
+diligently."
+
+Herman Grimm, a German critic of great influence in his own country,
+did much to obtain a hearing for Emerson's works in Germany. At first
+the Germans could not understand the unusual English, the unaccustomed
+turns of phrase which are so characteristic of Emerson's style.
+
+"Macaulay gives them no difficulty; even Carlyle is comprehended. But
+in Emerson's writings the broad turnpike is suddenly changed into a
+hazardous sandy foot-path. His thoughts and his style are American. He
+is not writing for Berlin, but for the people of Massachusetts.... It
+is an art to rise above what we have been taught.... All great men are
+seen to possess this freedom. They derive their standard from their
+own natures, and their observations on life are so natural and
+spontaneous that it would seem as if the most illiterate person with a
+scrap of common-sense would have made the same.... We become wiser
+with them, and know not how the difficult appears easy and the
+involved plain.
+
+"Emerson possesses this noble manner of communicating himself. He
+inspires me with courage and confidence. He has read and seen but
+conceals the labor. I meet in his works plenty of familiar facts, but
+he does not employ them to figure up anew the old worn-out problems:
+each stands on a new spot and serves for new combinations. From
+everything he sees the direct line issuing which connects it with the
+focus of life....
+
+".... Emerson's theory is that of the 'sovereignty of the individual.'
+To discover what a young man is good for, and to equip him for the
+path he is to strike out in life, regardless of any other
+consideration, is the great duty to which he calls attention. He makes
+men self-reliant. He reveals to the eyes of the idealist the
+magnificent results of practical activity, and unfolds before the
+realist the grandeur of the ideal world of thought. No man is to allow
+himself, through prejudice, to make a mistake in choosing the task to
+which he will devote his life. Emerson's essays are, as it were,
+printed sermons--all having this same text.... The wealth and harmony
+of his language overpowered and entranced me anew. But even now I
+cannot say wherein the secret of his influence lies. What he has
+written is like life itself--the unbroken thread ever lengthened
+through the addition of the small events which make up each day's
+experience."
+
+Froude in his famous "Life of Carlyle" gives an interesting description
+of Emerson's visit to the Carlyles in Scotland:
+
+"The Carlyles were sitting alone at dinner on a Sunday afternoon at
+the end of August when a Dumfries carriage drove to the door, and
+there stepped out of it a young American then unknown to fame, but
+whose influence in his own country equals that of Carlyle in ours, and
+whose name stands connected with his wherever the English language is
+spoken. Emerson, the younger of the two, had just broken his Unitarian
+fetters, and was looking out around him like a young eagle longing for
+light. He had read Carlyle's articles and had discerned with the
+instinct of genius that here was a voice speaking real and fiery
+convictions, and no longer echoes and conventionalisms. He had come to
+Europe to study its social and spiritual phenomena; and to the young
+Emerson as to the old Goethe, the most important of them appeared to
+be Carlyle.... The acquaintance then begun to their mutual pleasure
+ripened into a deep friendship, which has remained unclouded in spite
+of wide divergences of opinion throughout their working lives."
+
+Carlyle wrote to his mother after Emerson had left:
+
+"Our third happiness was the arrival of a certain young unknown friend
+named Emerson, from Boston, in the United States, who turned aside so
+far from his British, French, and Italian travels to see me here! He
+had an introduction from Mill and a Frenchman (Baron d'Eichthal's
+nephew) whom John knew at Rome. Of course, we could do no other than
+welcome him; the rather as he seemed to be one of the most lovable
+creatures in himself we had ever looked on. He stayed till next day
+with us, and talked and heard to his heart's content, and left us all
+really sad to part with him."
+
+In 1841 Carlyle wrote to John Sterling a few words apropos of the
+recent publication of Emerson's essays in England:
+
+"I love Emerson's book, not for its detached opinions, not even for
+the scheme of the general world he has framed for himself, or any
+eminence of talent he has expressed that with, but simply because it
+is his own book; because there is a tone of veracity, an unmistakable
+air of its being _his_, and a real utterance of a human soul, not a
+mere echo of such. I consider it, in that sense, highly remarkable,
+rare, very rare, in these days of ours. Ach Gott! It is frightful to
+live among echoes. The few that read the book, I imagine, will get
+benefit of it. To America, I sometimes say that Emerson, such as he
+is, seems to me like a kind of New Era."
+
+John Morley, the acute English critic, has made an analytic study of
+Emerson's style, which may reconcile the reader to some of its
+exasperating peculiarities.
+
+"One of the traits that every critic notes in Emerson's writing is
+that it is so abrupt, so sudden in its transitions, so discontinuous,
+so inconsecutive. Dislike of a sentence that drags made him
+unconscious of the quality that French critics name _coulant_.
+Everything is thrown in just as it comes, and sometimes the pell-mell
+is enough to persuade us that Pope did not exaggerate when he said
+that no one qualification is so likely to make a good writer as the
+power of rejecting his own thoughts.... Apart from his difficult
+staccato, Emerson is not free from secondary faults. He uses words
+that are not only odd, but vicious in construction; he is sometimes
+oblique and he is often clumsy; and there is a visible feeling after
+epigrams that do not always come. When people say that Emerson's style
+must be good and admirable because it fits his thought, they forget
+that though it is well that a robe should fit, there is still
+something to be said about its cut and fashion.... Yet, as happens to
+all fine minds, there came to Emerson ways of expression deeply marked
+with character. On every page there is set the strong stamp of
+sincerity, and the attraction of a certain artlessness; the most
+awkward sentence rings true; and there is often a pure and simple note
+that touches us more than if it were the perfection of elaborated
+melody. The uncouth procession of the periods discloses the travail of
+the thought, and that, too, is a kind of eloquence. An honest reader
+easily forgives the rude jolt or unexpected start when it shows a
+thinker faithfully working his way along arduous and unworn tracks.
+Even at the roughest, Emerson often interjects a delightful cadence.
+As he says of Landor, his sentences are cubes which will stand firm,
+place them how or where you will. He criticised Swedenborg for being
+superfluously explanatory, and having an exaggerated feeling of the
+ignorance of men. 'Men take truths of this nature,' said Emerson,
+'very fast;' and his own style does no doubt very boldly take this
+capacity for granted in us. In 'choice and pith of diction,' again, of
+which Mr. Lowell speaks, he hits the mark with a felicity that is
+almost his own in this generation. He is terse, concentrated, and free
+from the important blunder of mistaking intellectual dawdling for
+meditation. Nor in fine does his abruptness ever impede a true
+urbanity. The accent is homely and the apparel plain, but his bearing
+has a friendliness, a courtesy, a hospitable humanity, which goes
+nearer to our hearts than either literary decoration or rhetorical
+unction. That modest and lenient fellow-feeling which gave such charm
+to his companionship breathes in his gravest writing, and prevents us
+from finding any page of it cold or hard or dry."
+
+E.P. Whipple, the well-known American critic, wrote soon after Emerson's
+death:
+
+"But 'sweetness and light' are precious and inspiring only so far as
+they express the essential sweetness of the disposition of the
+thinker, and the essential illuminating power of his intelligence.
+Emerson's greatness came from his character. Sweetness and light
+streamed from him because they were _in_ him. In everything he
+thought, wrote, and did, we feel the presence of a personality as
+vigorous and brave as it was sweet, and the particular radical thought
+he at any time expressed derived its power to animate and illuminate
+other minds from the might of the manhood, which was felt to be within
+and behind it. To 'sweetness and light' he therefore added the prime
+quality of fearless manliness.
+
+"If the force of Emerson's character was thus inextricably blended
+with the force of all his faculties of intellect and imagination, and
+the refinement of all his sentiments, we have still to account for the
+peculiarities of his genius, and to answer the question, why do we
+instinctively apply the epithet 'Emersonian' to every characteristic
+passage in his writings? We are told that he was the last in a long
+line of clergymen, his ancestors, and that the modern doctrine of
+heredity accounts for the impressive emphasis he laid on the moral
+sentiment; but that does not solve the puzzle why he unmistakably
+differed in his nature and genius from all other Emersons. An
+imaginary genealogical chart of descent connecting him with Confucius
+or Gautama would be more satisfactory.
+
+"What distinguishes _the_ Emerson was his exceptional genius and
+character, that something in him which separated him from all other
+Emersons, as it separated him from all other eminent men of letters,
+and impressed every intelligent reader with the feeling that he was
+not only 'original but aboriginal.' Some traits of his mind and
+character may be traced back to his ancestors, but what doctrine of
+heredity can give us the genesis of his genius? Indeed, the safest
+course to pursue is to quote his own words, and despairingly confess
+that it is the nature of genius 'to spring, like the rainbow daughter
+of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past, and refuse all
+history.'"
+
+
+
+
+CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF EMERSON'S PRINCIPAL WORKS.
+
+
+Nature                         1836
+Essays (First Series)          1841
+Essays (Second Series)         1844
+Poems                          1847
+Miscellanies                   1849
+Representative Men             1850
+English Traits                 1856
+Conduct of Life                1860
+Society and Solitude           1870
+Correspondence of Thomas
+Carlyle and R.W. Emerson       1883
+
+
+
+
+THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR.
+
+     This address was delivered at Cambridge in 1837, before the
+     Harvard Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, a college
+     fraternity composed of the first twenty-five men in each
+     graduating class. The society has annual meetings, which
+     have been the occasion for addresses from the most
+     distinguished scholars and thinkers of the day.
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN,
+
+I greet you on the recommencement of our literary year. Our
+anniversary is one of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of labor. We do
+not meet for games of strength[1] or skill, for the recitation of
+histories, tragedies, and odes, like the ancient Greeks; for
+parliaments of love and poesy, like the Troubadours;[2] nor for the
+advancement of science, like our co-temporaries in the British and
+European capitals. Thus far, our holiday has been simply a friendly
+sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy
+to give to letters any more. As such it is precious as the sign of an
+indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come when it
+ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect
+of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the
+postponed expectation of the world with something better than the
+exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long
+apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The
+millions that around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed on
+the sere remains of foreign harvests.[3] Events, actions arise that
+must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt that poetry
+will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation
+Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one
+day be the pole-star[4] for a thousand years?
+
+In the light of this hope I accept the topic which not only usage but
+the nature of our association seem to prescribe to this day,--the
+AMERICAN SCHOLAR. Year by year we come up hither to read one
+more chapter of his biography. Let us inquire what new lights, new
+events, and more days have thrown on his character, his duties, and
+his hopes.
+
+It is one of those fables which out of an unknown antiquity convey an
+unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into
+men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just as the hand was
+divided into fingers, the better to answer its end.[5]
+
+The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is
+One Man,--present to all particular men only partially, or through one
+faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole
+man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is
+all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and
+soldier. In the _divided_ or social state these functions are parceled
+out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint[6] of the joint
+work, whilst each other performs his. The fable implies that the
+individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own
+labor to embrace all the other laborers. But, unfortunately, this
+original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to
+multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it
+is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is
+one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk and
+strut about so many walking monsters,--a good finger, a neck, a
+stomach, an elbow, but never a man.
+
+Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The planter,
+who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom cheered
+by any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He sees his bushel
+and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead
+of Man on the farm. The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth
+to his work, but is ridden[7] by the routine of his craft, and the
+soul is subject to dollars. The priest becomes a form; the attorney a
+statute-book; the mechanic a machine; the sailor a rope of the ship.
+
+In this distribution of functions the scholar is the delegated
+intellect. In the right state he is _Man Thinking_. In the degenerate
+state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker,
+or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.
+
+In this view of him, as Man Thinking, the whole theory of his office
+is contained. Him Nature solicits with all her placid, all her
+monitory pictures.[8] Him the past instructs. Him the future invites.
+Is not indeed every man a student, and do not all things exist for the
+student's behoof? And, finally, is not the true scholar the only true
+master? But as the old oracle said, "All things have two handles:
+Beware of the wrong one."[9] In life, too often, the scholar errs with
+mankind and forfeits his privilege. Let us see him in his school, and
+consider him in reference to the main influences he receives.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I. The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon
+the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun;[10] and, after sunset,
+Night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. Every
+day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden.[11] The scholar
+must needs stand wistful and admiring before this great spectacle. He
+must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to him? There is never
+a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of
+this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself.[12]
+Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he
+never can find,--so entire, so boundless. Far too as her splendors
+shine, system on system shooting like rays, upward, downward, without
+center, without circumference,--in the mass and in the particle, Nature
+hastens to render account of herself to the mind. Classification begins.
+To the young mind everything is individual, stands by itself. By and by
+it finds how to join two things and see in them one nature; then three,
+then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying
+instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies,
+discovering roots running under ground whereby contrary and remote
+things cohere and flower out from one stem. It presently learns that
+since the dawn of history there has been a constant accumulation and
+classifying of facts. But what is classification but the perceiving that
+these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which
+is also a law of the human mind? The astronomer discovers that geometry,
+a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of planetary
+motion. The chemist finds proportions and intelligible method throughout
+matter; and science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in
+the most remote parts. The ambitious soul sits down before each
+refractory fact; one after another reduces all strange constitutions,
+all new powers, to their class and their law, and goes on forever to
+animate the last fiber of organization, the outskirts of nature, by
+insight.
+
+Thus to him, to this school-boy under the bending dome of day, is
+suggested that he and it proceed from one Root; one is leaf and one is
+flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. And what is that
+root? Is not that the soul of his soul?--A thought too bold?--A dream
+too wild? Yet when this spiritual light shall have revealed the law of
+more earthly natures,--when he has learned to worship the soul, and to
+see that the natural philosophy that now is, is only the first
+gropings of its gigantic hand,--he shall look forward to an
+ever-expanding knowledge as to a becoming creator.[13] He shall see
+that nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for
+part. One is seal and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his
+own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind. Nature then becomes
+to him the measure of his attainments. So much of nature as he is
+ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess. And, in
+fine, the ancient precept, "Know thyself,"[14] and the modern precept,
+"Study nature," become at last one maxim.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+II. The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar is the
+mind of the Past,--in whatever form, whether of literature, of art, of
+institutions, that mind is inscribed. Books are the best type of the
+influence of the past, and perhaps we shall get at the truth,--learn
+the amount of this influence more conveniently,--by considering their
+value alone.
+
+The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received
+into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new
+arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into him
+life; it went out from him truth. It came to him short-lived actions;
+it went out from him immortal thoughts. It came to him business; it
+went from him poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is quick thought. It
+can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now
+inspires.[15] Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which
+it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing.
+
+Or, I might say, it depends on how far the process had gone, of
+transmuting life into truth. In proportion to the completeness of the
+distillation, so will the purity and imperishableness of the product
+be. But none is quite perfect. As no air-pump can by any means make a
+perfect vacuum,[16] so neither can any artist entirely exclude the
+conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book
+of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a
+remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age.
+Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each
+generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will
+not fit this.
+
+Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which attaches to
+the act of creation, the act of thought, is instantly transferred to
+the record. The poet chanting was felt to be a divine man. Henceforth
+the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and wise spirit.
+Henceforward it is settled the book is perfect; as love of the hero
+corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly the book becomes
+noxious.[17] The guide is a tyrant. We sought a brother, and lo, a
+governor. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, always
+slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened,
+having once received this book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry if
+it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by
+thinkers, not by Man Thinking, by men of talent, that is, who start
+wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of
+principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their
+duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke,[18] which
+Bacon,[19] have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were
+only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.
+
+Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence the
+book-learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature
+and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate[20]
+with the world and soul. Hence the restorers of readings,[21] the
+emendators,[22] the bibliomaniacs[23] of all degrees. This is bad;
+this is worse than it seems.
+
+Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What
+is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect?
+They are for nothing but to inspire.[24] I had better never see a book
+than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and
+made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world of
+value is the active soul,--the soul, free, sovereign, active. This
+every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although
+in almost all men obstructed, and as yet unborn. The soul active sees
+absolute truth and utters truth, or creates. In this action it is
+genius; not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound
+estate of every man.[25] In its essence it is progressive. The book,
+the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with
+some past utterance of genius. This is good, say they,--let us hold by
+this. They pin me down.[26] They look backward and not forward. But
+genius always looks forward. The eyes of man are set in his forehead,
+not in his hindhead. Man hopes. Genius creates. To create,--to
+create,--is the proof of a divine presence. Whatever talents may be,
+if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not
+his;[27]--cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame. There are
+creative manners, there are creative actions, and creative words;
+manners, actions, words, that is, indicative of no custom or
+authority, but springing spontaneous from the mind's own sense of good
+and fair.
+
+On the other part, instead of being its own seer, let it receive
+always from another mind its truth, though it were in torrents of
+light, without periods of solitude, inquest, and self-recovery; and a
+fatal disservice[28] is done. Genius is always sufficiently the enemy
+of genius by over-influence.[29] The literature of every nation bear
+me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakespearized now for two
+hundred years.[30]
+
+Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly
+subordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments.
+Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly,
+the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of
+their readings.[31] But when the intervals of darkness come, as come
+they must,--when the soul seeth not, when the sun is hid and the stars
+withdraw their shining,--we repair to the lamps which were kindled by
+their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn
+is.[32] We hear, that we may speak. The Arabian proverb says, "A
+fig-tree, looking on a fig-tree, becometh fruitful."
+
+It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the
+best books. They impress us ever with the conviction that one nature
+wrote and the same reads. We read the verses of one of the great
+English poets, of Chaucer,[33] of Marvell,[34] of Dryden,[35] with the
+most modern joy,--with a pleasure, I mean, which is in great part
+caused by the abstraction of all _time_ from their verses. There is
+some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived
+in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which
+lies close to my own soul, that which I also had well-nigh thought and
+said. But for the evidence thence afforded to the philosophical
+doctrine of the identity of all minds, we should suppose some
+pre-established harmony, some foresight of souls that were to be, and
+some preparation of stores for their future wants, like the fact
+observed in insects, who lay up food before death for the young grub
+they shall never see.
+
+I would not be hurried by any love of system, by any exaggeration of
+instincts, to underrate the Book. We all know that as the human body
+can be nourished on any food, though it were boiled grass and the
+broth of shoes, so the human mind can be fed by any knowledge. And
+great and heroic men have existed who had almost no other information
+than by the printed page. I only would say that it needs a strong head
+to bear that diet. One must be an inventor to read well. As the
+proverb says, "He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies must
+carry out the wealth of the Indies." There is then creative reading as
+well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and
+invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with
+manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense
+of our author is as broad as the world. We then see, what is always
+true, that as the seer's hour of vision is short and rare among heavy
+days and months, so is its record, perchance, the least part of his
+volume. The discerning will read, in his Plato[36] or Shakespeare,
+only that least part,--only the authentic utterances of the
+oracle;--all the rest he rejects, were it never so many times Plato's
+and Shakespeare's.
+
+Of course there is a portion of reading quite indispensable to a wise
+man. History and exact science he must learn by laborious reading.
+Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office,--to teach
+elements. But they can only highly serve us when they aim not to
+drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various
+genius to their hospitable halls, and by the concentrated fires set
+the hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge are natures
+in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns[37] and
+pecuniary foundations,[38] though of towns of gold, can never
+countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit.[39] Forget this,
+and our American colleges will recede in their public importance,
+whilst they grow richer every year.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+III. There goes in the world a notion that the scholar should be a
+recluse, a valetudinarian,[40]--as unfit for any handiwork or public
+labor as a penknife for an axe. The so-called "practical men" sneer at
+speculative men, as if, because they speculate or _see_, they could do
+nothing. I have heard it said that the clergy--who are always, more
+universally than any other class, the scholars of their day--are
+addressed as women; that the rough, spontaneous conversation of men
+they do not hear, but only a mincing[41] and diluted speech. They are
+often virtually disfranchised; and indeed there are advocates for
+their celibacy. As far as this is true of the studious classes, it is
+not just and wise. Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is
+essential. Without it he is not yet man. Without it thought can never
+ripen into truth. Whilst the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of
+beauty, we cannot even see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, but
+there can be no scholar without the heroic mind. The preamble[42] of
+thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious
+to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived.
+Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not.
+
+The world--this shadow of the soul, or _other me_, lies wide around.
+Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me
+acquainted with myself. I launch eagerly into this resounding tumult.
+I grasp the hands of those next me, and take my place in the ring to
+suffer and to work, taught by an instinct that so shall the dumb
+abyss[43] be vocal with speech. I pierce its order; I dissipate its
+fear;[44] I dispose of it within the circuit of my expanding life. So
+much only of life as I know by experience, so much of the wilderness
+have I vanquished and planted, or so far have I extended my being, my
+dominion. I do not see how any man can afford, for the sake of his
+nerves and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake. It is
+pearls and rubies to his discourse. Drudgery, calamity, exasperation,
+want, are instructors in eloquence and wisdom. The true scholar
+grudges every opportunity of action passed by, as a loss of power.
+
+It is the raw material out of which the intellect molds her splendid
+products. A strange process too, this by which experience is converted
+into thought, as a mulberry-leaf is converted into satin.[45] The
+manufacture goes forward at all hours.
+
+The actions and events of our childhood and youth are now matters of
+calmest observation. They lie like fair pictures in the air. Not so
+with our recent actions,--with the business which we now have in hand.
+On this we are quite unable to speculate. Our affections as yet
+circulate through it. We no more feel or know it than we feel the
+feet, or the hand, or the brain of our body. The new deed is yet a
+part of life,--remains for a time immersed in our unconscious life. In
+some contemplative hour it detaches itself from the life like a ripe
+fruit,[46] to become a thought of the mind. Instantly it is raised,
+transfigured; the corruptible has put on incorruption.[47] Henceforth
+it is an object of beauty, however base its origin and neighborhood.
+Observe, too, the impossibility of antedating this act. In its grub
+state it cannot fly, it cannot shine, it is a dull grub. But suddenly,
+without observation, the selfsame thing unfurls beautiful wings, and
+is an angel of wisdom. So is there no fact, no event, in our private
+history, which shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert
+form, and astonish us by soaring from our body into the empyrean.[48]
+Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and dogs,
+and ferules,[49] the love of little maids and berries, and many
+another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already; friend
+and relative, profession and party, town and country, nation and
+world, must also soar and sing.[50]
+
+Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit actions has
+the richest return of wisdom. I will not shut myself out of this globe
+of action, and transplant an oak into a flower-pot, there to hunger
+and pine; nor trust the revenue of some single faculty, and exhaust
+one vein of thought, much like those Savoyards,[51] who, getting their
+livelihood by carving shepherds, shepherdesses, and smoking Dutchmen,
+for all Europe, went out one day to the mountain to find stock, and
+discovered that they had whittled up the last of their pine-trees.
+Authors we have, in numbers, who have written out their vein, and who,
+moved by a commendable prudence, sail for Greece or Palestine, follow
+the trapper into the prairie, or ramble round Algiers, to replenish
+their merchantable stock.
+
+If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous of
+action. Life is our dictionary.[52] Years are well spent in country
+labors; in town; in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank
+intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art; to the one
+end of mastering in all their facts a language by which to illustrate
+and embody our perceptions. I learn immediately from any speaker how
+much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his
+speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and
+copestones for the masonry of to-day. This is the way to learn
+grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and
+the work-yard made.
+
+But the final value of action, like that of books, and better than
+books, is that it is a resource. That great principle of Undulation in
+nature, that shows itself in the inspiring and expiring of the breath;
+in desire and satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea; in day and night;
+in heat and cold; and, as yet more deeply ingrained in every atom and
+every fluid, is known to us under the name of Polarity,--these "fits of
+easy transmission and reflection," as Newton[53] called them, are the
+law of nature because they are the law of spirit.
+
+The mind now thinks, now acts, and each fit reproduces the other. When
+the artist has exhausted his materials, when the fancy no longer
+paints, when thoughts are no longer apprehended and books are a
+weariness,--he has always the resource _to live_. Character is higher
+than intellect. Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary.
+The stream retreats to its source. A great soul will be strong to
+live, as well as strong to think. Does he lack organ or medium to
+impart his truth? He can still fall back on this elemental force of
+living them. This is a total act. Thinking is a partial act. Let the
+grandeur of justice shine in his affairs. Let the beauty of affection
+cheer his lowly roof. Those "far from fame," who dwell and act with
+him, will feel the force of his constitution in the doings and
+passages of the day better than it can be measured by any public and
+designed display. Time shall teach him that the scholar loses no hour
+which the man lives. Herein he unfolds the sacred germ of his
+instinct, screened from influence. What is lost in seemliness is
+gained in strength. Not out of those on whom systems of education have
+exhausted their culture comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or
+to build the new, but out of unhandselled[54] savage nature; out of
+terrible Druids[55] and Berserkers[56] come at last Alfred[57] and
+Shakespeare. I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be
+said of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is
+virtue yet in the hoe and the spade,[58] for learned as well as for
+unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; always we are
+invited to work; only be this limitation observed, that a man shall
+not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the
+popular judgments and modes of action.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have now spoken of the education of the scholar by nature, by books,
+and by action. It remains to say somewhat of his duties.
+
+They are such as become Man Thinking. They may all be comprised in
+self-trust. The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to
+guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He plies the slow,
+unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. Flamsteed[59] and
+Herschel,[60] in their glazed observatories, may catalogue the stars
+with the praise of all men, and, the results being splendid and
+useful, honor is sure. But he, in his private observatory, cataloguing
+obscure and nebulous[61] stars of the human mind, which as yet no man
+has thought of as such,--watching days and months sometimes for a few
+facts; correcting still his old records,--must relinquish display and
+immediate fame. In the long period of his preparation he must betray
+often an ignorance and shiftlessness in popular arts, incurring the
+disdain of the able who shoulder him aside. Long he must stammer in
+his speech; often forego the living for the dead. Worse yet, he must
+accept--how often!--poverty and solitude. For the ease and pleasure of
+treading the old road, accepting the fashions, the education, the
+religion of society, he takes the cross of making his own, and, of
+course, the self-accusation, the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty
+and loss of time, which are the nettles and tangling vines in the way
+of the self-relying and self-directed; and the state of virtual
+hostility in which he seems to stand to society, and especially to
+educated society. For all this loss and scorn, what offset? He is to
+find consolation in exercising the highest functions of human nature.
+He is one who raises himself from private considerations and breathes
+and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the world's eye.
+He is the world's heart. He is to resist the vulgar prosperity that
+retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and communicating heroic
+sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and the conclusions of
+history. Whatsoever oracles the human heart, in all emergencies, in
+all solemn hours, has uttered as its commentary on the world of
+actions,--these he shall receive and impart. And whatsoever new
+verdict Reason from her inviolable seat pronounces on the passing men
+and events of to-day,--this he shall hear and promulgate.
+
+These being his functions, it becomes him to feel all confidence in
+himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He and he only knows
+the world. The world of any moment is the merest appearance. Some
+great decorum, some fetich[62] of a government, some ephemeral trade,
+or war, or man, is cried up[63] by half mankind and cried down by the
+other half, as if all depended on this particular up or down. The odds
+are that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought which the
+scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his
+belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable[64]
+of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom. In silence, in
+steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add
+observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach,
+and bide his own time,--happy enough if he can satisfy himself alone
+that this day he has seen something truly. Success treads on every
+right step. For the instinct is sure that prompts him to tell his
+brother what he thinks. He then learns that in going down into the
+secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all
+minds. He learns that he who has mastered any law in his private
+thoughts is master to that extent of all men whose language he speaks,
+and of all into whose language his own can be translated. The poet, in
+utter solitude remembering his spontaneous thoughts and recording
+them, is found to have recorded that which men in cities vast find
+true for them also. The orator distrusts at first the fitness of his
+frank confessions, his want of knowledge of the persons he addresses,
+until he finds that he is the complement[65] of his hearers;--that
+they drink his words because he fulfills for them their own nature;
+the deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to his
+wonder he finds this is the most acceptable, most public and
+universally true. The people delight in it; the better part of every
+man feels--This is my music; this is myself.
+
+In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended. Free should the
+scholar be,--free and brave. Free even to the definition of freedom,
+"without any hindrance that does not arise out of his own
+constitution." Brave; for fear is a thing which a scholar by his very
+function puts behind him. Fear always springs from ignorance. It is a
+shame to him if his tranquility, amid dangerous times, arise from the
+presumption that like children and women his is a protected class; or
+if he seek a temporary peace by the diversion of his thoughts from
+politics or vexed questions, hiding his head like an ostrich in the
+flowering bushes, peeping into microscopes, and turning rhymes, as a
+boy whistles to keep his courage up. So is the danger a danger still;
+so is the fear worse. Manlike let him turn and face it. Let him look
+into its eye and search its nature, inspect its origin,--see the
+whelping of this lion,--which lies no great way back; he will then
+find in himself a perfect comprehension of its nature and extent; he
+will have made his hands meet on the other side, and can henceforth
+defy it and pass on superior. The world is his who can see through its
+pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown
+error you behold is there only by sufferance,--by your sufferance. See
+it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.
+
+Yes, we are the cowed,--we the trustless. It is a mischievous notion
+that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long
+time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so
+it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To
+ignorance and sin it is flint. They adapt themselves to it as they
+may; but in proportion as a man has any thing in him divine, the
+firmament flows before him and takes his signet[66] and form. Not he
+is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind.
+They are the kings of the world who give the color of their present
+thought to all nature and all art, and persuade men, by the cheerful
+serenity of their carrying the matter, that this thing which they do
+is the apple which the ages have desired to pluck, now at last ripe,
+and inviting nations to the harvest. The great man makes the great
+thing. Wherever Macdonald[67] sits, there is the head of the table.
+Linnaeus[68] makes botany the most alluring of studies, and wins it
+from the farmer and the herb-woman: Davy,[69] chemistry; and
+Cuvier,[70] fossils. The day is always his who works in it with
+serenity and great aims. The unstable estimates of men crowd to him
+whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic
+follow the moon.[71]
+
+For this self-trust, the reason is deeper than can be fathomed,--darker
+than can be enlightened. I might not carry with me the feeling of my
+audience in stating my own belief. But I have already shown the ground
+of my hope, in adverting to the doctrine that man is one. I believe man
+has been wronged; he has wronged himself. He has almost lost the light
+that can lead him back to his prerogatives. Men are become of no
+account. Men in history, men in the world of to-day, are bugs, are
+spawn, and are called "the mass" and "the herd." In a century, in a
+millennium, one or two men;[72] that is to say, one or two
+approximations to the right state of every man. All the rest behold in
+the hero or the poet their own green and crude being,--ripened; yes, and
+are content to be less, so _that_ may attain to its full stature. What a
+testimony, full of grandeur, full of pity, is borne to the demands of
+his own nature, by the poor clansman, the poor partisan, who rejoices in
+the glory of his chief! The poor and the low find some amends to their
+immense moral capacity, for their acquiescence in a political and social
+inferiority.[73] They are content to be brushed like flies from the path
+of a great person, so that justice shall be done by him to that common
+nature which it is the dearest desire of all to see enlarged and
+glorified. They sun themselves in the great man's light, and feel it to
+be their own element. They cast the dignity of man from their downtrod
+selves upon the shoulders of a hero, and will perish to add one drop of
+blood to make that great heart beat, those giant sinews combat and
+conquer. He lives for us, and we live in him.
+
+Men such as they[74] are very naturally seek money or power; and power
+because it is as good as money,--the "spoils," so called, "of office."
+And why not? For they aspire to the highest, and this, in their
+sleep-walking, they dream is highest. Wake them and they shall quit
+the false good and leap to the true, and leave governments to clerks
+and desks. This revolution is to be wrought by the gradual
+domestication of the idea of Culture. The main enterprise of the world
+for splendor, for extent, is the upbuilding of a man. Here are the
+materials strewn along the ground. The private life of one man shall
+be a more illustrious monarchy, more formidable to its enemy, more
+sweet and serene in its influence to its friend, than any kingdom in
+history. For a man, rightly viewed, comprehendeth[75] the particular
+natures of all men. Each philosopher, each bard, each actor has only
+done for me, as by a delegate, what one day I can do for myself. The
+books which once we valued more than the apple of the eye, we have
+quite exhausted. What is that but saying that we have come up with the
+point of view which the universal mind took through the eyes of one
+scribe; we have been that man, and have passed on. First, one, then
+another, we drain all cisterns, and waxing greater by all these
+supplies, we crave a better and a more abundant food. The man has
+never lived that can feed us ever. The human mind cannot be enshrined
+in a person who shall set a barrier on any one side to this unbounded,
+unboundable empire. It is one central fire, which, flaming now out of
+the lips of Etna, lightens the capes of Sicily, and now out of the
+throat of Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and vineyards of Naples. It
+is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which
+animates all men.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But I have dwelt perhaps tediously upon this abstraction of the
+Scholar. I ought not to delay longer to add what I have to say of
+nearer reference to the time and to this country.
+
+Historically, there is thought to be a difference in the ideas which
+predominate over successive epochs, and there are data for marking the
+genius of the Classic, of the Romantic, and now of the Reflective or
+Philosophical age.[76] With the views I have intimated of the oneness
+or the identity of the mind through all individuals, I do not much
+dwell on these differences. In fact, I believe each individual passes
+through all three. The boy is a Greek; the youth, romantic; the
+adult, reflective. I deny not, however, that a revolution in the
+leading idea may be distinctly enough traced.
+
+Our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion.[77] Must that needs be
+evil? We, it seems, are critical. We are embarrassed with second
+thoughts.[78] We cannot enjoy anything for hankering to know whereof
+the pleasure consists. We are lined with eyes. We see with our feet.
+The time is infected with Hamlet's unhappiness,--
+
+     "Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."[79]
+
+Is it so bad then? Sight is the last thing to be pitied. Would we be
+blind? Do we fear lest we should outsee nature and God, and drink
+truth dry? I look upon the discontent of the literary class as a mere
+announcement of the fact that they find themselves not in the state of
+mind of their fathers, and regret the coming state as untried; as a
+boy dreads the water before he has learned that he can swim. If there
+is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of
+Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side and admit of
+being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and
+by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by
+the rich possibilities of the new era? This time, like all times, is a
+very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
+
+I read with some joy of the auspicious signs of the coming days, as
+they glimmer already through poetry and art, through philosophy and
+science, through church and state.
+
+One of these signs is the fact that the same movement[80] which
+effected the elevation of what was called the lowest class in the
+state assumed in literature a very marked and as benign an aspect.
+Instead of the sublime and beautiful, the near, the low, the common,
+was explored and poetized. That which had been negligently trodden
+under foot by those who were harnessing and provisioning themselves
+for long journeys into far countries, is suddenly found to be richer
+than all foreign parts. The literature of the poor, the feelings of
+the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household
+life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a
+sign--is it not?--of new vigor when the extremities are made active,
+when currents of warm life run into the hands and the feet. I ask not
+for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or
+Arabia; what is Greek art, or Provencal minstrelsy; I embrace the
+common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give
+me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future
+worlds. What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the
+firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the
+boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body;--show
+me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence
+of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in
+these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle
+bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal
+law;[81] and the shop, the plow, and the ledger referred to the like
+cause by which light undulates and poets sing;--and the world lies no
+longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order:
+there is no trifle, there is no puzzle, but one design unites and
+animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.
+
+This idea has inspired the genius of Goldsmith,[82] Burns,[83]
+Cowper,[84] and, in a newer time, of Goethe,[85] Wordsworth,[86] and
+Carlyle.[87] This idea they have differently followed and with various
+success. In contrast with their writing, the style of Pope,[88] of
+Johnson,[89] of Gibbon,[90] looks cold and pedantic. This writing is
+blood-warm. Man is surprised to find that things near are not less
+beautiful and wondrous than things remote. The near explains the far.
+The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature. This
+perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries.
+Goethe, in this very thing the most modern of the moderns, has shown
+us, as none ever did, the genius of the ancients.
+
+There is one man of genius who has done much for this philosophy of
+life, whose literary value has never yet been rightly estimated:--I
+mean Emanuel Swedenborg.[91] The most imaginative of men, yet writing
+with the precision of a mathematician, he endeavored to engraft a
+purely philosophical Ethics on the popular Christianity of his time.
+Such an attempt of course must have difficulty which no genius could
+surmount. But he saw and showed the connexion between nature and the
+affections of the soul. He pierced the emblematic or spiritual
+character of the visible, audible, tangible world. Especially did his
+shade-loving muse hover over and interpret the lower parts of nature;
+he showed the mysterious bond that allies moral evil to the foul
+material forms, and has given in epical parables a theory of insanity,
+of beasts, of unclean and fearful things.
+
+Another sign of our times, also marked by an analogous political
+movement, is the new importance given to the single person. Everything
+that tends to insulate the individual--to surround him with barriers
+of natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world is his, and
+man shall treat with man as a sovereign state with a sovereign
+state--tends to true union as well as greatness. "I learned," said the
+melancholy Pestalozzi,[92] "that no man in God's wide earth is either
+willing or able to help any other man." Help must come from the bosom
+alone. The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the
+ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes
+of the future. He must be an university of knowledges. If there be one
+lesson more than another that should pierce his ear, it is--The world
+is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and
+you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers
+the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all; it is for you to dare
+all. Mr. President and Gentlemen, this confidence in the unsearched
+might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all
+preparation, to the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the
+courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already
+suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice
+make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent,
+indolent, complaisant. See already the tragic consequence. The mind of
+this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is
+no work for any one but the decorous and the complaisant. Young men of
+the fairest promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the
+mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of God, find the earth
+below not in unison with these, but are hindered from action by the
+disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire, and
+turn drudges, or die of disgust, some of them suicides. What is the
+remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hopeful
+now crowding to the barriers for the career do not yet see, that if
+the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there
+abide, the huge world will come round to him. Patience,--patience;
+with the shades of all the good and great for company; and for solace
+the perspective of your own infinite life; and for work the study and
+the communication of principles, the making those instincts prevalent,
+the conversion of the world. Is it not the chief disgrace in the
+world, not to be an unit; not to be reckoned one character; not to
+yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to
+be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the
+party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted
+geographically, as the north, or the south? Not so, brothers and
+friends,--please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our own
+feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.
+Then shall man be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, and for
+sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man shall be a
+wall of defense and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of men will
+for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by
+the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.
+
+
+
+
+COMPENSATION.[93]
+
+    The wings of Time are black and white,
+    Pied with morning and with night.
+    Mountain tall and ocean deep
+    Trembling balance duly keep.
+    In changing moon, in tidal wave,
+    Glows the feud of Want and Have.
+    Gauge of more and less through space
+    Electric star and pencil plays.
+    The lonely Earth amid the balls
+    That hurry through the eternal halls,
+    A makeweight flying to the void,
+    Supplemental asteroid,
+    Or compensatory spark,
+    Shoots across the neutral Dark.
+
+    Man's the elm, and Wealth the vine,
+    Stanch and strong the tendrils twine;
+    Through the frail ringlets thee deceive,
+    None from its stock that vine can reave.
+    Fear not, then, thou child infirm,
+    There's no god dare wrong a worm.
+    Laurel crowns cleave to deserts,
+    And power to him who power exerts;
+    Hast not thy share? On winged feet,
+    Lo! it rushes thee to meet;
+    And all that Nature made thy own,
+    Floating in air or pent in stone,
+    Will rive the hills and swim the sea,
+    And, like thy shadow, follow thee.
+
+
+Ever since I was a boy, I have wished to write a discourse on
+Compensation: for it seemed to me when very young, that on this
+subject life was ahead of theology, and the people knew more than the
+preachers taught. The documents,[94] too, from which the doctrine is
+to be drawn, charmed my fancy by their endless variety, and lay always
+before me, even in sleep; for they are the tools in our hands, the
+bread in our basket, the transactions of the street, the farm, and the
+dwelling-house, greetings, relations, debts and credits, the influence
+of character, the nature and endowment of all men. It seemed to me,
+also, that in it might be shown men a ray of divinity, the present
+action of the soul of this world, clean from all vestige of tradition,
+and so the heart of man might be bathed by an inundation of eternal
+love, conversing with that which he knows was always and always must
+be, because it really is now. It appeared, moreover, that if this
+doctrine could be stated in terms with any resemblance to those bright
+intuitions in which this truth is sometimes revealed to us, it would
+be a star in many dark hours and crooked passages in our journey that
+would not suffer us to lose our way.
+
+I was lately confirmed in these desires by hearing a sermon at church.
+The preacher, a man esteemed for his orthodoxy, unfolded in the
+ordinary manner the doctrine of the Last Judgment. He assumed that
+judgment is not executed in this world; that the wicked are
+successful; that the good are miserable;[95] and then urged from
+reason and from Scripture a compensation to be made to both parties in
+the next life. No offense appeared to be taken by the congregation at
+this doctrine. As far as I could observe, when the meeting broke up,
+they separated without remark on the sermon.
+
+Yet what was the import of this teaching? What did the preacher mean
+by saying that the good are miserable in the present life? Was it that
+houses and lands, offices, wine, horses, dress, luxury, are had by
+unprincipled men, whilst the saints are poor and despised; and that a
+compensation is to be made to these last hereafter, by giving them the
+like gratifications another day,--bank stock and doubloons,[96]
+venison and champagne? This must be the compensation intended; for
+what else? Is it that they are to have leave to pray and praise? to
+love and serve men? Why, that they can do now. The legitimate
+inference the disciple would draw was: "We are to have _such_ a good
+time as the sinners have now"; or, to push it to its extreme import:
+"You sin now; we shall sin by and by; we would sin now, if we could;
+not being successful, we expect our revenue to-morrow."
+
+The fallacy lay in the immense concession that the bad are successful;
+that justice is not done now. The blindness of the preacher consisted
+in deferring to the base estimate of the market of what constitutes a
+manly success, instead of confronting and convicting the world from
+the truth; announcing the presence of the soul; the omnipotence of the
+will: and so establishing the standard of good and ill, of success and
+falsehood.
+
+I find a similar base tone in the popular religious works of the day,
+and the same doctrines assumed by the literary men when occasionally
+they treat the related topics. I think that our popular theology has
+gained in decorum, and not in principle, over the superstitions it has
+displaced. But men are better than this theology. Their daily life
+gives it the lie. Every ingenuous and aspiring soul leaves the
+doctrine behind him in his own experience; and all men feel sometimes
+the falsehood which they cannot demonstrate. Few men are wiser than
+they know. That which they hear in schools and pulpits without
+afterthought, if said in conversation, would probably be questioned in
+silence. If a man dogmatize in a mixed company on Providence and the
+divine laws, he is answered by a silence which conveys well enough to
+an observer the dissatisfaction of the hearer, but his incapacity to
+make his own statement.
+
+I shall attempt in this and the following chapter to record some facts
+that indicate the path of the law of Compensation; happy beyond my
+expectation, if I shall truly draw the smallest arc of this circle.
+
+POLARITY,[97] or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature;
+in darkness and light; in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow of waters;
+in male and female; in the inspiration and expiration of plants and
+animals; in the equation of quantity and quality in the fluids of the
+animal body; in the systole and diastole[98] of the heart; in the
+undulations of fluids, and of sound; in the centrifugal and centripetal
+gravity; in electricity, galvanism, and chemical affinity. Superinduce
+magnetism at one end of a needle; the opposite magnetism takes place at
+the other end. If the south attracts, the north repels. To empty here,
+you must condense there. An inevitable dualism bisects nature, so that
+each thing is a half, and suggests another thing to make it whole; as,
+spirit, matter; man, woman; odd, even; subjective, objective; in, out;
+upper, under; motion, rest; yea, nay.
+
+Whilst the world is thus dual, so is every one of its parts. The
+entire system of things gets represented in every particle. There is
+somewhat that resembles the ebb and flow of the sea, day and night,
+man and woman, in a single needle of the pine, in a kernel of corn, in
+each individual of every animal tribe. The reaction, so grand in the
+elements, is repeated within these small boundaries. For example, in
+the animal kingdom the physiologist has observed that no creatures
+are favorites, but a certain compensation balances every gift and
+every defect. A surplusage given to one part is paid out of a
+reduction from another part of the same creature. If the head and neck
+are enlarged, the trunk and extremities are cut short.
+
+The theory of the mechanic forces is another example. What we gain in
+power is lost in time; and the converse. The periodic or compensating
+errors of the planets is another instance. The influences of climate
+and soil in political history is another. The cold climate
+invigorates. The barren soil does not breed fevers, crocodiles,
+tigers, or scorpions.
+
+The same dualism underlies the nature and condition of man. Every
+excess causes a defect; every defect an excess. Every sweet hath its
+sour; every evil its good. Every faculty which is a receiver of
+pleasure has an equal penalty put on its abuse. It is to answer for
+its moderation with its life. For every grain of wit there is a grain
+of folly. For everything you have missed, you have gained something
+else; and for everything you gain, you lose something. If riches
+increase, they are increased[99] that use them. If the gatherer
+gathers too much, nature takes out of the man what she puts into his
+chest, swells the estate, but kills the owner. Nature hates monopolies
+and exceptions. The waves of the sea do not more speedily seek a level
+from their loftiest tossing, than the varieties of condition tend to
+equalize themselves. There is always some leveling circumstance that
+puts down the overbearing, the strong, the rich, the fortunate,
+substantially on the same ground with all others. Is a man too strong
+and fierce for society, and by temper and position a bad citizen,--a
+morose ruffian, with a dash of the pirate in him;--nature sends him a
+troop of pretty sons and daughters, who are getting along in the
+dame's classes at the village school, and love and fear for them
+smooths his grim scowl to courtesy. Thus she contrives to
+intenerate[100] the granite and felspar, takes the boar out and puts
+the lamb in, and keeps her balance true.
+
+The farmer imagines power and place are fine things. But the President
+has paid dear for his White House.[101] It has commonly cost him all
+his peace, and the best of his many attributes. To preserve for a
+short time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is
+content to eat dust[102] before the real masters who stand erect
+behind the throne. Or, do men desire the more substantial and
+permanent grandeur of genius? Neither has this an immunity. He who by
+force of will or of thought, is great, and overlooks[103] thousands,
+has the charges of that eminence. With every influx of light comes new
+danger. Has he light? he must bear witness to the light, and always
+outrun that sympathy which gives him such keen satisfaction, by his
+fidelity to new revelations of the incessant soul. He must hate father
+and mother, wife and child. Has he all that the world loves and
+admires and covets?--he must cast behind him their admiration, and
+afflict them by faithfulness to his truth, and become a by-word and a
+hissing.
+
+This law writes the laws of cities and nations. It is in vain to build
+or plot or combine against it. Things refuse to be mismanaged long.
+_Res nolunt diu male administrari._[104] Though no checks to a new
+evil appear, the checks exist, and will appear. If the government is
+cruel, the governor's life is not safe. If you tax too high, the
+revenue will yield nothing. If you make the criminal code sanguinary,
+juries will not convict. If the law is too mild, private vengeance
+comes in. If the government is a terrific democracy, the pressure is
+resisted by an overcharge of energy in the citizen, and life glows
+with a fiercer flame. The true life and satisfactions of man seem to
+elude the utmost rigors or felicities of condition, and to establish
+themselves with great indifferency under all varieties of
+circumstances. Under all governments the influence of character
+remains the same,--in Turkey and in New England about alike. Under the
+primeval despots of Egypt, history honestly confesses that man must
+have been as free as culture could make him.
+
+These appearances indicate the fact that the universe is represented
+in every one of its particles. Everything in nature contains all the
+powers of nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff; as the
+naturalist sees one type under every metamorphosis, and regards a
+horse as a running man, a fish as a swimming man, a bird as a flying
+man, a tree as a rooted man. Each new form repeats not only the main
+character of the type, but part for part all the details, all the
+aims, furtherances, hindrances, energies, and whole system of every
+other. Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the
+world and a correlative of every other. Each one is an entire emblem
+of human life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its
+course and its end. And each one must somehow accommodate the whole
+man, and recite all his destiny.
+
+The world globes itself in a drop of dew.[105] The microscope cannot
+find the animalcule which is less perfect for being little.[106] Eyes,
+ears, taste, smell, motion, resistance, appetite, and organs of
+reproduction that take hold on eternity,--all find room to consist in
+the small creature. So do we put our life into every act. The true
+doctrine of omnipresence is, that God reappears with all his parts in
+every moss and cobweb.[107] The value of the universe contrives to
+throw itself into every point. If the good is there, so is the evil;
+if the affinity, so the repulsion; if the force, so the limitation.
+
+Thus is the universe alive. All things are moral. That soul, which
+within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its
+inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength. "It
+is in the world, and the world was made by it." Justice is not
+postponed. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts of life.
+[Greek: Hoi  kyboi Dios aei eupiptousi],[108]--the dice of God are
+always loaded. The world looks like a multiplication table, or a
+mathematical equation, which, turn it how you will, balances itself.
+Take what figure you will, its exact value, nor more nor less, still
+returns to you. Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every
+virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty. What
+we call retribution is the universal necessity by which the whole
+appears wherever a part appears. If you see smoke, there must be fire.
+If you see a hand or limb, you know that the trunk to which it belongs
+is there behind.
+
+Every act rewards itself, or, in other words, integrates itself, in a
+twofold manner; first, in the thing, or in real nature; and secondly,
+in the circumstance, or in apparent nature. Men call the circumstance
+the retribution. The causal retribution is in the thing, and is seen
+by the soul. The retribution in the circumstance is seen by the
+understanding; it is inseparable from the thing, but is often spread
+over a long time, and so does not become distinct until after many
+years. The specific stripes may follow late after the offense, but
+they follow because they accompany it. Crime and punishment grow out
+of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the
+flower of the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, means and
+ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms
+in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.
+
+Whilst thus the world will be whole, and refuses to be disparted, we
+seek to act partially, to sunder, to appropriate; for example,--to
+gratify the senses, we sever the pleasure of the senses from the needs
+of the character. The ingenuity of man has always been dedicated to
+the solution of one problem,--how to detach the sensual sweet, the
+sensual strong, the sensual bright, etc., from the moral sweet, the
+moral deep, the moral fair; that is, again, to contrive to cut clean
+off this upper surface so thin as to leave it bottomless; to get a
+_one end_, without an _other end_. The soul says, Eat; the body would
+feast. The soul says, The man and woman shall be one flesh and one
+soul; the body would join the flesh only. The soul says, Have dominion
+over all things to the ends of virtue; the body would have the power
+over things to its own ends.
+
+The soul strives amain[109] to live and work through all things. It
+would be the only fact. All things shall be added unto it,--power,
+pleasure, knowledge, beauty. The particular man aims to be somebody;
+to set up for himself; to truck and higgle for a private good; and, in
+particulars, to ride, that he may ride; to dress, that he may be
+dressed; to eat, that he may eat; and to govern, that he may be seen.
+Men seek to be great; they would have offices, wealth, power, and
+fame. They think that to be great is to possess one side of
+nature,--the sweet, without the other side,--the bitter.
+
+This dividing and detaching is steadily counteracted. Up to this day,
+it must be owned, no projector has had the smallest success. The
+parted water reunites behind our hand. Pleasure is taken out of
+pleasant things, profit out of profitable things, power out of strong
+things, as soon as we seek to separate them from the whole. We can no
+more have things and get the sensual good, by itself, than we can get
+an inside that shall have no outside, or a light without a shadow.
+"Drive out nature with a fork, she comes running back."[110]
+
+Life invests itself with inevitable conditions, which the unwise seek
+to dodge, which one and another brags that he does not know; that they
+do not touch him;--but the brag is on his lips, the conditions are in
+his soul. If he escapes them in one part, they attack him in another
+more vital part. If he has escaped them in form, and in the
+appearance, it is because he has resisted his life, and fled from
+himself, and the retribution is so much death. So signal is the
+failure of all attempts to make this separation of the good from the
+tax, that the experiment would not be tried,--since to try it is to be
+mad,--but for the circumstance, that when the disease began in the
+will, of rebellion and separation, the intellect is at once infected,
+so that the man ceases to see God whole in each object, but is able to
+see the sensual allurement of an object, and not see the sensual hurt;
+he sees the mermaid's head, but not the dragon's tail; and thinks he
+can cut off that which he would have, from that which he would not
+have. "How secret art thou who dwellest in the highest heavens in
+silence, O thou only great God, sprinkling with an unwearied
+Providence certain penal blindnesses upon such as have unbridled
+desires!"[111]
+
+The human soul is true to these facts in the painting of fable, of
+history, of law, of proverbs, of conversation. It finds a tongue in
+literature unawares. Thus the Greeks called Jupiter,[112] Supreme
+Mind; but having traditionally ascribed to him many base actions, they
+involuntarily made amends to reason, by tying up the hands[113] of so
+bad a god. He is made as helpless as a king of England.[114]
+Prometheus[115] knows one secret which Jove must bargain for;
+Minerva,[116] another. He cannot get his own thunders; Minerva keeps
+the key of them.
+
+   "Of all the gods, I only know the keys
+    That ope the solid doors within whose vaults
+    His thunders sleep."
+
+A plain confession of the in-working of the All, and of its moral aim.
+The Indian mythology ends in the same ethics; and it would seem
+impossible for any fable to be invented to get any currency which was
+not moral. Aurora[117] forgot to ask youth for her lover, and though
+Tithonus is immortal, he is old, Achilles[118] is not quite
+invulnerable; the sacred waters did not wash the heel by which Thetis
+held him. Siegfried,[119] in the Niebelungen, is not quite immortal,
+for a leaf fell on his back whilst he was bathing in the dragon's
+blood, and that spot which it covered is mortal. And so it must be.
+There is a crack in everything God has made. It would seem, there is
+always this vindictive circumstance stealing in at unawares, even into
+the wild poesy in which the human fancy attempted to make bold
+holiday, and to shake itself free of the old laws,--this back-stroke,
+this kick of the gun, certifying that the law is fatal; that in nature
+nothing can be given, all things are sold.
+
+This is that ancient doctrine of Nemesis,[120] who keeps watch in the
+universe, and lets no offense go unchastised. The Furies,[121] they
+said, are attendants on justice, and if the sun in heaven should
+transgress his path, they would punish him. The poets related that
+stone walls, and iron swords, and leathern thongs had an occult
+sympathy with the wrongs of their owners; that the belt which Ajax
+gave Hector[122] dragged the Trojan hero over the field at the wheels
+of the car of Achilles, and the sword which Hector gave Ajax was that
+on whose point Ajax fell. They recorded, that when the Thasians[123]
+erected a statue to Theagenes, a victor in the games, one of his
+rivals went to it by night, and endeavored to throw it down by
+repeated blows, until at last he moved it from its pedestal, and was
+crushed to death beneath its fall.
+
+This voice of fable has in it somewhat divine. It came from thought
+above the will of the writer. That is the best part of each writer,
+which has nothing private in it;[124] that which he does not know,
+that which flowed out of his constitution, and not from his too
+active invention; that which in the study of a single artist you might
+not easily find, but in the study of many, you would abstract as the
+spirit of them all. Phidias it is not, but the work of man in that
+early Hellenic[125] world, that I would know. The name and
+circumstance of Phidias, however convenient for history, embarrass
+when we come to the highest criticism. We are to see that which man
+was tending to do in a given period, and was hindered, or, if you
+will, modified in doing, by the interfering volitions of Phidias, of
+Dante, of Shakespeare, the organ whereby man at the moment wrought.
+
+Still more striking is the expression of this fact in the proverbs of
+all nations, which are always the literature of reason, or the
+statements of an absolute truth, without qualification. Proverbs, like
+the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions.
+That which the droning world, chained to appearances, will not allow
+the realist to say in his own words, it will suffer him to say in
+proverbs without contradiction. And this law of laws which the pulpit,
+the senate, and the college deny, is hourly preached in all markets
+and workshops by flights of proverbs, whose teaching is as true and as
+omnipresent as that of birds and flies.
+
+All things are double, one against another.--Tit for tat;[126] an eye
+for an eye; a tooth for a tooth; blood for blood; measure for measure;
+love for love.--Give and it shall be given you.--- He that watereth
+shall be watered himself.--What will you have? quoth God; pay for it
+and take it.--Nothing venture, nothing have.--Thou shalt be paid
+exactly for what thou hast done, no more, no less.--Who doth not work
+shall not eat.--Harm watch, harm catch.--Curses always recoil on the
+head of him who imprecates them.--If you put a chain around the neck
+of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.--Bad counsel
+confounds the adviser.--The Devil is an ass.
+
+It is thus written, because it is thus in life. Our action is
+overmastered and characterized above our will by the law of nature. We
+aim at a petty end quite aside from the public good, but our act
+arranges itself by irresistible magnetism in a line with the poles of
+the world.
+
+A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will, or against
+his will, he draws his portrait to the eye of his companions by every
+word. Every opinion reacts on him who utters it. It is a thread-ball
+thrown at a mark, but the other end remains in the thrower's bag. Or,
+rather, it is a harpoon hurled at the whale, unwinding, as it flies, a
+coil of cord in the boat, and if the harpoon is not good, or not well
+thrown, it will go nigh to cut the steersman in twain, or to sink the
+boat.
+
+You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong. "No man had ever a point
+of pride that was not injurious to him," said Burke.[127] The
+exclusive in fashionable life does not see that he excludes himself
+from enjoyment in the attempt to appropriate it. The exclusionist in
+religion does not see that he shuts the door of heaven on himself, in
+striving to shut out others. Treat men as pawns[128] and ninepins, and
+you shall suffer as well as they. If you leave out their heart, you
+shall lose your own. The senses would make things of all persons; of
+women, of children, of the poor. The vulgar proverb, "I will get it
+from his purse or get it from his skin," is sound philosophy.
+
+All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are
+speedily punished. They are punished by fear. Whilst I stand in simple
+relations to my fellow-man, I have no displeasure in meeting him. We
+meet as water meets water, or as two currents of air mix, with perfect
+diffusion and interpenetration of nature. But as soon as there is any
+departure from simplicity, and attempt at halfness, or good for me
+that is not good for him, my neighbor feels the wrong; he shrinks from
+me as far as I have shrunk from him; his eyes no longer seek mine;
+there is war between us; there is hate in him and fear in me.
+
+All the old abuses in society, universal and particular, all unjust
+accumulations of property and power, are avenged in the same manner.
+Fear is an instructor of great sagacity, and the herald of all
+revolutions. One thing he teaches, that there is rottenness where he
+appears. He is a carrion crow, and though you see not well what he
+hovers for, there is death somewhere. Our property is timid, our laws
+are timid, our cultivated classes are timid. Fear for ages has boded
+and mowed and gibbered over government and property. That obscene[129]
+bird is not there for nothing. He indicates great wrongs which must be
+revised.
+
+Of the like nature is that expectation of change which instantly
+follows the suspension of our voluntary activity. The terror of
+cloudless noon, the emerald of Polycrates,[130] the awe of prosperity,
+the instinct which leads every generous soul to impose on itself tasks
+of a noble asceticism and vicarious virtue, are the tremblings of the
+balance of justice through the heart and mind of man.
+
+Experienced men of the world know very well that it is best to pay
+scot and lot[131] as they go along, and that a man often pays dear for
+a small frugality. The borrower runs in his own debt. Has a man gained
+anything who has received a hundred favors and rendered none? Has he
+gained by borrowing, through indolence or cunning, his neighbor's
+wares, or horses, or money? There arises on the deed the instant
+acknowledgment of benefit on the one part, and of debt on the other;
+that is, of superiority and inferiority. The transaction remains in
+the memory of himself and his neighbor; and every new transaction
+alters, according to its nature, their relation to each other. He may
+soon come to see that he had better have broken his own bones than to
+have ridden in his neighbor's coach, and that "the highest price he
+can pay for a thing is to ask for it."
+
+A wise man will extend this lesson to all parts of life, and know that
+it is the part of prudence to face every claimant, and pay every just
+demand on your time, your talents, or your heart. Always pay; for,
+first or last, you must pay your entire debt. Persons and events may
+stand for a time between you and justice, but it is only a
+postponement. You must pay at last your own debt. If you are wise, you
+will dread a prosperity which only loads you with more. Benefit is the
+end of nature. But for every benefit which you receive, a tax is
+levied. He is great who confers the most benefits. He is base--and
+that is the one base thing in the universe--to receive favors and
+render none. In the order of nature we cannot render benefits to those
+from whom we receive them, or only seldom.[132] But the benefit we
+receive must be rendered again, line for line, deed for deed, cent for
+cent, to somebody. Beware of too much good staying in your hand. It
+will fast corrupt and worm worms.[133] Pay it away quickly in some
+sort.
+
+Labor is watched over by the same pitiless laws. Cheapest, say the
+prudent, is the dearest labor. What we buy in a broom, a mat, a wagon,
+a knife, is some application of good sense to a common want. It is
+best to pay in your land a skillful gardener, or to buy good sense
+applied to gardening; in your sailor, good sense applied to
+navigation; in the house, good sense applied to cooking, sewing,
+serving; in your agent, good sense applied to accounts and affairs.
+So do you multiply your presence, or spread yourself throughout your
+estate. But because of the dual constitution of things, in labor as in
+life there can be no cheating. The thief steals from himself. The
+swindler swindles himself. For the real price of labor is knowledge
+and virtue, whereof wealth and credit are signs. These signs, like
+paper money, may be counterfeited or stolen, but that which they
+represent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited or
+stolen. These ends of labor cannot be answered but by real exertions
+of the mind, and in obedience to pure motives. The cheat, the
+defaulter, the gambler, cannot extort the knowledge of material and
+moral nature which his honest care and pains yield to the operative.
+The law of nature is, Do the thing, and you shall have the power: but
+they who do not the thing have not the power.
+
+Human labor, through all its forms, from the sharpening of a stake to
+the construction of a city or an epic, is one immense illustration of
+the perfect compensation of the universe. The absolute balance of Give
+and Take, the doctrine that everything has its price,--and if that
+price is not paid, not that thing but something else is obtained, and
+that it is impossible to get anything without its price,--is not less
+sublime in the columns of a ledger than in the budgets of states, in
+the laws of light and darkness, in all the action and reaction of
+nature. I cannot doubt that the high laws which each man sees
+implicated in those processes with which he is conversant, the stern
+ethics which sparkle on his chisel edge, which are measured out by his
+plumb and foot rule, which stand as manifest in the footing of the
+shop bill as in the history of a state,--do recommend to him his
+trade, and though seldom named, exalt his business to his imagination.
+
+The league between virtue and nature engages all things to assume a
+hostile front to vice. The beautiful laws and substances of the world
+persecute and whip the traitor. He finds that things are arranged for
+truth and benefit, but there is no den in the wide world to hide a
+rogue. Commit a crime,[134] and the earth is made of glass. Commit a
+crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as
+reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel
+and mole. You cannot recall the spoken word,[135] you cannot wipe out
+the foot-track, you cannot draw up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet
+or clew. Some damning circumstance always transpires. The laws and
+substances of nature--water, snow, wind, gravitation--become penalties
+to the thief.
+
+On the other hand, the law holds with equal sureness for all right
+action. Love, and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just,
+as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation. The good man has
+absolute good, which like fire turns everything to its own nature, so
+that you cannot do him any harm; but as the royal armies sent against
+Napoleon, when he approached, cast down their colors and from enemies
+became friends, so disasters of all kinds, as sickness, offense,
+poverty, prove benefactors:--
+
+              "Winds blow and waters roll
+    Strength to the brave, and power and deity,
+    Yet in themselves are nothing."
+
+The good are befriended even by weakness and defect. As no man had
+ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him, so no man had
+ever a defect that was not somewhere made useful to him. The stag in
+the fable[136] admired his horns and blamed his feet, but when the
+hunter came, his feet saved him, and afterwards, caught in the
+thicket, his horns destroyed him. Every man in his lifetime needs to
+thank his faults. As no man thoroughly understands a truth until he
+has contended against it, so no man has a thorough acquaintance with
+the hindrances or talents of men, until he has suffered from the one,
+and seen the triumph of the other over his own want of the same. Has
+he a defect of temper that unfits him to live in society? Thereby he
+is driven to entertain himself alone, and acquire habits of self-help;
+and thus, like the wounded oyster, he mends his shell with pearl.
+
+Our strength grows out of our weakness. The indignation which arms
+itself with secret forces does not awaken until we are pricked and
+stung and sorely assailed. A great man is always willing to be little.
+Whilst he sits on the cushion of advantages, he goes to sleep. When he
+is punished, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something;
+he has been put on his wits, on his manhood; he has gained facts;
+learns his ignorance; is cured of the insanity of conceit; has got
+moderation and real skill. The wise man throws himself on the side of
+his assailants. It is more his interest than it is theirs to find his
+weak point. The wound cicatrizes and falls off from him like a dead
+skin, and when they would triumph, lo! he has passed on invulnerable.
+Blame is safer than praise. I hate to be defended in a newspaper. As
+long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain
+assurance of success. But as soon as honeyed words of praise are
+spoken for me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies.
+In general, every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor. As
+the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the
+enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the
+temptation we resist.
+
+The same guards which protect us from disaster, defect, and enmity,
+defend us, if we will, from selfishness and fraud. Bolts and bars are
+not the best of our institutions, nor is shrewdness in trade a mark of
+wisdom. Men suffer all their life long, under the foolish superstition
+that they can be cheated. But it is as impossible for a man to be
+cheated by anyone but himself,[137] as for a thing to be and not to be
+at the same time. There is a third silent party to all our bargains.
+The nature and soul of things takes on itself the guaranty of the
+fulfillment of every contract, so that honest service cannot come to
+loss. If you serve an ungrateful master, serve him the more. Put God
+in your debt. Every stroke shall be repaid. The longer the payment is
+withholden,[138] the better for you; for compound interest on compound
+interest is the rate and usage of this exchequer.
+
+The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature,
+to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand. It makes no
+difference whether the actors be many or one, a tyrant or a mob. A
+mob[139] is a society of bodies voluntarily bereaving themselves of
+reason, and traversing its work. The mob is man voluntarily descending
+to the nature of the beast. Its fit hour of activity is night. Its
+actions are insane like its whole constitution; it persecutes a
+principle; it would whip a right; it would tar and feather justice, by
+inflicting fire and outrage upon the houses and persons of those who
+have these. It resembles the prank of boys, who run with fire engines
+to put out the ruddy aurora streaming to the stars. The inviolate
+spirit turns their spite against the wrongdoers. The martyr cannot be
+dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison, a
+more illustrious abode; every burned book or house enlightens the
+world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the
+earth from side to side. Hours of sanity and consideration are always
+arriving to communities, as to individuals, when the truth is seen,
+and the martyrs are justified.
+
+Thus do all things preach the indifferency of circumstances. The man
+is all. Everything has two sides, a good and an evil. Every advantage
+has its tax. I learn to be content. But the doctrine of compensation
+is not the doctrine of indifferency. The thoughtless say, on hearing
+these representations, What boots it to do well? there is one event to
+good and evil; if I gain any good, I must pay for it; if I lose any
+good, I gain some other; all actions are indifferent.
+
+There is a deeper fact in the soul than compensation, to wit, its own
+nature. The soul is not a compensation, but a life. The soul _is_.
+Under all this running sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and flow
+with perfect balance, lies the aboriginal abyss of real Being.
+Essence, or God, is not a relation, or a part, but the whole. Being is
+the vast affirmative, excluding negation, self-balanced, and
+swallowing up all relations, parts, and times within itself. Nature,
+truth, virtue, are the influx from thence. Vice is the absence or
+departure of the same. Nothing, Falsehood, may indeed stand as the
+great Night or shade, on which, as a background, the living universe
+paints itself forth, but no fact is begotten by it; it cannot work,
+for it is not. It cannot work any good; it cannot work any harm. It is
+harm inasmuch as it is worse not to be than to be.
+
+We feel defrauded of the retribution due to evil acts, because the
+criminal adheres to his vice and contumacy, and does not come to a
+crisis or judgment anywhere in visible nature. There is no stunning
+confutation of his nonsense before men and angels. Has he therefore
+outwitted the law? Inasmuch as he carries the malignity and the lie
+with him, he so far deceases from nature. In some manner there will be
+a demonstration of the wrong to the understanding also; but should we
+not see it, this deadly deduction makes square the eternal account.
+
+Neither can it be said, on the other hand, that the gain of rectitude
+must be bought by any loss. There is no penalty to virtue; no penalty
+to wisdom; they are proper additions of being. In a virtuous action, I
+properly _am_; in a virtuous act, I add to the world; I plant into
+deserts conquered from Chaos and Nothing, and see the darkness
+receding on the limits of the horizon. There can be no excess to love;
+none to knowledge; none to beauty, when these attributes are
+considered in the purest sense. The soul refuses limits, and always
+affirms an Optimism,[140] never a Pessimism.
+
+Man's life is a progress, and not a station. His instinct is trust.
+Our instinct uses "more" and "less" in application to man, of the
+_presence of the soul_, and not of its absence; the brave man is
+greater than the coward; the true, the benevolent, the wise, is more a
+man, and not less, than the fool and knave. There is no tax on the
+good of virtue; for that is the incoming of God himself, or absolute
+existence without any comparative. Material good has its tax, and if
+it came without desert or sweat, has no root in me, and the next wind
+will blow it away. But all the good of nature is the soul's, and may
+be had, if paid for in nature's lawful coin, that is, by labor which
+the heart and the head allow. I no longer wish to meet a good I do not
+earn; for example, to find a pot of buried gold, knowing that it
+brings with it new burdens. I do not wish more external
+goods,--neither possessions, nor honors, nor powers, nor persons. The
+gain is apparent; the tax is certain. But there is no tax on the
+knowledge that the compensation exists, and that it is not desirable
+to dig up treasure. Herein I rejoice with a serene eternal peace. I
+contract the boundaries of possible mischief. I learn the wisdom of
+St. Bernard,[141]--"Nothing can, work me damage except myself; the
+harm, that I sustain I carry about with me, and never am a real
+sufferer but by my own fault."
+
+In the nature of the soul is the compensation for the inequalities of
+condition. The radical tragedy of nature seems to be the distinction
+of More and Less. How can Less not feel the pain; how not feel
+indignation or malevolence towards More? Look at those who have less
+faculty, and one feels sad, and knows not well what to make of it. He
+almost shuns their eye; he fears they will upbraid God. What should
+they do? It seems a great injustice. But see the facts nearly, and
+these mountainous inequalities vanish. Love reduces them, as the sun
+melts the iceberg in the sea. The heart and soul of all men being one,
+this bitterness of _His_ and _Mine_ ceases. His is mine. I am my
+brother, and my brother is me. If I feel overshadowed and outdone by
+great neighbors, I can yet love; I can still receive; and he that
+loveth maketh his own the grandeur he loves. Thereby I make the
+discovery that my brother is my guardian, acting for me with the
+friendliest designs, and the estate I so admired and envied is my own.
+It is the nature of the soul to appropriate all things. Jesus[142] and
+Shakespeare are fragments of the soul, and by love I conquer and
+incorporate them in my own conscious domain. His[143] virtue,--is not
+that mine? His wit,--if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit.
+
+Such, also, is the natural history of calamity. The changes which
+break up at short intervals the prosperity of men are advertisements
+of a nature whose law is growth. Every soul is by this intrinsic
+necessity quitting its whole system of things, its friends, and home,
+and laws, and faith, as the shellfish crawls out of its beautiful but
+stony case, because it no longer admits of its growth, and slowly
+forms a new house. In proportion to the vigor of the individual, these
+revolutions are frequent, until in some happier mind they are
+incessant, and all worldly relations hang very loosely about him,
+becoming, as it were, a transparent fluid membrane through which the
+living form is seen, and not, as in most men, an indurated
+heterogeneous fabric of many dates, and of no settled character, in
+which the man is imprisoned. Then there can be enlargement, and the
+man of to-day scarcely recognizes the man of yesterday. And such
+should be the outward biography of man in time, a putting off of dead
+circumstances day by day, as he renews his raiment day by day. But to
+us, in our lapsed estate, resting, not advancing, resisting, not
+cooeperating with the divine expansion, this growth comes by shocks.
+
+We cannot part with our friend. We cannot let our angels go. We do not
+see that they only go out, that archangels may come in. We are
+idolaters of the old. We do not believe in the riches of the soul, in
+its proper eternity and omnipresence. We do not believe there is any
+force in to-day to rival or recreate that beautiful yesterday. We
+linger in the ruins of the old tent, where once we had bread and
+shelter and organs, nor believe that the spirit can feed, cover, and
+nerve us again. We cannot again find aught so dear, so sweet, so
+graceful. But we sit and weep in vain. The voice of the Almighty
+saith, "Up and onward forevermore!" We cannot stay amid the ruins.
+Neither will we rely on the new; and so we walk ever with reverted
+eyes, like those monsters who look backwards.
+
+And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the
+understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a
+mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of
+friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure
+years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts. The
+death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but
+privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius;
+for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an
+epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up
+a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows
+the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character. It
+permits or constrains the formation of new acquaintances, and the
+reception of new influences that prove of the first importance to the
+next years; and the man or woman who would have remained a sunny
+garden flower, with no room for its roots and too much sunshine for
+its head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect of the gardener,
+is made the banyan[144] of the forest, yielding shade and fruit to
+wide neighborhoods of men.
+
+
+
+
+SELF-RELIANCE
+
+"Ne te quaesiveris extra."[145]
+
+    "Man is his own star; and the soul that can
+    Render an honest and a perfect man,
+    Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
+    Nothing to him falls early or too late.
+    Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
+    Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."[146]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+      Cast the bantling on the rocks,
+      Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat;
+      Wintered with the hawk and fox,
+      Power and speed be hands and feet.[147]
+
+I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which
+were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an
+admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The
+sentiment they instill is of more value than any thought they may
+contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for
+you in your private heart is true for all men,--that is genius.[148]
+Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal
+sense;[149] for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,--and our
+first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last
+Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest
+merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato,[150] and Milton[151] is, that they
+set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what
+they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of
+light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster
+of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice
+his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize
+our own rejected thoughts:[152] they come back to us with a certain
+alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson
+for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression
+with good-humored inflexibility then most when[153] the whole cry of
+voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with
+masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the
+time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from
+another.
+
+There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the
+conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide;[154]
+that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that
+though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn
+can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground
+which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new
+in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor
+does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one
+character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none.
+This sculpture in the memory is not without preestablished harmony.
+The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of
+that particular ray. We but half express ourselves,[155] and are
+ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be
+safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be
+faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by
+cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his
+work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall
+give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the
+attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no
+hope.
+
+Trust thyself:[156] every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept
+the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your
+contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done
+so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age,
+betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated
+at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all
+their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind
+the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a
+protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides,
+redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing
+on Chaos[157] and the Dark.
+
+What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text, in the face and
+behavior of children, babes, and even brutes! That divided and rebel
+mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed
+the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these[158] have not.
+Their mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we
+look in their faces we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody:
+all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five[159]
+out of the adults who prattle and play to it. So God has armed youth
+and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and
+made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it
+will stand by itself. Do not think the youth has no force, because he
+cannot speak to you and me. Hark! in the next room his voice is
+sufficiently clear and emphatic. It seems he knows how to speak to his
+contemporaries. Bashful or bold, then, he will know how to make us
+seniors very unnecessary.
+
+The nonchalance[160] of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would
+disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the
+healthy attitude of human nature. A boy is in the parlor what the pit
+is in the playhouse;[161] independent, irresponsible, looking out from
+his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences
+them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad,
+interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never
+about consequences about interests; he gives an independent, genuine
+verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as
+it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has
+once acted or spoken with _eclat_[162] he is a committed person,
+watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections
+must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe[163] for this. Ah,
+that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who[164] can thus avoid
+all pledges, and having observed, observe again from the same
+unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always
+be formidable. He would utter opinions on all passing affairs, which
+being seen to be not private, but necessary, would sink like darts
+into the ear of men, and put them in fear.
+
+These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint
+and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in
+conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is
+a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better
+securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty
+and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity.
+Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators,
+but names and customs.
+
+Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.[165] He who would gather
+immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must
+explore if it be goodness.[166] Nothing is at last sacred but the
+integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall
+have the suffrage[167] of the world. I remember an answer which when
+quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was wont
+to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my
+saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live
+wholly from within? my friend suggested: "But these impulses may be
+from below, not from above." I replied: "They do not seem to me to be
+such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil."
+No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but
+names very readily transferable to that or this;[168] the only right
+is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A
+man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if
+everything were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think
+how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and
+dead institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and
+sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and
+speak the rude truth in all ways. If malice and vanity wear the coat
+of philanthropy, shall that pass? If an angry bigot assumes this
+bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from
+Barbadoes,[169] why should I not say to him: "Go love thy infant; love
+thy wood-chopper: be good-natured and modest: have that grace; and
+never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible
+tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is
+spite at home." Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but truth
+is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have
+some edge to it,--else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be
+preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules
+and whines. I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my
+genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post,
+_Whim_.[170] I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we
+cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I
+seek or why I exclude company. Then, again, do not tell me, as a good
+man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good
+situations. Are they _my_ poor? I tell thee, thou foolish
+philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give
+to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There
+is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought
+and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your
+miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools;
+the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now
+stand; alms to sots; and the thousand-fold Relief Societies;--though I
+confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a
+wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.
+
+Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the
+rule. There is the man _and_ his virtues. Men do what is called a good
+action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a
+fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are
+done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world,--as
+invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are penances.
+I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not
+for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so
+it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and
+unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and
+bleeding.[171] I ask primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse
+this appeal from the man to his actions. I know that for myself it
+makes no difference whether I do or forbear those actions which are
+reckoned excellent. I cannot consent to pay for a privilege where I
+have intrinsic right. Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am,
+and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows
+any secondary testimony.
+
+What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.
+This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may
+serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is
+the harder, because you will always find those who think they know
+what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to
+live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after
+our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps
+with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.[172]
+
+The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is,
+that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the
+impression of your character. If you maintain a dead church,
+contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for
+the government or against it, spread your table like base
+housekeepers,--under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the
+precise[173] man you are. And, of course, so much force is withdrawn
+from your proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you.[174] Do
+your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what
+a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect, I
+anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and
+topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I
+not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous
+word? Do I not know that, with[175] all this ostentation of examining
+the grounds of the institution, he will do no such thing? Do I not
+know that he is pledged to himself not to look but at one side,--the
+permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister? He is a
+retained attorney, and these airs of the bench[176] are the emptiest
+affectation. Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another
+handkerchief,[177] and attached themselves to some one of these
+communities of opinion.[178] This conformity makes them not false in a
+few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars.
+Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two,
+their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us,
+and we know not where to begin to set them right. Meantime nature is
+not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we
+adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by
+degrees the gentlest asinine expression. There is a mortifying
+experience in particular which does not fail to wreak itself also in
+the general history; I mean "the foolish face of praise," the forced
+smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in
+answer to conversation which does not interest us. The muscles, not
+spontaneously moved, but moved by a low usurping willfulness, grow
+tight about the outline of the face with the most disagreeable
+sensation.
+
+For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.[179] And
+therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face. The bystanders
+look askance on him in the public street or in the friend's parlor. If
+this aversation had its origin in contempt and resistance like his
+own, he might well go home with a sad countenance; but the sour faces
+of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are
+put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs.[180] Yet is
+the discontent of the multitude more formidable than that of the
+senate and the college. It is easy enough for a firm man who knows the
+world to brook the rage of the cultivated classes. Their rage is
+decorous and prudent, for they are timid as being very vulnerable
+themselves. But when to their feminine rage the indignation of the
+people is added, when the ignorant and the poor are aroused, when the
+unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom of society is made
+to growl and mow, it needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to
+treat it godlike as a trifle of no concernment.
+
+The other terror[181] that scares us from self-trust is our
+consistency;[182] a reverence for our past act or word, because the
+eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit[183] than
+our past acts, and we are loth to disappoint them.
+
+But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about
+this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat[184] you have
+stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict
+yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on
+your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring
+the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in
+a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the
+Deity; yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them
+heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color.
+Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and
+flee.[185]
+
+A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by
+little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a
+great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself
+with the shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words,
+and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though
+it contradict everything you said to-day.--"Ah, so you shall be sure
+to be misunderstood."--Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood?
+Pythagoras[186] was misunderstood, and Socrates,[187] and Jesus, and
+Luther,[188] and Copernicus,[189] and Galileo,[190] and Newton,[191]
+and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to
+be misunderstood.
+
+I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies of his will
+are rounded in by the law of his being, as the inequalities of
+Andes[192] and Himmaleh[193] are insignificant in the curve of the
+sphere. Nor does it matter how you gauge and try him. A character is
+like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza;[194]--read it forward,
+backward, or across, it still spells the same thing. In this pleasing,
+contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my
+honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it
+will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not, and see it not. My
+book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects. The
+swallow over my window should interweave that thread or straw he
+carries in his bill into my web also. We pass for what we are.
+Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate
+their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue
+or vice emit a breath every moment.
+
+There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so they be
+each honest and natural in their hour. For of one will, the actions
+will be harmonious, however unlike they seem. These varieties are lost
+sight of at a little distance, at a little height of thought. One
+tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line
+of a hundred tacks.[195] See the line from a sufficient distance, and
+it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action
+will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your
+conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already
+done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future. If
+I can be firm enough to-day to do right, and scorn eyes,[196] I must
+have done so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will,
+do right now. Always scorn appearances, and you always may. The force
+of character is cumulative. All the foregone days of virtue work their
+health into this. What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate
+and the field, which so fills the imagination? The consciousness of a
+train of great days and victories behind. They shed an united light on
+the advancing actor. He is attended as by a visible escort of angels.
+That is it which throws thunder into Chatham's[197] voice, and dignity
+into Washington's port, and America into Adams's[198] eye. Honor is
+venerable to us because it is no ephemeris. It is always ancient
+virtue. We worship it to-day because it is not of to-day. We love it
+and pay it homage, because it is not a trap for our love and homage,
+but is self-dependent, self-derived, and therefore of an old
+immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a young person.
+
+I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and
+consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward.
+Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the
+Spartan[199] fife. Let us never bow and apologize more. A great man is
+coming to eat at my house. I do not wish to please him; I wish that he
+should wish to please me. I will stand here for humanity, and though I
+would make it kind, I would make it true. Let us affront and reprimand
+the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl
+in the face of custom, and trade, and office, the fact which is the
+upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and
+Actor working wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no
+other time or place, but is the center of things. Where he is, there
+is nature. He measures you, and all men, and all events. Ordinarily,
+everybody in society reminds us of somewhat else, or of some other
+person. Character, reality, reminds you of nothing else; it takes
+place of the whole creation. The man must be so much, that he must
+make all circumstances indifferent. Every true man is a cause, a
+country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time
+fully to accomplish his design;--and posterity seem to follow his
+steps as a train of clients. A man Caesar[200] is born, and for ages
+after we have a Roman Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds
+so grow and cleave to his genius, that he is confounded with virtue
+and the possible of man. An institution is the lengthened shadow of
+one man; as Monachism, of the hermit Antony;[201] the Reformation, of
+Luther; Quakerism, of Fox;[202] Methodism, of Wesley;[203] Abolition,
+of Clarkson.[204] Scipio,[205] Milton called "the height of Rome"; and
+all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few
+stout and earnest persons.
+
+Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him
+not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy,
+a bastard, or an interloper, in the world which exists for him. But
+the man in the street, finding no worth in himself which corresponds
+to the force which built a tower or sculptured a marble god, feels
+poor when he looks on these. To him a palace, a statue, a costly book,
+have an alien and forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seem
+to say like that, "Who are you, Sir?" Yet they all are his, suitors
+for his notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come out
+and take possession. The picture waits for my verdict: it is not to
+command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise. That popular
+fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried
+to the duke's house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke's bed,
+and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the
+duke, and assured that he had been insane,[206] owes its popularity to
+the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the
+world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason,
+and finds himself a true prince.
+
+Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In history, our imagination
+plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, power and estate, are a gaudier
+vocabulary than private John and Edward in a small house and common
+day's work; but the things of life are the same to both; the sum total
+of both is the same. Why all this deference to Alfred,[207] and
+Scanderbeg,[208] and Gustavus?[209] Suppose they were virtuous; did
+they wear out virtue? As great a stake depends on your private act
+to-day, as followed their public and renowned steps. When private men
+shall act with original views, the luster will be transferred from the
+actions of kings to those of gentlemen.
+
+The world has been instructed by its kings, who have so magnetized the
+eyes of nations. It has been taught by this colossal symbol the mutual
+reverence that is due from man to man. The joyful loyalty with which
+men have everywhere suffered the king, the noble, or the great
+proprietor to walk among them by a law of his own, make his own scale
+of men and things, and reverse theirs, pay for benefits not with money
+but with honor, and represent the law in his person, was the
+hieroglyphic[210] by which they obscurely signified their
+consciousness of their own right and comeliness, the right of every
+man.
+
+The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we
+inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee? What is the
+aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded? What
+is the nature and power of that science-baffling star, without
+parallax,[211] without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of
+beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of
+independence appear? The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the
+essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity
+or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all
+later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind
+which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin. For the
+sense of being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the
+soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time,
+from man, but one with them, and proceeds obviously from the same
+source whence their life and being also proceed. We first share the
+life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in
+nature, and forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the
+fountain of action and of thought. Here are the lungs of that
+inspiration which giveth man wisdom, and which cannot be denied
+without impiety and atheism. We lie in the lap of immense
+intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its
+activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do
+nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask
+whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all
+philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can
+affirm. Every man discriminates between the voluntary acts of his
+mind, and his involuntary perceptions, and knows that to his
+involuntary perceptions a perfect faith is due. He may err in the
+expression of them, but he knows that these things are so, like day
+and night, not to be disputed. My willful actions and acquisitions are
+but roving;--the idlest reverie, the faintest native emotion, command
+my curiosity and respect. Thoughtless people contradict as readily the
+statement of perceptions as of opinions, or rather much more readily;
+for, they do not distinguish between perception and notion. They fancy
+that I choose to see this or that thing. But perception is not
+whimsical, it is fatal. If I see a trait, my children will see it
+after me, and in course of time, all mankind,--although it may chance
+that no one has seen it before me. For my perception of it is as much
+a fact as the sun.
+
+The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is
+profane to seek to interpose helps. It must be that when God speaketh
+he should communicate, not one thing, but all things; should fill the
+world with his voice; should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls,
+from the center of the present thought; and new date and new create
+the whole. Whenever a mind is simple, and receives a divine wisdom,
+old things pass away,--means, teachers, texts, temples, fall; it lives
+now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour. All things are
+made sacred by relation to it,--one as much as another. All things
+are dissolved to their center by their cause, and, in the universal
+miracle, petty and particular miracles disappear. If, therefore, a man
+claims to know and speak of God, and carries you backward to the
+phraseology of some old moldered nation in another country, in another
+world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which is its
+fullness and completion? Is the parent better than the child into whom
+he has cast his ripened being?[212] Whence, then, this worship of the
+past?[213] The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and
+authority of the soul. Time and space are but physiological colors
+which the eye makes, but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where
+it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury, if it
+be anything more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and
+becoming.
+
+Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say
+"I think," "I am," but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before
+the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window
+make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what
+they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There
+is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.
+Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown
+flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its
+nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike.
+But man postpones, or remembers; he does not live in the present, but
+with a reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that
+surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be
+happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above
+time.
+
+This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong intellects dare not
+yet hear God himself, unless he speak the phraseology of I know not
+what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great a
+price on a few texts, on a few lives.[214] We are like children who
+repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as they
+grow older, of the men and talents and characters they chance to
+see,--painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke; afterwards,
+when they come into the point of view which those had who uttered
+those saying, they understand them, and are willing to let the words
+go; for, at any time, they can use words as good when occasion comes.
+If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man
+to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak. When we have new
+perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded
+treasures as old rubbish. When a man lives with God, his voice shall
+be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn.
+
+And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains unsaid;
+probably cannot be said; for all that we say is the far-off
+remembering of the intuition. That thought, by what I can now nearest
+approach to say it, is this. When good is near you, when you have
+life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way; you shall
+not discern the footprints of any other; you shall not see the face of
+man; you shall not hear any name;--the way, the thought, the good,
+shall be wholly strange and new. It shall exclude example and
+experience. You take the way from man, not to man. All persons that
+ever existed are its forgotten ministers. Fear and hope are alike
+beneath it. There is somewhat low even in hope. In the hour of vision,
+there is nothing that can be called gratitude, nor properly joy. The
+soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation,
+perceives the self-existence of Truth and Right, and calms itself with
+knowing that all things go well. Vast spaces of nature, the Atlantic
+Ocean, the South Sea,--long intervals of time, years, centuries,--are
+of no account. This which I think and feel underlay every former state
+of life and circumstances, as it does underlie my present, and what is
+called life, and what is called death.
+
+Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of
+repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new
+state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one
+fact the world hates, that the soul _becomes_; for that forever
+degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to
+shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas[215]
+equally aside. Why, then, do we prate of self-reliance? Inasmuch as
+the soul is present, there will be power not confident but agent.[216]
+To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather
+of that which relies, because it works and is. Who has more obedience
+than I masters me, though he should not raise his finger. Round him I
+must revolve by the gravitation of spirits. We fancy it rhetoric, when
+we speak of eminent virtue. We do not yet see that virtue is Height,
+and that a man or a company of men, plastic and permeable to
+principles, by the law of nature must overpower and ride all cities,
+nations, kings, rich men, poets, who are not.
+
+This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this, as on
+every topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed ONE.
+Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it
+constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it enters into
+all lower forms. All things real are so by so much virtue as they
+contain. Commerce, husbandry, hunting, whaling, war eloquence,
+personal weight, are somewhat, and engage my respect as examples of
+its presence and impure action. I see the same law working in nature
+for conservation and growth. Power is in nature the essential measure
+of right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which
+cannot help itself. The genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise
+and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the
+vital resources of every animal and vegetable, are demonstrations of
+the self-sufficing, and therefore self-relying soul.
+
+Thus all concentrates: let us not rove; let us sit at home with the
+cause. Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books
+and institutions, by a simple declaration of the divine fact. Bid the
+invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here
+within.[217] Let our simplicity judge them, and our docility to our
+own law demonstrate the poverty of nature and fortune beside our
+native riches.
+
+But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his
+genius admonished to stay at home to put itself in communication with
+the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the
+urns of other men. We must go alone. I like the silent church before
+the service begins, better than any preaching. How far off, how cool,
+how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a precinct or
+sanctuary! So let us always sit. Why should we assume the faults of
+our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our
+hearth, or are said to have the same blood? All men have my blood, and
+I have all men's.[218] Not for that will I adopt their petulance or
+folly, even to the extent of being ashamed of it. But your isolation
+must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation. At
+times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with
+emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want,
+charity, all knock at once at thy closet door, and say, "Come out unto
+us." But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The power men
+possess to annoy men, I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can
+come near me but through my act. "What we love that we have, but by
+desire we bereave ourselves of the love."
+
+If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith,
+let us at least resist our temptations; let us enter into the state of
+war, and wake Thor and Woden,[219] courage and constancy, in our Saxon
+breasts. This is to be done in our smooth times by speaking the truth.
+Check this lying hospitality and lying affection. Live no longer to
+the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we
+converse. Say to them, O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O
+friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward
+I am the truth's. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law
+less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but
+proximities.[220] I shall endeavor to nourish my parents, to support
+my family, to be the chaste husband of one wife,--but these relations
+I must fill after a new and unprecedented way. I appeal from your
+customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you,
+or you.[221] If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the
+happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should.
+I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is
+deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever
+inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints. If you are noble, I will
+love you; if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by
+hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truth
+with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own. I do this not
+selfishly, but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest, and mine,
+and all men's however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth.
+Does this sound harsh to-day? You will soon love what is dictated by
+your nature as well as mine, and, if we follow the truth, it will
+bring us out safe at last.[222] But so may you give these friends
+pain. Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their
+sensibility. Besides, all persons have their moments of reason, when
+they look out into the region of absolute truth; then will they
+justify me, and do the same thing.
+
+The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a
+rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism;[223] and the bold
+sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the
+law of consciousness abides. There are two confessionals, in one or
+the other of which we must be shriven. You may fulfill your round of
+duties by clearing yourself in the _direct_, or in the _reflex_ way.
+Consider whether you have satisfied your relations to father, mother,
+cousin, neighbor, town, cat, and dog; whether any of these can upbraid
+you. But I may also neglect this reflex standard, and absolve me to
+myself. I have my own stern claims and perfect circle. It denies the
+name of duty to many offices that are called duties. But if I can
+discharge its debts, it enables me to dispense with the popular code.
+If any one imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its
+commandment one day.
+
+And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the
+common motives of humanity, and has ventured to trust himself for a
+taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight,
+that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself,
+that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is to
+others!
+
+If any man consider the present aspects of what is called by
+distinction _society_, he will see the need of these ethics. The sinew
+and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous,
+desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune,
+afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and
+perfect persons. We want men and women who shall renovate life and our
+social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot
+satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to
+their practical force,[224] and do lean and beg day and night
+continually. Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations,
+our marriages, our religion, we have not chosen, but society has
+chosen for us. We are parlor soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of
+fate, where strength is born.
+
+If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all
+heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is _ruined_. If the
+finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in
+an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of
+Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is
+right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life.
+A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the
+professions, who _teams it, farms it_,[225] _peddles_, keeps a school,
+preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so
+forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet,
+is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his
+days, and feels no shame in not "studying a profession," for he does
+not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a
+hundred chances. Let a Stoic[226] open the resources of man, and tell
+men they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves;
+that with the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear; that a
+man is the word made flesh,[227] born to shed healing to the
+nations,[228] that he should be ashamed of our compassion, and that
+the moment he acts from himself, tossing the laws, the books,
+idolatries and customs out of the window, we pity him no more, but
+thank and revere him,--and that teacher shall restore the life of man
+to splendor, and make his name dear to all history.
+
+It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution
+in all the offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their
+education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their
+association; in their property; in their speculative views.
+
+1. In what prayers do men allow themselves![229] That which they call
+a holy office is not so much as brave and manly. Prayer looks abroad
+and asks for some foreign addition to come through some foreign
+virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural,
+and mediatorial and miraculous. Prayer that craves a particular
+commodity,--anything less than all good,--is vicious. Prayer is the
+contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It
+is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul.[230] It is the
+spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to
+effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and
+not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one
+with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action. The
+prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of
+the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard
+throughout nature, though for cheap ends. Caratach,[231] in Fletcher's
+Bonduca, when admonished to inquire the mind of the god Audate,
+replies,--
+
+   "His hidden meaning lies in our endeavors;
+    Our valors are our best gods."
+
+Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want
+of self-reliance; it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you
+can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and
+already the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base.
+We come to them who weep foolishly, and sit down and cry for company,
+instead of imparting to them truth and health in rough electric
+shocks, putting them once more in communication with their own reason.
+The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods
+and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him
+all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our
+love goes out to him and embraces him, because he did not need it. We
+solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him, because he
+held on his way and scorned our disapprobation. The gods love him
+because men hated him. "To the persevering mortal," said
+Zoroaster,[232] "the blessed Immortals are swift."
+
+As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a
+disease of the intellect. They say with those foolish Israelites, "Let
+not God speak to us, lest we die. Speak thou, speak any man with us, and
+we will obey."[233] Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God in my
+brother, because he has shut his own temple doors, and recites fables
+merely of his brother's, or his brother's brother's God. Every new mind
+is a new classification. If it prove a mind of uncommon activity and
+power, a Locke,[234] a Lavoisier,[235] a Hutton,[236] a Betham,[237] a
+Fourier,[238] it imposes its classification on other men, and lo! a new
+system. In proportion to the depth of the thought, and so to the number
+of the objects it touches and brings within reach of the pupil, is his
+complacency. But chiefly is this apparent in creeds and churches, which
+are also classifications of some powerful mind acting on the elemental
+thought of duty, and man's relation to the Highest. Such is
+Calvinism,[239] Quakerism,[240] Swedenborgism.[241] The pupil takes the
+same delight in subordinating everything to the new terminology, as a
+girl who has just learned botany in seeing a new earth and new seasons
+thereby. It will happen for a time, that the pupil will find his
+intellectual power has grown by the study of his master's mind. But in
+all unbalanced minds, the classification is idolized, passes for the
+end, and not for a speedily exhaustible means, so that the walls of the
+system blend to their eye in the remote horizon with the walls of the
+universe; the luminaries of heaven seem to them hung on the arch their
+master built. They cannot imagine how you aliens have any right to
+see,--how you can see; "It must be somehow that you stole the light from
+us." They do not yet perceive that light, unsystematic, indomitable,
+will break into any cabin, even into theirs. Let them chirp awhile and
+call it their own. If they are honest and do well, presently their neat
+new pinfold will be too strait and low, will crack, will lean, will rot
+and vanish, and the immortal light, all young and joyful, million-orbed,
+million-colored, will beam over the universe as on the first morning.
+
+2. It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Traveling,
+whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all
+educated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable
+in the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like an
+axis of the earth. In manly hours, we feel that duty is our place. The
+soul is no traveler; the wise man stays at home, and when his
+necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or
+into foreign lands, he is at home still; and shall make men sensible
+by the expression of his countenance, that he goes the missionary of
+wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign, and not
+like an interloper or a valet.
+
+I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for
+the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is
+first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding
+somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get
+somewhat which he does not carry,[242] travels away from himself, and
+grows old even in youth among old things. In Thebes,[243] in
+Palmyra,[244] his will and mind have become old and dilapidated as
+they. He carries ruins to ruins.
+
+Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the
+indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can
+be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk,
+embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples,
+and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting,
+identical, that I fled from.[245] I seek the Vatican,[246] and the
+palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but
+I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.
+
+3. But the rage of traveling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness
+affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond,
+and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel
+when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is
+imitation but the traveling of the mind? Our houses are built with
+foreign taste; our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments; our
+opinions, our tastes, our faculties, lean, and follow the Past and the
+Distant. The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished. It
+was in his own mind that the artist sought his model. It was an
+application of his own thought to the thing to be done and the
+conditions to be observed. And why need we copy the Doric[247] or the
+Gothic[248] model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought, and
+quaint expression are as near to us as to any, and if the American
+artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by
+him considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the
+wants of the people, the habit and form of the government, he will
+create a house in which all these will find themselves fitted, and
+taste and sentiment will be satisfied also.
+
+Insist on yourself; never imitate.[249] Your own gift you can present
+every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation;
+but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous,
+half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can
+teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has
+exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught
+Shakespeare?[250] Where is the master who could have instructed
+Franklin,[251] or Washington, or Bacon,[252] or Newton?[253] Every great
+man is a unique. The Scipionism of Scipio[254] is precisely that part he
+could not borrow. Shakespeare will never be made by the study of
+Shakespeare. Do that which is assigned to you, and you cannot hope too
+much or dare too much. There is at this moment for you an utterance
+brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias,[255] or
+trowel of the Egyptians,[256] or the pen of Moses,[257] or Dante,[258]
+but different from all these. Not possibly will the soul all rich, all
+eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if
+you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can reply to them in
+the same pitch of voice; for the ear and the tongue are two organs of
+one nature. Abide in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy
+heart, and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld[259] again.
+
+4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so does our
+spirit of society. All men plume themselves on the improvement of
+society, and no man improves.
+
+Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on
+the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is
+civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this
+change is not amelioration. For everything that is given, something is
+taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. What a
+contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American,
+with a watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the
+naked New Zealander,[260] whose property is a club, a spear, a mat,
+and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the
+health of the two men, and you shall see that the white man has lost
+his aboriginal strength. If the traveler tell us truly, strike the
+savage with a broad ax, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and
+heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow
+shall send the white to his grave.
+
+The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.
+He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He
+has a fine Geneva[261] watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the
+hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac[262] he has, and so
+being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street
+does not know a star in the sky. The solstice[263] he does not
+observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar
+of the year is without a dial in his mind. His notebooks impair his
+memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance office increases
+the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery
+does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some
+energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some
+vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom
+where is the Christian?
+
+There is no more deviation in the moral standard than in the standard
+of height or bulk. No greater men are now than ever were. A singular
+equality may be observed between great men of the first and of the
+last ages; nor can all the science, art, religion, and philosophy of
+the nineteenth century avail to educate greater men than
+Plutarch's[264] heroes, three or four and twenty centuries ago. Not in
+time is the race progressive. Phocion,[265] Socrates, Anaxagoras,[266]
+Diogenes,[267] are great men, but they leave no class. He who is
+really of their class will not be called by their name, but will be
+his own man, and, in his turn, the founder of a sect. The arts and
+inventions of each period are only its costume, and do not invigorate
+men. The harm of the improved machinery may compensate its good.
+Hudson[268] and Bering[269] accomplished so much in their fishing
+boats, as to astonish Parry[270] and Franklin,[271] whose equipment
+exhausted the resources of science and art. Galileo, with an
+opera-glass, discovered a more splendid series of celestial phenomena
+than any one since. Columbus[272] found the New World in an undecked
+boat. It is curious to see the periodical disuse and perishing of
+means and machinery, which were introduced with loud laudation a few
+years or centuries before. The great genius returns to essential man.
+We reckoned the improvements of the art of war among the triumphs of
+science, and yet Napoleon[273] conquered Europe by the bivouac, which
+consisted of falling back on naked valor, and disencumbering it of all
+aids. The Emperor held it impossible to make a perfect army, says Las
+Casas,[274] "without abolishing our arms, magazines, commissaries, and
+carriages, until, in imitation of the Roman custom, the soldier should
+receive his supply of corn, grind it in his handmill, and bake his
+bread himself."
+
+Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is
+composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to
+the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a
+nation to-day, next year die, and their experience with them.
+
+And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments
+which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have looked away
+from themselves and at things so long, that they have come to esteem
+the religious, learned, and civil institutions as guards of property,
+and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be
+assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what
+each has, and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes
+ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially
+he hates what he has, if he see that it is accidental,--came to him by
+inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having;
+it does not belong to him, has no root in him, and merely lies there,
+because no revolution or no robber takes it away. But that which a man
+is, does always by necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is
+living property, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or
+revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually
+renews itself wherever the man breathes. "Thy lot or portion of life,"
+said the Caliph Ali,[275] "is seeking after thee; therefore be at rest
+from seeking after it." Our dependence on these foreign goods leads us
+to our slavish respect for numbers. The political parties meet in
+numerous conventions; the greater the concourse, and with each new
+uproar of announcement, The delegation from Essex![276] The Democrats
+from New Hampshire! The Whigs of Maine! the young patriot feels
+himself stronger than before by a new thousand of eyes and arms. In
+like manner the reformers summon conventions, and vote and resolve in
+multitude. Not so, O friends! will the god deign to enter and inhabit
+you, but by a method precisely the reverse. It is only as a man puts
+off all foreign support, and stands alone, that I see him to be strong
+and to prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to his banner. Is not a
+man better than a town? Ask nothing of men, and in the endless
+mutation, thou only firm column must presently appear the upholder of
+all that surrounds thee. He who knows that power is inborn, that he is
+weak because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and so
+perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly
+rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs,
+works miracles; just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than
+a man who stands on his head.
+
+So use all that is called Fortune.[277] Most men gamble with her, and
+gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as
+unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the
+chancelors of God. In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained
+the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her
+rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your
+sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable
+event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for
+you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
+Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
+
+
+
+
+FRIENDSHIP.[278]
+
+
+1. We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. Barring all
+the selfishness that chills like east winds the world, the whole human
+family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether. How many
+persons we meet in houses, whom we scarcely speak to, whom yet we
+honor, and who honor us! How many we see in the street, or sit with in
+church, whom, though silently, we warmly rejoice to be with! Read the
+language of these wandering eyebeams. The heart knoweth.
+
+2. The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is a certain
+cordial exhilaration. In poetry, and in common speech, the emotions of
+benevolence and complacency which are felt toward others, are likened
+to the material effects of fire; so swift, or much more swift, more
+active, more cheering are these fine inward irradiations. From the
+highest degree of passionate love, to the lowest degree of good will,
+they make the sweetness of life.
+
+3. Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection. The
+scholar sits down to write, and all his years of meditation do not
+furnish him with one good thought or happy expression; but it is
+necessary to write a letter to a friend, and, forthwith, troops of
+gentle thoughts invest themselves, on every hand, with chosen words.
+See in any house where virtue and self-respect abide, the palpitation
+which the approach of a stranger causes. A commended stranger is
+expected and announced, and an uneasiness between pleasure and pain
+invades all the hearts of a household. His arrival almost brings fear
+to the good hearts that would welcome him. The house is dusted, all
+things fly into their places, the old coat is exchanged for the new,
+and they must get up a dinner if they can. Of a commended stranger,
+only the good report is told by others, only the good and new is heard
+by us. He stands to us for humanity. He is, what we wish. Having
+imagined and invested him, we ask how we should stand related in
+conversation and action with such a man, and are uneasy with fear. The
+same idea exalts conversation with him. We talk better than we are
+wont. We have the nimblest fancy, a richer memory, and our dumb devil
+has taken leave for the time. For long hours we can continue a series
+of sincere, graceful, rich communications, drawn from the oldest,
+secretest experience, so that they who sit by, of our own kinsfolk and
+acquaintance, shall feel a lively surprise at our unusual powers. But
+as soon as the stranger begins to intrude his partialities, his
+definitions, his defects, into the conversation, it is all over. He
+has heard the first, the last and best, he will ever hear from us. He
+is no stranger now. Vulgarity, ignorance, misapprehension, are old
+acquaintances. Now, when he comes, he may get the order, the dress,
+and the dinner, but the throbbing of the heart, and the communications
+of the soul, no more.
+
+4. What is so pleasant as these jets of affection which relume[279] a
+young world for me again? What is so delicious as a just and firm
+encounter of two, in a thought, in a feeling? How beautiful, on their
+approach to this beating heart, the steps and forms of the gifted and
+the true! The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is
+metamorphosed; there is no winter, and no night; all tragedies, all
+ennuis vanish; all duties even; nothing fills the proceeding eternity
+but the forms all radiant of beloved persons. Let the soul be assured
+that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it
+would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years.
+
+5. I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old
+and the new. Shall I not call God, the Beautiful, who daily showeth
+himself so to me in his gifts? I chide society, I embrace solitude, and
+yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, the lovely, and the
+noble-minded, as from time to time they pass my gate.[280] Who hears me,
+who understands me, becomes mine,--a possession for all time. Nor is
+nature so poor, but she gives me this joy several times, and thus we
+weave social threads of our own, a new web of relations; and, as many
+thoughts in succession substantiate themselves, we shall by-and-by stand
+in a new world of our own creation, and no longer strangers and pilgrims
+is a traditionary globe. My friends have come[281] to me unsought. The
+great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of
+virtue with itself, I find them, or rather, not I, but the Deity in me
+and in them, both deride and cancel the thick walls of individual
+character, relation, age, sex and circumstance, at which he usually
+connives, and now makes many one. High thanks I owe you, excellent
+lovers, who carry out the world for me to new and noble depths, and
+enlarge the meaning of all my thoughts. These are new poetry of the
+first Bard[282]--poetry without stop--hymn, ode and epic,[283] poetry
+still flowing, Apollo[284] and the Muses[285] chanting still. Will these
+two separate themselves from me again, or some of them? I know not, but
+I fear it not; for my relation to them is so pure, that we hold by
+simple affinity, and the Genius[286] of my life being thus social, the
+same affinity will exert its energy on whomsoever is as noble as these
+men and women, wherever I may be.
+
+6. I confess to an extreme tenderness of nature on this point. It is
+almost dangerous to me to "crush the sweet poison,[287] of misused
+wine" of the affections. A new person is to me a great event, and
+hinders me from sleep. I have had such fine fancies lately about two
+or three persons, as have given me delicious hours, but the joy ends
+in the day: it yields no fruit. Thought is not born of it; my action
+is very little modified. I must feel pride in my friend's
+accomplishments as if they were mine, and a property in his virtues.
+I feel as warmly when he is praised, as the lover when he hears
+applause of his engaged maiden. We over-estimate the conscience of our
+friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer,
+his temptations less. Everything that is his,--his name, his form, his
+dress, books and instruments,--fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds
+new and larger from his mouth.
+
+7. Yet the systole and diastole[288] of the heart are not without
+their analogy in the ebb and flow of love. Friendship, like the
+immortality[289] of the soul, is too good to be believed. The lover,
+beholding his maiden, half knows that she is not verily that which he
+worships; and in the golden hour of friendship, we are surprised with
+shades of suspicion and unbelief. We doubt that we bestow on our hero
+the virtues in which he shines, and afterward worship the form to
+which we have ascribed this divine inhabitation. In strictness, the
+soul does not respect men as it respects itself. In strict science,
+all persons underlie the same condition of an infinite remoteness.
+Shall we fear to cool our love by mining for the metaphysical
+foundation of this Elysian temple?[290] Shall I not be as real as the
+things I see? If I am, I shall not fear to know them for what they
+are. Their essence is not less beautiful than their appearance, though
+it needs finer organs for its apprehension. The root of the plant is
+not unsightly to science, though for chaplets and festoons we cut the
+stem short. And I must hazard the production of the bald fact amid
+these pleasing reveries, though it should prove an Egyptian skull at
+our banquet.[291] A man who stands united with his thought, conceives
+magnificently to himself. He is conscious of a universal success,[292]
+even though bought by uniform particular failures. No advantages, no
+powers, no gold or force can be any match for him. I cannot choose but
+rely on my own poverty, more than on your wealth. I cannot make your
+consciousness tantamount to mine. Only the star dazzles; the planet
+has a faint, moon-like ray. I hear what you say of the admirable parts
+and tried temper of the party you praise, but I see well that for all
+his purple cloaks I shall not like him, unless he is at least a poor
+Greek like me. I cannot deny it, O friend, that the vast shadow of the
+Phenomenal includes thee, also, in its pied and painted
+immensity,--thee, also, compared with whom all else is shadow. Thou
+art not Being, as Truth is, as Justice is,--thou art not my soul, but
+a picture and effigy of that. Thou hast come to me lately, and already
+thou art seizing thy hat and cloak. It is not that the soul puts forth
+friends, as the tree puts forth leaves, and presently, by the
+germination of new buds, extrudes the old leaf?[293] The law of nature
+is alternation forevermore. Each electrical state superinduces the
+opposite. The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter
+into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone, for a
+season, that it may exalt its conversation or society. This method
+betrays itself along the whole history of our personal relations. The
+instinct of affection revives the hope of union with our mates, and
+the returning sense of insulation recalls us from the chase. Thus
+every man passes his life in the search after friendship, and if he
+should record his true sentiment, he might write a letter like this,
+to each new candidate for his love:--
+
+     DEAR FRIEND:--
+
+     If I was sure of thee, sure of thy capacity, sure to match
+     my mood with thine, I should never think again of trifles,
+     in relation to thy comings and goings. I am not very wise;
+     my moods are quite attainable; and I respect thy genius; it
+     is to me as yet unfathomed; yet dare I not presume in thee a
+     perfect intelligence of me, and so thou art to me a
+     delicious torment. Thine ever, or never.
+
+8. Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for curiosity, and
+not for life. They are not to be indulged. This is to weave cobweb,
+and not cloth. Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions,
+because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams,[294] instead
+of the tough fiber of the human heart. The laws of friendship are
+great, austere, and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of
+morals. But we have aimed at a swift and petty benefit, to suck a
+sudden sweetness. We snatch at the slowest fruit in the whole garden
+of God, which many summers and many winters must ripen. We seek our
+friend not sacredly but with an adulterate passion which would
+appropriate him to ourselves. In vain. We are armed all over with
+subtle antagonisms, which, as soon as we meet, begin to play, and
+translate all poetry into stale prose. Almost all people descend to
+meet. All association must be a compromise, and, what is worst, the
+very flower and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures
+disappears as they approach each other. What a perpetual
+disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and gifted!
+After interviews have been compassed with long foresight, we must be
+tormented presently by baffled blows, by sudden, unseasonable
+apathies, by epilepsies of wit and of animal spirits, in the heyday of
+friendship and thought. Our faculties do not play us true, and both
+parties are relieved by solitude.
+
+9. I ought to be equal to every relation. It makes no difference how
+many friends I have, and what content I can find in conversing with
+each, if there be one to whom I am not equal. If I have shrunk unequal
+from one contest instantly, the joy I find in all the rest becomes
+mean and cowardly. I should hate myself, if then I made my other
+friends my asylum.
+
+    "The valiant warrior[295] famoused for fight,
+       After a hundred victories, once foiled,
+     Is from the book of honor razed quite,
+       And all the rest forgot for which he toiled."
+
+10. Our impatience is thus sharply rebuked. Bashfulness and apathy are
+a tough husk in which a delicate organization is protected from
+premature ripening. It would be lost if it knew itself before any of
+the best souls were yet ripe enough to know and own it. Respect the
+_naturlangsamkeit_[296] which hardens the ruby in a million years,
+and works in duration, in which Alps and Andes come and go as
+rainbows. The good spirit of our life has no heaven which is the price
+of rashness. Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but
+for the total worth of man. Let us not have this childish luxury in
+our regards, but the austerest worth; let us approach our friend with
+an audacious trust in the truth of his heart, in the breadth,
+impossible to be overturned, of his foundations.
+
+11. The attractions of this subject are not to be resisted, and I
+leave, for the time, all account of subordinate social benefit, to
+speak of that select and sacred relation which is a kind of absolute,
+and which even leaves the language of love suspicious and common, so
+much is this purer, and nothing is so much divine.
+
+12. I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest
+courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work,
+but the solidest thing we know. For now, after so many ages of
+experience, what do we know of nature, or of ourselves? Not one step
+has man taken toward the solution of the problem of his destiny. In
+one condemnation of folly stand the whole universe of men. But the
+sweet sincerity of joy and peace, which I draw from this alliance
+with my brother's soul, is the nut itself whereof all nature and all
+thought is but the husk and shell. Happy is the house that shelters a
+friend! It might well be built, like a festal bower or arch, to
+entertain him a single day. Happier, if he know the solemnity of that
+relation, and honor its law! He who offers himself a candidate for
+that covenant comes up, like an Olympian,[297] to the great games,
+where the first-born of the world are the competitors. He proposes
+himself for contest where Time, Want, Danger are in the lists, and he
+alone is victor who has truth enough in his constitution to preserve
+the delicacy of his beauty from the wear and tear of all these. The
+gifts of fortune may be present or absent, but all the hap in that
+contest depends on intrinsic nobleness, and the contempt of trifles.
+There are two elements that go to the composition of friendship, each
+so sovereign, that I can detect no superiority in either, no reason
+why either should be first named. One is Truth. A friend is a person
+with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud. I am
+arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal that I may
+drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and
+second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with
+the simplicity and wholeness, with which one chemical atom meets
+another. Sincerity is the luxury allowed, but diadems and authority,
+only to the highest rank, _that_ being permitted to speak truth as
+having none above it to court or conform unto. Every man alone is
+sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins. We
+parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by
+gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him
+under a hundred folds. I knew a man who,[298] under a certain
+religious frenzy, cast off this drapery, and omitting all compliments
+and commonplace, spoke to the conscience of every person he
+encountered, and that with great insight and beauty. At first he was
+resisted, and all men agreed he was mad. But persisting, as indeed he
+could not help doing, for some time in this course, he attained to the
+advantage of bringing every man of his acquaintance into true
+relations with him. No man would think of speaking falsely with him,
+or of putting him off with any chat of markets or reading-rooms. But
+every man was constrained by so much sincerity to the like plain
+dealing and what love of nature, what poetry, what symbol of truth he
+had, he did certainly show him. But to most of us society shows not
+its face and eye, but its side and its back. To stand in true
+relations with men in a false age, is worth a fit of insanity, is it
+not? We can seldom go erect. Almost every man we meet requires some
+civility,--requires to be humored; he has some fame, some talent, some
+whim of religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be
+questioned, and which spoils all conversation with him. But a friend
+is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me. My friend gives
+me entertainment without requiring any stipulation on my part. A
+friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox[299] in nature. I who alone
+am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with
+equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being in all
+its height, variety and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so
+that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
+
+13. The other element of friendship is tenderness. We are holden to
+men by every sort of tie, by blood, by pride, by fear, by hope, by
+lucre, by lust, by hate, by admiration, by every circumstance and
+badge and trifle, but we can scarce believe that so much character can
+subsist in another as to draw us by love. Can another be so blessed,
+and we so pure, that we can offer him tenderness? When a man becomes
+dear to me, I have touched the goal of fortune. I find very little
+written directly to the heart of this matter in books. And yet I have
+one text which I cannot choose but remember. My author says,[300]--"I
+offer myself faintly and bluntly to those whose I effectually am, and
+tender myself least to him to whom I am the most devoted." I wish that
+friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must
+plant itself on the ground, before it vaults over the moon. I wish it
+to be a little of a citizen, before it is quite a cherub.[301] We
+chide the citizen because he makes love a commodity. It is an exchange
+of gifts, of useful loans; it is good neighborhood; it watches with
+the sick; it holds the pall at the funeral; and quite loses sight of
+the delicacies and nobility of the relation. But though we cannot find
+the god under this disguise of a sutler, yet, on the other hand, we
+cannot forgive the poet if he spins his thread too fine, and does not
+substantiate his romance by the municipal virtues of justice,
+punctuality, fidelity and pity. I hate the prostitution of the name of
+friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances. I much prefer the
+company of plow-boys and tin-peddlers, to the silken and perfumed
+amity which only celebrates its days of encounter by a frivolous
+display, by rides in a curricle,[302] and dinners at the best taverns.
+The end of friendship is a commerce the most strict and homely that
+can be joined; more strict than any of which we have experience. It is
+for aid and comfort through all the relations and passages of life and
+death. It is fit for serene days, and graceful gifts, and country
+rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty,
+and persecution. It keeps company with the sallies of the wit and the
+trances of religion. We are to dignify to each other the daily needs
+and offices of man's life, and embellish it by courage, wisdom and
+unity. It should never fall into something usual and settled, but
+should be alert and inventive, and add rhyme and reason to what was
+drudgery.
+
+14. Friendship may be said to require natures so rare and costly, each
+so well-tempered, and so happily adapted, and withal so
+circumstanced, (for even in that particular, a poet says, love demands
+that the parties be altogether paired,) that its satisfaction can very
+seldom be assured. It cannot subsist in its perfection, say some of
+those who are learned in this warm lore of the heart, betwixt more
+than two. I am not quite so strict in my terms, perhaps because I have
+never known so high a fellowship as others. I please my imagination
+more with a circle of godlike men and women variously related to each
+other, and between whom subsists a lofty intelligence. But I find this
+law of _one to one_,[303] peremptory for conversation, which is the
+practice and consummation of friendship. Do not mix waters too much.
+The best mix as ill as good and bad. You shall have very useful and
+cheering discourse at several times with two several men, but let all
+three of you come together, and you shall not have one new and hearty
+word. Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a
+conversation of the most sincere and searching sort. In good company
+there is never such discourse between two, across the table, as takes
+place when you leave them alone. In good company, the individuals at
+once merge their egotism into a social soul exactly co-extensive with
+the several consciousnesses there present. No partialities of friend
+to friend, no fondnesses of brother to sister, of wife to husband, are
+there pertinent, but quite otherwise. Only he may then speak who can
+sail on the common thought of the party, and not poorly limited to
+his own. Now this convention, which good sense demands, destroys the
+high freedom of great conversation, which requires an absolute running
+of two souls into one.
+
+15. No two men but being left alone with each other, enter into
+simpler relations. Yet it is affinity that determines _which_ two
+shall converse. Unrelated men give little joy to each other; will
+never suspect the latent powers of each. We talk sometimes of a great
+talent for conversation, as if it were a permanent property in some
+individuals. Conversation is an evanescent relation,--no more. A man
+is reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all that, say
+a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his silence with as
+much reason as they would blame the insignificance of a dial in the
+shade. In the sun it will mark the hour. Among those who enjoy his
+thought, he will regain his tongue.
+
+16. Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and
+unlikeness, that piques each with the presence of power and of consent
+in the other party. Let me be alone to the end of the world, rather
+than that my friend should overstep by a word or a look his real
+sympathy. I am equally balked by antagonism and by compliance. Let him
+not cease an instant to be himself. The only joy I have in his being
+mine, is that the _not mine_ is _mine_. I hate, where I looked for a
+manly furtherance, or at least a manly resistance, to find a mush of
+concession. Better be a nettle in the side of your friend, than his
+echo. The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do
+without it. That high office requires great and sublime parts. There
+must be very two before there can be very one. Let it be an alliance
+of two large formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared,
+before yet they recognize the deep identity which beneath these
+disparities unites them.
+
+17. He only is fit for this society who is magnanimous; who is sure
+that greatness and goodness are always economy; who is not swift to
+intermeddle with his fortunes. Let him not intermeddle with this.
+Leave to the diamond its ages to grow, nor expect to accelerate the
+births of the eternal. Friendship demands a religious treatment. We
+talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected. Reverence
+is a great part of it. Treat your friend as a spectacle. Of course he
+has merits that are not yours, and that you cannot honor, if you must
+needs hold him close to your person. Stand aside; give those merits
+room; let them mount and expand. Are you the friend of your friend's
+buttons, or of his thought? To a great heart he will still be a
+stranger in a thousand particulars, that he may come near in the
+holiest ground. Leave it to girls and boys to regard a friend as
+property, and to suck a short and all-confounding pleasure instead of
+the noblest benefits.
+
+18. Let us buy our entrance to this guild by a long probation. Why
+should we desecrate noble and beautiful souls by intruding on them?
+Why insist on rash personal relations with your friend? Why go to his
+house, or know his mother and brother and sisters? Why be visited by
+him at your own? Are these things material to our covenant? Leave this
+touching and clawing. Let him be to me a spirit. A message, a thought,
+a sincerity, a glance from him I want, but not news, nor pottage. I
+can get politics, and chat, and neighborly conveniences, from cheaper
+companions. Should not the society of my friend be to me poetic, pure,
+universal, and great as nature itself? Ought I to feel that our tie is
+profane in comparison with yonder bar of cloud that sleeps on the
+horizon, or that clump of waving grass that divides the brook? Let us
+not vilify but raise it to that standard. That great defying eye, that
+scornful beauty of his mien and action, do not pique yourself on
+reducing, but rather fortify and enhance. Worship his superiorities;
+wish him not less by a thought, but hoard and tell them all. Guard him
+as thy counterpart. Let him be to thee forever a sort of beautiful
+enemy, untamable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial conveniency to
+be soon outgrown and cast aside. The hues of the opal, the light of
+the diamond, are not to be seen, if the eye is too near. To my friend
+I write a letter, and from him I receive a letter. That seems to you a
+little. It suffices me. It is a spiritual gift worthy of him to give
+and of me to receive. It profanes nobody. In these warm lines the
+heart will trust itself, as it will not to the tongue, and pour out
+the prophecy of a godlier existence than all the annals of heroism
+have yet made good.
+
+19. Respect so far the holy laws of this fellowship as not to
+prejudice its perfect flower by your impatience for its opening. We
+must be our own before we can be another's. There is at least this
+satisfaction in crime, according to the Latin proverb;--you can speak
+to your accomplice on even terms. _Crimen quos[304] inquinat, aequat_.
+To those whom we admire and love, at first we cannot. Yet the least
+defect of self-possession vitiates, in my judgment, the entire
+relation. There can never be deep peace between two spirits, never
+mutual respect until, in their dialogue, each stands for the whole
+world.
+
+20. What is so great as friendship, let us carry with what grandeur of
+spirit we can. Let us be silent,--so we may hear the whisper of the
+gods. Let us not interfere. Who set you to cast about what you should
+say to the select souls, or how to say anything to such? No matter how
+ingenious, no matter how graceful and bland. There are innumerable
+degrees of folly and wisdom, and for you to say aught is to be
+frivolous. Wait, and thy heart shall speak. Wait until the necessary
+and everlasting overpowers you, until day and night avail themselves
+of your lips. The only reward of virtue, is virtue; the only way to
+have a friend is to be one. You shall not come nearer a man by getting
+into his house. If unlike, his soul only flees the faster from you,
+and you shall catch never a true glance of his eye. We see the noble
+afar off, and they repel us; why should we intrude? Late,--very
+late,--we perceive that no arrangements, no introductions, no
+consuetudes or habits of society, would be of any avail to establish
+us in such relations with them as we desire,--but solely the uprise of
+nature in us to the same degree it is in them; then shall we meet as
+water with water; and if we should not meet them then, we shall not
+want them, for we are already they. In the last analysis, love is only
+the reflection of a man's own worthiness from other men. Men have
+sometimes exchanged names with their friends, as if they would signify
+that in their friend each loved his own soul.
+
+21. The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less
+easy to establish it with flesh and blood. We walk alone in the world.
+Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope
+cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of
+the universal power, souls are now acting, enduring and daring, which
+can love us, and which we can love. We may congratulate ourselves that
+the period of nonage,[305] of follies, of blunders, and of shame, is
+passed in solitude, and when we are finished men, we shall grasp
+heroic hands in heroic hands. Only be admonished by what you already
+see, not to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no
+friendship can be. Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish
+alliances which no God attends. By persisting in your path, though
+you forfeit the little you gain the great. You demonstrate yourself,
+so as to put yourself out of the reach of false relations, and you
+draw to you the first-born of the world, those rare pilgrims whereof
+only one or two wander in nature at once, and before whom the vulgar
+great show as specters and shadows merely.
+
+22. It is foolish to be afraid of making our ties too spiritual, as if
+so we could lose any genuine love. Whatever correction of our popular
+views we make from insight, nature will be sure to bear us out in, and
+though it seem to rob us of some joy, will repay us with a greater.
+Let us feel, if we will, the absolute insulation of man. We are sure
+that we have all in us. We go to Europe, or we pursue persons, or we
+read books, in the instinctive faith that these will call it out and
+reveal us to ourselves. Beggars all. The persons are such as we; the
+Europe, an old faded garment of dead persons; the books, their ghosts.
+Let us drop this idolatry. Let us give over this mendicancy. Let us
+even bid our dearest friends farewell, and defy them, saying, "Who are
+you? Unhand me. I will be dependent no more." Ah! seest thou not, O
+brother, that thus we part only to meet again on a higher platform,
+and only be more each other's, because we are more our own? A friend
+is Janus-faced:[306] he looks to the past and the future. He is the
+child of all my foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and
+the harbinger[307] of a greater friend.
+
+23. I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them
+where I can find them, but I seldom use them. We must have society on
+our own terms, and admit or exclude it on the slightest cause. I
+cannot afford to speak much with my friend. If he is great, he makes
+me so great that I cannot descend to converse. In the great days,
+presentiments hover before me, far before me in the firmament. I ought
+then to dedicate myself to them. I go in that I may seize them, I go
+out that I may seize them. I fear only that I may lose them receding
+into the sky in which now they are only a patch of brighter light.
+Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and
+study their visions, lest I lose my own. It would indeed give me a
+certain household joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual
+astronomy, or search of stars, and come down to warm sympathies with
+you; but then I know well I shall mourn always the vanishing of my
+mighty gods. It is true, next week I shall have languid moods, when I
+can well afford to occupy myself with foreign objects; then I shall
+regret the lost literature of your mind, and wish you were by my side
+again. But if you come, perhaps you will fill my mind only with new
+visions, not with yourself but with your lusters, and I shall not be
+able any more than now to converse with you. So I will owe to my
+friends this evanescent intercourse. I will receive from them, not
+what they have, but what they are. They shall give me that which
+properly they cannot give, but which emanates from them. But they
+shall not hold me by any relations less subtile and pure. We will meet
+as though we met not, and part as though we parted not.
+
+24. It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a
+friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the
+other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is
+not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall
+wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the
+reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold
+companion. If he is unequal, he will presently pass away; but thou art
+enlarged by thy own shining, and no longer a mate for frogs and worms,
+dost soar and burn with the gods of the empyrean.[308] It is thought a
+disgrace to love unrequited. But the great will see that true love
+cannot be unrequited. True love transcends the unworthy object, and
+dwells and broods on the eternal, and when the poor interposed mask
+crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth, and feels its
+independency the surer. Yet these things may hardly be said without a
+sort of treachery to the relation. The essence of friendship is
+entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or
+provide for infirmity. It treats its object as a god, that it may
+deify both.
+
+
+
+
+HEROISM[309]
+
+    "Paradise is under the shadow of swords,"[310]
+                                          _Mahomet._
+
+
+1. In the elder English dramatists,[311] and mainly in the plays of
+Beaumont and Fletcher,[312] there is a constant recognition of
+gentility, as if a noble behavior were as easily marked in the society
+of their age, as color is in our American population. When any Rodrigo,
+Pedro, or Valerio[313] enters, though he be a stranger, the duke or
+governor exclaims, This is a gentleman,--and proffers civilities without
+end; but all the rest are slag and refuse. In harmony with this delight
+in personal advantages, there is in their plays a certain heroic cast of
+character and dialogue,--as in Bonduca, Sophocles, the Mad Lover, the
+Double Marriage,[314]--wherein the speaker is so earnest and cordial,
+and on such deep grounds of character, that the dialogue, on the
+slightest additional incident in the plot, rises naturally into poetry.
+Among many texts, take the following. The Roman Martius has conquered
+Athens--all but the invincible spirits of Sophocles, the duke of Athens,
+and Dorigen, his wife. The beauty of the latter inflames Martius, and he
+seeks to save her husband; but Sophocles will not ask his life, although
+assured, that a word will save him, and the execution of both proceeds.
+
+"_Valerius._ Bid thy wife farewell.
+
+_Soph._ No, I will take no leave. My Dorigen,
+Yonder, above, 'bout Ariadne's crown.[315]
+My spirit shall hover for thee. Prithee, haste.
+
+_Dor._ Stay, Sophocles--with this, tie up my sight;
+Let not soft nature so transformed be,
+And lose her gentler sexed humanity,
+To make me see my lord bleed. So, 'tis well;
+Never one object underneath the sun
+Will I behold before my Sophocles:
+Farewell; now teach the Romans how to die.
+
+_Mar._ Dost know what 'tis to die?
+
+_Soph._ Thou dost not, Martius,
+And therefore, not what 'tis to live; to die
+Is to begin to live. It is to end
+An old, stale, weary work, and to commence
+A newer and a better. 'Tis to leave
+Deceitful knaves for the society
+Of gods and goodness. Thou, thyself, must part
+At last, from all thy garlands, pleasures, triumphs,
+And prove thy fortitude what then 'twill do.
+
+_Val._ But art not grieved nor vexed to leave thy life thus?
+
+_Soph._ Why should I grieve or vex for being sent
+To them I ever loved best? Now, I'll kneel,
+But with my back toward thee; 'tis the last duty
+This trunk can do the gods.
+
+_Mar._ Strike, strike, Valerius,
+Or Martius' heart will leap out at his mouth:
+This is a man, a woman! Kiss thy lord,
+And live with all the freedom you were wont.
+O love! thou doubly hast afflicted me
+With virtue and with beauty. Treacherous heart,
+My hand shall cast thee quick into my urn,
+Ere thou transgress this knot of piety.
+
+_Val._ What ails my brother?
+
+_Soph._ Martius, oh Martius,
+Thou now hast found a way to conquer me.
+
+_Dor._ O star of Rome! what gratitude can speak
+Fit words to follow such a deed as this?
+
+_Mar._ This admirable duke, Valerius,
+With his disdain of fortune and of death,
+Captived himself, has captived me,
+And though my arm hath ta'en his body here,
+His soul hath subjugated Martius' soul.
+By Romulus,[316] he is all soul, I think;
+He hath no flesh, and spirit cannot be gyved;
+Then we have vanquished nothing; he is free,
+And Martius walks now in captivity."
+
+2. I do not readily remember any poem, play, sermon, novel, or
+oration, that our press vents in the last few years, which goes to the
+same tune. We have a great many flutes and flageolets, but not often
+the sound of any fife. Yet, Wordsworth's Laodamia, and the ode of
+"Dion,"[317] and some sonnets, have a certain noble music; and
+Scott[318] will sometimes draw a stroke like the portrait of Lord
+Evandale, given by Balfour of Burley.[319] Thomas Carlyle,[320] with
+his natural taste for what is manly and daring in character, has
+suffered no heroic trait in his favorites to drop from his
+biographical and historical pictures. Earlier, Robert Burns[321] has
+given us a song or two. In the Harleian Miscellanies,[322] there is an
+account of the battle of Lutzen,[323] which deserves to be read. And
+Simon Ockley's[324] History of the Saracens recounts the prodigies of
+individual valor with admiration, all the more evident on the part of
+the narrator, that he seems to think that his place in Christian
+Oxford[325] requires of him some proper protestations of abhorrence.
+But if we explore the literature of Heroism, we shall quickly come to
+Plutarch,[326] who is its Doctor and historian. To him we owe the
+Brasidas,[327] the Dion,[328] the Epaminondas,[329] the Scipio[330] of
+old, and I must think we are more deeply indebted to him than to all
+the ancient writers. Each of his "Lives" is a refutation to the
+despondency and cowardice of our religious and political theorists. A
+wild courage, a Stoicism[331] not of the schools, but of the blood,
+shines in every anecdote, and has given that book its immense fame.
+
+3. We need books of this tart cathartic virtue, more than books of
+political science, or of private economy. Life is a festival only to
+the wise. Seen from the nook and chimney-side of prudence, it wears a
+ragged and dangerous front. The violations of the laws of nature by
+our predecessors and our contemporaries are punished in us also. The
+disease and deformity around us certify the infraction of natural,
+intellectual, and moral laws, and often violation on violation to
+breed such compound misery. A lockjaw that bends a man's head back to
+his heels, hydrophobia that makes him bark at his wife and babes,
+insanity that makes him eat grass; war, plague, cholera, famine
+indicate a certain ferocity in nature, which, as it had its inlet by
+human crime, must have its outlet by human suffering. Unhappily,
+almost no man exists who has not in his own person become, to some
+amount, a stockholder in the sin, and so made himself liable to a
+share in the expiation.
+
+4. Our culture, therefore, must not omit the arming of the man. Let
+him hear in season that he is born into the state of war, and that the
+commonwealth and his own well-being require that he should not go
+dancing in the weeds of peace, but warned, self-collected, and neither
+defying nor dreading the thunder, let him take both reputation and
+life in his hand, and, with perfect urbanity, dare the gibbet and the
+mob by the absolute truth of his speech, and the rectitude of his
+behavior.
+
+5. Toward all this external evil, the man within the breast assumes a
+warlike attitude, and affirms his ability to cope single-handed with
+the infinite army of enemies. To this military attitude of the soul we
+give the name of Heroism. Its rudest form is the contempt for safety
+and ease, which makes the attractiveness of war. It is a self-trust
+which slights the restraints of prudence, in the plenitude of its
+energy and power to repair the harms it may suffer. The hero is a mind
+of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will, but
+pleasantly, and, as it were, merrily, he advances to his own music,
+alike in frightful alarms, and in the tipsy mirth of universal
+dissoluteness. There is somewhat not philosophical in heroism; there
+is somewhat not holy in it; it seems not to know that other souls are
+of one texture with it; it has pride; it is the extreme of individual
+nature. Nevertheless, we must profoundly revere it. There is somewhat
+in great actions, which does not allow us to go behind them. Heroism
+feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right; and although a
+different breeding, different religion, and greater intellectual
+activity, would have modified or even reversed the particular action,
+yet for the hero, that thing he does is the highest deed, and is not
+open to the censure of philosophers or divines. It is the avowal of
+the unschooled man, that he finds a quality in him that is negligent
+of expense, of health, of life, of danger, of hatred, of reproach, and
+knows that his will is higher and more excellent than all actual and
+all possible antagonists.
+
+6. Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind, and in
+contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism
+is an obedience[332] to a secret impulse of an individual's character.
+Now to no other man can its wisdom appear as it does to him, for every
+man must be supposed to see a little further on his own proper path
+than any one else. Therefore, just and wise men take umbrage at his
+act, until after some little time be past: then they see it to be in
+unison with their acts. All prudent men see that the action is clean
+contrary to a sensual prosperity; for every heroic act measures itself
+by its contempt of some external good. But it finds its own success
+at last, and then the prudent also extol.
+
+7. Self-trust is the essence of heroism. It is the state of the soul
+at war, and its ultimate objects are the last defiance of falsehood
+and wrong, and the power to bear all that can be inflicted by evil
+agents. It speaks the truth, and it is just, generous, hospitable,
+temperate, scornful of petty calculations, and scornful of being
+scorned. It persists; it is of an undaunted boldness, and of a
+fortitude not to be wearied out. Its jest is the littleness of common
+life. That false prudence which dotes on health and wealth is the butt
+and merriment of heroism. Heroism, like Plotinus,[333] is almost
+ashamed of its body. What shall it say, then, to the sugar-plums, and
+cats'-cradles, to the toilet, compliments, quarrels, cards, and
+custard, which rack the wit of all human society. What joys has kind
+nature provided for us dear creatures! There seems to be no interval
+between greatness and meanness. When the spirit is not master of the
+world then it is its dupe. Yet the little man takes the great hoax so
+innocently, works in it so headlong and believing, is born red, and
+dies gray, arranging his toilet, attending on his own health, laying
+traps for sweet food and strong wine, setting his heart on a horse or
+a rifle, made happy with a little gossip or a little praise, that the
+great soul cannot choose but laugh at such earnest nonsense. "Indeed,
+these humble considerations[334] make me out of love with greatness.
+What a disgrace is it to me to take note how many pairs of silk
+stockings thou hast, namely, these and those that were the
+peach-colored ones; or to bear the inventory of thy shirts, as one for
+superfluity, and one other for use!"
+
+8. Citizens, thinking after the laws of arithmetic, consider the
+inconvenience of receiving strangers at their fireside, reckon
+narrowly the loss of time and the unusual display: the soul of a
+better quality thrusts back the unreasonable economy into the vaults
+of life, and says, I will obey the God, and the sacrifice and the fire
+he will provide. Ibn Hankal,[335] the Arabian geographer, describes a
+heroic extreme in the hospitality of Sogd, in Bokhar,[336] "When I was
+in Sogd I saw a great building, like a palace, the gates of which were
+open and fixed back to the wall with large nails. I asked the reason,
+and was told that the house had not been shut, night or day, for a
+hundred years. Strangers may present themselves at any hour, and in
+whatever number; the master has amply provided for the reception of
+the men and their animals, and is never happier than when they tarry
+for some time. Nothing of the kind have I seen in any other country."
+The magnanimous know very well that they who give time, or money, or
+shelter, to the stranger--so it be done for love, and not for
+ostentation--do, as it were, put God under obligation to them, so
+perfect are the compensations of the universe. In some way the time
+they seem to lose is redeemed, and the pains they seem to take
+remunerate themselves. These men fan the flame of human love, and
+raise the standard of civil virtue among mankind. But hospitality must
+be for service, and not for show, or it pulls down the host. The brave
+soul rates itself too high to value itself by the splendor of its
+table and draperies. It gives what it hath, and all it hath, but its
+own majesty can lend a better grace to bannocks[337] and fair water
+than belong to city feasts.
+
+9. The temperance of the hero proceeds from the same wish to do no
+dishonor to the worthiness he has. But he loves it for its elegancy,
+not for its austerity. It seems not worth his while to be solemn, and
+denounce with bitterness flesh-eating or wine-drinking, the use of
+tobacco, or opium, or tea, or silk, or gold. A great man scarcely
+knows how he dines, how he dresses; but without railing or precision,
+his living is natural and poetic. John Eliot,[338] the Indian Apostle,
+drank water, and said of wine,--"It is a noble, generous liquor, and
+we should be humbly thankful for it, but, as I remember, water was
+made before it." Better still is the temperance of king David[339] who
+poured out on the ground unto the Lord the water which three of his
+warriors had brought him to drink, at the peril of their lives.
+
+10. It is told of Brutus,[340] that when he fell on his sword, after
+the battle of Philippi,[341] he quoted a line of Euripides,[342]--"O
+virtue! I have followed thee through life, and I find thee at last but
+a shade." I doubt not the hero is slandered by this report. The heroic
+soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness. It does not ask to
+dine nicely, and to sleep warm. The essence of greatness is the
+perception that virtue is enough. Poverty is its ornament. It does not
+need plenty, and can very well abide its loss.
+
+11. But that which takes my fancy most, in the heroic class, is the
+good humor and hilarity they exhibit. It is a height to which common
+duty can very well attain, to suffer and to dare with solemnity. But
+these rare souls set opinion, success, and life, at so cheap a rate,
+that they will not soothe their enemies by petitions, or the show of
+sorrow, but wear their own habitual greatness. Scipio,[343] charged
+with peculation, refuses to do himself so great a disgrace as to wait
+for justification, though he had the scroll of his accounts in his
+hands, but tears it to pieces before the tribunes. Socrates'[344]
+condemnation of himself to be maintained in all honor in the
+Prytaneum,[345] during his life, and Sir Thomas More's[346]
+playfulness at the scaffold, are of the same strain. In Beaumont and
+Fletcher's "Sea Voyage," Juletta tells the stout captain and his
+company,
+
+_Jul._ Why, slaves, 'tis in our power to hang ye.
+
+_Master._                         Very likely,
+'Tis in our powers, then, to be hanged, and scorn ye.
+
+These replies are sound and whole. Sport is the bloom and glow of a
+perfect health. The great will not condescend to take anything
+seriously; all must be as gay as the song of a canary, though it were
+the building of cities, or the eradication of old and foolish
+churches and nations, which have cumbered the earth long thousands of
+years. Simple hearts put all the history and customs of this world
+behind them, and play their own play in innocent defiance of the
+Blue-Laws[347] of the world; and such would appear, could we see the
+human race assembled in vision, like little children frolicking
+together; though, to the eyes of mankind at large, they wear a stately
+and solemn garb of works and influences.
+
+12. The interest these fine stories have for us, the power of a
+romance over the boy who grasps the forbidden book under his bench at
+school, our delight in the hero, is the main fact to our purpose. All
+these great and transcendent properties are ours. If we dilate in
+beholding the Greek energy, the Roman pride, it is that we are already
+domesticating the same sentiment. Let us find room for this great
+guest in our small houses. The first step of worthiness will be to
+disabuse us of our superstitious associations with places and times,
+with number and size. Why should these words, Athenian, Roman, Asia,
+and England, so tingle in the ear? Where the heart is, there the
+muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame.
+Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry
+places, and the ear loves names of foreign and classic topography. But
+here we are; and, if we will tarry a little, we may come to learn that
+here is best. See to it only that thyself is here;--and art and
+nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall
+not be absent from the chamber where thou sittest. Epaminondas,[348]
+brave and affectionate, does not seem to us to need Olympus[349] to
+die upon, nor the Syrian sunshine. He lies very well where he is. The
+Jerseys[350] were handsome ground enough for Washington to tread, and
+London streets for the feet of Milton.[351] A great man makes his
+climate genial in the imagination of men, and its air the beloved
+element of all delicate spirits. That country is the fairest, which is
+inhabited by the noblest minds. The pictures which fill the
+imagination in reading the actions of Pericles,[352] Xenophon,[353]
+Columbus,[354] Bayard,[355] Sidney,[356] Hampden,[357] teach us how
+needlessly mean our life is, that we, by the depth of our living,
+should deck it with more than regal or national splendor, and act on
+principles that should interest man and nature in the length of our
+days.
+
+13. We have seen or heard of many extraordinary young men, who never
+ripened, or whose performance in actual life was not extraordinary.
+When we see their air and mien, when we hear them speak of society, or
+books, or religion, we admire their superiority; they seem to throw
+contempt on our entire polity and social state; theirs is the tone of
+a youthful giant, who is sent to work revolutions. But they enter an
+active profession, and the forming Colossus[358] shrinks to the common
+size of man. The magic they used was the ideal tendencies, which
+always make the Actual ridiculous; but the tough world had its revenge
+the moment they put their horses of the sun to plow in its furrow.
+They found no example and no companion, and their heart fainted. What
+then? The lesson they gave in their first aspirations, is yet true;
+and a better valor and a purer truth shall one day organize their
+belief. Or why should a woman liken herself to any historical woman,
+and think, because Sappho,[359] or Sevigne,[360] or De Stael,[361] or
+the cloistered souls who have had genius and cultivation, do not
+satisfy the imagination and the serene Themis,[362] none
+can,--certainly not she. Why not? She has a new and unattempted
+problem to solve, perchance that of the happiest nature that ever
+bloomed. Let the maiden, with erect soul, walk serenely on her way,
+accept the hint of each new experience, search, in turn, all the
+objects that solicit her eye, that she may learn the power and the
+charm of her new-born being which is the kindling of a new dawn in the
+recesses of space. The fair girl, who repels interference by a decided
+and proud choice of influences, so careless of pleasing, so wilful and
+lofty, inspires every beholder with somewhat of her own nobleness. The
+silent heart encourages her; O friend, never strike sail to a fear!
+Come into port greatly, or sail with God the seas. Not in vain you
+live, for every passing eye is cheered and refined by the vision.
+
+14. The characteristic of a genuine heroism is its persistency. All
+men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when
+you have chosen your part, abide by it, and do not weakly try to
+reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common,
+nor the common the heroic. Yet we have the weakness to expect the
+sympathy of people in those actions whose excellence is that they
+outrun sympathy, and appeal to a tardy justice. If you would serve
+your brother, because it is fit for you to serve him, do not take back
+your words when you find that prudent people do not commend you.
+Adhere to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done
+something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a
+decorous age. It was a high counsel[363] that I once heard given to a
+young person,--"Always do what you are afraid to do." A simple manly
+character need never make an apology, but should regard its past
+action with the calmness of Phocion,[364] when he admitted that the
+event of the battle was happy, yet did not regret his dissuasion from
+the battle.
+
+15. There is no weakness or exposure for which we cannot find
+consolation in the thought,--this is a part of my constitution, part
+of my relation and office to my fellow-creature. Has nature covenanted
+with me that I should never appear to disadvantage, never make a
+ridiculous figure? Let us be generous of our dignity as well as of our
+money. Greatness once and forever has done with opinion. We tell our
+charities, not because we wish to be praised for them, not because we
+think they have great merit, but for our justification. It is a
+capital blunder; as you discover, when another man recites his
+charities.
+
+16. To speak the truth, even with some austerity, to live with some
+rigor of temperance, or some extremes of generosity, seems to be an
+asceticism which common good-nature would appoint to those who are at
+ease and in plenty, in sign that they feel a brotherhood with the
+great multitude of suffering men. And not only need we breathe and
+exercise the soul by assuming the penalties of abstinence, of debt, of
+solitude, of unpopularity, but it behooves the wise man to look with a
+bold eye into those rarer dangers which sometimes invade men, and to
+familiarize himself with disgusting forms of disease, with sounds of
+execration, and the vision of violent death.
+
+17. Times of heroism are generally times of terror, but the day never
+shines in which this element may not work. The circumstances of man,
+we say, are historically somewhat better in this country, and at this
+hour, than perhaps ever before. More freedom exists for culture. It
+will not now run against an ax at the first step out of the beaten
+track of opinion. But whoso is heroic will always find crises to try
+his edge. Human virtue demands her champions and martyrs, and the
+trial of persecution always proceeds. It is but the other day that the
+brave Lovejoy[365] gave his breast to the bullets of a mob, for the
+rights of free speech and opinion, and died when it was better not to
+live.
+
+18. I see not any road to perfect peace which a man can walk, but to
+take counsel of his own bosom. Let him quit too much association, let
+him go home much, and establish himself in those courses he approves.
+The unremitting retention of simple and high sentiments in obscure
+duties is hardening the character to that temper which will work with
+honor, if need be, in the tumult, or on the scaffold. Whatever
+outrages have happened to men may befall a man again; and very easily
+in a republic, if there appear any signs of a decay of religion.
+Coarse slander, fire, tar and feathers, and the gibbet, the youth may
+freely bring home to his mind, and with what sweetness of temper he
+can, and inquire how fast he can fix his sense of duty, braving such
+penalties, whenever it may please the next newspaper and a sufficient
+number of his neighbors to pronounce his opinions incendiary.
+
+19. It may calm the apprehension of calamity in the most susceptible
+heart to see how quick a bound nature has set to the utmost infliction
+of malice. We rapidly approach a brink over which no enemy can follow
+us.
+
+                "Let them rave:[366]
+    Thou art quiet in thy grave."
+
+In the gloom of our ignorance of what shall be, in the hour when we
+are deaf to the higher voices, who does not envy them who have seen
+safely to an end their manful endeavor? Who that sees the meanness of
+our politics, but inly congratulates Washington that he is long
+already wrapped in his shroud, and forever safe; that he was laid
+sweet in his grave, the hope of humanity not yet subjugated in him?
+Who does not sometimes envy the good and brave, who are no more to
+suffer from the tumults of the natural world, and await with curious
+complacency the speedy term of his own conversation with finite
+nature? And yet the love that will be annihilated sooner than
+treacherous has already made death impossible, and affirms itself no
+mortal, but a native of the deeps of absolute and inextinguishable
+being.
+
+
+
+
+MANNERS[367]
+
+
+1. Half the world, it is said, knows not how the other half live. Our
+Exploring Expedition saw the Feejee Islanders[368] 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[369]
+(west of old Thebes) is philosophical to a fault. To set up their
+housekeeping, nothing is requisite but two or three earthen pots, a
+stone to grind meal, and a mat which is the bed. The house, namely, a
+tomb, is ready without rent or taxes. No rain can pass through the
+roof, and there is no door, for there is no want of one, as there is
+nothing to lose. If the house do not please them, they walk out and
+enter another, as there are several hundreds at their command. "It is
+somewhat singular," adds Berzoni, to whom we owe this account, "to
+talk of Happiness among people who live in sepulchers, among corpses
+and rags of an ancient nation which they knew nothing of." In the
+deserts of Borgoo[370] 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[371] have no proper names; individuals are called
+after their height, thickness, or other accidental quality, and have
+nick-names 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;[372] 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.
+
+2. What fact more conspicuous in modern history, than the creation of
+the gentleman? Chivalry[373] is that, and loyalty is that, and, in
+English literature, half the drama, and all the novels, from Sir
+Philip Sidney[374] to Sir Walter Scott,[375] 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,[376]
+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.
+
+3. There is something equivocal in all the words in use to express the
+excellence of manners and social cultivation, because the qualities
+are fluxional, and the last effect is assumed by the senses as the
+cause. The word _gentleman_ has not any correlative abstract[377] to
+express the quality. _Gentility_ is mean, and _gentilesse_[378] 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 and 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,[379] rattles in our
+ear like a flourish of trumpets. But personal force never goes out of
+fashion. That is still paramount to-day, and, in the moving crowd of
+good society, the men of valor and reality are known, and rise to
+their natural place. The competition is transferred from war to
+politics and trade, but the personal force appears readily enough in
+these new arenas.
+
+4. Power first, or no leading class. In politics and in trade,
+bruisers and pirates are of better promise than talkers and clerks.
+God knows[380] 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.[381] The ruling class must
+have more, but they must have these, giving in every company the sense
+of power,[382] 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,[383] 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,[384] who have great range of affinity. I am far from
+believing the timid maxim[385] of Lord Falkland,[386] ("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,[387] Sapor,[388]
+the Cid,[389] Julius Caesar,[390] Scipio,[391] Alexander,[392]
+Pericles,[393] and the lordliest personages. They sat very carelessly
+in their chairs, and were too excellent themselves to value any
+condition at a high rate.
+
+5. 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,[394] Socrates,[395] and Epaminondas[396] 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.[397] 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.
+
+6. 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[398] 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
+traveling, 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
+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.
+
+7. 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,[399] child of the revolution, destroyer of the old
+noblesse,[400] never ceased to court the Faubourg St. Germain:[401]
+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 a 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,[402] the Nelson,[403] the Napoleon,
+see that this is the festivity and permanent celebration of such as
+they; that fashion is funded talent; is Mexico,[404] Marengo,[405] and
+Trafalgar[406][407] beaten out thin; that the brilliant names of
+fashion run back to just such busy names as their own, fifty or sixty
+years ago. They are the sowers, their sons shall be the reapers, and
+_their_ sons, in the ordinary course of things, must yield the
+possession of the harvest, to new competitors with keener eyes and
+stronger frames. The city is recruited from the country. In the year
+1805, it is said, every legitimate monarch in Europe was imbecile. The
+city would have died out, rotted, and exploded, long ago, but that it
+was reinforced from the fields. It is only country which came to town
+day before yesterday, that is city and court to-day.
+
+8. 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.[408] 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 lease 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.[409]
+
+9. 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,"[410] 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
+cotillions. For there is nothing settled in manners, but the laws of
+behavior yield to the energy of the individual. The maiden at her
+first ball, the countryman at a city dinner, believes that there is a
+ritual according to which every act and compliment must be performed,
+or the failing party must be cast out of this presence. Later, they
+learn that good sense and character make their own forms every moment,
+and speak or abstain, to 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 appear. If the fashionist have not this
+quality, he is nothing. We are such lovers of self-reliance, that we
+excuse in 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![411]--" But Vich Ian Vohr
+must always carry his belongings in some fashion, if not added as
+honor, then severed as disgrace.
+
+10. There will always be in society certain persons who are
+mercuries[412] 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[413] for the sifting of character?
+
+11. 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,[414] who shall subordinate these appendages. I may go into
+a cottage, and find a farmer who feels that he is the man I have come
+to see, and fronts me accordingly. It was therefore a very natural
+point of old feudal etiquette, that a gentleman who received a visit,
+though it were of his sovereign, should not leave his roof, but should
+wait his arrival at the door of his house. No house, though it were
+the Tuileries,[415] or the Escurial,[416] is good for anything without
+a master. And yet we are not often gratified by this hospitality.
+Everybody we know surrounds himself with a fine house, fine books,
+conservatory, gardens, equipage, and all manner of toys, as screens to
+interpose between himself and his guests. Does it not seem as if man
+was of a very sly, elusive nature, and dreaded nothing so much as a
+full renconter 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 eyes we
+have no care to stand, then again we run to our curtain, and hide
+ourselves as Adam[417] at the voice of the Lord God in the garden.
+Cardinal Caprara,[418] the Pope's[419] 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 free-born eyes,
+but fenced himself with etiquette, and within triple barriers of
+reserve: and, as all the world knows from Madame de Stael,[420] 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
+skillful masters of good manners. No rent roll nor army-list can
+dignify skulking and dissimulations: and the first point of courtesy
+must always be truth, as really all forms of good-breeding point that
+way.
+
+12. I have just been reading, in Mr. Hazlitt's[421] translation,
+Montaigne's[422] 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.
+
+13. 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.[423] 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;[424] 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 neighbors's needs. Must
+we have a good understanding with one another's palates? as foolish
+people who have lived long together, know when each wants salt or
+sugar. I pray my companion, if he wishes for bread, to ask me for
+bread, and if he wishes for sassafras or arsenic, to ask me for them,
+and not to hold out his plate, as if I knew already. Every natural
+function can be dignified by deliberation and privacy. Let us leave
+hurry to slaves. The compliments and ceremonies of our breeding should
+recall,[425] however remotely, the grandeur of our destiny.
+
+14. 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 work yard, 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.[426] 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.
+
+15. 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,[427] 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.
+
+16. 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,[428] 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[429] 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[430]: it is a debt of honor: if an accident
+should happen to me, he has nothing to show." "Then," said the
+creditor, "I change my debt into a debt of honor," and tore the note
+in pieces. Fox thanked the man for his confidence, and paid him,
+saying, "his debt was of older standing, and Sheridan must wait."
+Lover of liberty, friend of the Hindoo, friend of the African slave,
+he possessed a great personal popularity; and Napoleon said of him on
+the occasion of his visit to Paris, in 1805, "Mr. Fox will always hold
+the first place in an assembly at the Tuileries."
+
+17. 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,[431] to her horned company. This
+gentleman is this afternoon arrived from Denmark; and that is my Lord
+Ride, who came yesterday from Bagdad; here is Captain Friese, from
+Cape Turnagain, and Captain Symmes,[432] 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 Signer Torre del
+Greco, who extinguished Vesuvius by pouring into it the Bay of Naples;
+Spahr, the Persian ambassador; and Tul Wil Shan, the exiled nabob of
+Nepaul, whose saddle is the new moon.--But these are monsters of one
+day, and to-morrow will be dismissed to their holes and dens; for, in
+these rooms every chair is waited for. The artist, the scholar, and,
+in general, the clerisy,[433] 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,[434] being steeped in Cologne water,[435] and
+perfumed, and dined, and introduced, and properly grounded in all the
+biography, and politics, and anecdotes of the boudoirs.
+
+18. 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;[436] some Philhellene;[437] 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 centers 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
+worshiped 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[438]
+    Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs;
+    And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth,
+    In form and shape compact and beautiful;
+    So, on our heels a fresh perfection treads;
+    A power, more strong in beauty, born of us,
+    And fated to excel us, as we pass
+    In glory that old Darkness:
+     ... for, 'tis the eternal law,
+    That first in beauty shall be first in might."
+
+19. 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, leisurely 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 offense. 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;[439]
+but neither does Scott's dialogue bear criticism. His lords brave each
+other in smart epigrammatic speeches, but the dialogue is in costume,
+and does not please on the second reading; it is not warm with life.
+In Shakespeare 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;[440] yet with
+the port of an emperor,--if need be, calm, serious, and fit to stand
+the gaze of millions.
+
+20. 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
+scepter 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,[441] Juno,[442] or Polymnia;[443] 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,[444] 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[445] or Firdousi[446] 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.[447] 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 fullness of her heart, warming them by her
+sentiments; believing, as she did, that by dealing nobly with all, all
+would show themselves noble."
+
+21. I know that this Byzantine[448] pile of chivalry of 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,[449] 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.
+
+22. 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 ind 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 lone holiday from the
+national caution? Without the rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar.
+The king of Schiraz[450] could not afford to be so bountiful as the
+poor Osman[451] 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[452] 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 center 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?
+
+23. 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,[453] one day," said Silenus,[454]
+"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,[455] much more all Olympus, to know whether
+it was fundamentally bad or good."
+
+
+
+
+GIFTS[456]
+
+    Gifts of one who loved me--
+    'Twas high time they came;
+    When he ceased to love me,
+    Time they stopped for shame.
+
+
+1. 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,[457] 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:[458] 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,[459]
+because they are the flower of commodities, and admit of fantastic
+values being attached to them. If a man should send to me to come a
+hundred miles to visit him, and should set before me a basket of fine
+summer-fruit, I should think there was some proportion between the
+labor and the reward.
+
+2. 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[460] 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.[461] 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[462] 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. That 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,[463] or
+payment of blackmail.[464]
+
+3. 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 forgiver. 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[465] 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.
+
+4. 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,[466]
+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,[467] this of
+being served, and the debtor naturally wishes to give you a slap. A
+golden text for these gentlemen is that which I admire in the
+Buddhist,[468] who never thanks, and who says, "Do not flatter your
+benefactors."
+
+5. 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.
+
+6. 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 for you, and
+delight in you all the time.
+
+
+
+
+NATURE[469]
+
+    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.
+
+
+1. There are days[470] 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[471] may be looked for with a little more assurance in that
+pure October weather, which we distinguish by the name of Indian
+Summer.[472] 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 entrance 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 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.
+
+2. 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 traveler 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[473] and Uriel,[474]
+the upper sky would be all that would remain of our furniture.
+
+3. 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-fields;
+the mimic waving of acres of houstonia, whose innumerable florets
+whiten and ripple before the eye; the reflections of trees and flowers
+in glassy lakes; the musical steaming odorous south wind, which
+converts all trees to wind-harps;[475] the crackling and spurting of
+hemlock in the flames; or of pine-logs, which yield glory to the walls
+and faces in the sitting-room,--these are the music and pictures of
+the most ancient religion. My house stands in low land, with limited
+outlook, and on the skirt of the village.[476] But I go with my
+friend[477] to the shore of our little river,[478] and with one stroke
+of the paddle, I leave the village politics and personalities, yes,
+and the world of villages and personalities behind, and pass into a
+delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted
+man to enter without novitiate and probation.[479] 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,[480] a royal revel, the proudest, most heart-rejoicing
+festival that valor and beauty, power and taste, ever decked and
+enjoyed, establishes itself on the instant. These sunset clouds, these
+delicately emerging stars, with their private and ineffable glances,
+signify it and proffer it. I am taught the poorness of our invention,
+the ugliness of towns and palaces. Art and luxury have early learned
+that they must work as enhancement and sequel to this original beauty.
+I am overinstructed for my return. Henceforth I shall be hard to
+please. I cannot go back to toys. I am grown expensive and
+sophisticated. I can no longer live without elegance: but a countryman
+shall be my master of revels. He who knows the most, he who knows what
+sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the
+heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal
+man. Only as far as 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,[481] 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,[482] or Paphos,[483] or Ctesiphon.[484]
+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
+baubles. When the rich tax the poor with servility and obsequiousness,
+they should consider the effect of man 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,[485] for example, which converts the mountains into an
+AEolian harp,[486] and this supernatural _tiralira_ restores to him the
+Dorian[487] mythology, Apollo,[488] Diana,[489] 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 gift of wealthy 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.
+
+4. The moral sensibility which makes Edens[490] and Tempes[491] 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,[492] or the Madeira Islands.[493] 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,[494] with all the
+spiritual magnificence which they shed on the Campagna,[495] 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.
+
+5. But it is very easy to outrun the sympathy of readers on this
+topic, which school-men 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[496] 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 woodcraft and I suppose that such a gazetteer as
+wood-cutters and Indians should furnish facts for would take place in
+the most sumptuous drawing-rooms of all the "Wreaths" and "Flora's
+chaplets"[497] of the book-shops; 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,[498] 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[499] 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 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.
+
+6. But taking timely warning, and leaving many things unsaid on this
+topic, but 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,[500] 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[501] and Ptolemaic schemes[502] for her large
+style. We know 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,[503] Fauna,[504] Ceres,[505] and Pomona,[506] to
+come in. How far off yet is the trilobite! how far the quadruped! how
+inconceivably remote is man! All duly arrive,[507] and then race after
+race of men. It is a long way from granite to the oyster; farther yet to
+Plato,[508] and the preaching of the immortality of the soul. Yet all
+must come, as surely as the first atom has two sides.
+
+7. 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 thumb-nail, 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.
+
+8. 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 toward
+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.
+
+9. Things are so strictly related, that according to the skill of the
+eye, from any one object the parts and properties of any other may be
+predicted. If we had eyes to see it, a bit of stone from the city wall
+would certify us of the necessity that man must exist, as readily as
+the city. That identity makes us all one, and reduces to nothing great
+intervals on our customary scale. We talk of deviations from natural
+life, as if artificial life were not also natural. The smoothest
+curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude
+and aboriginal as a white bear, omnipotent to its own ends, and is
+directly related, there amid essences and billets-doux, to Himalaya
+mountain-chains[509] 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 wood-chucks, and the
+oak and the elm shall gladly serve us, though we sit in chairs of
+ivory on carpets of silk.
+
+10. This guiding identity runs through all the surprises and contrasts
+of the piece, and characterizes every law. Man carries the world in
+his head, the whole astronomy and chemistry suspended in a thought.
+Because the history of nature is charactered in his brain, therefore
+is he the prophet and discoverer of her secrets. Every known fact in
+natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it
+was actually verified. A man does not tie his shoe without recognizing
+laws which bind the farthest regions of nature: moon, plant, gas,
+crystal, are concrete geometry and numbers. Common sense knows its
+own, and recognizes the fact at first sight in chemical experiment.
+The common sense of Franklin,[510] Dalton,[511] Davy[512] and
+Black,[513] is the same common sense which made the arrangements which
+now it discovers.
+
+11. If the identity expresses organized rest, the counter action runs
+also into organization. The astronomers said,[514] "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[515] 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 of 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 aims; 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 ginger-bread dog,
+individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every
+new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue, which this
+day of continual petty 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 luster plays round the top of every toy to his
+eye, to insure his fidelity, and he is deceived to his good. We are
+made alive and kept alive by the same arts. Let the Stoics[516] 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 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.
+
+12. But the craft with which the world is made runs also into the mind
+and character of men. No man is quite sane; each has a vein of folly in
+his composition, a slight determination of blood to the head, to make
+sure of holding him hard to some one point which nature had taken to
+heart. Great causes are never tried on their merits; but the cause is
+reduced to particulars to suit the size of the partisans, and the
+contention is ever hottest on minor matters. Not less remarkable is the
+overfaith of each man in the importance of what he has to do or say. The
+poet, the prophet, has a higher value for what he utters than any
+hearer, and therefore it gets spoken. The strong, self-complacent
+Luther[517] declares with an emphasis, not to be mistaken, that "God
+himself cannot do without wise men." Jacob Behmen[518] and George
+Fox[519] betray their egotism in the pertinacity of their controversial
+tracts, and James Naylor[520] once suffered himself to be worshiped 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 is of none, or I shall not do it
+with impunity.
+
+13. 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[521] 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
+water-side, 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?
+
+14. 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
+fore-looking to such pavilions and gardens of festivity beyond. It is
+an odd jealousy; but the poet finds himself not near enough to this
+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[522] 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 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 landscapes 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.
+
+15. What shall we say of this omnipresent appearance of that first
+projectile impulse, of this flattery and balking of so many
+well-meaning creatures? Must we not suppose somewhere in the universe
+a slight treachery and derision? Are we not engaged to a serious
+resentment of this use that is made of us? Are we tickled trout, and
+fools of nature? One looks 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[523] 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.
+
+16. 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[524] or self-heal. After every foolish day we sleep off the
+fumes and furies of its hours; and though we are always engaged with
+particulars, and often enslaved to them, we bring with us to every
+experiment the innate universal laws. These, while they exist in the
+mind as ideas, stand around us in nature forever embodied, a present
+sanity to expose and cure the insanity of men. Our servitude to
+particulars betrays us into a hundred foolish expectations. We
+anticipate a new era from the invention of a locomotive, or a balloon;
+the new engine brings with it the old checks. They say that by
+electro-magnetism, your salad shall be grown from the seed whilst your
+fowl is roasting for dinner: it is a symbol of our modern aims and
+endeavors,--of our condensation and acceleration of objects: but
+nothing is gained: nature cannot be cheated: man's life is but seventy
+salads long, grow they swift or grow they slow. In these checks and
+impossibilities, however, we find our advantage, not less than in
+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
+center to the poles of nature, and have some stake in every
+possibility, lends that sublime luster 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
+distills 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.
+
+
+
+
+SHAKSPEARE;[525] OR, THE POET
+
+[Transcriber's Note: Shakspeare is spelled as "Shakspeare" as well as
+"Shakespeare" in this book. The original spellings have been retained.]
+
+
+1. Great men are more distinguished by range and extent, than by
+originality. If we require the originality which consists in weaving,
+like a spider, their web from their own bowels; in finding clay, and
+making bricks, and building the house; no great men are original. Nor
+does valuable originality consist in unlikeness to other men. The hero
+is in the press of knights, and the thick of events; and, seeing what
+men want, and sharing their desire, he adds the needful length of
+sight and of arm, to come to the desired point. The greatest genius is
+the most indebted man. A poet is no rattlebrain, saying what comes
+uppermost and, because he says everything, saying, at last, something
+good; but a heart in unison with his time and country. There is
+nothing whimsical and fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad
+earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions, and pointed with
+the most determined aim which any man or class knows of in his times.
+
+2. The Genius[526] of our life is jealous of individuals and will not
+have any individual great, except through the general. There is no
+choice to genius. A great man does not wake up on some fine morning,
+and say, "I am full of life, I will go to sea, and find an Antarctic
+continent: to-day I will square the circle: I will ransack botany, and
+find a new food for man: I have a new architecture in my mind: I
+foresee a new mechanic power:" no, but he finds himself in the river
+of the thoughts and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities
+of his contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes of men look one
+way, and their hands all point in the direction in which he should go.
+The church has reared him amidst rites and pomps, and he carries out
+the advice which her music gave him, and builds a cathedral needed by
+her chants and processions. He finds a war raging: it educates him, by
+trumpet, in barracks, and he betters the instruction. He finds two
+counties groping to bring coal, or flour, or fish, from the place of
+production to the place of consumption, and he hits on a railroad.
+Every master has found his materials collected, and his power lay in
+his sympathy with his people, and in his love of the materials he
+wrought in. What an economy of power! and what a compensation for the
+shortness of life! All is done to his hand. The world has brought him
+thus far on his way. The human race has gone out before him, sunk the
+hills, filled the hollows, and bridged the rivers. Men, nations,
+poets, artisans, women, all have worked for him, and he enters into
+their labors. Choose any other thing, out of the line of tendency, out
+of the national feeling and history, and he would have all to do for
+himself: his powers would be expended in the first preparations. Great
+genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at
+all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and
+suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the
+mind.
+
+3. Shakspeare's youth[527] fell in a time when the English people were
+importunate for dramatic entertainments. The court took offense easily
+at political allusions, and attempted to suppress them. The
+Puritans,[528] a growing and energetic party and the religious among
+the Anglican Church,[529] would suppress them. But the people wanted
+them. Inn-yards, houses without roofs, and extemporaneous inclosures
+at country fairs, were the ready theaters of strolling players. The
+people had tasted this new joy; and, as we could not hope to suppress
+newspapers now,--no, not by the strongest party,--neither then could
+king, prelate, or puritan,--alone or united, suppress an organ, which
+was ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, Punch,[530] and library,
+at the same time. Probably king, prelate, and puritan, all found their
+own account in it. It had become, by all causes, a national
+interest,--by no means conspicuous, so that some great scholar would
+have thought of treating it in an English history,--but not a whit
+less considerable, because it was cheap, and of no account, like a
+baker's shop. The best proof of its vitality is the crowd of writers
+which suddenly broke into this field; Kyd, Marlow, Greene,[531]
+Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Peele, Ford,
+Massinger, Beaumont, and Fletcher.
+
+4. The secure possession, by the stage, of the public mind, is of the
+first importance to the poet who works for it. He loses no time in
+idle experiments. Here is audience and expectation prepared. In the
+case of Shakspeare there is much more. At the time when[532] he left
+Stratford, and went up to London, a great body of stage-plays, of all
+dates and writers, existed in manuscript, and were in turn produced on
+the boards. Here is the Tale of Troy,[533] which the audience will
+bear hearing some part of, every week; the Death of Julius Caesar,[534]
+and other stories out of Plutarch,[535] which they never tire of; a
+shelf full of English history, from the chronicles of Brut[536] and
+Arthur,[537] down to the royal Henries,[538] which men hear eagerly;
+and a string of doleful tragedies, merry Italian tales,[539] and
+Spanish voyages,[540] which all the London prentices know. All the
+mass has been treated, with more or less skill, by every playwright,
+and the prompter has the soiled and tattered manuscripts. It is now no
+longer possible to say who wrote them first. They have been the
+property of the Theater so long, and so many rising geniuses have
+enlarged or altered them, inserting a speech, or a whole scene, or
+adding a song, that no man can any longer claim copyright in this work
+of numbers. Happily, no man wishes to. They are not yet desired in
+that way. We have few readers, many spectators and hearers. They had
+best lie where they are.
+
+5. Shakspeare, in common with his comrades, esteemed the mass of old
+plays, waste stock, in which any experiment could be freely tried.
+Had the _prestige_[541] which hedges about a modern tragedy existed,
+nothing could have been done. The rude warm blood of the living
+England circulated in the play, as in street-ballads, and gave body
+which he wanted to his airy and majestic fancy. The poet needs a
+ground in popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again,
+may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the
+people, supplies a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so
+much work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full
+strength for the audacities of his imagination. In short, the poet
+owes to his legend what sculpture owed to the temple. Sculpture in
+Egypt, and in Greece, grew up in subordination to architecture. It was
+the ornament of the temple wall: at first, a rude relief carved on
+pediments, then the relief became bolder, and a head or arm was
+projected from the wall, the groups being still arranged with
+reference to the building, which serves also as a frame to hold the
+figures; and when, at last, the greatest freedom of style and
+treatment was reached, the prevailing genius of architecture still
+enforced a certain calmness and continence in the statue. As soon as
+the statue was begun for itself, and with no reference to the temple
+or palace, the art began to decline: freak, extravagance, and
+exhibition, took the place of the old temperance. This balance-wheel,
+which the sculptor found in architecture, the perilous irritability of
+poetic talent found in the accumulated dramatic materials to which the
+people were already wonted, and which had a certain excellence which
+no single genius,[542] however extraordinary, could hope to create.
+
+6. In point of fact, it appears that Shakspeare did owe debts in all
+directions, and was able to use whatever he found; and the amount of
+indebtedness may be inferred from Malone's[543] laborious computations
+in regard to the First, Second, and Third parts of Henry VI., in
+which, "out of 6043 lines, 1771 were written by some author preceding
+Shakspeare; 2373 by him, on the foundation laid by his predecessors;
+and 1899 were entirely his own." And the proceeding investigation
+hardly leaves a single drama of his absolute invention. Malone's
+sentence is an important piece of external history. In Henry VIII, I
+think I see plainly the cropping out of the original rock on which his
+own finer stratum was laid. The first play was written by a superior,
+thoughtful man, with a vicious ear. I can mark his lines, and know
+well their cadence. See Wolsey's soliloquy,[544] and the following
+scene from Cromwell,[545] where,--instead of the meter of Shakspeare,
+whose secret is, that the thought constructs the tune, so that reading
+for the sense will best bring out the rhythm,--here the lines are
+constructed on a given tune, and the verse has even a trace of pulpit
+eloquence. But the play contains, through all its length, unmistakable
+traits of Shakspeare's hand, and some passages, as the account of the
+coronation,[546] are like autographs. What is odd, the compliment to
+Queen Elizabeth[547] is in bad rhythm.[548]
+
+7. Shakspeare knew that tradition supplies a better fable than any
+invention can. If he lost any credit of design, he augmented his
+resources; and, at that day, our petulant demand for originality was
+not so much pressed. There was no literature for the million. The
+universal reading, the cheap press, were unknown. A great poet, who
+appears in illiterate times, absorbs into his sphere all the light
+which is anywhere radiating. Every intellectual jewel, every flower of
+sentiment, it is his fine office to bring to his people; and he comes
+to value his memory[549] equally with his invention. He is therefore
+little solicitous whence his thoughts have been derived; whether
+through translation, whether through tradition, whether by travel in
+distant countries, whether by inspiration; from whatever source, they
+are equally welcome to his uncritical audience. Nay, he borrows very
+near home. Other men say wise things as well as he; only they say a
+good many foolish things, and do not know when they have spoken
+wisely. He knows the sparkle of the true stone, and puts it in high
+place, wherever he finds it. Such is the happy position of Homer,[550]
+perhaps; of Chaucer,[551] of Saadi.[552] They felt that all wit was
+their wit. And they are librarians and historiographers, as well as
+poets. Each romancer was heir and dispenser of all the hundred tales
+of the world,--
+
+   "Presenting Thebes'[553] and Pelops' line
+    And the tale of Troy divine."
+
+The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our early literature;
+and, more recently, not only Pope[554] and Dryden[555] have been
+beholden to him, but, in the whole society of English writers, a large
+unacknowledged debt is easily traced. One is charmed with the opulence
+which feeds so many pensioners. But Chaucer is a huge borrower.[556]
+Chaucer, it seems, drew continually, through Lydgat[557] and
+Caxton,[558] from Guido di Colonna,[559] whose Latin romance of the
+Trojan war was in turn a compilation from Dares Phrygius,[560]
+Ovid,[561] and Statius.[562] Then Petrarch,[563] Boccaccio,[564] and
+the Provencal poets,[565] and his benefactors: the Romaunt of the
+Rose[566] is only judicious translation from William of Lorris and
+John of Meung: Troilus and Creseide,[567] from Lollius of Urbino: The
+Cock and the Fox,[568] from the _Lais_ of Marie: The House of
+Fame,[569] from the French or Italian: and poor Gower[570] he uses as
+if he were only a brick-kiln or stone-quarry, out of which to build
+his house. He steals by this apology,--that what he takes has no worth
+where he finds it, and the greatest where he leaves it. It has come to
+be practically a sort of rule in literature, that a man, having once
+shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to
+steal from the writings of others at discretion. Thought is the
+property of him who can entertain it; and of him who can adequately
+place it. A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts;
+but, as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our
+own.
+
+8. Thus, all originality is relative. Every thinker is retrospective.
+The learned member of the legislature, at Westminister,[571] or at
+Washington, speaks and votes for thousands. Show us the constituency,
+and the now invisible channels by which the senator is made aware of
+their wishes, the crowd of practical and knowing men, who, by
+correspondence or conversation, are feeding him with evidence,
+anecdotes, and estimates, and it will bereave his fine attitude and
+resistance of something of their impressiveness. As Sir Robert
+Peel[572] and Mr. Webster[573] vote, so Locke[574] and Rousseau[575]
+think for thousands; and so there were foundations all around
+Homer,[576] Menu,[577] Saada,[578] or Milton,[579] from which they
+drew; friends, lovers, books, traditions, proverbs,--all
+perished,--which, if seen, would go to reduce the wonder. Did the bard
+speak with authority? Did he feel himself overmatched by any
+companion? The appeal is to the consciousness of the writer. Is there
+at last in his breast a Delphi[580] whereof to ask concerning any
+thought or thing whether it be verily so, yea or nay? and to have
+answer, and rely on that? All the debts which such a man could
+contract to other wit, would never disturb his consciousness of
+originality: for the ministrations of books, and of other minds, are a
+whiff of smoke to that most private reality with which he has
+conversed.
+
+9. It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius, in
+the world, was no man's work, but came by wide social labor, when a
+thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse. Our English
+Bible[581] is a wonderful specimen of the strength and music of the
+English language. But it was not made by one man, or at one time; but
+centuries and churches brought it to perfection. There never was a
+time when there was not some translation existing. The Liturgy,[582]
+admired for its energy and pathos, is an anthology of the piety of
+ages and nations, a translation of the prayers and forms of the
+Catholic church,--these collected, too, in long periods, from the
+prayers and meditations of every saint and sacred writer all over the
+world. Grotius[583] makes the like remark in respect to the Lord's
+Prayer, that the single clauses of which it is composed were already
+in use, in the time of Christ, in the rabbinical forms.[584] He picked
+out the grains of gold. The nervous language of the Common Law,[585]
+the impressive forms of our courts, and the precision and substantial
+truth of the legal distinctions, are the contribution of all the
+sharp-sighted, strong-minded men who have lived in the countries where
+these laws govern. The translation of Plutarch gets its excellence by
+being translation on translation. There never was a time when there
+was none. All the truly idiomatic and national phrases are kept, and
+all others successively picked out, and thrown away. Something like
+the same process had gone on, long before, with the originals of these
+books. The world takes liberties with world-books. Vedas,[586] AEsop's
+Fables,[587] Pilpay,[588] Arabian Nights,[589] Cid,[590] Iliad,[591]
+Robin Hood,[592] Scottish Minstrelsy,[593] are not the work of single
+men. In the composition of such works, the time thinks, the market
+thinks, the mason, the carpenter, the merchant, the farmer, the fop,
+all think for us. Every book supplies its time with one good word;
+every municipal law, every trade, every folly of the day, and the
+generic catholic genius who is not afraid or ashamed to owe his
+originality to the originality of all, stands with the next age as the
+recorder and embodiment of his own.
+
+10. We have to thank the researches of antiquaries, and the Shakspeare
+Society,[594] for ascertaining the steps of the English drama, from
+the Mysteries[595] celebrated in churches and by churchmen, and the
+final detachment from the church, and the completion of secular plays,
+from Ferrex and Porrex,[596] and Gammer Gurton's Needle,[597] down to
+the possession of the stage by the very pieces which Shakspeare
+altered, remodelled, and finally made his own. Elated with success,
+and piqued by the growing interest of the problem, they have left no
+book-stall unsearched, no chest in a garret unopened, no file of old
+yellow accounts to decompose in damp and worms, so keen was the hope
+to discover whether the boy Shakspeare poached[598] or not, whether he
+held horses at the theater-door, whether he kept school, and why he
+left in his will only his second-best bed to Ann Hathaway, his wife.
+
+11. There is somewhat touching in the madness with which the passing
+age mischooses the object on which all candles shine, and all eyes are
+turned; the care with which it registers every trifle touching Queen
+Elizabeth,[599] and King James,[600] and the Essexes,[601]
+Leicesters,[602] Burleighs,[603] and Buckinghams;[604] and lets pass
+without a single valuable note the founder of another dynasty, which
+alone will cause the Tudor dynasty[605] to be remembered,--the man who
+carries the Saxon race in him by the inspiration which feeds him, and
+on whose thoughts the foremost people of the world are now for some
+ages to be nourished, and minds to receive this and not another bias.
+A popular player,--nobody suspected he was the poet of the human race;
+and the secret was kept as faithfully from poets and intellectual men,
+as from courtiers and frivolous people. Bacon,[606] who took the
+inventory of the human understanding for his times, never mentioned
+his name. Ben Jonson,[607] though we have strained his few words of
+regard and panegyric, had no suspicion of the elastic fame whose first
+vibrations he was attempting. He no doubt thought the praise he has
+conceded to him generous, and esteemed himself, out of all question,
+the better poet of the two.
+
+12. If it need wit to know wit, according to the proverb, Shakspeare's
+time should be capable of recognizing it. Sir Henry Wotton[608] was
+born four years after Shakspeare, and died twenty-three years after
+him; and I find, among his correspondents and acquaintances, the
+following persons:[609] Theodore Beza, Isaac Casaubon, Sir Philip
+Sidney, Earl of Essex, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Milton,
+Sir Henry Vane, Isaac Walton, Dr. Donne, Abraham Cowley, Berlarmine,
+Charles Cotton, John Pym, John Hales, Kepler, Vieta, Albericus
+Gentilis, Paul Sarpi, Arminius; with all of whom exists some token of
+his having communicated, without enumerating many others, whom
+doubtless[610] he saw,--Shakspeare, Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont,
+Massinger, two Herberts, Marlow, Chapman and the rest. Since the
+constellation of great men who appeared in Greece in the time of
+Pericles,[611] there was never any such society;--yet their genius
+failed them to find out the best head in the universe. Our poet's mask
+was impenetrable. You cannot see the mountain near. It took a century
+to make it suspected; and not until two centuries had passed, after
+his death, did any criticism which we think adequate begin to appear.
+It was not possible to write the history of Shakspeare till now; for
+he is the father of German literature: it was on the introduction of
+Shakspeare into German, by Lessing,[612] and the translation of his
+works by Wieland[613] and Schlegel,[614] that the rapid burst of
+German literature was most intimately connected. It was not until the
+nineteenth century, whose speculative genius is a sort of living
+Hamlet,[615] that the tragedy of Hamlet could find such wondering
+readers. Now, literature, philosophy, and thought, are Shakspearized.
+His mind is the horizon beyond which, at present, we do not see. Our
+ears are educated to music by his rhythm. Coleridge[616] and
+Goethe[617] are the only critics who have expressed our convictions
+with any adequate fidelity; but there is in all cultivated minds a
+silent appreciation of his superlative power and beauty, which, like
+Christianity, qualifies the period.
+
+[Transcriber's Note: Number runs from 12 to 14. Number 13 omitted]
+
+14. The Shakspeare Society have inquired in all directions,
+advertised the missing facts, offered money for any information that
+will lead to proof; and with what result? Beside some important
+illustration of the history of the English stage, to which I have
+adverted, they have gleaned a few facts touching the property, and
+dealings in regard to property, of the poet. It appears that, from
+year to year, he owned a larger share in the Blackfriars'
+Theater:[618] its wardrobe and other appurtenances were his: and he
+bought an estate in his native village, with his earnings, as writer
+and shareholder; that he lived in the best house in Stratford;[619]
+was intrusted by his neighbors with their commissions in London, as of
+borrowing money, and the like; and he was a veritable farmer. About
+the time when he was writing Macbeth,[620] he sues Philip Rogers, in
+the borough-court of Stratford, for thirty-five shillings, ten pence,
+for corn delivered to him at different times; and, in all respects,
+appears as a good husband with no reputation for eccentricity or
+excess. He was a good-natured sort of man, an actor and shareholder in
+the theater, not in any striking manner distinguished from other
+actors and managers. I admit the importance of this information. It is
+well worth the pains that have been taken to procure it.
+
+15. But whatever scraps of information concerning his condition these
+researches may have rescued, they can shed no light upon that infinite
+invention which is the concealed magnet of his attraction for us. We
+are very clumsy writers of history. We tell the chronicle of
+parentage, birth, birth-place, schooling, schoolmates, earning of
+money, marriage, publication of books, celebrity, death; and when we
+have come to an end of this gossip no ray of relation appears between
+it and the goddess-born; and it seems as if, had we dipped at random
+into the "Modern Plutarch," and read any other life there, it would
+have fitted the poems as well. It is the essence of poetry to spring,
+like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish
+the past, and refuse all history. Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and
+Collier,[621] have wasted their oil. The famed theaters, Covent
+Garden, Drury Lane, the Park, and Tremont,[622] have vainly assisted.
+Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean, and Macready,[623] dedicate their
+lives to this genius; him they crown, elucidate, obey, and express.
+The genius knows them not. The recitation begins; one golden word
+leaps out immortal from all this painted pedantry, and sweetly
+torments us with invitations to its own inaccessible homes. I
+remember, I went once to see the Hamlet of a famed performer,[624] the
+pride of the English stage; and all I then heard, and all I now
+remember, of the tragedian, was that in which the tragedian had no
+part; simply, Hamlet's question to the ghost,--
+
+                            "What may this mean,[625]
+    That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
+    Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon?"
+
+That imagination which dilates the closet he writes in to the world's
+dimension, crowds it with agents in rank and order, as quickly
+reduces the big reality to be the glimpses of the moon. These tricks
+of his magic spoil for us the illusions of the green-room. Can any
+biography shed light on the localities into which the Midsummer
+Night's Dream[626] admits me? Did Shakspeare confide to any notary or
+parish recorder, sacristan, or surrogate, in Stratford, the genesis of
+that delicate creation? The forest of Arden,[627] the nimble air of
+Scone Castle,[628] the moonlight of Portia's villa,[629] "the antres
+vast[630] and desarts idle," of Othello's captivity,--where is the
+third cousin, or grand-nephew, the chancellor's file of accounts, or
+private letter, that has kept one word of those transcendent secrets?
+In fine, in this drama, as in all great works of art,--in the
+Cyclopean architecture[631] of Egypt and India; in the Phidian
+sculpture;[632] the Gothic ministers;[633] the Italian painting;[634]
+the Ballads of Spain and Scotland,[635]--the Genius draws up the
+ladder after him, when the creative age goes up to heaven, and gives
+way to a new, which sees the works, and ask in vain for a history.
+
+16. Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shakspeare; and even he can
+tell nothing, except to the Shakspeare in us; that is, to our most
+apprehensive and sympathetic hour. He cannot step from off his
+tripod,[636] and give us anecdotes of his inspirations. Read the antique
+documents extricated, analyzed, and compared, by the assiduous Dyce and
+Collier; and now read one of those skyey sentences,--aerolites,--which
+seem to have fallen out of heaven, and which, not your experience, but
+the man within the breast, has accepted, as words of fate; and tell me
+if they match; if the former account in any manner for the latter; or,
+which gives the most historical insight into the man.
+
+17. Hence, though our external history is so meager, yet, with
+Shakspeare for biographer, instead of Aubrey[637] and Rowe,[638] we
+have really the information which is material, that which describes
+character and fortune, that which, if we were about to meet the man
+and deal with him, would most import us to know. We have his recorded
+convictions on those questions which knock for answer at every
+heart,--on life and death, on love, on wealth and poverty, on the
+prizes of life, and the ways whereby we come at them; on the
+characters of men, and the influences, occult and open, which affect
+their fortunes; and on those mysterious and demoniacal powers which
+defy our science, and which yet interweave their malice and their gift
+in our brightest hours. Who ever read the volume of the Sonnets,
+without finding that the poet had there revealed, under masks that are
+no masks to the intelligent, the lore of friendship and of love; the
+confusion of sentiments in the most susceptible, and, at the same
+time, the most intellectual of men? What trait of his private mind has
+he hidden in his dramas? One can discern, in his ample pictures of the
+gentleman and the king, what forms and humanities pleased him; his
+delight in troops of friends, in large hospitality, in cheerful
+giving. Let Timon,[639] let Warwick,[640] let Antonio[641] the
+merchant, answer for his great heart. So far from Shakspeare's being
+the least known, he is the one person, in all modern history, known to
+us. What point of morals, of manners, of economy, of philosophy, of
+religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he not settled? What
+mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What office, or
+function, or district of man's work, has he not remembered? What king
+has he not taught state, as Talma[642] taught Napoleon? What maiden
+has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he not
+out-loved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not
+instructed in the rudeness of his behavior?
+
+18. Some able and appreciating critics think no criticism on
+Shakspeare valuable, that does not rest purely on the dramatic merit;
+that he is falsely judged as poet and philosopher. I think as highly
+as these critics of his dramatic merit, who still think it secondary.
+He was a full man, who liked to talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and
+images, which, seeking vent, found the drama next at hand. Had he been
+less, we should have had to consider how well he filled his place, how
+good a dramatist he was,--and he is the best in the world. But it
+turns out, that what he has to say is of that weight, as to withdraw
+some attention from the vehicle; and he is like some saint whose
+history is to be rendered into all languages, into verse and prose,
+into songs and pictures, and cut up into proverbs; so that the
+occasion which gave the saint's meaning the form of a conversation, or
+of a prayer, or of a code of laws, is immaterial, compared with the
+universality of its application. So it fares with the wise Shakspeare
+and his book of life. He wrote the airs for all our modern music: he
+wrote the text of modern life; the text of manners: he drew the man of
+England and Europe; the father of the man in America: he drew the man,
+and described the day, and what is done in it: he read the hearts of
+men and women, their probity, and their second thought, and wiles; the
+wiles of innocence, and the transitions by which virtues and vices
+slide into their contraries: he could divide the mother's part from
+the father's part in the face of the child, or draw the fine
+demarcations of freedom and of fate: he knew the laws of repression
+which make the police of nature: and all the sweets and all the
+terrors of human lot lay in his mind as truly but as softly as the
+landscape lies on the eye. And the importance of this wisdom of life
+sinks the form, as of Drama or Epic, out of notice. 'Tis like making a
+question concerning the paper on which a king's message is written.
+
+19. Shakspeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as
+he is out of the crowd. He is inconceivably wise; the others,
+conceivably. A good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato's brain,
+and think from thence; but not into Shakspeare's. We are still out of
+doors. For executive faculty, for creation, Shakspeare is unique. No
+man can imagine it better. He was the farthest reach of subtlety
+compatible with an individual self,--the subtilest of authors, and
+only just within the possibility of authorship. With this wisdom of
+life, is the equal endowment of imaginative and of lyric power. He
+clothed the creatures of his legend with form and sentiments, as if
+they were people who had lived under his roof; and few real men have
+left such distinct characters as these fictions. And they spoke in
+language as sweet as it was fit. Yet his talents never seduced him
+into an ostentation, nor did he harp on one string. An omnipresent
+humanity[643] cooerdinates all his faculties. Give a man of talents a
+story to tell, and his partiality will presently appear. He has
+certain observations, opinions, topics, which have some accidental
+prominence, and which he disposes all to exhibit. He crams this part,
+and starves that other part, consulting not the fitness of the thing,
+but his fitness and strength. But Shakspeare has no peculiarity, no
+importunate topic; but all is duly given; no veins, no curiosities: no
+cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no mannerist is he: he has no
+discoverable egotism: the great he tells greatly; the small,
+subordinately. He is wise without emphasis or assertion; he is strong,
+as nature is strong, who lifts the land into mountain slopes without
+effort, and by the same rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and
+likes as well to do the one as the other. This makes that equality of
+power in farce, tragedy, narrative, and love-songs; a merit so
+incessant, that each reader is incredulous of the perception of other
+readers.
+
+20. This power of expression, or of transferring the inmost truth of
+things into music and verse, makes him the type of the poet, and has
+added a new problem to metaphysics. This is that which throws him into
+natural history, as a main production of the globe, and as announcing
+new eras and ameliorations. Things were mirrored in his poetry without
+loss or blur; he could paint the fine with precision, the great with
+compass: the tragic and the comic indifferently, and without any
+distortion or favor. He carried his powerful execution into minute
+details, to a hair point; finishes an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as
+he draws a mountain; and yet these, like nature's, will bear the
+scrutiny of the solar microscope.
+
+21. In short, he is the chief example to prove that more or less of
+production, more or fewer pictures, is a thing indifferent. He had the
+power to make one picture. Daguerre[644] learned how to let one flower
+etch its image on his plate of iodine; and then proceeds at leisure to
+etch a million. There are always objects; but there was never
+representation. Here is perfect representation, at last; and now let
+the world of figures sit for their portraits. No recipe can be given
+for the making of a Shakspeare; but the possibility of the translation
+of things into song is demonstrated.
+
+22. His lyric power lies in the genius of the piece. The sonnets,
+though their excellence is lost in the splendor of the dramas, are as
+inimitable as they: and it is not a merit of lines, but a total merit
+of the piece; like the tone of voice of some incomparable person, so
+is this a speech of poetic beings, and any clause as unproducible now
+as a whole poem.
+
+23. Though the speeches in the plays, and single lines, have a beauty
+which tempts the ear to pause on them for their euphuism,[645] yet the
+sentence is so loaded with meaning, and so linked with its foregoers
+and followers, that the logician is satisfied. His means are as
+admirable as his ends; every subordinate invention, by which he helps
+himself to connect some irreconcilable opposites, is a poem too. He is
+not reduced to dismount and walk, because his horses are running off
+with him in some distant direction; he always rides.
+
+24. The finest poetry was first experienced: but the thought has
+suffered a transformation since it was an experience. Cultivated men
+often attain a good degree of skill in writing verses; but it is easy
+to read, through their poems, their personal history: any one
+acquainted with parties can name every figure: this is Andrew, and
+that is Rachael. The sense thus remains prosaic. It is a caterpillar
+with wings, and not yet a butterfly. In the poet's mind, the fact has
+gone quite over into the new element of thought, and has lost all that
+is exuvial. This generosity bides with Shakspeare. We say, from the
+truth and closeness of his pictures, that he knows the lesson by
+heart. Yet there is not a trace of egotism.
+
+25. One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his
+cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet,--for beauty is his
+aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation, but for its grace: he
+delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely light that
+sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds
+over the universe. Epicurus[646] relates, that poetry hath such charms
+that a lover might forsake his mistress to partake of them. And the
+true bards have been noted for their firm and cheerful temper. Homer
+lies in sunshine; Chaucer is glad and erect; and Saadi says, "It was
+rumored abroad that I was penitent; but what had I to do with
+repentance?" Not less sovereign and cheerful,--much more sovereign and
+cheerful, is the tone of Shakspeare. His name suggests joy and
+emancipation to the heart of men. If he should appear in any company
+of human souls, who would not march in his troop? He touches nothing
+that does not borrow health and longevity from his festal style.
+
+26. And now, how stands the account of man with this bard and
+benefactor, when in solitude, shutting our ears to the reverberations
+of his fame, we seek to strike the balance? Solitude has austere
+lessons; it can teach us to spare both heroes and poets; and it weighs
+Shakspeare also, and finds him to share the halfness and imperfection
+of humanity.
+
+27. Shakspeare, Homer, Dante,[647] Chaucer, saw the splendor of
+meaning that plays over the visible world; knew that a tree had
+another use than for apples, and corn another than for meal, and the
+ball of the earth, than for tillage and roads: that these things bore
+a second and finer harvest to the mind, being emblems of its
+thoughts, and conveying in all their natural history a certain mute
+commentary on human life. Shakspeare employed them as colors to
+compose his picture. He rested in their beauty; and never took the
+step which seemed inevitable to such genius, namely, to explore the
+virtue which resides in these symbols, and imparts this power,--what
+is that which they themselves say? He converted the elements, which
+waited on his command, into entertainments. He was master of the
+revels[648] to mankind. Is it not as if one should have, through
+majestic powers of science, the comets given into his hand, or the
+planets and their moons, and should draw them from their orbits to
+glare with the municipal fireworks on a holiday night, and advertise
+in all towns, "very superior pyrotechny this evening!" Are the agents
+of nature, and the power to understand them, worth no more than a
+street serenade, or the breath of a cigar? One remembers again the
+trumpet-text in the Koran,[649]--"The heavens and the earth, and all
+that is between them, think ye we have created them in jest?" As long
+as the question is of talent and mental power, the world of men has
+not his equal to show. But when the question is to life, and its
+materials, and its auxiliaries, how does he profit me? What does it
+signify? It is but a Twelfth Night,[650] or Midsummer Night's Dream,
+or a Winter Evening's Tale: what signifies another picture more or
+less? The Egyptian verdict[651] of the Shakspeare Societies comes to
+mind, that he was a jovial actor and manager. I cannot marry this
+fact to his verse. Other admirable men have led lives in some sort of
+keeping with their thought; but this man, in wide contrast. Had he
+been less, had he reached only the common measure of great authors, of
+Bacon, Milton, Tasso,[652] Cervantes,[653] we might leave the fact in
+the twilight of human fate: but, that this man of men, he who gave to
+the science of mind a new and larger subject than had ever existed,
+and planted the standard of humanity some furlongs forward into
+Chaos,--that he should not be wise for himself,--it must even go into
+the world's history, that the best poet led an obscure and profane
+life, using his genius for the public amusement.
+
+28. Well, other men, priest and prophet, Israelite,[654] German,[655]
+and Swede,[656] beheld the same objects: they also saw through them
+that which was contained. And to what purpose? The beauty straightway
+vanished; they read commandments, all-excluding mountainous duty; an
+obligation, a sadness, as of piled mountains, fell on them, and life
+became ghastly, joyless, a pilgrim's progress,[657] a probation,
+beleaguered round with doleful histories, of Adam's fall[658] and
+curse, behind us; with doomsdays and purgatorial[659] and penal fires
+before us; and the heart of the seer and the heart of the listener
+sank in them.
+
+29. It must be conceded that these are half-views of half-men. The
+world still wants its poet-priest, a reconciler, who shall not trifle
+with Shakspeare the player, nor shall grope in graves with Swedenborg
+the mourner; but who shall see, speak, and act, with equal
+inspiration. For knowledge will brighten the sunshine; right is more
+beautiful than private affection; and love is compatible with
+universal wisdom.
+
+
+
+
+PRUDENCE.[660]
+
+
+What right have I to write on Prudence, whereof I have little, and
+that of the negative sort? My prudence consists in avoiding and going
+without, not in the inventing of means and methods, not in adroit
+steering, not in gentle repairing. I have no skill to make money spend
+well, no genius in my economy, and whoever sees my garden discovers
+that I must have some other garden. Yet I love facts, and hate
+lubricity[661] and people without perception. Then I have the same
+title to write on prudence that I have to write on poetry or holiness.
+We write from aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience.
+We paint those qualities which we do not possess. The poet admires the
+man of energy and tactics; the merchant breeds his son for the church
+or the bar; and where a man is not vain and egotistic you shall find
+what he has not by his praise. Moreover it would be hardly honest in
+me not to balance these fine lyric words of Love and Friendship[662]
+with words of coarser sound, and whilst my debt to my senses is real
+and constant, not to own it in passing.
+
+Prudence is the virtue of the senses. It is the science of
+appearances. It is the outmost action of the inward life. It is God
+taking thought for oxen. It moves matter after the laws of matter. It
+is content to seek health of body by complying with physical
+conditions, and health of mind by the laws of the intellect.
+
+The world of the senses is a world of shows; it does not exist for
+itself, but has a symbolic character; and a true prudence or law of
+shows recognizes the co-presence of other laws and knows that its own
+office is subaltern; knows that it is surface and not centre where it
+works. Prudence is false when detached. It is legitimate when it is
+the Natural History of the soul incarnate, when it unfolds the beauty
+of laws within the narrow scope of the senses.
+
+There are all degrees of proficiency in knowledge of the world. It is
+sufficient to our present purpose to indicate three. One class lives
+to the utility of the symbol, esteeming health and wealth a final
+good. Another class live above this mark of the beauty of the symbol,
+as the poet and artist and the naturalist and man of science. A third
+class live above the beauty of the symbol to the beauty of the thing
+signified; these are wise men. The first class have common sense; the
+second, taste; and the third, spiritual perception. Once in a long
+time, a man traverses the whole scale, and sees and enjoys the symbol
+solidly, then also has a clear eye for its beauty, and lastly, whilst
+he pitches his tent on this sacred volcanic isle of nature, does not
+offer to build houses and barns thereon reverencing the splendor of
+the God which he sees bursting through each chink and cranny.
+
+The world is filled with the proverbs[663] and acts and winkings of a
+base prudence, which is a devotion to matter, as if we possessed no
+other faculties than the palate, the nose, the touch, the eye and ear;
+a prudence which adores the Rule of Three, which never subscribes,
+which gives never, which seldom lends, and asks but one question of
+any project,--Will it bake bread? This is a disease like a thickening
+of the skin until the vital organs are destroyed. But culture,
+revealing the high origin of the apparent world and aiming at the
+perfection of the man as the end, degrades everything else, as health
+and bodily life, into means. It sees prudence not to be a several
+faculty, but a name for wisdom and virtue conversing with the body and
+its wants. Cultivated men always feel and speak so as if a great
+fortune, the achievement of a civil or social measure, great personal
+influence, a graceful and commanding address, had their value as
+proofs of the energy of the spirit. If a man lose his balance and
+immerse himself in any trades or pleasures for their own sake, he may
+be a good wheel or pin,[664] but he is not a cultivated man.
+
+The spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and
+cowards, and is the subject of all comedy. It is nature's joke, and
+therefore literature's. The true prudence limits this sensualism by
+admitting the knowledge of an internal and real world. This
+recognition once made,--the order of the world and the distribution
+of affairs and times being studied with the co-perception of their
+subordinate place, will reward any degree of attention. For, our
+existence, thus apparently attached in nature to the sun and the
+returning moon and the periods which they mark; so susceptible to
+climate and to country, so alive to social good and evil, so fond of
+splendor and so tender to hunger and cold and debt,--reads all its
+primary lessons out of these books.
+
+Prudence does not go behind nature and ask whence it is? It takes the
+laws of the world whereby man's being is conditioned, as they are, and
+keeps these laws that it may enjoy their proper good. It respects
+space and time, climate, want, sleep, the law of polarity,[665] growth
+and death. There revolve, to give bound and period to his being on all
+sides, the sun and moon, the great formalists in the sky: here lies
+stubborn matter, and will not swerve from its chemical routine. Here
+is a planted globe, pierced and belted with natural laws and fenced
+and distributed externally with civil partitions and properties which
+impose new restraints on the young inhabitant.
+
+We eat of the bread which grows in the field. We live by the air which
+blows around us and we are poisoned by the air that is too cold or too
+hot, too dry or too wet. Time, which shows so vacant, indivisible and
+divine in its coming, is slit and peddled into trifles and tatters. A
+door is to be painted, a lock to be repaired. I want wood or oil, or
+meal, or salt; the house smokes, or I have a headache; then the tax;
+and an affair to be transacted with a man without heart or brains, and
+the stinging recollection of an injurious or very awkward word,--these
+eat up the hours. Do what we can, summer will have its flies.[666] If
+we walk in the woods we must feed mosquitoes. If we go a-fishing we
+must expect a wet coat. Then climate is a great impediment to idle
+persons. We often resolve to give up the care of the weather, but
+still we regard the clouds and the rain.
+
+We are instructed by these petty experiences which usurp the hours and
+years. The hard soil and four months of snow make the inhabitant of the
+northern temperate zone wiser and abler than his fellow who enjoys the
+fixed smile of the tropics. The islander may ramble all day at will. At
+night he may sleep on a mat under the moon, and wherever a wild
+date-tree grows, nature has, without a prayer even, spread a table for
+his morning meal. The northerner is perforce a householder. He must
+brew, bake, salt and preserve his food. He must pile wood and coal. But
+as it happens that not one stroke can labor lay to without some new
+acquaintance with nature; and as nature is inexhaustibly significant,
+the inhabitants of these climates[667] have always excelled the
+southerner in force. Such is the value of these matters that a man who
+knows other things can never know too much of these. Let him have
+accurate perceptions. Let him, if he have hands, handle; if eyes,
+measure and discriminate; let him accept and hive every fact of
+chemistry, natural history and economics; the more he has, the less is
+he willing to spare any one. Time is always bringing the occasions that
+disclose their value. Some wisdom comes out of every natural and
+innocent action. The domestic man, who loves no music so well as his
+kitchen clock and the airs which the logs sing to him as they burn on
+the hearth, has solaces which others never dream of. The application of
+means to ends ensures victory and the songs of victory not less in a
+farm or a shop than in the tactics of party or of war. The good husband
+finds method as efficient in the packing of fire-wood in a shed or in
+the harvesting of fruits in the cellar, as in Peninsular campaigns[668]
+or the files of the Department of State. In the rainy day he builds a
+work-bench, or gets his tool-box set in the corner of the barn-chamber,
+and stored with nails, gimlet, pincers, screwdriver and chisel. Herein
+he tastes an old joy of youth and childhood, the cat-like love of
+garrets, presses and corn-chambers, and of the conveniences of long
+housekeeping. His garden or his poultry-yard--very paltry places it may
+be--tells him many pleasant anecdotes. One might find argument for
+optimism in the abundant flow of this saccharine element of pleasure in
+every suburb and extremity of the good world. Let a man keep the
+law--any law,--and his way will be strown with satisfactions. There is
+more difference in the quality of our pleasures than in the amount.
+
+On the other hand, nature punishes any neglect of prudence. If you
+think the senses final, obey their law. If you believe in the soul, do
+not clutch at sensual sweetness before it is ripe on the slow tree of
+cause and effect. It is vinegar to the eyes to deal with men of loose
+and imperfect perception. Dr. Johnson is reported to have
+said,[669]--"If the child says he looked out of this window, when he
+looked out of that,--whip him." Our American character is marked by a
+more than average delight in accurate perception, which is shown by
+the currency of the by-word, "No mistake."
+
+But the discomfort of unpunctuality, of confusion of thought about
+facts, inattention to the wants of to-morrow, is of no nation. The
+beautiful laws of time and space, once dislocated by our inaptitude,
+are holes and dens. If the hive be disturbed by rash and stupid hands,
+instead of honey it will yield us bees. Our words and actions to be
+fair must be timely. A gay and pleasant sound is the whetting of the
+scythe in the mornings of June; yet what is more lonesome and sad than
+the sound of a whetstone or mower's rifle[670] when it is too late in
+the season to make hay? Scatter brained and "afternoon men" spoil much
+more than their own affairs in spoiling the temper of those who deal
+with them. I have seen a criticism on some paintings, of which I am
+reminded when I see the shiftless and unhappy men who are not true to
+their senses. The last Grand Duke of Weimar,[671] a man of superior
+understanding, said: "I have sometimes remarked in the presence of
+great works of art, and just now especially in Dresden, how much a
+certain property contributes to the effect which gives life to the
+figures, and to the life an irresistible truth. This property is the
+hitting, in all the figures we draw, the right centre of gravity. I
+mean the placing the figures firm upon their feet, making the hands
+grasp, and fastening the eyes on the spot where they should look. Even
+lifeless figures, as vessels and stools--let them be drawn ever so
+correctly--lose all effect so soon as they lack the resting upon their
+centre of gravity, and have a certain swimming and oscillating
+appearance. The Raphael in the Dresden gallery[672] (the only great
+affecting picture which I have seen) is the quietest and most
+passionless piece you can imagine; a couple of saints who worship the
+Virgin and child. Nevertheless it awakens a deeper impression than the
+contortions of ten crucified martyrs. For, beside all the resistless
+beauty of form, it possesses in the highest degree the property of the
+perpendicularity of all the figures." This perpendicularity we demand
+of all the figures in this picture of life. Let them stand on their
+feet, and not float and swing. Let us know where to find them. Let
+them discriminate between what they remember and what they dreamed.
+Let them call a spade a spade.[673] Let them give us facts, and honor
+their own senses with trust.
+
+But what man shall dare task another with imprudence? Who is prudent?
+The men we call greatest are least in this kingdom. There is a certain
+fatal dislocation in our relation to nature, distorting all our modes
+of living and making every law our enemy, which seems at last to have
+aroused all the wit and virtue in the world to ponder the question of
+Reform. We must call the highest prudence to counsel, and ask why
+health and beauty and genius should now be the exception rather than
+the rule of human nature? We do not know the properties of plants and
+animals and the laws of nature, through our sympathy with the same;
+but this remains the dream of poets. Poetry and prudence should be
+coincident. Poets should be lawgivers; that is, the boldest lyric
+inspiration should not chide and insult, but should announce and lead
+the civil code and the day's work. But now the two things seem
+irreconcilably parted. We have violated law upon law until we stand
+amidst ruins, and when by chance we espy a coincidence between reason
+and the phenomena, we are surprised. Beauty should be the dowry of
+every man and woman, as invariably as sensation; but it is rare.
+Health or sound organization should be universal. Genius should be the
+child of genius, and every child should be inspired; but now it is not
+to be predicted of any child, and nowhere is it pure. We call partial
+half lights, by courtesy, genius; talent which converts itself to
+money; talent which glitters to-day that it may dine and sleep well
+to-morrow; and society is officered by _men of parts_,[674] as they
+are properly called, and not by divine men. These use their gifts to
+refine luxury, not to abolish it. Genius is always ascetic; and piety,
+and love. Appetite shows to the finer souls as a disease, and they
+find beauty in rites and bounds that resist it.
+
+We have found out[675] fine names to cover our sensuality withal, but
+no gifts can raise intemperance. The man of talent affects to call his
+transgressions of the laws of the senses trivial and to count them
+nothing considered with his devotion to his art. His art rebukes him.
+That never taught him lewdness, nor the love of wine, nor the wish to
+reap where he had not sowed. His art is less for every deduction from
+his holiness, and less for every defect of common sense. On him who
+scorned the world, as he said, the scorned world wreaks its revenge.
+He that despiseth small things will perish by little and little.
+Goethe's Tasso[676] is very likely to be a pretty fair historical
+portrait, and that is true tragedy. It does not seem to me so genuine
+grief when some tyrannous Richard III.[677] oppresses and slays a
+score of innocent persons, as when Antonio and Tasso, both apparently
+right, wrong each other. One living after the maxims of this world and
+consistent and true to them, the other fired with all divine
+sentiments, yet grasping also at the pleasures of sense, without
+submitting to their law. That is a grief we all feel, a knot we cannot
+untie. Tasso's is no infrequent case in modern biography. A man of
+genius, of an ardent temperament, reckless of physical laws,
+self-indulgent, becomes presently unfortunate, querulous, a
+"discomfortable cousin," a thorn to himself and to others.
+
+The scholar shames us by his bifold[678] life. Whilst something higher
+than prudence is active, he is admirable; when common sense is wanted,
+he is an encumbrance. Yesterday, Caesar[679] was not so great; to-day,
+Job[680] not so miserable. Yesterday, radiant with the light of an
+ideal world in which he lives, the first of men, and now oppressed by
+wants and by sickness, for which he must thank himself, none is so
+poor to do him reverence. He resembles the opium eaters whom
+travellers describe as frequenting the bazaars of Constantinople, who
+skulk about all day, the most pitiful drivellers, yellow, emaciated,
+ragged, sneaking; then at evening, when the bazaars are open, they
+slink to the opium-shop, swallow their morsel and become tranquil,
+glorious and great. And who has not seen the tragedy of imprudent
+genius struggling for years with paltry pecuniary difficulties, at
+last sinking, chilled, exhausted and fruitless, like a giant
+slaughtered by pins?
+
+Is it not better that a man should accept the first pains and
+mortifications of this sort, which nature is not slack in sending him,
+as hints that he must expect no other good than the just fruit of his
+own labor and self-denial? Health, bread, climate, social position,
+have their importance, and he will give them their due. Let him esteem
+Nature a perpetual counsellor, and her perfections the exact measure
+of our deviations. Let him make the night night, and the day day. Let
+him control the habit of expense. Let him see that as much wisdom may
+be expended on a private economy as on an empire, and as much wisdom
+may be drawn from it. The laws of the world are written out for him on
+every piece of money in his hand. There is nothing he will not be the
+better for knowing, were it only the wisdom of Poor Richard,[681] or
+the State-street[682] prudence of buying by the acre to sell by the
+foot; or the thrift of the agriculturist, to stick[683] in a tree
+between whiles, because it will grow whilst he sleeps; or the prudence
+which consists in husbanding little strokes of the tool, little
+portions of time, particles of stock and small gains. The eye of
+prudence may never shut. Iron, if kept at the ironmonger's, will rust;
+beer, if not brewed in the right state of the atmosphere, will sour;
+timber of ships will rot at sea, or if laid up high and dry, will
+strain, warp and dry-rot. Money, if kept by us, yields no rent and is
+liable to loss; if invested, is liable to depreciation of the
+particular kind of stock. Strike, says the smith, the iron is white.
+Keep the rake, says the haymaker, as nigh the scythe as you can, and
+the cart as nigh the rake. Our Yankee trade is reputed to be very much
+on the extreme of this prudence. It saves itself by its activity. It
+takes bank notes,--good, bad, clean, ragged, and saves itself by the
+speed with which it passes them off. Iron cannot rust, nor beer sour,
+nor timber rot, nor calicoes go out of fashion, nor money stocks
+depreciate, in the few swift moments in which the Yankee suffers any
+one of them to remain in his possession. In skating over thin ice our
+safety is in our speed.
+
+Let him learn a prudence of a higher strain. Let him learn that
+everything in nature, even motes and feathers, go by law and not by
+luck, and that what he sows he reaps. By diligence and self-command
+let him put the bread he eats at his own disposal, and not at that of
+others, that he may not stand in bitter and false relations to other
+men; for the best good of wealth is freedom. Let him practise the
+minor virtues.[684] How much of human life is lost in waiting! Let him
+not make his fellow creatures wait. How many words and promises are
+promises of conversation! Let his be words of fate. When he sees a
+folded and sealed scrap of paper float around the globe in a pine ship
+and come safe to the eye for which it was written, amidst a swarming
+population, let him likewise feel the admonition to integrate his
+being across all these distracting forces, and keep a slender human
+word among the storms, distances and accidents that drive us hither
+and thither, and, by persistency, make the paltry force of one man
+reappear to redeem its pledge after months and years in the most
+distant climates.
+
+We must not try to write the laws of any one virtue, looking at that
+only. Human nature loves no contradictions, but is symmetrical. The
+prudence which secures an outward well-being is not to be studied by
+one set of men, whilst heroism and holiness are studied by another,
+but they are reconcilable. Prudence concerns the present time,
+persons, property and existing forms. But as every fact hath its roots
+in the soul, and, if the soul were changed, would cease to be, or
+would become some other thing, therefore the proper administration of
+outward things will always rest on a just apprehension of their cause
+and origin; that is, the good man will be the wise man, and the
+single-hearted the politic man. Every violation of truth is not only a
+sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human
+society. On the most profitable lie the course of events presently
+lays a destructive tax; whilst frankness proves to be the best
+tactics, for it invites frankness, puts the parties on a convenient
+footing and makes their business a friendship. Trust men and they will
+be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves
+great, though they make an exception in your favor to all their rules
+of trade.
+
+So, in regard to disagreeable and formidable things, prudence does not
+consist in evasion or in flight, but in courage. He who wishes to walk
+in the most peaceful parts of life with any serenity must screw
+himself up to resolution. Let him front the object of his worst
+apprehension, and his stoutness will commonly make his fears
+groundless. The Latin proverb says,[685] "in battles the eye is first
+overcome." The eye is daunted and greatly exaggerates the perils of
+the hour. Entire self-possession may make a battle very little more
+dangerous to life than a match at foils or at football. Examples are
+cited by soldiers of men who have seen the cannon pointed and the fire
+given to it, and who have stepped aside from the path of the ball. The
+terrors of the storm are chiefly confined to the parlor and the cabin.
+The drover, the sailor, buffets it all day, and his health renews
+itself at as vigorous a pulse under the sleet as under the sun of
+June.
+
+In the occurrence of unpleasant things among neighbors, fear comes
+readily to heart and magnifies the consequence of the other party; but
+it is a bad counsellor. Every man is actually weak and apparently
+strong. To himself he seems weak; to others formidable. You are afraid
+of Grim; but Grim also is afraid of you. You are solicitous of the
+good will of the meanest person, uneasy at his ill will. But the
+sturdiest offender of your peace and of the neighborhood, if you rip
+up _his_ claims, is as thin and timid as any; and the peace of society
+is often kept, because, as children say, one is afraid and the other
+dares not. Far off, men swell, bully and threaten: bring them hand to
+hand, and they are a feeble folk.
+
+It is a proverb that "courtesy costs nothing"; but calculation might
+come to value love for its profit. Love is fabled to be blind, but
+kindness is necessary to perception; love is not a hood, but an
+eye-water. If you meet a sectary or a hostile partisan, never
+recognize the dividing lines, but meet on what common ground
+remains,--if only that the sun shines and the rain rains for
+both,--the area will widen very fast, and ere you know it, the
+boundary mountains on which the eye had fastened have melted into air.
+If he set out to contend,[686] almost St. Paul will lie, almost St.
+John will hate. What low, poor, paltry, hypocritical people an
+argument on religion will make of the pure and chosen souls. Shuffle
+they will and crow, crook and hide, feign to confess here, only that
+they may brag and conquer there, and not a thought has enriched either
+party, and not an emotion of bravery, modesty, or hope. So neither
+should you put yourself in a false position to your contemporaries by
+indulging a vein of hostility and bitterness. Though your views are in
+straight antagonism[687] to theirs, assume an identity of sentiment,
+assume that you are saying precisely that which all think, and in the
+flow of wit and love roll out your paradoxes in solid column, with not
+the infirmity of a doubt. So at least shall you get an adequate
+deliverance. The natural emotions of the soul are so much better than
+the voluntary ones that you will never do yourself justice in dispute.
+The thought is not then taken hold of by the right handle, does not
+show itself proportioned and in its true bearings, but bears extorted,
+hoarse, and half witness. But assume a consent and it shall presently
+be granted, since really and underneath their all external
+diversities, all men are of one heart and mind.
+
+Wisdom will never let us stand with any man or men on an unfriendly
+footing. We refuse sympathy and intimacy with people, as if we waited
+for some better sympathy and intimacy to come. But whence and when?
+To-morrow will be like to-day. Life wastes itself whilst we are
+preparing to live. Our friends and fellow-workers die off from us.
+Scarcely can we say we see new men, new women, approaching us. We are
+too old to regard fashion, too old to expect patronage of any greater
+or more powerful. Let us suck the sweetness of those affections and
+consuetudes[688] that grow near us. These old shoes are easy to the
+feet. Undoubtedly we can easily pick faults in our company, can easily
+whisper names prouder and that tickle the fancy more. Every man's
+imagination hath its friends; and pleasant would life be with such
+companions. But if you cannot have them on good mutual terms, you
+cannot have them. If not the Deity but our ambition hews and shapes
+the new relations, their virtue escapes, as strawberries lose their
+flavor in garden beds.
+
+Thus truth, frankness, courage, love, humility, and all the virtues
+range themselves on the side of prudence, or the art of securing a
+present well-being. I do not know if all matter will be found to be
+made of one element, as oxygen or hydrogen, at last, but the world of
+manners and actions is wrought of one stuff, and begin where we
+will[689] we are pretty sure in a short space to be mumbling our ten
+commandments.
+
+
+
+
+CIRCLES.[690]
+
+
+The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second;
+and throughout nature this primary picture is repeated without end. It
+is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine[691]
+described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere
+and its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the
+copious sense of this first of forms. One moral we have already
+deduced in considering the circular or compensatory character of every
+human action. Another analogy we shall now trace, that every action
+admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth
+that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in
+nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another
+dawn risen on mid-noon,[692] and under every deep a lower deep opens.
+
+This fact, as far as it symbolizes the moral fact of the Unattainable,
+the flying Perfect, around which the hands of man can never meet, at
+once the inspirer and the condemner of every success, may conveniently
+serve us to connect many illustrations of human power in every
+department.
+
+There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile.
+Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe seen by God is a
+transparent law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the fact and
+holds its fluid. Our culture is the predominance of an idea which
+draws after it all this train of cities and institutions. Let us rise
+into another idea; they will disappear. The Greek sculpture[693] is
+all melted away, as if it had been statues of ice: here and there a
+solitary figure or fragment remaining, as we see flecks and scraps of
+snow left in cold dells and mountain clefts in June and July. For the
+genius that created it creates now somewhat else. The Greek
+letters[694] last a little longer, but are already passing under the
+same sentence and tumbling into the inevitable pit which the creation
+of new thought opens for all that is old. The new continents are built
+out of the ruins of an old planet; the new races fed out of the
+decomposition of the foregoing. New arts destroy the old.[695] See the
+investment of capital in aqueducts, made useless by hydraulics;
+fortifications, by gunpowder; roads and canals, by railways; sails, by
+steam; steam, by electricity.
+
+You admire this tower of granite, weathering the hurts of so many
+ages. Yet a little waving hand built this huge wall, and that which
+builds is better than that which is built. The hand that built can
+topple it down much faster. Better than the hand and nimbler was the
+invisible thought which wrought through it; and thus ever, behind the
+coarse effect, is a fine cause, which, being narrowly seen, is itself
+the effect of a finer cause. Everything looks permanent until its
+secret is known. A rich estate appears to women and children a firm
+and lasting fact; to a merchant, one easily created out of any
+materials, and easily lost. An orchard, good tillage, good grounds,
+seem a fixture, like a gold mine, or a river, to a citizen; but to a
+large farmer, not much more fixed than the state of the crop. Nature
+looks provokingly stable and secular, but it has a cause like all the
+rest; and when once I comprehend that, will these fields stretch so
+immovably wide, these leaves hang so individually considerable?
+Permanence is a word of degrees. Every thing is medial. Moons are no
+more bounds to spiritual power than bat-balls.
+
+The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look,
+he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his
+facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea
+which commands his own. The life of man is a self-evolving circle,[696]
+which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to
+new and larger circles, and that without end. The extent to which this
+generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the
+force or truth of the individual soul. For it is the inert effort of
+each thought, having formed itself into a circular wave of circumstance,
+as for instance an empire, rules of an art, a local usage, a religious
+rite, to heap itself on that ridge and to solidify and hem in the life.
+But if the soul is quick and strong it bursts over that boundary on all
+sides and expands another orbit on the great deep, which also runs up
+into a high wave, with attempt again to stop and to bind. But the heart
+refuses to be imprisoned;[697] in its first and narrowest pulses it
+already tends outward with a vast force and to immense and innumerable
+expansions.
+
+Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series. Every general
+law only a particular fact of some more general law presently to
+disclose itself. There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no
+circumference to us. The man finishes his story,--how good! how final!
+how it puts a new face on all things! He fills the sky. Lo, on the
+other side rises also a man and draws a circle around the circle we
+had just pronounced the outline of the sphere. Then already is our
+first speaker not man, but only a first speaker. His only redress is
+forthwith to draw a circle outside of his antagonist. And so men do by
+themselves. The result of to-day, which haunts the mind and cannot be
+escaped will presently be abridged into a word, and the principle that
+seemed to explain nature will itself be included as one example of a
+bolder generalization. In the thought of to-morrow there is a power to
+upheave all thy creed, all the creeds, all the literatures of the
+nations, and marshal thee to a heaven which no epic dream has yet
+depicted. Every man is not so much a workman in the world as he is a
+suggestion of that he should be. Men walk as prophecies of the next
+age.
+
+Step by step we scale this mysterious ladder; the steps are actions,
+the new prospect is power. Every several result is threatened and
+judged by that which follows. Every one seems to be contradicted by
+the new; it is only limited by the new. The new statement is always
+hated by the old, and, to those dwelling in the old, comes like an
+abyss of scepticism. But the eye soon gets wonted to it, for the eye
+and it are effects of one cause; then its innocency and benefit
+appear, and presently, all its energy spent, it pales and dwindles
+before the revelation of the new hour.
+
+Fear not the new generalization. Does the fact look crass[698] and
+material, threatening to degrade thy theory of spirit? Resist it not;
+it goes to refine and raise thy theory of matter just as much.
+
+There are no fixtures to men, if we appeal to consciousness. Every man
+supposes himself not to be fully understood; and if there is any truth
+in him, if he rests at last on the divine soul, I see not how it can
+be otherwise. The last chamber, the last closet, he must feel was
+never opened; there is always a residuum unknown, unanalyzable. That
+is, every man believes that he has a greater possibility.
+
+Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of thoughts
+and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the
+same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write,
+whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world: but
+yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see
+so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was
+that wrote so many continuous pages. Alas for this infirm faith, this
+will not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am God in nature;
+I am a weed by the wall.
+
+The continual effort to raise himself above himself,[699] to work a
+pitch above his last height, betrays itself in a man's relations. We
+thirst for approbation, yet cannot forgive the approver. The sweet of
+nature is love; yet if I have a friend I am tormented by my
+imperfections. The love of me accuses the other party. If he were high
+enough[700] to slight me, then could I love him, and rise by my
+affection to new heights. A man's growth is seen in the successive
+choirs of his friends. For every friend whom he loses for truth, he
+gains a better. I thought as I walked in the woods and mused on any
+friends, why should I play with them this game of idolatry? I know and
+see too well, when not voluntarily blind, the speedy limits of persons
+called high and worthy. Rich, noble and great they are by the
+liberality of our speech, but truth is sad. O blessed Spirit, whom I
+forsake for these, they are not thee! Every personal consideration
+that we allow costs us heavenly state. We sell the thrones of angels
+for a short and turbulent pleasure.
+
+How often must we learn this lesson? Men cease to interest us when we
+find their limitations. The only sin is limitation. As soon as you
+once come up with a man's limitations, it is all over with him. Has
+he talents? has he enterprises? has he knowledge? It boots not.
+Infinitely alluring and attractive was he to you yesterday, a great
+hope, a sea to swim in; now, you have found his shores, found it a
+pond, and you care not if you never see it again.
+
+Each new step we take in thought reconciles twenty seemingly
+discordant facts, as expressions of one law. Aristotle and Plato[701]
+are reckoned the respective heads of two schools. A wise man will see
+that Aristotle platonizes. By going one step farther back in thought,
+discordant opinions are reconciled by being seen to be two extremes of
+one principle, and we can never go so far back as to preclude a still
+higher vision.
+
+Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then
+all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out
+in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end.
+There is not a piece of science but its flank may be turned to-morrow;
+there is not any literary reputation, not the so-called eternal names
+of fame, that may not be revised and condemned. The very hopes of man,
+the thoughts of his heart, the religion of nations, the manners and
+morals of mankind are all at the mercy of a new generalization.
+Generalization is always a new influx of the divinity into the mind.
+Hence the thrill that attends it.
+
+Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot
+have his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you
+will, he stands. This can only be by his preferring truth to his past
+apprehension of truth, and his alert acceptance of it from whatever
+quarter; the intrepid conviction that his laws, his relations to
+society, his Christianity, his world, may at any time be superseded
+and decease.
+
+There are degrees in idealism. We learn first to play with it
+academically, as the magnet was once a toy. Then we see in the heyday
+of youth and poetry that it may be true, that it is true in gleams and
+fragments. Then, its countenance waxes stern and grand, and we see
+that it must be true. It now shows itself ethical and practical. We
+learn that God is; that he is in me; and that all things are shadows
+of him. The idealism of Berkeley[702] is only a crude statement of the
+idealism of Jesus, and that again is a crude statement of the fact
+that all nature is the rapid efflux of goodness executing and
+organizing itself. Much more obviously is history and the state of the
+world at any one time directly dependent on the intellectual
+classification then existing in the minds of men. The things which are
+dear to men at this hour are so on account of the ideas which have
+emerged on their mental horizon, and which cause the present order of
+things, as a tree bears its apples. A new degree of culture would
+instantly revolutionize the entire system of human pursuits.
+
+Conversation is a game of circles. In conversation we pluck up the
+_termini_[703] which bound the common of silence on every side. The
+parties are not to be judged by the spirit they partake and even
+express under this Pentecost.[704] To-morrow they will have receded
+from this high-water mark. To-morrow you shall find them stooping
+under the old pack-saddles. Yet let us enjoy the cloven flame whilst
+it glows on our walls. When each new speaker strikes a new light,
+emancipates us from the oppression of the last speaker to oppress us
+with the greatness and exclusiveness of his own thought, then yields
+us to another redeemer, we seem to recover our rights, to become men.
+O, what truths profound and executable only in ages and orbs, are
+supposed in the announcement of every truth! In common hours, society
+sits cold and statuesque. We all stand waiting, empty,--knowing,
+possibly, that we can be full, surrounded by mighty symbols which are
+not symbols to us, but prose and trivial toys. Then cometh the god and
+converts the statues into fiery men, and by a flash of his eye burns
+up the veil which shrouded all things, and the meaning of the very
+furniture, of cup and saucer, of chair and clock and tester, is
+manifest. The facts which loomed so large in the fogs of
+yesterday,--property, climate, breeding, personal beauty and the like,
+have strangely changed their proportions. All that we reckoned settled
+shakes and rattles; and literatures, cities, climates, religions,
+leave their foundations and dance before our eyes. And yet here again
+see the swift circumscription! Good as is discourse, silence is
+better, and shames it. The length of the discourse indicates the
+distance of thought betwixt the speaker and the hearer. If they were
+at a perfect understanding in any part, no words would be necessary
+thereon. If at one in all parts, no words would be suffered.
+
+Literature is a point outside of our hodiernal[705] circle through
+which a new one may be described. The use of literature is to afford
+us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a
+purchase by which we may move it. We fill ourselves with ancient
+learning, install ourselves the best we can in Greek, in Punic,[706]
+in Roman houses, only that we may wiselier see French, English and
+American houses and modes of living. In like manner[707] we see
+literature best from the midst of wild nature, or from the din of
+affairs, or from a high religion. The field cannot be well seen from
+within the field. The astronomer must have his diameter of the earth's
+orbit as a base to find the parallax of any star.
+
+Therefore we value the poet. All the argument and all the wisdom is
+not in the encyclopaedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body
+of Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play. In my daily work I incline
+to repeat my old steps, and do not believe in remedial force, in the
+power of change and reform. But some Petrarch[708] or Ariosto,[709]
+filled with the new wine of his imagination, writes me an ode or a
+brisk romance, full of daring thought and action. He smites and
+arouses me with his shrill tones, breaks up my whole chain of habits,
+and I open my eye on my own possibilities. He claps wings to the sides
+of all the solid old lumber of the world, and I am capable once more
+of choosing a straight path in theory and practice.
+
+We have the same need to command a view of the religion of the world.
+We can never see Christianity from the catechism:--from the pastures,
+from a boat in the pond, from amidst the songs of wood-birds we
+possibly may. Cleansed by the elemental light and wind, steeped in the
+sea of beautiful forms which the field offers us, we may chance to
+cast a right glance back upon biography. Christianity is rightly dear
+to the best of mankind; yet was there never a young philosopher whose
+breeding had fallen into the Christian church by whom that brave text
+of Paul's was not specially prized, "Then shall also the Son be
+subject unto Him who put all things under him, that God may be all in
+all."[710] Let the claims and virtues of persons be never so great and
+welcome, the instinct of man presses eagerly onward to the impersonal
+and illimitable, and gladly arms itself against the dogmatism of
+bigots with this generous word out of the book itself.
+
+The natural world may be conceived of as a system of concentric
+circles, and we now and then detect in nature slight dislocations
+which apprize us that this surface on which we now stand is not fixed,
+but sliding. These manifold tenacious qualities,[711] this chemistry
+and vegetation, these metals and animals, which seem to stand there
+for their own sake, are means and methods only, are words of God, and
+as fugitive as other words. Has the naturalist or chemist learned his
+craft, who has explored the gravity of atoms and the elective
+affinities, who has not yet discerned the deeper law whereof this is
+only a partial or approximate statement, namely that like draws to
+like, and that the goods which belong to you gravitate to you and need
+not be pursued with pains and cost? Yet is that statement approximate
+also, and not final. Omnipresence is a higher fact. Not through subtle
+subterranean channels need friend and fact be drawn to their
+counterpart, but, rightly considered, these things proceed from the
+eternal generation of the soul. Cause and effect are two sides of one
+fact.
+
+The same law of eternal procession ranges all that we call the
+virtues, and extinguishes each in the light of a better. The great man
+will not be prudent in the popular sense; all his prudence will be so
+much deduction from his grandeur. But it behooves each to see, when he
+sacrifices prudence, to what god he devotes it; if to ease and
+pleasure, he had better be prudent still; if to a great trust, he can
+well spare his mule and panniers who has a winged chariot instead.
+Geoffrey draws on his boots to go through the woods, that his feet may
+be safer from the bite of snakes; Aaron never thinks of such a peril.
+In many years neither is harmed by such an accident. Yet it seems to
+me that with every precaution you take against such an evil you put
+yourself into the power of the evil. I suppose that the highest
+prudence is the lowest prudence. Is this too sudden a rushing from
+the centre to the verge of our orbit? Think how many times we shall
+fall back into pitiful calculations before we take up our rest in the
+great sentiment, or make the verge of to-day the new centre. Besides,
+your bravest sentiment is familiar to the humblest men. The poor and
+the low have their way of expressing the last facts of philosophy as
+well as you. "Blessed be nothing" and "The worse things are, the
+better they are" are proverbs which express the transcendentalism of
+common life.
+
+One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's
+ugliness; one man's wisdom another's folly; as one beholds the same
+objects from a higher point of view. One man thinks justice consists
+in paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who
+is very remiss in this duty and makes the creditor wait tediously. But
+that second man has his own way of looking at things; asks himself
+which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the
+poor? the debt of money, or the debt of thought to mankind, of genius
+to nature? For you, O broker, there is no other principle but
+arithmetic. For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth
+of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred; nor can I
+detach one duty, like you, from all other duties, and concentrate my
+forces mechanically on the payment of moneys. Let me live onward; you
+shall find that, though slower, the progress of my character will
+liquidate all these debts without injustice to higher claims. If a
+man should dedicate himself to the payment of notes, would not this be
+injustice? Owes he no debt but money? And are all claims on him to be
+postponed to a landlord's or a banker's?
+
+There is no virtue which is final; all are initial. The virtues of
+society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery
+that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed
+such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.
+
+    Forgive his crimes, forgive his virtues too,
+    Those smaller faults, half converts to the right.[712]
+
+It is the highest power of divine moments that they abolish our
+contritions also. I accuse myself of sloth and unprofitableness day by
+day; but when these waves of God flow into me I no longer reckon lost
+time. I no longer poorly compute my possible achievement by what
+remains to me of the month or the year; for these moments confer a
+sort of omnipresence and omnipotence which asks nothing of duration,
+but sees that the energy of the mind is commensurate with the work to
+be done, without time.
+
+And thus, O circular philosopher, I hear some reader exclaim, you have
+arrived at a fine pyrrhonism,[713] at an equivalence and indifferency
+of all actions, and would fain teach us that _if we are true_,
+forsooth, our crimes may be lively stones out of which we shall
+construct the temple of the true God.
+
+I am not careful to justify myself. I own I am gladdened[714] by
+seeing the predominance of the saccharine principle throughout
+vegetable nature, and not less by beholding in morals that
+unrestrained inundation of the principle of good into every chink and
+hole that selfishness has left open, yea into selfishness and sin
+itself; so that no evil is pure, nor hell itself without its extreme
+satisfactions. But lest I should mislead any when I have my own head
+and obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am only an
+experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least
+discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle anything as
+true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none
+are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my
+back.
+
+Yet this incessant movement and progression which all things partake
+could never become sensible to us but by contrast to some principle of
+fixture or stability in the soul. Whilst the eternal generation of
+circles proceeds, the eternal generator abides. That central life is
+somewhat superior to creation, superior to knowledge and thought, and
+contains all its circles. For ever it labors to create a life and
+thought as large and excellent as itself; but in vain; for that which
+is made instructs how to make a better.
+
+Thus there is no sleep, no pause, no preservation, but all things
+renew, germinate and spring. Why should we import rags and relics into
+the new hour? Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only
+disease: all others run into this one. We call it by many
+names,--fever, intemperance, insanity, stupidity and crime: they are
+all forms of old age: they are rest, conservatism, appropriation,
+inertia; not newness, not the way onward. We grizzle every day. I see
+no need of it. Whilst we converse with what is above us, we do not
+grow old, but grow young. Infancy, youth, receptive, aspiring, with
+religious eye looking upward, counts itself nothing and abandons
+itself to the instruction flowing from all sides. But the man and
+woman of seventy assume to know all; throw up their hope; renounce
+aspiration; accept the actual for the necessary and talk down to the
+young. Let them then become organs of the Holy Ghost; let them be
+lovers; let them behold truth; and their eyes are uplifted, their
+wrinkles smoothed, they are perfumed again with hope and power. This
+old age ought not to creep on a human mind. In nature every moment is
+new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is
+sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.
+No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher
+love. No truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light
+of new thoughts. People wish to be settled: only as far as they are
+unsettled is there any hope for them.
+
+Life is a series of surprises. We do not guess to-day the mood, the
+pleasure, the power of to-morrow, when we are building up our being.
+Of lower states,--of acts of routine and sense, we can tell somewhat,
+but the masterpieces of God, the total growths and universal movements
+of the soul, he hideth; they are incalculable. I can know that truth
+is divine and helpful; but how it shall help me I can have no guess,
+for _so to be_ is the sole inlet of _so to know_. The new position of
+the advancing man has all the powers of the old, yet has them all new.
+It carries in its bosom all the energies of the past, yet is itself an
+exhalation of the morning. I cast away in this new moment all my once
+hoarded knowledge, as vacant and vain. Now for the first time seem I
+to know any thing rightly. The simplest words,--we do not know what
+they mean except when we love and aspire.
+
+The difference between talents and character is adroitness to keep the
+old and trodden round, and power and courage to make a new road to new
+and better goals. Character makes an overpowering present, a cheerful,
+determined hour, which fortifies all the company by making them see
+that much is possible and excellent that was not thought of. Character
+dulls the impression of particular events. When we see the conqueror
+we do not think much of any one battle or success. We see that we had
+exaggerated the difficulty. It was easy to him. The great man is not
+convulsible or tormentable. He is so much that events pass over him
+without much impression. People say sometimes, "See what I have
+overcome; see how cheerful I am; see how completely I have triumphed
+over these black events." Not if they still remind me of the black
+event,--they have not yet conquered. Is it conquest to be a gay and
+decorated sepulchre, or a half-crazed widow, hysterically laughing?
+True conquest is the causing the black event to fade and disappear as
+an early cloud of insignificant result in a history so large and
+advancing.
+
+The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget
+ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our
+sempiternal[715] memory and to do something without knowing how or
+why; in short to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved
+without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful. It is by
+abandonment. The great moments of history are the facilities of
+performance through the strength of ideas, as the works of genius and
+religion. "A man," said Oliver Cromwell,[716] "never rises so high as
+when he knows not whither he is going." Dreams and drunkenness, the
+use of opium and alcohol are the semblance and counterfeit of this
+oracular genius, and hence their dangerous attraction for men. For the
+like reason they ask the aid of wild passions, as in the gaming and
+war, ape in some manner these flames and generosities of the heart.
+
+
+
+
+NOTES
+
+THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR
+
+
+[Footnote 1: Games of strength. The public games of Greece were
+athletic and intellectual contests of various kinds. There were four
+of importance: the Olympic, held every four years; the Pythian, held
+every third Olympic year; and the Nemean and Isthmian, held alternate
+years between the Olympic periods. These great national festivals
+exercised a strong influence in Greece. They were a secure bond of
+union between the numerous independent states and did much to help the
+nation to repel its foreign invaders. In Greece the accomplished
+athlete was reverenced almost as a god, and cases have been recorded
+where altars were erected and sacrifices made in his honor. The
+extreme care and cultivation of the body induced by this national
+spirit is one of the most significant features of Greek culture, and
+one which might wisely be imitated in the modern world.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Troubadours. In southern France during the eleventh
+century, wandering poets went from castle to castle reciting or
+singing love-songs, composed in the old Provencal dialect, a sort of
+vulgarized Latin. The life in the great feudal chateaux was so dull
+that the lords and ladies seized with avidity any amusement which
+promised to while away an idle hour. The troubadours were made much of
+and became a strong element in the development of the Southern spirit.
+So-called Courts of Love were formed where questions of an amorous
+nature were discussed in all their bearings; learned opinions were
+expressed on the most trivial matters, and offenses were tried.
+
+Some of the Provencal poetry is of the highest artistic significance,
+though the mass of it is worthless high-flown trash.]
+
+[Footnote 3: At the time this oration was delivered (1837), many of
+the authors who have since given America a place in the world's
+literature were young men writing their first books. "We were," says
+James Russell Lowell, "still socially and intellectually moored to
+English thought, till Emerson cut the cable and gave us a chance at
+the dangers and glories of blue water."]
+
+[Footnote 4: Pole-star. Polaris is now the nearest conspicuous star to
+the north pole of the celestial equator. Owing to the motion of the
+pole of the celestial equator around that of the ecliptic, this star
+will in course of time recede from its proud position, and the
+brilliant star Vega in the constellation Harp will become the
+pole-star.]
+
+[Footnote 5: It is now a well-recognized fact in the development of
+animal life that as any part of the body falls into disuse it in time
+disappears. Good examples of this are the disappearance of powerful
+fangs from the mouth of man, the loss of power in the wings of
+barnyard fowls; and, _vice versa_, as new uses for a member arise, its
+structure changes to meet the new needs. An example of this is the
+transformation from the hoof of a horse through the cloven hoofs of
+the cow to the eventual development of highly expert fingers in the
+monkey and man. Emerson assumed the doctrine of evolution to be
+sufficiently established by the anatomical evidence of gradual
+development. In his own words: "Man is no up-start in the creation.
+His limbs are only a more exquisite organization--say rather the
+finish--of the rudimental forms that have been already sweeping the
+sea and creeping in the mud. The brother of his hand is even now
+cleaving the arctic sea in the fin of the whale, and innumerable ages
+since was pawing the marsh in the flipper of the saurian." A view
+afterwards condensed into his memorable couplet:
+
+   "Striving to be man, the worm
+    Mounts through all the spires of form."
+]
+
+[Footnote 6: Stint. A prescribed or allotted task, a share of labor.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Ridden. Here used in the sense of dominated.]
+
+[Footnote 8: Monitory pictures. Instructive warning pictures.]
+
+[Footnote 9: The Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus is the author of
+this saying, not "the old oracle." It occurs in the Encheiridion, or
+manual, a work put together by a pupil of Epictetus. The original
+saying of Epictetus is as follows: "Every thing has two handles, the
+one by which it may be borne, the other by which it may not. If your
+brother acts unjustly, do not lay hold of the act by that handle
+wherein he acts unjustly, for this is the handle which cannot be
+borne: but lay hold of the other, that he is your brother, that he was
+nurtured with you, and you will lay hold of the thing by that handle
+by which it can be borne."]
+
+[Footnote 10: Every day, the sun (shines).]
+
+[Footnote 11: Beholden. Emerson here uses this past participle with
+its original meaning instead of in its present sense of "indebted."]
+
+[Footnote 12: Here we have a reminder of Emerson's pantheism. He means
+the inexplicable continuity "of what I call God, and fools nature," as
+Browning expressed it.]
+
+[Footnote 13: His expanding knowledge will become a creator.]
+
+[Footnote 14: Know thyself. Plutarch ascribes this saying to Plato. It
+is also ascribed to Pythagoras, Chilo, Thales, Cleobulus, Bias, and
+Socrates; also to Phemonie, a mythical Greek poetess of the
+ante-Homeric period. Juvenal (Satire XI. 27) says that this precept
+descended from heaven. "Know thyself" and "Nothing too much" were
+inscribed upon the Delphic oracle.
+
+   "Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
+    The proper study of mankind is man."
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 15: Observe the brisk movement of these sentences. How they
+catch and hold the attention, giving a new impulse to the reader's
+interest!]
+
+[Footnote 16: Nature abhors a vacuum.]
+
+[Footnote 17: Noxious. Harmful.]
+
+[Footnote 18: John Locke (1632-1704), an English philosopher whose
+work was of especial significance in the development of modern
+philosophy. The work he is best known by is the exhaustive "Essay on
+the Human Understanding," in which he combated the theory of
+Descartes, that every man has certain "innate ideas." The innate-idea
+theory was first proved by the philosopher Descartes in this way.
+Descartes began his speculations from a standpoint of absolute doubt.
+Then he said, "I think, therefore I am," and from this formula he
+built up a number of ideas innate to the human mind, ideas which we
+cannot but hold. Locke's "Essay on the Human Understanding" did much
+to discredit Descartes' innate ideas, which had been very generally
+accepted in Europe before.]
+
+[Footnote 19: Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam, Viscount Saint Alban's
+(1561-1626), a famous English statesman and philosopher. He occupied
+high public offices, but in 1621 was convicted of taking bribes in his
+office of Lord Chancellor. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to
+imprisonment and a fine of forty thousand pounds. Both these sentences
+were remitted, however. In the seventeenth century, judicial
+corruption was so common that Bacon's offence was not considered so
+gross as it would now be. As a philosopher Bacon's rank has been much
+disputed. While some claim that to his improved method of studying
+nature are chiefly to be attributed the prodigious strides taken by
+modern science, others deny him all merit in this respect. His best
+known works are: "The Novum Organum," a philosophical treatise; "The
+Advancement of Learning," a remarkable argument in favor of
+scholarship; and the short essays on subjects of common interest,
+usually printed under the simple title "Bacon's Essays."]
+
+[Footnote 20: Third Estate. The thirteenth century was the age when
+the national assemblies of most European countries were putting on
+their definite shape. In most of them the system of _estates_
+prevailed. These in most countries were three--nobles, clergy, and
+commons, the commons being the third estate. During the French
+Revolution the Third Estate, or Tiers Etat, asserted its rights and
+became a powerful factor in French politics, choosing its own leaders
+and effecting the downfall of its oppressors.]
+
+[Footnote 21: Restorers of readings. Men who spend their lives trying
+to improve and correct the texts of classical authors, by comparing
+the old editions with each other and picking out the version which
+seem most in accordance with the authors' original work.]
+
+[Footnote 22: Emendators. The same as restorers of readings.]
+
+[Footnote 23: Bibliomaniacs. Men with a mania for collecting rare and
+beautiful books. Not a bad sort of mania, though Emerson never had any
+sympathy for it.]
+
+[Footnote 24: To many readers Emerson's own works richly fulfill this
+obligation. He himself lived continually in such a lofty mental
+atmosphere that no one can come within the circle of his influence
+without being stimulated and elevated.]
+
+[Footnote 25: Genius, the possession of a thoroughly active soul,
+ought not to be the special privilege of favorites of fortune, but the
+right of every sound man.]
+
+[Footnote 26: They stunt my mental growth. A man should not accept
+another man's conclusions, but merely use them as steps on his upward
+path.]
+
+[Footnote 27: If you do not employ such talent as you have in original
+labor, in bearing the mental fruit of which you are capable, then you
+do not vindicate your claim to a share in the divine nature.]
+
+[Footnote 28: Disservice. Injury.]
+
+[Footnote 29: In original composition of any sort our efforts
+naturally flow in the channels worn for us by the first dominating
+streams of early genius. The conventional is the continual foe of all
+true art.]
+
+[Footnote 30: Emerson is continually stimulating us to look at things
+in new ways. Here, for instance, at once the thought comes: "Is it not
+perhaps possible that the transcendent genius of Shakespeare has been
+rather noxious than beneficent in its influence on the mind of the
+world? Has not the all-pervading Shakespearian influence flooded and
+drowned out a great deal of original genius?"]
+
+[Footnote 31: That is,--when in his clear, seeing moments he can
+distil some drops of truth from the world about him, let him not waste
+his time in studying other men's records of what they have seen.]
+
+[Footnote 32: While Emerson's verse is frequently unmusical, in his
+prose we often find passages like this instinct with the fairest
+poetry.]
+
+[Footnote 33: Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400). The father of English
+poetry. Chaucer's chief work is the "Canterbury Tales," a series of
+stories told by pilgrims traveling in company to Canterbury.
+Coleridge, the poet, wrote of Chaucer: "I take unceasing delight in
+Chaucer; his manly cheerfulness is especially delicious to me in my
+old age. How exquisitely tender he is, yet how free from the least
+touch of sickly melancholy or morbid drooping." Chaucer's poetry is
+above all things fresh. It breathes of the morning of literature. Like
+Homer he had at his command all the riches of a new language undefiled
+by usage from which to choose.
+
+   "Dan Chaucer, well of English undefyled,
+    On Fame's eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled."
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 34: Andrew Marvell (1620-1678). An eminent English patriot
+and satirist. As a writer he is chiefly known by his "Rehearsal
+Transposed," written in answer to a fanatical defender of absolute
+power. When a young man he was assistant to the poet Milton, who was
+then Latin secretary to Oliver Cromwell. Marvell's wit and
+distinguished abilities rendered him formidable to the corrupt
+administration of Charles II., who attempted without success to buy
+his friendship. Emerson's literary perspective is a bit unusual when
+he speaks of Marvell as "one of the great English poets." Marvell
+hardly ranks with Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton.]
+
+[Footnote 35: John Dryden (1631-1700). A celebrated English poet.
+Early in life he wrote almost entirely for the stage and achieved
+great success. In the latter part of his life, however, according to
+Macaulay, he "turned his powers in a new direction with success the
+most splendid and decisive. The first rank in poetry was beyond his
+reach, but he secured the most honorable place in the second.... With
+him died the secret of the old poetical diction of England,--the art
+of producing rich effects by familiar words."]
+
+[Footnote 36: Plato (429-347 B.C.). One of the most illustrious
+philosophers of all time. Probably no other philosopher has
+contributed so much as Plato to the moral and intellectual training of
+the human race. This pre-eminence is due not solely to his
+transcendent intellect, but also in no small measure to his poetic
+power and to that unrivaled grace of style which led the ancients to
+say that if Jove should speak Greek he would speak like Plato. He was
+a remarkable example of that universal culture of body and mind which
+characterized the last period of ancient Greece. He was proficient in
+every branch of art and learning and was such a brilliant athlete that
+he contended in the Isthmian and Pythian games.]
+
+[Footnote 37: Gowns. The black gown worn occasionally in America and
+always in England at the universities; the distinctive academic dress
+is a cap and gown.]
+
+[Footnote 38: Pecuniary foundations. Gifts of money for the support of
+institutions of learning.]
+
+[Footnote 39: Wit is here used in its early sense of intellect, good
+understanding.]
+
+[Footnote 40: Valetudinarian. A person of a weak, sickly
+constitution.]
+
+[Footnote 41: Mincing. Affected.]
+
+[Footnote 42: Preamble. A preface or introduction.]
+
+[Footnote 43: Dumb abyss. That vast immensity of the universe about us
+which we can never understand.]
+
+[Footnote 44: I comprehend its laws; I lose my fear of it.]
+
+[Footnote 45: Silkworms feed on mulberry-leaves. Emerson describes
+what science calls "unconscious cerebration."]
+
+[Footnote 46: Ripe fruit. Emerson's ripe fruit found its way into his
+diary, where it lay until he needed it in the preparation of some
+lecture or essay.]
+
+[Footnote 47: I. Corinthians xv. 53.]
+
+[Footnote 48: Empyrean. The region of pure light and fire; the ninth
+heaven of ancient astronomy.
+
+   "The deep-domed empyrean
+    Rings to the roar of an angel onset."
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 49: Ferules. According to the methods of education fifty
+years ago, it was quite customary for the teacher to punish a
+school-child with his ferule or ruler.]
+
+[Footnote 50: Oliver Wendell Holmes cites this last sentence as the
+most extreme development of the distinctively Emersonian style. Such
+things must be read not too literally but rapidly, with alert
+attention to what the previous train of thought has been.]
+
+[Footnote 51: Savoyards. The people of Savoy, south of Lake Geneva in
+Switzerland.]
+
+[Footnote 52: Emerson's style is characterized by the frequent use of
+pithy epigrams like this.]
+
+[Footnote 53: Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727). A great English
+philosopher and mathematician. He is famous as having discovered the
+law of gravitation.]
+
+[Footnote 54: Unhandselled. Uncultivated, without natural advantages.
+A handsel is a gift.]
+
+[Footnote 55: Druids. The ancient priesthood of the Britons in Caesar's
+time. They had immense power among these primitive peoples. They were
+the judges as well as the priests and decided all questions. It is
+believed that they made human sacrifices to their gods in the depths
+of the primeval forest, but not much is known of their rites.]
+
+[Footnote 56: Berserkers. Berserker was a redoubtable hero in
+Scandinavian mythology, the grandson of the eight-handed Starkodder
+and the beautiful Alfhilde. He had twelve sons who inherited the
+wild-battle frenzy, or berserker rage. The sagas, the great
+Scandinavian epics, are full of stories of heroes who are seized with
+this fierce longing for battle, murder, and sudden death. The name
+means bear-shirt and has been connected with the old _were-wolf_
+tradition, the myth that certain people were able to change into
+man-devouring wolves with a wolfish mad desire to rend and kill.]
+
+[Footnote 57: Alfred, surnamed the Great (848-901), king of the West
+Saxons in England. When he ascended the throne his country was in a
+deplorable condition from the repeated inroads of northern invaders.
+He eventually drove them out and established a secure government.
+England owes much to the efforts of Alfred. He not only fought his
+country's battles, but also founded schools, translated Latin books
+into his native tongue, and did much for the intellectual improvement
+of his people.]
+
+[Footnote 58: The hoe and the spade. "In spite of Emerson's habit of
+introducing the names of agricultural objects into his writing ('Hay,
+corn, roots, hemp, flax, apples, wool, and wood' is a line from one of
+his poems), his familiarity therewith is evidently not so great as he
+would lead one to imagine. 'Take care, papa,' cried his little son,
+seeing him at work with a spade, 'you will dig your leg.'"]
+
+[Footnote 59: John Flamsteed (1646-1719). An eminent English
+astronomer. He appears to have been the first to understand the theory
+of the equation of time. He passed his life in patient observation and
+determined the position of 2884 stars.]
+
+[Footnote 60: Sir William Herschel (1738-1822). One of the greatest
+astronomers that any age or nation has produced. Brought up to the
+profession of music, it was not until he was thirty years old that he
+turned his attention to astronomy. By rigid economy he obtained a
+telescope, and in 1781 discovered the planet Uranus. This great
+discovery gave him great fame and other substantial advantages. He was
+made private astronomer to the king and received a pension. His
+discoveries were so far in advance of his time, they had so little
+relation with those of his predecessors, that he may almost be said
+to have created a new science by revealing the immensity of the scale
+on which the universe is constructed.]
+
+[Footnote 61: Nebulous. In astronomy a nebula is a luminous patch in
+the heavens far beyond the solar system, composed of a mass of stars
+or condensed gases.]
+
+[Footnote 62: Fetich. The word seems to have been applied by
+Portuguese sailors and traders on the west coast of Africa to objects
+worshiped by the natives, which were regarded as charms or talismans.
+Of course the word here means an object of blind admiration and
+devotion.]
+
+[Footnote 63: Cry up, to praise, extol.]
+
+[Footnote 64: Ancient and honorable. Isaiah ix. 15.]
+
+[Footnote 65: Complement. What is needed to complete or fill up some
+quantity or thing.]
+
+[Footnote 66: Signet. Seal. Emerson is not always felicitous in his
+choice of metaphors.]
+
+[Footnote 67: Macdonald. In Cervantes' "Don Quixote," Sancho Panza,
+the squire to the "knight of the metaphysical countenance," tells a
+story of a gentleman who had asked a countryman to dine with him. The
+farmer was pressed to take his seat at the head of the table, and when
+he refused out of politeness to his host, the latter became impatient
+and cried: "Sit there, clod-pate, for let me sit wherever I will, that
+will still be the upper end, and the place of worship to thee." This
+saying is commonly attributed to Rob Roy, but Emerson with his usual
+inaccuracy in such matters places it in the mouth of Macdonald,--which
+Macdonald is uncertain.]
+
+[Footnote 68: Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778). A great Swedish botanist.
+He did much to make botany the orderly science it now is.]
+
+[Footnote 69: Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829). The most famous of English
+chemists. The most important to mankind of his many discoveries was
+the safety-lamp to be used in mines where there is danger of explosion
+from fire-damp.]
+
+[Footnote 70: Baron George Cuvier (1769-1832). An illustrious French
+philosopher, statesman, and writer who made many discoveries in the
+realm of natural history, geology and philosophy.]
+
+[Footnote 71: The moon. The tides are caused by the attraction of the
+moon and the sun. The attraction of the moon for the water nearest the
+moon is somewhat greater than the attraction of the earth's center.
+This causes a slight bulging of the water toward the moon and a
+consequent high tide.]
+
+[Footnote 72: Emerson frequently omits the principal verb of his
+sentences as here: "In a century _there may exist_ one or two men."]
+
+[Footnote 73: This obscurely constructed sentence means: "For their
+acquiescence in a political and social inferiority the poor and low
+find some compensation in the immense moral capacity thereby gained."]
+
+[Footnote 74: "They" refers to the hero or poet mentioned some twenty
+lines back.]
+
+[Footnote 75: Comprehendeth. Here used in the original sense _to
+include_. The perfect man should be so thoroughly developed at every
+point that he will possess a share in the nature of every man.]
+
+[Footnote 76: By the Classic age is generally meant the age of Greece
+and Rome; and by the Romantic is meant the middle ages.]
+
+[Footnote 77: Introversion. Introspection is the more usual word to
+express the analytic self-searching so common in these days.]
+
+[Footnote 78: Second thoughts. Emerson uses the word here in the same
+sense as the French _arriere-pensee_, a mental reservation.]
+
+[Footnote 79:
+
+   "And thus the native hue of resolution
+    Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."
+                           _Hamlet_, Act III, Sc. 1.
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 80: Movement. The French Revolution.]
+
+[Footnote 81: Let every common object be credited with the diviner
+attributes which will class it among others of the same importance.]
+
+[Footnote 82: Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774). An eminent English poet
+and writer. He is best known by the comedy "She Stoops to Conquer,"
+the poem "The Deserted Village," and the "Vicar of Wakefield." "Of all
+romances in miniature," says Schlegel, the great German critic, "the
+'Vicar of Wakefield' is the most exquisite." It is probably the most
+popular English work of fiction in Germany.]
+
+[Footnote 83: Robert Burns (1759-1796). A celebrated Scottish poet.
+The most striking characteristics of Burns' poetry are simplicity and
+intensity, in which he is scarcely, if at all, inferior to any of the
+greatest poets that have ever lived.]
+
+[Footnote 84: William Cowper (1731-1800). One of the most popular of
+English poets. His poem "The Task" was probably more read in his day
+than any poem of equal length in the language. Cowper also made an
+excellent translation of Homer.]
+
+[Footnote 85: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). The most
+illustrious name in German literature; a great poet, dramatist,
+novelist, philosopher, and critic. The Germans regard Goethe with the
+same veneration we accord to Shakespeare. The colossal drama "Faust"
+is the most splendid product of his genius, though he wrote a large
+number of other plays and poems.]
+
+[Footnote 86: William Wordsworth (1770-1850). By many considered the
+greatest of modern English poets. His descriptions of the ever-varying
+moods of nature are the most exquisite in the language. Matthew Arnold
+in his essay on Emerson says: "As Wordsworth's poetry is, in my
+judgment, the most important work done in verse in our language during
+the present century, so Emerson's 'Essays' are, I think, the most
+important work done in prose."]
+
+[Footnote 87: Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). A famous English essayist,
+historian, and speculative philosopher. It is scarcely too much to say
+that no other author of this century has exerted a greater influence
+not merely upon the literature but upon the mind of the English nation
+than Carlyle. Emerson was an intimate friend of Carlyle, and during
+the greater part of his life maintained a correspondence with the
+great Englishman. An interesting description of their meeting will be
+found among the "Critical Opinions" at the beginning of the work.]
+
+[Footnote 88: Alexander Pope (1688-1744). The author of the "Essay on
+Criticism," "Rape of the Lock," the "Essay on Man," and other famous
+poems. Pope possessed little originality or creative imagination, but
+he had a vivid sense of the beautiful and an exquisite taste. He owed
+much of his popularity to the easy harmony of his verse and the
+keenness of his satire.]
+
+[Footnote 89: Samuel Johnson (1709-1784). One of the eminent writers
+of the eighteenth century. He wrote "Lives of the Poets," poems, and
+probably the most remarkable work of the kind ever produced by a
+single person, an English dictionary.]
+
+[Footnote 90: Edward Gibbon (1737-1794). One of the most distinguished
+of English historians. His great work is the "Decline and Fall of the
+Roman Empire." Carlyle called Gibbon, "the splendid bridge from the
+old world to the new."]
+
+[Footnote 91: Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). A great Swedish
+theologian, naturalist, and mathematician, and the founder of a
+religious sect which has since his death become prominent among the
+philosophical schools of Christianity.]
+
+[Footnote 92: Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827). A Swiss teacher
+and educational reformer of great influence in his time.]
+
+
+COMPENSATION
+
+[Footnote 93: These lines are printed under the title of
+_Compensation_ in Emerson's collected poems. He has also another poem
+of eight lines with the same title.]
+
+[Footnote 94: Documents, data, facts.]
+
+[Footnote 95: This doctrine, which a little observation would confute,
+is still taught by some.]
+
+[Footnote 96: Doubloons, Spanish and South American gold coins of the
+value of about $15.60 each.]
+
+[Footnote 97: Polarity, that quality or condition of a body by virtue
+of which it exhibits opposite or contrasted properties in opposite or
+contrasted directions.]
+
+[Footnote 98: Systole and diastole, the contraction and dilation of
+the heart and arteries.]
+
+[Footnote 99: They are increased and consequently want more.]
+
+[Footnote 100: Intenerate, soften.]
+
+[Footnote 101: White House, the popular name of the presidential
+mansion at Washington.]
+
+[Footnote 102: Explain the phrase _eat dust_.]
+
+[Footnote 103: Overlook, oversee, superintend.]
+
+[Footnote 104: Res nolunt, etc. Translated in the previous sentence.]
+
+[Footnote 105: The world ... dew. Explain the thought. What gives the
+earth its shape?]
+
+[Footnote 106: The microscope ... little. This statement is not in
+accordance with the facts, if we are to understand _perfect_ in the
+sense which the next sentence would suggest.]
+
+[Footnote 107: Emerson has been considered a pantheist.]
+
+[Footnote 108: _[Greek: Hoi kyboi]_, etc. The translation follows in
+the text. This old proverb is quoted by Sophocles, (Fragm. LXXIV.2) in
+the form:
+
+     [Greek: Aei gar eu piptousin oi Dios kyboi],
+
+Emerson uses it in _Nature_ in the form "Nature's dice are always
+loaded."]
+
+[Footnote 109: Amain, with full force, vigorously.]
+
+[Footnote 110: The proverb is quoted by Horace, Epistles, I, X.24:
+
+     "Naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret."
+
+A similar thought is expressed by Juvenal, Seneca, Cicero, and
+Aristophanes.]
+
+[Footnote 111: Augustine, Confessions, B. I.]
+
+[Footnote 112: Jupiter, the supreme god of the Romans, the Zeus of the
+Greeks.]
+
+[Footnote 113: Tying up the hands. The expression is used
+figuratively, of course.]
+
+[Footnote 114: The supreme power in England is vested in Parliament.]
+
+[Footnote 115: Prometheus stole fire from heaven to benefit the race
+of men. In punishment for this Jupiter chained him to a rock and set
+an eagle to prey upon his liver. Some unknown and terrible danger
+threatened Jupiter, the secret of averting which only Prometheus knew.
+For this secret Jupiter offered him his freedom.]
+
+[Footnote 116: Minerva, goddess of wisdom, who sprang full-armed from
+the brain of Jupiter. The secret which she held is told in the
+following lines.]
+
+[Footnote 117: Aurora, goddess of the dawn. Enamored of Tithonus, she
+persuaded Jupiter to grant him immortality, but forgot to ask for him
+immortal youth. Read Tennyson's poem on _Tithonus_.]
+
+[Footnote 118: Achilles, the hero of Homer's _Iliad_. His mother
+Thetis, to render him invulnerable, plunged him into the waters of the
+Styx. The heel by which she held him was not washed by the waters and
+remained vulnerable. Here he received a mortal wound.]
+
+[Footnote 119: Siegfried, hero of the Nibelungenlied, the old German
+epic poem. Having slain a dragon, he bathed in its blood and became
+covered with an invulnerable horny hide, only one small spot between
+his shoulders which was covered by a leaf remaining vulnerable. Into
+this spot the treacherous Hagen plunged his lance.]
+
+[Footnote 120: Nemesis, a Greek female deity, goddess of retribution,
+who visited the righteous anger of the gods upon mortals.]
+
+[Footnote 121: The Furies or Eumenides, stern and inexorable ministers
+of the vengeance of the gods.]
+
+[Footnote 122: Ajax and Hector, Greek and Trojan heroes in the Trojan
+War. See Homer's _Iliad_. Achilles slew Hector and, lashing him to his
+chariot with the belt which Ajax had given Hector, dragged him round
+the walls of Troy. Ajax committed suicide with the sword which Hector
+had presented to him.]
+
+[Footnote 123: Thasians, inhabitants of the island of Thasus. The
+story here told of the rival of the athlete Theagenes is found in
+Pausanias' _Description of Greece_, Book VI. chap. XI.]
+
+[Footnote 124: Shakespeare, the greatest of English writers, seems to
+have succeeded entirely or almost entirely in removing the personal
+element from his writings.]
+
+[Footnote 125: Hellenic, Greek.]
+
+[Footnote 126: Tit for tat, etc. This paragraph is composed of a
+series of proverbs.]
+
+[Footnote 127: Edmund Burke (1729?-1797), illustrious Irish statesman,
+orator, and author.]
+
+[Footnote 128: Pawns, the pieces of lowest rank in chess.]
+
+[Footnote 129: What is the meaning of _obscene_ here? Compare the
+Latin.]
+
+[Footnote 130: Polycrates, a tyrant of Samos, who was visited with
+such remarkable prosperity that he was advised by a friend to break
+the course of it by depriving himself of some valued possession. In
+accordance with this advice he cast into the sea an emerald ring which
+he considered his rarest treasure. A few days later a fisherman
+presented the monarch with a large fish inside of which the ring was
+found. Soon after this Polycrates fell into the power of an enemy and
+was nailed to a cross.]
+
+[Footnote 131: Scot and lot, "formerly, a parish assessment laid on
+subjects according to their ability. Now, a phrase for obligations of
+every kind regarded collectively." (Webster.)]
+
+[Footnote 132: Read Emerson's essay on _Gifts_.]
+
+[Footnote 133: Worm worms, breed worms.]
+
+[Footnote 134: Compare the old proverb "Murder will out." See Chaucer,
+_N.P.T._, 232 and 237, and _Pr. T._, 124.]
+
+[Footnote 135:
+
+"Et semel emissum volat irrevocabile verbum."
+                       HORACE, _EPIST._, I. XVIII. 65.
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 136: Stag in the fable. See _AEsop_, LXVI. 184, _Cerva et
+Leo_; Phaedrus I. 12. _Cervus ad fontem_; La Fontaine, vi. 9, _Le Cerf
+se Voyant dans l'eau_.]
+
+[Footnote 137: See the quotation from St. Bernard farther on.]
+
+[Footnote 138: Withholden, old participle of _withhold_, now
+_withheld_.]
+
+[Footnote 139: What is the etymology of the word _mob_?]
+
+[Footnote 140: Optimism and Pessimism. The meanings of these two
+opposites are readily made out from the Latin words from which they
+come.]
+
+[Footnote 141: St. Bernard de Clairvaux (1091-1153), French
+ecclesiastic.]
+
+[Footnote 142: Jesus. Holmes writes of Emerson: "Jesus was for him a
+divine manifestation, but only as other great human souls have been in
+all ages and are to-day. He was willing to be called a Christian just
+as he was willing to be called a Platonist.... If he did not worship
+the 'man Christ Jesus' as the churches of Christendom have done, he
+followed his footsteps so nearly that our good Methodist, Father
+Taylor, spoke of him as more like Christ than any man he had known."]
+
+[Footnote 143: The first _his_ refers to Jesus, the second to
+Shakespeare.]
+
+[Footnote 144: Banyan. What is the characteristic of this tree that
+makes it appropriate for this figure?]
+
+
+SELF-RELIANCE
+
+[Footnote 145: Ne te, etc. "Do not seek for anything outside of
+thyself." From Persius, _Sat._ I. 7. Compare Macrobius, _Com. in Somn.
+Scip._, I. ix. 3, and Boethius, _De Consol. Phil._, IV. 4.]
+
+[Footnote 146: _Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's
+Fortune_.]
+
+[Footnote 147: These lines appear in Emerson's _Quatrains_ under the
+title _Power_.]
+
+[Footnote 148: Genius. See the paragraph on genius in Emerson's
+lecture on _The Method of Nature_, one sentence of which runs: "Genius
+is its own end, and draws its means and the style of its architecture
+from within, going abroad only for audience, and spectator."]
+
+[Footnote 149: "The man that stands by himself, the universe stands by
+him also."--EMERSON, _Behavior_.]
+
+[Footnote 150: Plato (429-347 B.C.), (See note 36.)]
+
+[Footnote 151: Milton (1608-1674), the great English epic poet, author
+of _Paradise Lost._
+
+   "O mighty-mouth'd inventor of harmonies,
+    O skill'd to sing of Time or Eternity,
+    God-gifted organ-voice of England,
+    Milton, a name to resound for ages."--TENNYSON.
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 152: "The great poet makes feel our own wealth."--EMERSON,
+_The Over-Soul_.]
+
+[Footnote 153: Then most when, most at the time when.]
+
+[Footnote 154: "The imitator dooms himself to hopeless
+mediocrity."--EMERSON, _Address to the Senior Class in Divinity
+College, Cambridge_.]
+
+[Footnote 155:
+
+   "For words, like Nature, half reveal
+    And half conceal the soul within."
+                      TENNYSON, _In Memoriam_, V. I.
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 156: Trust thyself. This is the theme of the present essay,
+and is a lesson which Emerson is never tired of teaching. In _The
+American Scholar_ he says:
+
+"In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended." In the essay on
+_Greatness_:
+
+"Self-respect is the early form in which greatness appears.... Stick
+to your own.... Follow the path your genius traces like the galaxy of
+heaven for you to walk in."
+
+Carlyle says:
+
+     "The fearful unbelief is unbelief in yourself."
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 157: Chaos ([Greek: Chaos]), the confused, unorganized
+condition in which the world was supposed to have existed before it
+was reduced to harmony and order; hence, utter confusion and
+disorder.]
+
+[Footnote 158: These, _i.e._, children, babes, and brutes.]
+
+[Footnote 159: Four or five. Supply the noun.]
+
+[Footnote 160: Nonchalance, a French word meaning _indifference_,
+_coolness_.]
+
+[Footnote 161: Pit in the playhouse, formerly, the seats on the floor
+below the level of the stage. These cheap seats were occupied by a
+class who did not hesitate to express their opinions of the
+performances.]
+
+[Footnote 162: Eclat, a French word meaning _brilliancy of success_,
+_striking effect_.]
+
+[Footnote 163: "Lethe, the river of oblivion."--_Paradise Lost_.
+Oblivion, forgetfulness.]
+
+[Footnote 164: Who. What is the construction?]
+
+[Footnote 165: Nonconformist, one who does not conform to established
+usages or opinions. Emerson considers conformity and consistency as
+the two terrors that scare us from self-trust. (See note 182.)]
+
+[Footnote 166: Explore if it be goodness, investigate for himself and
+see if it be really goodness.
+
+    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good."
+                                    PAUL, _I. Thes._ v. 21.
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 167: Suffrage, approval.
+
+    "What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted?
+    Thrice is he arm'd that hath his quarrel just;
+    And he but naked, though lock'd up in steel,
+    Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted."
+                      SHAKESPEARE, _II. Henry VI._, III. 2.
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 168: "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking
+makes it so." _Hamlet_, II. 2.]
+
+[Footnote 169: Barbadoes, an island in the Atlantic Ocean, one of the
+Lesser Antilles. The negroes, composing by far the larger part of the
+population, were formerly slaves.]
+
+[Footnote 170: He had rather have his actions ascribed to whim and
+caprice than to spend the day in explaining them.]
+
+[Footnote 171: Diet and bleeding, special diet and medical care, used
+figuratively, of course.]
+
+[Footnote 172: Read Emerson's essay on _Greatness_.]
+
+[Footnote 173: The precise man, precisely what kind of man.]
+
+[Footnote 174: "By their fruits ye shall know them."--_Matthew_, vii.
+16 and 20.]
+
+[Footnote 175: With, notwithstanding, in spite of.]
+
+[Footnote 176: Of the bench, of an impartial judge.]
+
+[Footnote 177: Bound their eyes with ... handkerchief, in this game of
+blindman's-buff.]
+
+[Footnote 178: "Pin thy faith to no man's sleeve; hast thou not two
+eyes of thy own?"--CARLYLE.]
+
+[Footnote 179: Give examples of men who have been made to feel the
+displeasure of the world for their nonconformity.]
+
+[Footnote 180: "Nihil tam incertum nec tam inaestimabile est quam animi
+multitudinis."--LIVY, xxxi. 34.
+
+    "Mobile mutatur semper cum principe vulgus."
+                    CLAUDIANUS, _De IV. Consul. Honorii_, 302.
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 181: _The other terror._ The first, conformity, has just
+been treated.]
+
+[Footnote 182: Consistency. Compare, on the other hand, the well-known
+saying, "Consistency, thou art a jewel."]
+
+[Footnote 183: Orbit, course in life.]
+
+[Footnote 184: Somewhat, something.]
+
+[Footnote 185: See _Genesis_, xxxix. 12.]
+
+[Footnote 186: Pythagoras (fl. about 520 B.C.), a Greek philosopher.
+His society was scattered and persecuted by the fury of the populace.]
+
+[Footnote 187: Socrates (470?-399 B.C.), the great Athenian
+philosopher, whose teachings are the subject of most of Plato's
+writings, was accused of corrupting the youth, and condemned to drink
+hemlock.]
+
+[Footnote 188: Martin Luther (1483-1546) preached against certain
+abuses of the Roman Catholic Church and was excommunicated by the
+Pope. He became the leader of the Protestant Reformation.]
+
+[Footnote 189: Copernicus (1473-1543) discovered the error of the old
+Ptolemaic system of astronomy and showed that the sun is the centre of
+our planetary system. Fearing the persecution of the church, he
+hesitated long to publish his discovery, and it was many years after
+his death before the world accepted his theory.]
+
+[Footnote 190: Galileo (1564-1642), the famous Italian astronomer and
+physicist, discoverer of the satellites of Jupiter and the rings of
+Saturn, was thrown into prison by the Inquisition.]
+
+[Footnote 191: Sir Isaac Newton. (See note 53.)]
+
+[Footnote 192: Andes, the great mountain system of South America.]
+
+[Footnote 193: Himmaleh, Himalaya, the great mountain system of Asia.]
+
+[Footnote 194: Alexandrian stanza. The Alexandrian line consists of
+twelve syllables (iambic hexameter). Neither the acrostic nor the
+Alexandrine has the property assigned to it here. A palindrame reads
+the same forward as backward, as:
+
+                "Madam, I'm Adam";
+    "Signa te signa; temere me tangis et angis";
+
+or the inscription on the church of St. Sophia, Constantinople:
+
+    [Greek: "Nipson anomemata me monan opsin,"]
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 195: The reference is to sailing vessels, of course.]
+
+[Footnote 196: Scorn eyes, scorn observers.]
+
+[Footnote 197: Chatham, William Pitt, Earl of Chatham (1708-1778),
+this distinguished statesman and orator. He became very popular as a
+statesman and was known as "The Great Commoner."]
+
+[Footnote 198: Adams. The reference is presumably to Samuel Adams
+(1722-1803), a popular leader and orator in the cause of American
+freedom. He was a member of the Continental Congress and a signer of
+the Declaration of Independence. Emerson may have in mind, however,
+John Adams (1735-1826), second president of the United States.]
+
+[Footnote 199: Spartan. The ancient Spartans were noted for their
+courage and fortitude.]
+
+[Footnote 200: Julius Caesar (100-44 B.C.), the great Roman general,
+statesman, orator, and author.]
+
+[Footnote 201: St. Anthony (251-356), Egyptian founder of monachism,
+the system of monastic seclusion.]
+
+[Footnote 202: George Fox (1624-1691), English founder of the Society
+of Friends or Quakers.]
+
+[Footnote 203: John Wesley (1703-1791), English founder of the
+religious sect known as Methodists.]
+
+[Footnote 204: Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846), English philanthropist and
+abolitionist.]
+
+[Footnote 205: Scipio (235-184 B.C.), the great Roman general who
+defeated Hannibal and decided the fate of Carthage. The quotation is
+from _Paradise Lost_, Book IX., line 610.]
+
+[Footnote 206: In the story of _Abou Hassan_ or _The Sleeper Awakened_
+in the _Arabian Nights_ Abou Hassan awakes and finds himself treated
+in every respect as the Caliph Haroun Al-raschid. Shakespeare has made
+use of a similar trick in _Taming of the Shrew_, where Christopher Sly
+is put to bed drunk in the lord's room and on awaking is treated as a
+lord.]
+
+[Footnote 207: Alfred the Great (849-901), King of the West Saxons. He
+was a wise king, a great scholar, and a patron of learning.]
+
+[Footnote 208: Scanderbeg, George Castriota (1404-1467), an Albanian
+chief who embraced Christianity and carried on a successful war
+against the Turks.]
+
+[Footnote 209: Gustavus Adolphus (1594-1632), King of Sweden, the hero
+of Protestantism in the Thirty Years' War.]
+
+[Footnote 210: Hieroglyphic, a character in the picture-writing of the
+ancient Egyptian priests; hence, hidden sign.]
+
+[Footnote 211: Parallax, an angle used in astronomy in calculating the
+distance of a heavenly body. The parallax decreases as the distance of
+the body increases.]
+
+[Footnote 212: The child has the advantage of the experience of all
+his ancestors. Compare Tennyson's line in _Locksley Hall_:
+
+    "I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time."
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 213: "Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past,
+or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded
+wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also."--EMERSON, _Introd. to Nature,
+Addresses, etc._]
+
+[Footnote 214: Explain the thought in this sentence.]
+
+[Footnote 215: Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus.]
+
+[Footnote 216: Agent, active, acting.]
+
+[Footnote 217: An allusion to the Mohammedan custom of removing the
+shoes before entering a mosque.]
+
+[Footnote 218: Of a truth, men are mystically united; a mystic bond of
+brotherhood makes all men one.]
+
+[Footnote 219: Thor and Woden. Woden or Odin was the chief god of
+Scandinavian mythology. Thor, his elder son, was the god of thunder.
+From these names come the names of the days Wednesday and Thursday.]
+
+[Footnote 220: Explain the meaning of this sentence.]
+
+[Footnote 221: You, or you, addressing different persons.]
+
+[Footnote 222: "The truth shall make you free."--_John_, viii. 32.]
+
+[Footnote 223: Antinomianism, the doctrine that the moral law is not
+binding under the gospel dispensation, faith alone being necessary to
+salvation.]
+
+[Footnote 224: "There is no sorrow I have thought more about than
+that--to love what is great, and try to reach it, and yet to fail."
+        GEORGE ELIOT, _Middlemarch_, lxxvi.]
+
+[Footnote 225: Explain the use of _it_ in these expressions.]
+
+[Footnote 226: Stoic, a disciple of the Greek philosopher Zeno, who
+taught that men should be free from passion, unmoved by joy and grief,
+and should submit without complaint to the inevitable.]
+
+[Footnote 227: Word made flesh, see _John_, i. 14.]
+
+[Footnote 228: Healing to the nations, see _Revelation_, xxii. 2.]
+
+[Footnote 229: In what prayers do men allow themselves to indulge?]
+
+[Footnote 230:
+
+    "Prayer is the soul's sincere desire,
+     Uttered or unexpressed,
+     The motion of a hidden fire
+     That trembles in the breast."
+                    MONTGOMERY, _What is Prayer?_
+]
+
+[Footnote 231: Caratach (Caractacus) is a historical character in
+Fletcher's (1576-1625) tragedy of _Bonduca_(Boadicea).]
+
+[Footnote 232: Zoroaster, a Persian philosopher, founder of the
+ancient Persian religion. He flourished long before the Christian
+era.]
+
+[Footnote 233: "Speak thou with us, and we will hear: but let not God
+speak with us, lest we die."--_Exodus_, xx. 19. Compare also the
+parallel passage in _Deuteronomy_, v. 25-27.]
+
+[Footnote 234: John Locke. (See note 18.)]
+
+[Footnote 235: Lavoisier (1743-1794), celebrated French chemical
+philosopher, discoverer of the composition of water.]
+
+[Footnote 236: James Hutton (1726-1797), great Scotch geologist,
+author of the _Theory of the Earth_.]
+
+[Footnote 237: Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), English philosopher,
+jurist, and legislative reformer.]
+
+[Footnote 238: Fourier (1772-1837), French socialist, founder of the
+system of Fourierism.]
+
+[Footnote 239: Calvinism, the doctrines of John Calvin (1509-1564).
+French theologian and Protestant reformer. A cardinal doctrine of
+Calvinism is predestination.]
+
+[Footnote 240: Quakerism, the doctrines of the Quakers or Friends, a
+society founded by George Fox (1624-1691).]
+
+[Footnote 241: Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), Swedish theosophist,
+founder of the New Jerusalem Church. He is taken by Emerson in his
+_Representative Men_ as the type of the mystic, and is often mentioned
+in his other works.]
+
+[Footnote 242: "Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful,
+we must carry it with us, or we find it not."--EMERSON, _Art_.]
+
+[Footnote 243: Thebes, a celebrated ruined city of Upper Egypt.]
+
+[Footnote 244: Palmyra, a ruined city of Asia situated in an oasis of
+the Syrian desert, supposed to be the Tadmor built by Solomon in the
+wilderness (_II. Chr._, viii. 4).]
+
+[Footnote 245:
+
+    "Vain, very vain, my weary search to find
+     That bliss which only centers in the mind....
+     Still to ourselves in every place consign'd,
+     Our own felicity we make or find."
+                              GOLDSMITH (and JOHNSON),
+                              _The Traveler_, 423-32.
+
+    "He that has light within his own clear breast
+     May sit i' th' center, and enjoy bright day;
+     But he that hides a dark soul, and foul thoughts,
+     Benighted walks under the mid-day sun;
+     Himself in his own dungeon."
+                             MILTON, _Comus_, 381-5.
+
+Compare also _Paradise Lost_, I, 255-7.]
+
+[Footnote 246: Vatican, the palace of the pope in Rome, with its
+celebrated library, museum, and art gallery.]
+
+[Footnote 247: Doric, the oldest, strongest, and simplest of the three
+styles of Grecian architecture.]
+
+[Footnote 248: Gothic, a pointed style of architecture, prevalent in
+western Europe in the latter part of the middle ages.]
+
+[Footnote 249: Never imitate. Emerson insists on this doctrine.]
+
+[Footnote 250: Shakespeare (1564-1616), the great English poet and
+dramatist. He is mentioned in Emerson's writings more than any other
+character in history, and is taken as the type of the poet in his
+_Representative Men_.
+
+"O mighty poet! Thy works are not as those of other men, simply and
+merely great works of art; but are also like the phenomena of nature,
+like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers,--like frost and
+snow, rain and dew, hailstorm and thunder, which are to be studied
+with entire submission of our own faculties, and in the perfect faith
+that in them there can be no too much or too little, nothing useless
+or inert,--but that, the further we press in our discoveries, the more
+we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where
+the careless eye had seen nothing but accident!"--DE QUINCY.]
+
+[Footnote 251: Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), American philosopher,
+statesman, diplomatist, and author. He discovered the identity of
+lightning with electricity, invented the lightning-rod, went on
+several diplomatic missions to Europe, was one of the committee that
+drew up the Declaration of Independence, signed the treaty of Paris,
+and compiled _Poor Richard's Almanac_.]
+
+[Footnote 252: Francis Bacon (1561-1626), a famous English philosopher
+and statesman. He became Lord Chancellor under Elizabeth. He is best
+known by his _Essays_; he wrote also the _Novum Organum_ and the
+_Advancement of Learning_.]
+
+[Footnote 253: Sir Isaac Newton. (See note 53.)]
+
+[Footnote 254: Scipio. (See note 205.)]
+
+[Footnote 255: Phidias (500?-432? B.C.), famous Greek sculptor.]
+
+[Footnote 256: Egyptians. He has in mind the pyramids.]
+
+[Footnote 257: The Pentateuch is attributed to Moses.]
+
+[Footnote 258: Dante (1265-1321), the greatest of Italian poets,
+author of the _Divina Commedia_.]
+
+[Footnote 259: Foreworld, a former ideal state of the world.]
+
+[Footnote 260: New Zealander, inhabitant of New Zealand, a group of
+two islands lying southeast of Australia.]
+
+[Footnote 261: Geneva, a city of Switzerland, situated at the
+southwestern extremity of Lake Geneva.]
+
+[Footnote 262: Greenwich nautical almanac. The meridian of the Royal
+Observatory at Greenwich, near London, is the prime meridian for
+reckoning the longitude of the world. The nautical almanac is a
+publication containing astronomical data for the use of navigators and
+astronomers. What is the name of the corresponding publication of the
+U.S. Observatory at Washington?]
+
+[Footnote 263: Get the meaning of these astronomical terms.]
+
+[Footnote 264: Plutarch. (50?-120? A.D.), Greek philosopher and
+biographer, author of _Parallel Lives_, a series of Greek and Roman
+biographies. Next after Shakespeare and Plato he is the author most
+frequently mentioned by Emerson. Read the essay of Emerson on
+Plutarch.]
+
+[Footnote 265: Phocion (402-317 B.C.), Athenian statesman and general.
+(See note 364.)]
+
+[Footnote 266: Anaxagoras (500-426 B.C.), Greek philosopher of
+distinction.]
+
+[Footnote 267: Diogenes (400?-323?), Greek cynic philosopher who
+affected great contempt for riches and honors and the comforts of
+civilized life, and is said to have taken up his residence in a tub.]
+
+
+[Footnote 268: Henry Hudson (---- - 1611), English navigator and
+explorer, discoverer of the bay and river which bear his name.]
+
+[Footnote 269: Bering or Behring (1680-1741), Danish navigator,
+discoverer of Behring Strait.]
+
+[Footnote 270: Sir William Edward Parry (1790-1855), English navigator
+and Arctic explorer.]
+
+[Footnote 271: Sir John Franklin (1786-1846?), celebrated English
+navigator and Arctic explorer, lost in the Arctic seas.]
+
+[Footnote 272: Christopher Columbus (1445?-1506), Genoese navigator
+and discoverer of America. His ship, the Santa Maria, appears small
+and insignificant in comparison with the modern ocean ship.]
+
+[Footnote 273: Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), Emperor of France, one
+of the greatest military geniuses the world has ever seen. He was
+defeated in the battle of Waterloo by the Duke of Wellington, and died
+in exile on the isle of St. Helena. Emerson takes him as a type of the
+man of the world in his _Representative Men_: "I call Napoleon the
+agent or attorney of the middle class of modern society.... He was the
+agitator, the destroyer of prescription, the internal improver, the
+liberal, the radical, the inventor of means, the opener of doors and
+markets, the subverter of monopoly and abuse.... He had the virtues of
+the masses of his constituents: he had also their vices. I am sorry
+that the brilliant picture has its reverse."]
+
+[Footnote 274: Comte de las Cases (not Casas) (1766-1842), author of
+_Memorial de Sainte-Helene_.]
+
+[Footnote 275: Ali, Arabian caliph, surnamed the "Lion of God," cousin
+and son-in-law of Mohammed. He was assassinated about 661.]
+
+[Footnote 276: The county of Essex in England has several namesakes in
+America.]
+
+[Footnote 277: Fortune. In Roman mythology Fortune, the goddess of
+fortune or chance, is represented as standing on a ball or wheel.
+
+    "Nec metuis dubio Fortunae stantis in orbe
+      Numen, et exosae verba superba deae?"
+                      OVID, _Tristia_, v., 8, 8.
+
+]
+
+
+FRIENDSHIP
+
+[Footnote 278: Most of Emerson's _Essays_ were first delivered as
+lectures, in practically the form in which they afterwards appeared in
+print. The form and style, it is true, were always carefully revised
+before publication; this Emerson called 'giving his thoughts a Greek
+dress.' His essay on _Friendship_, published in the First Series of
+_Essays_ in 1841 was not, so far as we know, delivered as a lecture;
+parts of it, however, were taken from lectures which Emerson delivered
+on _Society_, _The Heart_, and _Private Life_.
+
+In connection with his essay on _Friendship_, the student should read
+the two other notable addresses on the same subject, one the speech by
+Cicero, the famous Roman orator, and the other the essay by Lord
+Bacon, the great English author.]
+
+[Footnote 279: Relume. Is this a common word? Define it.]
+
+[Footnote 280: Pass my gate. The walk opposite Emerson's house on the
+'Great Road' to Boston was a favorite winter walk for Concord people.
+Along it passed the philosophic Alcott and the imaginative Hawthorne,
+as well as famous townsmen, and school children.]
+
+[Footnote 281: My friends have come to me, etc.: Compare with
+Emerson's views here expressed the noble passage in his essay on _The
+Over-Soul_: "Every friend whom not thy fantastic will but the great
+and tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his embrace. And
+this because the heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a
+wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood
+rolls uninterruptedly in endless circulation through all men, as the
+water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one."]
+
+[Footnote 282: Bard. Poet: originally one who composed and sang to the
+music of a harp verses in honor of heroes and heroic deeds.]
+
+[Footnote 283: Hymn, ode, and epic. Define each of these three kinds
+of poetry.]
+
+[Footnote 284: Apollo. In classic mythology, the sun god who presided
+over music, poetry, and art; he was the guardian and leader of the
+Muses.]
+
+[Footnote 285: Muses. In classic mythology, the nine sisters who
+presided over music, poetry, art, and science. They were Clio the muse
+of history, Euterpe of music, especially the flute, Thalia of comedy,
+Melpomene of tragedy, Terpsichore of dancing, Erato of erotic poetry,
+mistress of the lyre, Polyhymnia of sacred poetry, Urania of
+astronomy, Calliope of eloquence and epic poetry.]
+
+[Footnote 286: Genius. According to an old belief, a spirit that
+watched over a person to control, guide and aid him.]
+
+[Footnote 287: "Crush the sweet poison," etc. This is a quotation from
+_Comus_, a poem by Milton.]
+
+[Footnote 288: Systole and diastole. (See note 98.)]
+
+[Footnote 289: Friendship, like the immortality, etc. See on what a
+high plane Emerson places this relation of friendship. In 1840 he
+wrote in a letter: "I am a worshiper of friendship, and cannot find
+any other good equal to it. As soon as any man pronounces the words
+which approve him fit for that great office, I make no haste; he is
+holy; let me be holy also; our relations are eternal; why should we
+count days and weeks?"]
+
+[Footnote 290: Elysian temple. Temple of bliss. In Greek mythology,
+Elysium was the abode of the blessed after death.]
+
+[Footnote 291: An Egyptian skull. Plutarch says that at an Egyptian
+feast a skull was displayed, either as a hint to make the most of the
+pleasure which can be enjoyed but for a brief space, or as a warning
+not to set one's heart upon transitory things.]
+
+[Footnote 292: Conscious of a universal success, etc. Emerson wrote in
+his journal: "My entire success, such as it is, is composed wholly of
+particular failures."]
+
+[Footnote 293: Extends the old leaf. Compare Emerson's lines:
+
+   "When half-gods go
+    The gods arrive."
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 294: A texture of wine and dreams. What does Emerson mean by
+this phrase? Explain the whole sentence.]
+
+[Footnote 295: "The valiant warrior," etc. The quotation is from
+Shakespeare's _Sonnet_, XXV.]
+
+[Footnote 296: Naturlangsamkeit. A German word meaning slowness. The
+slowness of natural development.]
+
+[Footnote 297: Olympian. One who took part in the great Greek games
+held every four years on the plain of Olympia. The racing, wrestling
+and other contests of strength and skill were accompanied by
+sacrifices to the gods, processions, and banquets. There was a sense
+of dignity and almost of worship about the games. The Olympic games
+have been recently revived, and athletes from all countries of the
+world contest for the prizes--simple garlands of wild olive.]
+
+[Footnote 298: I knew a man who, etc. The allusion is to Jonas Very, a
+mystic and poet, who lived at Salem, Massachusetts.]
+
+[Footnote 299: Paradox. Define this word. Explain its application to a
+friend.]
+
+[Footnote 300: My author says, etc. The quotation is from _A
+Consideration upon Cicero_, by the French author, Montaigne. Montaigne
+was one of Emerson's favorite authors from his boyhood: of the essays
+he says, "I felt as if I myself, had written this book in some former
+life, so sincerely it spoke my thoughts."]
+
+[Footnote 301: Cherub. What is the difference between a cherub and a
+seraph?]
+
+[Footnote 302: Curricle. A two-wheeled carriage, especially popular in
+the eighteenth century.]
+
+[Footnote 303: This law of one to one. Emerson felt that this same law
+applied to nature. He wrote in his journal: "Nature says to man, 'one
+to one, my dear.'"]
+
+[Footnote 304: Crimen quos, etc. The Latin saying is translated in
+the preceding sentence.]
+
+[Footnote 305: Nonage. We use more commonly the word, "minority."]
+
+[Footnote 306: Janus-faced. The word here means simply two-faced,
+without the idea of deceit usually attached to it. In Roman mythology,
+Janus, the doorkeeper of heaven was the protector of doors and
+gateways and the patron of the beginning and end of undertakings. He
+was the god of the rising and setting of the sun, and was represented
+with two faces, one looking to the east and the other to the west. His
+temple at Rome was kept open in time of war and closed in time of
+peace.]
+
+[Footnote 307: Harbinger. A forerunner; originally an officer who rode
+in advance of a royal person to secure proper lodgings and
+accommodations.]
+
+[Footnote 308: Empyrean. Highest and purest heaven; according to the
+ancients, the region of pure light and fire.]
+
+
+HEROISM
+
+[Footnote 309: Title. Probably this essay is, essentially at least,
+the lecture on _Heroism_ delivered in Boston in the winter of 1837, in
+the course of lectures on _Human Culture_.]
+
+[Footnote 310: Motto. This saying of Mahomet's was the only motto
+prefixed to the essay in the first edition. In later editions, Emerson
+prefixed, according to his custom, some original lines;
+
+   "Ruby wine is drunk by knaves,
+    Sugar spends to fatten slaves,
+    Rose and vine-leaf deck buffoons,
+    Thunder clouds are Jove's festoons,
+    Drooping oft in wreaths of dread
+    Lightning-knotted round his head:
+    The hero is not fed on sweets,
+    Daily his own heart he eats;
+    Chambers of the great are jails,
+    And head-winds right for royal sails."
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 311: Elder English dramatists. The dramatists who preceded
+Shakespeare. In his essay on _Shakespeare; or, the Poet_, Emerson
+enumerates the foremost of these,--"Kyd, Marlowe, Greene, Jonson,
+Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Peele, Ford, Massinger,
+Beaumont and Fletcher."]
+
+[Footnote 312: Beaumont and Fletcher. Francis Beaumont and John
+Fletcher were two dramatists of the Elizabethan age. They wrote
+together and their styles were so similar that critics are unable to
+identify the share of each in their numerous plays.]
+
+[Footnote 313: Rodrigo, Pedro, or Valerio. Favorite names for heroes
+among the dramatists. Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar, known usually by the
+title of the Cid, was the national hero of Spain, famous for his
+exploits against the Moors. Don Pedro was the Prince of Arragon in
+Shakespeare's play, _Much Ado About Nothing_.]
+
+[Footnote 314: Bonduca, Sophocles, the Mad Lover, and Double Marriage.
+The first, third and fourth are names of plays by Beaumont and
+Fletcher. In the case of the second, Emerson, by a lapse of memory,
+gives the name of one of the chief characters instead of the name of
+the play--_The Triumph of Honor_ in a piece called _Four Plays in
+One_. It is from this play by Beaumont and Fletcher that the passage
+in the essay is quoted.]
+
+[Footnote 315: Adriadne's crown. According to Greek mythology, the
+crown of Adriadne was, for her beauty and her sufferings, put among
+the stars. She was the daughter of Minos, King of Crete; she gave
+Theseus the clue by means of which he escaped from the labyrinth and
+she was afterwards abandoned by him.]
+
+[Footnote 316: Romulus. The reputed founder of the city of Rome.]
+
+[Footnote 317: Laodamia, Dion. Read these two poems by Wordsworth, the
+great English poet, and tell why you think Emerson mentioned them
+here.]
+
+[Footnote 318: Scott. Sir Walter Scott, a famous Scotch author.]
+
+[Footnote 319: Lord Evandale, Balfour of Burley. These are characters
+in Scott's novel, _Old Mortality_. The passage referred to by Emerson
+is in the forty-second chapter.]
+
+[Footnote 320: Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle was a great admirer of heroes,
+asserting that history is the biography of great men. One of his most
+popular books is _Heroes and Hero-Worship_, on a plan similar to that
+of Emerson's _Representative Men_.]
+
+[Footnote 321: Robert Burns. A Scotch lyric poet. Emerson was probably
+thinking of the patriotic song, _Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled_.]
+
+[Footnote 322: Harleian Miscellanies. A collection of manuscripts
+published in the eighteenth century, and named for Robert Harley, the
+English statesman who collected them.]
+
+[Footnote 323: Lutzen. A small town in Prussia. The battle referred to
+was fought in 1632 and in it the Swedes under Gustavus Adolphus gained
+a great victory over vastly superior numbers. Nearly two hundred years
+later another battle was fought at Lutzen, in which Napoleon gained a
+victory over the allied Russians and Prussians.]
+
+[Footnote 324: Simon Ockley. An English scholar of the seventeenth
+century whose chief work was a _History of the Saracens_.]
+
+[Footnote 325: Oxford. One of the two great English universities.]
+
+[Footnote 326: Plutarch. (See note 264.)]
+
+[Footnote 327: Brasidas. This hero, described by Plutarch, was a
+Spartan general who lived about four hundred years before Christ.]
+
+[Footnote 328: Dion. A Greek philosopher who ruled the city of
+Syracuse in the fourth century before Christ.]
+
+[Footnote 329: Epaminondas. A Greek general and statesman of the
+fourth century before Christ.]
+
+[Footnote 330: Scipio. (See note 205.)]
+
+[Footnote 331: Stoicism. The stern and severe philosophy taught by the
+Greek philosopher Zeno; he taught that men should always seek virtue
+and be indifferent to pleasure and happiness. This belief, carried to
+the extreme of severity, exercised a great influence on many noble
+Greeks and Romans.]
+
+[Footnote 332: Heroism is an obedience, etc. In one of his poems
+Emerson says:
+
+   "So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
+    So near is God to man,
+    When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,'
+    The youth replies, 'I can.'"
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 333: Plotinus. An Egyptian philosopher who taught in Rome
+during the third century. It was said that he so exalted the mind that
+he was ashamed of his body.]
+
+[Footnote 334: Indeed these humble considerations, etc. The passage,
+like many which Emerson quotes, is rendered inexactly. The Prince says
+to Poins: "Indeed these humble considerations make me out of love with
+my greatness. What a disgrace it is to me to remember thy name! or to
+know thy face to-morrow! or to take note how many pairs of silk
+stockings thou hast, that is, these and those that were thy
+peach-colored ones! or to bear the inventory of thy shirts, as, one
+for superfluity and another for use!" Shakespeare's _Henry IV._, Part
+II. 2, 2.]
+
+[Footnote 335: Ibn Hankal. Ibn Hankul, an Arabian geographer and
+traveler of the tenth century. He wrote an account of his twenty
+years' travels in Mohammedan countries; in 1800 this was translated
+into English by Sir William Jones under the title of _The Oriental
+Geography of Ibn Hankal_. In that volume this anecdote is told in
+slightly different words.]
+
+[Footnote 336: Bokhara. Where is Bokhara? It corresponds to the
+ancient Sogdiana.]
+
+[Footnote 337: Bannocks. Thick cakes, made usually of oatmeal. What
+does Emerson mean by this sentence? Probably no person ever met his
+visitors, many of whom were "exacting and wearisome," and must have
+been unwelcome, with more perfect courtesy and graciousness than
+Emerson.]
+
+[Footnote 338: John Eliot. Give as full an account as you can of the
+life and works of this noble Apostle to the Indians of the seventeenth
+century.]
+
+[Footnote 339: King David, etc. See First Chronicles, 11, 15-19.]
+
+[Footnote 340: Brutus. Marcus Junius Brutus, a Roman patriot of the
+first century before Christ, who took part in the assassination of
+Julius Caesar.]
+
+[Footnote 341: Philippi. A city of Macedonia near which in the year 42
+B.C. were fought two battles in which the republican army under Brutus
+and Cassius was defeated by Octavius and Antony, friends of Caesar.]
+
+[Footnote 342: Euripides. A Greek tragic poet of the fifth century
+before Christ.]
+
+[Footnote 343: Scipio. (See note 205.) Plutarch in his _Morals_ gives
+another version of the story: "When Paetilius and Quintus accused him
+of many crimes before the people; 'on this very day,' he said, 'I
+conquered Hannibal and Carthage. I for my part am going with my crown
+on to the Capitol to sacrifice; and let him that pleaseth stay and
+pass his vote upon me.' Having thus said, he went his way; and the
+people followed him, leaving his accusers declaiming to themselves."]
+
+[Footnote 344: Socrates. (See note 187.)]
+
+[Footnote 345: Prytaneum. A public hall at Athens.]
+
+[Footnote 346: Sir Thomas More. An English statesman and author who
+was beheaded in 1535 on a charge of high treason. The incident to
+which Emerson refers is one which showed his "pleasant wit"
+undisturbed by the prospect of death. As the executioner was about to
+strike, More moved his head carefully out of reach of the ax. "Pity
+that should be cut," he said, "that has never committed treason."]
+
+[Footnote 347: Blue Laws. Any rigid Sunday laws or religious
+regulations. The term is usually applied to the early laws of New
+Haven and Connecticut which regulated personal and religious conduct.]
+
+[Footnote 348: Epaminondas. (See note 329.)]
+
+[Footnote 349: Olympus. A mountain of Greece, the summit of which,
+according to Greek mythology, was the home of the gods.]
+
+[Footnote 350: Jerseys. Consult a history of the United States for a
+full account of Washington's campaign in New Jersey.]
+
+[Footnote 351: Milton. (See note 151.)]
+
+[Footnote 352: Pericles. A famous Greek statesman of the fifth century
+before Christ, in whose age Athens was preeminent in naval and
+military affairs and in letters and art.]
+
+[Footnote 353: Xenophon. A Greek historian of the fourth century
+before Christ.]
+
+[Footnote 354: Columbus. Give an account of his life.]
+
+[Footnote 355: Bayard. Chevalier de Bayard was a French gentleman of
+the fifteenth century. He is the French national hero, and is called
+"The Knight without fear and without reproach."]
+
+[Footnote 356: Sidney. Probably Sir Philip Sidney, an English
+gentleman and scholar of the sixteenth century who is the English
+national hero as Bayard is the French; another brave Englishman was
+Algernon Sidney, a politician and patriot of the seventeenth century.]
+
+[Footnote 357: Hampden. John Hampden was an English statesman and
+patriot who was killed in the civil war of the seventeenth century.]
+
+[Footnote 358: Colossus. The Colossus of Rhodes was a gigantic
+statue--over a hundred feet in height--of the Rhodian sun god. It was
+one of the seven wonders of the world; it was destroyed by an
+earthquake about two hundred years before Christ.]
+
+[Footnote 359: Sappho. A Greek poet of the seventh century before
+Christ. Her fame remains, though most of her poems have been lost.]
+
+[Footnote 360: Sevigne. Marquise de Sevigne was a French author of the
+seventeenth century.]
+
+[Footnote 361: De Stael. Madame de Stael was a French writer whose
+books and political opinions were condemned by Napoleon.]
+
+[Footnote 362: Themis. A Greek goddess. The personification of law,
+order, and justice.]
+
+[Footnote 363: A high counsel, etc. Such was the advice given to the
+Emerson boys by their aunt, Miss. Mary Moody Emerson: "Scorn trifles,
+lift your aims; do what you are afraid to do; sublimity of character
+must come from sublimity of motive." Upon her monument are inscribed
+Emerson's words about her: "She gave high counsels. It was the
+privilege of certain boys to have this immeasurably high standard
+indicated to their childhood, a blessing which nothing else in
+education could supply."]
+
+[Footnote 364: Phocion. A Greek general and statesman of the fourth
+century before Christ who advised the Athenians to make peace with
+Philip of Macedon. He was put to death on a charge of treason.]
+
+[Footnote 365: Lovejoy. Rev. Elijah Lovejoy, a Presbyterian clergyman
+of Maine who published a periodical against slavery. In 1837 an
+Illinois mob demanded his printing press, which he refused to give up.
+The building containing it was set on fire and when Lovejoy came out
+he was shot.]
+
+[Footnote 366: Let them rave, etc. These lines are misquoted, being
+evidently given from memory, from Tennyson's _Dirge_. In the poem
+occur these lines:
+
+          "Let them rave.
+    Thou wilt never raise thine head
+    From the green that folds thy grave--
+          Let them rave."
+
+]
+
+
+MANNERS
+
+[Footnote 367: The essay on _Manners_ is from the Second Series of
+_Essays_, published in 1844, three years after the First Series. The
+essays in this volume, like those in the first, were, for the most
+part, made up of Emerson's lectures, rearranged and corrected. The
+lecture on _Manners_ had been delivered in the winter of 1841. He had
+given another lecture on the same subject about four years before, and
+several years later he treated of the same subject in his essay on
+_Behavior_ in _The Conduct of Life_. You will find it interesting to
+read _Behavior_ in connection with this essay.]
+
+[Footnote 368: Feejee islanders. Since this essay was written, the
+people of the Feejee, or Fiji, Islands have become Christianized, and,
+to a large extent, civilized.]
+
+[Footnote 369: Gournou. This description is found in _A Narrative of
+the Operations and Recent Discoveries within the Pyramids_, by
+Belzoni, an Italian traveler and explorer.]
+
+[Footnote 370: Borgoo. A province of Africa.]
+
+[Footnote 371: Tibboos, Bornoos. Tribes of Central Africa, mentioned
+in Heeren's _Historical Researches_.]
+
+[Footnote 372: Honors himself with architecture. Architecture was a
+subject in which Emerson was deeply interested. Read his poem, _The
+Problem_.]
+
+[Footnote 373: Chivalry. Chivalry may be considered "as embodying the
+Middle Age conception of the ideal life of ... the Knights"; the word
+is often used to express "the ideal qualifications of a knight, as
+courtesy, generosity, valor, and dexterity in arms." Fully to
+understand the order of Knighthood and the ideals of chivalry, you
+must read the history of Europe in the Middle Ages.]
+
+[Footnote 374: Sir Philip Sidney. (See note 356.)]
+
+[Footnote 375: Sir Walter Scott. (1771-1832). His historical novels
+dealing with the Middle Ages have some fine pictures of the chivalrous
+characters in which he delighted.]
+
+[Footnote 376: Masonic sign. A sign of secret brotherhood, like the
+sign given by one Mason to another.]
+
+[Footnote 377: Correlative abstract. Corresponding abstract name. Sir
+Philip Sidney, himself the ideal gentleman, used the word
+"gentlemanliness." He said: "Gentlemanliness is high-erected thoughts
+seated in a heart of courtesy."]
+
+[Footnote 378: Gentilesse. Gentle birth and breeding. Emerson was very
+fond of the passage on "gentilesse" in Chaucer's _Wife of Bath's
+Tale_.]
+
+[Footnote 379: Feudal Ages. The Middle Ages in Europe during which the
+feudal system prevailed. According to this, land was held by its
+owners on condition of certain duties, especially military service,
+performed for a superior lord.]
+
+[Footnote 380: God knows, etc. Why is this particularly true of a
+republic such as the United States?]
+
+[Footnote 381: The incomparable advantage of animal spirits. Why does
+Emerson regard this as of such importance? In his journals he
+frequently comments on his own lack of animal spirits, and says that
+it unfits him for general society and for action.]
+
+[Footnote 382: The sense of power. "I like people who can do things,"
+wrote Emerson in his journal.]
+
+[Footnote 383: Lundy's Lane. Give a full account of this battle in the
+War of 1812.]
+
+[Footnote 384: Men of the right Caesarian pattern. Men versatile as was
+Julius Caesar, the Roman, famous as a general, statesman, orator, and
+writer.]
+
+[Footnote 385: Timid maxim. Why does Emerson term this saying
+"timid"?]
+
+[Footnote 386: Lord Falkland. Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, was an
+English politician who espoused the royalist side; he was killed in
+battle in the Civil War.]
+
+[Footnote 387: Saladin. A famous sultan of Egypt and Syria who lived
+in the twelfth century. Scott describes him as possessing an ideal
+knightly character and introduces him, disguised as a physician and
+also as a wandering soldier in his historical romance, _The
+Talisman_.]
+
+[Footnote 388: Sapor. A Persian monarch of the fourth century who
+defeated the Romans in battle.]
+
+[Footnote 389: The Cid. See "Rodrigo," in _Heroism_, 313.]
+
+[Footnote 390: Julius Caesar. See note on "Caesarian," 384.]
+
+[Footnote 391: Scipio. (See note 205.)]
+
+[Footnote 392: Alexander. Alexander, King of Macedon, surnamed the
+Great. In the fourth century before Christ he made himself master of
+the known world.]
+
+[Footnote 393: Pericles. See note on _Heroism_, 352.]
+
+[Footnote 394: Diogenes. (See note 267.)]
+
+[Footnote 395: Socrates. (See note 187.)]
+
+[Footnote 396: Epaminondas. (See note 329.)]
+
+[Footnote 397: My contemporaries. Emerson probably had in mind, among
+others, his friend, the gentle philosopher, Thoreau.]
+
+[Footnote 398: Fine manners. "I think there is as much merit in
+beautiful manners as in hard work," said Emerson in his journal.]
+
+[Footnote 399: Napoleon. (See note 273.)]
+
+[Footnote 400: Noblesse. Nobility. Why does Emerson use here the
+French word?]
+
+[Footnote 401: Faubourg St. Germain. A once fashionable quarter of
+Paris, on the south bank of the Seine; it was long the headquarters of
+the French royalists.]
+
+[Footnote 402: Cortez. Consult a history of the United States for an
+account of this Spanish soldier, the conqueror of Mexico.]
+
+[Footnote 403: Nelson. Horatio Nelson, an English admiral, who won
+many great naval victories and was killed in the battle of Trafalgar
+in 1805.]
+
+[Footnote 404: Mexico. The scene of Cortez's victories.]
+
+[Footnote 405: Marengo. The scene of a battle in Italy in 1800, in
+which Napoleon defeated the Austrians with a larger army and made
+himself master of northern Italy.]
+
+[Footnote 406: Trafalgar. A cape on the southern coast of Spain, the
+scene of Nelson's last great victory, in which the allied French and
+Spanish fleets were defeated.]
+
+[Footnote 407: Mexico, Marengo, and Trafalgar. Is this the order in
+which you would expect these words to occur? Why not?]
+
+[Footnote 408: Estates of the realm. Orders or classes of people with
+regard to political rights and powers. In modern times, the nobility,
+the clergy, and the people are called "the three estates."]
+
+[Footnote 409: Tournure. Figure; turn of dress,--and so of mind.]
+
+[Footnote 410: Coventry. It is said that the people of Coventry, a
+city in England, at one time so disliked soldiers that to send a
+military man there meant to exclude him from social intercourse; hence
+the expression "to send to Coventry" means to exclude from society.]
+
+[Footnote 411: "If you could see Vich Ian Vohr with his tail on." Vich
+Ian Vohr is a Scotch chieftain in Scott's novel, _Waverley_. One of
+his dependents says to Waverley, the young English officer: "If you
+Saxon duinhe-wassal [English gentleman] saw but the Chief with his
+tail on." "With his tail on?" echoed Edward in some surprise.
+"Yes--that is, with all his usual followers when he visits those of
+the same rank." See _Waverley_, chapter 16.]
+
+[Footnote 412: Mercuries. The word here means simply messengers.
+According to Greek mythology, Mercury was the messenger of the gods.]
+
+[Footnote 413: Herald's office. In England the Herald's College, or
+College of Arms, is a royal corporation the chief business of which is
+to grant armorial bearings, or coats of arms, and to trace and
+preserve genealogies. What does Emerson mean by comparing certain
+circles of society to this corporation?]
+
+[Footnote 414: Amphitryon. Host; it came to have this meaning from an
+incident in the story of Amphitryon, a character in Greek legend. At
+one time Jupiter assumed the form of Amphitryon and gave a banquet.
+The real Amphitryon came in and asserted that he was master of the
+house. In the French play, founded on this story, the question is
+settled by the assertion of the servants and guests that "he who gives
+the feast is the host."]
+
+[Footnote 415: Tuileries. An old royal residence in Paris which was
+burned in 1871.]
+
+[Footnote 416: Escurial, or escorial. A celebrated royal edifice near
+Madrid in Spain.]
+
+[Footnote 417: Hide ourselves as Adam, etc. See Genesis iii. 8.]
+
+[Footnote 418: Cardinal Caprara. An Italian cardinal, Bishop of Milan,
+who negotiated the famous concordat of 1801, an agreement between the
+Church and State regulating the relations between civil and
+ecclesiastical powers.]
+
+[Footnote 419: The pope. Pope Pius VII.]
+
+[Footnote 420: Madame de Stael. (See note 361.)]
+
+[Footnote 421: Mr. Hazlitt. William Hazlitt, an English writer.]
+
+[Footnote 422: Montaigne. A French essayist of the sixteenth century.]
+
+[Footnote 423: The hint of tranquillity and self-poise. It is
+suggested that Emerson had here in mind a favorite passage of the
+German author, Richter, in which Richter says of the Greek statues:
+"The repose not of weariness but of perfection looks from their eyes
+and rests upon their lips."]
+
+[Footnote 424: A Chinese etiquette. What does Emerson mean by this
+expression?]
+
+[Footnote 425: Recall. In the first edition, Emerson had here the word
+"signify." Which is the better word and why?]
+
+[Footnote 426: Measure. What meaning has this word here? Is this the
+sense in which we generally use it?]
+
+[Footnote 427: Creole natures. What is a creole? What does Emerson
+mean by "Creole natures"?]
+
+[Footnote 428: Mr. Fox. Charles James Fox, an English statesman and
+orator of the eighteenth century.]
+
+[Footnote 429: Burke. Both Fox and Burke opposed the taxation of the
+American colonies and sympathized with their resistance; it was on the
+subject of the French Revolution that the two friends clashed.]
+
+[Footnote 430: Sheridan. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, an Irish
+dramatist, member of the famous Literary Club to which both Fox and
+Burke belonged.]
+
+[Footnote 431: Circe. According to Greek legend, Circe was a beautiful
+enchantress. Men who partook of the draught she offered, were turned
+to swine.]
+
+[Footnote 432: Captain Symmes. The only real personage of this group.
+He asserted that there was an opening to the interior of the earth
+which was stocked with plants and animals.]
+
+[Footnote 433: Clerisy. What word would we be more apt to use here?]
+
+[Footnote 434: St. Michael's (Square). St. Michael's was an order
+instituted by Louis XI. of France.]
+
+[Footnote 435: Cologne water. A perfumed water first made at the city
+of Cologne in Germany, from which it took its name.]
+
+[Footnote 436: Poland. This kingdom of Europe was, in the eighteenth
+century, taken possession of and divided among its powerful neighbors,
+Russia, Prussia, and Austria.]
+
+[Footnote 437: Philhellene. Friend of Greece.]
+
+[Footnote 438: As Heaven and Earth are fairer far, etc. This passage
+is quoted from Book II. of Keats' _Hyperion_.]
+
+[Footnote 439: Waverley. The Waverley novels, a name applied to all of
+Scott's novels from _Waverley_, the title of the first one.]
+
+[Footnote 440: Robin Hood. An English outlaw and popular hero, the
+subject of many ballads.]
+
+[Footnote 441: Minerva. In Roman mythology, the goddess of wisdom
+corresponding to the Greek Pallas-Athene.]
+
+[Footnote 442: Juno. In Roman mythology, the wife of the supreme god
+Jupiter.]
+
+[Footnote 443: Polymnia. In Greek mythology, one of the nine muses who
+presided over sacred poetry; the name is more usually written
+Polyhymia.]
+
+[Footnote 444: Delphic Sibyl. In ancient mythology, the Sibyls were
+certain women who possessed the power of prophecy. One of these who
+made her abode at Delphi in Greece was called the Delphian, or
+Delphic, sibyl.]
+
+[Footnote 445: Hafiz. A Persian poet of the fourteenth century.]
+
+[Footnote 446: Firdousi. A Persian poet of the tenth century.]
+
+[Footnote 447: She was an elemental force, etc. Of this passage Oliver
+Wendell Holmes said that Emerson "speaks of woman in language that
+seems to pant for rhythm and rhyme."]
+
+[Footnote 448: Byzantine. An ornate style of architecture developed in
+the fourth and fifth centuries, marked especially by its use of gold
+and color.]
+
+[Footnote 449: Golden Book. In a book, called "the Golden Book," were
+recorded the names of all the children of Venetian noblemen.]
+
+[Footnote 450: Schiraz. A province of Persia famous especially for its
+roses, wine, and nightingales, and described by the poets as a place
+of ideal beauty.]
+
+[Footnote 451: Osman. The name given by Emerson in his journal and
+essays to his ideal man, one subject to the same conditions as
+himself.]
+
+[Footnote 452: Koran. The sacred book of the Mohammedans.]
+
+[Footnote 453: Jove. Jupiter, the supreme god of Roman mythology.]
+
+[Footnote 454: Silenus. In Greek mythology, the leader of the satyrs.
+This fable, which Emerson credits to tradition, was original.]
+
+[Footnote 455: Her owl. The owl was the bird sacred to Minerva, the
+goddess of wisdom.]
+
+
+GIFTS
+
+[Footnote 456: This essay was first printed in the periodical called
+_The Dial_.
+
+It was a part of Emerson's philosophic faith that there is no such
+thing as giving,--everything that belongs to a man or that he ought to
+have, will come to him. But in the ordinarily accepted sense of the
+word, Emerson was a gracious giver and receiver. In his family the old
+New England custom of New Year's presents was kept up to his last
+days. His presents were accompanied with verses to be read before the
+gift was opened.]
+
+[Footnote 457: Into chancery. The phrase "in chancery," means in
+litigation, as an estate, in a court of equity.]
+
+[Footnote 458: Cocker. Spoil, indulge,--a word now little used.]
+
+[Footnote 459: Fruits are acceptable gifts. Emerson took especial
+pleasure in the beauty of fruits and the thought of how they had been
+evolved from useless, insipid seed cases.]
+
+[Footnote 460: To let the petitioner, etc. We can hardly imagine
+Emerson's asking a gift or favor. He often quoted the words of Landor,
+an English writer: "The highest price you can pay for a thing is to
+ask for it."]
+
+[Footnote 461: Furies. In Roman mythology, three goddesses who sought
+out and punished evil-doers.]
+
+[Footnote 462: A man's biography, etc. Emerson wrote in his journal:
+"Long ago I wrote of _gifts_ and neglected a capital example. John
+Thoreau, Jr. [who, like his brother Henry, was a lover of nature] one
+day put a bluebird's box on my barn,--fifteen years ago it must
+be,--and there it still is, with every summer a melodious family in it
+adorning the place and singing its praises. There's a gift for you
+which cost the giver no money, but nothing which he bought could have
+been as good."]
+
+[Footnote 463: Sin offering. Under the Hebrew law, a sacrifice or
+offering for sin. See Leviticus xxiii. 19. Explain what Emerson means
+here by the word.]
+
+[Footnote 464: Blackmail. What is "blackmail"? How may Christmas
+gifts, for instance, become a species of blackmail?]
+
+[Footnote 465: Brother, if Jove, etc. In the Greek legend, Epimetheus
+gives this advice to his brother Prometheus. The lines are taken from
+a translation of _Works and Days_, by the Greek poet, Hesiod.]
+
+[Footnote 466: Timons. Here used in the sense of wealthy givers.
+Timon, the hero of Shakespeare's play, _Timon of Athens_, wasted his
+fortune in lavish gifts and entertainments, and in his poverty was
+exposed to the ingratitude of those whom he had served. He became
+morose and died in miserable retirement.]
+
+[Footnote 467: It is a very onerous business, etc. One of Emerson's
+favorite passages in the essays of Montaigne, a French writer, was
+this: "Oh, how am I obliged to Almighty God, who has been pleased that
+I should immediately receive all I have from his bounty, and
+particularly reserved all my obligation to himself! How instantly do I
+beg of his holy compassion that I may never owe a real thanks to
+anyone. O happy liberty in which I have thus far lived! May it
+continue with me to the last. I endeavor to have no need of any one."
+
+When Emerson, in his old age, had his house injured by fire, his
+friends contributed funds to repair it and to send him to England. The
+gift was proffered graciously and accepted gratefully.]
+
+[Footnote 468: Buddhist. A follower of Buddha, a Hindoo religious
+teacher of the fifth century before Christ.]
+
+
+NATURE
+
+[Footnote 469: Nature. Emerson's first published volume was a little
+book of essays, entitled _Nature_, which appeared in 1836. In the
+years which followed, he thought more deeply on the subject and,
+according to his custom, made notes about it and entries in his
+journals. In the winter of 1843 he delivered a lecture on _Relation to
+Nature_, and it is probable that this essay is built up from that. The
+plan of it, however, had been long in his mind: In 1840 he wrote in
+his journal: "I think I must do these eyes of mine the justice to
+write a new chapter on Nature. This delight we all take in every show
+of night or day or field or forest or sea or city, down to the lowest
+particulars, is not without sequel, though we be as yet only wishers
+and gazers, not at all knowing what we want. We are predominated here
+as elsewhere by an upper wisdom, and resemble those great discoverers
+who are haunted for years, sometimes from infancy, with a passion for
+the fact, or class of facts in which the secret lies which they are
+destined to unlock, and they let it not go until the blessing is won.
+So these sunsets and starlights, these swamps and rocks, these bird
+notes and animal forms off which we cannot get our eyes and ears, but
+hover still, as moths round a lamp, are no doubt a Sanscrit cipher
+covering the whole religious history of the universe, and presently we
+shall read it off into action and character. The pastures are full of
+ghosts for me, the morning woods full of angels."]
+
+[Footnote 470: There are days, etc. The passage in Emerson's journal
+is hardly less beautiful. Under date of October 30, 1841, he wrote:
+"On this wonderful day when heaven and earth seem to glow with
+magnificence, and all the wealth of all the elements is put under
+contribution to make the world fine, as if Nature would indulge her
+offspring, it seemed ungrateful to hide in the house. Are there not
+dull days enough in the year for you to write and read in, that you
+should waste this glittering season when Florida and Cuba seem to have
+left their glittering seats and come to visit us with all their
+shining hours, and almost we expect to see the jasmine and cactus
+burst from the ground instead of these last gentians and asters which
+have loitered to attend this latter glory of the year? All insects are
+out, all birds come forth, the very cattle that lie on the ground seem
+to have great thoughts, and Egypt and India look from their eyes."]
+
+[Footnote 471: Halcyons. Halcyon days, ones of peace and tranquillity;
+anciently, days of calm weather in mid-winter, when the halcyon, or
+kingfisher, was supposed to brood. It was fabled that this bird laid
+its eggs in a nest that floated on the sea, and that it charmed the
+winds and waves to make them calm while it brooded.]
+
+[Footnote 472: Indian Summer. Calm, dry, hazy weather which comes in
+the autumn in America. The Century Dictionary says it was called
+Indian Summer because the season was most marked in the sections of
+the upper eastern Mississippi valley inhabited by Indians about the
+time the term became current.]
+
+[Footnote 473: Gabriel. One of the seven archangels. The Hebrew name
+means "God is my strong one."]
+
+[Footnote 474: Uriel. Another of the seven archangels; the name means
+"Light of God."]
+
+[Footnote 475: Converts all trees to wind-harps. Compare with this
+passage the lines in Emerson's poem, _Woodnotes_:
+
+   "And the countless leaves of the pines are strings
+    Tuned to the lay the wood-god sings."
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 476: The village. Concord, Massachusetts. Emerson's home the
+greater part of the time from 1832 till his death.]
+
+[Footnote 477: I go with my friend, etc. With Henry Thoreau, the lover
+of Nature.]
+
+[Footnote 478: Our little river. The Concord river.]
+
+[Footnote 479: Novitiate and probation. Explain the meaning of these
+words, in the Roman Catholic Church. What does Emerson mean by them
+here?]
+
+[Footnote 480: Villegiatura. The Italian name for a season spent in
+country pleasures.]
+
+[Footnote 481: Hanging gardens. The hanging gardens of Babylon were
+one of the seven wonders of the world.]
+
+[Footnote 482: Versailles. A royal residence near Paris, with
+beautiful formal gardens.]
+
+[Footnote 483: Paphos. A beautiful city on the island of Cyprus, where
+was situated a temple of Astarte, or Venus.]
+
+[Footnote 484: Ctesiphon. One of the chief cities of ancient Persia,
+the site of a magnificent royal palace.]
+
+[Footnote 485: Notch Mountains. Probably the White Mountains near
+Crawford Notch, a deep, narrow valley which is often called "The
+Notch."]
+
+[Footnote 486: AEolian harp. A stringed instrument from which sound is
+drawn by the passing of the wind over its strings. It was named for
+AEolus, the god of the winds, in Greek mythology.]
+
+[Footnote 487: Dorian. Dorus was one of the four divisions of Greece:
+the word is here used in a general sense for Grecian.]
+
+[Footnote 488: Apollo. In Greek and Roman mythology, the sun god, who
+presided over music, poetry, and healing.]
+
+[Footnote 489: Diana. In Roman mythology, the goddess of the moon
+devoted to the chase.]
+
+[Footnote 490: Edens. Beautiful, sinless places,--like the garden of
+Eden.]
+
+[Footnote 491: Tempes. Places like the lovely valley of Tempe in
+Thessaly, Greece.]
+
+[Footnote 492: Como Lake. A lake of northern Italy, celebrated for its
+beauty.]
+
+[Footnote 493: Madeira Islands. Where are these islands, famous for
+picturesque beauty and balmy atmosphere?]
+
+[Footnote 494: Common. What is a common?]
+
+[Footnote 495: Campagna. The plain near Rome.]
+
+[Footnote 496: Dilettantism. Define this word and explain its use
+here.]
+
+[Footnote 497: "Wreaths" and "Flora's Chaplets." About the time that
+Emerson was writing his essays, volumes of formal, artificial verses
+were very fashionable, more as parlor ornaments than as literature.
+Two such volumes were _A Wreath of Wild Flowers from New England_ and
+_The Floral Offering_ by Mrs. Frances Osgood, a New England writer.]
+
+[Footnote 498: Pan. In Greek mythology, the god of woods, fields,
+flocks, and shepherds.]
+
+[Footnote 499: The multitude of false cherubs, etc. Explain the
+meaning of this sentence. If true money were valueless, would people
+make false money?]
+
+[Footnote 500: Proteus. In Greek mythology, a sea god who had the
+power of assuming different shapes. If caught and held fast, however,
+he was forced to assume his own shape and answer the questions put to
+him.]
+
+[Footnote 501: Mosaic ... Schemes. The conception of the world as
+given in Genesis on which the law of Moses, the great Hebrew lawgiver,
+was founded.]
+
+[Footnote 502: Ptolemaic schemes. The system of geography and
+astronomy taught in the second century by Ptolemy of Alexandria; it
+was accepted till the sixteenth century, when the Copernican system
+was established. Ptolemy believed that the sun, planets, and stars
+revolve around the earth; Copernicus taught that the planets revolve
+around the sun.]
+
+[Footnote 503: Flora. In Roman mythology, the goddess of the spring
+and of flowers.]
+
+[Footnote 504: Fauna. In Roman mythology, the goddess of fields and
+shepherds; she represents the fruitfulness of the earth.]
+
+[Footnote 505: Ceres. The Roman goddess of grain and harvest,
+corresponding to the Greek goddess, Demeter.]
+
+[Footnote 506: Pomona. The Roman goddess of fruit trees and gardens.]
+
+[Footnote 507: All duly arrive. Emerson deducts from nature the
+doctrine of evolution. What is its teaching?]
+
+[Footnote 508: Plato. (See note 36.)]
+
+[Footnote 509: Himalaya Mountain chains. (See note 193.)]
+
+[Footnote 510: Franklin. Give an account of Benjamin Franklin, the
+famous American scientist and patriot. What did he prove about
+lightening?]
+
+[Footnote 511: Dalton. John Dalton was an English chemist who, about
+the beginning of the nineteenth century, perfected the atomic theory,
+that is, the theory that all chemical combinations take place in
+certain ways between the atoms, or ultimate particles, of bodies.]
+
+[Footnote 512: Davy. (See note 69.)]
+
+[Footnote 513: Black. Joseph Black, a Scotch chemist who made valuable
+discoveries about latent heat and carbon dioxide, or carbonic acid
+gas.]
+
+[Footnote 514: The astronomers said, etc. Beginning with this passage,
+several pages of this essay was published in 1844, under the title of
+_Tantalus_, in the next to the last number of _The Dial_, which
+Emerson edited.]
+
+[Footnote 515: Centrifugal, centripetal. Define these words.]
+
+[Footnote 516: Stoics. See "Stoicism," 331.]
+
+[Footnote 517: Luther. (See note 188.)]
+
+[Footnote 518: Jacob Behmen. A German mystic of the sixteenth century;
+his name is usually written Boehme.]
+
+[Footnote 519: George Fox. (See note 202.)]
+
+[Footnote 520: James Naylor. An English religious enthusiast of the
+seventeenth century; he was first a Puritan and later a Quaker.]
+
+[Footnote 521: Operose. Laborious.]
+
+[Footnote 522: Outskirt and far-off reflection, etc. Compare with this
+passage Emerson's poem, _The Forerunners_.]
+
+[Footnote 523: Oedipus. In Greek mythology, the King of Thebes who
+solved the riddle of the Sphinx, a fabled monster.]
+
+[Footnote 524: Prunella. A widely scattered plant, called self-heal,
+because a decoction of its leaves and stems was, and to some extent
+is, valued as an application to wounds. An editor comments on the fact
+that during the last years of Emerson's life "the little blue
+self-heal crept into the grass before his study window."]
+
+
+SHAKESPEARE; OR, THE POET
+
+[Footnote 525: Shakespeare; or the Poet is one of seven essays on
+great men in various walks of life, published in 1850 under the title
+of _Representative Men_. These essays were first delivered as lectures
+in Boston in the winter of 1845, and were repeated two years later
+before English audiences. They must have been especially interesting
+to those Englishmen who had, seven years before, heard Emerson's
+friend, Carlyle, deliver his six lectures on great men whom he
+selected as representative ones. These lectures were published under
+the title of _Heroes and Hero-Worship_. You should read the latter
+part of Carlyle's lecture on _The Hero as Poet_ and compare what he
+says about Shakespeare with Emerson's words. Both Emerson and Carlyle
+reverenced the great English poet as "the master of mankind." Even in
+serious New England, the plays of Shakespeare were found upon the
+bookshelf beside religious tracts and doctrinal treatises. There the
+boy Emerson found them and learned to love them, and the man Emerson
+loved them but the more. It was as a record of personal experiences
+that he wrote in his journal: "Shakespeare fills us with wonder the
+first time we approach him. We go away, and work and think, for years,
+and come again,--he astonishes us anew. Then, having drank deeply and
+saturated us with his genius, we lose sight of him for another period
+of years. By and by we return, and there he stands immeasurable as at
+first. We have grown wiser, but only that we should see him wiser than
+ever. He resembles a high mountain which the traveler sees in the
+morning and thinks he shall quickly near it and pass it and leave it
+behind. But he journeys all day till noon, till night. There still is
+the dim mountain close by him, having scarce altered its bearings
+since the morning light."]
+
+[Footnote 526: Genius. Here instead of speaking as in _Friendship_,
+see note 286, of the genius or spirit supposed to preside over each
+man's life, Emerson mentions the guardian spirit of human kind.]
+
+[Footnote 527: Shakespeare's youth, etc. It is impossible to
+appreciate or enjoy this essay without having some clear general
+information about the condition of the English people and English
+literature in the glorious Elizabethan age in which Shakespeare lived.
+Consult, for this information, some brief history of England and a
+comprehensive English literature.]
+
+[Footnote 528: Puritans. Strict Protestants who became so powerful in
+England that in the time of the Commonwealth they controlled the
+political and religious affairs of the country.]
+
+[Footnote 529: Anglican Church. The Established Church of England; the
+Episcopal church.]
+
+[Footnote 530: Punch. The chief character in a puppet show, hence the
+puppet show itself.]
+
+[Footnote 531: Kyd, Marlowe, Greene, etc. For an account of these
+dramatists consult a text book on English literature. The English
+drama seems to have begun in the Middle Ages with what were called
+Miracle plays, which were scenes from Bible history; about the same
+time were performed the Mystery plays, which dramatized the lives of
+saints. These were followed by the Moralities, plays in which were
+personified abstract virtues and vices. The first step in the creation
+of the regular drama was taken by Heywood, who composed some farcical
+plays called Interludes. The people of the sixteenth century were fond
+of pageants, shows in which classical personages were introduced, and
+Masques, which gradually developed from pageants into dramas
+accompanied with music. About the middle of the sixteenth century,
+rose the English drama,--comedy, tragedy, and historical plays. The
+chief among the group of dramatists who attained fame before
+Shakespeare began to write were Kyd, Marlowe, Greene, and Peele. Ben
+Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher rank next to Shakespeare among his
+contemporaries, and among the other dramatists of the period were
+Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Ford, and Massinger.]
+
+[Footnote 532: At the time when, etc. Probably about 1585.]
+
+[Footnote 533: Tale of Troy. Drama founded on the Trojan war. The
+subject of famous poems by Latin and Greek poets.]
+
+[Footnote 534: Death of Julius Caesar. An account of the plots which
+ended in the assassination of the great Roman general.]
+
+[Footnote 535: Plutarch. See note on _Heroism_(264). Shakespeare, like
+the earlier dramatists, drew freely on Plutarch's _Lives_ for
+material.]
+
+[Footnote 536: Brut. A poetical version of the legendary history of
+Britain, by Layamon. Its hero is Brutus, a mythical King of Britain.]
+
+[Footnote 537: Arthur. A British King of the sixth century, around
+whose life and deeds so many legends have grown up that some
+historians say he, too, was a myth. He is the center of the great
+cycle of romances told in prose in Mallory's _Morte d'Arthur_ and in
+poetry in Tennyson's _Idylls of the King_.]
+
+[Footnote 538: The royal Henries. Among the dramas popular in
+Shakespeare's day which he retouched or rewrote are the historical
+plays. Henry IV., First and Second Parts; Henry V; Henry VI., First,
+Second, and Third Parts; and Henry VIII.]
+
+[Footnote 539: Italian tales. Italian literature was very popular in
+Shakespeare's day, and authors drew freely from it for material,
+especially from the _Decameron_, a famous collection of a hundred
+tales, by Boccaccio, a poet of the fourteenth century.]
+
+[Footnote 540: Spanish voyages. In the sixteenth century, Spain was
+still a power upon the high seas, and the tales of her conquests and
+treasures in the New World were like tales of romance.]
+
+[Footnote 541: Prestige. Can you give an English equivalent for this
+French word?]
+
+[Footnote 542: Which no single genius, etc. In the same way, some
+critics assure us, the poems credited to the Greek poet, Homer, were
+built up by a number of poets.]
+
+[Footnote 543: Malone. An Irish critic and scholar of the eighteenth
+century, best known by his edition of Shakespeare's plays.]
+
+[Footnote 544: Wolsey's Soliloquy. See Shakespeare's _Henry VIII._
+III, 2. Cardinal Wolsey was prime minister of England in the reign of
+Henry VIII.]
+
+[Footnote 545: Scene with Cromwell. See _Henry VIII._ III, 2. Thomas
+Cromwell was the son of an English blacksmith; he rose to be lord high
+chamberlain of England in the reign of Henry VIII., but, incurring the
+King's displeasure, was executed on a charge of treason.]
+
+[Footnote 546: Account of the coronation. See _Henry VIII._ IV, 1.]
+
+[Footnote 547: Compliment to Queen Elizabeth. See _Henry VIII._ V, 5.]
+
+[Footnote 548: Bad rhythm. Too much importance must not be attached to
+these matters in deciding authorship, as critics disagree about them.]
+
+[Footnote 549: Value his memory, etc. The Greeks, in appreciation of
+the value of memory to the poet, represented the Muses as the
+daughters of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory.]
+
+[Footnote 550: Homer. A Greek poet to whom is assigned the authorship
+of the two greatest Greek poems, the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_; he is
+said to have lived about a thousand years before Christ.]
+
+[Footnote 551: Chaucer. (See note 33.)]
+
+[Footnote 552: Saadi. A Persian poet, supposed to have lived in the
+thirteenth century. His best known poems are his odes.]
+
+[Footnote 553: Presenting Thebes, etc. This quotation is from Milton's
+poem, _Il Penseroso_. Milton here names the three most popular
+subjects of Greek tragedy,--the story of Oedipus, the ill-fated King
+of Thebes who slew his father; the tale of the descendants of Pelops,
+King of Pisa, who seemed born to woe--Agamemnon was one of his
+grandsons; the third subject was the tale of Troy and the heroes of
+the Trojan war,--called "divine" because the Greeks represented even
+the gods as taking part in the contest.]
+
+[Footnote 554: Pope. (See note 88.)]
+
+[Footnote 555: Dryden. (See note 35.)]
+
+[Footnote 556: Chaucer is a huge borrower. Taine, the French critic,
+says on this subject: "Chaucer was capable of seeking out in the old
+common forest of the Middle Ages, stories and legends, to replant them
+in his own soil and make them send out new shoots.... He has the right
+and power of copying and translating because by dint of retouching he
+impresses ... his original work. He recreates what he imitates."]
+
+[Footnote 557: Lydgate. John Lydgate was an English poet who lived a
+generation later than Chaucer; in his _Troy Book_ and other poems he
+probably borrowed from the sources used by Chaucer; he called himself
+"Chaucer's disciple."]
+
+[Footnote 558: Caxton. William Caxton, the English author, more famous
+as the first English printer, was not born until after Chaucer's
+death. The work from which Emerson supposes the poet to have borrowed
+Caxton's translation of _Recueil des Histoires de Troye_, the first
+printed English book, appeared about 1474.]
+
+[Footnote 559: Guido di Colonna. A Sicilian poet and historian of the
+thirteenth century. Chaucer in his _House of Fame_ placed in his
+vision "on a pillar higher than the rest, Homer and Livy, Dares the
+Phrygian, Guido Colonna, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and the other
+historians of the war of Troy."]
+
+[Footnote 560: Dares Phrygius. A Latin account of the fall of Troy,
+written about the fifth century, which pretends to be a translation of
+a lost work on the fall of Troy by Dares, a Trojan priest mentioned in
+Homer's _Iliad_.]
+
+[Footnote 561: Ovid. A Roman poet who lived about the time of Christ,
+whose best-known work is the _Metamorphoses_, founded on classical
+legends.]
+
+[Footnote 562: Statius. A Roman poet of the first century after
+Christ.]
+
+[Footnote 563: Petrarch. An Italian poet of the fourteenth century.]
+
+[Footnote 564: Boccaccio. An Italian novelist and poet of the
+fourteenth century. See note on "Italian tales," 539. It is supposed
+that the plan of the _Decameron_ suggested the similar but far
+superior plan of Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_.]
+
+[Footnote 565: Provencal poets. The poets of Provence, a province of
+the southeastern part of France. In the Middle Ages it was celebrated
+for its lyric poets, called troubadours.]
+
+[Footnote 566: Romaunt of the Rose, etc. Chaucer's _Romaunt of the
+Rose_, written during the period of French influence, is an incomplete
+and abbreviated translation of a French poem of the thirteenth
+century, _Roman de la Rose_, the first part of which was written by
+William of Loris and the latter by John of Meung, or Jean de Meung.]
+
+[Footnote 567: Troilus and Creseide, etc. Chaucer ascribes the Italian
+poem which he followed in his _Troilus and Creseide_ to an unknown
+"Lollius of Urbino"; the source of the poem, however, is _Il
+Filostrato_, by Boccaccio, the Italian poet already mentioned.
+Chaucer's poem is far more than a translation; more than half is
+entirely original, and it is a powerful poem, showing profound
+knowledge of the Italian poets, whose influence with him superseded
+the French poets.]
+
+[Footnote 568: The Cock and the Fox. _The Nun's Priest's Tale_ in the
+_Canterbury Tales_ was an original treatment of the _Roman de Renart_,
+of Marie of France, a French poet of the twelfth century.]
+
+[Footnote 569: House of Fame, etc. The plan of the _House of Fame_,
+written during the period of Chaucer's Italian influence, shows the
+influence of Dante; the general idea of the poem is from Ovid, the
+Roman poet.]
+
+[Footnote 570: Gower. John Gower was an English poet, Chaucer's
+contemporary and friend; the two poets went to the same sources for
+poetic materials, but Chaucer made no such use of Gower's works as we
+would infer from this passage. Emerson relied on his memory for facts,
+and hence made mistakes, as here in the instances of Lydgate, Caxton,
+and Gower.]
+
+[Footnote 571: Westminster, Washington. What legislative body
+assembles at Westminster Palace, London? What at Washington?]
+
+[Footnote 572: Sir Robert Peel. An English statesman who died in 1850,
+not long after _Representative Men_ was published.]
+
+[Footnote 573: Webster. Daniel Webster, an American statesman and
+orator who was living when this essay was written.]
+
+[Footnote 574: Locke. John Locke. (See note 18.)]
+
+[Footnote 575: Rousseau. Jean Jacques Rousseau, a French philosopher
+of the eighteenth century.]
+
+[Footnote 576: Homer. (See note 550.)]
+
+[Footnote 577: Menn. Menn, or Mann, was in Sanscrit one of fourteen
+legendary beings; the one referred to by Emerson, Mann Vaivasvata was
+supposed to be the author of the laws of Mann, a collection made about
+the second century.]
+
+[Footnote 578: Saadi or Sadi. (See note 552.)]
+
+[Footnote 579: Milton. Of this great English poet and prose writer of
+the seventeenth century, Emerson says: "No man can be named whose mind
+still acts on the cultivated intellect of England and America with an
+energy comparable to that of Milton. As a poet Shakespeare undoubtedly
+transcends and far surpasses him in his popularity with foreign
+nations: but Shakespeare is a voice merely: who and what he was that
+sang, that sings, we know not."]
+
+[Footnote 580: Delphi. Here, source of prophecy. Delphi was a city in
+Greece, where was the oracle of Apollo, the most famous of the oracles
+of antiquity.]
+
+[Footnote 581: Our English Bible. The version made in the reign of
+King James I. by forty-seven learned divines is a monument of noble
+English.]
+
+[Footnote 582: Liturgy. An appointed form of worship used in a
+Christian church,--here, specifically, the service of the Episcopal
+church. Emerson's mother had been brought up in that church, and
+though she attended her husband's church, she always loved and read
+her Episcopal prayer book.]
+
+[Footnote 583: Grotius. Hugo Grotius was a Dutch jurist, statesman,
+theologian, and poet of the seventeenth century.]
+
+[Footnote 584: Rabbinical forms. The forms used by the rabbis, Jewish
+doctors or expounders of the law.]
+
+[Footnote 585: Common law. In a general sense, the system of law
+derived from England, in general use among English-speaking people.]
+
+[Footnote 586: Vedas. The sacred books of the Brahmins.]
+
+[Footnote 587: AEsop's Fables. Fables ascribed to AEsop, a Greek slave
+who lived in the sixth century before Christ.]
+
+[Footnote 588: Pilpay, or Bidpai. Indian sage to whom were ascribed
+some fables. From an Arabic translation, these passed into European
+languages and were used by La Fontaine, the French fabulist.]
+
+[Footnote 589: Arabian Nights. _The Arabian Nights' Entertainment or A
+Thousand and One Nights_ is a collection of Oriental tales, the plan
+and name of which are very ancient.]
+
+[Footnote 590: Cid. _The Romances of the Cid_, the story of the
+Spanish national hero, mentioned in note on _Heroism_139:5, was
+written about the thirteenth century by an unknown author; it supplied
+much of the material for two Spanish chronicles and Spanish and French
+tragedies written later on the same subject.]
+
+[Footnote 591: Iliad. The poem in which the Greek, poet, Homer,
+describes the siege and fall of Troy. Emerson here expresses the view
+adopted by many scholars that it was the work, not of one, but of many
+men.]
+
+[Footnote 592: Robin Hood. The ballads about Robin Hood, an English
+outlaw and popular hero of the twelfth century.]
+
+[Footnote 593: Scottish Minstrelsy. _The Minstrelsy of the Scottish
+Border_, a collection of original and collected poems, published by
+Sir Walter Scott in 1802.]
+
+[Footnote 594: Shakespeare Society. The Shakespeare Society, founded
+in 1841, was dissolved in 1853. In 1874 The New Shakespeare Society
+was founded.]
+
+[Footnote 595: Mysteries. See "Kyd, Marlowe, etc." 531.]
+
+[Footnote 596: Ferrex and Porrex, or Gorboduc. The first regular
+English tragedy, by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, printed in
+1565.]
+
+[Footnote 597: Gammer Gurtor's Needle. One of the first English
+comedies, written by Bishop Still and printed in 1575.]
+
+[Footnote 598: Whether the boy Shakespeare poached, etc. For a fuller
+account of the facts of Shakespeare's life, of which some traditions
+and facts are mentioned here, consult some good biography of the
+poet.]
+
+[Footnote 599: Queen Elizabeth. Dining her reign, 1558-1603, the
+English drama rose and attained its height, and there was produced a
+prose literature hardly inferior to the poetic.]
+
+[Footnote 600: King James. King James VI. of Scotland and I. of
+England who was Elizabeth's kinsman and successor; he reigned in
+England from 1603 to 1625.]
+
+[Footnote 601: Essexes. Walter Devereux was a brave English gentleman
+whom Elizabeth made Earl of Essex in 1572. His son Robert, the second
+Earl of Essex, was a favorite of Queen Elizabeth's.]
+
+[Footnote 602: Leicester. The Earl of Leicester, famous in
+Shakespeare's time, was Robert Dudley, an English courtier,
+politician, and general, the favorite of Queen Elizabeth.]
+
+[Footnote 603: Burleighs or Burghleys: William Cecil, baron of
+Burghley, was an English statesman, who, for forty years, was
+Elizabeth's chief minister.]
+
+[Footnote 604: Buckinghams. George Villiers, the first duke of
+Buckingham, was an English courtier and politician, a favorite of
+James I. and Charles I.]
+
+[Footnote 605: Tudor dynasty. The English dynasty of sovereigns
+descended on the male side from Owen Tudor. It began with Henry VII.
+and ended with Elizabeth.]
+
+[Footnote 606: Bacon. Consult English literature and history for an
+account of the great statesman and author, Francis Bacon, "the wisest,
+brightest, meanest of mankind."]
+
+[Footnote 607: Ben Jonson, etc. In his _Timber or Discoveries_, Ben
+Jonson, a famous classical dramatist contemporary with Shakespeare,
+says: "I loved the man and do honor his memory on this side idolatry
+as much as any. He was indeed honest and of an open and free nature:
+had an excellent fancy; brave notions and gentle expressions: wherein
+he flowed with that facility that sometimes it was necessary he should
+be stopped.... His wit was in his own power; would the rule of it had
+been so, too. Many times he fell into those things could not escape
+laughter.... But he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was
+ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned."]
+
+[Footnote 608: Sir Henry Wotton. An English diplomatist and author of
+wide culture.]
+
+[Footnote 609: The following persons, etc. The persons enumerated were
+all people of note of the seventeenth century. Sir Philip Sidney, Earl
+of Essex, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Milton, Sir Henry Vane,
+Isaac Walton, Dr. John Donne, Abraham Cowley, Charles Cotton, John
+Pym, and John Hales were Englishmen, scholars, statesmen, and authors.
+Theodore Beza was a French theologian; Isaac Casaubon was a
+French-Swiss scholar; Roberto Berlarmine was an Italian cardinal;
+Johann Kepler was a German astronomer; Francis Vieta was a French
+mathematician; Albericus Gentilis was an Italian jurist; Paul Sarpi
+was an Italian historian; Arminius was a Dutch theologian.]
+
+[Footnote 610: Many others whom doubtless, etc. Emerson here
+enumerates some famous English authors of the same period, not
+mentioned in the preceeding list.]
+
+[Footnote 611: Pericles. See note on _Heroism_, 352.]
+
+[Footnote 612: Lessing. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, a German critic and
+poet of the eighteenth century.]
+
+[Footnote 613: Wieland. Christopher Martin Wieland was a German
+contemporary of Lessing's, who made a prose translation into German of
+Shakespeare's plays.]
+
+[Footnote 614: Schlegel. August Wilhelm von Schlegel, a German critic
+and poet, who about the first of the nineteenth century translated
+some of Shakespeare's plays into classical German.]
+
+[Footnote 615: Hamlet. The hero of Shakespeare's play of the same
+name.]
+
+[Footnote 616: Coleridge. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an English poet,
+author of critical lectures and notes on Shakespeare.]
+
+[Footnote 617: Goethe. (See note 85.)]
+
+[Footnote 618: Blackfriar's Theater. A famous London theater in which
+nearly all the great dramas of the Elizabethan age were performed.]
+
+[Footnote 619: Stratford. Stratford-on-Avon, a little town in
+Warwickshire, England, where Shakespeare was born and where he spent
+his last years.]
+
+[Footnote 620: Macbeth. One of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies,
+written about 1606.]
+
+[Footnote 621: Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and Collier. English scholars
+of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who edited the works of
+Shakespeare.]
+
+[Footnote 622: Covent Garden, Drury Lane, the Park, and Tremont: The
+leading London theaters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.]
+
+[Footnote 623: Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean, and Macready, famous
+British actors of the Shakespearian parts.]
+
+[Footnote 624: The Hamlet of a famed performer, etc. Macready. Emerson
+said to a friend: "I see you are one of the happy mortals who are
+capable of being carried away by an actor of Shakespeare. Now,
+whenever I visit the theater to witness the performance of one of his
+dramas, I am carried away by the poet."]
+
+[Footnote 625: What may this mean, etc. _Hamlet_, I. 4.]
+
+[Footnote 626: Midsummer Night's Dream. One of Shakespeare's plays.]
+
+[Footnote 627: The forest of Arden. In which is laid, the scene of
+Shakespeare's play, _As You Like It_.]
+
+[Footnote 628: The nimble air of Scone Castle. It was of the air of
+Inverness, not of Scone, that "the air nimbly and sweetly recommends
+itself unto our gentle senses."--_Macbeth_, I. 6.]
+
+[Footnote 629: Portia's villa. See the moonlight scene, _Merchant of
+Venice_, V. 1.]
+
+[Footnote 630: The antres vost, etc. See _Othello_, I. 3. "Antres" is
+an old word, meaning caves, caverns.]
+
+[Footnote 631: Cyclopean architecture. In Greek mythology, the Cyclops
+were a race of giants. The term 'Cyclopean' is applied here to the
+architecture of Egypt and India, because of the majestic size of the
+buildings, and the immense size of the stones used, as if it would
+require giants to perform such works.]
+
+[Footnote 632: Phidian sculpture. Phidias was a famous Greek sculptor
+who lived in the age of Pericles and beautified Athens with his
+works.]
+
+[Footnote 633: Gothic minsters. Churches or cathedrals, built in the
+Gothic, or pointed, style of architecture which prevailed during the
+Middle Ages; it owed nothing to the Goths, and this term was
+originally used in reproach, in the sense of "barbarous."]
+
+[Footnote 634: The Italian painting. In Italy during the fifteenth and
+sixteenth centuries pictorial art was carried to a degree of
+perfection unknown in any other time or country.]
+
+[Footnote 635: Ballads of Spain and Scotland. The old ballads of these
+countries are noted for beauty and spirit.]
+
+[Footnote 636: Tripod. Define this word, and explain its
+appropriateness here.]
+
+[Footnote 637: Aubrey. John Aubrey, an English antiquarian of the
+seventeenth century.]
+
+[Footnote 638: Rowe. Nicholas Rowe, an English author of the
+seventeenth century, who wrote a biography of Shakespeare.]
+
+[Footnote 639: Timon. See note on _Gifts_, 466.]
+
+[Footnote 640: Warwick. An English politician and commander of the
+fifteenth century, called "the King Maker." He appears in
+Shakespeare's plays, _Henry IV._, _V._, and _VI._]
+
+[Footnote 641: Antonio. The Venetian Merchant in Shakespeare's play,
+_The Merchant of Venice_.]
+
+[Footnote 642: Talma. Francois Joseph Talma was a French tragic actor,
+to whom Napoleon showed favor.]
+
+[Footnote 643: An omnipresent humanity, etc. See what Carlyle has to
+say on this subject in his _Hero as Poet_.]
+
+[Footnote 644: Daguerre. Louis Jacques Daguerre, a French painter, one
+of the inventors of the daguerreotype process, by means of which an
+image is fixed on a metal plate by the chemical action of light.]
+
+[Footnote 645: Euphuism. The word here has rather the force of
+euphemism, an entirely different word. Euphuism was an affected ornate
+style of expression, so called from _Euphues_, by John Lyly, a
+sixteenth century master of that style.]
+
+[Footnote 646: Epicurus. A Greek philosopher of the third century
+before Christ. He was the founder of the Epicurean school of
+philosophy which taught that pleasure should be man's chief aim and
+that the highest pleasure is freedom.]
+
+[Footnote 647: Dante. (See note 258.)]
+
+[Footnote 648: Master of the revels, etc. Emerson always expressed
+thankfulness for "the spirit of joy which Shakespeare had shed over
+the universe." See what Carlyle says in _The Hero as Poet_, about
+Shakespeare's "mirthfulness and love of laughter."]
+
+[Footnote 649: Koran. The Sacred book of the Mohammedans.]
+
+[Footnote 650: Twelfth Night, etc. The names of three bright, merry,
+or serene plays by Shakespeare.]
+
+[Footnote 651: Egyptian verdict. Emerson used Egyptian probably in the
+sense of "gipsy." He compares such opinions to the fortunes told by
+the gipsies.]
+
+[Footnote 652: Tasso. An Italian poet of the sixteenth century.]
+
+[Footnote 653: Cervantes. A Spanish poet and romancer of the sixteenth
+century, the author of _Don Quixote_.]
+
+[Footnote 654: Israelite. Such Hebrew prophets as Isaiah and
+Jeremiah.]
+
+[Footnote 655: German. Such as Luther.]
+
+[Footnote 656: Swede. Such as Swedenborg, the mystic philosopher of
+the eighteenth century of whom Emerson had already written in
+_Representative Men_.]
+
+[Footnote 657: A pilgrim's progress. As described by John Bunyan, the
+English writer, in his famous _Pilgrim's Progress_.]
+
+[Footnote 658: Doleful histories of Adam's fall, etc. The subject of
+_Paradise Lost,_ the great poem by John Milton.]
+
+[Footnote 659: With doomsdays and purgatorial, etc. As described by
+Dante in his _Divine Commedia_, an epic about hell, purgatory, and
+paradise.]
+
+
+PRUDENCE
+
+[Footnote 660: The essay on _Prudence_ was given as a lecture in
+the course on _Human Culture_, in the winter of 1837-8. It was
+published in the first series of _Essays_, which appeared in 1841.]
+
+[Footnote 661: Lubricity. The word means literally the state or
+quality of being slippery; Emerson uses it several times, in its
+derived sense of "instability."]
+
+[Footnote 662: Love and Friendship. The subjects of the two essays
+preceding _Prudence_, in the volume of 1841.]
+
+[Footnote 663: The world is filled with the proverbs, etc. Compare
+with this passage Emerson's words in _Compensation_ on "the flights of
+proverbs, whose teaching is as true and as omnipresent as that of
+birds and flies."]
+
+[Footnote 664: A good wheel or pin. That is, a part of a machine.]
+
+[Footnote 665: The law of polarity. Having two opposite poles, the
+properties of the one of which are the opposite of the other.]
+
+[Footnote 666: Summer will have its flies. Emerson discoursed
+with philosophic calm about the impediments and disagreeableness which
+beset every path; he also accepted them with serenity when he
+encountered them in his daily life.]
+
+[Footnote 667: The inhabitants of the climates, etc. As a
+northerner, Emerson naturally felt that the advantage and superiority
+were with his own section. He expressed in his poems _Voluntaries_ and
+_Mayday_ views similar to those declared here.]
+
+[Footnote 668: Peninsular campaign. Emerson here refers to
+the military operations carried on from 1808 to 1814 in Portugal,
+Spain, and southern France against the French, by the British,
+Spanish, and Portuguese forces commanded by Wellington. What was the
+"Peninsular campaign" in American history?]
+
+[Footnote 669: Dr. Johnson is reported to have said, etc. Dr.
+Samuel Johnson was an eminent English scholar of the eighteenth
+century. In this, as in many other instances, Emerson quotes from his
+memory instead of from the book. The words of Dr. Johnson, as reported
+by his biographer Boswell, are: "Accustom your children constantly to
+this; if a thing happened at one window, and they, when relating it,
+say it happened at another, do not let it pass, but instantly check
+them; you do not know where deviation from truth will end."]
+
+[Footnote 670: Rifle. A local name in England and New England
+for an instrument, on the order of a whetstone, used for sharpening
+scythes; it is made of wood, covered with fine sand or emery.]
+
+[Footnote 671: Last grand duke of Weimar. Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach is a
+grand duchy of Germany. The grand duke referred to was Charles
+Augustus, who died in 1828. He was the friend and patron of the great
+German authors, Goethe, Schiller, Herder, and Wieland.]
+
+[Footnote 672: The Raphael in the Dresden gallery. The Sistine
+Madonna, the most famous picture of the great Italian artist,
+Raphael.]
+
+[Footnote 673: Call a spade a spade. Plutarch, the Greek historian,
+said, "These Macedonians ... call a spade a spade."]
+
+[Footnote 674: Parts. A favorite eighteenth century term for
+abilities, talents.]
+
+[Footnote 675: We have found out, etc. Emerson always insisted that
+morals and intellect should be united. He urged that power and
+insight are lessened by shortcomings in morals.]
+
+[Footnote 676: Goethe's Tasso. A play by the German poet
+Goethe, founded on the belief that the imprisonment of Tasso was due
+to his aspiration to the hand of Leonora d'Este, sister of the duke of
+Ferrara. Tasso was a famous Italian poet of the seventeenth century.]
+
+[Footnote 677: Richard III. An English king, the last of the
+Plantagenet line, the hero--or villain--of Shakespeare's historical
+play, Richard III.]
+
+[Footnote 678: Bifold. Give a simpler word that means the same.]
+
+[Footnote 679: Caesar. Why is Caesar the great Roman ruler, given as a
+type of greatness?]
+
+[Footnote 680: Job. Why is Job, the hero of the Old Testament book of
+the same name, given as a type of misery?]
+
+[Footnote 681: Poor Richard. _Poor Richard's Almanac_,
+published (1732-1757) by Benjamin Franklin was a collection of maxims
+inculcating prudence and thrift. These were given as the sayings of
+"Poor Richard."]
+
+[Footnote 682: State Street. A street in Boston, Massachusetts, noted
+as a financial center.]
+
+[Footnote 683: Stick in a tree between whiles, etc. "Jock, when ye hae
+naething else to do, ye may be aye sticking in a tree; it will be
+growing, Jock, when ye're sleeping."--Scott's _Heart of Midlothian_.
+It is said that these were the words of a dying Scotchman to his son.]
+
+[Footnote 684: Minor virtues. Emerson suggests that punctuality and
+regard for a promise are two of these. Can you name others?]
+
+[Footnote 685: The Latin proverb says, etc. This is quoted from
+Tacitus, the famous Roman historian.]
+
+[Footnote 686: If he set out to contend, etc. In contention,
+Emerson holds, the best men would lose their characteristic virtues,
+--the fearless apostle Paul, his devotion to truth; the gentle
+disciple John, his loving charity.]
+
+[Footnote 687: Though your views are in straight antagonism, &c. This
+was Emerson's own method, and by it he won a courteous hearing from
+those to whom his views were most objectionable.]
+
+[Footnote 688: Consuetudes. Give a simpler word that has the same
+meaning.]
+
+[Footnote 689: Begin where we will, etc. Explain what Emerson means by
+this expression.]
+
+
+CIRCLES
+
+[Footnote 690: This essay first appeared in the first series of
+_Essays_, published in 1841. Unlike most of the other essays in the
+volume, no earlier form of it exists, and it was probably not
+delivered first as a lecture.
+
+Dr. Richard Garnett says in his _Life of Emerson_: "The object of this
+fine essay quaintly entitled _Circles_ is to reconcile this rigidity
+of unalterable law with the fact of human progress. Compensation
+illustrates one property of a circle, which always returns to the
+point where it began, but it is no less true that around every circle
+another can be drawn.... Emerson followed his own counsel; he always
+keeps a reserve of power. His theory of _Circles_ reappears without
+the least verbal indebtedness to himself in the splendid essay on
+_Love_."]
+
+[Footnote 691: St. Augustine. A celebrated father of the
+Latin church, who flourished in the fourth century. His most famous
+work is his _Confessions_, an autobiographical volume of religious
+meditations.]
+
+[Footnote 692: Another dawn risen on mid-noon. "Another morn has risen
+on mid-noon." Milton, _Paradise Lost_, Book V.]
+
+[Footnote 693: Greek sculpture. The greatest development of
+the art of sculpture that the world has ever known was that which took
+place in Greece, with Athens as the center, in the fifth century
+before Christ. The masterpieces which remain are the models on which
+modern art formed itself.]
+
+[Footnote 694: Greek letters. In literature--in drama, philosophy and
+history--Greece attained an excellence as signal as in art. Emerson as
+a scholar, felt that the literature of Greece was more permanent than
+its art. Would an artist be apt to take this view?]
+
+[Footnote 695: New arts destroy the old, etc. Tell the ways in which
+the improvements and inventions mentioned by Emerson have been
+superseded by others; give the reasons. Mention other similar cases of
+more recent date.]
+
+[Footnote 696: The life of man is a self-evolving circle, etc. "Throw a
+stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the
+beautiful type of all influence."--EMERSON, in _Nature_.]
+
+[Footnote 697: The heart refuses to be imprisoned. It is a
+superstition current in many countries that an evil spirit cannot
+escape from a circle drawn round it.]
+
+[Footnote 698: Crass. Gross; coarse.]
+
+[Footnote 699: The continual effort to raise himself above
+himself, etc.
+
+    "Unless above himself he can
+    Erect himself, how poor a thing is man!"
+                                 SAMUEL DANIEL.
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 700: If he were high enough, etc.
+
+    Have I a lover
+    Who is noble and free?--
+    I would he were nobler
+    Than to love me.--EMERSON, _The Sphinx._
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 701: Aristotle and Plato. Plato was a famous Greek
+philosopher who flourished in the fourth century before Christ. He was
+the disciple of Socrates, the teacher of Aristotle, and the founder of
+the academic school of philosophy. His exposition of idealism was
+founded on the teachings of Socrates. Aristotle, another famous Greek
+philosopher, was for twenty years the pupil of Plato. He founded the
+peripatetic school of philosophy, and his writing dealt with all the
+then known branches of science.]
+
+[Footnote 702: Berkeley. George Berkeley was a British clergyman of
+the eighteenth century. He was the author of works on philosophy which
+are marked by extreme subjective idealism.]
+
+[Footnote 703: Termini. Boundaries or marks to indicate boundaries. In
+Roman mythology, Terminus was the god who presided over boundaries or
+landmarks. He is represented with a human head, but without feet or
+arms,--to indicate that he never moved from his place.]
+
+[Footnote 704: Pentecost. One of three great Jewish festivals. On the
+day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descended upon the infant Christian
+church, with the gift of tongues. See Acts ii. 1-20.]
+
+[Footnote 705: Hodiernal. Belonging to our present day.]
+
+[Footnote 706: Punic. Of Carthage, a famous ancient city, and
+state of northern Africa. Carthage was the rival of Rome, but was,
+after long warfare, overcome in the second century before Christ.]
+
+[Footnote 707: In like manner, etc. Emerson always urged that in order
+to get the best from all, one must pass from affairs to thought,
+society to solitude, books to nature.
+
+    "See thou bring not to field or stone
+       The fancies found in books;
+     Leave authors' eyes, and fetch your own,
+       To brave the landscape's look."--EMERSON,
+                                        _Waldeinsamkeit_.
+
+]
+
+[Footnote 708: Petrarch. (See note 563.)]
+
+[Footnote 709: Ariosto. A famous Italian author of the sixteenth
+century, who wrote comedies, satires, and a metrical romance, _Orlando
+Furioso_.]
+
+[Footnote 710: "Then shall also the Son", etc. See 1 Corinthians xv.
+28: Does Emerson quote the passage verbatim?]
+
+[Footnote 711: These manifold tenacious qualities, etc. It is
+remarked of Emerson that the idea of the symbolism of nature which he
+received from Plato, was the source of much of his pleasure in
+Swedenborg, the Swedish mystic philosopher. Emerson says in his volume
+on _Nature_: "The noblest ministry of nature is to stand as an
+apparition of God."]
+
+[Footnote 712: "Forgive his crimes," etc. This is quoted from _Night
+Thoughts_ by the English didactic poet, Edward Young.]
+
+[Footnote 713: Pyrrhonism. A doctrine held by a follower of Pyrrho, a
+Greek philosopher of the third century before Christ, who founded the
+sceptical school. He taught that it is impossible to attain truth, and
+that men should be indifferent to all external circumstances.]
+
+[Footnote 714: I own I am gladdened, etc. Emerson always held fast to
+the consoling thought that there was no evil without good, none out of
+which Good did not or could not come.]
+
+[Footnote 715: Sempiternal. Everlasting; eternal.]
+
+[Footnote 716: Oliver Cromwell. An Englishman of the middle classes
+who became the military and civil leader of the English Revolution of
+the seventeenth century. He refused the title of king; but as Lord
+Protector of the English commonwealth, he exercised royal power.]
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Essays, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
+
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