Essays, First Series ..............................................................................................................................................1

THERE is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same.

He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought,

he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand.

Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and

Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is

explicable by nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from

the beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it, in appropriate

events. But the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history preexist in the mind as laws. Each

law in turn is made by circumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but one at a time. A

man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt,

Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom,

empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world.

This human mind wrote history, and this must read it. The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of

history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between the

hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature,

as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body

depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages

and the ages explained by the hours. Of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation. All

its properties consist in him. Each new fact in his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of

men have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises. Every revolution was first a thought in one

man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era. Every reform was

once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again it will solve the problem of the age. The

fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible. We, as we read, must become

Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in

our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly. What befell Asdrubal or Caesar Borgia is as much an

illustration of the mind's powers and depravations as what has befallen us. Each new law and political

movement has meaning for you. Stand before each of its tablets and say, 'Under this mask did my Proteus

nature hide itself.' This remedies the defect of our too great nearness to ourselves. This throws our actions

into perspective; and as crabs, goats, scorpions, the balance and the waterpot lose their meanness when hung

as signs in the zodiac, so I can see my own vices without heat in the distant persons of Solomon, Alcibiades,

It is the universal nature which gives worth to particular men and things. Human life, as containing this, is

mysterious and inviolable, and we hedge it round with penalties and laws. All laws derive hence their

ultimate reason; all express more or less distinctly some command of this supreme, illimitable essence.

Property also holds of the soul, covers great spiritual facts, and instinctively we at first hold to it with swords

and laws and wide and complex combinations. The obscure consciousness of this fact is the light of all our

day, the claim of claims; the plea for education, for justice, for charity; the foundation of friendship and love

and of the heroism and grandeur which belong to acts of selfreliance. It is remarkable that involuntarily we

always read as superior beings. Universal history, the poets, the romancers, do not in their stateliest pictures,

in the sacerdotal, the imperial palaces, in the triumphs of will or of genius,anywhere lose our ear,

anywhere make us feel that we intrude, that this is for better men; but rather is it true that in their grandest

strokes we feel most at home. All that Shakspeare says of the king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the

corner feels to be true of himself. We sympathize in the great moments of history, in the great discoveries, the

great resistances, the great prosperities of men;because there law was enacted, the sea was searched, the

land was found, or the blow was struck, for us, as we ourselves in that place would have done or applauded.

We have the same interest in condition and character. We honor the rich because they have externally the

freedom, power, and grace which we feel to be proper to man, proper to us. So all that is said of the wise man

by Stoic or Oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but

attainable self. All literature writes the character of the wise man. Books, monuments, pictures, conversation,

are portraits in which he finds the lineaments he is forming. The silent and the eloquent praise him and accost

him, and he is stimulated wherever he moves, as by personal allusions. A true aspirant therefore never needs

look for allusions personal and laudatory in discourse. He hears the commendation, not of himself, but, more

sweet, of that character he seeks, in every word that is said concerning character, yea further in every fact and

circumstance,in the running river and the rustling corn. Praise is looked, homage tendered, love flows,

These hints, dropped as it were from sleep and night, let us use in broad day. The student is to read history

actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary. Thus compelled, the

Muse of history will utter oracles, as never to those who do not respect themselves. I have no expectation that

any man will read history aright who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have

The world exists for the education of each man. There is no age or state of society or mode of action in

history to which there is not somewhat corresponding in his life. Every thing tends in a wonderful manner to

abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to him. He should see that he can live all history in his own person.

He must sit solidly at home, and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires, but know that he is

greater than all the geography and all the government of the world; he must transfer the point of view from

which history is commonly read, from Rome and Athens and London, to himself, and not deny his conviction

that he is the court, and if England or Egypt have any thing to say to him he will try the case; if not, let them

for ever be silent. He must attain and maintain that lofty sight where facts yield their secret sense, and poetry

and annals are alike. The instinct of the mind, the purpose of nature, betrays itself in the use we make of the

signal narrations of history. Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts. No anchor, no cable,

no fences avail to keep a fact a fact. Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine, and even early Rome are passing already

into fiction. The Garden of Eden, the sun standing still in Gibeon, is poetry thenceforward to all nations. Who

cares what the fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign? London

and Paris and New York must go the same way. "What is history," said Napoleon, "but a fable agreed upon?"

This life of ours is stuck round with Egypt, Greece, Gaul, England, War, Colonization, Church, Court and

Commerce, as with so many flowers and wild ornaments grave and gay. I will not make more account of

them. I believe in Eternity. I can find Greece, Asia, Italy, Spain and the Islands, the genius and creative

We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience and verifying them

here. All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography. Every mind

must know the whole lesson for itself,must go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does

not live, it will not know. What the former age has epitomized into a formula or rule for manipular

convenience, it will lose all the good of verifying for itself, by means of the wall of that rule. Somewhere,

sometime, it will demand and find compensation for that loss, by doing the work itself. Ferguson discovered

History must be this or it is nothing. Every law which the state enacts indicates a fact in human nature; that is

all. We must in ourselves see the necessary reason of every fact,see how it could and must be. So stand

before every public and private work; before an oration of Burke, before a victory of Napoleon, before a

martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, of Sidney, of Marmaduke Robinson; before a French Reign of Terror, and a

Salem hanging of witches; before a fanatic Revival and the Animal Magnetism in Paris, or in Providence. We

assume that we under like influence should be alike affected, and should achieve the like; and we aim to

master intellectually the steps and reach the same height or the same degradation that our fellow, our proxy

All inquiry into antiquity, all curiosity respecting the Pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, the Ohio

Circles, Mexico, Memphis,is the desire to do away this wild, savage, and preposterous There or Then, and

introduce in its place the Here and the Now. Belzoni digs and measures in the mummypits and pyramids of

Thebes, until he can see the end of the difference between the monstrous work and himself. When he has

satisfied himself, in general and in detail, that it was made by such a person as he, so armed and so motived,

and to ends to which he himself should also have worked, the problem is solved; his thought lives along the

whole line of temples and sphinxes and catacombs, passes through them all with satisfaction, and they live

A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us and not done by us. Surely it was by man, but we find it not

in our man. But we apply ourselves to the history of its production. We put ourselves into the place and state

of the builder. We remember the forestdwellers, the first temples, the adherence to the first type, and the

decoration of it as the wealth of the nation increased; the value which is given to wood by carving led to the

carving over the whole mountain of stone of a cathedral. When we have gone through this process, and added

thereto the Catholic Church, its cross, its music, its processions, its Saints' days and image worship, we have

as it were been the man that made the minster; we have seen how it could and must be. We have the sufficient

The difference between men is in their principle of association. Some men classify objects by color and size

and other accidents of appearance; others by intrinsic likeness, or by the relation of cause and effect. The

progress of the intellect is to the clearer vision of causes, which neglects surface differences. To the poet, to

the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men

divine. For the eye is fastened on the life, and slights the circumstance. Every chemical substance, every

plant, every animal in its growth, teaches the unity of cause, the variety of appearance.

Upborne and surrounded as we are by this allcreating nature, soft and fluid as a cloud or the air, why should

we be such hard pedants, and magnify a few forms? Why should we make account of time, or of magnitude,

or of figure? The soul knows them not, and genius, obeying its law, knows how to play with them as a young

child plays with graybeards and in churches. Genius studies the causal thought, and far back in the womb of

things sees the rays parting from one orb, that diverge, ere they fall, by infinite diameters. Genius watches the

monad through all his masks as he performs the metempsychosis of nature. Genius detects through the fly,

through the caterpillar, through the grub, through the egg, the constant individual; through countless

individuals the fixed species; through many species the genus; through all genera the steadfast type; through

all the kingdoms of organized life the eternal unity. Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the

same. She casts the same thought into troops of forms, as a poet makes twenty fables with one moral.

Through the bruteness and toughness of matter, a subtle spirit bends all things to its own will. The adamant

streams into soft but precise form before it, and whilst I look at it its outline and texture are changed again.

Nothing is so fleeting as form; yet never does it quite deny itself. In man we still trace the remains or hints of

all that we esteem badges of servitude in the lower races; yet in him they enhance his nobleness and grace; as

Io, in Aeschylus, transformed to a cow, offends the imagination; but how changed when as Isis in Egypt she

meets OsirisJove, a beautiful woman with nothing of the metamorphosis left but the lunar horns as the

The identity of history is equally intrinsic, the diversity equally obvious. There is, at the surface, infinite

variety of things; at the centre there is simplicity of cause. How many are the acts of one man in which we

recognize the same character! Observe the sources of our information in respect to the Greek genius. We

have the civil history of that people, as Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch have given it; a very

sufficient account of what manner of persons they were and what they did. We have the same national mind

expressed for us again in their literature, in epic and lyric poems, drama, and philosophy; a very complete

form. Then we have it once more in their architecture, a beauty as of temperance itself, limited to the straight

line and the square, a builded geometry. Then we have it once again in sculpture, the "tongue on the

balance of expression," a multitude of forms in the utmost freedom of action and never transgressing the ideal

serenity; like votaries performing some religious dance before the gods, and, though in convulsive pain or

mortal combat, never daring to break the figure and decorum of their dance. Thus of the genius of one

remarkable people we have a fourfold representation: and to the senses what more unlike than an ode of

Pindar, a marble centaur, the peristyle of the Parthenon, and the last actions of Phocion?

Every one must have observed faces and forms which, without any resembling feature, make a like

impression on the beholder. A particular picture or copy of verses, if it do not awaken the same train of

images, will yet superinduce the same sentiment as some wild mountain walk, although the resemblance is

nowise obvious to the senses, but is occult and out of the reach of the understanding. Nature is an endless

combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old wellknown air through innumerable

Nature is full of a sublime family likeness throughout her works, and delights in startling us with

resemblances in the most unexpected quarters. I have seen the head of an old sachem of the forest which at

once reminded the eye of a bald mountain summit, and the furrows of the brow suggested the strata of the

rock. There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on

the friezes of the Parthenon and the remains of the earliest Greek art. And there are compositions of the same

strain to be found in the books of all ages. What is Guido's Rospigliosi Aurora but a morning thought, as the

horses in it are only a morning cloud? If any one will but take pains to observe the variety of actions to which

he is equally inclined in certain moods of mind, and those to which he is averse, he will see how deep is the

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by

studying the outlines of its form merely,but, by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter

enters into his nature and can then draw him at will in every attitude. So Roos "entered into the inmost nature

of a sheep." I knew a draughtsman employed in a public survey who found that he could not sketch the rocks

until their geological structure was first explained to him. In a certain state of thought is the common origin

of very diverse works. It is the spirit and not the fact that is identical. By a deeper apprehension, and not

primarily by a painful acquisition of many manual skills, the artist attains the power of awakening other souls

It has been said that "common souls pay with what they do, nobler souls with that which they are." And why?

Because a profound nature awakens in us by its actions and words, by its very looks and manners, the same

Civil and natural history, the history of art and of literature, must be explained from individual history, or

must remain words. There is nothing but is related to us, nothing that does not interest us,kingdom,

college, tree, horse, or iron shoe,the roots of all things are in man. Santa Croce and the Dome of St. Peter's

are lame copies after a divine model. Strasburg Cathedral is a material counterpart of the soul of Erwin of

Steinbach. The true poem is the poet's mind; the true ship is the shipbuilder. In the man, could we lay him

open, we should see the reason for the last flourish and tendril of his work; as every spine and tint in the

seashell preexists in the secreting organs of the fish. The whole of heraldry and of chivalry is in courtesy. A

man of fine manners shall pronounce your name with all the ornament that titles of nobility could ever add.

The trivial experience of every day is always verifying some old prediction to us and converting into things

the words and signs which we had heard and seen without heed. A lady with whom I was riding in the forest

said to me that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as if the genii who inhabit them suspended their

deeds until the wayfarer had passed onward; a thought which poetry has celebrated in the dance of the fairies,

which breaks off on the approach of human feet. The man who has seen the rising moon break out of the

clouds at midnight, has been present like an archangel at the creation of light and of the world. I remember

one summer day in the fields my companion pointed out to me a broad cloud, which might extend a quarter

of a mile parallel to the horizon, quite accurately in the form of a cherub as painted over churches, a round

block in the centre, which it was easy to animate with eyes and mouth, supported on either side by wide

stretched symmetrical wings. What appears once in the atmosphere may appear often, and it was undoubtedly

the archetype of that familiar ornament. I have seen in the sky a chain of summer lightning which at once

showed to me that the Greeks drew from nature when they painted the thunderbolt in the hand of Jove. I have

seen a snowdrift along the sides of the stone wall which obviously gave the idea of the common

By surrounding ourselves with the original circumstances we invent anew the orders and the ornaments of

architecture, as we see how each people merely decorated its primitive abodes. The Doric temple preserves

the semblance of the wooden cabin in which the Dorian dwelt. The Chinese pagoda is plainly a Tartar tent.

The Indian and Egyptian temples still betray the mounds and subterranean houses of their forefathers. "The

custom of making houses and tombs in the living rock," says Heeren in his Researches on the Ethiopians,

"determined very naturally the principal character of the Nubian Egyptian architecture to the colossal form

which it assumed. In these caverns, already prepared by nature, the eye was accustomed to dwell on huge

shapes and masses, so that when art came to the assistance of nature it could not move on a small scale

without degrading itself. What would statues of the usual size, or neat porches and wings have been,

associated with those gigantic halls before which only Colossi could sit as watchmen or lean on the pillars of

The Gothic church plainly originated in a rude adaptation of the forest trees, with all their boughs, to a festal

or solemn arcade; as the bands about the cleft pillars still indicate the green withes that tied them. No one can

walk in a road cut through pine woods, without being struck with the architectural appearance of the grove,

especially in winter, when the barrenness of all other trees shows the low arch of the Saxons. In the woods in

a winter afternoon one will see as readily the origin of the stained glass window, with which the Gothic

cathedrals are adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen through the bare and crossing branches of the

forest. Nor can any lover of nature enter the old piles of Oxford and the English cathedrals, without feeling

that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder, and that his chisel, his saw and plane still reproduced its

The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man. The

mountain of granite blooms into an eternal flower, with the lightness and delicate finish as well as the aerial

In like manner all public facts are to be individualized, all private facts are to be generalized. Then at once

History becomes fluid and true, and Biography deep and sublime. As the Persian imitated in the slender

shafts and capitals of his architecture the stem and flower of the lotus and palm, so the Persian court in its

magnificent era never gave over the nomadism of its barbarous tribes, but travelled from Ecbatana, where the

In the early history of Asia and Africa, Nomadism and Agriculture are the two antagonist facts. The

geography of Asia and of Africa necessitated a nomadic life. But the nomads were the terror of all those

whom the soil or the advantages of a market had induced to build towns. Agriculture therefore was a religious

injunction, because of the perils of the state from nomadism. And in these late and civil countries of England

and America these propensities still fight out the old battle, in the nation and in the individual. The nomads of

Africa were constrained to wander, by the attacks of the gadfly, which drives the cattle mad, and so compels

the tribe to emigrate in the rainy season and to drive off the cattle to the higher sandy regions. The nomads of

Asia follow the pasturage from month to month. In America and Europe the nomadism is of trade and

curiosity; a progress, certainly, from the gadfly of Astaboras to the Anglo and Italomania of Boston Bay.

Sacred cities, to which a periodical religious pilgrimage was enjoined, or stringent laws and customs, tending

to invigorate the national bond, were the check on the old rovers; and the cumulative values of long residence

are the restraints on the itineracy of the present day. The antagonism of the two tendencies is not less active in

individuals, as the love of adventure or the love of repose happens to predominate. A man of rude health and

flowing spirits has the faculty of rapid domestication, lives in his wagon and roams through all latitudes as

easily as a Calmuc. At sea, or in the forest, or in the snow, he sleeps as warm, dines with as good appetite,

and associates as happily as beside his own chimneys. Or perhaps his facility is deeper seated, in the

increased range of his faculties of observation, which yield him points of interest wherever fresh objects meet

his eyes. The pastoral nations were needy and hungry to desperation; and this intellectual nomadism, in its

excess, bankrupts the mind through the dissipation of power on a miscellany of objects. The homekeeping

wit, on the other hand, is that continence or content which finds all the elements of life in its own soil; and

which has its own perils of monotony and deterioration, if not stimulated by foreign infusions.

Every thing the individual sees without him corresponds to his states of mind, and every thing is in turn

intelligible to him, as his onward thinking leads him into the truth to which that fact or series belongs.

The primeval world,the ForeWorld, as the Germans say, I can dive to it in myself as well as grope for

it with researching fingers in catacombs, libraries, and the broken reliefs and torsos of ruined villas.

What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods

from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five

centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period. The Grecian state

is the era of the bodily nature, the perfection of the senses,of the spiritual nature unfolded in strict unity

with the body. In it existed those human forms which supplied the sculptor with his models of Hercules,

Phoebus, and Jove; not like the forms abounding in the streets of modern cities, wherein the face is a

confused blur of features, but composed of incorrupt, sharply defined and symmetrical features, whose

eyesockets are so formed that it would be impossible for such eyes to squint and take furtive glances on this

side and on that, but they must turn the whole head. The manners of that period are plain and fierce. The

reverence exhibited is for personal qualities; courage, address, selfcommand, justice, strength, swiftness, a

loud voice, a broad chest. Luxury and elegance are not known. A sparse population and want make every

man his own valet, cook, butcher and soldier, and the habit of supplying his own needs educates the body to

wonderful performances. Such are the Agamemnon and Diomed of Homer, and not far different is the picture

Xenophon gives of himself and his compatriots in the Retreat of the Ten Thousand. "After the army had

crossed the river Teleboas in Armenia, there fell much snow, and the troops lay miserably on the ground

covered with it. But Xenophon arose naked, and taking an axe, began to split wood; whereupon others rose

and did the like." Throughout his army exists a boundless liberty of speech. They quarrel for plunder, they

wrangle with the generals on each new order, and Xenophon is as sharptongued as any and sharpertongued

than most, and so gives as good as he gets. Who does not see that this is a gang of great boys, with such a

The costly charm of the ancient tragedy, and indeed of all the old literature, is that the persons speak

simply,speak as persons who have great good sense without knowing it, before yet the reflective habit has

become the predominant habit of the mind. Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of

the natural. The Greeks are not reflective, but perfect in their senses and in their health, with the finest

physical organization in the world. Adults acted with the simplicity and grace of children. They made vases,

tragedies, and statues, such as healthy senses should,that is, in good taste. Such things have continued to be

made in all ages, and are now, wherever a healthy physique exists; but, as a class, from their superior

organization, they have surpassed all. They combine the energy of manhood with the engaging

unconsciousness of childhood. The attraction of these manners is that they belong to man, and are known to

every man in virtue of his being once a child; besides that there are always individuals who retain these

characteristics. A person of childlike genius and inborn energy is still a Greek, and revives our love of the

Muse of Hellas. I admire the love of nature in the Philoctetes. In reading those fine apostrophes to sleep, to

the stars, rocks, mountains and waves, I feel time passing away as an ebbing sea. I feel the eternity of man,

the identity of his thought. The Greek had it seems the same fellowbeings as I. The sun and moon, water

and fire, met his heart precisely as they meet mine. Then the vaunted distinction between Greek and English,

between Classic and Romantic schools, seems superficial and pedantic. When a thought of Plato becomes a

thought to me,when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no more. When I feel that we

two meet in a perception, that our two souls are tinged with the same hue, and do as it were run into one, why

The student interprets the age of chivalry by his own age of chivalry, and the days of maritime adventure and

circumnavigation by quite parallel miniature experiences of his own. To the sacred history of the world he

has the same key. When the voice of a prophet out of the deeps of antiquity merely echoes to him a sentiment

of his infancy, a prayer of his youth, he then pierces to the truth through all the confusion of tradition and the

Rare, extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, who disclose to us new facts in nature. I see that men of

God have from time to time walked among men and made their commission felt in the heart and soul of the

commonest hearer. Hence evidently the tripod, the priest, the priestess inspired by the divine afflatus.

Jesus astonishes and overpowers sensual people. They cannot unite him to history, or reconcile him with

themselves. As they come to revere their intuitions and aspire to live holily, their own piety explains every

How easily these old worships of Moses, of Zoroaster, of Menu, of Socrates, domesticate themselves in the

I have seen the first monks and anchorets, without crossing seas or centuries. More than once some individual

has appeared to me with such negligence of labor and such commanding contemplation, a haughty

beneficiary begging in the name of God, as made good to the nineteenth century Simeon the Stylite, the

The priestcraft of the East and West, of the Magian, Brahmin, Druid, and Inca, is expounded in the

individual's private life. The cramping influence of a hard formalist on a young child, in repressing his spirits

and courage, paralyzing the understanding, and that without producing indignation, but only fear and

obedience, and even much sympathy with the tyranny,is a familiar fact, explained to the child when he

becomes a man, only by seeing that the oppressor of his youth is himself a child tyrannized over by those

names and words and forms of whose influence he was merely the organ to the youth. The fact teaches him

how Belus was worshipped and how the Pyramids were built, better than the discovery by Champollion of

the names of all the workmen and the cost of every tile. He finds Assyria and the Mounds of Cholula at his

Again, in that protest which each considerate person makes against the superstition of his times, he repeats

step for step the part of old reformers, and in the search after truth finds, like them, new perils to virtue. He

learns again what moral vigor is needed to supply the girdle of a superstition. A great licentiousness treads on

the heels of a reformation. How many times in the history of the world has the Luther of the day had to

lament the decay of piety in his own household! "Doctor," said his wife to Martin Luther, one day, "how is it

that whilst subject to papacy we prayed so often and with such fervor, whilst now we pray with the utmost

The advancing man discovers how deep a property he has in literature,in all fable as well as in all history.

He finds that the poet was no odd fellow who described strange and impossible situations, but that universal

man wrote by his pen a confession true for one and true for all. His own secret biography he finds in lines

wonderfully intelligible to him, dotted down before he was born. One after another he comes up in his private

adventures with every fable of Aesop, of Homer, of Hafiz, of Ariosto, of Chaucer, of Scott, and verifies them

The beautiful fables of the Greeks, being proper creations of the imagination and not of the fancy, are

universal verities. What a range of meanings and what perpetual pertinence has the story of Prometheus!

Beside its primary value as the first chapter of the history of Europe, (the mythology thinly veiling authentic

facts, the invention of the mechanic arts and the migration of colonies,) it gives the history of religion, with

some closeness to the faith of later ages. Prometheus is the Jesus of the old mythology. He is the friend of

man; stands between the unjust "justice" of the Eternal Father and the race of mortals, and readily suffers all

things on their account. But where it departs from the Calvinistic Christianity and exhibits him as the defier

of Jove, it represents a state of mind which readily appears wherever the doctrine of Theism is taught in a

crude, objective form, and which seems the selfdefence of man against this untruth, namely a discontent

with the believed fact that a God exists, and a feeling that the obligation of reverence is onerous. It would

steal if it could the fire of the Creator, and live apart from him and independent of him. The Prometheus

Vinctus is the romance of skepticism. Not less true to all time are the details of that stately apologue. Apollo

kept the flocks of Admetus, said the poets. When the gods come among men, they are not known. Jesus was

not; Socrates and Shakspeare were not. Antaeus was suffocated by the gripe of Hercules, but every time he

touched his mother earth his strength was renewed. Man is the broken giant, and in all his weakness both his

body and his mind are invigorated by habits of conversation with nature. The power of music, the power of

poetry, to unfix and as it were clap wings to solid nature, interprets the riddle of Orpheus. The philosophical

perception of identity through endless mutations of form makes him know the Proteus. What else am I who

laughed or wept yesterday, who slept last night like a corpse, and this morning stood and ran? And what see I

on any side but the transmigrations of Proteus? I can symbolize my thought by using the name of any

creature, of any fact, because every creature is man agent or patient. Tantalus is but a name for you and me.

Tantalus means the impossibility of drinking the waters of thought which are always gleaming and waving

within sight of the soul. The transmigration of souls is no fable. I would it were; but men and women are only

half human. Every animal of the barnyard, the field and the forest, of the earth and of the waters that are

under the earth, has contrived to get a footing and to leave the print of its features and form in some one or

other of these upright, heaven facing speakers. Ah! brother, stop the ebb of thy soul, ebbing downward

into the forms into whose habits thou hast now for many years slid. As near and proper to us is also that old

fable of the Sphinx, who was said to sit in the roadside and put riddles to every passenger. If the man could

not answer, she swallowed him alive. If he could solve the riddle, the Sphinx was slain. What is our life but

an endless flight of winged facts or events? In splendid variety these changes come, all putting questions to

the human spirit. Those men who cannot answer by a superior wisdom these facts or questions of time, serve

them. Facts encumber them, tyrannize over them, and make the men of routine, the men of sense, in whom a

literal obedience to facts has extinguished every spark of that light by which man is truly man. But if the man

is true to his better instincts or sentiments, and refuses the dominion of facts, as one that comes of a higher

race; remains fast by the soul and sees the principle, then the facts fall aptly and supple into their places; they

See in Goethe's Helena the same desire that every word should be a thing. These figures, he would say, these

Chirons, Griffins, Phorkyas, Helen and Leda, are somewhat, and do exert a specific influence on the mind. So

far then are they eternal entities, as real today as in the first Olympiad. Much revolving them he writes out

freely his humor, and gives them body to his own imagination. And although that poem be as vague and

fantastic as a dream, yet is it much more attractive than the more regular dramatic pieces of the same author,

for the reason that it operates a wonderful relief to the mind from the routine of customary images,awakens

the reader's invention and fancy by the wild freedom of the design, and by the unceasing succession of brisk

The universal nature, too strong for the petty nature of the bard, sits on his neck and writes through his hand;

so that when he seems to vent a mere caprice and wild romance, the issue is an exact allegory. Hence Plato

said that "poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand." All the fictions of the

Middle Age explain themselves as a masked or frolic expression of that which in grave earnest the mind of

that period toiled to achieve. Magic and all that is ascribed to it is a deep presentiment of the powers of

science. The shoes of swiftness, the sword of sharpness, the power of subduing the elements, of using the

secret virtues of minerals, of understanding the voices of birds, are the obscure efforts of the mind in a right

direction. The preternatural prowess of the hero, the gift of perpetual youth, and the like, are alike the

endeavour of the human spirit "to bend the shows of things to the desires of the mind."

In Perceforest and Amadis de Gaul a garland and a rose bloom on the head of her who is faithful, and fade on

the brow of the inconstant. In the story of the Boy and the Mantle even a mature reader may be surprised with

a glow of virtuous pleasure at the triumph of the gentle Venelas; and indeed all the postulates of elfin

annals,that the fairies do not like to be named; that their gifts are capricious and not to be trusted; that who

seeks a treasure must not speak; and the like,I find true in Concord, however they might be in Cornwall or

Is it otherwise in the newest romance? I read the Bride of Lammermoor. Sir William Ashton is a mask for a

vulgar temptation, Ravenswood Castle a fine name for proud poverty, and the foreign mission of state only a

Bunyan disguise for honest industry. We may all shoot a wild bull that would toss the good and beautiful, by

fighting down the unjust and sensual. Lucy Ashton is another name for fidelity, which is always beautiful and

But along with the civil and metaphysical history of man, another history goes daily forward,that of the

external world,in which he is not less strictly implicated. He is the compend of time; he is also the

correlative of nature. His power consists in the multitude of his affinities, in the fact that his life is

intertwined with the whole chain of organic and inorganic being. In old Rome the public roads beginning at

the Forum proceeded north, south, east, west, to the centre of every province of the empire, making each

markettown of Persia, Spain and Britain pervious to the soldiers of the capital: so out of the human heart go

as it were highways to the heart of every object in nature, to reduce it under the dominion of man. A man is a

bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world. His faculties refer to natures out

of him and predict the world he is to inhabit, as the fins of the fish foreshow that water exists, or the wings of

an eagle in the egg presuppose air. He cannot live without a world. Put Napoleon in an island prison, let his

faculties find no men to act on, no Alps to climb, no stake to play for, and he would beat the air, and appear

stupid. Transport him to large countries, dense population, complex interests and antagonist power, and you

shall see that the man Napoleon, bounded that is by such a profile and outline, is not the virtual Napoleon.

Columbus needs a planet to shape his course upon. Newton and Laplace need myriads of age and

thickstrewn celestial areas. One may say a gravitating solar system is already prophesied in the nature of

Newton's mind. Not less does the brain of Davy or of GayLussac, from childhood exploring the affinities

and repulsions of particles, anticipate the laws of organization. Does not the eye of the human embryo predict

the light? the ear of Handel predict the witchcraft of harmonic sound? Do not the constructive fingers of

Watt, Fulton, Whittemore, Arkwright, predict the fusible, hard, and temperable texture of metals, the

properties of stone, water, and wood? Do not the lovely attributes of the maiden child predict the refinements

and decorations of civil society? Here also we are reminded of the action of man on man. A mind might

ponder its thought for ages and not gain so much selfknowledge as the passion of love shall teach it in a day.

Who knows himself before he has been thrilled with indignation at an outrage, or has heard an eloquent

tongue, or has shared the throb of thousands in a national exultation or alarm? No man can antedate his

experience, or guess what faculty or feeling a new object shall unlock, any more than he can draw today the

I will not now go behind the general statement to explore the reason of this correspondency. Let it suffice that

in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be

Thus in all ways does the soul concentrate and reproduce its treasures for each pupil. He too shall pass

through the whole cycle of experience. He shall collect into a focus the rays of nature. History no longer shall

be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just and wise man. You shall not tell me by languages and

titles a catalogue of the volumes you have read. You shall make me feel what periods you have lived. A man

shall be the Temple of Fame. He shall walk, as the poets have described that goddess, in a robe painted all

over with wonderful events and experiences;his own form and features by their exalted intelligence shall

be that variegated vest. I shall find in him the Foreworld; in his childhood the Age of Gold, the Apples of

Knowledge, the Argonautic Expedition, the calling of Abraham, the building of the Temple, the Advent of

Christ, Dark Ages, the Revival of Letters, the Reformation, the discovery of new lands, the opening of new

sciences and new regions in man. He shall be the priest of Pan, and bring with him into humble cottages the

blessing of the morning stars, and all the recorded benefits of heaven and earth.

Is there somewhat overweening in this claim? Then I reject all I have written, for what is the use of

pretending to know what we know not? But it is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact

without seeming to belie some other. I hold our actual knowledge very cheap. Hear the rats in the wall, see

the lizard on the fence, the fungus under foot, the lichen on the log. What do I know sympathetically,

morally, of either of these worlds of life? As old as the Caucasian man,perhaps older,these creatures

have kept their counsel beside him, and there is no record of any word or sign that has passed from one to the

other. What connection do the books show between the fifty or sixty chemical elements and the historical

eras? Nay, what does history yet record of the metaphysical annals of man? What light does it shed on those

mysteries which we hide under the names Death and Immortality? Yet every history should be written in a

wisdom which divined the range of our affinities and looked at facts as symbols. I am ashamed to see what a

shallow village tale our socalled History is. How many times we must say Rome, and Paris, and

Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these

neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux

sealhunter, for the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?

Broader and deeper we must write our annals,from an ethical reformation, from an influx of the ever new,

ever sanative conscience,if we would trulier express our central and wide related nature, instead of this

old chronology of selfishness and pride to which we have too long lent our eyes. Already that day exists for

us, shines in on us at unawares, but the path of science and of letters is not the way into nature. The idiot, the

Indian, the child and unschooled farmer's boy stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the

I READ the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional.

The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is

of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true

for you in your private heart is true for all men,that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be

the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to

us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we

ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men,

but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his

mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice

his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come

back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this.

They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good humored inflexibility then most when the

whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else tomorrow 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

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that

imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide

universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that

plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he

knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one

character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not

without preestablished harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that

particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us

represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God

will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into

his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance

which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for

you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and

confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely

trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we

are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids

in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers and benefactors, obeying

What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text in the face and behavior of children, babes, and even brutes!

That divided and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed the strength

and means opposed to our purpose, these have not. Their mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered,

and when we look in their faces we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody; all conform to it; so that

one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it. So God has armed youth

and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and made it enviable and gracious and its

claims not to be put by, if it will stand by itself. Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak

to you and me. Hark! in the next room his voice is sufficiently clear and emphatic. It seems he knows how to

speak to his contemporaries. Bashful or bold then, he will know how to make us seniors very unnecessary.

The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to

conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature. A boy is in the parlor what the pit is in the playhouse;

independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and

sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent,

troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests; he gives an independent,

genuine verdict. You must court him; he does not court you. But the man is as it were clapped into jail by his

consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat he is a committed person, watched by the

sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe for

this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who can thus avoid all pledges and, having observed,

observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be

formidable. He would utter opinions on all passing affairs, which being seen to be not private but necessary,

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

jointstock 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. Selfreliance is its

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be

hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the

integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. I

remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser who was wont to

importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, "What have I to do with the

sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within?" my friend suggested,"But these impulses may be

from below, not from above." I replied, "They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil's child, I

will live then from the Devil." No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names

very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what is

against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if every thing were titular and

ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and

dead institutions. Every decent and wellspoken individual affects and sways me more than is right. I ought

to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. If malice and vanity wear the coat of

philanthropy, shall that pass? If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me

with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him, 'Go love thy infant; love thy woodchopper;

be goodnatured 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 doorpost, *Whim*. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we

cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company.

Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did today, 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 meetinghouses to the vain end to which many

now stand; alms to sots, and the thousandfold 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 nonappearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their

living in the world,as invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to

expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower

strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and

sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. I ask primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse this appeal

from the man to his actions. I know that for myself it makes no difference whether I do or forbear those

actions which are reckoned excellent. I cannot consent to pay for a privilege where I have intrinsic right. Few

and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in

intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because

you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the

world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who

in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. It loses

your time and blurs the impression of your character. If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead

Biblesociety, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base

housekeepers,under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are: and of course so

much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and

you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what a blindman'sbuff is this game of conformity. If I

know your sect, I anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency

of one of the institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and

spontaneous word? Do I not know that with all this ostentation of examining the grounds of the institution he

will do no such thing? Do I not know that he is pledged to himself not to look but at one side, the permitted

side, not as a man, but as a parish minister? He is a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the

emptiest affectation. Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached

themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few

particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is

not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us and we know not where

to begin to set them right. Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the prisonuniform of the party to

which we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine

expression. There is a mortifying experience in particular, which does not fail to wreak itself also in the

general history; I mean "the foolish face of praise," the forced smile which we put on in company where we

do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously

moved but moved by a low usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face with the most

For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. 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. Yet is the discontent of the multitude more formidable

than that of the senate and the college. It is easy enough for a firm man who knows the world to brook the

rage of the cultivated classes. Their rage is decorous and prudent, for they are timid, as being very vulnerable

themselves. But when to their feminine rage the indignation of the people is added, when the ignorant and the

poor are aroused, when the unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and

mow, it needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a trifle of no concernment.

The other terror that scares us from selftrust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word because

the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to

But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest

you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself;

what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure

memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousandeyed 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

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and

divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his

shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks

in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.'Ah, so you shall be sure to be

misunderstood.'Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and

Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took

I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies of his will are rounded in by the law of his being, as

the inequalities of Andes and Himmaleh are insignificant in the curve of the sphere. Nor does it matter how

you gauge and try him. A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza;read it forward, backward, or

across, it still spells the same thing. In this pleasing contrite woodlife which God allows me, let me record

day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be found

symmetrical, though I mean it not and see it not. My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of

insects. The swallow over my window should interweave that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my

web also. We pass for what we are. Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate

their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.

There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so they be each honest and natural in their hour.

For of one will, the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem. These varieties are lost sight of at

a little distance, at a little height of thought. One tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is a

zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average

tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself and will explain your other genuine actions. Your

conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now.

Greatness appeals to the future. If I can be firm enough today to do right and scorn eyes, I must have done

so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn appearances and you

always may. The force of character is cumulative. All the foregone days of virtue work their health into this.

What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills the imagination? The

consciousness of a train of great days and victories behind. They shed an united light on the advancing actor.

He is attended as by a visible escort of angels. That is it which throws thunder into Chatham's voice, and

dignity into Washington's port, and America into Adams's eye. Honor is venerable to us because it is no

ephemera. It is always ancient virtue. We worship it today because it is not of today. We love it and pay it

homage because it is not a trap for our love and homage, but is selfdependent, self derived, and therefore

I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. Let the words be gazetted and

ridiculous henceforward. Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife. Let us

never bow and apologize more. A great man is coming to eat at my house. I do not wish to please him; I wish

that he should wish to please me. I will stand here for humanity, and though I would make it kind, I would

make it true. Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and

hurl in the face of custom and trade and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great

responsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no other time or

place, but is the centre of things. Where he is, there is nature. He measures you and all men and all events.

Ordinarily, every body in society reminds us of somewhat else, or of some other person. Character, reality,

reminds you of nothing else; it takes place of the whole creation. The man must be so much that he must

make all circumstances indifferent. Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces

and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design;and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of

clients. A man Caesar is born, and for ages after we have a Roman Empire. Christ is born, and millions of

minds so grow and cleave to his genius that he is confounded with virtue and the possible of man. An

institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as, Monachism, of the Hermit Antony; the Reformation, of

Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called "the height

of Rome"; and all history Resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons.

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and

down with the air of a charityboy, a bastard, or an interloper in the world which exists for him. But the man

in the street, finding no worth in himself which corresponds to the force which built a tower or sculptured a

marble god, feels poor when he looks on these. To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book have an alien and

forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seem to say like that, 'Who are you, Sir?' Yet they all are his,

suitors for his notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come out and take possession. The picture

waits for my verdict; it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise. That popular fable of the

sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke's house, washed and dressed and laid in

the duke's bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he

had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world

a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true prince.

Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In history our imagination plays us false. Kingdom and lordship,

power and estate, are a gaudier vocabulary than private John and Edward in a small house and common day's

work; but the things of life are the same to both; the sum total of both is the same. Why all this deference to

Alfred and Scanderbeg and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous; did they wear out virtue? As great a stake

depends on your private act today, as followed their public and renowned steps. When private men shall act

with original views, the lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen.

The world has been instructed by its kings, who have so magnetized the eyes of nations. It has been taught by

this colossal symbol the mutual reverence that is due from man to man. The joyful loyalty with which men

have everywhere suffered the king, the noble, or the great proprietor to walk among them by a law of his

own, make his own scale of men and things and reverse theirs, pay for benefits not with money but with

honor, and represent the law in his person, was the hieroglyphic by which they obscurely signified their

The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of selftrust. Who is

the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded? What is the nature

and power of that science baffling star, without parallax, without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of

beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence appear? The inquiry leads us to

that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We

denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact

behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin. For the sense of being which in calm

hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from

man, but one with them and proceeds obviously from the same source whence their life and being also

proceed. We first share the life by which things exist and afterwards see them as appearances in nature and

forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the fountain of action and of thought. Here are the lungs of that

inspiration which giveth man wisdom and which cannot be denied without impiety and atheism. We lie in the

lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern

justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask

whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its

absence is all we can affirm. Every man discriminates between the voluntary acts of his mind and his

involuntary perceptions, and knows that to his involuntary perceptions a perfect faith is due. He may err in

the expression of them, but he knows that these things are so, like day and night, not to be disputed. My

wilful actions and acquisitions are but roving;the idlest reverie, the faintest native emotion, command my

curiosity and respect. Thoughtless people contradict as readily the statement of perceptions as of opinions, or

rather much more readily; for they do not distinguish between perception and notion. They fancy that I

choose to see this or that thing. But perception is not whimsical, but fatal. If I see a trait, my children will see

it after me, and in course of time all mankind, although it may chance that no one has seen it before me.

The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it is profane to seek to interpose helps. It must be

that when God speaketh he should communicate, not one thing, but all things; should fill the world with his

voice; should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls, from the centre of the present thought; and new date and

new create the whole. Whenever a mind is simple and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass

away,means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour.

All things are made sacred by relation to it,one as much as another. All things are dissolved to their centre

by their cause, and in the universal miracle petty and particular miracles disappear. If therefore a man claims

to know and speak of God and carries you backward to the phraseology of some old mouldered nation in

another country, in another world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fulness and

completion? Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence then this

worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul. Time and

space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is light: where it is, is day; where it was,

is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury if it be any thing more than a cheerful apologue or

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 today. There is no

time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leafbud has

burst, its whole life acts; in the fullblown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its

nature is satisfied and it satisfies nature in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not

live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands

on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present,

This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong intellects dare not yet hear God himself unless he speak the

phraseology of I know not what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great a price on a few

texts, on a few lives. We are like children who repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as

they grow older, of the men of talents and character they chance to see,painfully recollecting the exact

words they spoke; afterwards, when they come into the point of view which those had who uttered these

sayings, they understand them and are willing to let the words go; for at any time they can use words as good

when occasion comes. If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is

for the weak to be weak. When we have new perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded

treasures as old rubbish. When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook

And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains unsaid; probably cannot be said; for all that we say

is the faroff 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

selfexistence 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,

Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of

transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact the

world hates; that the soul becomes; for that for ever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all

reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside. Why then do

we prate of selfreliance? Inasmuch as the soul is present there will be power not confident but agent. To talk

of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies because it works and is. Who

has more obedience than I masters me, though he should not raise his finger. Round him I must revolve by

the gravitation of spirits. We fancy it rhetoric when we speak of eminent virtue. We do not yet see that virtue

is Height, and that a man or a company of men, plastic and permeable to principles, by the law of nature must

This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all into the

everblessed ONE. Selfexistence 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

Thus all concentrates: let us not rove; let us sit at home with the cause. Let us stun and astonish the intruding

rabble of men and books and institutions, by a simple declaration of the divine fact. Bid the invaders take the

shoes from off their feet, for God is here within. Let our simplicity judge them, and our docility to our own

But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his genius admonished to stay at home, to

put itself in communication with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the urns of

other men. We must go alone. I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.

How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary! So let us

always sit. Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around

our hearth, or are said to have the same blood? All men have my blood and I have all men's. Not for that will

I adopt their petulance or folly, even to the extent of being ashamed of it. But your isolation must not be

mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation. At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to

importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at

thy closet door and say,'Come out unto us.' But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The power

men possess to annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my act.

If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith, let us at least resist our temptations; let us

enter into the state of war and wake Thor and Woden, courage and constancy, in our Saxon breasts. This is to

be done in our smooth times by speaking the truth. Check this lying hospitality and lying affection. Live no

longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse. Say to them, 'O

father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward

I am the truth's. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal law. I will have

no covenants but proximities. I shall endeavour to nourish my parents, to support my family, to be the chaste

husband of one wife,but these relations I must fill after a new and unprecedented way. I appeal from your

customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I

am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I will not hide my

tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon

whatever inly rejoices me and the heart appoints. If you are noble, I will love you: if you are not, I will not

hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to

your companions; I will seek my own. I do this not selfishly but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest,

and mine, and all men's, however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth. Does this sound harsh today?

You will soon love what is dictated by your nature as well as mine, and if we follow the truth it will bring us

out safe at last.'But so may you give these friends pain. Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to

save their sensibility. Besides, all persons have their moments of reason, when they look out into the region

The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standard, and mere

antinomianism; and the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law of

consciousness abides. There are two confessionals, in one or the other of which we must be shriven. You may

fulfil your round of duties by clearing yourself in the direct, or in the reflex way. Consider whether you have

satisfied your relations to father, mother, cousin, neighbor, town, cat, and dog; whether any of these can

upbraid you. But I may also neglect this reflex standard and absolve me to myself. I have my own stern

claims and perfect circle. It denies the name of duty to many offices that are called duties. But if I can

discharge its debts it enables me to dispense with the popular code. If any one imagines that this law is lax,

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

If any man consider the present aspects of what is called by distinction society, he will see the need of these

ethics. The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous, desponding

whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death and afraid of each other. Our age yields

no great and perfect persons. We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state, but we

see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to

their practical force and do lean and beg day and night continually. Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts,

our occupations, our marriages, our religion we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us. We are parlor

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he

is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges and is not installed in an office within one year

afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is

right in being disheartened and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or

Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits

a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls

on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not

'studying a profession,' for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a

hundred chances. Let a Stoic open the resources of man and tell men they are not leaning willows, but can

and must detach themselves; that with the exercise of selftrust, new powers shall appear; that a man is the

word made flesh, born to shed healing to the nations; that he should be ashamed of our compassion, and that

the moment he acts from himself, tossing the laws, the books, idolatries and customs out of the window, we

pity him no more but thank and revere him;and that teacher shall restore the life of man to splendor and

It is easy to see that a greater selfreliance 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

1. In what prayers do men allow themselves! That which they call a holy office is not so much as brave and

manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign addition to come through some foreign virtue, and

loses itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous. Prayer that craves a

particular commodity, any thing less than all good, is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life

from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God

pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes

dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg.

He will then see prayer in all action. The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of

the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends.

Caratach, in Fletcher's Bonduca, when admonished to inquire the mind of the god Audate, replies,

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want of selfreliance: 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 selfhelping man. For him all doors are flung wide; him all tongues greet, all honors

crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him because he did not need it.

We solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him because he held on his way and scorned our

disapprobation. The gods love him because men hated him. "To the persevering mortal," said Zoroaster, "the

As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect. They say with those

foolish Israelites, 'Let not God speak to us, lest we die. Speak thou, speak any man with us, and we will obey.'

Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God in my brother, because he has shut his own temple doors and

recites fables merely of his brother's, or his brother's brother's God. Every new mind is a new classification. If

it prove a mind of uncommon activity and power, a Locke, a Lavoisier, a Hutton, a Bentham, a Fourier, it

imposes its classification on other men, and lo! a new system. In proportion to the depth of the thought, and

so to the number of the objects it touches and brings within reach of the pupil, is his complacency. But

chiefly is this apparent in creeds and churches, which are also classifications of some powerful mind acting

on the elemental thought of duty, and man's relation to the Highest. Such is Calvinism, Quakerism,

Swedenborgism. The pupil takes the same delight in subordinating every thing to the new terminology as a

girl who has just learned botany in seeing a new earth and new seasons thereby. It will happen for a time that

the pupil will find his intellectual power has grown by the study of his master's mind. But in all unbalanced

minds the classification is idolized, passes for the end and not for a speedily exhaustible means, so that the

walls of the system blend to their eye in the remote horizon with the walls of the universe; the luminaries of

heaven seem to them hung on the arch their master built. They cannot imagine how you aliens have any right

to see,how you can see; 'It must be somehow that you stole the light from us.' They do not yet perceive that

light, unsystematic, indomitable, will break into any cabin, even into theirs. Let them chirp awhile and call it

their own. If they are honest and do well, presently their neat new pinfold will be too strait and low, will

crack, will lean, will rot and vanish, and the immortal light, all young and joyful, millionorbed, million

2. It is for want of selfculture that the superstition of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt,

retains its fascination for all educated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the

imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the earth. In manly hours we feel that duty

is our place. The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any

occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still and shall make men sensible by the

expression of his countenance that he goes, the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe for the purposes of art, of study, and

benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat

greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels

away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind

Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream

that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my

friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self,

unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights

3. But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action.

The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies

are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind? Our houses are

built with foreign taste; our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments; our opinions, our tastes, our

faculties, lean, and follow the Past and the Distant. The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished. It

was in his own mind that the artist sought his model. It was an application of his own thought to the thing to

be done and the conditions to be observed. And why need we copy the Doric or the Gothic model? Beauty,

convenience, grandeur of thought and quaint expression are as near to us as to any, and if the American artist

will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by him, considering the climate, the soil, the length

of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of the government, he will create a house in which all

these will find themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied also.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a

whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half

possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor

can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught Shakspeare? Where is the

master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is a

unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow. Shakspeare will never be made

by the study of Shakspeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much.

There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or

trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses or Dante, but different from all these. Not possibly will the soul,

all rich, all eloquent, with thousandcloven 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

4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so does our spirit of society. All men plume

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes;

it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration.

For every thing that is given something is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts. What a

contrast between the wellclad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil and a bill of

exchange in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat and an

undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of the two men and you shall see that

the white man has lost his aboriginal strength. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad axe

and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so

much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A

Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the

street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and

the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His notebooks impair his memory; his

libraries overload his wit; the insuranceoffice 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;

There is no more deviation in the moral standard than in the standard of height or bulk. No greater men are

now than ever were. A singular equality may be observed between the great men of the first and of the last

ages; nor can all the science, art, religion, and philosophy of the nineteenth century avail to educate greater

men than Plutarch's heroes, three or four and twenty centuries ago. Not in time is the race progressive.

Phocion, Socrates, Anaxagoras, Diogenes, are great men, but they leave no class. He who is really of their

class will not be called by their name, but will be his own man, and in his turn the founder of a sect. The arts

and inventions of each period are only its costume and do not invigorate men. The harm of the improved

machinery may compensate its good. Hudson and Behring accomplished so much in their fishingboats as to

astonish Parry and Franklin, whose equipment exhausted the resources of science and art. Galileo, with an

operaglass, discovered a more splendid series of celestial phenomena than any one since. Columbus found

the New World in an undecked boat. It is curious to see the periodical disuse and perishing of means and

machinery which were introduced with loud laudation a few years or centuries before. The great genius

returns to essential man. We reckoned the improvements of the art of war among the triumphs of science, and

yet Napoleon conquered Europe by the bivouac, which consisted of falling back on naked valor and

disencumbering it of all aids. The Emperor held it impossible to make a perfect army, says Las Cases,

"without abolishing our arms, magazines, commissaries and carriages, until, in imitation of the Roman

custom, the soldier should receive his supply of corn, grind it in his 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

And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self

reliance. Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the

religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because

they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not

by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature.

Especially he hates what he has if he see that it is accidental,came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime;

then he feels that it is not having; it does not belong to him, has no root in him and merely lies there because

no revolution or no robber takes it away. But that which a man is, does always by necessity acquire, and what

the man acquires is living property, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or

storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the man breathes. "Thy lot or portion of life,"

said the Caliph Ali, "is seeking after thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after it." Our dependence on these

foreign goods leads us to our slavish respect for numbers. The political parties meet in numerous

conventions; the greater the concourse and with each new uproar of announcement, The delegation from

Essex! The Democrats from New Hampshire! The Whigs of Maine! the young patriot feels himself stronger

than before by a new thousand of eyes and arms. In like manner the reformers summon conventions and vote

and resolve in multitude. Not so, O friends! will the God deign to enter and inhabit you, but by a method

precisely the reverse. It is only as a man puts off all foreign support and stands alone that I see him to be

strong and to prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to his banner. Is not a man better than a town? Ask

nothing of men, and, in the endless mutation, thou only firm column must presently appear the upholder of all

that surrounds thee. He who knows that power is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for good out

of him and elsewhere, and so perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights

himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs, works miracles; just as a man who stands on his

So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But

do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God. In the Will

work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her

rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick or the return of your absent friend, or

some other favorable event raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe

it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

Ever since I was a boy I have wished to write a discourse on Compensation; for it seemed to me when very

young that on this subject life was ahead of theology and the people knew more than the preachers taught.

The documents too from which the doctrine is to be drawn, charmed my fancy by their endless variety, and

lay always before me, even in sleep; for they are the tools in our hands, the bread in our basket, the

transactions of the street, the farm and the dwellinghouse; 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

I was lately confirmed in these desires by hearing a sermon at church. The preacher, a man esteemed for his

orthodoxy, unfolded in the ordinary manner the doctrine of the Last Judgment. He assumed that judgment is

not executed in this world; that the wicked are successful; that the good are miserable; and then urged from

reason and from Scripture a compensation to be made to both parties in the next life. No offence appeared to

be taken by the congregation at this doctrine. As far as I could observe when the meeting broke up they

Yet what was the import of this teaching? What did the preacher mean by saying that the good are miserable

in the present life? Was it that houses and lands, offices, wine, horses, dress, luxury, are had by unprincipled

men, whilst the saints are poor and despised; and that a compensation is to be made to these last hereafter, by

giving them the like gratifications another day,bank stock and doubloons, venison and champagne? This

must be the compensation intended; for what else? Is it that they are to have leave to pray and praise? to love

and serve men? Why, that they can do now. The legitimate inference the disciple would draw was,'We are

to have such a good time as the sinners have now';or, to push it to its extreme import,'You sin now; we

shall sin by and by; we would sin now, if we could; not being successful, we expect our revenge tomorrow.'

The fallacy lay in the immense concession that the bad are successful; that justice is not done now. The

blindness of the preacher consisted in deferring to the base estimate of the market of what constitutes a manly

success, instead of confronting and convicting the world from the truth; announcing the presence of the soul;

the omnipotence of the will; and so establishing the standard of good and ill, of success and falsehood.

I find a similar base tone in the popular religious works of the day and the same doctrines assumed by the

literary men when occasionally they treat the related topics. I think that our popular theology has gained in

decorum, and not in principle, over the superstitions it has displaced. But men are better than their theology.

Their daily life gives it the lie. Every ingenuous and aspiring soul leaves the doctrine behind him in his own

experience, and all men feel sometimes the falsehood which they cannot demonstrate. For men are wiser than

they know. That which they hear in schools and pulpits without afterthought, if said in conversation would

probably be questioned in silence. If a man dogmatize in a mixed company on Providence and the divine

laws, he is answered by a silence which conveys well enough to an observer the dissatisfaction of the hearer,

I shall attempt in this and the following chapter to record some facts that indicate the path of the law of

Compensation; happy beyond my expectation if I shall truly draw the smallest arc of this circle.

POLARITY, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature; in darkness and light; in heat and cold;

in the ebb and flow of waters; in male and female; in the inspiration and expiration of plants and animals; in

the equation of quantity and quality in the fluids of the animal body; in the systole and diastole of the heart;

in the undulations of fluids, and of sound; in the centrifugal and centripetal gravity; in electricity, galvanism,

and chemical affinity. Superinduce magnetism at one end of a needle, the opposite magnetism takes place at

the other end. If the south attracts, the north repels. To empty here, you must condense there. An inevitable

dualism bisects nature, so that each thing is a half, and suggests another thing to make it whole; as, spirit,

matter; man, woman; odd, even; subjective, objective; in, out; upper, under; motion, rest; yea, nay.

Whilst the world is thus dual, so is every one of its parts. The entire system of things gets represented in

every particle. There is somewhat that resembles the ebb and flow of the sea, day and night, man and woman,

in a single needle of the pine, in a kernel of corn, in each individual of every animal tribe. The reaction, so

grand in the elements, is repeated within these small boundaries. For example, in the animal kingdom the

physiologist has observed that no creatures are favorites, but a certain compensation balances every gift and

every defect. A surplusage given to one part is paid out of a reduction from another part of the same creature.

The theory of the mechanic forces is another example. What we gain in power is lost in time, and the

converse. The periodic or compensating errors of the planets is another instance. The influences of climate

and soil in political history are another. The cold climate invigorates. The barren soil does not breed fevers,

The same dualism underlies the nature and condition of man. Every excess causes a defect; every defect an

excess. Every sweet hath its sour; every evil its good. Every faculty which is a receiver of pleasure has an

equal penalty put on its abuse. It is to answer for its moderation with its life. For every grain of wit there is a

grain of folly. For every thing you have missed, you have gained something else; and for every thing you

gain, you lose something. If riches increase, they are increased that use them. If the gatherer gathers too

much, Nature takes out of the man what she puts into his chest; swells the estate, but kills the owner. Nature

hates monopolies and exceptions. The waves of the sea do not more speedily seek a level from their loftiest

tossing than the varieties of condition tend to equalize themselves. There is always some levelling

circumstance that puts down the overbearing, the strong, the rich, the fortunate, substantially on the same

ground with all others. Is a man too strong and fierce for society and by temper and position a bad citizen,a

morose ruffian, with a dash of the pirate in him?Nature sends him a troop of pretty sons and daughters who

are getting along in the dame's classes at the village school, and love and fear for them smooths his grim

scowl to courtesy. Thus she contrives to intenerate the granite and felspar, takes the boar out and puts the

The farmer imagines power and place are fine things. But the President has paid dear for his White House. It

has commonly cost him all his peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To preserve for a short time so

conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is content to eat dust before the real masters who stand erect

behind the throne. Or, do men desire the more substantial and permanent grandeur of genius? Neither has this

an immunity. He who by force of will or of thought is great and overlooks thousands, has the charges of that

eminence. With every influx of light comes new danger. Has he light? he must bear witness to the light, and

always outrun that sympathy which gives him such keen satisfaction, by his fidelity to new revelations of the

incessant soul. He must hate father and mother, wife and child. Has he all that the world loves and admires

and covets?he must cast behind him their admiration, and afflict them by faithfulness to his truth, and

This law writes the laws of cities and nations. It is in vain to build or plot or combine against it. Things refuse

to be mismanaged long. Res nolunt diu male administrari. Though no checks to a new evil appear, the checks

exist, and will appear. If the government is cruel, the governor's life is not safe. If you tax too high, the

revenue will yield nothing. If you make the criminal code sanguinary, juries will not convict. If the law is too

mild, private vengeance comes in. If the government is a terrific democracy, the pressure is resisted by an

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

These appearances indicate the fact that the universe is represented in every one of its particles. Every thing

in nature contains all the powers of nature. Every thing is made of one hidden stuff; as the naturalist sees one

type under every metamorphosis, and regards a horse as a running man, a fish as a swimming man, a bird as a

flying man, a tree as a rooted man. Each new form repeats not only the main character of the type, but part for

part all the details, all the aims, furtherances, hindrances, energies and whole system of every other. Every

occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the world and a correlative of every other. Each one is an

entire emblem of human life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course and its end. And each one

The world globes itself in a drop of dew. The microscope cannot find the animalcule which is less perfect for

being little. Eyes, ears, taste, smell, motion, resistance, appetite, and organs of reproduction that take hold on

eternity,all find room to consist in the small creature. So do we put our life into every act. The true

doctrine of omnipresence is that God reappears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb. The value of the

universe contrives to throw itself into every point. If the good is there, so is the evil; if the affinity, so the

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. Hoi kuboi

Dios aei eupiptousi,The dice of God are always loaded. The world looks like a multiplicationtable, or a

mathematical equation, which, turn it how you will, balances itself. Take what figure you will, its exact value,

nor more nor less, still returns to you. Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded,

every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty. What we call retribution is the universal necessity by which

the whole appears wherever a part appears. If you see smoke, there must be fire. If you see a hand or a limb,

Every act rewards itself, or, in other words integrates itself, in a twofold manner; first in the thing, or in real

nature; and secondly in the circumstance, or in apparent nature. Men call the circumstance the retribution.

The causal retribution is in the thing and is seen by the soul. The retribution in the circumstance is seen by the

understanding; it is inseparable from the thing, but is often spread over a long time and so does not become

distinct until after many years. The specific stripes may follow late after the offence, but they follow because

they accompany it. Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected

ripens within the flower of the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit,

cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the

Whilst thus the world will be whole and refuses to be disparted, we seek to act partially, to sunder, to

appropriate; for example,to gratify the senses we sever the pleasure of the senses from the needs of the

character. The ingenuity of man has always been dedicated to the solution of one problem,how to detach

the sensual sweet, the sensual strong, the sensual bright, etc., from the moral sweet, the moral deep, the moral

fair; that is, again, to contrive to cut clean off this upper surface so thin as to leave it bottomless; to get a one

end, without an other end. The soul says, 'Eat;' the body would feast. The soul says, 'The man and woman

shall be one flesh and one soul;' the body would join the flesh only. The soul says, 'Have dominion over all

things to the ends of virtue;' the body would have the power over things to its own ends.

The soul strives amain to live and work through all things. It would be the only fact. All things shall be added

unto it,power, pleasure, knowledge, beauty. The particular man aims to be somebody; to set up for

himself; to truck and higgle for a private good; and, in particulars, to ride that he may ride; to dress that he

may be dressed; to eat that he may eat; and to govern, that he may be seen. Men seek to be great; they would

have offices, wealth, power, and fame. They think that to be great is to possess one side of nature,the

This dividing and detaching is steadily counteracted. Up to this day it must be owned no projector has had the

smallest success. The parted water reunites behind our hand. Pleasure is taken out of pleasant things, profit

out of profitable things, power out of strong things, as soon as we seek to separate them from the whole. We

can no more halve things and get the sensual good, by itself, than we can get an inside that shall have no

outside, or a light without a shadow. "Drive out Nature with a fork, she comes running back."

Life invests itself with inevitable conditions, which the unwise seek to dodge, which one and another brags

that he does not know, that they do not touch him;but the brag is on his lips, the conditions are in his soul.

If he escapes them in one part they attack him in another more vital part. If he has escaped them in form and

in the appearance, it is because he has resisted his life and fled from himself, and the retribution is so much

death. So signal is the failure of all attempts to make this separation of the good from the tax, that the

experiment would not be tried,since to try it is to be mad,but for the circumstance, that when the disease

began in the will, of rebellion and separation, the intellect is at once infected, so that the man ceases to see

God whole in each object, but is able to see the sensual allurement of an object and not see the sensual hurt;

he sees the mermaid's head but not the dragon's tail, and thinks he can cut off that which he would have from

that which he would not have. "How secret art thou who dwellest in the highest heavens in silence, O thou

only great God, sprinkling with an unwearied providence certain penal blindnesses upon such as have

The human soul is true to these facts in the painting of fable, of history, of law, of proverbs, of conversation.

It finds a tongue in literature unawares. Thus the Greeks called Jupiter, Supreme Mind; but having

traditionally ascribed to him many base actions, they involuntarily made amends to reason by tying up the

hands of so bad a god. He is made as helpless as a king of England. Prometheus knows one secret which Jove

must bargain for; Minerva, another. He cannot get his own thunders; Minerva keeps the key of them:

A plain confession of the inworking of the All and of its moral aim. The Indian mythology ends in the same

ethics; and it would seem impossible for any fable to be invented and get any currency which was not moral.

Aurora forgot to ask youth for her lover, and though Tithonus is immortal, he is old. Achilles is not quite

invulnerable; the sacred waters did not wash the heel by which Thetis held him. Siegfried, in the Nibelungen,

is not quite immortal, for a leaf fell on his back whilst he was bathing in the dragon's blood, and that spot

which it covered is mortal. And so it must be. There is a crack in every thing God has made. It would seem

there is always this vindictive circumstance stealing in at unawares even into the wild poesy in which the

human fancy attempted to make bold holiday and to shake itself free of the old laws, this backstroke, this

kick of the gun, certifying that the law is fatal; that in nature nothing can be given, all things are sold.

This is that ancient doctrine of Nemesis, who keeps watch in the universe and lets no offence go unchastised.

The Furies they said are attendants on justice, and if the sun in heaven should transgress his path they would

punish him. The poets related that stone walls and iron swords and leathern thongs had an occult sympathy

with the wrongs of their owners; that the belt which Ajax gave Hector dragged the Trojan hero over the field

at the wheels of the car of Achilles, and the sword which Hector gave Ajax was that on whose point Ajax fell.

They recorded that when the Thasians erected a statue to Theagenes, a victor in the games, one of his rivals

went to it by night and endeavored to throw it down by repeated blows, until at last he moved it from its

This voice of fable has in it somewhat divine. It came from thought above the will of the writer. That is the

best part of each writer which has nothing private in it; that which he does not know; that which flowed out of

his constitution and not from his too active invention; that which in the study of a single artist you might not

easily find, but in the study of many you would abstract as the spirit of them all. Phidias it is not, but the work

of man in that early Hellenic world that I would know. The name and circumstance of Phidias, however

convenient for history, embarrass when we come to the highest criticism. We are to see that which man was

tending to do in a given period, and was hindered, or, if you will, modified in doing, by the interfering

volitions of Phidias, of Dante, of Shakspeare, the organ whereby man at the moment wrought.

Still more striking is the expression of this fact in the proverbs of all nations, which are always the literature

of reason, or the statements of an absolute truth without qualification. Proverbs, like the sacred books of each

nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions. That which the droning world, chained to appearances, will not

allow the realist to say in his own words, it will suffer him to say in proverbs without contradiction. And this

law of laws, which the pulpit, the senate and the college deny, is hourly preached in all markets and

workshops by flights of proverbs, whose teaching is as true and as omnipresent as that of birds and flies.

All things are double, one against another.Tit for tat; an eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth; blood for blood;

measure for measure; love for love.Give and it shall be given you.He that watereth shall be watered

himself. What will you have? quoth God; pay for it and take it. Nothing venture, nothing have.Thou

shalt be paid exactly for what thou hast done, no more, no less.Who doth not work shall not eat.Harm

watch, harm catch. Curses always recoil on the head of him who imprecates them.If you put a chain

around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.Bad counsel confounds the

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

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 threadball 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

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong. "No man had ever a point of pride that was not injurious to

him," said Burke. The exclusive in fashionable life does not see that he excludes himself from enjoyment, in

the attempt to appropriate it. The exclusionist in religion does not see that he shuts the door of heaven on

himself, in striving to shut out others. Treat men as pawns and ninepins and you shall suffer as well as they. If

you leave out their heart, you shall lose your own. The senses would make things of all persons; of women, of

children, of the poor. The vulgar proverb, "I will get it from his purse or get it from his skin," is sound

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 fellowman, 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;

All the old abuses in society, universal and particular, all unjust accumulations of property and power, are

avenged in the same manner. Fear is an instructor of great sagacity and the herald of all revolutions. One

thing he teaches, that there is rottenness where he appears. He is a carrion crow, and though you see not well

what he hovers for, there is death somewhere. Our property is timid, our laws are timid, our cultivated classes

are timid. Fear for ages has boded and mowed and gibbered over government and property. That obscene bird

Of the like nature is that expectation of change which instantly follows the suspension of our voluntary

activity. The terror of cloudless noon, the emerald of Polycrates, the awe of prosperity, the instinct which

leads every generous soul to impose on itself tasks of a noble asceticism and vicarious virtue, are the

Experienced men of the world know very well that it is best to pay scot and lot as they go along, and that a

man often pays dear for a small frugality. The borrower runs in his own debt. Has a man gained any thing

who has received a hundred favors and rendered none? Has he gained by borrowing, through indolence or

cunning, his neighbor's wares, or horses, or money? There arises on the deed the instant acknowledgment of

benefit on the one part and of debt on the other; that is, of superiority and inferiority. The transaction remains

in the memory of himself and his neighbor; and every new transaction alters according to its nature their

relation to each other. He may soon come to see that he had better have broken his own bones than to have

ridden in his neighbor's coach, and that "the highest price he can pay for a thing is to ask for it."

A wise man will extend this lesson to all parts of life, and know that it is the part of prudence to face every

claimant and pay every just demand on your time, your talents, or your heart. Always pay; for first or last you

must pay your entire debt. Persons and events may stand for a time between you and justice, but it is only a

postponement. You must pay at last your own debt. If you are wise you will dread a prosperity which only

loads you with more. Benefit is the end of nature. But for every benefit which you receive, a tax is levied. He

is great who confers the most benefits. He is base,and that is the one base thing in the universe,to

receive favors and render none. In the order of nature we cannot render benefits to those from whom we

receive them, or only seldom. But the benefit we receive must be rendered again, line for line, deed for deed,

cent for cent, to somebody. Beware of too much good staying in your hand. It will fast corrupt and worm

Labor is watched over by the same pitiless laws. Cheapest, say the prudent, is the dearest labor. What we buy

in a broom, a mat, a wagon, a knife, is some application of good sense to a common want. It is best to pay in

your land a skilful gardener, or to buy good sense applied to gardening; in your sailor, good sense applied to

navigation; in the house, good sense applied to cooking, sewing, serving; in your agent, good sense applied to

accounts and affairs. So do you multiply your presence, or spread yourself throughout your estate. But

because of the dual constitution of things, in labor as in life there can be no cheating. The thief steals from

himself. The swindler swindles himself. For the real price of labor is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth

and credit are signs. These signs, like paper money, may be counterfeited or stolen, but that which they

represent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited or stolen. These ends of labor cannot be

answered but by real exertions of the mind, and in obedience to pure motives. The cheat, the defaulter, the

gambler, cannot extort the knowledge of material and moral nature which his honest care and pains yield to

the operative. The law of nature is, Do the thing, and you shall have the Power; but they who do not the thing

Human labor, through all its forms, from the sharpening of a stake to the construction of a city or an epic, is

one immense illustration of the perfect compensation of the universe. The absolute balance of Give and Take,

the doctrine that every thing has its price,and if that price is not paid, not that thing but something else is

obtained, and that it is impossible to get any thing without its price,is not less sublime in the columns of a

leger than in the budgets of states, in the laws of light and darkness, in all the action and reaction of nature. I

cannot doubt that the high laws which each man sees implicated in those processes with which he is

conversant, the stern ethics which sparkle on his chisel edge, which are measured out by his plumb and

footrule, which stand as manifest in the footing of the shopbill as in the history of a state,do recommend

to him his trade, and though seldom named, exalt his business to his imagination.

The league between virtue and nature engages all things to assume a hostile front to vice. The beautiful laws

and substances of the world persecute and whip the traitor. He finds that things are arranged for truth and

benefit, but there is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass.

Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of

every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole. You cannot recall the spoken word, you cannot wipe out the

foottrack, 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

On the other hand the law holds with equal sureness for all right action. Love, and you shall be loved. All

love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation. The good man has absolute

good, which like fire turns every thing to its own nature, so that you cannot do him any harm; but as the royal

armies sent against Napoleon, when he approached cast down their colors and from enemies became friends,

The good are befriended even by weakness and defect. As no man had ever a point of pride that was not

injurious to him, so no man had ever a defect that was not somewhere made useful to him. The stag in the

fable admired his horns and blamed his feet, but when the hunter came, his feet saved him, and afterwards,

caught in the thicket, his horns destroyed him. Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults. As no man

thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it, so no man has a thorough acquaintance with

the hindrances or talents of men until he has suffered from the one and seen the triumph of the other over his

own want of the same. Has he a defect of temper that unfits him to live in society? Thereby he is driven to

entertain himself alone and acquire habits of selfhelp; and thus, like the wounded oyster, he mends his shell

Our strength grows out of our weakness. The indignation which arms itself with secret forces does not

awaken until we are pricked and stung and sorely assailed. A great man is always willing to be little. Whilst

he sits on the cushion of advantages, he goes to sleep. When he is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a

chance to learn something; he has been put on his wits, on his manhood; he has gained facts; learns his

ignorance; is cured of the insanity of conceit; has got moderation and real skill. The wise man throws himself

on the side of his assailants. It is more his interest than it is theirs to find his weak point. The wound

cicatrizes and falls off from him like a dead skin and when they would triumph, lo! he has passed on

invulnerable. Blame is safer than praise. I hate to be defended in a newspaper. As long as all that is said is

said against me, I feel a certain assurance of success. But as soon as honeyed words of praise are spoken for

me I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies. In general, every evil to which we do not succumb

is a benefactor. As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes

The same guards which protect us from disaster, defect, and enmity, defend us, if we will, from selfishness

and fraud. Bolts and bars are not the best of our institutions, nor is shrewdness in trade a mark of wisdom.

Men suffer all their life long under the foolish superstition that they can be cheated. But it is as impossible for

a man to be cheated by any one but himself, as for a thing to be and not to be at the same time. There is a

third silent party to all our bargains. The nature and soul of things takes on itself the guaranty of the

fulfilment of every contract, so that honest service cannot come to loss. If you serve an ungrateful master,

serve him the more. Put God in your debt. Every stroke shall be repaid. The longer The payment is

withholden, the better for you; for compound interest on compound interest is the rate and usage of this

The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope

of sand. It makes no difference whether the actors be many or one, a tyrant or a mob. A mob is a society of

bodies voluntarily bereaving themselves of reason and traversing its work. The mob is man voluntarily

descending to the nature of the beast. Its fit hour of activity is night. Its actions are insane like its whole

constitution. It persecutes a principle; it would whip a right; it would tar and feather justice, by inflicting fire

and outrage upon the houses and persons of those who have these. It resembles the prank of boys, who run

with fireengines to put out the ruddy aurora streaming to the stars. The inviolate spirit turns their spite

against the wrongdoers. The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every

prison, a more illustrious abode; every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or

expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side. Hours of sanity and consideration are always

arriving to communities, as to individuals, when the truth is seen and the martyrs are justified.

Thus do all things preach the indifferency of circumstances. The man is all. Every thing has two sides, a good

and an evil. Every advantage has its tax. I learn to be content. But the doctrine of compensation is not the

doctrine of indifferency. The thoughtless say, on hearing these representations,What boots it to do well?

there is one event to good and evil; if I gain any good I must pay for it; if I lose any good I gain some other;

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, selfbalanced, 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

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

His life is a progress, and not a station. His instinct is trust. Our instinct uses "more" and "less" in application

to man, of the presence of the soul, and not of its absence, the brave man is greater than the coward; the true,

the benevolent, the wise, is more a man and not less, than the fool and knave. There is no tax on the good of

virtue, for that is the incoming of God himself, or absolute existence, without any comparative. Material good

has its tax, and if it came without desert or sweat, has no root in me, and the next wind will blow it away. But

all the good of nature is the soul's, and may be had if paid for in nature's lawful coin, that is, by labor which

the heart and the head allow. I no longer wish to meet a good I do not earn, for example to find a pot of

buried gold, knowing that it brings with it new burdens. I do not wish more external goods,neither

possessions, nor honors, nor powers, nor persons. The gain is apparent; the tax is certain. But there is no tax

on the knowledge that the compensation exists and that it is not desirable to dig up treasure. Herein I rejoice

with a serene eternal peace. I contract the boundaries of possible mischief. I learn the wisdom of St.

Bernard,"Nothing can work me damage except myself; the harm that I sustain I carry about with me, and

In the nature of the soul is the compensation for the inequalities of condition. The radical tragedy of nature

seems to be the distinction of More and Less. How can Less not feel the pain; how not feel indignation or

malevolence towards More? Look at those who have less faculty, and one feels sad and knows not well what

to make of it. He almost shuns their eye; he fears they will upbraid God. What should they do? It seems a

great injustice. But see the facts nearly and these mountainous inequalities vanish. Love reduces them as the

sun melts the iceberg in the sea. The heart and soul of all men being one, this bitterness of His and Mine

ceases. His is mine. I am my brother and my brother is me. If I feel overshadowed and outdone by great

neighbors, I can yet love; I can still receive; and he that loveth maketh his own the grandeur he loves.

Thereby I make the discovery that my brother is my guardian, acting for me with the friendliest designs, and

the estate I so admired and envied is my own. It is the nature of the soul to appropriate all things. Jesus and

Shakspeare are fragments of the soul, and by love I conquer and incorporate them in my own conscious

domain. His virtue,is not that mine? His wit,if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit.

Such also is the natural history of calamity. The changes which break up at short intervals the prosperity of

men are advertisements of a nature whose law is growth. Every soul is by this intrinsic necessity quitting its

whole system of things, its friends and home and laws and faith, as the 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

today scarcely recognizes the man of yesterday. And such should be the outward biography of man in time,

a putting off of dead circumstances day by day, as he renews his raiment day by day. But to us, in our lapsed

estate, resting, not advancing, resisting, not cooperating with the divine expansion, this growth comes by

We cannot part with our friends. We cannot let our angels go. We do not see that they only go out that

archangels may come in. We are idolaters of the old. We do not believe in the riches of the soul, in its proper

eternity and omnipresence. We do not believe there is any force in today to rival or recreate that beautiful

yesterday. We linger in the ruins of the old tent where once we had bread and shelter and organs, nor believe

that the spirit can feed, cover, and nerve us again. We cannot again find aught so dear, so sweet, so graceful.

But we sit and weep in vain. The voice of the Almighty saith, 'Up and onward for evermore!' We cannot stay

amid the ruins. Neither will we rely on the new; and so we walk ever with reverted eyes, like those monsters

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 gardenflower, with

no room for its roots and too much sunshine for its head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect of the

gardener is made the banian of the forest, yielding shade and fruit to wide neighborhoods of men.

When the act of reflection takes place in the mind, when we look at ourselves in the light of thought, we

discover that our life is embosomed in beauty. Behind us, as we go, all things assume pleasing forms, as

clouds do far off. Not only things familiar and stale, but even the tragic and terrible are comely as they take

their place in the pictures of memory. The river bank, the weed at the waterside, the old house, the foolish

person, however neglected in the passing, have a grace in the past. Even the corpse that has lain in the

chambers has added a solemn ornament to the house. The soul will not know either deformity or pain. If in

the hours of clear reason we should speak the severest truth, we should say that we had never made a

sacrifice. In these hours the mind seems so great that nothing can be taken from us that seems much. All loss,

all pain, is particular; the universe remains to the heart unhurt. Neither vexations nor calamities abate our

trust. No man ever stated his griefs as lightly as he might. Allow for exaggeration in the most patient and

sorely ridden hack that ever was driven. For it is only the finite that has wrought and suffered; the infinite lies

The intellectual life may be kept clean and healthful if man will live the life of nature and not import into his

mind difficulties which are none of his. No man need be perplexed in his speculations. Let him do and say

what strictly belongs to him, and though very ignorant of books, his nature shall not yield him any intellectual

obstructions and doubts. Our young people are diseased with the theological problems of original sin, origin

of evil, predestination and the like. These never presented a practical difficulty to any man,never darkened

across any man's road who did not go out of his way to seek them. These are the soul's mumps and measles

and whoopingcoughs, and those who have not caught them cannot describe their health or prescribe the

cure. A simple mind will not know these enemies. It is quite another thing that he should be able to give

account of his faith and expound to another the theory of his selfunion and freedom. This requires rare gifts.

Yet without this selfknowledge there may be a sylvan strength and integrity in that which he is. "A few

My will never gave the images in my mind the rank they now take. The regular course of studies, the years of

academical and professional education have not yielded me better facts than some idle books under the bench

at the Latin School. What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so. We form no

guess, at the time of receiving a thought, of its comparative value. And education often wastes its effort in

attempts to thwart and balk this natural magnetism, which is sure to select what belongs to it.

In like manner our moral nature is vitiated by any interference of our will. People represent virtue as a

struggle, and take to themselves great airs upon their attainments, and the question is everywhere vexed when

a noble nature is commended, whether the man is not better who strives with temptation. But there is no merit

in the matter. Either God is there or he is not there. We love characters in proportion as they are impulsive

and spontaneous. The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues the better we like him. Timoleon's

victories are the best victories, which ran and flowed like Homer's verses, Plutarch said. When we see a soul

whose acts are all regal, graceful and pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things can be and are,

and not turn sourly on the angel and say 'Crump is a better man with his grunting resistance to all his native

Not less conspicuous is the preponderance of nature over will in all practical life. There is less intention in

history than we ascribe to it. We impute deeplaid far sighted plans to Caesar and Napoleon; but the best of

their power was in nature, not in them. Men of an extraordinary success, in their honest moments, have

always sung, 'Not unto us, not unto us.' According to the faith of their times they have built altars to Fortune,

or to Destiny, or to St. Julian. Their success lay in their parallelism to the course of thought, which found in

them an unobstructed channel; and the wonders of which they were the visible conductors seemed to the eye

their deed. Did the wires generate the galvanism? It is even true that there was less in them on which they

could reflect than in another; as the virtue of a pipe is to be smooth and hollow. That which externally seemed

will and immovableness was willingness and selfannihilation. Could Shakspeare give a theory of

Shakspeare? Could ever a man of prodigious mathematical genius convey to others any insight into his

methods? If he could communicate that secret it would instantly lose its exaggerated value, blending with the

The lesson is forcibly taught by these observations that our life might be much easier and simpler than we

make it; that the world might be a happier place than it is; that there is no need of struggles, convulsions, and

despairs, of the wringing of the hands and the gnashing of the teeth; that we miscreate our own evils. We

interfere with the optimism of nature; for whenever we get this vantageground of the past, or of a wiser

mind in the present, we are able to discern that we are begirt with laws which execute themselves.

The face of external nature teaches the same lesson. Nature will not have us fret and fume. She does not like

our benevolence or our learning much better than she likes our frauds and wars. When we come out of the

caucus, or the bank, or the Abolitionconvention, or the Temperancemeeting, or the Transcendental club

We are full of mechanical actions. We must needs intermeddle and have things in our own way, until the

sacrifices and virtues of society are odious. Love should make joy; but our benevolence is unhappy. Our

Sundayschools and churches and paupersocieties are yokes to the neck. We pain ourselves to please

nobody. There are natural ways of arriving at the same ends at which these aim, but do not arrive. Why

should all virtue work in one and the same way? Why should all give dollars? It is very inconvenient to us

country folk, and we do not think any good will come of it. We have not dollars; merchants have; let them

give them. Farmers will give corn; poets will sing; women will sew; laborers will lend a hand; the children

will bring flowers. And why drag this dead weight of a Sundayschool over the whole Christendom? It is

natural and beautiful that childhood should inquire and maturity should teach; but it is time enough to answer

questions when they are asked. Do not shut up the young people against their will in a pew and force the

If we look wider, things are all alike; laws and letters and creeds and modes of living seem a travesty of truth.

Our society is encumbered by ponderous machinery, which resembles the endless aqueducts which the

Romans built over hill and dale and which are superseded by the discovery of the law that water rises to the

level of its source. It is a Chinese wall which any nimble Tartar can leap over. It is a standing army, not so

good as a peace. It is a graduated, titled, richly appointed empire, quite superfluous when townmeetings are

Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always works by short ways. When the fruit is ripe, it falls. When the

fruit is despatched, the leaf falls. The circuit of the waters is mere falling. The walking of man and all animals

is a falling forward. All our manual labor and works of strength, as prying, splitting, digging, rowing and so

forth, are done by dint of continual falling, and the globe, earth, moon, comet, sun, star, fall for ever and ever.

The simplicity of the universe is very different from the simplicity of a machine. He who sees moral nature

out and out and thoroughly knows how knowledge is acquired and character formed, is a pedant. The

simplicity of nature is not that which may easily be read, but is inexhaustible. The last analysis can no wise

be made. We judge of a man's wisdom by his hope, knowing that the perception of the inexhaustibleness of

nature is an immortal youth. The wild fertility of nature is felt in comparing our rigid names and reputations

with our fluid consciousness. We pass in the world for sects and schools, for erudition and piety, and we are

all the time jejune babes. One sees very well how Pyrrhonism grew up. Every man sees that he is that middle

point whereof every thing may be affirmed and denied with equal reason. He is old, he is young, he is very

wise, he is altogether ignorant. He hears and feels what you say of the seraphim, and of the tinpeddler.

There is no permanent wise man except in the figment of the Stoics. We side with the hero, as we read or

paint, against the coward and the robber; but we have been ourselves that coward and robber, and shall be

again,not in the low circumstance, but in comparison with the grandeurs possible to the soul.

A little consideration of what takes place around us every day would show us that a higher law than that of

our will regulates events; that our painful labors are unnecessary and fruitless; that only in our easy, simple,

spontaneous action are we strong, and by contenting ourselves with obedience we become divine. Belief and

love,a believing love will relieve us of a vast load of care. O my brothers, God exists. There is a soul at the

centre of nature and over the will of every man, so that none of us can wrong the universe. It has so infused

its strong enchantment into nature that we prosper when we accept its advice, and when we struggle to wound

its creatures our hands are glued to our sides, or they beat our own breasts. The whole course of things goes

to teach us faith. We need only obey. There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear

the right word. Why need you choose so painfully your place and occupation and associates and modes of

action and of entertainment? Certainly there is a possible right for you that precludes the need of balance and

wilful election. For you there is a reality, a fit place and congenial duties. Place yourself in the middle of the

stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth,

to right and a perfect contentment. Then you put all gainsayers in the wrong. Then you are the world, the

measure of right, of truth, of beauty. If we will not be marplots with our miserable interferences, the work,

the society, letters, arts, science, religion of men would go on far better than now, and the heaven predicted

from the beginning of the world, and still predicted from the bottom of the heart, would organize itself, as do

I say, do not choose; but that is a figure of speech by which I would distinguish what is commonly called

choice among men, and which is a partial act, the choice of the hands, of the eyes, of the appetites, and not a

whole act of the man. But that which I call right or goodness, is the choice of my constitution; and that which

I call heaven, and inwardly aspire after, is the state or circumstance desirable to my constitution; and the

action which I in all my years tend to do, is the work for my faculties. We must hold a man amenable to

reason for the choice of his daily craft or profession. It is not an excuse any longer for his deeds that they are

the custom of his trade. What business has he with an evil trade? Has he not a calling in his character?

Each man has his own vocation. The talent is the call. There is one direction in which all space is open to

him. He has faculties silently inviting him thither to endless exertion. He is like a ship in a river; he runs

against obstructions on every side but one, on that side all obstruction is taken away and he sweeps serenely

over a deepening channel into an infinite sea. This talent and this call depend on his organization, or the mode

in which the general soul incarnates itself in him. He inclines to do something which is easy to him and good

when it is done, but which no other man can do. He has no rival. For the more truly he consults his own

powers, the more difference will his work exhibit from the work of any other. His ambition is exactly

proportioned to his powers. The height of the pinnacle is determined by the breadth of the base. Every man

has this call of the power to do somewhat unique, and no man has any other call. The pretence that he has

another call, a summons by name and personal election and outward "signs that mark him extraordinary, and

not in the roll of common men," is fanaticism, and betrays obtuseness to perceive that there is one mind in all

By doing his work he makes the need felt which he can supply, and creates the taste by which he is enjoyed.

By doing his own work he unfolds himself. It is the vice of our public speaking that it has not abandonment.

Somewhere, not only every orator but every man should let out all the length of all the reins; should find or

make a frank and hearty expression of what force and meaning is in him. The common experience is that the

man fits himself as well as he can to the customary details of that work or trade he falls into, and tends it as a

dog turns a spit. Then is he a part of the machine he moves; the man is lost. Until he can manage to

communicate himself to others in his full stature and proportion, he does not yet find his vocation. He must

find in that an outlet for his character, so that he may justify his work to their eyes. If the labor is mean, let

him by his thinking and character make it liberal. Whatever he knows and thinks, whatever in his

apprehension is worth doing, that let him communicate, or men will never know and honor him aright.

Foolish, whenever you take the meanness and formality of that thing you do, instead of converting it into the

We like only such actions as have already long had the praise of men, and do not perceive that any thing man

can do may be divinely done. We think greatness entailed or organized in some places or duties, in certain

offices or occasions, and do not see that Paganini can extract rapture from a catgut, and Eulenstein from a

jewsharp, and a nimblefingered lad out of shreds of paper with his scissors, and Landseer out of swine, and

the hero out of the pitiful habitation and company in which he was hidden. What we call obscure condition or

vulgar society is that condition and society whose poetry is not yet written, but which you shall presently

make as enviable and renowned as any. In our estimates let us take a lesson from kings. The parts of

hospitality, the connection of families, the impressiveness of death, and a thousand other things, royalty

makes its own estimate of, and a royal mind will. To make habitually a new estimate,that is elevation.

What a man does, that he has. What has he to do with hope or fear? In himself is his might. Let him regard no

good as solid but that which is in his nature and which must grow out of him as long as he exists. The goods

of fortune may come and go like summer leaves; let him scatter them on every wind as the momentary signs

He may have his own. A man's genius, the quality that differences him from every other, the susceptibility to

one class of influences, the selection of what is fit for him, the rejection of what is unfit, determines for him

the character of the universe. A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle, gathering

his like to him wherever he goes. He takes only his own out of the multiplicity that sweeps and circles round

him. He is like one of those booms which are set out from the shore on rivers to catch driftwood, or like the

loadstone amongst splinters of steel. Those facts, words, persons, which dwell in his memory without his

being able to say why, remain because they have a relation to him not less real for being as yet

unapprehended. They are symbols of value to him as they can interpret parts of his consciousness which he

would vainly seek words for in the conventional images of books and other minds. What attracts my attention

shall have it, as I will go to the man who knocks at my door, whilst a thousand persons as worthy go by it, to

whom I give no regard. It is enough that these particulars speak to me. A few anecdotes, a few traits of

character, manners, face, a few incidents, have an emphasis in your memory out of all proportion to their

apparent significance if you measure them by the ordinary standards. They relate to your gift. Let them have

their weight, and do not reject them and cast about for illustration and facts more usual in literature. What

Over all things that are agreeable to his nature and genius the man has the highest right. Everywhere he may

take what belongs to his spiritual estate, nor can he take any thing else though all doors were open, nor can all

the force of men hinder him from taking so much. It is vain to attempt to keep a secret from one who has a

right to know it. It will tell itself. That mood into which a friend can bring us is his dominion over us. To the

thoughts of that state of mind he has a right. All the secrets of that state of mind he can compel. This is a law

which statesmen use in practice. All the terrors of the French Republic, which held Austria in awe, were

unable to command her diplomacy. But Napoleon sent to Vienna M. de Narbonne, one of the old noblesse,

with the morals, manners and name of that interest, saying that it was indispensable to send to the old

aristocracy of Europe men of the same connection, which, in fact, constitutes a sort of freemasonry. M. de

Narbonne in less than a fortnight penetrated all the secrets of the imperial cabinet.

Nothing seems so easy as to speak and to be understood. Yet a man may come to find that the strongest of

defences and of ties,that he has been understood; and he who has received an opinion may come to find it

If a teacher have any opinion which he wishes to conceal, his pupils will become as fully indoctrinated into

that as into any which he publishes. If you pour water into a vessel twisted into coils and angles, it is vain to

say, I will pour it only into this or that;it will find its level in all. Men feel and act the consequences of

your doctrine without being able to show how they follow. Show us an arc of the curve, and a good

mathematician will find out the whole figure. We are always reasoning from the seen to the unseen. Hence

the perfect intelligence that subsists between wise men of remote ages. A man cannot bury his meanings so

deep in his book but time and likeminded men will find them. Plato had a secret doctrine, had he? What

secret can he conceal from the eyes of Bacon? of Montaigne? of Kant? Therefore, Aristotle said of his works,

No man can learn what he has not preparation for learning, however near to his eyes is the object. A chemist

may tell his most precious secrets to a carpenter, and he shall be never the wiser,the secrets he would not

utter to a chemist for an estate. God screens us evermore from premature ideas. Our eyes are holden that we

cannot see things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened; then we behold

Not in nature but in man is all the beauty and worth he sees. The world is very empty, and is indebted to this

gilding, exalting soul for all its pride. "Earth fills her lap with splendors" not her own. The vale of Tempe,

Tivoli and Rome are earth and water, rocks and sky. There are as good earth and water in a thousand places,

People are not the better for the sun and moon, the horizon and the trees; as it is not observed that the keepers

of Roman galleries or the valets of painters have any elevation of thought, or that librarians are wiser men

than others. There are graces in the demeanor of a polished and noble person which are lost upon the eye of a

He may see what he maketh. Our dreams are the sequel of our waking knowledge. The visions of the night

bear some proportion to the visions of the day. Hideous dreams are exaggerations of the sins of the day. We

see our evil affections embodied in bad physiognomies. On the Alps the traveller sometimes beholds his own

shadow magnified to a giant, so that every gesture of his hand is terrific. "My children," said an old man to

his boys scared by a figure in the dark entry, "my children, you will never see any thing worse than

yourselves." As in dreams, so in the scarcely less fluid events of the world every man sees himself in

colossal, without knowing that it is himself. The good, compared to the evil which he sees, is as his own good

to his own evil. Every quality of his mind is magnified in some one acquaintance, and every emotion of his

heart in some one. He is like a quincunx of trees, which counts five,east, west, north, or south; or an initial,

medial, and terminal acrostic. And why not? He cleaves to one person and avoids another, according to their

likeness or unlikeness to himself, truly seeking himself in his associates and moreover in his trade and habits

and gestures and meats and drinks, and comes at last to be faithfully represented by every view you take of

He may read what he writes. What can we see or acquire but what we are? You have observed a skilful man

reading Virgil. Well, that author is a thousand books to a thousand persons. Take the book into your two

hands and read your eyes out, you will never find what I find. If any ingenious reader would have a

monopoly of the wisdom or delight he gets, he is as secure now the book is Englished, as if it were

imprisoned in the Pelews' tongue. It is with a good book as it is with good company. Introduce a base person

among gentlemen, it is all to no purpose; he is not their fellow. Every society protects itself. The company is

What avails it to fight with the eternal laws of mind, which adjust the relation of all persons to each other by

the mathematical measure of their havings and beings? Gertrude is enamored of Guy; how high, how

aristocratic, how Roman his mien and manners! to live with him were life indeed, and no purchase is too

great; and heaven and earth are moved to that end. Well, Gertrude has Guy; but what now avails how high,

how aristocratic, how Roman his mien and manners, if his heart and aims are in the senate, in the theatre and

in the billiardroom, and she has no aims, no conversation that can enchant her graceful lord?

He shall have his own society. We can love nothing but nature. The most wonderful talents, the most

meritorious exertions really avail very little with us; but nearness or likeness of nature,how beautiful is the

ease of its victory! Persons approach us, famous for their beauty, for their accomplishments, worthy of all

wonder for their charms and gifts; they dedicate their whole skill to the hour and the company,with very

imperfect result. To be sure it would be ungrateful in us not to praise them loudly. Then, when all is done, a

person of related mind, a brother or sister by nature, comes to us so softly and easily, so nearly and

intimately, as if it were the blood in our proper veins, that we feel as if some one was gone, instead of another

having come; we are utterly relieved and refreshed; it is a sort of joyful solitude. We foolishly think in our

days of sin that we must court friends by compliance to the customs of society, to its dress, its breeding, and

its estimates. But only that soul can be my friend which I encounter on the line of my own march, that soul to

which I do not decline and which does not decline to me, but, native of the same celestial latitude, repeats in

its own all my experience. The scholar forgets himself and apes the customs and costumes of the man of the

world to deserve the smile of beauty, and follows some giddy girl, not yet taught by religious passion to

know the noble woman with all that is serene, oracular and beautiful in her soul. Let him be great, and love

shall follow him. Nothing is more deeply punished than the neglect of the affinities by which alone society

He may set his own rate. It is a maxim worthy of all acceptation that a man may have that allowance he takes.

Take the place and attitude which belong to you, and all men acquiesce. The world must be just. It leaves

every man, with profound unconcern, to set his own rate. Hero or driveller, it meddles not in the matter. It

will certainly accept your own measure of your doing and being, whether you sneak about and deny your own

name, or whether you see your work produced to the concave sphere of the heavens, one with the revolution

The same reality pervades all teaching. The man may teach by doing, and not otherwise. If he can

communicate himself he can teach, but not by words. He teaches who gives, and he learns who receives.

There is no teaching until the pupil is brought into the same state or principle in which you are; a transfusion

takes place; he is you and you are he; then is a teaching, and by no unfriendly chance or bad company can he

ever quite lose the benefit. But your propositions run out of one ear as they ran in at the other. We see it

advertised that Mr. Grand will deliver an oration on the Fourth of July, and Mr. Hand before the Mechanics'

Association, and we do not go thither, because we know that these gentlemen will not communicate their own

character and experience to the company. If we had reason to expect such a confidence we should go through

all inconvenience and opposition. The sick would be carried in litters. But a public oration is an escapade, a

noncommittal, an apology, a gag, and not a communication, not a speech, not a man.

A like Nemesis presides over all intellectual works. We have yet to learn that the thing uttered in words is not

therefore affirmed. It must affirm itself, or no forms of logic or of oath can give it evidence. The sentence

The effect of any writing on the public mind is mathematically measurable by its depth of thought. How

much water does it draw? If it awaken you to think, if it lift you from your feet with the great voice of

eloquence, then the effect is to be wide, slow, permanent, over the minds of men; if the pages instruct you

not, they will die like flies in the hour. The way to speak and write what shall not go out of fashion is to speak

and write sincerely. The argument which has not power to reach my own practice, I may well doubt will fail

to reach yours. But take Sidney's maxim:"Look in thy heart, and write." He that writes to himself writes to

an eternal public. That statement only is fit to be made public which you have come at in attempting to satisfy

your own curiosity. The writer who takes his subject from his ear and not from his heart, should know that he

has lost as much as he seems to have gained, and when the empty book has gathered all its praise, and half

the people say, 'What poetry! what genius!' it still needs fuel to make fire. That only profits which is

profitable. Life alone can impart life; and though we should burst we can only be valued as we make

ourselves valuable. There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every

book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears, but a court as of angels, a public not to

be bribed, not to be entreated and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame. Only those

books come down which deserve to last. Gilt edges, vellum and morocco, and presentationcopies to all the

libraries will not preserve a book in circulation beyond its intrinsic date. It must go with all Walpole's Noble

and Royal Authors to its fate. Blackmore, Kotzebue, or Pollok may endure for a night, but Moses and Homer

stand for ever. There are not in the world at any one time more than a dozen persons who read and understand

Plato,never enough to pay for an edition of his works; yet to every generation these come duly down, for

the sake of those few persons, as if God brought them in his hand. "No book," said Bentley, "was ever written

down by any but itself." The permanence of all books is fixed by no effort, friendly or hostile, but by their

own specific gravity, or the intrinsic importance of their contents to the constant mind of man. "Do not

trouble yourself too much about the light on your statue," said Michael Angelo to the young sculptor; "the

In like manner the effect of every action is measured by the depth of the sentiment from which it proceeds.

The great man knew not that he was great. It took a century or two for that fact to appear. What he did, he did

because he must; it was the most natural thing in the world, and grew out of the circumstances of the

moment. But now, every thing he did, even to the lifting of his finger or the eating of bread, looks large, all

These are the demonstrations in a few particulars of the genius of nature; they show the direction of the

stream. But the stream is blood; every drop is alive. Truth has not single victories; all things are its

organs,not only dust and stones, but errors and lies. The laws of disease, physicians say, are as beautiful as

the laws of health. Our philosophy is affirmative and readily accepts the testimony of negative facts, as every

shadow points to the sun. By a divine necessity every fact in nature is constrained to offer its testimony.

Human character evermore publishes itself. The most fugitive deed and word, the mere air of doing a thing,

the intimated purpose, expresses character. If you act you show character; if you sit still, if you sleep, you

show it. You think because you have spoken nothing when others spoke, and have given no opinion on the

times, on the church, on slavery, on marriage, on socialism, on secret societies, on the college, on parties and

persons, that your verdict is still expected with curiosity as a reserved wisdom. Far otherwise; your silence

answers very loud. You have no oracle to utter, and your fellowmen have learned that you cannot help

them; for oracles speak. Doth not Wisdom cry and Understanding put forth her voice?

Dreadful limits are set in nature to the powers of dissimulation. Truth tyrannizes over the unwilling members

of the body. Faces never lie, it is said. No man need be deceived who will study the changes of expression.

When a man speaks the truth in the spirit of truth, his eye is as clear as the heavens. When he has base ends

I have heard an experienced counsellor say that he never feared the effect upon a jury of a lawyer who does

not believe in his heart that his client ought to have a verdict. If he does not believe it his unbelief will appear

to the jury, despite all his protestations, and will become their unbelief. This is that law whereby a work of

art, of whatever kind, sets us in the same state of mind wherein the artist was when he made it. That which we

do not believe we cannot adequately say, though we may repeat the words never so often. It was this

conviction which Swedenborg expressed when he described a group of persons in the spiritual world

endeavoring in vain to articulate a proposition which they did not believe; but they could not, though they

A man passes for that he is worth. Very idle is all curiosity concerning other people's estimate of us, and all

fear of remaining unknown is not less so. If a man know that he can do any thing,that he can do it better

than any one else,he has a pledge of the acknowledgment of that fact by all persons. The world is full of

judgmentdays, and into every assembly that a man enters, in every action he attempts, he is gauged and

stamped. In every troop of boys that whoop and run in each yard and square, a newcomer is as well and

accurately weighed in the course of a few days and stamped with his right number, as if he had undergone a

formal trial of his strength, speed and temper. A stranger comes from a distant school, with better dress, with

trinkets in his pockets, with airs and pretensions; an older boy says to himself, 'It's of no use; we shall find

him out tomorrow.' 'What has he done?' is the divine question which searches men and transpierces every

false reputation. A fop may sit in any chair of the world nor be distinguished for his hour from Homer and

Washington; but there need never be any doubt concerning the respective ability of human beings. Pretension

may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad,

As much virtue as there is, so much appears; as much goodness as there is, so much reverence it commands.

All the devils respect virtue. The high, the generous, the selfdevoted sect will always instruct and command

mankind. Never was a sincere word utterly lost. Never a magnanimity fell to the ground, but there is some

heart to greet and accept it unexpectedly. A man passes for that he is worth. What he is engraves itself on his

face, on his form, on his fortunes, in letters of light. Concealment avails him nothing, boasting nothing. There

is confession in the glances of our eyes, in our smiles, in salutations, and the grasp of hands. His sin bedaubs

him, mars all his good impression. Men know not why they do not trust him, but they do not trust him. His

vice glasses his eye, cuts lines of mean expression in his cheek, pinches the nose, sets the mark of the beast

If you would not be known to do any thing, never do it. A man may play the fool in the drifts of a desert, but

every grain of sand shall seem to see. He may be a solitary eater, but he cannot keep his foolish counsel. A

broken complexion, a swinish look, ungenerous acts and the want of due knowledge,all blab. Can a cook, a

Chiffinch, an Iachimo be mistaken for Zeno or Paul? Confucius exclaimed,"How can a man be concealed?

On the other hand, the hero fears not that if he withhold the avowal of a just and brave act it will go

unwitnessed and unloved. One knows it,himself, and is pledged by it to sweetness of peace and to

nobleness of aim which will prove in the end a better proclamation of it than the relating of the incident.

Virtue is the adherence in action to the nature of things, and the nature of things makes it prevalent. It

consists in a perpetual substitution of being for seeming, and with sublime propriety God is described as

The lesson which these observations convey is, Be, and not seem. Let us acquiesce. Let us take our bloated

nothingness out of the path of the divine circuits. Let us unlearn our wisdom of the world. Let us lie low in

If you visit your friend, why need you apologize for not having visited him, and waste his time and deface

your own act? Visit him now. Let him feel that the highest love has come to see him, in thee its lowest organ.

Or why need you torment yourself and friend by secret selfreproaches that you have not assisted him or

complimented him with gifts and salutations heretofore? Be a gift and a benediction. Shine with real light and

not with the borrowed reflection of gifts. Common men are apologies for men; they bow the head, excuse

themselves with prolix reasons, and accumulate appearances because the substance is not.

We are full of these superstitions of sense, the worship of magnitude. We call the poet inactive, because he is

not a president, a merchant, or a porter. We adore an institution, and do not see that it is founded on a thought

which we have. But real action is in silent moments. The epochs of our life are not in the visible facts of our

choice of a calling, our marriage, our acquisition of an office, and the like, but in a silent thought by the

wayside as we walk; in a thought which revises our entire manner of life and says,'Thus hast thou done,

but it were better thus.' And all our after years, like menials, serve and wait on this, and according to their

ability execute its will. This revisal or correction is a constant force, which, as a tendency, reaches through

our lifetime. The object of the man, the aim of these moments, is to make daylight shine through him, to

suffer the law to traverse his whole being without obstruction, so that on what point soever of his doing your

eye falls it shall report truly of his character, whether it be his diet, his house, his religious forms, his society,

his mirth, his vote, his opposition. Now he is not homogeneous, but heterogeneous, and the ray does not

traverse; there are no thorough lights, but the eye of the beholder is puzzled, detecting many unlike

Why should we make it a point with our false modesty to disparage that man we are and that form of being

assigned to us? A good man is contented. I love and honor Epaminondas, but I do not wish to be

Epaminondas. I hold it more just to love the world of this hour than the world of his hour. Nor can you, if I

am true, excite me to the least uneasiness by saying, 'He acted and thou sittest still.' I see action to be good,

when the need is, and sitting still to be also good. Epaminondas, if he was the man I take him for, would have

sat still with joy and peace, if his lot had been mine. Heaven is large, and affords space for all modes of love

and fortitude. Why should we be busybodies and superserviceable? Action and inaction are alike to the true.

One piece of the tree is cut for a weathercock and one for the sleeper of a bridge; the virtue of the wood is

I desire not to disgrace the soul. The fact that I am here certainly shows me that the soul had need of an organ

here. Shall I not assume the post? Shall I skulk and dodge and duck with my unseasonable apologies and vain

modesty and imagine my being here impertinent? less pertinent than Epaminondas or Homer being there? and

that the soul did not know its own needs? Besides, without any reasoning on the matter, I have no discontent.

The good soul nourishes me and unlocks new magazines of power and enjoyment to me every day. I will not

meanly decline the immensity of good, because I have heard that it has come to others in another shape.

Besides, why should we be cowed by the name of Action? 'Tis a trick of the senses,no more. We know that

the ancestor of every action is a thought. The poor mind does not seem to itself to be any thing unless it have

an outside badge,some Gentoo diet, or Quaker coat, or Calvinistic prayermeeting, or philanthropic

society, or a great donation, or a high office, or, any how, some wild contrasting action to testify that it is

somewhat. The rich mind lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature. To think is to act.

Let us, if we must have great actions, make our own so. All action is of an infinite elasticity, and the least

admits of being inflated with the celestial air until it eclipses the sun and moon. Let us seek one peace by

fidelity. Let me heed my duties. Why need I go gadding into the scenes and philosophy of Greek and Italian

history before I have justified myself to my benefactors? How dare I read Washington's campaigns when I

have not answered the letters of my own correspondents? Is not that a just objection to much of our reading?

It is a pusillanimous desertion of our work to gaze after our neighbors. It is peeping. Byron says of Jack

I may say it of our preposterous use of books,He knew not what to do, and so he read. I can think of

nothing to fill my time with, and I find the Life of Brant. It is a very extravagant compliment to pay to Brant,

or to General Schuyler, or to General Washington. My time should be as good as their time,my facts, my

net of relations, as good as theirs, or either of theirs. Rather let me do my work so well that other idlers if they

choose may compare my texture with the texture of these and find it identical with the best.

This overestimate of the possibilities of Paul and Pericles, this underestimate of our own, comes from a

neglect of the fact of an identical nature. Bonaparte knew but one merit, and rewarded in one and the same

way the good soldier, the good astronomer, the good poet, the good player. The poet uses the names of

Caesar, of Tamerlane, of Bonduca, of Belisarius; the painter uses the conventional story of the Virgin Mary,

of Paul, of Peter. He does not therefore defer to the nature of these accidental men, of these stock heroes. If

the poet write a true drama, then he is Caesar, and not the player of Caesar; then the selfsame strain of

thought, emotion as pure, wit as subtle, motions as swift, mounting, extravagant, and a heart as great,

selfsufficing, dauntless, which on the waves of its love and hope can uplift all that is reckoned solid and

precious in the world,palaces, gardens, money, navies, kingdoms,marking its own incomparable worth

by the slight it casts on these gauds of men;these all are his, and by the power of these he rouses the

nations. Let a man believe in God, and not in names and places and persons. Let the great soul incarnated in

some woman's form, poor and sad and single, in some Dolly or Joan, go out to service, and sweep chambers

and scour floors, and its effulgent daybeams cannot be muffled or hid, but to sweep and scour will instantly

appear supreme and beautiful actions, the top and radiance of human life, and all people will get mops and

brooms; until, lo! suddenly the great soul has enshrined itself in some other form and done some other deed,

We are the photometers, we the irritable goldleaf and tinfoil that measure the accumulations of the subtle

element. We know the authentic effects of the true fire through every one of its million disguises.

Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfilments; each of its joys ripens into a new want. Nature,

uncontainable, flowing, forelooking, in the first sentiment of kindness anticipates already a benevolence

which shall lose all particular regards in its general light. The introduction to this felicity is in a private and

tender relation of one to one, which is the enchantment of human life; which, like a certain divine rage and

enthusiasm, seizes on man at one period and works a revolution in his mind and body; unites him to his race,

pledges him to the domestic and civic relations, carries him with new sympathy into nature, enhances the

power of the senses, opens the imagination, adds to his character heroic and sacred attributes, establishes

The natural association of the sentiment of love with the heyday of the blood seems to require that in order to

portray it in vivid tints, which every youth and maid should confess to be true to their throbbing experience,

one must not be too old. The delicious fancies of youth reject the least savor of a mature philosophy, as

chilling with age and pedantry their purple bloom. And therefore I know I incur the imputation of

unnecessary hardness and stoicism from those who compose the Court and Parliament of Love. But from

these formidable censors I shall appeal to my seniors. For it is to be considered that this passion of which we

speak, though it begin with the young, yet forsakes not the old, or rather suffers no one who is truly its

servant to grow old, but makes the aged participators of it not less than the tender maiden, though in a

different and nobler sort. For it is a fire that kindling its first embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom,

caught from a wandering spark out of another private heart, glows and enlarges until it warms and beams

upon multitudes of men and women, upon the universal heart of all, and so lights up the whole world and all

nature with its generous flames. It matters not therefore whether we attempt to describe the passion at twenty,

at thirty, or at eighty years. He who paints it at the first period will lose some of its later, he who paints it at

the last, some of its earlier traits. Only it is to be hoped that by patience and the Muses' aid we may attain to

that inward view of the law which shall describe a truth ever young and beautiful, so central that it shall

And the first condition is, that we must leave a too close and lingering adherence to facts, and study the

sentiment as it appeared in hope and not in history. For each man sees his own life defaced and disfigured, as

the life of man is not, to his imagination. Each man sees over his own experience a certain stain of error,

whilst that of other men looks fair and ideal. Let any man go back to those delicious relations which make the

beauty of his life, which have given him sincerest instruction and nourishment, he will shrink and moan.

Alas! I know not why, but infinite compunctions embitter in mature life the remembrances of budding joy

and cover every beloved name. Every thing is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all

is sour, if seen as experience. Details are melancholy; the plan is seemly and noble. In the actual worldthe

painful kingdom of time and placedwell care, and canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is

immortal hilarity, the rose of joy. Round it all the Muses sing. But grief cleaves to names, and persons, and

The strong bent of nature is seen in the proportion which this topic of personal relations usurps in the

conversation of society. What do we wish to know of any worthy person so much, as how he has sped in the

history of this sentiment? What books in the circulating libraries circulate? How we glow over these novels of

passion, when the story is told with any spark of truth and nature! And what fastens attention, in the

intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between two parties? Perhaps we never saw them

before, and never shall meet them again. But we see them exchange a glance, or betray a deep emotion, and

we are no longer strangers. We understand them, and take the warmest interest in the development of the

romance. All mankind love a lover. The earliest demonstrations of complacency and kindness are nature's

most winning pictures. It is the dawn of civility and grace in the coarse and rustic. The rude village boy teases

the girls about the schoolhouse door;but today he comes running into the entry, and meets one fair child

disposing her satchel; he holds her books to help her, and instantly it seems to him as if she removed herself

from him infinitely, and was a sacred precinct. Among the throng of girls he runs rudely enough, but one

alone distances him; and these two little neighbors, that were so close just now, have learned to respect each

other's personality. Or who can avert his eyes from the engaging, halfartful, halfartless ways of

schoolgirls who go into the country shops to buy a skein of silk or a sheet of paper, and talk half an hour

about nothing with the broadfaced, goodnatured shopboy. In the village they are on a perfect equality,

which love delights in, and without any coquetry the happy, affectionate nature of woman flows out in this

pretty gossip. The girls may have little beauty, yet plainly do they establish between them and the good boy

the most agreeable, confiding relations, what with their fun and their earnest, about Edgar and Jonas and

Almira, and who was invited to the party, and who danced at the dancingschool, and when the

singingschool would begin, and other nothings concerning which the parties cooed. By and by that boy

wants a wife, and very truly and heartily will he know where to find a sincere and sweet mate, without any

I have been told that in some public discourses of mine my reverence for the intellect has made me unjustly

cold to the personal relations. But now I almost shrink at the remembrance of such disparaging words. For

persons are love's world, and the coldest philosopher cannot recount the debt of the young soul wandering

here in nature to the power of love, without being tempted to unsay, as treasonable to nature, aught

derogatory to the social instincts. For though the celestial rapture falling out of heaven seizes only upon those

of tender age, and although a beauty overpowering all analysis or comparison and putting us quite beside

ourselves we can seldom see after thirty years, yet the remembrance of these visions outlasts all other

remembrances, and is a wreath of flowers on the oldest brows. But here is a strange fact; it may seem to many

men, in revising their experience, that they have no fairer page in their life's book than the delicious memory

of some passages wherein affection contrived to give a witchcraft, surpassing the deep attraction of its own

truth, to a parcel of accidental and trivial circumstances. In looking backward they may find that several

things which were not the charm have more reality to this groping memory than the charm itself which

embalmed them. But be our experience in particulars what it may, no man ever forgot the visitations of that

power to his heart and brain, which created all things anew; which was the dawn in him of music, poetry, and

art; which made the face of nature radiant with purple light, the morning and the night varied enchantments;

when a single tone of one voice could make the heart bound, and the most trivial circumstance associated

with one form is put in the amber of memory; when he became all eye when one was present, and all memory

when one was gone; when the youth becomes a watcher of windows and studious of a glove, a veil, a ribbon,

or the wheels of a carriage; when no place is too solitary and none too silent, for him who has richer company

and sweeter conversation in his new thoughts than any old friends, though best and purest, can give him; for

the figures, the motions, the words of the beloved object are not like other images written in water, but, as

In the noon and the afternoon of life we still throb at the recollection of days when happiness was not happy

enough, but must be drugged with the relish of pain and fear; for he touched the secret of the matter who said

and when the day was not long enough, but the night too must be consumed in keen recollections; when the

head boiled all night on the pillow with the generous deed it resolved on; when the moonlight was a pleasing

fever and the stars were letters and the flowers ciphers and the air was coined into song; when all business

seemed an impertinence, and all the men and women running to and fro in the streets, mere pictures.

The passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant. Nature grows

conscious. Every bird on the boughs of the tree sings now to his heart and soul. The notes are almost

articulate. The clouds have faces as he looks on them. The trees of the forest, the waving grass and the

peeping flowers have grown intelligent; and he almost fears to trust them with the secret which they seem to

invite. Yet nature soothes and sympathizes. In the green solitude he finds a dearer home than with men:

Behold there in the wood the fine madman! He is a palace of sweet sounds and sights; he dilates; he is twice a

man; he walks with arms akimbo; he soliloquizes; he accosts the grass and the trees; he feels the blood of the

violet, the clover and the lily in his veins; and he talks with the brook that wets his foot.

The heats that have opened his perceptions of natural beauty have made him love music and verse. It is a fact

often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well

The like force has the passion over all his nature. It expands the sentiment; it makes the clown gentle and

gives the coward heart. Into the most pitiful and abject it will infuse a heart and courage to defy the world, so

only it have the countenance of the beloved object. In giving him to another it still more gives him to himself.

He is a new man, with new perceptions, new and keener purposes, and a religious solemnity of character and

aims. He does not longer appertain to his family and society; he is somewhat; he is a person; he is a soul.

And here let us examine a little nearer the nature of that influence which is thus potent over the human youth.

Beauty, whose revelation to man we now celebrate, welcome as the sun wherever it pleases to shine, which

pleases everybody with it and with themselves, seems sufficient to itself. The lover cannot paint his maiden

to his fancy poor and solitary. Like a tree in flower, so much soft, budding, informing loveliness is society for

itself; and she teaches his eye why Beauty was pictured with Loves and Graces attending her steps. Her

existence makes the world rich. Though she extrudes all other persons from his attention as cheap and

unworthy, she indemnifies him by carrying out her own being into somewhat impersonal, large, mundane, so

that the maiden stands to him for a representative of all select things and virtues. For that reason the lover

never sees personal resemblances in his mistress to her kindred or to others. His friends find in her a likeness

to her mother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no resemblance except to summer

The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue. Who can analyze the nameless charm which glances from

one and another face and form? We are touched with emotions of tenderness and complacency, but we cannot

find whereat this dainty emotion, this wandering gleam, points. It is destroyed for the imagination by any

attempt to refer it to organization. Nor does it point to any relations of friendship or love known and

described in society, but, as it seems to me, to a quite other and unattainable sphere, to relations of

transcendent delicacy and sweetness, to what roses and violets hint and foreshow. We cannot approach

beauty. Its nature is like opaline doves'neck lustres, hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles the most

excellent things, which all have this rainbow character, defying all attempts at appropriation and use. What

else did Jean Paul Richter signify, when he said to music, "Away! away! thou speakest to me of things which

in all my endless life I have not found, and shall not find." The same fluency may be observed in every work

of the plastic arts. The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out

of criticism and can no longer be defined by compass and measuringwand, but demands an active

imagination to go with it and to say what it is in the act of doing. The god or hero of the sculptor is always

represented in a transition from that which is representable to the senses, to that which is not. Then first it

ceases to be a stone. The same remark holds of painting. And of poetry the success is not attained when it

lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and fires us with new endeavors after the unattainable. Concerning it

Landor inquires "whether it is not to be referred to some purer state of sensation and existence."

In like manner, personal beauty is then first charming and itself when it dissatisfies us with any end; when it

becomes a story without an end; when it suggests gleams and visions and not earthly satisfactions; when it

makes the beholder feel his unworthiness; when he cannot feel his right to it, though he were Caesar; he

cannot feel more right to it than to the firmament and the splendors of a sunset.

Hence arose the saying, "If I love you, what is that to you?" We say so because we feel that what we love is

not in your will, but above it. It is not you, but your radiance. It is that which you know not in yourself and

This agrees well with that high philosophy of Beauty which the ancient writers delighted in; for they said that

the soul of man, embodied here on earth, went roaming up and down in quest of that other world of its own

out of which it came into this, but was soon stupefied by the light of the natural sun, and unable to see any

other objects than those of this world, which are but shadows of real things. Therefore the Deity sends the

glory of youth before the soul, that it may avail itself of beautiful bodies as aids to its recollection of the

celestial good and fair; and the man beholding such a person in the female sex runs to her and finds the

highest joy in contemplating the form, movement, and intelligence of this person, because it suggests to him

the presence of that which indeed is within the beauty, and the cause of the beauty.

If however, from too much conversing with material objects, the soul was gross, and misplaced its

satisfaction in the body, it reaped nothing but sorrow; body being unable to fulfil the promise which beauty

holds out; but if, accepting the hint of these visions and suggestions which beauty makes to his mind, the soul

passes through the body and falls to admire strokes of character, and the lovers contemplate one another in

their discourses and their actions, then they pass to the true palace of beauty, more and more inflame their

love of it, and by this love extinguishing the base affection, as the sun puts out the fire by shining on the

hearth, they become pure and hallowed. By conversation with that which is in itself excellent, magnanimous,

lowly, and just, the lover comes to a warmer love of these nobilities, and a quicker apprehension of them.

Then he passes from loving them in one to loving them in all, and so is the one beautiful soul only the door

through which he enters to the society of all true and pure souls. In the particular society of his mate he

attains a clearer sight of any spot, any taint which her beauty has contracted from this world, and is able to

point it out, and this with mutual joy that they are now able, without offence, to indicate blemishes and

hindrances in each other, and give to each all help and comfort in curing the same. And beholding in many

souls the traits of the divine beauty, and separating in each soul that which is divine from the taint which it

has contracted in the world, the lover ascends to the highest beauty, to the love and knowledge of the

Somewhat like this have the truly wise told us of love in all ages. The doctrine is not old, nor is it new. If

Plato, Plutarch and Apuleius taught it, so have Petrarch, Angelo and Milton. It awaits a truer unfolding in

opposition and rebuke to that subterranean prudence which presides at marriages with words that take hold of

the upper world, whilst one eye is prowling in the cellar; so that its gravest discourse has a savor of hams and

powderingtubs. Worst, when this sensualism intrudes into the education of young women, and withers the

hope and affection of human nature by teaching that marriage signifies nothing but a housewife's thrift, and

But this dream of love, though beautiful, is only one scene in our play. In the procession of the soul from

within outward, it enlarges its circles ever, like the pebble thrown into the pond, or the light proceeding from

an orb. The rays of the soul alight first on things nearest, on every utensil and toy, on nurses and domestics,

on the house and yard and passengers, on the circle of household acquaintance, on politics and geography and

history. But things are ever grouping themselves according to higher or more interior laws. Neighborhood,

size, numbers, habits, persons, lose by degrees their power over us. Cause and effect, real affinities, the

longing for harmony between the soul and the circumstance, the progressive, idealizing instinct, predominate

later, and the step backward from the higher to the lower relations is impossible. Thus even love, which is the

deification of persons, must become more impersonal every day. Of this at first it gives no hint. Little think

the youth and maiden who are glancing at each other across crowded rooms with eyes so full of mutual

intelligence, of the precious fruit long hereafter to proceed from this new, quite external stimulus. The work

of vegetation begins first in the irritability of the bark and leafbuds. From exchanging glances, they advance

to acts of courtesy, of gallantry, then to fiery passion, to plighting troth and marriage. Passion beholds its

object as a perfect unit. The soul is wholly embodied, and the body is wholly ensouled:

Romeo, if dead, should be cut up into little stars to make the heavens fine. Life, with this pair, has no other

aim, asks no more, than Juliet,than Romeo. Night, day, studies, talents, kingdoms, religion, are all

contained in this form full of soul, in this soul which is all form. The lovers delight in endearments, in

avowals of love, in comparisons of their regards. When alone, they solace themselves with the remembered

image of the other. Does that other see the same star, the same melting cloud, read the same book, feel the

same emotion, that now delight me? They try and weigh their affection, and adding up costly advantages,

friends, opportunities, properties, exult in discovering that willingly, joyfully, they would give all as a ransom

for the beautiful, the beloved head, not one hair of which shall be harmed. But the lot of humanity is on these

children. Danger, sorrow, and pain arrive to them, as to all. Love prays. It makes covenants with Eternal

Power in behalf of this dear mate. The union which is thus effected and which adds a new value to every

atom in naturefor it transmutes every thread throughout the whole web of relation into a golden ray, and

bathes the soul in a new and sweeter elementis yet a temporary state. Not always can flowers, pearls,

poetry, protestations, nor even home in another heart, content the awful soul that dwells in clay. It arouses

itself at last from these endearments, as toys, and puts on the harness and aspires to vast and universal aims.

The soul which is in the soul of each, craving a perfect beatitude, detects incongruities, defects and

disproportion in the behavior of the other. Hence arise surprise, expostulation and pain. Yet that which drew

them to each other was signs of loveliness, signs of virtue; and these virtues are there, however eclipsed.

They appear and reappear and continue to attract; but the regard changes, quits the sign and attaches to the

substance. This repairs the wounded affection. Meantime, as life wears on, it proves a game of permutation

and combination of all possible positions of the parties, to employ all the resources of each and acquaint each

with the strength and weakness of the other. For it is the nature and end of this relation, that they should

represent the human race to each other. All that is in the world, which is or ought to be known, is cunningly

The world rolls; the circumstances vary every hour. The angels that inhabit this temple of the body appear at

the windows, and the gnomes and vices also. By all the virtues they are united. If there be virtue, all the vices

are known as such; they confess and flee. Their once flaming regard is sobered by time in either breast, and

losing in violence what it gains in extent, it becomes a thorough good understanding. They resign each other

without complaint to the good offices which man and woman are severally appointed to discharge in time,

and exchange the passion which once could not lose sight of its object, for a cheerful, disengaged furtherance,

whether present or absent, of each other's designs. At last they discover that all which at first drew them

together,those once sacred features, that magical play of charms,was deciduous, had a prospective end,

like the scaffolding by which the house was built; and the purification of the intellect and the heart from year

to year is the real marriage, foreseen and prepared from the first, and wholly above their consciousness.

Looking at these aims with which two persons, a man and a woman, so variously and correlatively gifted, are

shut up in one house to spend in the nuptial society forty or fifty years, I do not wonder at the emphasis with

which the heart prophesies this crisis from early infancy, at the profuse beauty with which the instincts deck

the nuptial bower, and nature and intellect and art emulate each other in the gifts and the melody they bring to

Thus are we put in training for a love which knows not sex, nor person, nor partiality, but which seeks virtue

and wisdom everywhere, to the end of increasing virtue and wisdom. We are by nature observers, and thereby

learners. That is our permanent state. But we are often made to feel that our affections are but tents of a night.

Though slowly and with pain, the objects of the affections change, as the objects of thought do. There are

moments when the affections rule and absorb the man and make his happiness dependent on a person or

persons. But in health the mind is presently seen again,its overarching vault, bright with galaxies of

immutable lights, and the warm loves and fears that swept over us as clouds must lose their finite character

and blend with God, to attain their own perfection. But we need not fear that we can lose any thing by the

progress of the soul. The soul may be trusted to the end. That which is so beautiful and attractive as these

relations, must be succeeded and supplanted only by what is more beautiful, and so on for ever.

A RUDDY drop of manly blood The surging sea outweighs; The world uncertain comes and goes, The lover

rooted stays. I fancied he was fled, And, after many a year, Glowed unexhausted kindliness Like daily sunrise

there. My careful heart was free again, O friend, my bosom said, Through thee alone the sky is arched,

Through thee the rose is red, All things through thee take nobler form And look beyond the earth, The

millround of our fate appears A sunpath in thy worth. Me too thy nobleness has taught To master my

We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. Maugre 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

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 towards 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 goodwill, they make the

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 betwixt 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.

What is so pleasant as these jets of affection which make a young world for me again? What 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

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 nobleminded, as from time to time they pass my

gate. 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 in a traditionary globe. My friends have come 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 derides and cancels the thick walls of individual

character, relation, age, sex, 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, poetry without stop,hymn, ode and

epic, poetry still flowing, Apollo and the Muses chanting still. Will these too 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 of my life being thus social, the same affinity will exert its energy on

I confess to an extreme tenderness of nature on this point. It is almost dangerous to me to "crush the sweet

poison of misused wine" of the affections. A new person is to me a great event and hinders me from sleep. I

have often had fine fancies about persons which 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 overestimate the conscience of our friend. His

goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Every thing that is his,his

name, his form, his dress, books and instruments,fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger

Yet the systole and diastole of the heart are not without their analogy in the ebb and flow of love. Friendship,

like the immortality 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 afterwards

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? 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 amidst these pleasing reveries, though it should prove an Egyptian skull at our

banquet. A man who stands united with his thought conceives magnificently of himself. He is conscious of a

universal success, 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, moonlike

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 last 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. Is

it 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? The law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces

the opposite. The soul environs itself with friends that it may enter into a grander selfacquaintance 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

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, instead of the tough fibre of the human heart. The laws of

friendship are 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

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, the joy I find in all the rest becomes mean and cowardly. I should hate myself, if then I made my

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 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

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.

I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass

threads or frostwork, 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, to the great games where the

firstborn of the world are the competitors. He proposes himself for contests 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 speed 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, like 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 fellowman by compliments, by gossip, by

amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds. I knew a man who under a

certain religious frenzy cast off this drapery, and omitting all compliment 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 doingfor 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

readingrooms. But every man was constrained by so much sincerity to the like plaindealing, 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 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

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, "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. 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 ploughboys and tinpeddlers to the silken and perfumed amity which

celebrates its days of encounter by a frivolous display, by rides in a curricle 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

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 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 merge their egotism into a social soul exactly coextensive 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

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

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.

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 selfelected. 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 benefit.

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 for ever 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.

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 inquinat,

aequat. To those whom we admire and love, at first we cannot. Yet the least defect of selfpossession

vitiates, in my judgment, the entire relation. There can never be deep peace between two spirits, never mutual

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 any thing 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 never

catch 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

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,

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

firstborn of the world,those rare pilgrims whereof only one or two wander in nature at once, and before

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 Janusfaced;

he looks to the past and the future. He is the child of all my foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come,

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 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 lustres, 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

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. 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

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 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 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 copresence 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

There are all degrees of proficiency in knowledge of the world. It is sufficient to our present purpose to

indicate three. One class live to the utility of the symbol, esteeming health and wealth a final good. Another

class live above this mark to 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

The world is filled with the proverbs 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 never gives, 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 every thing 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

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 coperception 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

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, 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

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; if we walk in the woods we must

feed mosquitos; if we go afishing 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 datetree 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, and 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 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 insures 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

firewood in a shed or in the harvesting of fruits in the cellar, as in Peninsular campaigns or the files of the

Department of State. In the rainy day he builds a workbench, or gets his toolbox set in the corner of the

barnchamber, and stored with nails, gimlet, pincers, screwdriver and chisel. Herein he tastes an old joy of

youth and childhood, the catlike love of garrets, presses and cornchambers, and of the conveniences of

long housekeeping. His garden or his poultryyard 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, "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 byword, "No mistake." But the discomfort of unpunctuality, of confusion of thought about

facts, of inattention to the wants of tomorrow, 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 when it is too late in the season to make hay? Scatterbrained and "afternoon"

men spoil much more than their own affair 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, 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 stoolslet 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 (the only greatly 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, call a spade a spade, give us facts, and honor their own senses with trust.

But what man shall dare tax 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 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 halflights, by courtesy,

genius; talent which converts itself to money; talent which glitters today that it may dine and sleep well

tomorrow; and society is officered by men of parts, 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 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 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 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 the

Third 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, selfindulgent, becomes presently unfortunate,

The scholar shames us by his bifold life. Whilst something higher than prudence is active, he is admirable;

when common sense is wanted, he is an encumbrance. Yesterday, Caesar was not so great; today, the felon

at the gallows' foot is not more 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. He

resembles the pitiful drivellers whom travellers describe as frequenting the bazaars of Constantinople, who

skulk about all day, yellow, emaciated, ragged, sneaking; and at evening, when the bazaars are open, slink to

the opiumshop, swallow their morsel and become tranquil and glorified seers. And who has not seen the

tragedy of imprudent genius struggling for years with paltry pecuniary difficulties, at last sinking, chilled,

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 selfdenial?

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, or the StateStreet prudence of buying by the acre to

sell by the foot; or the thrift of the agriculturist, to stick 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 dryrot; 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 takes banknotes, 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 every thing in nature, even motes and feathers,

go by law and not by luck, and that what he sows he reaps. By diligence and selfcommand let him put the

bread he eats at his own disposal, 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. How much of human life is lost in waiting! let

him not make his fellowcreatures 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 round 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 wellbeing 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,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 singlehearted 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 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 fear

groundless. The Latin proverb says, "In battles the eye is first overcome." Entire selfpossession 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 goodwill of the meanest person, uneasy at his illwill. 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

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 eyewater. 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 they set out to

contend, Saint Paul will lie and Saint John will hate. What low, poor, paltry, hypocritical people an argument

on religion will make of the pure and chosen souls! They will shuffle 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 with your

contemporaries by indulging a vein of hostility and bitterness. Though your views are in straight antagonism

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 motions 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 external diversities,

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? Tomorrow will be like today. Life wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live. Our friends and

fellowworkers 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 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 life would be dearer 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 gardenbeds.

Thus truth, frankness, courage, love, humility and all the virtues range themselves on the side of prudence, or

the art of securing a present wellbeing. 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 we are pretty sure in a short space to be mumbling our ten commandments.

In the elder English dramatists, and mainly in the plays Of Beaumont and Fletcher, 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 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,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:

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," and some sonnets, have a certain noble music; and

Scott will sometimes draw a stroke like the portrait of Lord Evandale given by Balfour of Burley. Thomas

Carlyle, 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 has given us a song or

two. In the Harleian Miscellanies there is an account of the battle of Lutzen which deserves to be read. And

Simon Ockley's 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 requires of

him some proper protestations of abhorrence. But if we explore the literature of Heroism we shall quickly

come to Plutarch, who is its Doctor and historian. To him we owe the Brasidas, the Dion, the Epaminondas,

the Scipio 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 not of the schools but of the blood, shines in every anecdote, and has given that book its

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 chimneyside 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 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.

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 wellbeing require that he should not go dancing in the

weeds of peace, but warned, selfcollected 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

Towards all this external evil the man within the breast assumes a warlike attitude, and affirms his ability to

cope singlehanded 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

selftrust 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

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 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 farther 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.

Selftrust 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, is almost ashamed of its body. What shall it say then to the sugarplums and

cats'cradles, to the toilet, compliments, quarrels, cards and custard, which rack the wit of all 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 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

peachcolored ones; or to bear the inventory of thy shirts, as one for superfluity, and one other for use!"

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

unseasonable economy into the vaults of life, and says, I will obey the God, and the sacrifice and the fire he

will provide. Ibn Hankal, the Arabian geographer, describes a heroic extreme in the hospitality of Sogd, in

Bukharia. "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 and fair water than belong to city feasts.

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 flesheating or winedrinking, 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, 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, who poured out on the ground unto the Lord the water which three of his warriors had brought

It is told of Brutus, that when he fell on his sword after the battle of Philippi, he quoted a line of

Euripides,"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

But that which takes my fancy most in the heroic class, is the goodhumor 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, 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's condemnation of himself to be maintained in all honor in the

Prytaneum, during his life, and Sir Thomas More's playfulness at the scaffold, are of the same strain. In

Beaumont and Fletcher's "Sea Voyage," Juletta tells the stout captain and his company,

These replies are sound and whole. Sport is the bloom and glow of a perfect health. The great will not

condescend to take any thing 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 game in innocent defiance of the BlueLaws 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

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, brave and affectionate, does not seem to us to need Olympus to die

upon, nor the Syrian sunshine. He lies very well where he is. The Jerseys were handsome ground enough for

Washington to tread, and London streets for the feet of Milton. 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,

Xenophon, Columbus, Bayard, Sidney, Hampden, 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

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, of books, of

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 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 plough 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, or Sevigne, or De Stael, or the cloistered souls who have had genius and cultivation do not satisfy

the imagination and the serene Themis, 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 newborn 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.

The characteristic of 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 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, when he admitted that the event of the battle was happy, yet did not regret his dissuasion from the

There is no weakness or exposure for which we cannot find consolation in the thoughtthis is a part of my

constitution, part of my relation and office to my fellowcreature. 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 for ever 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

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 goodnature 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

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 axe 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 gave his breast to the bullets of a mob, for the rights of free speech and opinion, and died

I see not any road of perfect peace which a man can walk, but after the counsel of his own bosom. Let him

quit too much association, let him go home much, and stablish 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

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:

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 those 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 for ever 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

THERE is a difference between one and another hour of life in their authority and subsequent effect. Our

faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us

to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences. For this reason the argument which is always

forthcoming to silence those who conceive extraordinary hopes of man, namely the appeal to experience, is

for ever invalid and vain. We give up the past to the objector, and yet we hope. He must explain this hope.

We grant that human life is mean, but how did we find out that it was mean? What is the ground of this

uneasiness of ours; of this old discontent? What is the universal sense of want and ignorance, but the fine

innuendo by which the soul makes its enormous claim? Why do men feel that the natural history of man has

never been written, but he is always leaving behind what you have said of him, and it becomes old, and books

of metaphysics worthless? The philosophy of six thousand years has not searched the chambers and

magazines of the soul. In its experiments there has always remained, in the last analysis, a residuum it could

not resolve. Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not

whence. The most exact calculator has no prescience that somewhat incalculable may not balk the very next

moment. I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.

As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I watch that flowing river, which, out of regions I see not, pours

for a season its streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause, but a surprised spectator of this

ethereal water; that I desire and look up and put myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien

The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is

that great nature in which we rest as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that

Oversoul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common

heart of which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right action is submission; that

overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains every one to pass for what he is,

and to speak from his character and not from his tongue, and which evermore tends to pass into our thought

and hand and become wisdom and virtue and power and beauty. We live in succession, in division, in parts,

in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which

every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose

beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and

the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece,

as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul.

Only by the vision of that Wisdom can the horoscope of the ages be read, and by falling back on our better

thoughts, by yielding to the spirit of prophecy which is innate in every man, we can know what it saith. Every

man's words who speaks from that life must sound vain to those who do not dwell in the same thought on

their own part. I dare not speak for it. My words do not carry its august sense; they fall short and cold. Only

itself can inspire whom it will, and behold! their speech shall be lyrical, and sweet, and universal as the rising

of the wind. Yet I desire, even by profane words, if I may not use sacred, to indicate the heaven of this deity

and to report what hints I have collected of the transcendent simplicity and energy of the Highest Law.

If we consider what happens in conversation, in reveries, in remorse, in times of passion, in surprises, in the

instructions of dreams, wherein often we see ourselves in masquerade,the droll disguises only magnifying

and enhancing a real element and forcing it on our distinct notice,we shall catch many hints that will

broaden and lighten into knowledge of the secret of nature. All goes to show that the soul in man is not an

organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a function, like the power of memory, of calculation,

of comparison, but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or the will, but

the master of the intellect and the will; is the background of our being, in which they lie,an immensity not

possessed and that cannot be possessed. From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things

and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all. A man is the facade of a temple wherein all

wisdom and all good abide. What we commonly call man, the eating, drinking, planting, counting man, does

not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, but the soul,

whose organ he is, would he let it appear through his action, would make our knees bend. When it breathes

through his intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his

affection, it is love. And the blindness of the intellect begins when it would be something of itself. The

weakness of the will begins when the individual would be something of himself. All reform aims in some one

particular to let the soul have its way through us; in other words, to engage us to obey.

Of this pure nature every man is at some time sensible. Language cannot paint it with his colors. It is too

subtile. It is undefinable, unmeasurable; but we know that it pervades and contains us. We know that all

spiritual being is in man. A wise old proverb says, "God comes to see us without bell;" that is, as there is no

screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the soul where man,

the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken away. We lie open on one side to the deeps

of spiritual nature, to the attributes of God. Justice we see and know, Love, Freedom, Power. These natures

no man ever got above, but they tower over us, and most in the moment when our interests tempt us to wound

The sovereignty of this nature whereof we speak is made known by its independency of those limitations

which circumscribe us on every hand. The soul circumscribes all things. As I have said, it contradicts all

experience. In like manner it abolishes time and space. The influence of the senses has in most men

overpowered the mind to that degree that the walls of time and space have come to look real and

insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits is, in the world, the sign of insanity. Yet time and

space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul. The spirit sports with time,

We are often made to feel that there is another youth and age than that which is measured from the year of

our natural birth. Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the

universal and eternal beauty. Every man parts from that contemplation with the feeling that it rather belongs

to ages than to mortal life. The least activity of the intellectual powers redeems us in a degree from the

conditions of time. In sickness, in languor, give us a strain of poetry or a profound sentence, and we are

refreshed; or produce a volume of Plato or Shakspeare, or remind us of their names, and instantly we come

into a feeling of longevity. See how the deep divine thought reduces centuries and millenniums and makes

itself present through all ages. Is the teaching of Christ less effective now than it was when first his mouth

was opened? The emphasis of facts and persons in my thought has nothing to do with time. And so always

the soul's scale is one, the scale of the senses and the understanding is another. Before the revelations of the

soul, Time, Space and Nature shrink away. In common speech we refer all things to time, as we habitually

refer the immensely sundered stars to one concave sphere. And so we say that the Judgment is distant or near,

that the Millennium approaches, that a day of certain political, moral, social reforms is at hand, and the like,

when we mean that in the nature of things one of the facts we contemplate is external and fugitive, and the

other is permanent and connate with the soul. The things we now esteem fixed shall, one by one, detach

themselves like ripe fruit from our experience, and fall. The wind shall blow them none knows whither. The

landscape, the figures, Boston, London, are facts as fugitive as any institution past, or any whiff of mist or

smoke, and so is society, and so is the world. The soul looketh steadily forwards, creating a world before her,

leaving worlds behind her. She has no dates, nor rites, nor persons, nor specialties nor men. The soul knows

After its own law and not by arithmetic is the rate of its progress to be computed. The soul's advances are not

made by gradation, such as can be represented by motion in a straight line, but rather by ascension of state,

such as can be represented by metamorphosis,from the egg to the worm, from the worm to the fly. The

growths of genius are of a certain total character, that does not advance the elect individual first over John,

then Adam, then Richard, and give to each the pain of discovered inferiority,but by every throe of growth

the man expands there where he works, passing, at each pulsation, classes, populations, of men. With each

divine impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of the visible and finite, and comes out into eternity, and inspires

and expires its air. It converses with truths that have always been spoken in the world, and becomes

conscious of a closer sympathy with Zeno and Arrian than with persons in the house.

This is the law of moral and of mental gain. The simple rise as by specific levity not into a particular virtue,

but into the region of all the virtues. They are in the spirit which contains them all. The soul requires purity,

but purity is not it; requires justice, but justice is not that; requires beneficence, but is somewhat better; so

that there is a kind of descent and accommodation felt when we leave speaking of moral nature to urge a

virtue which it enjoins. To the wellborn child all the virtues are natural, and not painfully acquired. Speak to

Within the same sentiment is the germ of intellectual growth, which obeys the same law. Those who are

capable of humility, of justice, of love, of aspiration, stand already on a platform that commands the sciences

and arts, speech and poetry, action and grace. For whoso dwells in this moral beatitude already anticipates

those special powers which men prize so highly. The lover has no talent, no skill, which passes for quite

nothing with his enamoured maiden, however little she may possess of related faculty; and the heart which

abandons itself to the Supreme Mind finds itself related to all its works, and will travel a royal road to

particular knowledges and powers. In ascending to this primary and aboriginal sentiment we have come from

our remote station on the circumference instantaneously to the centre of the world, where, as in the closet of

One mode of the divine teaching is the incarnation of the spirit in a form,in forms, like my own. I live in

society, with persons who answer to thoughts in my own mind, or express a certain obedience to the great

instincts to which I live. I see its presence to them. I am certified of a common nature; and these other souls,

these separated selves, draw me as nothing else can. They stir in me the new emotions we call passion; of

love, hatred, fear, admiration, pity; thence come conversation, competition, persuasion, cities and war.

Persons are supplementary to the primary teaching of the soul. In youth we are mad for persons. Childhood

and youth see all the world in them. But the larger experience of man discovers the identical nature appearing

through them all. Persons themselves acquaint us with the impersonal. In all conversation between two

persons tacit reference is made, as to a third party, to a common nature. That third party or common nature is

not social; it is impersonal; is God. And so in groups where debate is earnest, and especially on high

questions, the company become aware that the thought rises to an equal level in all bosoms, that all have a

spiritual property in what was said, as well as the sayer. They all become wiser than they were. It arches over

them like a temple, this unity of thought in which every heart beats with nobler sense of power and duty, and

thinks and acts with unusual solemnity. All are conscious of attaining to a higher selfpossession. It shines

for all. There is a certain wisdom of humanity which is common to the greatest men with the lowest, and

which our ordinary education often labors to silence and obstruct. The mind is one, and the best minds, who

love truth for its own sake, think much less of property in truth. They accept it thankfully everywhere, and do

not label or stamp it with any man's name, for it is theirs long beforehand, and from eternity. The learned and

the studious of thought have no monopoly of wisdom. Their violence of direction in some degree disqualifies

them to think truly. We owe many valuable observations to people who are not very acute or profound, and

who say the thing without effort which we want and have long been hunting in vain. The action of the soul is

oftener in that which is felt and left unsaid than in that which is said in any conversation. It broods over every

society, and they unconsciously seek for it in each other. We know better than we do. We do not yet possess

ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more. I feel the same truth how often in my trivial

conversation with my neighbors, that somewhat higher in each of us overlooks this byplay, and Jove nods to

Men descend to meet. In their habitual and mean service to the world, for which they forsake their native

nobleness, they resemble those Arabian sheiks who dwell in mean houses and affect an external poverty, to

escape the rapacity of the Pacha, and reserve all their display of wealth for their interior and guarded

As it is present in all persons, so it is in every period of life. It is adult already in the infant man. In my

dealing with my child, my Latin and Greek, my accomplishments and my money stead me nothing; but as

much soul as I have avails. If I am wilful, he sets his will against mine, one for one, and leaves me, if I

please, the degradation of beating him by my superiority of strength. But if I renounce my will and act for the

soul, setting that up as umpire between us two, out of his young eyes looks the same soul; he reveres and

The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what

they choose. Foolish people ask you, when you have spoken what they do not wish to hear, 'How do you

know it is truth, and not an error of your own?' We know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know

when we are awake that we are awake. It was a grand sentence of Emanuel Swedenborg, which would alone

indicate the greatness of that man's perception,"It is no proof of a man's understanding to be able to

confirm whatever he pleases; but to be able to discern that what is true is true, and that what is false is

false,this is the mark and character of intelligence." In the book I read, the good thought returns to me, as

every truth will, the image of the whole soul. To the bad thought which I find in it, the same soul becomes a

discerning, separating sword, and lops it away. We are wiser than we know. If we will not interfere with our

thought, but will act entirely, or see how the thing stands in God, we know the particular thing, and every

thing, and every man. For the Maker of all things and all persons stands behind us and casts his dread

But beyond this recognition of its own in particular passages of the individual's experience, it also reveals

truth. And here we should seek to reinforce ourselves by its very presence, and to speak with a worthier,

loftier strain of that advent. For the soul's communication of truth is the highest event in nature, since it then

does not give somewhat from itself, but it gives itself, or passes into and becomes that man whom it

enlightens; or, in proportion to that truth he receives, it takes him to itself.

We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its manifestations of its own nature, by the term Revelation.

These are always attended by the emotion of the sublime. For this communication is an influx of the Divine

mind into our mind. It is an ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing surges of the sea of life. Every

distinct apprehension of this central commandment agitates men with awe and delight. A thrill passes through

all men at the reception of new truth, or at the performance of a great action, which comes out of the heart of

nature. In these communications the power to see is not separated from the will to do, but the insight proceeds

from obedience, and the obedience proceeds from a joyful perception. Every moment when the individual

feels himself invaded by it is memorable. By the necessity of our constitution a certain enthusiasm attends the

individual's consciousness of that divine presence. The character and duration of this enthusiasm varies with

the state of the individual, from an ecstasy and trance and prophetic inspiration,which is its rarer

appearance,to the faintest glow of virtuous emotion, in which form it warms, like our household fires, all

the families and associations of men, and makes society possible. A certain tendency to insanity has always

attended the opening of the religious sense in men, as if they had been "blasted with excess of light." The

trances of Socrates, the "union" of Plotinus, the vision of Porphyry, the conversion of Paul, the aurora of

Behmen, the convulsions of George Fox and his Quakers, the illumination of Swedenborg, are of this kind.

What was in the case of these remarkable persons a ravishment, has, in innumerable instances in common

life, been exhibited in less striking manner. Everywhere the history of religion betrays a tendency to

enthusiasm. The rapture of the Moravian and Quietist; the opening of the internal sense of the Word, in the

language of the New Jerusalem Church; the revival of the Calvinistic churches; the experiences of the

Methodists, are varying forms of that shudder of awe and delight with which the individual soul always

The nature of these revelations is the same; they are perceptions of the absolute law. They are solutions of the

soul's own questions. They do not answer the questions which the understanding asks. The soul answers

Revelation is the disclosure of the soul. The popular notion of a revelation is that it is a telling of fortunes. In

past oracles of the soul the understanding seeks to find answers to sensual questions, and undertakes to tell

from God how long men shall exist, what their hands shall do and who shall be their company, adding names

and dates and places. But we must pick no locks. We must check this low curiosity. An answer in words is

delusive; it is really no answer to the questions you ask. Do not require a description of the countries towards

which you sail. The description does not describe them to you, and tomorrow you arrive there and know

them by inhabiting them. Men ask concerning the immortality of the soul, the employments of heaven, the

state of the sinner, and so forth. They even dream that Jesus has left replies to precisely these interrogatories.

Never a moment did that sublime spirit speak in their patois. To truth, justice, love, the attributes of the soul,

the idea of immutableness is essentially associated. Jesus, living in these moral sentiments, heedless of

sensual fortunes, heeding only the manifestations of these, never made the separation of the idea of duration

from the essence of these attributes, nor uttered a syllable concerning the duration of the soul. It was left to

his disciples to sever duration from the moral elements, and to teach the immortality of the soul as a doctrine,

and maintain it by evidences. The moment the doctrine of the immortality is separately taught, man is already

fallen. In the flowing of love, in the adoration of humility, there is no question of continuance. No inspired

man ever asks this question or condescends to these evidences. For the soul is true to itself, and the man in

whom it is shed abroad cannot wander from the present, which is infinite, to a future which would be finite.

These questions which we lust to ask about the future are a confession of sin. God has no answer for them.

No answer in words can reply to a question of things. It is not in an arbitrary "decree of God," but in the

nature of man, that a veil shuts down on the facts of tomorrow; for the soul will not have us read any other

cipher than that of cause and effect. By this veil which curtains events it instructs the children of men to live

in today. The only mode of obtaining an answer to these questions of the senses is to forego all low

curiosity, and, accepting the tide of being which floats us into the secret of nature, work and live, work and

live, and all unawares the advancing soul has built and forged for itself a new condition, and the question and

By the same fire, vital, consecrating, celestial, which burns until it shall dissolve all things into the waves and

surges of an ocean of light, we see and know each other, and what spirit each is of. Who can tell the grounds

of his knowledge of the character of the several individuals in his circle of friends? No man. Yet their acts

and words do not disappoint him. In that man, though he knew no ill of him, he put no trust. In that other,

though they had seldom met, authentic signs had yet passed, to signify that he might be trusted as one who

had an interest in his own character. We know each other very well, which of us has been just to himself

and whether that which we teach or behold is only an aspiration or is our honest effort also.

We are all discerners of spirits. That diagnosis lies aloft in our life or unconscious power. The intercourse of

society, its trade, its religion, its friendships, its quarrels, is one wide, judicial investigation of character. In

full court, or in small committee, or confronted face to face, accuser and accused, men offer themselves to be

judged. Against their will they exhibit those decisive trifles by which character is read. But who judges? and

what? Not our understanding. We do not read them by learning or craft. No; the wisdom of the wise man

consists herein, that he does not judge them; he lets them judge themselves and merely reads and records their

By virtue of this inevitable nature, private will is overpowered, and, maugre our efforts or our imperfections,

your genius will speak from you, and mine from me. That which we are, we shall teach, not voluntarily but

involuntarily. Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open, and thoughts go out of

our minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened. Character teaches over our head. The

infallible index of true progress is found in the tone the man takes. Neither his age, nor his breeding, nor

company, nor books, nor actions, nor talents, nor all together can hinder him from being deferential to a

higher spirit than his own. If he have not found his home in God, his manners, his forms of speech, the turn of

his sentences, the build, shall I say, of all his opinions will involuntarily confess it, let him brave it out how

he will. If he have found his centre, the Deity will shine through him, through all the disguises of ignorance,

of ungenial temperament, of unfavorable circumstance. The tone of seeking is one, and the tone of having is

The great distinction between teachers sacred or literary,between poets like Herbert, and poets like

Pope,between philosophers like Spinoza, Kant and Coleridge, and philosophers like Locke, Paley,

Mackintosh and Stewart,between men of the world who are reckoned accomplished talkers, and here and

there a fervent mystic, prophesying half insane under the infinitude of his thought,is that one class speak

from within, or from experience, as parties and possessors of the fact; and the other class from without, as

spectators merely, or perhaps as acquainted with the fact on the evidence of third persons. It is of no use to

preach to me from without. I can do that too easily myself. Jesus speaks always from within, and in a degree

that transcends all others. In that is the miracle. I believe beforehand that it ought so to be. All men stand

continually in the expectation of the appearance of such a teacher. But if a man do not speak from within the

The same Omniscience flows into the intellect, and makes what we call genius. Much of the wisdom of the

world is not wisdom, and the most illuminated class of men are no doubt superior to literary fame, and are not

writers. Among the multitude of scholars and authors, we feel no hallowing presence; we are sensible of a

knack and skill rather than of inspiration; they have a light and know not whence it comes and call it their

own; their talent is some exaggerated faculty, some overgrown member, so that their strength is a disease. In

these instances the intellectual gifts do not make the impression of virtue, but almost of vice; and we feel that

a man's talents stand in the way of his advancement in truth. But genius is religious. It is a larger imbibing of

the common heart. It is not anomalous, but more like and not less like other men. There is in all great poets a

wisdom of humanity which is superior to any talents they exercise. The author, the wit, the partisan, the fine

gentleman, does not take place of the man. Humanity shines in Homer, in Chaucer, in Spenser, in Shakspeare,

in Milton. They are content with truth. They use the positive degree. They seem frigid and phlegmatic to

those who have been spiced with the frantic passion and violent coloring of inferior but popular writers. For

they are poets by the free course which they allow to the informing soul, which through their eyes beholds

again and blesses the things which it hath made. The soul is superior to its knowledge, wiser than any of its

works. The great poet makes us feel our own wealth, and then we think less of his compositions. His best

communication to our mind is to teach us to despise all he has done. Shakspeare carries us to such a lofty

strain of intelligent activity as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid

works which he has created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of selfexistent poetry, take no

stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered

itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to day for ever. Why then should I make

account of Hamlet and Lear, as if we had not the soul from which they fell as syllables from the tongue?

This energy does not descend into individual life on any other condition than entire possession. It comes to

the lowly and simple; it comes to whomsoever will put off what is foreign and proud; it comes as insight; it

comes as serenity and grandeur. When we see those whom it inhabits, we are apprised of new degrees of

greatness. From that inspiration the man comes back with a changed tone. He does not talk with men with an

eye to their opinion. He tries them. It requires of us to be plain and true. The vain traveller attempts to

embellish his life by quoting my lord and the prince and the countess, who thus said or did to him. The

ambitious vulgar show you their spoons and brooches and rings, and preserve their cards and compliments.

The more cultivated, in their account of their own experience, cull out the pleasing, poetic

circumstance,the visit to Rome, the man of genius they saw, the brilliant friend They know; still further on

perhaps the gorgeous landscape, the mountain lights, the mountain thoughts they enjoyed yesterday,and so

seek to throw a romantic color over their life. But the soul that ascends to worship the great God is plain and

true; has no rosecolor, no fine friends, no chivalry, no adventures; does not want admiration; dwells in the

hour that now is, in the earnest experience of the common day,by reason of the present moment and the

Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like wordcatching. The simplest utterances

are worthiest to be written, yet are they so cheap and so things of course, that in the infinite riches of the soul

it is like gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or bottling a little air in a phial, when the whole earth and the

whole atmosphere are ours. Nothing can pass there, or make you one of the circle, but the casting aside your

trappings, and dealing man to man in naked truth, plain confession, and omniscient affirmation.

Souls such as these treat you as gods would, walk as gods in the earth, accepting without any admiration your

wit, your bounty, your virtue even,say rather your act of duty, for your virtue they own as their proper

blood, royal as themselves, and overroyal, and the father of the gods. But what rebuke their plain fraternal

bearing casts on the mutual flattery with which authors solace each other and wound themselves! These

flatter not. I do not wonder that these men go to see Cromwell and Christina and Charles the Second and

James the First and the Grand Turk. For they are, in their own elevation, the fellows of kings, and must feel

the servile tone of conversation in the world. They must always be a godsend to princes, for they confront

them, a king to a king, without ducking or concession, and give a high nature the refreshment and satisfaction

of resistance, of plain humanity, of even companionship and of new ideas. They leave them wiser and

superior men. Souls like these make us feel that sincerity is more excellent than flattery. Deal so plainly with

man and woman as to constrain the utmost sincerity and destroy all hope of trifling with you. It is the highest

compliment you can pay. Their "highest praising," said Milton, "is not flattery, and their plainest advice is a

Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul. The simplest person who in his integrity

worships God, becomes God; yet for ever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is new and

unsearchable. It inspires awe and astonishment. How dear, how soothing to man, arises the idea of God,

peopling the lonely place, effacing the scars of our mistakes and disappointments! When we have broken our

god of tradition and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with his presence. It is the

doubling of the heart itself, nay, the infinite enlargement of the heart with a power of growth to a new infinity

on every side. It inspires in man an infallible trust. He has not the conviction, but the sight, that the best is the

true, and may in that thought easily dismiss all particular uncertainties and fears, and adjourn to the sure

revelation of time the solution of his private riddles. He is sure that his welfare is dear to the heart of being. In

the presence of law to his mind he is overflowed with a reliance so universal that it sweeps away all cherished

hopes and the most stable projects of mortal condition in its flood. He believes that he cannot escape from his

good. The things that are really for thee gravitate to thee. You are running to seek your friend. Let your feet

run, but your mind need not. If you do not find him, will you not acquiesce that it is best you should not find

him? for there is a power, which, as it is in you, is in him also, and could therefore very well bring you

together, if it were for the best. You are preparing with eagerness to go and render a service to which your

talent and your taste invite you, the love of men and the hope of fame. Has it not occurred to you that you

have no right to go, unless you are equally willing to be prevented from going? O, believe, as thou livest, that

every sound that is spoken over the round world, which thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate on thine ear! Every

proverb, every book, every byword that belongs to thee for aid or comfort, shall surely come home through

open or winding passages. 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 an endless

circulation through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one.

Let man then learn the revelation of all nature and all thought to his heart; this, namely; that the Highest

dwells with him; that the sources of nature are in his own mind, if the sentiment of duty is there. But if he

would know what the great God speaketh, he must 'go into his closet and shut the door,' as Jesus said. God

will not make himself manifest to cowards. He must greatly listen to himself, withdrawing himself from all

the accents of other men's devotion. Even their prayers are hurtful to him, until he have made his own. Our

religion vulgarly stands on numbers of believers. Whenever the appeal is made,no matter how

indirectly,to numbers, proclamation is then and there made that religion is not. He that finds God a sweet

enveloping thought to him never counts his company. When I sit in that presence, who shall dare to come in?

When I rest in perfect humility, when I burn with pure love, what can Calvin or Swedenborg say?

It makes no difference whether the appeal is to numbers or to one. The faith that stands on authority is not

faith. The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul. The position men

have given to Jesus, now for many centuries of history, is a position of authority. It characterizes themselves.

It cannot alter the eternal facts. Great is the soul, and plain. It is no flatterer, it is no follower; it never appeals

from itself. It believes in itself. Before the immense possibilities of man all mere experience, all past

biography, however spotless and sainted, shrinks away. Before that heaven which our presentiments

foreshow us, we cannot easily praise any form of life we have seen or read of. We not only affirm that we

have few great men, but, absolutely speaking, that we have none; that we have no history, no record of any

character or mode of living that entirely contents us. The saints and demigods whom history worships we are

constrained to accept with a grain of allowance. Though in our lonely hours we draw a new strength out of

their memory, yet, pressed on our attention, as they are by the thoughtless and customary, they fatigue and

invade. The soul gives itself, alone, original and pure, to the Lonely, Original and Pure, who, on that

condition, gladly inhabits, leads and speaks through it. Then is it glad, young and nimble. It is not wise, but it

sees through all things. It is not called religious, but it is innocent. It calls the light its own, and feels that the

grass grows and the stone falls by a law inferior to, and dependent on, its nature. Behold, it saith, I am born

into the great, the universal mind. I, the imperfect, adore my own Perfect. I am somehow receptive of the

great soul, and thereby I do Overlook the sun and the stars and feel them to be the fair accidents and effects

which change and pass. More and more the surges of everlasting nature enter into me, and I become public

and human in my regards and actions. So come I to live in thoughts and act with energies which are

immortal. Thus revering the soul, and learning, as the ancient said, that "its beauty is immense," man will

come to see that the world is the perennial miracle which the soul worketh, and be less astonished at

particular wonders; he will learn that there is no profane history; that all history is sacred; that the universe is

represented in an atom, in a moment of time. He will weave no longer a spotted life of shreds and patches,

but he will live with a divine unity. He will cease from what is base and frivolous in his life and be content

with all places and with any service he can render. He will calmly front the morrow in the negligency of that

trust which carries God with it and so hath already the whole future in the bottom of the heart.

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure

is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine 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

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

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 it fluid. Our

culture is the predominance of an idea which draws after it this train of cities and institutions. Let us rise into

another idea: they will disappear. The Greek sculpture 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

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. See the

investment of capital in aqueducts made useless by hydraulics; fortifications, by gunpowder; roads and

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.

Every thing looks permanent until its secret is known. A rich estate appears to women 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

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 selfevolving circle, 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; in its first and narrowest pulses, it already tends outward with a vast force and

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 today, 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 tomorrow 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

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

Fear not the new generalization. Does the fact look crass 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. Today 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, tomorrow. 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

The continual effort to raise himself above himself, 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 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 my 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 thou! Every personal consideration that we allow costs us heavenly state. We sell the thrones of

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 enterprise? 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

Each new step we take in thought reconciles twenty seemingly discordant facts, as expressions of one law.

Aristotle and Plato 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 tomorrow; there is not any literary reputation, not the

socalled 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

Valor consists in the power of selfrecovery, so that a man cannot have his flank turned, cannot be

outgeneralled, 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 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

Conversation is a game of circles. In conversation we pluck up the termini 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. Tomorrow they will have receded from this highwater mark. Tomorrow you shall find them

stooping under the old packsaddles. 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 circumspection! 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

Literature is a point outside of our hodiernal 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,

in Roman houses, only that we may wiselier see French, English and American houses and modes of living.

In like manner 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

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 or

Ariosto, 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

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 woodbirds 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." 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 apprise us that this surface on which we now stand is not fixed, but sliding.

These manifold tenacious qualities, 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

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 today 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

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. 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? Does he owe no debt but money? And are all claims on him to be postponed to a landlord's or a

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

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

And thus, O circular philosopher, I hear some reader exclaim, you have arrived at a fine Pyrrhonism, 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 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 any thing as true

or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless

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, they have outlived their hope, they 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

tomorrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there

Life is a series of surprises. We do not guess today the mood, the pleasure, the power of tomorrow, 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

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; 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. True conquest is the causing the calamity

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 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 "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 gaming and war, to ape in some manner these flames and generosities of the

Every substance is negatively electric to that which stands above it in the chemical tables, positively to that

which stands below it. Water dissolves wood and iron and salt; air dissolves water; electric fire dissolves air,

but the intellect dissolves fire, gravity, laws, method, and the subtlest unnamed relations of nature in its

resistless menstruum. Intellect lies behind genius, which is intellect constructive. Intellect is the simple power

anterior to all action or construction. Gladly would I unfold in calm degrees a natural history of the intellect,

but what man has yet been able to mark the steps and boundaries of that transparent essence? The first

questions are always to be asked, and the wisest doctor is gravelled by the inquisitiveness of a child. How can

we speak of the action of the mind under any divisions, as of its knowledge, of its ethics, of its works, and so

forth, since it melts will into perception, knowledge into act? Each becomes the other. Itself alone is. Its

Intellect and intellection signify to the common ear consideration of abstract truth. The considerations of time

and place, of you and me, of profit and hurt tyrannize over most men's minds. Intellect separates the fact

considered, from you, from all local and personal reference, and discerns it as if it existed for its own sake.

Heraclitus looked upon the affections as dense and colored mists. In the fog of good and evil affections it is

hard for man to walk forward in a straight line. Intellect is void of affection and sees an object as it stands in

the light of science, cool and disengaged. The intellect goes out of the individual, floats over its own

personality, and regards it as a fact, and not as I and mine. He who is immersed in what concerns person or

place cannot see the problem of existence. This the intellect always ponders. Nature shows all things formed

and bound. The intellect pierces the form, overleaps the wall, detects intrinsic likeness between remote things

The making a fact the subject of thought raises it. All that mass of mental and moral phenomena which we do

not make objects of voluntary thought, come within the power of fortune; they constitute the circumstance of

daily life; they are subject to change, to fear, and hope. Every man beholds his human condition with a degree

of melancholy. As a ship aground is battered by the waves, so man, imprisoned in mortal life, lies open to the

mercy of coming events. But a truth, separated by the intellect, is no longer a subject of destiny. We behold it

as a god upraised above care and fear. And so any fact in our life, or any record of our fancies or reflections,

disentangled from the web of our unconsciousness, becomes an object impersonal and immortal. It is the past

restored, but embalmed. A better art than that of Egypt has taken fear and corruption out of it. It is eviscerated

of care. It is offered for science. What is addressed to us for contemplation does not threaten us but makes us

The growth of the intellect is spontaneous in every expansion. The mind that grows could not predict the

times, the means, the mode of that spontaneity. God enters by a private door into every individual. Long prior

to the age of reflection is the thinking of the mind. Out of darkness it came insensibly into the marvellous

light of today. In the period of infancy it accepted and disposed of all impressions from the surrounding

creation after its own way. Whatever any mind doth or saith is after a law; and this native law remains over it

after it has come to reflection or conscious thought. In the most worn, pedantic, introverted selftormenter's

life, the greatest part is incalculable by him, unforeseen, unimaginable, and must be, until he can take himself

up by his own ears. What am I? What has my will done to make me that I am? Nothing. I have been floated

into this thought, this hour, this connection of events, by secret currents of might and mind, and my ingenuity

Our spontaneous action is always the best. You cannot with your best deliberation and heed come so close to

any question as your spontaneous glance shall bring you, whilst you rise from your bed, or walk abroad in the

morning after meditating the matter before sleep on the previous night. Our thinking is a pious reception. Our

truth of thought is therefore vitiated as much by too violent direction given by our will, as by too great

negligence. We do not determine what we will think. We only open our senses, clear away as we can all

obstruction from the fact, and suffer the intellect to see. We have little control over our thoughts. We are the

prisoners of ideas. They catch us up for moments into their heaven and so fully engage us that we take no

thought for the morrow, gaze like children, without an effort to make them our own. By and by we fall out of

that rapture, bethink us where we have been, what we have seen, and repeat as truly as we can what we have

beheld. As far as we can recall these ecstasies we carry away in the ineffaceable memory the result, and all

men and all the ages confirm it. It is called Truth. But the moment we cease to report and attempt to correct

If we consider what persons have stimulated and profited us, we shall perceive the superiority of the

spontaneous or intuitive principle over the arithmetical or logical. The first contains the second, but virtual

and latent. We want in every man a long logic; we cannot pardon the absence of it, but it must not be spoken.

Logic is the procession or proportionate unfolding of the intuition; but its virtue is as silent method; the

moment it would appear as propositions and have a separate value it is worthless.

In every man's mind, some images, words and facts remain, without effort on his part to imprint them, which

others forget, and afterwards these illustrate to him important laws. All our progress is an unfolding, like the

vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud and

fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason. It is vain to hurry it. By trusting it to the

Each mind has its own method. A true man never acquires after college rules. What you have aggregated in a

natural manner surprises and delights when it is produced. For we cannot oversee each other's secret. And

hence the differences between men in natural endowment are insignificant in comparison with their common

wealth. Do you think the porter and the cook have no anecdotes, no experiences, no wonders for you? Every

body knows as much as the savant. The walls of rude minds are scrawled all over with facts, with thoughts.

They shall one day bring a lantern and read the inscriptions. Every man, in the degree in which he has wit and

culture, finds his curiosity inflamed concerning the modes of living and thinking of other men, and especially

of those classes whose minds have not been subdued by the drill of school education.

This instinctive action never ceases in a healthy mind, but becomes richer and more frequent in its

informations through all states of culture. At last comes the era of reflection, when we not only observe, but

take pains to observe; when we of set purpose sit down to consider an abstract truth; when we keep the mind's

eye open whilst we converse, whilst we read, whilst we act, intent to learn the secret law of some class of

What is the hardest task in the world? To think. I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye an

abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know what he meant

who said, No man can see God face to face and live. For example, a man explores the basis of civil

government. Let him intend his mind without respite, without rest, in one direction. His best heed long time

avails him nothing. Yet thoughts are flitting before him. We all but apprehend, we dimly forebode the truth.

We say I will walk abroad, and the truth will take form and clearness to me. We go forth, but cannot find it. It

seems as if we needed only the stillness and composed attitude of the library to seize the thought. But we

come in, and are as far from it as at first. Then, in a moment, and unannounced, the truth appears. A certain

wandering light appears, and is the distinction, the principle, we wanted. But the oracle comes because we

had previously laid siege to the shrine. It seems as if the law of the intellect resembled that law of nature by

which we now inspire, now expire the breath; by which the heart now draws in, then hurls out the

blood,the law of undulation. So now you must labor with your brains, and now you must forbear your

The immortality of man is as legitimately preached from the intellections as from the moral volitions. Every

intellection is mainly prospective. Its present value is its least. Inspect what delights you in Plutarch, in

Shakspeare, in Cervantes. Each truth that a writer acquires is a lantern, which he turns full on what facts and

thoughts lay already in his mind, and behold, all the mats and rubbish which had littered his garret become

precious. Every trivial fact in his private biography becomes an illustration of this new principle, revisits the

day, and delights all men by its piquancy and new charm. Men say, Where did he get this? and think there

was something divine in his life. But no; they have myriads of facts just as good, would they only get a lamp

We are all wise. The difference between persons is not in wisdom but in art. I knew, in an academical club, a

person who always deferred to me; who, seeing my whim for writing, fancied that my experiences had

somewhat superior; whilst I saw that his experiences were as good as mine. Give them to me and I would

make the same use of them. He held the old; he holds the new; I had the habit of tacking together the old and

the new which he did not use to exercise. This may hold in the great examples. Perhaps if we should meet

Shakspeare we should not be conscious of any steep inferiority; no, but of a great equality,only that he

possessed a strange skill of using, of classifying, his facts, which we lacked. For notwithstanding our utter

incapacity to produce anything like Hamlet and Othello, see the perfect reception this wit and immense

If you gather apples in the sunshine, or make hay, or hoe corn, and then retire within doors and shut your eyes

and press them with your hand, you shall still see apples hanging in the bright light with boughs and leaves

thereto, or the tasselled grass, or the cornflags, and this for five or six hours afterwards. There lie the

impressions on the retentive organ, though you knew it not. So lies the whole series of natural images with

which your life has made you acquainted, in your memory, though you know it not; and a thrill of passion

flashes light on their dark chamber, and the active power seizes instantly the fit image, as the word of its

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write,

nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we

are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until by and by we begin to suspect that the biography

of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred

In the intellect constructive, which we popularly designate by the word Genius, we observe the same balance

of two elements as in intellect receptive. The constructive intellect produces thoughts, sentences, poems,

plans, designs, systems. It is the generation of the mind, the marriage of thought with nature. To genius must

always go two gifts, the thought and the publication. The first is revelation, always a miracle, which no

frequency of occurrence or incessant study can ever familiarize, but which must always leave the inquirer

stupid with wonder. It is the advent of truth into the world, a form of thought now for the first time bursting

into the universe, a child of the old eternal soul, a piece of genuine and immeasurable greatness. It seems, for

the time, to inherit all that has yet existed and to dictate to the unborn. It affects every thought of man and

goes to fashion every institution. But to make it available it needs a vehicle or art by which it is conveyed to

men. To be communicable it must become picture or sensible object. We must learn the language of facts.

The most wonderful inspirations die with their subject if he has no hand to paint them to the senses. The ray

of light passes invisible through space and only when it falls on an object is it seen. When the spiritual energy

is directed on something outward, then it is a thought. The relation between it and you first makes you, the

value of you, apparent to me. The rich inventive genius of the painter must be smothered and lost for want of

the power of drawing, and in our happy hours we should be inexhaustible poets if once we could break

through the silence into adequate rhyme. As all men have some access to primary truth, so all have some art

or power of communication in their head, but only in the artist does it descend into the hand. There is an

inequality, whose laws we do not yet know, between two men and between two moments of the same man, in

respect to this faculty. In common hours we have the same facts as in the uncommon or inspired, but they do

not sit for their portraits; they are not detached, but lie in a web. The thought of genius is spontaneous; but the

power of picture or expression, in the most enriched and flowing nature, implies a mixture of will, a certain

control over the spontaneous states, without which no production is possible. It is a conversion of all nature

into the rhetoric of thought, under the eye of judgment, with a strenuous exercise of choice. And yet the

imaginative vocabulary seems to be spontaneous also. It does not flow from experience only or mainly, but

from a richer source. Not by any conscious imitation of particular forms are the grand strokes of the painter

executed, but by repairing to the fountainhead of all forms in his mind. Who is the first drawingmaster?

Without instruction we know very well the ideal of the human form. A child knows if an arm or a leg be

distorted in a picture; if the attitude be natural or grand or mean; though he has never received any instruction

in drawing or heard any conversation on the subject, nor can himself draw with correctness a single feature.

A good form strikes all eyes pleasantly, long before they have any science on the subject, and a beautiful face

sets twenty hearts in palpitation, prior to all consideration of the mechanical proportions of the features and

head. We may owe to dreams some light on the fountain of this skill; for as soon as we let our will go and let

the unconscious states ensue, see what cunning draughtsmen we are! We entertain ourselves with wonderful

forms of men, of women, of animals, of gardens, of woods and of monsters, and the mystic pencil wherewith

we then draw has no awkwardness or inexperience, no meagreness or poverty; it can design well and group

well; its composition is full of art, its colors are well laid on and the whole canvas which it paints is lifelike

and apt to touch us with terror, with tenderness, with desire and with grief. Neither are the artist's copies from

experience ever mere copies, but always touched and softened by tints from this ideal domain.

The conditions essential to a constructive mind do not appear to be so often combined but that a good

sentence or verse remains fresh and memorable for a long time. Yet when we write with ease and come out

into the free air of thought, we seem to be assured that nothing is easier than to continue this communication

at pleasure. Up, down, around, the kingdom of thought has no inclosures, but the Muse makes us free of her

city. Well, the world has a million writers. One would think then that good thought would be as familiar as

air and water, and the gifts of each new hour would exclude the last. Yet we can count all our good books;

nay, I remember any beautiful verse for twenty years. It is true that the discerning intellect of the world is

always much in advance of the creative, so that there are many competent judges of the best book, and few

writers of the best books. But some of the conditions of intellectual construction are of rare occurrence. The

intellect is a whole and demands integrity in every work. This is resisted equally by a man's devotion to a

Truth is our element of life, yet if a man fasten his attention on a single aspect of truth and apply himself to

that alone for a long time, the truth becomes distorted and not itself but falsehood; herein resembling the air,

which is our natural element, and the breath of our nostrils, but if a stream of the same be directed on the

body for a time, it causes cold, fever, and even death. How wearisome the grammarian, the phrenologist, the

political or religious fanatic, or indeed any possessed mortal whose balance is lost by the exaggeration of a

single topic. It is incipient insanity. Every thought is a prison also. I cannot see what you see, because I am

caught up by a strong wind and blown so far in one direction that I am out of the hoop of your horizon.

Is it any better if the student, to avoid this offence, and to liberalize himself, aims to make a mechanical

whole of history, or science, or philosophy, by a numerical addition of all the facts that fall within his vision?

The world refuses to be analyzed by addition and subtraction. When we are young we spend much time and

pains in filling our notebooks with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that in

the course of a few years we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at

which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover

Neither by detachment neither by aggregation is the integrity of the intellect transmitted to its works, but by a

vigilance which brings the intellect in its greatness and best state to operate every moment. It must have the

same wholeness which nature has. Although no diligence can rebuild the universe in a model by the best

accumulation or disposition of details, yet does the world reappear in miniature in every event, so that all the

laws of nature may be read in the smallest fact. The intellect must have the like perfection in its apprehension

and in its works. For this reason, an index or mercury of intellectual proficiency is the perception of identity.

We talk with accomplished persons who appear to be strangers in nature. The cloud, the tree, the turf, the bird

are not theirs, have nothing of them; the world is only their lodging and table. But the poet, whose verses are

to be spheral and complete, is one whom Nature cannot deceive, whatsoever face of strangeness she may put

on. He feels a strict consanguinity, and detects more likeness than variety in all her changes. We are stung by

the desire for new thought; but when we receive a new thought it is only the old thought with a new face, and

though we make it our own we instantly crave another; we are not really enriched. For the truth was in us

before it was reflected to us from natural objects; and the profound genius will cast the likeness of all

But if the constructive powers are rare and it is given to few men to be poets, yet every man is a receiver of

this descending holy ghost, and may well study the laws of its influx. Exactly parallel is the whole rule of

intellectual duty to the rule of moral duty. A selfdenial no less austere than the saint's is demanded of the

scholar. He must worship truth, and forego all things for that, and choose defeat and pain, so that his treasure

God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please,you can never have

both. Between these, as a pendulum, man oscillates. He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept

the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets,most likely his father's. He gets rest,

commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth. He in whom the love of truth predominates will

keep himself aloof from all moorings, and afloat. He will abstain from dogmatism, and recognize all the

opposite negations between which, as walls, his being is swung. He submits to the inconvenience of suspense

and imperfect opinion, but he is a candidate for truth, as the other is not, and respects the highest law of his

The circle of the green earth he must measure with his shoes to find the man who can yield him truth. He

shall then know that there is somewhat more blessed and great in hearing than in speaking. Happy is the

hearing man; unhappy the speaking man. As long as I hear truth I am bathed by a beautiful element and am

not conscious of any limits to my nature. The suggestions are thousandfold that I hear and see. The waters of

the great deep have ingress and egress to the soul. But if I speak, I define, I confine and am less. When

Socrates speaks, Lysis and Menexenus are afflicted by no shame that they do not speak. They also are good.

He likewise defers to them, loves them, whilst he speaks. Because a true and natural man contains and is the

same truth which an eloquent man articulates; but in the eloquent man, because he can articulate it, it seems

something the less to reside, and he turns to these silent beautiful with the more inclination and respect. The

ancient sentence said, Let us be silent, for so are the gods. Silence is a solvent that destroys personality, and

gives us leave to be great and universal. Every man's progress is through a succession of teachers, each of

whom seems at the time to have a superlative influence, but it at last gives place to a new. Frankly let him

accept it all. Jesus says, Leave father, mother, house and lands, and follow me. Who leaves all, receives more.

This is as true intellectually as morally. Each new mind we approach seems to require an abdication of all our

past and present possessions. A new doctrine seems at first a subversion of all our opinions, tastes, and

manner of living. Such has Swedenborg, such has Kant, such has Coleridge, such has Hegel or his interpreter

Cousin seemed to many young men in this country. Take thankfully and heartily all they can give. Exhaust

them, wrestle with them, let them not go until their blessing be won, and after a short season the dismay will

be overpast, the excess of influence withdrawn, and they will be no longer an alarming meteor, but one more

bright star shining serenely in your heaven and blending its light with all your day.

But whilst he gives himself up unreservedly to that which draws him, because that is his own, he is to refuse

himself to that which draws him not, whatsoever fame and authority may attend it, because it is not his own.

Entire selfreliance belongs to the intellect. One soul is a counterpoise of all souls, as a capillary column of

water is a balance for the sea. It must treat things and books and sovereign genius as itself also a sovereign. If

Aeschylus be that man he is taken for, he has not yet done his office when he has educated the learned of

Europe for a thousand years. He is now to approve himself a master of delight to me also. If he cannot do

that, all his fame shall avail him nothing with me. I were a fool not to sacrifice a thousand Aeschyluses to my

intellectual integrity. Especially take the same ground in regard to abstract truth, the science of the mind. The

Bacon, the Spinoza, the Hume, Schelling, Kant, or whosoever propounds to you a philosophy of the mind, is

only a more or less awkward translator of things in your consciousness which you have also your way of

seeing, perhaps of denominating. Say then, instead of too timidly poring into his obscure sense, that he has

not succeeded in rendering back to you your consciousness. He has not succeeded; now let another try. If

Plato cannot, perhaps Spinoza will. If Spinoza cannot, then perhaps Kant. Anyhow, when at last it is done,

you will find it is no recondite, but a simple, natural, common state which the writer restores to you.

But let us end these didactics. I will not, though the subject might provoke it, speak to the open question

between Truth and Love. I shall not presume to interfere in the old politics of the skies;"The cherubim

know most; the seraphim love most." The gods shall settle their own quarrels. But I cannot recite, even thus

rudely, laws of the intellect, without remembering that lofty and sequestered class of men who have been its

prophets and oracles, the high priesthood of the pure reason, the Trismegisti, the expounders of the

principles of thought from age to age. When at long intervals we turn over their abstruse pages, wonderful

seems the calm and grand air of these few, these great spiritual lords who have walked in the world,these

of the old religion,dwelling in a worship which makes the sanctities of Christianity look parvenues and

popular; for "persuasion is in soul, but necessity is in intellect." This band of grandees, Hermes, Heraclitus,

Empedocles, Plato, Plotinus, Olympiodorus, Proclus, Synesius and the rest, have somewhat so vast in their

logic, so primary in their thinking, that it seems antecedent to all the ordinary distinctions of rhetoric and

literature, and to be at once poetry and music and dancing and astronomy and mathematics. I am present at

the sowing of the seed of the world. With a geometry of sunbeams the soul lays the foundations of nature.

The truth and grandeur of their thought is proved by its scope and applicability, for it commands the entire

schedule and inventory of things for its illustration. But what marks its elevation and has even a comic look

to us, is the innocent serenity with which these babelike Jupiters sit in their clouds, and from age to age

prattle to each other and to no contemporary. Well assured that their speech is intelligible and the most

natural thing in the world, they add thesis to thesis, without a moment's heed of the universal astonishment of

the human race below, who do not comprehend their plainest argument; nor do they ever relent so much as to

insert a popular or explaining sentence, nor testify the least displeasure or petulance at the dulness of their

amazed auditory. The angels are so enamored of the language that is spoken in heaven that they will not

distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be any

Because the soul is progressive, it never quite repeats itself, but in every act attempts the production of a new

and fairer whole. This appears in works both of the useful and the fine arts, if we employ the popular

distinction of works according to their aim either at use or beauty. Thus in our fine arts, not imitation but

creation is the aim. In landscapes the painter should give the suggestion of a fairer creation than we know.

The details, the prose of nature he should omit and give us only the spirit and splendor. He should know that

the landscape has beauty for his eye because it expresses a thought which is to him good; and this because the

same power which sees through his eyes is seen in that spectacle; and he will come to value the expression of

nature and not nature itself, and so exalt in his copy the features that please him. He will give the gloom of

gloom and the sunshine of sunshine. In a portrait he must inscribe the character and not the features, and must

esteem the man who sits to him as himself only an imperfect picture or likeness of the aspiring original

What is that abridgment and selection we observe in all spiritual activity, but itself the creative impulse? for it

is the inlet of that higher illumination which teaches to convey a larger sense by simpler symbols. What is a

man but nature's finer success in selfexplication? What is a man but a finer and compacter landscape than

the horizon figures, nature's eclecticism? and what is his speech, his love of painting, love of nature, but a

still finer success, all the weary miles and tons of space and bulk left out, and the spirit or moral of it

But the artist must employ the symbols in use in his day and nation to convey his enlarged sense to his

fellowmen. Thus the new in art is always formed out of the old. The Genius of the Hour sets his

ineffaceable seal on the work and gives it an inexpressible charm for the imagination. As far as the spiritual

character of the period overpowers the artist and finds expression in his work, so far it will retain a certain

grandeur, and will represent to future beholders the Unknown, the Inevitable, the Divine. No man can quite

exclude this element of Necessity from his labor. No man can quite emancipate himself from his age and

country, or produce a model in which the education, the religion, the politics, usages and arts of his times

shall have no share. Though he were never so original, never so wilful and fantastic, he cannot wipe out of his

work every trace of the thoughts amidst which it grew. The very avoidance betrays the usage he avoids.

Above his will and out of his sight he is necessitated by the air he breathes and the idea on which he and his

contemporaries live and toil, to share the manner of his times, without knowing what that manner is. Now

that which is inevitable in the work has a higher charm than individual talent can ever give, inasmuch as the

artist's pen or chisel seems to have been held and guided by a gigantic hand to inscribe a line in the history of

the human race. This circumstance gives a value to the Egyptian hieroglyphics, to the Indian, Chinese and

Mexican idols, however gross and shapeless. They denote the height of the human soul in that hour, and were

not fantastic, but sprung from a necessity as deep as the world. Shall I now add that the whole extant product

of the plastic arts has herein its highest value, as history; as a stroke drawn in the portrait of that fate, perfect

and beautiful, according to whose ordinations all beings advance to their beatitude?

Thus, historically viewed, it has been the office of art to educate the perception of beauty. We are immersed

in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vision. It needs, by the exhibition of single traits, to assist and lead the

dormant taste. We carve and paint, or we behold what is carved and painted, as students of the mystery of

Form. The virtue of art lies in detachment, in sequestering one object from the embarrassing variety. Until

one thing comes out from the connection of things, there can be enjoyment, contemplation, but no thought.

Our happiness and unhappiness are unproductive. The infant lies in a pleasing trance, but his individual

character and his practical power depend on his daily progress in the separation of things, and dealing with

one at a time. Love and all the passions concentrate all existence around a single form. It is the habit of

certain minds to give an allexcluding fulness to the object, the thought, the word, they alight upon, and to

make that for the time the deputy of the world. These are the artists, the orators, the leaders of society. The

power to detach and to magnify by detaching is the essence of rhetoric in the hands of the orator and the poet.

This rhetoric, or power to fix the momentary eminency of an object,so remarkable in Burke, in Byron, in

Carlyle,the painter and sculptor exhibit in color and in stone. The power depends on the depth of the

artist's insight of that object he contemplates. For every object has its roots in central nature, and may of

course be so exhibited to us as to represent the world. Therefore each work of genius is the tyrant of the hour

And concentrates attention on itself. For the time, it is the only thing worth naming to do that,be it a

sonnet, an opera, a landscape, a statue, an oration, the plan of a temple, of a campaign, or of a voyage of

discovery. Presently we pass to some other object, which rounds itself into a whole as did the first; for

example a welllaid garden; and nothing seems worth doing but the laying out of gardens. I should think fire

the best thing in the world, if I were not acquainted with air, and water, and earth. For it is the right and

property of all natural objects, of all genuine talents, of all native properties whatsoever, to be for their

moment the top of the world. A squirrel leaping from bough to bough and making the Wood but one wide

tree for his pleasure, fills the eye not less than a lion,is beautiful, selfsufficing, and stands then and there

for nature. A good ballad draws my ear and heart whilst I listen, as much as an epic has done before. A dog,

drawn by a master, or a litter of pigs, satisfies and is a reality not less than the frescoes of Angelo. From this

succession of excellent objects we learn at last the immensity of the world, the opulence of human nature,

which can run out to infinitude in any direction. But I also learn that what astonished and fascinated me in the

first work astonished me in the second work also; that excellence of all things is one.

The office of painting and sculpture seems to be merely initial. The best pictures can easily tell us their last

secret. The best pictures are rude draughts of a few of the miraculous dots and lines and dyes which make up

the everchanging "landscape with figures" amidst which we dwell. Painting seems to be to the eye what

dancing is to the limbs. When that has educated the frame to selfpossession, to nimbleness, to grace, the

steps of the dancingmaster are better forgotten; so painting teaches me the splendor of color and the

expression of form, and as I see many pictures and higher genius in the art, I see the boundless opulence of

the pencil, the indifferency in which the artist stands free to choose out of the possible forms. If he can draw

every thing, why draw any thing? and then is my eye opened to the eternal picture which nature paints in the

street, with moving men and children, beggars and fine ladies, draped in red and green and blue and gray;

longhaired, grizzled, whitefaced, blackfaced, wrinkled, giant, dwarf, expanded, elfish,capped and

A gallery of sculpture teaches more austerely the same lesson. As picture teaches the coloring, so sculpture

the anatomy of form. When I have seen fine statues and afterwards enter a public assembly, I understand well

what he meant who said, "When I have been reading Homer, all men look like giants." I too see that painting

and sculpture are gymnastics of the eye, its training to the niceties and curiosities of its function. There is no

statue like this living man, with his infinite advantage over all ideal sculpture, of perpetual variety. What a

gallery of art have I here! No mannerist made these varied groups and diverse original single figures. Here is

the artist himself improvising, grim and glad, at his block. Now one thought strikes him, now another, and

with each moment he alters the whole air, attitude and expression of his clay. Away with your nonsense of oil

and easels, of marble and chisels; except to open your eyes to the masteries of eternal art, they are

The reference of all production at last to an aboriginal Power explains the traits common to all works of the

highest art,that they are universally intelligible; that they restore to us the simplest states of mind, and are

religious. Since what skill is therein shown is the reappearance of the original soul, a jet of pure light, it

should produce a similar impression to that made by natural objects. In happy hours, nature appears to us one

with art; art perfected, the work of genius. And the individual, in whom simple tastes and susceptibility to

all the great human influences overpower the accidents of a local and special culture, is the best critic of art.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not. The best of

beauty is a finer charm than skill in surfaces, in outlines, or rules of art can ever teach, namely a radiation

from the work of art of human character,a wonderful expression through stone, or canvas, or musical

sound, of the deepest and simplest attributes of our nature, and therefore most intelligible at last to those souls

which have these attributes. In the sculptures of the Greeks, in the masonry of the Romans, and in the pictures

of the Tuscan and Venetian masters, the highest charm is the universal language they speak. A confession of

moral nature, of purity, love, and hope, breathes from them all. That which we carry to them, the same we

bring back more fairly illustrated in the memory. The traveller who visits the Vatican, and passes from

chamber to chamber through galleries of statues, vases, sarcophagi and candelabra, through all forms of

beauty cut in the richest materials, is in danger of forgetting the simplicity of the principles out of which they

all sprung, and that they had their origin from thoughts and laws in his own breast. He studies the technical

rules on these wonderful remains, but forgets that these works were not always thus constellated; that they are

the contributions of many ages and many countries; that each came out of the solitary workshop of one artist,

who toiled perhaps in ignorance of the existence of other sculpture, created his work without other model

save life, household life, and the sweet and smart of personal relations, of beating hearts, and meeting eyes;

of poverty and necessity and hope and fear. These were his inspirations, and these are the effects he carries

home to your heart and mind. In proportion to his force, the artist will find in his work an outlet for his proper

character. He must not be in any manner pinched or hindered by his material, but through his necessity of

imparting himself the adamant will be wax in his hands, and will allow an adequate communication of

himself, in his full stature and proportion. He need not cumber himself with a conventional nature and

culture, nor ask what is the mode in Rome or in Paris, but that house and weather and manner of living which

poverty and the fate of birth have made at once so odious and so dear, in the gray unpainted wood cabin, on

the corner of a New Hampshire farm, or in the loghut of the backwoods, or in the narrow lodging where he

has endured the constraints and seeming of a city poverty, will serve as well as any other condition as the

I remember when in my younger days I had heard of the wonders of Italian painting, I fancied the great

pictures would be great strangers; some surprising combination of color and form; a foreign wonder, barbaric

pearl and gold, like the spontoons and standards of the militia, which play such pranks in the eyes and

imaginations of schoolboys. I was to see and acquire I knew not what. When I came at last to Rome and saw

with eyes the pictures, I found that genius left to novices the gay and fantastic and ostentatious, and itself

pierced directly to the simple and true; that it was familiar and sincere; that it was the old, eternal fact I had

met already in so many forms,unto which I lived; that it was the plain you and me I knew so well,had

left at home in so many conversations. I had the same experience already in a church at Naples. There I saw

that nothing was changed with me but the place, and said to myself 'Thou foolish child, hast thou come out

hither, over four thousand miles of salt water, to find that which was perfect to thee there at home?' That fact

I saw again in the Academmia at Naples, in the chambers of sculpture, and yet again when I came to Rome

and to the paintings of Raphael, Angelo, Sacchi, Titian, and Leonardo da Vinci. "What, old mole! workest

thou in the earth so fast?" It had travelled by my side; that which I fancied I had left in Boston was here in the

Vatican, and again at Milan and at Paris, and made all travelling ridiculous as a treadmill. I now require this

of all pictures, that they domesticate me, not that they dazzle me. Pictures must not be too picturesque.

Nothing astonishes men so much as commonsense and plain dealing. All great actions have been simple,

The Transfiguration, by Raphael, is an eminent example of this peculiar merit. A calm benignant beauty

shines over all this picture, and goes directly to the heart. It seems almost to call you by name. The sweet and

sublime face of Jesus is beyond praise, yet how it disappoints all florid expectations! This familiar, simple,

homespeaking countenance is as if one should meet a friend. The knowledge of picturedealers has its

value, but listen not to their criticism when your heart is touched by genius. It was not painted for them, it

was painted for you; for such as had eyes capable of being touched by simplicity and lofty emotions.

Yet when we have said all our fine things about the arts, we must end with a frank confession, that the arts, as

we know them, are but initial. Our best praise is given to what they aimed and promised, not to the actual

result. He has conceived meanly of the resources of man, who believes that the best age of production is past.

The real value of the Iliad or the Transfiguration is as signs of power; billows or ripples they are of the stream

of tendency; tokens of the everlasting effort to produce, which even in its worst estate the soul betrays. Art

has not yet come to its maturity if it do not put itself abreast with the most potent influences of the world, if it

is not practical and moral, if it do not stand in connection with the conscience, if it do not make the poor and

uncultivated feel that it addresses them with a voice of lofty cheer. There is higher work for Art than the arts.

They are abortive births of an imperfect or vitiated instinct. Art is the need to create; but in its essence,

immense and universal, it is impatient of working with lame or tied hands, and of making cripples and

monsters, such as all pictures and statues are. Nothing less than the creation of man and nature is its end. A

man should find in it an outlet for his whole energy. He may paint and carve only as long as he can do that.

Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the

same sense of universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist, and its highest effect is to

Already History is old enough to witness the old age and disappearance of particular arts. The art of sculpture

is long ago perished to any real effect. It was originally a useful art, a mode of writing, a savage's record of

gratitude or devotion, and among a people possessed of a wonderful perception of form this childish carving

was refined to the utmost splendor of effect. But it is the game of a rude and youthful people, and not the

manly labor of a wise and spiritual nation. Under an oaktree loaded with leaves and nuts, under a sky full of

eternal eyes, I stand in a thoroughfare; but in the works of our plastic arts and especially of sculpture, creation

is driven into a corner. I cannot hide from myself that there is a certain appearance of paltriness, as of toys

and the trumpery of a theatre, in sculpture. Nature transcends all our moods of thought, and its secret we do

not yet find. But the gallery stands at the mercy of our moods, and there is a moment when it becomes

frivolous. I do not wonder that Newton, with an attention habitually engaged on the paths of planets and suns,

should have wondered what the Earl of Pembroke found to admire in "stone dolls." Sculpture may serve to

teach the pupil how deep is the secret of form, how purely the spirit can translate its meanings into that

eloquent dialect. But the statue will look cold and false before that new activity which needs to roll through

all things, and is impatient of counterfeits and things not alive. Picture and sculpture are the celebrations and

festivities of form. But true art is never fixed, but always flowing. The sweetest music is not in the oratorio,

but in the human voice when it speaks from its instant life tones of tenderness, truth, or courage. The oratorio

has already lost its relation to the morning, to the sun, and the earth, but that persuading voice is in tune with

these. All works of art should not be detached, but extempore performances. A great man is a new statue in

every attitude and action. A beautiful woman is a picture which drives all beholders nobly mad. Life may be

A true announcement of the law of creation, if a man were found worthy to declare it, would carry art up into

the kingdom of nature, and destroy its separate and contrasted existence. The fountains of invention and

beauty in modern society are all but dried up. A popular novel, a theatre, or a ballroom makes us feel that

we are all paupers in the almshouse of this world, without dignity, without skill or industry. Art is as poor

and low. The old tragic Necessity, which lowers on the brows even of the Venuses and the Cupids of the

antique, and furnishes the sole apology for the intrusion of such anomalous figures into nature,namely, that

they were inevitable; that the artist was drunk with a passion for form which he could not resist, and which

vented itself in these fine extravagances,no longer dignifies the chisel or the pencil. But the artist and the

connoisseur now seek in art the exhibition of their talent, or an asylum from the evils of life. Men are not well

pleased with the figure they make in their own imaginations, and they flee to art, and convey their better

sense in an oratorio, a statue, or a picture. Art makes the same effort which a sensual prosperity makes;

namely to detach the beautiful from the useful, to do up the work as unavoidable, and, hating it, pass on to

enjoyment. These solaces and compensations, this division of beauty from use, the laws of nature do not

permit. As soon as beauty is sought, not from religion and love but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker. High

beauty is no longer attainable by him in canvas or in stone, in sound, or in lyrical construction; an effeminate,

prudent, sickly beauty, which is not beauty, is all that can be formed; for the hand can never execute any

The art that thus separates is itself first separated. Art must not be a superficial talent, but must begin farther

back in man. Now men do not see nature to be beautiful, and they go to make a statue which shall be. They

abhor men as tasteless, dull, and inconvertible, and console themselves with colorbags and blocks of

marble. They reject life as prosaic, and create a death which they call poetic. They despatch the day's weary

chores, and fly to voluptuous reveries. They eat and drink, that they may afterwards execute the ideal. Thus is

art vilified; the name conveys to the mind its secondary and bad senses; it stands in the imagination as

somewhat contrary to nature, and struck with death from the first. Would it not be better to begin higher

up,to serve the ideal before they eat and drink; to serve the ideal in eating and drinking, in drawing the

breath, and in the functions of life? Beauty must come back to the useful arts, and the distinction between the

fine and the useful arts be forgotten. If history were truly told, if life were nobly spent, it would be no longer

easy or possible to distinguish the one from the other. In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore

beautiful because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is therefore useful because it is symmetrical and fair.

Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece.

It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men. It is in vain

that we look for genius to reiterate its miracles in the old arts; it is its instinct to find beauty and holiness in

new and necessary facts, in the field and roadside, in the shop and mill. Proceeding from a religious heart it

will raise to a divine use the railroad, the insurance office, the joint stock company; our law, our primary

assemblies, our commerce, the galvanic battery, the electric jar, the prism, and the chemist's retort; in which

we seek now only an economical use. Is not the selfish and even cruel aspect which belongs to our great

mechanical works, to mills, railways, and machinery, the effect of the mercenary impulses which these works

obey? When its errands are noble and adequate, a steamboat bridging the Atlantic between Old and New

England and arriving at its ports with the punctuality of a planet, is a step of man into harmony with nature.

The boat at St. Petersburg, which plies along the Lena by magnetism, needs little to make it sublime. When

science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded by love, they will appear the supplements and