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THE CONDUCT OF LIFE................................................................................................................................1

It chanced during one winter, a few years ago, that our cities wsing the theory of the Age. By an odd

coincidence, four or five noted men were each reading a discourse to the citizens of Boston or New York, on

the Spirit of the Times. It so happened that the subject had the same prominence in some remarkable

pamphlets and journals issued in London in the same season. To me, however, the question of the times

resolved itself into a practical question of the conduct of life. How shall I live? We are incompetent to solve

the times. Our geometry cannot span the huge orbits of the prevailing ideas, behold their return, and reconcile

their opposition. We can only obey our own polarity. 'Tis fine for us to speculate and elect our course, if we

In our first steps to gain our wishes, we come upon immovable limitations. We are fired with the hope to

reform men. After many experiments, we find that we must begin earlier, at school. But the boys and girls

are not docile; we can make nothing of them. We decide that they are not of good stock. We must begin our

reform earlier still, at generation: that is to say, there is Fate, or laws of the world.

But if there be irresistible dictation, this dictation understands itself. If we must accept Fate, we are not less

compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character.

This is true, and that other is true. But our geometry cannot span these extreme points, and reconcile them.

What to do? By obeying each thought frankly, by harping, or, if you will, pounding on each string, we learn

at last its power. By the same obedience to other thoughts, we learn theirs, and then comes some reasonable

hope of harmonizing them. We are sure, that, though we know not how, necessity does comport with liberty,

the individual with the world, my polarity with the spirit of the times. The riddle of the age has for each a

private solution. If one would study his own time, it must be by this method of taking up in turn each of the

leading topics which belong to our scheme of human life, and, by firmly stating all that is agreeable to

experience on one, and doing the same justice to the opposing facts in the others, the true limitations will

appear. Any excess of emphasis, on one part, would be corrected, and a just balance would be made.

But let us honestly state the facts. Our America has a bad name for superficialness. Great men, great nations,

have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face

it. The Spartan, embodying his religion in his country, dies before its majesty without a question. The Turk,

who believes his doom is written on the iron leaf in the moment when he entered the world, rushes on the

enemy's sabre with undivided will. The Turk, the Arab, the Persian, accepts the foreordained fate.

The Hindoo, under the wheel, is as firm. Our Calvinists, in the last generation, had something of the same

dignity. They felt that the weight of the Universe held them down to their place. What could they do? Wise

men feel that there is something which cannot be talked or voted away, a strap or belt which girds the

The Greek Tragedy expressed the same sense: "Whatever is fated, that will take place. The great immense

Savages cling to a local god of one tribe or town. The broad ethics of Jesus were quickly narrowed to village

theologies, which preach an election or favoritism. And, now and then, an amiable parson, like Jung Stilling,

or Robert Huntington, believes in a pistareenProvidence, which, whenever the good man wants a dinner,

makes that somebody shall knock at his door, and leave a halfdollar. But Nature is no sentimentalist,

does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a

man or a woman; but swallows your ship like a grain of dust. The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your

blood, benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple. The diseases, the elements, fortune, gravity, lightning,

respect no persons. The way of Providence is a little rude. The habit of snake and spider, the snap of the tiger

and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda,

these are in the system, and our habits are like theirs. You have just dined, and, however scrupulously the

slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity, expensive races,

race living at the expense of race. The planet is liable to shocks from comets, perturbations from planets,

rendings from earthquake and volcano, alterations of climate, precessions of equinoxes. Rivers dry up by

opening of the forest. The sea changes its bed. Towns and counties fall into it. At Lisbon, an earthquake

killed men like flies. At Naples, three years ago, ten thousand persons were crushed in a few minutes. The

scurvy at sea; the sword of the climate in the west of Africa, at Cayenne, at Panama, at New Orleans, cut off

men like a massacre. Our western prairie shakes with fever and ague. The cholera, the smallpox, have

proved as mortal to some tribes, as a frost to the crickets, which, having filled the summer with noise, are

silenced by a fall of the temperature of one night. Without uncovering what does not concern us, or counting

how many species of parasites hang on a bombyx; or groping after intestinal parasites, or infusory biters, or

the obscurities of alternate generation; the forms of the shark, the labrus, the jaw of the seawolf paved

with crushing teeth, the weapons of the grampus, and other warriors hidden in the sea, are hints of ferocity

in the interiors of nature. Let us not deny it up and down. Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to

its end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific

Will you say, the disasters which threaten mankind are exceptional, and one need not lay his account for

cataclysms every day? Aye, but what happens once, may happen again, and so long as these strokes are not to

But these shocks and ruins are less destructive to us, than the stealthy power of other laws which act on us

daily. An expense of ends to means is fate; organization tyrannizing over character. The menagerie, or

forms and powers of the spine, is a book of fate: the bill of the bird, the skull of the snake, determines

tyrannically its limits. So is the scale of races, of temperaments; so is sex; so is climate; so is the reaction of

talents imprisoning the vital power in certain directions. Every spirit makes its house; but afterwards the

The gross lines are legible to the dull: the cabman is phrenologist so far: he looks in your face to see if his

shilling is sure. A dome of brow denotes one thing; a potbelly another; a squint, a pugnose, mats of hair,

the pigment of the epidermis, betray character. People seem sheathed in their tough organization. Ask

Spurzheim, ask the doctors, ask Quetelet, if temperaments decide nothing? or if there be anything they do

not decide? Read the description in medical books of the four temperaments, and you will think you are

reading your own thoughts which you had not yet told. Find the part which black eyes, and which blue eyes,

play severally in the company. How shall a man escape from his ancestors, or draw off from his veins the

black drop which he drew from his father's or his mother's life? It often appears in a family, as if all the

qualities of the progenitors were potted in several jars, some ruling quality in each son or daughter of the

house, and sometimes the unmixed temperament, the rank unmitigated elixir, the family vice, is drawn off

in a separate individual, and the others are proportionally relieved. We sometimes see a change of expression

in our companion, and say, his father, or his mother, comes to the windows of his eyes, and sometimes a

remote relative. In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or

eight of us rolled up in each man's skin, seven or eight ancestors at least, and they constitute the variety

of notes for that new piece of music which his life is. At the corner of the street, you read the possibility of

each passenger, in the facial angle, in the complexion, in the depth of his eye. His parentage determines it.

Men are what their mothers made them. You may as well ask a loom which weaves huckaback, why it does

not make cashmere, as expect poetry from this engineer, or a chemical discovery from that jobber. Ask the

digger in the ditch to explain Newton's laws: the fine organs of his brain have been pinched by overwork and

squalid poverty from father to son, for a hundred years. When each comes forth from his mother's womb, the

gate of gifts closes behind him. Let him value his hands and feet, he has but one pair. So he has but one

future, and that is already predetermined in his lobes, and described in that little fatty face, pigeye, and squat

form. All the privilege and all the legislation of the world cannot meddle or help to make a poet or a prince of

Jesus said, "When he looketh on her, he hath committed adultery." But he is an adulterer before he has yet

looked on the woman, by the superfluity of animal, and the defect of thought, in his constitution. Who meets

him, or who meets her, in the street, sees that they are ripe to be each other's victim.

In certain men, digestion and sex absorb the vital force, and the stronger these are, the individual is so much

weaker. The more of these drones perish, the better for the hive. If, later, they give birth to some superior

individual, with force enough to add to this animal a new aim, and a complete apparatus to work it out, all the

ancestors are gladly forgotten. Most men and most women are merely one couple more. Now and then, one

has a new cell or camarilla opened in his brain, an architectural, a musical, or a philological knack, some

stray taste or talent for flowers, or chemistry, or pigments, or storytelling, a good hand for drawing, a good

foot for dancing, an athletic frame for wide journeying, which skill nowise alters rank in the scale of

nature, but serves to pass the time, the life of sensation going on as before. At last, these hints and tendencies

are fixed in one, or in a succession. Each absorbs so much food and force, as to become itself a new centre.

The new talent draws off so rapidly the vital force, that not enough remains for the animal functions, hardly

enough for health; so that, in the second generation, if the like genius appear, the health is visibly

People are born with the moral or with the material bias; uterine brothers with this diverging destination:

and I suppose, with high magnifiers, Mr. Frauenhofer or Dr. Carpenter might come to distinguish in the

It was a poetic attempt to lift this mountain of Fate, to reconcile this despotism of race with liberty, which led

the Hindoos to say, "Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence." I find the

coincidence of the extremes of eastern and western speculation in the daring statement of Schelling, "there is

in every man a certain feeling, that he has been what he is from all eternity, and by no means became such in

time." To say it less sublimely, in the history of the individual is always an account of his condition, and

A good deal of our politics is physiological. Now and then, a man of wealth in the heyday of youth adopts the

tenet of broadest freedom. In England, there is always some man of wealth and large connection planting

himself, during all his years of health, on the side of progress, who, as soon as he begins to die, checks his

forward play, calls in his troops, and becomes conservative. All conservatives are such from personal defects.

They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and

can only, like invalids, act on the defensive. But strong natures, backwoodsmen, New Hampshire giants,

Napoleons, Burkes, Broughams, Websters, Kossuths, are inevitable patriots, until their life ebbs, and their

The strongest idea incarnates itself in majorities and nations, in the healthiest and strongest. Probably, the

election goes by avoirdupois weight, and, if you could weigh bodily the tonnage of any hundred of the Whig

and the Democratic party in a town, on the Dearborn balance, as they passed the hayscales, you could predict

with certainty which party would carry it. On the whole, it would be rather the speediest way of deciding the

In science, we have to consider two things: power and circumstance. All we know of the egg, from each

successive discovery, is, another vesicle; and if, after five hundred years, you get a better observer, or a better

glass, he finds within the last observed another. In vegetable and animal tissue, it is just alike, and all that the

primary power or spasm operates, is, still, vesicles, vesicles. Yes, but the tyrannical Circumstance! A

vesicle in new circumstances, a vesicle lodged in darkness, Oken thought, became animal; in light, a plant.

Lodged in the parent animal, it suffers changes, which end in unsheathing miraculous capability in the

unaltered vesicle, and it unlocks itself to fish, bird, or quadruped, head and foot, eye and claw. The

Circumstance is Nature. Nature is, what you may do. There is much you may not. We have two things, the

circumstance, and the life. Once we thought, positive power was all. Now we learn, that negative power, or

circumstance, is half. Nature is the tyrannous circumstance, the thick skull, the sheathed snake, the

ponderous, rocklike jaw; necessitated activity; violent direction; the conditions of a tool, like the

locomotive, strong enough on its track, but which can do nothing but mischief off of it; or skates, which are

The book of Nature is the book of Fate. She turns the gigantic pages, leaf after leaf, never returning

one. One leaf she lays down, a floor of granite; then a thousand ages, and a bed of slate; a thousand ages, and

a measure of coal; a thousand ages, and a layer of marl and mud: vegetable forms appear; her first misshapen

animals, zoophyte, trilobium, fish; then, saurians, rude forms, in which she has only blocked her future

statue, concealing under these unwieldly monsters the fine type of her coming king. The face of the planet

cools and dries, the races meliorate, and man is born. But when a race has lived its term, it comes no more

The population of the world is a conditional population not the best, but the best that could live now; and the

scale of tribes, and the steadiness with which victory adheres to one tribe, and defeat to another, is as uniform

as the superposition of strata. We know in history what weight belongs to race. We see the English, French,

and Germans planting themselves on every shore and market of America and Australia, and monopolizing the

commerce of these countries. We like the nervous and victorious habit of our own branch of the family. We

follow the step of the Jew, of the Indian, of the Negro. We see how much will has been expended to

extinguish the Jew, in vain. Look at the unpalatable conclusions of Knox, in his "Fragment of Races," a

rash and unsatisfactory writer, but charged with pungent and unforgetable truths. "Nature respects race, and

not hybrids." "Every race has its own habitat." "Detach a colony from the race, and it deteriorates to the

crab." See the shades of the picture. The German and Irish millions, like the Negro, have a great deal of

guano in their destiny. They are ferried over the Atlantic, and carted over America, to ditch and to drudge, to

make corn cheap, and then to lie down prematurely to make a spot of green grass on the prairie.

One more fagot of these adamantine bandages, is, the new science of Statistics. It is a rule, that the most

casual and extraordinary events if the basis of population is broad enough become matter of fixed

calculation. It would not be safe to say when a captain like Bonaparte, a singer like Jenny Lind, or a navigator

like Bowditch, would be born in Boston: but, on a population of twenty or two hundred millions, something

(*) "Everything which pertains to the human species, considered as a whole, belongs to the order of physical

facts. The greater the number of individuals, the more does the influence of the individual will disappear,

leaving predominance to a series of general facts dependent on causes by which society exists, and is

'Tis frivolous to fix pedantically the date of particular inventions. They have all been invented over and over

fifty times. Man is the arch machine, of which all these shifts drawn from himself are toy models. He helps

himself on each emergency by copying or duplicating his own structure, just so far as the need is. 'Tis hard to

find the right Homer Zoroaster, or Menu; harder still to find the Tubal Cain, or Vulcan, or Cadmus, or

Copernicus, or Fust, or Fulton, the indisputable inventor. There are scores and centuries of them. "The air is

full of men." This kind of talent so abounds, this constructive toolmaking efficiency, as if it adhered to the

chemic atoms, as if the air he breathes were made of Vaucansons, Franklins, and Watts.

Doubtless, in every million there will be an astronomer, a mathematician, a comic poet, a mystic. No one can

read the history of astronomy, without perceiving that Copernicus, Newton, Laplace, are not new men, or a

new kind of men, but that Thales, Anaximenes, Hipparchus, Empedocles, Aristarchus, Pythagoras,

;oEnopides, had anticipated them; each had the same tense geometrical brain, apt for the same vigorous

computation and logic, a mind parallel to the movement of the world. The Roman mile probably rested on a

measure of a degree of the meridian. Mahometan and Chinese know what we know of leapyear, of the

Gregorian calendar, and of the precession of the equinoxes. As, in every barrel of cowries, brought to New

Bedford, there shall be one orangia, so there will, in a dozen millions of Malays and Mahometans, be one or

two astronomical skulls. In a large city, the most casual things, and things whose beauty lies in their casualty,

are produced as punctually and to order as the baker's muffin for breakfast. Punch makes exactly one capital

joke a week; and the journals contrive to furnish one good piece of news every day.

And not less work the laws of repression, the penalties of violated functions. Famine, typhus, frost, war,

suicide, and effete races, must be reckoned calculable parts of the system of the world.

These are pebbles from the mountain, hints of the terms by which our life is walled up, and which show a

kind of mechanical exactness, as of a loom or mill, in what we call casual or fortuitous events.

The force with which we resist these torrents of tendency looks so ridiculously inadequate, that it amounts to

little more than a criticism or a protest made by a minority of one, under compulsion of millions. I seemed, in

the height of a tempest, to see men overboard struggling in the waves, and driven about here and there. They

glanced intelligently at each other, but 'twas little they could do for one another; 'twas much if each could

keep afloat alone. Well, they had a right to their eyebeams, and all the rest was Fate.

We cannot trifle with this reality, this croppingout in our planted gardens of the core of the world. No

picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man's power is hooped in by a

necessity, which, by many experiments, he touches on every side, until he learns its arc.

The element running through entire nature, which we popularly call Fate, is known to us as limitation.

Whatever limits us, we call Fate. If we are brute and barbarous, the fate takes a brute and dreadful shape. As

we refine, our checks become finer. If we rise to spiritual culture, the antagonism takes a spiritual form. In the

Hindoo fables, Vishnu follows Maya through all her ascending changes, from insect and crawfish up to

elephant; whatever form she took, he took the male form of that kind, until she became at last woman and

goddess, and he a man and a god. The limitations refine as the soul purifies, but the ring of necessity is

When the gods in the Norse heaven were unable to bind the Fenris Wolf with steel or with weight of

mountains, the one he snapped and the other he spurned with his heel,they put round his foot a limp

band softer than silk or cobweb, and this held him: the more he spurned it, the stiffer it drew. So soft and so

stanch is the ring of Fate. Neither brandy, nor nectar, nor sulphuric ether, nor hellfire, nor ichor, nor poetry,

nor genius, can get rid of this limp band. For if we give it the high sense in which the poets use it, even

thought itself is not above Fate: that too must act according to eternal laws, and all that is wilful and fantastic

And, last of all, high over thought, in the world of morals, Fate appears as vindicator, levelling the high,

lifting the low, requiring justice in man, and always striking soon or late, when justice is not done. What is

useful will last; what is hurtful will sink. "The doer must suffer," said the Greeks: "you would soothe a Deity

not to be soothed." "God himself cannot procure good for the wicked," said the Welsh triad. "God may

consent, but only for a time," said the bard of Spain. The limitation is impassable by any insight of man. In its

last and loftiest ascensions, insight itself, and the freedom of the will, is one of its obedient members. But we

must not run into generalizations too large, but show the natural bounds or essential distinctions, and seek to

Thus we trace Fate, in matter, mind, and morals, in race, in retardations of strata, and in thought and

character as well. It is everywhere bound or limitation. But Fate has its lord; limitation its limits; is different

seen from above and from below; from within and from without. For, though Fate is immense, so is power,

which is the other fact in the dual world, immense. If Fate follows and limits power, power attends and

antagonizes Fate. We must respect Fate as natural history, but there is more than natural history. For who and

what is this criticism that pries into the matter? Man is not order of nature, sack and sack, belly and members,

link in a chain, nor any ignominious baggage, but a stupendous antagonism, a dragging together of the poles

of the Universe. He betrays his relation to what is below him, thickskulled, smallbrained, fishy,

quadrumanous, quadruped illdisguised, hardly escaped into biped, and has paid for the new powers by

loss of some of the old ones. But the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and

suns, is in him. On one side, elemental order, sandstone and granite, rockledges, peatbog, forest, sea and

shore; and, on the other part, thought, the spirit which composes and decomposes nature, here they are,

side by side, god and devil, mind and matter, king and conspirator, belt and spasm, riding peacefully together

Nor can he blink the freewill. To hazard the contradiction, freedom is necessary. If you please to plant

yourself on the side of Fate, and say, Fate is all; then we say, a part of Fate is the freedom of man. Forever

wells up the impulse of choosing and acting in the soul. Intellect annuls Fate. So far as a man thinks, he is

free. And though nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and

the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a "Declaration of Independence," or the

statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act, yet it is wholesome to man to look not

at Fate, but the other way: the practical view is the other. His sound relation to these facts is to use and

command, not to cringe to them. "Look not on nature, for her name is fatal," said the oracle. The too much

contemplation of these limits induces meanness. They who talk much of destiny, their birthstar, are in a

I cited the instinctive and heroic races as proud believers in Destiny. They conspire with it; a loving

resignation is with the event. But the dogma makes a different impression, when it is held by the weak and

lazy. 'Tis weak and vicious people who cast the blame on Fate. The right use of Fate is to bring up our

conduct to the loftiness of nature. Rude and invincible except by themselves are the elements. So let man be.

Let him empty his breast of his windy conceits, and show his lordship by manners and deeds on the scale of

nature. Let him hold his purpose as with the tug of gravitation. No power, no persuasion, no bribe shall make

him give up his point. A man ought to compare advantageously with a river, an oak, or a mountain. He shall

'Tis the best use of Fate to teach a fatal courage. Go face the fire at sea, or the cholera in your friend's house,

or the burglar in your own, or what danger lies in the way of duty, knowing you are guarded by the cherubim

of Destiny. If you believe in Fate to your harm, believe it, at least, for your good.

For, if Fate is so prevailing, man also is part of it, and can confront fate with fate. If the Universe have these

savage accidents, our atoms are as savage in resistance. We should be crushed by the atmosphere, but for the

reaction of the air within the body. A tube made of a film of glass can resist the shock of the ocean, if filled

with the same water. If there be omnipotence in the stroke, there is omnipotence of recoil.

1. But Fate against Fate is only parrying and defence: there are, also, the noble creative forces. The revelation

of Thought takes man out of servitude into freedom. We rightly say of ourselves, we were born, and

afterward we were born again, and many times. We have successive experiences so important, that the new

forgets the old, and hence the mythology of the seven or the nine heavens. The day of days, the great day of

the feast of life, is that in which the inward eye opens to the Unity in things, to the omnipresence of law;

sees that what is must be, and ought to be, or is the best. This beatitude dips from on high down on us, and we

see. It is not in us so much as we are in it. If the air come to our lungs, we breathe and live; if not, we die. If

the light come to our eyes, we see; else not. And if truth come to our mind, we suddenly expand to its

dimensions, as if we grew to worlds. We are as lawgivers; we speak for Nature; we prophesy and divine.

This insight throws us on the party and interest of the Universe, against all and sundry; against ourselves, as

much as others. A man speaking from insight affirms of himself what is true of the mind: seeing its

immortality, he says, I am immortal; seeing its invincibility, he says, I am strong. It is not in us, but we are in

it. It is of the maker, not of what is made. All things are touched and changed by it. This uses, and is not used.

It distances those who share it, from those who share it not. Those who share it not are flocks and herds. It

dates from itself; not from former men or better men, gospel, or constitution, or college, or custom.

Where it shines, Nature is no longer intrusive, but all things make a musical or pictorial impression. The

world of men show like a comedy without laughter: populations, interests, government, history; 'tis all

toy figures in a toy house. It does not overvalue particular truths. We hear eagerly every thought and word

quoted from an intellectual man. But, in his presence, our own mind is roused to activity, and we forget very

fast what he says, much more interested in the new play of our own thought, than in any thought of his. 'Tis

the majesty into which we have suddenly mounted, the impersonality, the scorn of egotisms, the sphere of

laws, that engage us. Once we were stepping a little this way, and a little that way; now, we are as men in a

balloon, and do not think so much of the point we have left, or the point we would make, as of the liberty and

Just as much intellect as you add, so much organic power. He who sees through the design, presides over it,

and must will that which must be. We sit and rule, and, though we sleep, our dream will come to pass. Our

thought, though it were only an hour old, affirms an oldest necessity, not to be separated from thought, and

not to be separated from will. They must always have coexisted. It apprises us of its sovereignty and godhead,

which refuse to be severed from it. It is not mine or thine, but the will of all mind. It is poured into the souls

of all men, as the soul itself which constitutes them men. I know not whether there be, as is alleged, in the

upper region of our atmosphere, a permanent westerly current, which carries with it all atoms which rise to

that height, but I see, that when souls reach a certain clearness of perception, they accept a knowledge and

motive above selfishness. A breath of will blows eternally through the universe of souls in the direction of the

Right and Necessary. It is the air which all intellects inhale and exhale, and it is the wind which blows the

Thought dissolves the material universe, by carrying the mind up into a sphere where all is plastic. Of two

men, each obeying his own thought, he whose thought is deepest will be the strongest character. Always one

2. If thought makes free, so does the moral sentiment. The mixtures of spiritual chemistry refuse to be

analyzed. Yet we can see that with the perception of truth is joined the desire that it shall prevail. That

affection is essential to will. Moreover, when a strong will appears, it usually results from a certain unity of

organization, as if the whole energy of body and mind flowed in one direction. All great force is real and

elemental. There is no manufacturing a strong will. There must be a pound to balance a pound. Where power

is shown in will, it must rest on the universal force. Alaric and Bonaparte must believe they rest on a truth, or

their will can be bought or bent. There is a bribe possible for any finite will. But the pure sympathy with

universal ends is an infinite force, and cannot be bribed or bent. Whoever has had experience of the moral

sentiment cannot choose but believe in unlimited power. Each pulse from that heart is an oath from the Most

High. I know not what the word sublime means, if it be not the intimations in this infant of a terrific force. A

text of heroism, a name and anecdote of courage, are not arguments, but sallies of freedom. One of these is

the verse of the Persian Hafiz, "'Tis written on the gate of Heaven, `Wo unto him who suffers himself to be

betrayed by Fate!'" Does the reading of history make us fatalists? What courage does not the opposite opinion

show! A little whim of will to be free gallantly contending against the universe of chemistry.

But insight is not will, nor is affection will. Perception is cold, and goodness dies in wishes; as Voltaire said,

'tis the misfortune of worthy people that they are cowards; "un des plus grands malheurs des honnetes gens

c'est qu'ils sont des lafaches." There must be a fusion of these two to generate the energy of will. There can

be no driving force, except through the conversion of the man into his will, making him the will, and the will

him. And one may say boldly, that no man has a right perception of any truth, who has not been reacted on by

The one serious and formidable thing in nature is a will. Society is servile from want of will, and therefore

the world wants saviours and religions. One way is right to go: the hero sees it, and moves on that aim, and

has the world under him for root and support. He is to others as the world. His approbation is honor; his

dissent, infamy. The glance of his eye has the force of sunbeams. A personal influence towers up in memory

only worthy, and we gladly forget numbers, money, climate, gravitation, and the rest of Fate.

We can afford to allow the limitation, if we know it is the meter of the growing man. We stand against Fate,

as children stand up against the wall in their father's house, and notch their height from year to year. But

when the boy grows to man, and is master of the house, he pulls down that wall, and builds a new and bigger.

'Tis only a question of time. Every brave youth is in training to ride and rule this dragon. His science is to

make weapons and wings of these passions and retarding forces. Now whether, seeing these two things, fate

and power, we are permitted to believe in unity? The bulk of mankind believe in two gods. They are under

one dominion here in the house, as friend and parent, in social circles, in letters, in art, in love, in religion: but

in mechanics, in dealing with steam and climate, in trade, in politics, they think they come under another; and

that it would be a practical blunder to transfer the method and way of working of one sphere, into the other.

What good, honest, generous men at home, will be wolves and foxes on change! What pious men in the

parlor will vote for what reprobates at the polls! To a certain point, they believe themselves the care of a

Providence. But, in a steamboat, in an epidemic, in war, they believe a malignant energy rules.

But relation and connection are not somewhere and sometimes, but everywhere and always. The divine order

does not stop where their sight stops. The friendly power works on the same rules, in the next farm, and the

next planet. But, where they have not experience, they run against it, and hurt themselves. Fate, then, is a

name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought; for causes which are unpenetrated.

But every jet of chaos which threatens to exterminate us, is convertible by intellect into wholesome force.

Fate is unpenetrated causes. The water drowns ship and sailor, like a grain of dust. But learn to swim, trim

your bark, and the wave which drowned it, will be cloven by it, and carry it, like its own foam, a plume and a

power. The cold is inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, freezes a man like a dewdrop. But learn to

skate, and the ice will give you a graceful, sweet, and poetic motion. The cold will brace your limbs and brain

to genius, and make you foremost men of time. Cold and sea will train an imperial Saxon race, which nature

cannot bear to lose, and, after cooping it up for a thousand years in yonder England, gives a hundred

Englands, a hundred Mexicos. All the bloods it shall absorb and domineer: and more than Mexicos, the

secrets of water and steam, the spasms of electricity, the ductility of metals, the chariot of the air, the

The annual slaughter from typhus far exceeds that of war; but right drainage destroys typhus. The plague in

the seaservice from scurvy is healed by lemon juice and other diets portable or procurable: the depopulation

by cholera and smallpox is ended by drainage and vaccination; and every other pest is not less in the chain

of cause and effect, and may be fought off. And, whilst art draws out the venom, it commonly extorts some

benefit from the vanquished enemy. The mischievous torrent is taught to drudge for man: the wild beasts he

makes useful for food, or dress, or labor; the chemic explosions are controlled like his watch. These are now

the steeds on which he rides. Man moves in all modes, by legs of horses, by wings of wind, by steam, by gas

of balloon, by electricity, and stands on tiptoe threatening to hunt the eagle in his own element. There's

Steam was, till the other day, the devil which we dreaded. Every pot made by any human potter or brazier had

a hole in its cover, to let off the enemy, lest he should lift pot and roof, and carry the house away. But the

Marquis of Worcester, Watt, and Fulton bethought themselves, that, where was power, was not devil, but was

God; that it must be availed of, and not by any means let off and wasted. Could he lift pots and roofs and

houses so handily? he was the workman they were in search of. He could be used to lift away, chain, and

compel other devils, far more reluctant and dangerous, namely, cubic miles of earth, mountains, weight or

resistance of water, machinery, and the labors of all men in the world; and time he shall lengthen, and shorten

It has not fared much otherwise with higher kinds of steam. The opinion of the million was the terror of the

world, and it was attempted, either to dissipate it, by amusing nations, or to pile it over with strata of society,

a layer of soldiers; over that, a layer of lords; and a king on the top; with clamps and hoops of castles,

garrisons, and police. But, sometimes, the religious principle would get in, and burst the hoops, and rive

every mountain laid on top of it. The Fultons and Watts of politics, believing in unity, saw that it was a

power, and, by satisfying it, (as justice satisfies everybody,) through a different disposition of society,

grouping it on a level, instead of piling it into a mountain, they have contrived to make of his terror the

Very odious, I confess, are the lessons of Fate. Who likes to have a dapper phrenologist pronouncing on his

fortunes? Who likes to believe that he has hidden in his skull, spine, and pelvis, all the vices of a Saxon or

Celtic race, which will be sure to pull him down, with what grandeur of hope and resolve he is fired,

into a selfish, huckstering, servile, dodging animal? A learned physician tells us, the fact is invariable with

the Neapolitan, that, when mature, he assumes the forms of the unmistakable scoundrel. That is a little

But these are magazines and arsenals. A man must thank his defects, and stand in some terror of his talents. A

transcendent talent draws so largely on his forces, as to lame him; a defect pays him revenues on the other

side. The sufferance, which is the badge of the Jew, has made him, in these days, the ruler of the rulers of the

earth. If Fate is ore and quarry, if evil is good in the making, if limitation is power that shall be, if calamities,

Fate involves the melioration. No statement of the Universe can have any soundness, which does not admit

its ascending effort. The direction of the whole, and of the parts, is toward benefit, and in proportion to the

health. Behind every individual, closes organization: before him, opens liberty, the Better, the Best. The

first and worst races are dead. The second and imperfect races are dying out, or remain for the maturing of

higher. In the latest race, in man, every generosity, every new perception, the love and praise he extorts from

his fellows, are certificates of advance out of fate into freedom. Liberation of the will from the sheaths and

clogs of organization which he has outgrown, is the end and aim of this world. Every calamity is a spur and

valuable hint; and where his endeavors do not yet fully avail, they tell as tendency. The whole circle of

animal life, tooth against tooth, devouring war, war for food, a yelp of pain and a grunt of triumph,

until, at last, the whole menagerie, the whole chemical mass is mellowed and refined for higher use,

But to see how fate slides into freedom, and freedom into fate, observe how far the roots of every creature

run, or find, if you can, a point where there is no thread of connection. Our life is consentaneous and

farrelated. This knot of nature is so well tied, that nobody was ever cunning enough to find the two ends.

Nature is intricate, overlapped, interweaved, and endless. Christopher Wren said of the beautiful King's

College chapel, "that, if anybody would tell him where to lay the first stone, he would build such another."

But where shall we find the first atom in this house of man, which is all consent, inosculation, and balance of

The web of relation is shown in habitat, shown in hybernation. When hybernation was observed, it was

found, that, whilst some animals became torpid in winter, others were torpid in summer: hybernation then

was a false name. The long sleep is not an effect of cold, but is regulated by the supply of food proper to the

animal. It becomes torpid when the fruit or prey it lives on is not in season, and regains its activity when its

Eyes are found in light; ears in auricular air; feet on land; fins in water; wings in air; and, each creature where

it was meant to be, with a mutual fitness. Every zone has its own Fauna. There is adjustment between the

animal and its food, its parasite, its enemy. Balances are kept. It is not allowed to diminish in numbers, nor to

exceed. The like adjustments exist for man. His food is cooked, when he arrives; his coal in the pit; the house

ventilated; the mud of the deluge dried; his companions arrived at the same hour, and awaiting him with love,

concert, laughter, and tears. These are coarse adjustments, but the invisible are not less. There are more

belongings to every creature than his air and his food. His instincts must be met, and he has predisposing

power that bends and fits what is near him to his use. He is not possible until the invisible things are right for

him, as well as the visible. Of what changes, then, in sky and earth, and in finer skies and earths, does the

How is this effected? Nature is no spendthrift, but takes the shortest way to her ends. As the general says to

his soldiers, "if you want a fort, build a fort," so nature makes every creature do its own work and get its

living, is it planet, animal, or tree. The planet makes itself. The animal cell makes itself; then, what it

wants. Every creature, wren or dragon, shall make its own lair. As soon as there is life, there is

selfdirection, and absorbing and using of material. Life is freedom, life in the direct ratio of its amount.

You may be sure, the newborn man is not inert. Life works both voluntarily and supernaturally in its

neighborhood. Do you suppose, he can be estimated by his weight in pounds, or, that he is contained in his

skin, this reaching, radiating, jaculating fellow? The smallest candle fills a mile with its rays, and the

When there is something to be done, the world knows how to get it done. The vegetable eye makes leaf,

pericarp, root, bark, or thorn, as the need is; the first cell converts itself into stomach, mouth, nose, or nail,

according to the want: the world throws its life into a hero or a shepherd; and puts him where he is wanted.

Dante and Columbus were Italians, in their time: they would be Russians or Americans today. Things ripen,

new men come. The adaptation is not capricious. The ulterior aim, the purpose beyond itself, the correlation

by which planets subside and crystallize, then animate beasts and men, will not stop, but will work into finer

The secret of the world is, the tie between person and event. Person makes event, and event person. The

"times," "the age," what is that, but a few profound persons and a few active persons who epitomize the

times? Goethe, Hegel, Metternich, Adams, Calhoun, Guizot, Peel, Cobden, Kossuth, Rothschild, Astor,

Brunel, and the rest. The same fitness must be presumed between a man and the time and event, as between

the sexes, or between a race of animals and the food it eats, or the inferior races it uses. He thinks his fate

alien, because the copula is hidden. But the soul contains the event that shall befall it, for the event is only the

actualization of its thoughts; and what we pray to ourselves for is always granted. The event is the print of

your form. It fits you like your skin. What each does is proper to him. Events are the children of his body and

All the toys that infatuate men, and which they play for, houses, land, money, luxury, power, fame, are the

selfsame thing, with a new gauze or two of illusion overlaid. And of all the drums and rattles by which men

are made willing to have their heads broke, and are led out solemnly every morning to parade, the most

admirable is this by which we are brought to believe that events are arbitrary, and independent of actions. At

the conjuror's, we detect the hair by which he moves his puppet, but we have not eyes sharp enough to descry

Nature magically suits the man to his fortunes, by making these the fruit of his character. Ducks take to the

water, eagles to the sky, waders to the sea margin, hunters to the forest, clerks to countingrooms, soldiers to

the frontier. Thus events grow on the same stem with persons; are subpersons. The pleasure of life is

according to the man that lives it, and not according to the work or the place. Life is an ecstasy. We know

what madness belongs to love, what power to paint a vile object in hues of heaven. As insane persons are

indifferent to their dress, diet, and other accommodations, and, as we do in dreams, with equanimity, the most

absurd acts, so, a drop more of wine in our cup of life will reconcile us to strange company and work. Each

creature puts forth from itself its own condition and sphere, as the slug sweats out its slimy house on the

pearleaf, and the woolly aphides on the apple perspire their own bed, and the fish its shell. In youth, we

clothe ourselves with rainbows, and go as brave as the zodiac. In age, we put out another sort of perspiration,

A man's fortunes are the fruit of his character. A man's friends are his magnetisms. We go to Herodotus and

Plutarch for examples of Fate; but we are examples. "Quisque suos patimur manes." The tendency of every

man to enact all that is in his constitution is expressed in the old belief, that the efforts which we make to

escape from our destiny only serve to lead us into it: and I have noticed, a man likes better to be

complimented on his position, as the proof of the last or total excellence, than on his merits.

A man will see his character emitted in the events that seem to meet, but which exude from and accompany

him. Events expand with the character. As once he found himself among toys, so now he plays a part in

colossal systems, and his growth is declared in his ambition, his companions, and his performance. He looks

like a piece of luck, but is a piece of causation; the mosaic, angulated and ground to fit into the gap he

fills. Hence in each town there is some man who is, in his brain and performance, an explanation of the

tillage, production, factories, banks, churches, ways of living, and society, of that town. If you do not chance

to meet him, all that you see will leave you a little puzzled: if you see him, it will become plain. We know in

Massachusetts who built New Bedford, who built Lynn, Lowell, Lawrence, Clinton, Fitchburg, Holyoke,

Portland, and many another noisy mart. Each of these men, if they were transparent, would seem to you not

so much men, as walking cities, and, wherever you put them, they would build one.

History is the action and reaction of these two, Nature and Thought; two boys pushing each other on

the curbstone of the pavement. Everything is pusher or pushed: and matter and mind are in perpetual tilt and

balance, so. Whilst the man is weak, the earth takes up him. He plants his brain and affections. By and by he

will take up the earth, and have his gardens and vineyards in the beautiful order and productiveness of his

thought. Every solid in the universe is ready to become fluid on the approach of the mind, and the power to

flux it is the measure of the mind. If the wall remain adamant, it accuses the want of thought. To a subtler

force, it will stream into new forms, expressive of the character of the mind. What is the city in which we sit

here, but an aggregate of incongruous materials, which have obeyed the will of some man? The granite was

reluctant, but his hands were stronger, and it came. Iron was deep in the ground, and well combined with

stone; but could not hide from his fires. Wood, lime, stuffs, fruits, gums, were dispersed over the earth and

sea, in vain. Here they are, within reach of every man's daylabor, what he wants of them. The whole

world is the flux of matter over the wires of thought to the poles or points where it would build. The races of

men rise out of the ground preoccupied with a thought which rules them, and divided into parties ready armed

and angry to fight for this metaphysical abstraction. The quality of the thought differences the Egyptian and

the Roman, the Austrian and the American. The men who come on the stage at one period are all found to be

related to each other. Certain ideas are in the air. We are all impressionable, for we are made of them; all

impressionable, but some more than others, and these first express them. This explains the curious

contemporaneousness of inventions and discoveries. The truth is in the air, and the most impressionable brain

will announce it first, but all will announce it a few minutes later. So women, as most susceptible, are the best

index of the coming hour. So the great man, that is, the man most imbued with the spirit of the time, is the

impressionable man, of a fibre irritable and delicate, like iodine to light. He feels the infinitesimal

attractions. His mind is righter than others, because he yields to a current so feeble as can be felt only by a

The correlation is shown in defects. Moller, in his Essay on Architecture, taught that the building which was

fitted accurately to answer its end, would turn out to be beautiful, though beauty had not been intended. I find

the like unity in human structures rather virulent and pervasive; that a crudity in the blood will appear in the

argument; a hump in the shoulder will appear in the speech and handiwork. If his mind could be seen, the

hump would be seen. If a man has a seesaw in his voice, it will run into his sentences, into his poem, into the

structure of his fable, into his speculation, into his charity. And, as every man is hunted by his own daemon,

So each man, like each plant, has his parasites. A strong, astringent, bilious nature has more truculent

enemies than the slugs and moths that fret my leaves. Such an one has curculios, borers, knifeworms: a

swindler ate him first, then a client, then a quack, then smooth, plausible gentlemen, bitter and selfish as

This correlation really existing can be divined. If the threads are there, thought can follow and show them.

Some people are made up of rhyme, coincidence, omen, periodicity, and presage: they meet the person they

seek; what their companion prepares to say to them, they first say to him; and a hundred signs apprise them of

Wonderful intricacy in the web, wonderful constancy in the design this vagabond life admits. We wonder

how the fly finds its mate, and yet year after year we find two men, two women, without legal or carnal tie,

spend a great part of their best time within a few feet of each other. And the moral is, that what we seek we

shall find; what we flee from flees from us; as Goethe said, "what we wish for in youth, comes in heaps on us

in old age," too often cursed with the granting of our prayer: and hence the high caution, that, since we are

One key, one solution to the mysteries of human condition, one solution to the old knots of fate, freedom, and

foreknowledge, exists, the propounding, namely, of the double consciousness. A man must ride alternately on

the horses of his private and his public nature, as the equestrians in the circus throw themselves nimbly from

horse to horse, or plant one foot on the back of one, and the other foot on the back of the other. So when a

man is the victim of his fate, has sciatica in his loins, and cramp in his mind; a clubfoot and a club in his

wit; a sour face, and a selfish temper; a strut in his gait, and a conceit in his affection; or is ground to powder

by the vice of his race; he is to rally on his relation to the Universe, which his ruin benefits. Leaving the

daemon who suffers, he is to take sides with the Deity who secures universal benefit by his pain.

To offset the drag of temperament and race, which pulls down, learn this lesson, namely, that by the cunning

copresence of two elements, which is throughout nature, whatever lames or paralyzes you, draws in with it

the divinity, in some form, to repay. A good intention clothes itself with sudden power. When a god wishes to

ride, any chip or pebble will bud and shoot out winged feet, and serve him for a horse.

Let us build altars to the Blessed Unity which holds nature and souls in perfect solution, and compels every

atom to serve an universal end. I do not wonder at a snowflake, a shell, a summer landscape, or the glory of

the stars; but at the necessity of beauty under which the universe lies; that all is and must be pictorial; that the

rainbow, and the curve of the horizon, and the arch of the blue vault are only results from the organism of the

eye. There is no need for foolish amateurs to fetch me to admire a garden of flowers, or a sungilt cloud, or a

waterfall, when I cannot look without seeing splendor and grace. How idle to choose a random sparkle here

or there, when the indwelling necessity plants the rose of beauty on the brow of chaos, and discloses the

Let us build altars to the Beautiful Necessity. If we thought men were free in the sense, that, in a single

exception one fantastical will could prevail over the law of things, it were all one as if a child's hand could

pull down the sun. If, in the least particular, one could derange the order of nature, who would accept the

Let us build altars to the Beautiful Necessity, which secures that all is made of one piece; that plaintiff and

defendant, friend and enemy, animal and planet, food and eater, are of one kind. In astronomy, is vast space,

but no foreign system; in geology, vast time, but the same laws as today. Why should we be afraid of

Nature, which is no other than "philosophy and theology embodied"? Why should we fear to be crushed by

savage elements, we who are made up of the same elements? Let us build to the Beautiful Necessity, which

makes man brave in believing that he cannot shun a danger that is appointed, nor incur one that is not; to the

Necessity which rudely or softly educates him to the perception that there are no contingencies; that Law

rules throughout existence, a Law which is not intelligent but intelligence, not personal nor impersonal,

it disdains words and passes understanding; it dissolves persons; it vivifies nature; yet solicits the pure in

There is not yet any inventory of a man's faculties, any more than a bible of his opinions. Who shall set a

limit to the influence of a human being? There are men, who, by their sympathetic attractions, carry nations

with them, and lead the activity of the human race. And if there be such a tie, that, wherever the mind of man

goes, nature will accompany him, perhaps there are men whose magnetisms are of that force to draw material

and elemental powers, and, where they appear, immense instrumentalities organize around them. Life is a

search after power; and this is an element with which the world is so saturated, there is no chink or crevice

in which it is not lodged, that no honest seeking goes unrewarded. A man should prize events and

possessions as the ore in which this fine mineral is found; and he can well afford to let events and

possessions, and the breath of the body go, if their value has been added to him in the shape of power. If he

have secured the elixir, he can spare the wide gardens from which it was distilled. A cultivated man, wise to

know and bold to perform, is the end to which nature works, and the education of the will is the flowering

All successful men have agreed in one thing, they were causationists. They believed that things went not

by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first and last of

things. A belief in causality, or strict connection between every trifle and the principle of being, and, in

consequence, belief in compensation, or, that nothing is got for nothing, characterizes all valuable minds,

and must control every effort that is made by an industrious one. The most valiant men are the best believers

in the tension of the laws. "All the great captains," said Bonaparte, "have performed vast achievements by

The key to the age may be this, or that, or the other, as the young orators describe; the key to all ages is

Imbecility; imbecility in the vast majority of men, at all times, and, even in heroes, in all but certain

eminent moments; victims of gravity, custom, and fear. This gives force to the strong, that the multitude

We must reckon success a constitutional trait. Courage, the old physicians taught, (and their meaning

holds, if their physiology is a little mythical,) courage, or the degree of life, is as the degree of circulation

of the blood in the arteries. "During passion, anger, fury, trials of strength, wrestling, fighting, a large amount

of blood is collected in the arteries, the maintenance of bodily strength requiring it, and but little is sent into

the veins. This condition is constant with intrepid persons." Where the arteries hold their blood, is courage

and adventure possible. Where they pour it unrestrained into the veins, the spirit is low and feeble. For

performance of great mark, it needs extraordinary health. If Eric is in robust health, and has slept well, and is

at the top of his condition, and thirty years old, at his departure from Greenland, he will steer west, and his

ships will reach Newfoundland. But take out Eric, and put in a stronger and bolder man, Biorn, or Thorfin,

and the ships will, with just as much ease, sail six hundred, one thousand, fifteen hundred miles further,

and reach Labrador and New England. There is no chance in results. With adults, as with children, one class

enter cordially into the game, and whirl with the whirling world; the others have cold hands, and remain

bystanders; or are only dragged in by the humor and vivacity of those who can carry a dead weight. The first

wealth is health. Sickness is poorspirited, and cannot serve any one: it must husband its resources to live.

But health or fulness answers its own ends, and has to spare, runs over, and inundates the neighborhoods and

All power is of one kind, a sharing of the nature of the world. The mind that is parallel with the laws of nature

will be in the current of events, and strong with their strength. One man is made of the same stuff of which

events are made; is in sympathy with the course of things; can predict it. Whatever befalls, befalls him first;

so that he is equal to whatever shall happen. A man who knows men, can talk well on politics, trade, law,

The advantage of a strong pulse is not to be supplied by any labor, art, or concert. It is like the climate, which

easily rears a crop, which no glass, or irrigation, or tillage, or manures, can elsewhere rival. It is like the

opportunity of a city like New York, or Constantinople, which needs no diplomacy to force capital or genius

or labor to it. They come of themselves, as the waters flow to it. So a broad, healthy, massive understanding

seems to lie on the shore of unseen rivers, of unseen oceans, which are covered with barks, that, night and

day, are drifted to this point. That is poured into its lap, which other men lie plotting for. It is in everybody's

secret; anticipates everybody's discovery; and if it do not command every fact of the genius and the scholar, it

is because it is large and sluggish, and does not think them worth the exertion which you do.

This affirmative force is in one, and is not in another, as one horse has the spring in him, and another in the

whip. "On the neck of the young man," said Hafiz, "sparkles no gem so gracious as enterprise." Import into

any stationary district, as into an old Dutch population in New York or Pennsylvania, or among the planters

of Virginia, a colony of hardy Yankees, with seething brains, heads full of steamhammer, pulley, crank, and

toothed wheel, and everything begins to shine with values. What enhancement to all the water and land in

England, is the arrival of James Watt or Brunel! In every company, there is not only the active and passive

sex, but, in both men and women, a deeper and more important sex of mind, namely, the inventive or creative

class of both men and women, and the uninventive or accepting class. Each plus man represents his set, and,

if he have the accidental advantage of personal ascendency, which implies neither more nor less of talent,

but merely the temperamental or taming eye of a soldier or a schoolmaster, (which one has, and one has not,

as one has a black moustache and one a blond,) then quite easily and without envy or resistance, all his

coadjutors and feeders will admit his right to absorb them. The merchant works by bookkeeper and cashier;

the lawyer's authorities are hunted up by clerks; the geologist reports the surveys of his subalterns;

Commander Wilkes appropriates the results of all the naturalists attached to the Expedition; Thorwaldsen's

statue is finished by stonecutters; Dumas has journeymen; and Shakspeare was theatremanager, and used

There is always room for a man of force, and he makes room for many. Society is a troop of thinkers, and the

best heads among them take the best places. A feeble man can see the farms that are fenced and tilled, the

houses that are built. The strong man sees the possible houses and farms. His eye makes estates, as fast as the

When a new boy comes into school, when a man travels, and encounters strangers every day, or, when into

any old club a new comer is domesticated, that happens which befalls, when a strange ox is driven into a pen

or pasture where cattle are kept; there is at once a trial of strength between the best pair of horns and the new

comer, and it is settled thenceforth which is the leader. So now, there is a measuring of strength, very

courteous, but decisive, and an acquiescence thenceforward when these two meet. Each reads his fate in the

other's eyes. The weaker party finds, that none of his information or wit quite fits the occasion. He thought he

knew this or that: he finds that he omitted to learn the end of it. Nothing that he knows will quite hit the mark,

whilst all the rival's arrows are good, and well thrown. But if he knew all the facts in the encyclopaedia, it

would not help him: for this is an affair of presence of mind, of attitude, of aplomb: the opponent has the sun

and wind, and, in every cast, the choice of weapon and mark; and, when he himself is matched with some

other antagonist, his own shafts fly well and hit. 'Tis a question of stomach and constitution. The second man

is as good as the first, perhaps better; but has not stoutness or stomach, as the first has, and so his wit

Health is good, power, life, that resists disease, poison, and all enemies, and is conservative, as well as

creative. Here is question, every spring, whether to graft with wax, or whether with clay; whether to

whitewash or to potash, or to prune; but the one point is the thrifty tree. A good tree, that agrees with the soil,

will grow in spite of blight, or bug, or pruning, or neglect, by night and by day, in all weathers and all

treatments. Vivacity, leadership, must be had, and we are not allowed to be nice in choosing. We must fetch

the pump with dirty water, if clean cannot be had. If we will make bread, we must have contagion, yeast,

emptyings, or what not, to induce fermentation into the dough: as the torpid artist seeks inspiration at any

cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine. And we have a certain instinct, that

where is great amount of life, though gross and peccant, it has its own checks and purifications, and will be

We watch in children with pathetic interest, the degree in which they possess recuperative force. When they

are hurt by us, or by each other, or go to the bottom of the class, or miss the annual prizes, or are beaten in the

game, if they lose heart, and remember the mischance in their chamber at home, they have a serious

check. But if they have the buoyancy and resistance that preoccupies them with new interest in the new

One comes to value this plus health, when he sees that all difficulties vanish before it. A timid man listening

to the alarmists in Congress, and in the newspapers, and observing the profligacy of party, sectional

interests urged with a fury which shuts its eyes to consequences, with a mind made up to desperate

extremities, ballot in one hand, and rifle in the other, might easily believe that he and his country have

seen their best days, and he hardens himself the best he can against the coming ruin. But, after this has been

foretold with equal confidence fifty times, and government six per cents have not declined a quarter of a mill,

he discovers that the enormous elements of strength which are here in play, make our politics unimportant.

Personal power, freedom, and the resources of nature strain every faculty of every citizen. We prosper with

such vigor, that, like thrifty trees, which grow in spite of ice, lice, mice, and borers, so we do not suffer from

the profligate swarms that fatten on the national treasury. The huge animals nourish huge parasites, and the

rancor of the disease attests the strength of the constitution. The same energy in the Greek Demos drew the

remark, that the evils of popular government appear greater than they are; there is compensation for them in

the spirit and energy it awakens. The rough and ready style which belongs to a people of sailors, foresters,

farmers, and mechanics, has its advantages. Power educates the potentate. As long as our people quote

English standards they dwarf their own proportions. A Western lawyer of eminence said to me he wished it

were a penal offence to bring an English lawbook into a court in this country, so pernicious had he found in

his experience our deference to English precedent. The very word `commerce' has only an English meaning,

and is pinched to the cramp exigencies of English experience. The commerce of rivers, the commerce of

railroads, and who knows but the commerce of airballoons, must add an American extension to the

pondhole of admiralty. As long as our people quote English standards, they will miss the sovereignty of

power; but let these rough riders, legislators in shirtsleeves, Hoosier, Sucker, Wolverine, Badger,

or whatever hard head Arkansas, Oregon, or Utah sends, half orator, half assassin, to represent its wrath and

cupidity at Washington, let these drive as they may; and the disposition of territories and public lands, the

necessity of balancing and keeping at bay the snarling majorities of German, Irish, and of native millions,

will bestow promptness, address, and reason, at last, on our buffalohunter, and authority and majesty of

manners. The instinct of the people is right. Men expect from good whigs, put into office by the respectability

of the country, much less skill to deal with Mexico, Spain, Britain, or with our own malcontent members,

than from some strong transgressor, like Jefferson, or Jackson, who first conquers his own government, and

then uses the same genius to conquer the foreigner. The senators who dissented from Mr. Polk's Mexican

war, were not those who knew better, but those who, from political position, could afford it; not Webster, but

This power, to be sure, is not clothed in satin. 'Tis the power of Lynch law, of soldiers and pirates; and it

bullies the peaceable and loyal. But it brings its own antidote; and here is my point, that all kinds of power

usually emerge at the same time; good energy, and bad; power of mind, with physical health; the ecstasies of

devotion, with the exasperations of debauchery. The same elements are always present, only sometimes these

conspicuous, and sometimes those; what was yesterday foreground, being today background, what was

surface, playing now a not less effective part as basis. The longer the drought lasts, the more is the

atmosphere surcharged with water. The faster the ball falls to the sun, the force to fly off is by so much

augmented. And, in morals, wild liberty breeds iron conscience; natures with great impulses have great

resources, and return from far. In politics, the sons of democrats will be whigs; whilst red republicanism, in

the father, is a spasm of nature to engender an intolerable tyrant in the next age. On the other hand,

conservatism, ever more timorous and narrow, disgusts the children, and drives them for a mouthful of fresh

Those who have most of this coarse energy, the `bruisers,' who have run the gauntlet of caucus and tavern

through the county or the state, have their own vices, but they have the good nature of strength and courage.

Fierce and unscrupulous, they are usually frank and direct, and above falsehood. Our politics fall into bad

hands, and churchmen and men of refinement, it seems agreed, are not fit persons to send to Congress.

Politics is a deleterious profession, like some poisonous handicrafts. Men in power have no opinions, but may

be had cheap for any opinion, for any purpose, and if it be only a question between the most civil and the

most forcible, I lean to the last. These Hoosiers and Suckers are really better than the snivelling opposition.

Their wrath is at least of a bold and manly cast. They see, against the unanimous declarations of the people,

how much crime the people will bear; they proceed from step to step, and they have calculated but too justly

upon their Excellencies, the New England governors, and upon their Honors, the New England legislators.

The messages of the governors and the resolutions of the legislatures, are a proverb for expressing a sham

In trade, also, this energy usually carries a trace of ferocity. Philanthropic and religious bodies do not

commonly make their executive officers out of saints. The communities hitherto founded by Socialists,

the Jesuits, the PortRoyalists, the American communities at New Harmony, at Brook Farm, at Zoar, are only

possible, by installing Judas as steward. The rest of the offices may be filled by good burgesses. The pious

and charitable proprietor has a foreman not quite so pious and charitable. The most amiable of country

gentlemen has a certain pleasure in the teeth of the bulldog which guards his orchard. Of the Shaker society,

it was formerly a sort of proverb in the country, that they always sent the devil to market. And in

representations of the Deity, painting, poetry, and popular religion have ever drawn the wrath from Hell. It is

an esoteric doctrine of society, that a little wickedness is good to make muscle; as if conscience were not

good for hands and legs, as if poor decayed formalists of law and order cannot run like wild goats, wolves,

and conies; that, as there is a use in medicine for poisons, so the world cannot move without rogues; that

public spirit and the ready hand are as well found among the malignants. 'Tis not very rare, the coincidence of

sharp private and political practice, with public spirit, and good neighborhood.

I knew a burly Boniface who for many years kept a publichouse in one of our rural capitals. He was a knave

whom the town could ill spare. He was a social, vascular creature, grasping and selfish. There was no crime

which he did not or could not commit. But he made good friends of the selectmen, served them with his best

chop, when they supped at his house, and also with his honor the Judge, he was very cordial, grasping his

hand. He introduced all the fiends, male and female, into the town, and united in his person the functions of

bully, incendiary, swindler, barkeeper, and burglar. He girdled the trees, and cut off the horses' tails of the

temperance people, in the night. He led the `rummies' and radicals in townmeeting with a speech.

Meantime, he was civil, fat, and easy, in his house, and precisely the most publicspirited citizen. He was

active in getting the roads repaired and planted with shadetrees; he subscribed for the fountains, the gas, and

the telegraph; he introduced the new horserake, the new scraper, the babyjumper, and what not, that

Connecticut sends to the admiring citizens. He did this the easier, that the peddler stopped at his house, and

Whilst thus the energy for originating and executing work, deforms itself by excess, and so our axe chops off

our own fingers, this evil is not without remedy. All the elements whose aid man calls in, will sometimes

become his masters, especially those of most subtle force. Shall he, then, renounce steam, fire, and electricity,

or, shall he learn to deal with them? The rule for this whole class of agencies is, all plus is good; only put

Men of this surcharge of arterial blood cannot live on nuts, herbtea, and elegies; cannot read novels, and

play whist; cannot satisfy all their wants at the Thursday Lecture, or the Boston Athenaeum. They pine for

adventure, and must go to Pike's Peak; had rather die by the hatchet of a Pawnee, than sit all day and every

day at a countingroom desk. They are made for war, for the sea, for mining, hunting, and clearing; for

hairbreadth adventures, huge risks, and the joy of eventful living. Some men cannot endure an hour of calm

at sea. I remember a poor Malay cook, on board a Liverpool packet, who, when the wind blew a gale, could

not contain his joy; "Blow!" he cried, "me do tell you, blow!" Their friends and governors must see that some

vent for their explosive complexion is provided. The roisters who are destined for infamy at home, if sent to

Mexico, will "cover you with glory," and come back heroes and generals. There are Oregons, Californias, and

Exploring Expeditions enough appertaining to America, to find them in files to gnaw, and in crocodiles to

eat. The young English are fine animals, full of blood, and when they have no wars to breathe their riotous

valors in, they seek for travels as dangerous as war, diving into Maelstroms; swimming Hellesponts; wading

up the snowy Himmaleh; hunting lion, rhinoceros, elephant, in South Africa; gypsying with Borrow in Spain

and Algiers; riding alligators in South America with Waterton; utilizing Bedouin, Sheik, and Pacha, with

Layard; yachting among the icebergs of Lancaster Sound; peeping into craters on the equator; or running on

The excess of virility has the same importance in general history, as in private and industrial life. Strong race

or strong individual rests at last on natural forces, which are best in the savage, who, like the beasts around

him, is still in reception of the milk from the teats of Nature. Cut off the connection between any of our

works, and this aboriginal source, and the work is shallow. The people lean on this, and the mob is not quite

so bad an argument as we sometimes say, for it has this good side. "March without the people," said a French

deputy from the tribune, "and you march into night: their instincts are a fingerpointing of Providence,

always turned toward real benefit. But when you espouse an Orleans party, or a Bourbon, or a Montalembert

party, or any other but an organic party, though you mean well, you have a personality instead of a principle,

The best anecdotes of this force are to be had from savage life, in explorers, soldiers, and buccaneers. But

who cares for fallingsout of assassins, and fights of bears, or grindings of icebergs? Physical force has no

value, where there is nothing else. Snow in snowbanks, fire in volcanoes and solfataras is cheap. The luxury

of ice is in tropical countries, and midsummer days. The luxury of fire is, to have a little on our hearth: and of

electricity, not volleys of the charged cloud, but the manageable stream on the batterywires. So of spirit, or

energy; the rests or remains of it in the civil and moral man, are worth all the cannibals in the Pacific.

In history, the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic

strength directed on his opening sense of beauty: and you have Pericles and Phidias, not yet passed

over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and the world is in that moment of transition,

when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astringency or acridity is got out by ethics

The triumphs of peace have been in some proximity to war. Whilst the hand was still familiar with the

swordhilt, whilst the habits of the camp were still visible in the port and complexion of the gentleman, his

intellectual power culminated: the compression and tension of these stern conditions is a training for the

finest and softest arts, and can rarely be compensated in tranquil times, except by some analogous vigor

We say that success is constitutional; depends on a plus condition of mind and body, on power of work, on

courage; that it is of main efficacy in carrying on the world, and, though rarely found in the right state for an

article of commerce, but oftener in the supersaturate or excess, which makes it dangerous and destructive, yet

it cannot be spared, and must be had in that form, and absorbents provided to take off its edge.

The affirmative class monopolize the homage of mankind. They originate and execute all the great feats.

What a force was coiled up in the skull of Napoleon! Of the sixty thousand men making his army at Eylau, it

seems some thirty thousand were thieves and burglars. The men whom, in peaceful communities, we hold if

we can, with iron at their legs, in prisons, under the muskets of sentinels, this man dealt with, hand to hand,

This aboriginal might gives a surprising pleasure when it appears under conditions of supreme refinement, as

in the proficients in high art. When Michel Angelo was forced to paint the Sistine Chapel in fresco, of which

art he knew nothing, he went down into the Pope's gardens behind the Vatican, and with a shovel dug out

ochres, red and yellow, mixed them with glue and water with his own hands, and having, after many trials, at

last suited himself, climbed his ladders, and painted away, week after week, month after month, the sibyls

and prophets. He surpassed his successors in rough vigor, as much as in purity of intellect and refinement. He

was not crushed by his one picture left unfinished at last. Michel was wont to draw his figures first in

skeleton, then to clothe them with flesh, and lastly to drape them. "Ah!" said a brave painter to me, thinking

on these things, "if a man has failed, you will find he has dreamed instead of working. There is no way to

success in our art, but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and

Success goes thus invariably with a certain plus or positive power: an ounce of power must balance an ounce

of weight. And, though a man cannot return into his mother's womb, and be born with new amounts of

vivacity, yet there are two economies, which are the best succedanea which the case admits. The first is, the

stopping off decisively our miscellaneous activity, and concentrating our force on one or a few points; as the

gardener, by severe pruning, forces the sap of the tree into one or two vigorous limbs, instead of suffering it

"Enlarge not thy destiny," said the oracle: "endeavor not to do more than is given thee in charge." The one

prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation: and it makes no difference whether our

dissipations are coarse or fine; property and its cares, friends, and a social habit, or politics, or music, or

feasting. Everything is good which takes away one plaything and delusion more, and drives us home to add

one stroke of faithful work. Friends, books, pictures, lower duties, talents, flatteries, hopes, all are

distractions which cause oscillations in our giddy balloon, and make a good poise and a straight course

impossible. You must elect your work; you shall take what your brain can, and drop all the rest. Only so, can

that amount of vital force accumulate, which can make the step from knowing to doing. No matter how much

faculty of idle seeing a man has, the step from knowing to doing is rarely taken. 'Tis a step out of a chalk

circle of imbecility into fruitfulness. Many an artist lacking this, lacks all: he sees the masculine Angelo or

Cellini with despair. He, too, is up to Nature and the First Cause in his thought. But the spasm to collect and

swing his whole being into one act, he has not. The poet Campbell said, that "a man accustomed to work was

equal to any achievement he resolved on, and, that, for himself, necessity not inspiration was the prompter of

Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short, in all management of human

affairs. One of the high anecdotes of the world is the reply of Newton to the inquiry, "how he had been able

to achieve his discoveries?" "By always intending my mind." Or if you will have a text from politics, take

this from Plutarch: "There was, in the whole city, but one street in which Pericles was ever seen, the street

which led to the marketplace and the council house. He declined all invitations to banquets, and all gay

assemblies and company. During the whole period of his administration, he never dined at the table of a

friend." Or if we seek an example from trade, "I hope," said a good man to Rothyschild, "your children

are not too fond of money and business: I am sure you would not wish that." "I am sure I should wish that:

I wish them to give mind, soul, heart, and body to business, that is the way to be happy. It requires a great

deal of boldness and a great deal of caution, to make a great fortune, and when you have got it, it requires ten

times as much wit to keep it. If I were to listen to all the projects proposed to me, I should ruin myself very

soon. Stick to one business, young man. Stick to your brewery, (he said this to young Buxton,) and you will

be the great brewer of London. Be brewer, and banker, and merchant, and manufacturer, and you will soon be

Many men are knowing, many are apprehensive and tenacious, but they do not rush to a decision. But in our

flowing affairs a decision must be made, the best, if you can; but any is better than none. There are twenty

ways of going to a point, and one is the shortest; but set out at once on one. A man who has that presence of

mind which can bring to him on the instant all he knows, is worth for action a dozen men who know as much,

but can only bring it to light slowly. The good Speaker in the House is not the man who knows the theory of

parliamentary tactics, but the man who decides offhand. The good judge is not he who does hairsplitting

justice to every allegation, but who, aiming at substantial justice, rules something intelligible for the guidance

of suitors. The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and

qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he can get you out of a

scrape. Dr. Johnson said, in one of his flowing sentences, "Miserable beyond all names of wretchedness is

that unhappy pair, who are doomed to reduce beforehand to the principles of abstract reason all the details of

each domestic day. There are cases where little can be said, and much must be done."

The second substitute for temperament is drill, the power of use and routine. The hack is a better roadster

than the Arab barb. In chemistry, the galvanic stream, slow, but continuous, is equal in power to the electric

spark, and is, in our arts, a better agent. So in human action, against the spasm of energy, we offset the

continuity of drill. We spread the same amount of force over much time, instead of condensing it into a

moment. 'Tis the same ounce of gold here in a ball, and there in a leaf. At West Point, Col. Buford, the chief

engineer, pounded with a hammer on the trunnions of a cannon, until he broke them off. He fired a piece of

ordnance some hundred times in swift succession, until it burst. Now which stroke broke the trunnion? Every

stroke. Which blast burst the piece? Every blast. "Diligence passe sens," Henry VIII. was wont to say, or,

great is drill. John Kemble said, that the worst provincial company of actors would go through a play better

than the best amateur company. Basil Hall likes to show that the worst regular troops will beat the best

volunteers. Practice is nine tenths. A course of mobs is good practice for orators. All the great speakers were

bad speakers at first. Stumping it through England for seven years, made Cobden a consummate debater.

Stumping it through New England for twice seven, trained Wendell Phillips. The way to learn German, is, to

read the same dozen pages over and over a hundred times, till you know every word and particle in them, and

can pronounce and repeat them by heart. No genius can recite a ballad at first reading, so well as mediocrity

can at the fifteenth or twentieth readying. The rule for hospitality and Irish `help,' is, to have the same dinner

every day throughout the year. At last, Mrs. O'Shaughnessy learns to cook it to a nicety, the host learns to

carve it, and the guests are well served. A humorous friend of mine thinks, that the reason why Nature is so

perfect in her art, and gets up such inconceivably fine sunsets, is, that she has learned how, at last, by dint of

doing the same thing so very often. Cannot one converse better on a topic on which he has experience, than

on one which is new? Men whose opinion is valued on 'Change, are only such as have a special experience,

and off that ground their opinion is not valuable. "More are made good by exercitation, than by nature," said

Democritus. The friction in nature is so enormous that we cannot spare any power. It is not question to

express our thought, to elect our way, but to overcome resistances of the medium and material in everything

we do. Hence the use of drill, and the worthlessness of amateurs to cope with practitioners. Six hours every

day at the piano, only to give facility of touch; six hours a day at painting, only to give command of the

odious materials, oil, ochres, and brushes. The masters say, that they know a master in music, only by seeing

the pose of the hands on the keys; so difficult and vital an act is the command of the instrument. To have

learned the use of the tools, by thousands of manipulations; to have learned the arts of reckoning, by endless

I remarked in England, in confirmation of a frequent experience at home, that, in literary circles, the men of

trust and consideration, bookmakers, editors, university deans and professors, bishops, too, were by no means

men of the largest literary talent, but usually of a low and ordinary intellectuality, with a sort of mercantile

activity and working talent. Indifferent hacks and mediocrities tower, by pushing their forces to a lucrative

point, or by working power, over multitudes of superior men, in Old as in New England.

I have not forgotten that there are sublime considerations which limit the value of talent and superficial

success. We can easily overpraise the vulgar hero. There are sources on which we have not drawn. I know

what I abstain from. I adjourn what I have to say on this topic to the chapters on Culture and Worship. But

this force or spirit, being the means relied on by Nature for bringing the work of the day about, as far as

we attach importance to household life, and the prizes of the world, we must respect that. And I hold, that an

economy may be applied to it; it is as much a subject of exact law and arithmetic as fluids and gases are; it

may be husbanded, or wasted; every man is efficient only as he is a container or vessel of this force, and

never was any signal act or achievement in history, but by this expenditure. This is not gold, but the

If these forces and this husbandry are within reach of our will, and the laws of them can be read, we infer that

all success, and all conceivable benefit for man, is also, first or last, within his reach, and has its own sublime

economies by which it may be attained. The world is mathematical, and has no casualty, in all its vast and

flowing curve. Success has no more eccentricity, than the gingham and muslin we weave in our mills. I know

no more affecting lesson to our busy, plotting New England brains, than to go into one of the factories with

which we have lined all the watercourses in the States. A man hardly knows how much he is a machine, until

he begins to make telegraph, loom, press, and locomotive, in his own image. But in these, he is forced to

leave out his follies and hindrances, so that when we go to the mill, the machine is more moral than we. Let a

man dare go to a loom, and see if he be equal to it. Let machine confront machine, and see how they come

out. The worldmill is more complex than the calicomill, and the architect stooped less. In the

ginghammill, a broken thread or a shred spoils the web through a piece of a hundred yards, and is traced

back to the girl that wove it, and lessens her wages. The stockholder, on being shown this, rubs his hands

with delight. Are you so cunning, Mr. Profitloss, and do you expect to swindle your master and employer, in

the web you weave? A day is a more magnificent cloth than any muslin, the mechanism that makes it is

infinitely cunninger, and you shall not conceal the sleezy, fraudulent, rotten hours you have slipped into the

piece, nor fear that any honest thread, or straighter steel, or more inflexible shaft, will not testify in the web.

As soon as a stranger is introduced into any compations which all wish to have answered, is, How does that

man get his living? And with reason. He is no whole man until he knows how to earn a blameless livelihood.

Society is barbarous, until every industrious man can get his living without dishonest customs.

Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He fails to make his place good in the world, unless he

not only pays his debt, but also adds something to the common wealth. Nor can he do justice to his genius,

without making some larger demand on the world than a bare subsistence. He is by constitution expensive,

Wealth has its source in applications of the mind to nature, from the rudest strokes of spade and axe, up to the

last secrets of art. Intimate ties subsist between thought and all production; because a better order is

equivalent to vast amounts of brute labor. The forces and the resistances are Nature's, but the mind acts in

bringing things from where they abound to where they are wanted; in wise combining; in directing the

practice of the useful arts, and in the creation of finer values, by fine art, by eloquence, by song, or the

reproductions of memory. Wealth is in applications of mind to nature; and the art of getting rich consists not

in industry, much less in saving, but in a better order, in timeliness, in being at the right spot. One man has

stronger arms, or longer legs; another sees by the course of streams, and growth of markets, where land will

be wanted, makes a clearing to the river, goes to sleep, wakes up rich. Steam is no stronger now, than it was a

hundred years ago; but is put to better use. A clever fellow was acquainted with the expansive force of steam;

he also saw the wealth of wheat and grass rotting in Michigan. Then he cunningly screws on the steampipe

to the wheatcrop. Puff now, O Steam! The steam puffs and expands as before, but this time it is dragging all

Michigan at its back to hungry New York and hungry England. Coal lay in ledges under the ground since the

Flood, until a laborer with pick and windlass brings it to the surface. We may well call it black diamonds.

Every basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to

Labrador and the polar circle: and it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. Watt and

Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a halfounce of coal will draw two tons a mile,

and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta, and with its comfort brings its

When the farmer's peaches are taken from under the tree, and carried into town, they have a new look, and a

hundredfold value over the fruit which grew on the same bough, and lies fulsomely on the ground. The craft

of the merchant is this bringing a thing from where it abounds, to where it is costly.

Wealth begins in a tight roof that keeps the rain and wind out; in a good pump that yields you plenty of sweet

water; in two suits of clothes, so to change your dress when you are wet; in dry sticks to burn; in a good

doublewick lamp; and three meals; in a horse, or a locomotive, to cross the land; in a boat to cross the sea;

in tools to work with; in books to read; and so, in giving, on all sides, by tools and auxiliaries, the greatest

possible extension to our powers, as if it added feet, and hands, and eyes, and blood, length to the day, and

Wealth begins with these articles of necessity. And here we must recite the iron law which Nature thunders in

these northern climates. First, she requires that each man should feed himself. If, happily, his fathers have left

him no inheritance, he must go to work, and by making his wants less, or his gains more, he must draw

himself out of that state of pain and insult in which she forces the beggar to lie. She gives him no rest until

this is done: she starves, taunts, and torments him, takes away warmth, laughter, sleep, friends, and daylight,

until he has fought his way to his own loaf. Then, less peremptorily, but still with sting enough, she urges him

to the acquisition of such things as belong to him. Every warehouse and shopwindow, every fruittree,

every thought of every hour, opens a new want to him, which it concerns his power and dignity to gratify. It

is of no use to argue the wants down: the philosophers have laid the greatness of man in making his wants

few; but will a man content himself with a hut and a handful of dried pease? He is born to be rich. He is

thoroughly related; and is tempted out by his appetites and fancies to the conquest of this and that piece of

nature, until he finds his wellbeing in the use of his planet, and of more planets than his own. Wealth

requires, besides the crust of bread and the roof, the freedom of the city, the freedom of the earth,

travelling, machinery, the benefits of science, music, and fine arts, the best culture, and the best company. He

is the rich man who can avail himself of all men's faculties. He is the richest man who knows how to draw a

benefit from the labors of the greatest number of men, of men in distant countries, and in past times. The

same correspondence that is between thirst in the stomach, and water in the spring, exists between the whole

of man and the whole of nature. The elements offer their service to him. The sea, washing the equator and the

poles, offers its perilous aid, and the power and empire that follow it, day by day to his craft and audacity.

"Beware of me," it says, "but if you can hold me, I am the key to all the lands." Fire offers, on its side, an

equal power. Fire, steam, lightning, gravity, ledges of rock, mines of iron, lead, quicksilver, tin, and gold;

forests of all woods; fruits of all climates; animals of all habits; the powers of tillage; the fabrics of his

chemic laboratory; the webs of his loom; the masculine draught of his locomotive, the talismans of the

machineshop; all grand and subtile things, minerals, gases, ethers, passions, war, trade, government, are his

natural playmates, and, according to the excellence of the machinery in each human being, is his attraction

for the instruments he is to employ. The world is his toolchest, and he is successful, or his education is

carried on just so far, as is the marriage of his faculties with nature, or, the degree in which he takes up things

The strong race is strong on these terms. The Saxons are the merchants of the world; now, for a thousand

years, the leading race, and by nothing more than their quality of personal independence, and, in its special

modification, pecuniary independence. No reliance for bread and games on the government, no clanship, no

patriarchal style of living by the revenues of a chief, no marryingon, no system of clientship suits them;

but every man must pay his scot. The English are prosperous and peaceable, with their habit of considering

that every man must take care of himself, and has himself to thank, if he do not maintain and improve his

The subject of economy mixes itself with morals, inasmuch as it is a peremptory point of virtue that a man's

independence be secured. Poverty demoralizes. A man in debt is so far a slave; and Wallstreet thinks it easy

for a millionaire to be a man of his word, a man of honor, but, that, in failing circumstances, no man can be

relied on to keep his integrity. And when one observes in the hotels and palaces of our Atlantic capitals, the

habit of expense, the riot of the senses, the absence of bonds, clanship, fellowfeeling of any kind, he feels,

that, when a man or a woman is driven to the wall, the chances of integrity are frightfully diminished, as if

virtue were coming to be a luxury which few could afford, or, as Burke said, "at a market almost too high for

humanity." He may fix his inventory of necessities and of enjoyments on what scale he pleases, but if he

wishes the power and privilege of thought, the chalking out his own career, and having society on his own

The manly part is to do with might and main what you can do. The world is full of fops who never did

anything, and who have persuaded beauties and men of genius to wear their fop livery, and these will deliver

the fop opinion, that it is not respectable to be seen earning a living; that it is much more respectable to spend

without earning; and this doctrine of the snake will come also from the elect sons of light; for wise men are

not wise at all hours, and will speak five times from their taste or their humor, to once from their reason. The

brave workman, who might betray his feeling of it in his manners, if he do not succumb in his practice, must

replace the grace or elegance forfeited, by the merit of the work done. No matter whether he make shoes, or

statues, or laws. It is the privilege of any human work which is well done to invest the doer with a certain

haughtiness. He can well afford not to conciliate, whose faithful work will answer for him. The mechanic at

his bench carries a quiet heart and assured manners, and deals on even terms with men of any condition. The

artist has made his picture so true, that it disconcerts criticism. The statue is so beautiful, that it contracts no

stain from the market, but makes the market a silent gallery for itself. The case of the young lawyer was

pitiful to disgust, a paltry matter of buttons or tweezercases; but the determined youth saw in it an

aperture to insert his dangerous wedges, made the insignificance of the thing forgotten, and gave fame by his

Society in large towns is babyish, and wealth is made a toy. The life of pleasure is so ostentatious, that a

shallow observer must believe that this is the agreed best use of wealth, and, whatever is pretended, it ends in

cosseting. But, if this were the main use of surplus capital, it would bring us to barricades, burned towns, and

tomahawks, presently. Men of sense esteem wealth to be the assimilation of nature to themselves, the

converting of the sap and juices of the planet to the incarnation and nutriment of their design. Power is what

they want, not candy; power to execute their design, power to give legs and feet, form and actuality to

their thought, which, to a clearsighted man, appears the end for which the Universe exists, and all its

resources might be well applied. Columbus thinks that the sphere is a problem for practical navigation, as

well as for closet geometry, and looks on all kings and peoples as cowardly landsmen, until they dare fit him

out. Few men on the planet have more truly belonged to it. But he was forced to leave much of his map blank.

So the men of the mine, telegraph, mill, map, and survey, the monomaniacs, who talk up their project in

marts, and offices, and entreat men to subscribe: how did our factories get built? how did North America

get netted with iron rails, except by the importunity of these orators, who dragged all the prudent men in? Is

party the madness of many for the gain of a few? This speculative genius is the madness of few for the gain

of the world. The projectors are sacrificed, but the public is the gainer. Each of these idealists, working after

his thought, would make it tyrannical, if he could. He is met and antagonized by other speculators, as hot as

he. The equilibrium is preserved by these counteractions, as one tree keeps down another in the forest, that it

may not absorb all the sap in the ground. And the supply in nature of railroad presidents, copperminers,

grandjunctioners, smokeburners, fireannihilators, is limited by the same law which keeps the proportion

To be rich is to have a ticket of admission to the masterworks and chief men of each race. It is to have the

sea, by voyaging; to visit the mountains, Niagara, the Nile, the desert, Rome, Paris, Constantinople; to see

galleries, libraries, arsenals, manufactories. The reader of Humboldt's "Cosmos" follows the marches of a

man whose eyes, ears, and mind are armed by all the science, arts, and implements which mankind have

anywhere accumulated, and who is using these to add to the stock. So is it with Denon, Beckford, Belzoni,

Wilkinson, Layard, Kane, Lepsius, and Livingston. "The rich man," says Saadi, "is everywhere expected and

at home." The rich take up something more of the world into man's life. They include the country as well as

the town, the oceanside, the White Hills, the Far West, and the old European homesteads of man, in their

notion of available material. The world is his, who has money to go over it. He arrives at the seashore, and a

sumptuous ship has floored and carpeted for him the stormy Atlantic, and made it a luxurious hotel, amid the

horrors of tempests. The Persians say, "'Tis the same to him who wears a shoe, as if the whole earth were

Kings are said to have long arms, but every man should have long arms, and should pluck his living, his

instruments, his power, and his knowing, from the sun, moon, and stars. Is not then the demand to be rich

legitimate? Yet, I have never seen a rich man. I have never seen a man as rich as all men ought to be, or, with

an adequate command of nature. The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for

wealth; but if men should take these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists

would rush to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the people, lest civilization should be undone. Men

are urged by their ideas to acquire the command over nature. Ages derive a culture from the wealth of Roman

Caesars, Leo Tenths, magnificent Kings of France, Grand Dukes of Tuscany, Dukes of Devonshire,

Townleys, Vernons, and Peels, in England; or whatever great proprietors. It is the interest of all men, that

there should be Vaticans and Louvres full of noble works of art; British Museums, and French Gardens of

Plants, Philadelphia Academies of Natural History, Bodleian, Ambrosian, Royal, Congressional Libraries. It

is the interest of all that there should be Exploring Expeditions; Captain Cooks to voyage round the world,

Rosses, Franklins, Richardsons, and Kanes, to find the magnetic and the geographic poles. We are all richer

for the measurement of a degree of latitude on the earth's surface. Our navigation is safer for the chart. How

intimately our knowledge of the system of the Universe rests on that! and a true economy in a state or an

Whilst it is each man's interest, that, not only ease and convenience of living, but also wealth or surplus

product should exist somewhere, it need not be in his hands. Often it is very undesirable to him. Goethe said

well, "nobody should be rich but those who understand it." Some men are born to own, and can animate all

their possessions. Others cannot: their owning is not graceful; seems to be a compromise of their character:

they seem to steal their own dividends. They should own who can administer; not they who hoard and

conceal; not they who, the greater proprietors they are, are only the greater beggars, but they whose work

carves out work for more, opens a path for all. For he is the rich man in whom the people are rich, and he is

the poor man in whom the people are poor: and how to give all access to the masterpieces of art and nature, is

the problem of civilization. The socialism of our day has done good service in setting men on thinking how

certain civilizing benefits, now only enjoyed by the opulent, can be enjoyed by all. For example, the

providing to each man the means and apparatus of science, and of the arts. There are many articles good for

occasional use, which few men are able to own. Every man wishes to see the ring of Saturn, the satellites and

belts of Jupiter and Mars; the mountains and craters in the moon: yet how few can buy a telescope! and of

those, scarcely one would like the trouble of keeping it in order, and exhibiting it. So of electrical and

chemical apparatus, and many the like things. Every man may have occasion to consult books which he does

not care to possess, such as cyclopaedias, dictionaries, tables, charts, maps, and public documents: pictures

also of birds, beasts, fishes, shells, trees, flowers, whose names he desires to know.

There is a refining influence from the arts of Design on a prepared mind, which is as positive as that of music,

and not to be supplied from any other source. But pictures, engravings, statues, and casts, beside their first

cost, entail expenses, as of galleries and keepers for the exhibition; and the use which any man can make of

them is rare, and their value, too, is much enhanced by the numbers of men who can share their enjoyment. In

the Greek cities, it was reckoned profane, that any person should pretend a property in a work of art, which

belonged to all who could behold it. I think sometimes, could I only have music on my own terms;

could I live in a great city, and know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of

If properties of this kind were owned by states, towns, and lyceums, they would draw the bonds of

neighborhood closer. A town would exist to an intellectual purpose. In Europe, where the feudal forms secure

the permanence of wealth in certain families, those families buy and preserve these things, and lay them open

to the public. But in America, where democratic institutions divide every estate into small portions, after a

few years, the public should step into the place of these proprietors, and provide this culture and inspiration

Man was born to be rich, or, inevitably grows rich by the use of his faculties; by the union of thought with

nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and

patience in the players. Cultivated labor drives out brute labor. An infinite number of shrewd men, in infinite

years, have arrived at certain best and shortest ways of doing, and this accumulated skill in arts, cultures,

harvestings, curings, manufactures, navigations, exchanges, constitutes the worth of our world today.

Commerce is a game of skill, which every man cannot play, which few men can play well. The right

merchant is one who has the just average of faculties we call common sense; a man of a strong affinity for

facts, who makes up his decision on what he has seen. He is thoroughly persuaded of the truths of arithmetic.

There is always a reason, in the man, for his good or bad fortune, and so, in making money. Men talk as if

there were some magic about this, and believe in magic, in all parts of life. He knows, that all goes on the old

road, pound for pound, cent for cent, for every effect a perfect cause, and that good luck is another

name for tenacity of purpose. He insures himself in every transaction, and likes small and sure gains. Probity

and closeness to the facts are the basis, but the masters of the art add a certain long arithmetic. The problem

is, to combine many and remote operations, with the accuracy and adherence to the facts, which is easy in

near and small transactions; so to arrive at gigantic results, without any compromise of safety. Napoleon was

fond of telling the story of the Marseilles banker, who said to his visitor, surprised at the contrast between the

splendor of the banker's chateau and hospitality, and the meanness of the countingroom in which he had

seen him, "Young man, you are too young to understand how masses are formed, the true and only

power, whether composed of money, water, or men, it is all alike, a mass is an immense centre of

motion, but it must be begun, it must be kept up:" and he might have added, that the way in which it must

Success consists in close appliance to the laws of the world, and, since those laws are intellectual and moral,

an intellectual and moral obedience. Political Economy is as good a book wherein to read the life of man, and

the ascendency of laws over all private and hostile influences, as any Bible which has come down to us.

Money is representative, and follows the nature and fortunes of the owner. The coin is a delicate meter of

civil, social, and moral changes. The farmer is covetous of his dollar, and with reason. It is no waif to him. He

knows how many strokes of labor it represents. His bones ache with the day's work that earned it. He knows

how much land it represents; how much rain, frost, and sunshine. He knows that, in the dollar, he gives

you so much discretion and patience so much hoeing, and threshing. Try to lift his dollar; you must lift all

that weight. In the city, where money follows the skit of a pen, or a lucky rise in exchange, it comes to be

looked on as light. I wish the farmer held it dearer, and would spend it only for real bread; force for force.

The farmer's dollar is heavy, and the clerk's is light and nimble; leaps out of his pocket; jumps on to cards and

farotables: but still more curious is its susceptibility to metaphysical changes. It is the finest barometer of

Every step of civil advancement makes every man's dollar worth more. In California, the country where it

grew, what would it buy? A few years since, it would buy a shanty, dysentery, hunger, bad company, and

crime. There are wide countries, like Siberia, where it would buy little else today, than some petty

mitigation of suffering. In Rome, it will buy beauty and magnificence. Forty years ago, a dollar would not

buy much in Boston. Now it will buy a great deal more in our old town, thanks to railroads, telegraphs,

steamers, and the contemporaneous growth of New York, and the whole country. Yet there are many goods

appertaining to a capital city, which are not yet purchasable here, no, not with a mountain of dollars. A dollar

in Florida is not worth a dollar in Massachusetts. A dollar is not value, but representative of value, and, at

last, of moral values. A dollar is rated for the corn it will buy, or to speak strictly, not for the corn or

houseroom, but for Athenian corn, and Roman houseroom, for the wit, probity, and power, which we

eat bread and dwell in houses to share and exert. Wealth is mental; wealth is moral. The value of a dollar is,

to buy just things: a dollar goes on increasing in value with all the genius, and all the virtue of the world. A

dollar in a university, is worth more than a dollar in a jail; in a temperate, schooled, lawabiding community,

than in some sink of crime, where dice, knives, and arsenic, are in constant play.

The "BankNote Detector" is a useful publication. But the current dollar, silver or paper, is itself the detector

of the right and wrong where it circulates. Is it not instantly enhanced by the increase of equity? If a trader

refuses to sell his vote, or adheres to some odious right, he makes so much more equity in Massachusetts; and

every acre in the State is more worth, in the hour of his action. If you take out of Statestreet the ten

honestest merchants, and put in ten roguish persons, controlling the same amount of capital, the rates of

insurance will indicate it; the soundness of banks will show it: the highways will be less secure: the schools

will feel it; the children will bring home their little dose of the poison: the judge will sit less firmly on the

bench, and his decisions be less upright; he has lost so much support and constraint, which all need; and

the pulpit will betray it, in a laxer rule of life. An appletree, if you take out every day for a number of days,

a load of loam, and put in a load of sand about its roots, will find it out. An appletree is a stupid kind of

creature, but if this treatment be pursued for a short time, I think it would begin to mistrust something. And if

you should take out of the powerful class engaged in trade a hundred good men, and put in a hundred bad, or,

what is just the same thing, introduce a demoralizing institution, would not the dollar, which is not much

stupider than an appletree, presently find it out? The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society.

Every man who removes into this city, with any purchasable talent or skill in him, gives to every man's labor

in the city, a new worth. If a talent is anywhere born into the world, the community of nations is enriched;

and, much more, with a new degree of probity. The expense of crime, one of the principal charges of every

nation, is so far stopped. In Europe, crime is observed to increase or abate with the price of bread. If the

Rothschilds at Paris do not accept bills, the people at Manchester, at Paisley, at Birmingham, are forced into

the highway, and landlords are shot down in Ireland. The police records attest it. The vibrations are presently

felt in New York, New Orleans, and Chicago. Not much otherwise, the economical power touches the masses

through the political lords. Rothschild refuses the Russian loan, and there is peace, and the harvests are saved.

He takes it, and there is war, and an agitation through a large portion of mankind, with every hideous result,

Wealth brings with it its own checks and balances. The basis of political economy is noninterference. The

only safe rule is found in the selfadjusting meter of demand and supply. Do not legislate. Meddle, and you

snap the sinews with your sumptuary laws. Give no bounties: make equal laws: secure life and property, and

you need not give alms. Open the doors of opportunity to talent and virtue, and they will do themselves

justice, and property will not be in bad hands. In a free and just commonwealth, property rushes from the idle

The laws of nature play through trade, as a toybattery exhibits the effects of electricity. The level of the sea

is not more surely kept, than is the equilibrium of value in society, by the demand and supply: and artifice or

legislation punishes itself, by reactions, gluts, and bankruptcies. The sublime laws play indifferently through

atoms and galaxies. Whoever knows what happens in the getting and spending of a loaf of bread and a pint of

beer; that no wishing will change the rigorous limits of pints and penny loaves; that, for all that is consumed,

so much less remains in the basket and pot; but what is gone out of these is not wasted, but well spent, if it

nourish his body, and enable him to finish his task; knows all of political economy that the budgets of

empires can teach him. The interest of petty economy is this symbolization of the great economy; the way in

which a house, and a private man's methods, tally with the solar system, and the laws of give and take,

throughout nature; and, however wary we are of the falsehoods and petty tricks which we suicidally play off

on each other, every man has a certain satisfaction, whenever his dealing touches on the inevitable facts;

when he sees that things themselves dictate the price, as they always tend to do, and, in large manufactures,

are seen to do. Your paper is not fine or coarse enough, is too heavy, or too thin. The manufacturer says,

he will furnish you with just that thickness or thinness you want; the pattern is quite indifferent to him; here is

his schedule; any variety of paper, as cheaper or dearer, with the prices annexed. A pound of paper costs

There is in all our dealings a selfregulation that supersedes chaffering. You will rent a house, but must have

it cheap. The owner can reduce the rent, but so he incapacitates himself from making proper repairs, and the

tenant gets not the house he would have, but a worse one; besides, that a relation a little injurious is

established between landlord and tenant. You dismiss your laborer, saying, "Patrick, I shall send for you as

soon as I cannot do without you." Patrick goes off contented, for he knows that the weeds will grow with the

potatoes, the vines must be planted, next week, and, however unwilling you may be, the cantelopes,

crooknecks, and cucumbers will send for him. Who but must wish that all labor and value should stand on

the same simple and surly market? If it is the best of its kind, it will. We must have joiner, locksmith, planter,

If a St. Michael's pear sells for a shilling, it costs a shilling to raise it. If, in Boston, the best securities offer

twelve per cent. for money, they have just six per cent. of insecurity. You may not see that the fine pear costs

you a shilling, but it costs the community so much. The shilling represents the number of enemies the pear

has, and the amount of risk in ripening it. The price of coal shows the narrowness of the coalfield, and a

compulsory confinement of the miners to a certain district. All salaries are reckoned on contingent, as well as

on actual services. "If the wind were always southwest by west," said the skipper, "women might take ships

to sea." One might say, that all things are of one price; that nothing is cheap or dear; and that the apparent

disparities that strike us, are only a shopman's trick of concealing the damage in your bargain. A youth

coming into the city from his native New Hampshire farm, with its hard fare still fresh in his remembrance,

boards at a firstclass hotel, and believes he must somehow have outwitted Dr. Franklin and Malthus, for

luxuries are cheap. But he pays for the one convenience of a better dinner, by the loss of some of the richest

social and educational advantages. He has lost what guards! what incentives! He will perhaps find by and by,

that he left the Muses at the door of the hotel, and found the Furies inside. Money often costs too much, and

power and pleasure are not cheap. The ancient poet said, "the gods sell all things at a fair price."

There is an example of the compensations in the commercial history of this country. When the European wars

threw the carryingtrade of the world, from 1800 to 1812, into American bottoms, a seizure was now and

then made of an American ship. Of course, the loss was serious to the owner, but the country was

indemnified; for we charged threepence a pound for carrying cotton, sixpence for tobacco, and so on; which

paid for the risk and loss, and brought into the country an immense prosperity, early marriages, private

wealth, the building of cities, and of states: and, after the war was over, we received compensation over and

above, by treaty, for all the seizures. Well, the Americans grew rich and great. But the payday comes round.

Britain, France, and Germany, which our extraordinary profits had impoverished, send out, attracted by the

fame of our advantages, first their thousands, then their millions, of poor people, to share the crop. At first,

we employ them, and increase our prosperity: but, in the artificial system of society and of protected labor,

which we also have adopted and enlarged, there come presently checks and stoppages. Then we refuse to

employ these poor men. But they will not so be answered. They go into the poor rates, and, though we refuse

wages, we must now pay the same amount in the form of taxes. Again, it turns out that the largest proportion

of crimes are committed by foreigners. The cost of the crime, and the expense of courts, and of prisons, we

must bear, and the standing army of preventive police we must pay. The cost of education of the posterity of

this great colony, I will not compute. But the gross amount of these costs will begin to pay back what we

thought was a net gain from our transatlantic customers of 1800. It is vain to refuse this payment. We cannot

get rid of these people, and we cannot get rid of their will to be supported. That has become an inevitable

element of our politics; and, for their votes, each of the dominant parties courts and assists them to get it

executed. Moreover, we have to pay, not what would have contented them at home, but what they have

learned to think necessary here; so that opinion, fancy, and all manner of moral considerations complicate the

There are a few measures of economy which will bear to be named without disgust; for the subject is tender,

and we may easily have too much of it; and therein resembles the hideous animalcules of which our bodies

are built up, which, offensive in the particular, yet compose valuable and effective masses. Our nature and

genius force us to respect ends, whilst we use means. We must use the means, and yet, in our most accurate

using, somehow screen and cloak them, as we can only give them any beauty, by a reflection of the glory of

the end. That is the good head, which serves the end, and commands the means. The rabble are corrupted by

1. The first of these measures is that each man's expense must proceed from his character. As long as your

genius buys, the investment is safe, though you spend like a monarch. Nature arms each man with some

faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other, and thus makes him necessary to

society. This native determination guides his labor and his spending. He wants an equipment of means and

tools proper to his talent. And to save on this point, were to neutralize the special strength and helpfulness of

each mind. Do your work, respecting the excellence of the work, and not its acceptableness. This is so much

economy, that, rightly read, it is the sum of economy. Profligacy consists not in spending years of time or

chests of money, but in spending them off the line of your career. The crime which bankrupts men and

states, is, jobwork; declining from your main design, to serve a turn here or there. Nothing is beneath

you, if it is in the direction of your life: nothing is great or desirable, if it is off from that. I think we are

entitled here to draw a straight line, and say, that society can never prosper, but must always be bankrupt,

Spend for your expense, and retrench the expense which is not yours. Allston, the painter, was wont to say,

that he built a plain house, and filled it with plain furniture, because he would hold out no bribe to any to visit

him, who had not similar tastes to his own. We are sympathetic, and, like children, want everything we see.

But it is a large stride to independence, when a man, in the discovery of his proper talent, has sunk the

necessity for false expenses. As the betrothed maiden, by one secure affection, is relieved from a system of

slaveries, the daily inculcated necessity of pleasing all, so the man who has found what he can do, can

spend on that, and leave all other spending. Montaigne said, "When he was a younger brother, he went brave

in dress and equipage, but afterward his chateau and farms might answer for him." Let a man who belongs to

the class of nobles, those, namely, who have found out that they can do something, relieve himself of all

vague squandering on objects not his. Let the realist not mind appearances. Let him delegate to others the

costly courtesies and decorations of social life. The virtues are economists, but some of the vices are also.

Thus, next to humility, I have noticed that pride is a pretty good husband. A good pride is, as I reckon it,

worth from five hundred to fifteen hundred a year. Pride is handsome, economical: pride eradicates so many

vices, letting none subsist but itself, that it seems as if it were a great gain to exchange vanity for pride. Pride

can go without domestics, without fine clothes, can live in a house with two rooms, can eat potato, purslain,

beans, lyed corn, can work on the soil, can travel afoot, can talk with poor men, or sit silent wellcontented in

fine saloons. But vanity costs money, labor, horses, men, women, health, and peace, and is still nothing at

last, a long way leading nowhere. Only one drawback; proud people are intolerably selfish, and the vain

Art is a jealous mistress, and, if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy,

he makes a bad husband, and an ill provider, and should be wise in season, and not fetter himself with duties

which will embitter his days, and spoil him for his proper work. We had in this region, twenty years ago,

among our educated men, a sort of Arcadian fanaticism, a passionate desire to go upon the land, and unite

farming to intellectual pursuits. Many effected their purpose, and made the experiment, and some became

downright ploughmen; but all were cured of their faith that scholarship and practical farming, (I mean, with

With brow bent, with firm intent, the pale scholar leaves his desk to draw a freer breath, and get a juster

statement of his thought, in the gardenwalk. He stoops to pull up a purslain, or a dock, that is choking the

young corn, and finds there are two: close behind the last, is a third; he reaches out his hand to a fourth;

behind that, are four thousand and one. He is heated and untuned, and, by and by, wakes up from his idiot

dream of chickweed and redroot, to remember his morning thought, and to find, that, with his adamantine

purposes, he has been duped by a dandelion. A garden is like those pernicious machineries we read of, every

month, in the newspapers, which catch a man's coatskirt or his hand, and draw in his arm, his leg, and his

whole body to irresistible destruction. In an evil hour he pulled down his wall, and added a field to his

homestead. No land is bad, but land is worse. If a man own land, the land owns him. Now let him leave

home, if he dare. Every tree and graft, every hill of melons, row of corn, or quickset hedge, all he has done,

and all he means to do, stand in his way, like duns, when he would go out of his gate. The devotion to these

vines and trees he finds poisonous. Long free walks, a circuit of miles, free his brain, and serve his body.

Long marches are no hardship to him. He believes he composes easily on the hills. But this pottering in a few

square yards of garden is dispiriting and drivelling. The smell of the plants has drugged him, and robbed him

of energy. He finds a catalepsy in his bones. He grows peevish and poorspirited. The genius of reading and

of gardening are antagonistic, like resinous and vitreous electricity. One is concentrative in sparks and

shocks: the other is diffuse strength; so that each disqualifies its workman for the other's duties.

An engraver whose hands must be of an exquisite delicacy of stroke, should not lay stone walls. Sir David

Brewster gives exact instructions for microscopic observation: "Lie down on your back, and hold the

single lens and object over your eye," How much more the seeker of abstract truth, who needs periods of

2. Spend after your genius, and by system. Nature goes by rule, not by sallies and saltations. There must be

system in the economies. Saving and unexpensiveness will not keep the most pathetic family from ruin, nor

will bigger incomes make free spending safe. The secret of success lies never in the amount of money, but in

the relation of income to outgo; as if, after expense has been fixed at a certain point, then new and steady rills

of income, though never so small, being added, wealth begins. But in ordinary, as means increase, spending

increases faster, so that, large incomes, in England and elsewhere, are found not to help matters; the eating

quality of debt does not relax its voracity. When the cholera is in the potato, what is the use of planting larger

crops? In England, the richest country in the universe, I was assured by shrewd observers, that great lords and

ladies had no more guineas to give away than other people; that liberality with money is as rare, and as

immediately famous a virtue as it is here. Want is a growing giant whom the coat of Have was never large

enough to cover. I remember in Warwickshire, to have been shown a fair manor, still in the same name as in

Shakspeare's time. The rentroll, I was told, is some fourteen thousand pounds a year: but, when the second

son of the late proprietor was born, the father was perplexed how to provide for him. The eldest son must

inherit the manor; what to do with this supernumerary? He was advised to breed him for the Church, and to

settle him in the rectorship, which was in the gift of the family; which was done. It is a general rule in that

country, that bigger incomes do not help anybody. It is commonly observed, that a sudden wealth, like a prize

drawn in a lottery, or a large bequest to a poor family, does not permanently enrich. They have served no

apprenticeship to wealth, and, with the rapid wealth, come rapid claims: which they do not know how to

A system must be in every economy, or the best single expedients are of no avail. A farm is a good thing,

when it begins and ends with itself, and does not need a salary, or a shop, to eke it out. Thus, the cattle are a

main link in the chainring. If the nonconformist or aesthetic farmer leaves out the cattle, and does not also

leave out the want which the cattle must supply, he must fill the gap by begging or stealing. When men now

alive were born, the farm yielded everything that was consumed on it. The farm yielded no money, and the

farmer got on without. If he fell sick, his neighbors came in to his aid: each gave a day's work; or a half day;

or lent his yoke of oxen, or his horse, and kept his work even: hoed his potatoes, mowed his hay, reaped his

rye; well knowing that no man could afford to hire labor, without selling his land. In autumn, a farmer could

sell an ox or a hog, and get a little money to pay taxes withal. Now, the farmer buys almost all he consumes,

tinware, cloth, sugar, tea, coffee, fish, coal, railroadtickets, and newspapers.

A master in each art is required, because the practice is never with still or dead subjects, but they change in

your hands. You think farmbuildings and broad acres a solid property: but its value is flowing like water. It

requires as much watching as if you were decanting wine from a cask. The farmer knows what to do with it,

stops every leak, turns all the streamlets to one reservoir, and decants wine: but a blunderhead comes out of

Cornhill, tries his hand, and it all leaks away. So is it with granite streets, or timber townships, as with fruit or

flowers. Nor is any investment so permanent, that it can be allowed to remain without incessant watching, as

the history of each attempt to lock up an inheritance through two generations for an unborn inheritor may

When Mr. Cockayne takes a cottage in the country, and will keep his cow, he thinks a cow is a creature that is

fed on hay, and gives a pail of milk twice a day. But the cow that he buys gives milk for three months; then

her bag dries up. What to do with a dry cow? who will buy her? Perhaps he bought also a yoke of oxen to do

his work; but they get blown and lame. What to do with blown and lame oxen? The farmer fats his, after the

springwork is done, and kills them in the fall. But how can Cockayne, who has no pastures, and leaves his

cottage daily in the cars, at business hours, be pothered with fatting and killing oxen? He plants trees; but

there must be crops, to keep the trees in ploughed land. What shall be the crops? He will have nothing to do

with trees, but will have grass. After a year or two, the grass must be turned up and ploughed: now what

3. Help comes in the custom of the country, and the rule of Impera parendo. The rule is not to dictate, nor to

insist on carrying out each of your schemes by ignorant wilfulness, but to learn practically the secret spoken

from all nature, that things themselves refuse to be mismanaged, and will show to the watchful their own law.

Nobody need stir hand or foot. The custom of the country will do it all. I know not how to build or to plant;

neither how to buy wood, nor what to do with the houselot, the field, or the woodlot, when bought. Never

fear: it is all settled how it shall be, long beforehand, in the custom of the country, whether to sand, or

whether to clay it, when to plough, and how to dress, whether to grass, or to corn; and you cannot help or

hinder it. Nature has her own best mode of doing each thing, and she has somewhere told it plainly, if we will

keep our eyes and ears open. If not, she will not be slow in undeceiving us, when we prefer our own way to

hers. How often we must remember the art of the surgeon, which, in replacing the broken bone, contents

itself with releasing the parts from false position; they fly into place by the action of the muscles. On this art

Of the two eminent engineers in the recent construction of railways in England, Mr. Brunel went straight

from terminus to terminus, through mountains, over streams, crossing highways, cutting ducal estates in two,

and shooting through this man's cellar, and that man's attic window, and so arriving at his end, at great

pleasure to geometers, but with cost to his company. Mr. Stephenson, on the contrary, believing that the river

knows the way, followed his valley, as implicitly as our Western Railroad follows the Westfield River, and

turned out to be the safest and cheapest engineer. We say the cows laid out Boston. Well, there are worse

surveyors. Every pedestrian in our pastures has frequent occasion to thank the cows for cutting the best path

through the thicket, and over the hills: and travellers and Indians know the value of a buffalotrail, which is

When a citizen, fresh from Docksquare, or Milkstreet, comes out and buys land in the country, his first

thought is to a fine outlook from his windows: his library must command a western view: a sunset every day,

bathing the shoulder of Blue Hills, Wachusett, and the peaks of Monadnoc and Uncanoonuc. What, thirty

acres, and all this magnificence for fifteen hundred dollars! It would be cheap at fifty thousand. He proceeds

at once, his eyes dim with tears of joy, to fix the spot for his cornerstone. But the man who is to level the

ground, thinks it will take many hundred loads of gravel to fill the hollow to the road. The stonemason who

should build the well thinks he shall have to dig forty feet: the baker doubts he shall never like to drive up to

the door: the practical neighbor cavils at the position of the barn; and the citizen comes to know that his

predecessor the farmer built the house in the right spot for the sun and wind, the spring, and waterdrainage,

and the convenience to the pasture, the garden, the field, and the road. So Docksquare yields the point, and

things have their own way. Use has made the farmer wise, and the foolish citizen learns to take his counsel.

From step to step he comes at last to surrender at discretion. The farmer affects to take his orders; but the

citizen says, You may ask me as often as you will, and in what ingenious forms, for an opinion concerning

the mode of building my wall, or sinking my well, or laying out my acre, but the ball will rebound to you.

These are matters on which I neither know, nor need to know anything. These are questions which you and

Not less, within doors, a system settles itself paramount and tyrannical over master and mistress, servant and

child, cousin and acquaintance. 'Tis in vain that genius or virtue or energy of character strive and cry against

it. This is fate. And 'tis very well that the poor husband reads in a book of a new way of living, and resolves

4. Another point of economy is to look for seed of the same kind as you sow: and not to hope to buy one kind

with another kind. Friendship buys friendship; justice, justice; military merit, military success. Good

husbandry finds wife, children, and household. The good merchant large gains, ships, stocks, and money. The

good poet fame, and literary credit; but not either, the other. Yet there is commonly a confusion of

expectations on these points. Hotspur lives for the moment; praises himself for it; and despises Furlong, that

he does not. Hotspur, of course, is poor; and Furlong a good provider. The odd circumstance is, that Hotspur

thinks it a superiority in himself, this improvidence, which ought to be rewarded with Furlong's lands.

I have not at all completed my design. But we must not leave the topic, without casting one glance into the

interior recesses. It is a doctrine of philosophy, that man is a being of degrees; that there is nothing in the

world, which is not repeated in his body; his body being a sort of miniature or summary of the world: then

that there is nothing in his body, which is not repeated as in a celestial sphere in his mind: then, there is

nothing in his brain, which is not repeated in a higher sphere, in his moral system.

5. Now these things are so in Nature. All things ascend, and the royal rule of economy is, that it should

ascend also, or, whatever we do must always have a higher aim. Thus it is a maxim, that money is another

kind of blood. Pecunia alter sanguis: or, the estate of a man is only a larger kind of body, and admits of

regimen analogous to his bodily circulations. So there is no maxim of the merchant, e. g., "Best use of money

is to pay debts;" "Every business by itself;" "Best time is present time;" "The right investment is in tools of

your trade;" or the like, which does not admit of an extended sense. The countingroom maxims liberally

expounded are laws of the Universe. The merchant's economy is a coarse symbol of the soul's economy. It is,

to spend for power, and not for pleasure. It is to invest income; that is to say, to take up particulars into

generals; days into integral eras, literary, emotive, practical, of its life, and still to ascend in its investment.

The merchant has but one rule, absorb and invest: he is to be capitalist: the scraps and filings must be

gathered back into the crucible; the gas and smoke must be burned, and earnings must not go to increase

expense, but to capital again. Well, the man must be capitalist. Will he spend his income, or will he invest?

His body and every organ is under the same law. His body is a jar, in which the liquor of life is stored. Will

he spend for pleasure? The way to ruin is short and facile. Will he not spend, but hoard for power? It passes

through the sacred fermentations, by that law of Nature whereby everything climbs to higher platforms, and

bodily vigor becomes mental and moral vigor. The bread he eats is first strength and animal spirits: it

becomes, in higher laboratories, imagery and thought; and in still higher results, courage and endurance. This

is the right compound interest; this is capital doubled, quadrupled, centupled; man raised to his highest

The true thrift is always to spend on the higher plane; to invest and invest, with keener avarice, that he may

spend in spiritual creation, and not in augmenting animal existence. Nor is the man enriched, in repeating the

old experiments of animal sensation, nor unless through new powers and ascending pleasures, he knows

himself by the actual experience of higher good, to be already on the way to the highest.

The word of ambition at the present day is Culture. Whilst all the world is in pursuit of power, and of wealth

as a means of power, culture corrects the theory of success. A man is the prisoner of his power. A topical

memory makes him an almanac; a talent for debate, a disputant; skill to get money makes him a miser, that is,

a beggar. Culture reduces these inflammations by invoking the aid of other powers against the dominant

talent, and by appealing to the rank of powers. It watches success. For performance, Nature has no mercy,

and sacrifices the performer to get it done; makes a dropsy or a tympany of him. If she wants a thumb, she

makes one at the cost of arms and legs, and any excess of power in one part is usually paid for at once by

Our efficiency depends so much on our concentration, that Nature usually in the instances where a marked

man is sent into the world, overloads him with bias, sacrificing his symmetry to his working power. It is said,

no man can write but one book; and if a man have a defect, it is apt to leave its impression on all his

performances. If she creates a policeman like Fouche, he is made up of suspicions and of plots to circumvent

them. "The air," said Fouche, "is full of poniards." The physician Sanctorius spent his life in a pair of scales,

weighing his food. Lord Coke valued Chaucer highly, because the Canon Yeman's Tale illustrates the statute

Hen. V. Chap. 4, against alchemy. I saw a man who believed the principal mischiefs in the English state were

derived from the devotion to musical concerts. A freemason, not long since, set out to explain to this country,

that the principal cause of the success of General Washington, was, the aid he derived from the freemasons.

But worse than the harping on one string, Nature has secured individualism, by giving the private person a

high conceit of his weight in the system. The pest of society is egotists. There are dull and bright, sacred and

profane, coarse and fine egotists. 'Tis a disease that, like influenza, falls on all constitutions. In the distemper

known to physicians as chorea, the patient sometimes turns round, and continues to spin slowly on one spot.

Is egotism a metaphysical varioloid of this malady? The man runs round a ring formed by his own talent, falls

into an admiration of it, and loses relation to the world. It is a tendency in all minds. One of its annoying

forms, is a craving for sympathy. The sufferers parade their miseries, tear the lint from their bruises, reveal

their indictable crimes, that you may pity them. They like sickness, because physical pain will extort some

show of interest from the bystanders, as we have seen children, who, finding themselves of no account when

This distemper is the scourge of talent, of artists, inventors, and philosophers. Eminent spiritualists shall

have an incapacity of putting their act or word aloof from them, and seeing it bravely for the nothing it is.

Beware of the man who says, "I am on the eve of a revelation." It is speedily punished, inasmuch as this habit

invites men to humor it, and by treating the patient tenderly, to shut him up in a narrower selfism, and

exclude him from the great world of God's cheerful fallible men and women. Let us rather be insulted, whilst

we are insultable. Religious literature has eminent examples, and if we run over our private list of poets,

critics, philanthropists, and philosophers, we shall find them infected with this dropsy and elephantiasis,

This goitre of egotism is so frequent among notable persons, that we must infer some strong necessity in

nature which it subserves; such as we see in the sexual attraction. The preservation of the species was a point

of such necessity, that Nature has secured it at all hazards by immensely overloading the passion, at the risk

of perpetual crime and disorder. So egotism has its root in the cardinal necessity by which each individual

This individuality is not only not inconsistent with culture, but is the basis of it. Every valuable nature is there

in its own right, and the student we speak to must have a motherwit invincible by his culture, which uses all

books, arts, facilities, and elegancies of intercourse, but is never subdued and lost in them. He only is a

wellmade man who has a good determination. And the end of culture is not to destroy this, God forbid! but

to train away all impediment and mixture, and leave nothing but pure power. Our student must have a style

and determination, and be a master in his own specialty. But, having this, he must put it behind him. He must

have a catholicity, a power to see with a free and disengaged look every object. Yet is this private interest and

self so overcharged, that, if a man seeks a companion who can look at objects for their own sake, and without

affection or selfreference, he will find the fewest who will give him that satisfaction; whilst most men are

afflicted with a coldness, an incuriosity, as soon as any object does not connect with their selflove. Though

they talk of the object before them, they are thinking of themselves, and their vanity is laying little traps for

But after a man has discovered that there are limits to the interest which his private history has for mankind,

he still converses with his family, or a few companions, perhaps with half a dozen personalities that are

famous in his neighborhood. In Boston, the question of life is the names of some eight or ten men. Have you

seen Mr. Allston, Doctor Channing, Mr. Adams, Mr. Webster, Mr. Greenough? Have you heard Everett,

Garrison, Father Taylor, Theodore Parker? Have you talked with Messieurs Turbinewheel, Summitlevel, and

Lacofrupees? Then you may as well die. In New York, the question is of some other eight, or ten, or twenty.

Have you seen a few lawyers, merchants, and brokers, two or three scholars, two or three capitalists, two

or three editors of newspapers? New York is a sucked orange. All conversation is at an end, when we have

discharged ourselves of a dozen personalities, domestic or imported, which make up our American existence.

Life is very narrow. Bring any club or company of intelligent men together again after ten years, and if the

presence of some penetrating and calming genius could dispose them to frankness, what a confession of

insanities would come up! The "causes" to which we have sacrificed, Tariff or Democracy, Whigism or

Abolition, Temperance or Socialism, would show like roots of bitterness and dragons of wrath: and our

talents are as mischievous as if each had been seized upon by some bird of prey, which had whisked him

away from fortune, from truth, from the dear society of the poets, some zeal, some bias, and only when he

was now gray and nerveless, was it relaxing its claws, and he awaking to sober perceptions.

Culture is the suggestion from certain best thoughts, that a man has a range of affinities, through which he

can modulate the violence of any mastertones that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor

him against himself. Culture redresses his balance, puts him among his equals and superiors, revives the

delicious sense of sympathy, and warns him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion.

'Tis not a compliment but a disparagement to consult a man only on horses, or on steam, or on theatres, or on

eating, or on books, and, whenever he appears, considerately to turn the conversation to the bantling he is

known to fondle. In the Norse heaven of our forefathers, Thor's house had five hundred and forty floors; and

man's house has five hundred and forty floors. His excellence is facility of adaptation and of transition

through many related points, to wide contrasts and extremes. Culture kills his exaggeration, his conceit of his

village or his city. We must leave our pets at home, when we go into the street, and meet men on broad

grounds of good meaning and good sense. No performance is worth loss of geniality. 'Tis a cruel price we

pay for certain fancy goods called fine arts and philosophy. In the Norse legend, Allfadir did not get a drink

of Mimir's spring, (the fountain of wisdom,) until he left his eye in pledge. And here is a pedant that cannot

unfold his wrinkles, nor conceal his wrath at interruption by the best, if their conversation do not fit his

impertinency, here is he to afflict us with his personalities. 'Tis incident to scholars, that each of them

fancies he is pointedly odious in his community. Draw him out of this limbo of irritability. Cleanse with

healthy blood his parchment skin. You restore to him his eyes which he left in pledge at Mimir's spring. If

you are the victim of your doing, who cares what you do? We can spare your opera, your gazetteer, your

chemic analysis, your history, your syllogisms. Your man of genius pays dear for his distinction. His head

runs up into a spire, and instead of a healthy man, merry and wise, he is some mad dominie. Nature is

reckless of the individual. When she has points to carry, she carries them. To wade in marshes and

seamargins is the destiny of certain birds, and they are so accurately made for this, that they are imprisoned

in those places. Each animal out of its habitat would starve. To the physician, each man, each woman, is an

amplification of one organ. A soldier, a locksmith, a bankclerk, and a dancer could not exchange functions.

The antidotes against this organic egotism, are, the range and variety of attractions, as gained by acquaintance

with the world, with men of merit, with classes of society, with travel, with eminent persons, and with the

high resources of philosophy, art, and religion: books, travel, society, solitude.

The hardiest skeptic who has seen a horse broken, a pointer trained, or, who has visited a menagerie, or the

exhibition of the Industrious Fleas, will not deny the validity of education. "A boy," says Plato, "is the most

vicious of all wild beasts;" and, in the same spirit, the old English poet Gascoigne says, "a boy is better

unborn than untaught." The city breeds one kind of speech and manners; the backcountry a different style;

the sea, another; the army, a fourth. We know that an army which can be confided in, may be formed by

discipline; that, by systematic discipline all men may be made heroes: Marshal Lannes said to a French

officer, "Know, Colonel, that none but a poltroon will boast that he never was afraid." A great part of courage

is the courage of having done the thing before. And, in all human action, those faculties will be strong which

are used. Robert Owen said, "Give me a tiger, and I will educate him." 'Tis inhuman to want faith in the

power of education, since to meliorate, is the law of nature; and men are valued precisely as they exert

onward or meliorating force. On the other hand, poltroonery is the acknowledging an inferiority to be

Incapacity of melioration is the only mortal distemper. There are people who can never understand a trope, or

any second or expanded sense given to your words, or any humor; but remain literalists, after hearing the

music, and poetry, and rhetoric, and wit, of seventy or eighty years. They are past the help of surgeon or

clergy. But even these can understand pitchforks and the cry of fire! and I have noticed in some of this class a

Let us make our education brave and preventive. Politics is an afterwork, a poor patching. We are always a

little late. The evil is done, the law is passed, and we begin the uphill agitation for repeal of that of which

we ought to have prevented the enacting. We shall one day learn to supersede politics by education. What we

call our rootandbranch reforms of slavery, war, gambling, intemperance, is only medicating the symptoms.

Our arts and tools give to him who can handle them much the same advantage over the novice, as if you

extended his life, ten, fifty, or a hundred years. And I think it the part of good sense to provide every fine soul

with such culture, that it shall not, at thirty or forty years, have to say, `This which I might do is made

But it is conceded that much of our training fails of effect; that all success is hazardous and rare; that a large

part of our cost and pains is thrown away. Nature takes the matter into her own hands, and, though we must

not omit any jot of our system, we can seldom be sure that it has availed much, or, that as much good would

Books, as containing the finest records of human wit, must always enter into our notion of culture. The best

heads that ever existed, Pericles, Plato, Julius Caesar, Shakspeare, Goethe, Milton, were wellread,

universally educated men, and quite too wise to undervalue letters. Their opinion has weight, because they

had means of knowing the opposite opinion. We look that a great man should be a good reader, or, in

proportion to the spontaneous power should be the assimilating power. Good criticism is very rare, and

always precious. I am always happy to meet persons who perceive the transcendent superiority of Shakspeare

over all other writers. I like people who like Plato. Because this love does not consist with selfconceit.

But books are good only as far as a boy is ready for them. He sometimes gets ready very slowly. You send

your child to the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys who educate him. You send him to the Latin class, but

much of his tuition comes, on his way to school, from the shopwindows. You like the strict rules and the

long terms; and he finds his best leading in a byway of his own, and refuses any companions but of his

choosing. He hates the grammar and Gradus, and loves guns, fishingrods, horses, and boats. Well, the boy is

right; and you are not fit to direct his bringing up, if your theory leaves out his gymnastic training. Archery,

cricket, gun and fishingrod, horse and boat, are all educators, liberalizers; and so are dancing, dress, and the

streettalk; and, provided only the boy has resources, and is of a noble and ingenuous strain, these will

not serve him less than the books. He learns chess, whist, dancing, and theatricals. The father observes that

another boy has learned algebra and geometry in the same time. But the first boy has acquired much more

than these poor games along with them. He is infatuated for weeks with whist and chess; but presently will

find out, as you did, that when he rises from the game too long played, he is vacant and forlorn, and despises

himself. Thenceforward it takes place with other things, and has its due weight in his experience. These

minor skills and accomplishments, for example, dancing, are tickets of admission to the dresscircle of

mankind, and the being master of them enables the youth to judge intelligently of much, on which, otherwise,

he would give a pedantic squint. Landor said, "I have suffered more from my bad dancing, than from all the

misfortunes and miseries of my life put together." Provided always the boy is teachable, (for we are not

proposing to make a statue out of punk,) football, cricket, archery, swimming, skating, climbing, fencing,

riding, are lessons in the art of power, which it is his main business to learn; riding, specially, of which

Lord Herbert of Cherbury said, "a good rider on a good horse is as much above himself and others as the

world can make him." Besides, the gun, fishingrod, boat, and horse, constitute, among all who use them,

There is also a negative value in these arts. Their chief use to the youth, is, not amusement, but to be known

for what they are, and not to remain to him occasions of heartburn. We are full of superstitions. Each class

fixes its eyes on the advantages it has not; the refined, on rude strength; the democrat, on birth and breeding.

One of the benefits of a college education is, to show the boy its little avail. I knew a leading man in a leading

city, who, having set his heart on an education at the university, and missed it, could never quite feel himself

the equal of his own brothers who had gone thither. His easy superiority to multitudes of professional men

could never quite countervail to him this imaginary defect. Balls, riding, wineparties, and billiards, pass to a

poor boy for something fine and romantic, which they are not; and a free admission to them on an equal

footing, if it were possible, only once or twice, would be worth ten times its cost, by undeceiving him.

I am not much an advocate for travelling, and I observe that men run away to other countries, because they

are not good in their own, and run back to their own, because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the

most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home? I have been

quoted as saying captious things about travel; but I mean to do justice. I think, there is a restlessness in our

people, which argues want of character. All educated Americans, first or last, go to Europe; perhaps,

because it is their mental home, as the invalid habits of this country might suggest. An eminent teacher of

girls said, "the idea of a girl's education, is, whatever qualifies them for going to Europe." Can we never

extract this tapeworm of Europe from the brain of our countrymen? One sees very well what their fate must

be. He that does not fill a place at home, cannot abroad. He only goes there to hide his insignificance in a

larger crowd. You do not think you will find anything there which you have not seen at home? The stuff of

all countries is just the same. Do you suppose, there is any country where they do not scald milkpans, and

swaddle the infants, and burn the brushwood, and broil the fish? What is true anywhere is true everywhere.

And let him go where he will, he can only find so much beauty or worth as he carries.

Of course, for some men, travel may be useful. Naturalists, discoverers, and sailors are born. Some men are

made for couriers, exchangers, envoys, missionaries, bearers of despatches, as others are for farmers and

workingmen. And if the man is of a light and social turn, and Nature has aimed to make a legged and

winged creature, framed for locomotion, we must follow her hint, and furnish him with that breeding which

gives currency, as sedulously as with that which gives worth. But let us not be pedantic, but allow to travel its

full effect. The boy grown up on the farm, which he has never left, is said in the country to have had no

chance, and boys and men of that condition look upon work on a railroad, or drudgery in a city, as

opportunity. Poor country boys of Vermont and Connecticut formerly owed what knowledge they had, to

their peddling trips to the Southern States. California and the Pacific Coast is now the university of this class,

as Virginia was in old times. `To have some chance' is their word. And the phrase `to know the world,' or to

travel, is synonymous with all men's ideas of advantage and superiority. No doubt, to a man of sense, travel

offers advantages. As many languages as he has, as many friends, as many arts and trades, so many times is

he a man. A foreign country is a point of comparison, wherefrom to judge his own. One use of travel, is, to

recommend the books and works of home; [we go to Europe to be Americanized;] and another, to find men.

For, as Nature has put fruits apart in latitudes, a new fruit in every degree, so knowledge and fine moral

quality she lodges in distant men. And thus, of the six or seven teachers whom each man wants among his

contemporaries, it often happens, that one or two of them live on the other side of the world.

Moreover, there is in every constitution a certain solstice, when the stars stand still in our inward firmament,

and when there is required some foreign force, some diversion or alterative to prevent stagnation. And, as a

medical remedy, travel seems one of the best. Just as a man witnessing the admirable effect of ether to lull

pain, and meditating on the contingencies of wounds, cancers, lockjaws, rejoices in Dr. Jackson's benign

discovery, so a man who looks at Paris, at Naples, or at London, says, `If I should be driven from my own

home, here, at least, my thoughts can be consoled by the most prodigal amusement and occupation which the

Akin to the benefit of foreign travel, the aesthetic value of railroads is to unite the advantages of town and

country life, neither of which we can spare. A man should live in or near a large town, because, let his own

genius be what it may, it will repel quite as much of agreeable and valuable talent as it draws, and, in a city,

the total attraction of all the citizens is sure to conquer, first or last, every repulsion, and drag the most

improbable hermit within its walls some day in the year. In town, he can find the swimmingschool, the

gymnasium, the dancingmaster, the shootinggallery, opera, theatre, and panorama; the chemist's shop, the

museum of natural history; the gallery of fine arts; the national orators, in their turn; foreign travellers, the

libraries, and his club. In the country, he can find solitude and reading, manly labor, cheap living, and his old

shoes; moors for game, hills for geology, and groves for devotion. Aubrey writes, "I have heard Thomas

Hobbes say, that, in the Earl of Devon's house, in Derbyshire, there was a good library and books enough for

him, and his lordship stored the library with what books he thought fit to be bought. But the want of good

conversation was a very great inconvenience, and, though he conceived he could order his thinking as well as

another, yet he found a great defect. In the country, in long time, for want of good conversation, one's

understanding and invention contract a moss on them, like an old paling in an orchard."

Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man. A great part of our

education is sympathetic and social. Boys and girls who have been brought up with wellinformed and

superior people, show in their manners an inestimable grace. Fuller says, that "William, Earl of Nassau, won

a subject from the King of Spain, every time he put off his hat." You cannot have one wellbred man,

without a whole society of such. They keep each other up to any high point. Especially women; it requires

a great many cultivated women, saloons of bright, elegant, reading women, accustomed to ease and

refinement, to spectacles, pictures, sculpture, poetry, and to elegant society, in order that you should have one

Madame de Stael. The head of a commercial house, or a leading lawyer or politician is brought into daily

contact with troops of men from all parts of the country, and those too the drivingwheels, the business men

of each section, and one can hardly suggest for an apprehensive man a more searching culture. Besides, we

must remember the high social possibilities of a million of men. The best bribe which London offers today

to the imagination, is, that, in such a vast variety of people and conditions, one can believe there is room for

persons of romantic character to exist, and that the poet, the mystic, and the hero may hope to confront their

I wish cities could teach their best lesson, of quiet manners. It is the foible especially of American youth,

pretension. The mark of the man of the world is absence of pretension. He does not make a speech; he

takes a low businesstone, avoids all brag, is nobody, dresses plainly, promises not at all, performs much,

speaks in monosyllables, hugs his fact. He calls his employment by its lowest name, and so takes from evil

tongues their sharpest weapon. His conversation clings to the weather and the news, yet he allows himself to

be surprised into thought, and the unlocking of his learning and philosophy. How the imagination is piqued

by anecdotes of some great man passing incognito, as a king in gray clothes, of Napoleon affecting a plain

suit at his glittering levee; of Burns, or Scott, or Beethoven, or Wellington, or Goethe, or any container of

transcendent power, passing for nobody; of Epaminondas, "who never says anything, but will listen

eternally;" of Goethe, who preferred trifling subjects and common expressions in intercourse with strangers,

worse rather than better clothes, and to appear a little more capricious than he was. There are advantages in

the old hat and boxcoat. I have heard, that, throughout this country, a certain respect is paid to good

broadcloth; but dress makes a little restraint: men will not commit themselves. But the boxcoat is like wine;

'Tis odd that our people should have not water on the brain, but a little gas there. A shrewd foreigner

said of the Americans, that, "whatever they say has a little the air of a speech." Yet one of the traits down in

the books as distinguishing the AngloSaxon, is, a trick of selfdisparagement. To be sure, in old, dense

countries, among a million of good coats, a fine coat comes to be no distinction, and you find humorists. In

an English party, a man with no marked manners or features, with a face like red dough, unexpectedly

discloses wit, learning, a wide range of topics, and personal familiarity with good men in all parts of the

world, until you think you have fallen upon some illustrious personage. Can it be that the American forest has

refreshed some weeds of old Pietish barbarism just ready to die out, the love of the scarlet feather, of

beads, and tinsel? The Italians are fond of red clothes, peacock plumes, and embroidery; and I remember one

rainy morning in the city of Palermo, the street was in a blaze with scarlet umbrellas. The English have a

plain taste. The equipages of the grandees are plain. A gorgeous livery indicates new and awkward city

wealth. Mr. Pitt, like Mr. Pym, thought the title of Mister good against any king in Europe. They have piqued

themselves on governing the whole world in the poor, plain, dark Committeeroom which the House of

Whilst we want cities as the centres where the best things are found, cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.

The countryman finds the town a chophouse, a barber's shop. He has lost the lines of grandeur of the

horizon, hills and plains, and with them, sobriety and elevation. He has come among a supple, glibtongued

tribe, who live for show, servile to public opinion. Life is dragged down to a fracas of pitiful cares and

disasters. You say the gods ought to respect a life whose objects are their own; but in cities they have

What is odious but noise, and people who scream and bewail? people whose vane points always east, who

live to dine, who send for the doctor, who coddle themselves, who toast their feet on the register, who

intrigue to secure a padded chair, and a corner out of the draught. Suffer them once to begin the enumeration

of their infirmities, and the sun will go down on the unfinished tale. Let these triflers put us out of conceit

with petty comforts. To a man at work, the frost is but a color: the rain, the wind, he forgot them when he

came in. Let us learn to live coarsely, dress plainly, and lie hard. The least habit of dominion over the palate

has certain good effects not easily estimated. Neither will we be driven into a quiddling abstemiousness. 'Tis

a superstition to insist on a special diet. All is made at last of the same chemical atoms.

A man in pursuit of greatness feels no little wants. How can you mind diet, bed, dress, or salutes or

compliments, or the figure you make in company, or wealth, or even the bringing things to pass, when you

think how paltry are the machinery and the workers? Wordsworth was praised to me, in Westmoreland, for

having afforded to his country neighbors an example of a modest household where comfort and culture were

secured, without display. And a tender boy who wears his rusty cap and outgrown coat, that he may secure

the coveted place in college, and the right in the library, is educated to some purpose. There is a great deal of

selfdenial and manliness in poor and middleclass houses, in town and country, that has not got into

literature, and never will, but that keeps the earth sweet; that saves on superfluities, and spends on essentials;

that goes rusty, and educates the boy; that sells the horse, but builds the school; works early and late, takes

two looms in the factory, three looms, six looms, but pays off the mortgage on the paternal farm, and then

We can ill spare the commanding social benefits of cities; they must be used; yet cautiously, and haughtily,

and will yield their best values to him who best can do without them. Keep the town for occasions, but the

habits should be formed to retirement. Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the

cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars. He who should

inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing,

reading, and writing in the daily, timeworn yoke of their opinions. "In the morning, solitude;" said

Pythagoras; that Nature may speak to the imagination, as she does never in company, and that her favorite

may make acquaintance with those divine strengths which disclose themselves to serious and abstracted

thought. 'Tis very certain that Plato, Plotinus, Archimedes, Hermes, Newton, Milton, Wordsworth, did not

live in a crowd, but descended into it from time to time as benefactors: and the wise instructor will press this

point of securing to the young soul in the disposition of time and the arrangements of living, periods and

habits of solitude. The high advantage of universitylife is often the mere mechanical one, I may call it, of a

separate chamber and fire, which parents will allow the boy without hesitation at Cambridge, but do not

think needful at home. We say solitude, to mark the character of the tone of thought; but if it can be shared

between two or more than two, it is happier, and not less noble. "We four," wrote Neander to his sacred

friends, "will enjoy at Halle the inward blessedness of a civitas Dei, whose foundations are forever

friendship. The more I know you, the more I dissatisfy and must dissatisfy all my wonted companions. Their

very presence stupefies me. The common understanding withdraws itself from the one centre of all

Solitude takes off the pressure of present importunities that more catholic and humane relations may appear.

The saint and poet seek privacy to ends the most public and universal: and it is the secret of culture, to

interest the man more in his public, than in his private quality. Here is a new poem, which elicits a good

many comments in the journals, and in conversation. From these it is easy, at last, to eliminate the verdict

which readers passed upon it; and that is, in the main, unfavorable. The poet, as a craftsman, is only

interested in the praise accorded to him, and not in the censure, though it be just. And the poor little poet

hearkens only to that, and rejects the censure, as proving incapacity in the critic. But the poet

cultivated becomes a stockholder in both companies, say Mr. Curfew, in the Curfew stock, and in the

humanity stock; and, in the last, exults as much in the demonstration of the unsoundness of Curfew, as his

interest in the former gives him pleasure in the currency of Curfew. For, the depreciation of his Curfew stock

only shows the immense values of the humanity stock. As soon as he sides with his critic against himself,

We must have an intellectual quality in all property and in all action, or they are nought. I must have children,

I must have events, I must have a social state and history, or my thinking and speaking want body or basis.

But to give these accessories any value, I must know them as contingent and rather showy possessions, which

pass for more to the people than to me. We see this abstraction in scholars, as a matter of course: but what a

charm it adds when observed in practical men. Bonaparte, like Caesar, was intellectual, and could look at

every object for itself, without affection. Though an egotist a l'outrance, he could criticize a play, a building,

a character, on universal grounds, and give a just opinion. A man known to us only as a celebrity in politics

or in trade, gains largely in our esteem if we discover that he has some intellectual taste or skill; as when we

learn of Lord Fairfax, the Long Parliament's general, his passion for antiquarian studies; or of the French

regicide Carnot, his sublime genius in mathematics; or of a living banker, his success in poetry; or of a

partisan journalist, his devotion to ornithology. So, if in travelling in the dreary wildernesses of Arkansas or

Texas, we should observe on the next seat a man reading Horace, or Martial, or Calderon, we should wish to

hug him. In callings that require roughest energy, soldiers, seacaptains, and civil engineers sometimes

betray a fine insight, if only through a certain gentleness when off duty; a goodnatured admission that there

are illusions, and who shall say that he is not their sport? We only vary the phrase, not the doctrine, when we

say, that culture opens the sense of beauty. A man is a beggar who only lives to the useful, and, however he

may serve as a pin or rivet in the social machine, cannot be said to have arrived at selfpossession. I suffer,

every day, from the want of perception of beauty in people. They do not know the charm with which all

moments and objects can be embellished, the charm of manners, of selfcommand, of benevolence. Repose

and cheerfulness are the badge of the gentleman, repose in energy. The Greek battlepieces are calm; the

heroes, in whatever violent actions engaged, retain a serene aspect; as we say of Niagara, that it falls without

speed. A cheerful, intelligent face is the end of culture, and success enough. For it indicates the purpose of

When our higher faculties are in activity, we are domesticated, and awkwardness and discomfort give place

to natural and agreeable movements. It is noticed, that the consideration of the great periods and spaces of

astronomy induces a dignity of mind, and an indifference to death. The influence of fine scenery, the

presence of mountains, appeases our irritations and elevates our friendships. Even a high dome, and the

expansive interior of a cathedral, have a sensible effect on manners. I have heard that stiff people lose

something of their awkwardness under high ceilings, and in spacious halls. I think, sculpture and painting

But, over all, culture must reinforce from higher influx the empirical skills of eloquence, or of politics, or of

trade, and the useful arts. There is a certain loftiness of thought and power to marshal and adjust particulars,

which can only come from an insight of their whole connection. The orator who has once seen things in their

divine order, will never quite lose sight of this, and will come to affairs as from a higher ground, and, though

he will say nothing of philosophy, he will have a certain mastery in dealing with them, and an incapableness

of being dazzled or frighted, which will distinguish his handling from that of attorneys and factors. A man

who stands on a good footing with the heads of parties at Washington, reads the rumors of the newspapers,

and the guesses of provincial politicians, with a key to the right and wrong in each statement, and sees well

enough where all this will end. Archimedes will look through your Connecticut machine, at a glance, and

judge of its fitness. And much more, a wise man who knows not only what Plato, but what Saint John can

show him, can easily raise the affair he deals with, to a certain majesty. Plato says, Pericles owed this

elevation to the lessons of Anaxagoras. Burke descended from a higher sphere when he would influence

human affairs. Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Washington, stood on a fine humanity, before which the brawls of

But there are higher secrets of culture, which are not for the apprentices, but for proficients. These are lessons

only for the brave. We must know our friends under ugly masks. The calamities are our friends. Ben Jonson

We wish to learn philosophy by rote, and play at heroism. But the wiser God says, Take the shame, the

poverty, and the penal solitude, that belong to truthspeaking. Try the rough water as well as the smooth.

Rough water can teach lessons worth knowing. When the state is unquiet, personal qualities are more than

ever decisive. Fear not a revolution which will constrain you to live five years in one. Don't be so tender at

making an enemy now and then. Be willing to go to Coventry sometimes, and let the populace bestow on you

their coldest contempts. The finished man of the world must eat of every apple once. He must hold his

hatreds also at arm's length, and not remember spite. He has neither friends nor enemies, but values men only

He who aims high, must dread an easy home and popular manners. Heaven sometimes hedges a rare

character about with ungainliness and odium, as the burr that protects the fruit. If there is any great and good

thing in store for you, it will not come at the first or the second call, nor in the shape of fashion, ease, and city

drawingrooms. Popularity is for dolls. "Steep and craggy," said Porphyry, "is the path of the gods." Open

your Marcus Antoninus. In the opinion of the ancients, he was the great man who scorned to shine, and who

contested the frowns of fortune. They preferred the noble vessel too late for the tide, contending with winds

and waves, dismantled and unrigged, to her companion borne into harbor with colors flying and guns firing.

There is none of the social goods that may not be purchased too dear, and mere amiableness must not take

Bettine replies to Goethe's mother, who chides her disregard of dress, "If I cannot do as I have a mind, in

our poor Frankfort, I shall not carry things far." And the youth must rate at its true mark the inconceivable

levity of local opinion. The longer we live, the more we must endure the elementary existence of men and

women; and every brave heart must treat society as a child, and never allow it to dictate.

"All that class of the severe and restrictive virtues," said Burke, "are almost too costly for humanity." Who

wishes to be severe? Who wishes to resist the eminent and polite, in behalf of the poor, and low, and

impolite? and who that dares do it, can keep his temper sweet, his frolic spirits? The high virtues are not

debonair, but have their redress in being illustrious at last. What forests of laurel we bring, and the tears of

mankind, to those who stood firm against the opinion of their contemporaries! The measure of a master is his

Let me say here, that culture cannot begin too early. In talking with scholars, I observe that they lost on ruder

companions those years of boyhood which alone could give imaginative literature a religious and infinite

quality in their esteem. I find, too, that the chance for appreciation is much increased by being the son of an

appreciator, and that these boys who now grow up are caught not only years too late, but two or three births

too late, to make the best scholars of. And I think it a presentable motive to a scholar, that, as, in an old

community, a wellborn proprietor is usually found, after the first heats of youth, to be a careful husband,

and to feel a habitual desire that the estate shall suffer no harm by his administration, but shall be delivered

down to the next heir in as good condition as he received it; so, a considerate man will reckon himself a

subject of that secular melioration by which mankind is mollified, cured, and refined, and will shun every

expenditure of his forces on pleasure or gain, which will jeopardize this social and secular accumulation.

The fossil strata show us that Nature began with rudimental forms, and rose to the more complex, as fast as

the earth was fit for their dwellingplace; and that the lower perish, as the higher appear. Very few of our

race can be said to be yet finished men. We still carry sticking to us some remains of the preceding inferior

quadruped organization. We call these millions men; but they are not yet men. Halfengaged in the soil,

pawing to get free, man needs all the music that can be brought to disengage him. If Love, red Love, with

tears and joy; if Want with his scourge; if War with his cannonade; if Christianity with its charity; if Trade

with its money; if Art with its portfolios; if Science with her telegraphs through the deeps of space and time;

can set his dull nerves throbbing, and by loud taps on the tough chrysalis, can break its walls, and let the new

creature emerge erect and free, make way, and sing paean! The age of the quadruped is to go out, the

age of the brain and of the heart is to come in. The time will come when the evil forms we have known can

no more be organized. Man's culture can spare nothing, wants all the material. He is to convert all

impediments into instruments, all enemies into power. The formidable mischief will only make the more

useful slave. And if one shall read the future of the race hinted in the organic effort of Nature to mount and

meliorate, and the corresponding impulse to the Better in the human being, we shall dare affirm that there is

nothing he will not overcome and convert, until at last culture shall absorb the chaos and gehenna. He will

The soul which animates Nature is not less sigshed in the figure, movement, and gesture of animated bodies,

than in its last vehicle of articulate speech. This silent and subtile language is Manners; not what, but how.

Life expresses. A statue has no tongue, and needs none. Good tableaux do not need declamation. Nature tells

every secret once. Yes, but in man she tells it all the time, by form, attitude, gesture, mien, face, and parts of

the face, and by the whole action of the machine. The visible carriage or action of the individual, as resulting

from his organization and his will combined, we call manners. What are they but thought entering the hands

There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing

things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage. They form at last a

rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are the

dewdrops which give such a depth to the morning meadows. Manners are very communicable: men catch

them from each other. Consuelo, in the romance, boasts of the lessons she had given the nobles in manners,

on the stage; and, in real life, Talma taught Napoleon the arts of behavior. Genius invents fine manners,

which the baron and the baroness copy very fast, and, by the advantage of a palace, better the instruction.

The power of manners is incessant, an element as unconcealable as fire. The nobility cannot in any

country be disguised, and no more in a republic or a democracy, than in a kingdom. No man can resist their

influence. There are certain manners which are learned in good society, of that force, that, if a person have

them, he or she must be considered, and is everywhere welcome, though without beauty, or wealth, or genius.

Give a boy address and accomplishments, and you give him the mastery of palaces and fortunes where he

goes. He has not the trouble of earning or owning them: they solicit him to enter and possess. We send girls

of a timid, retreating disposition to the boardingschool, to the ridingschool, to the ballroom, or

wheresoever they can come into acquaintance and nearness of leading persons of their own sex; where they

might learn address, and see it near at hand. The power of a woman of fashion to lead, and also to daunt and

repel, derives from their belief that she knows resources and behaviors not known to them; but when these

have mastered her secret, they learn to confront her, and recover their selfpossession.

Every day bears witness to their gentle rule. People who would obtrude, now do not obtrude. The mediocre

circle learns to demand that which belongs to a high state of nature or of culture. Your manners are always

under examination, and by committees little suspected, a police in citizens' clothes, but are awarding

We talk much of utilities, but 'tis our manners that associate us. In hours of business, we go to him who

knows, or has, or does this or that which we want, and we do not let our taste or feeling stand in the way. But

this activity over, we return to the indolent state, and wish for those we can be at ease with; those who will go

where we go, whose manners do not offend us, whose social tone chimes with ours. When we reflect on their

persuasive and cheering force; how they recommend, prepare, and draw people together; how, in all clubs,

manners make the members; how manners make the fortune of the ambitious youth; that, for the most part,

his manners marry him, and, for the most part, he marries manners; when we think what keys they are, and to

what secrets; what high lessons and inspiring tokens of character they convey; and what divination is required

in us, for the reading of this fine telegraph, we see what range the subject has, and what relations to

Their first service is very low, when they are the minor morals: but 'tis the beginning of civility, to

make us, I mean, endurable to each other. We prize them for their roughplastic, abstergent force; to get

people out of the quadruped state; to get them washed, clothed, and set up on end; to slough their animal

husks and habits; compel them to be clean; overawe their spite and meanness, teach them to stifle the base,

and choose the generous expression, and make them know how much happier the generous behaviors are.

Bad behavior the laws cannot reach. Society is infested with rude, cynical, restless, and frivolous persons

who prey upon the rest, and whom, a public opinion concentrated into good manners, forms accepted by the

sense of all, can reach: the contradictors and railers at public and private tables, who are like terriers, who

conceive it the duty of a dog of honor to growl at any passerby, and do the honors of the house by barking

him out of sight: I have seen men who neigh like a horse when you contradict them, or say something

which they do not understand: then the overbold, who make their own invitation to your hearth; the

persevering talker, who gives you his society in large, saturating doses; the pitiers of themselves, a

perilous class; the frivolous Asmodeus, who relies on you to find him in ropes of sand to twist; the

monotones; in short, every stripe of absurdity; these are social inflictions which the magistrate cannot cure

or defend you from, and which must be intrusted to the restraining force of custom, and proverbs, and

In the hotels on the banks of the Mississippi, they print, or used to print, among the rules of the house, that

"no gentleman can be permitted to come to the public table without his coat;" and in the same country, in the

pews of the churches, little placards plead with the worshipper against the fury of expectoration. Charles

Dickens selfsacrificingly undertook the reformation of our American manners in unspeakable particulars. I

think the lesson was not quite lost; that it held bad manners up, so that the churls could see the deformity.

Unhappily, the book had its own deformities. It ought not to need to print in a readingroom a caution to

strangers not to speak loud; nor to persons who look over fine engravings, that they should be handled like

cobwebs and butterflies' wings; nor to persons who look at marble statues, that they shall not smite them with

canes. But, even in the perfect civilization of this city, such cautions are not quite needless in the Athenaeum

Manners are factitious, and grow out of circumstance as well as out of character. If you look at the pictures of

patricians and of peasants, of different periods and countries, you will see how well they match the same

classes in our towns. The modern aristocrat not only is well drawn in Titian's Venetian doges, and in Roman

coins and statues, but also in the pictures which Commodore Perry brought home of dignitaries in Japan.

Broad lands and great interests not only arrive to such heads as can manage them, but form manners of

power. A keen eye, too, will see nice gradations of rank, or see in the manners the degree of homage the party

is wont to receive. A prince who is accustomed every day to be courted and deferred to by the highest

grandees, acquires a corresponding expectation, and a becoming mode of receiving and replying to this

There are always exceptional people and modes. English grandees affect to be farmers. Claverhouse is a fop,

and, under the finish of dress, and levity of behavior, hides the terror of his war. But Nature and Destiny are

honest, and never fail to leave their mark, to hang out a sign for each and for every quality. It is much to

conquer one's face, and perhaps the ambitious youth thinks he has got the whole secret when he has learned,

that disengaged manners are commanding. Don't be deceived by a facile exterior. Tender men sometimes

have strong wills. We had, in Massachusetts, an old statesman, who had sat all his life in courts and in chairs

of state, without overcoming an extreme irritability of face, voice, and bearing: when he spoke, his voice

would not serve him; it cracked, it broke, it wheezed, it piped; little cared he; he knew that it had got to

pipe, or wheeze, or screech his argument and his indignation. When he sat down, after speaking, he seemed in

a sort of fit, and held on to his chair with both hands: but underneath all this irritability, was a puissant will,

firm, and advancing, and a memory in which lay in order and method like geologic strata every fact of his

Manners are partly factitious, but, mainly, there must be capacity for culture in the blood. Else all culture is

vain. The obstinate prejudice in favor of blood, which lies at the base of the feudal and monarchical fabrics of

the old world, has some reason in common experience. Every man, mathematician, artist, soldier, or

merchant, looks with confidence for some traits and talents in his own child, which he would not dare to

presume in the child of a stranger. The Orientalists are very orthodox on this point. "Take a thornbush," said

the emir AbdelKader, "and sprinkle it for a whole year with water; it will yield nothing but thorns. Take

a datetree, leave it without culture, and it will always produce dates. Nobility is the datetree, and the Arab

A main fact in the history of manners is the wonderful expressiveness of the human body. If it were made of

glass, or of air, and the thoughts were written on steel tablets within, it could not publish more truly its

meaning than now. Wise men read very sharply all your private history in your look and gait and behavior.

The whole economy of nature is bent on expression. The telltale body is all tongues. Men are like Geneva

watches with crystal faces which expose the whole movement. They carry the liquor of life flowing up and

down in these beautiful bottles, and announcing to the curious how it is with them. The face and eyes reveal

what the spirit is doing, how old it is, what aims it has. The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul, or, through

how many forms it has already ascended. It almost violates the proprieties, if we say above the breath here,

Man cannot fix his eye on the sun, and so far seems imperfect. In Siberia, a late traveller found men who

could see the satellites of Jupiter with their unarmed eye. In some respects the animals excel us. The birds

have a longer sight, beside the advantage by their wings of a higher observatory. A cow can bid her calf, by

secret signal, probably of the eye, to run away, or to lie down and hide itself. The jockeys say of certain

horses, that "they look over the whole ground." The outdoor life, and hunting, and labor, give equal vigor to

the human eye. A farmer looks out at you as strong as the horse; his eyebeam is like the stroke of a staff. An

eye can threaten like a loaded and levelled gun, or can insult like hissing or kicking; or, in its altered mood,

The eye obeys exactly the action of the mind. When a thought strikes us, the eyes fix, and remain gazing at a

distance; in enumerating the names of persons or of countries, as France, Germany, Spain, Turkey, the eyes

wink at each new name. There is no nicety of learning sought by the mind, which the eyes do not vie in

acquiring. "An artist," said Michel Angelo, "must have his measuring tools not in the hand, but in the eye;"

and there is no end to the catalogue of its performances, whether in indolent vision, (that of health and

Eyes are bold as lions, roving, running, leaping, here and there, far and near. They speak all languages.

They wait for no introduction; they are no Englishmen; ask no leave of age, or rank; they respect neither

poverty nor riches, neither learning nor power, nor virtue, nor sex, but intrude, and come again, and go

through and through you, in a moment of time. What inundation of life and thought is discharged from one

soul into another, through them! The glance is natural magic. The mysterious communication established

across a house between two entire strangers, moves all the springs of wonder. The communication by the

glance is in the greatest part not subject to the control of the will. It is the bodily symbol of identity of nature.

We look into the eyes to know if this other form is another self, and the eyes will not lie, but make a faithful

confession what inhabitant is there. The revelations are sometimes terrific. The confession of a low, usurping

devil is there made, and the observer shall seem to feel the stirring of owls, and bats, and horned hoofs, where

he looked for innocence and simplicity. 'Tis remarkable, too, that the spirit that appears at the windows of the

house does at once invest himself in a new form of his own, to the mind of the beholder.

The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues, with the advantage, that the ocular dialect needs no

dictionary, but is understood all the world over. When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a

practised man relies on the language of the first. If the man is off his centre, the eyes show it. You can read in

the eyes of your companion, whether your argument hits him, though his tongue will not confess it. There is a

look by which a man shows he is going to say a good thing, and a look when he has said it. Vain and

forgotten are all the fine offers and offices of hospitality, if there is no holiday in the eye. How many furtive

inclinations avowed by the eye, though dissembled by the lips! One comes away from a company, in which,

it may easily happen, he has said nothing, and no important remark has been addressed to him, and yet, if in

sympathy with the society, he shall not have a sense of this fact, such a stream of life has been flowing into

him, and out from him, through the eyes. There are eyes, to be sure, that give no more admission into the man

than blueberries. Others are liquid and deep, wells that a man might fall into; others are aggressive and

devouring, seem to call out the police, take all too much notice, and require crowded Broadways, and the

security of millions, to protect individuals against them. The military eye I meet, now darkly sparkling under

clerical, now under rustic brows. 'Tis the city of Lacedaemon; 'tis a stack of bayonets. There are asking eyes,

asserting eyes, prowling eyes; and eyes full of fate, some of good, and some of sinister omen. The alleged

power to charm down insanity, or ferocity in beasts, is a power behind the eye. It must be a victory achieved

in the will, before it can be signified in the eye. 'Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact

indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man

should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence. Whoever looked on him would consent to his will, being

certified that his aims were generous and universal. The reason why men do not obey us, is because they see

If the organ of sight is such a vehicle of power, the other features have their own. A man finds room in the

few square inches of the face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his

wants. The sculptor, and Winckelmann, and Lavater, will tell you how significant a feature is the nose; how

its forms express strength or weakness of will, and good or bad temper. The nose of Julius Caesar, of Dante,

and of Pitt, suggest "the terrors of the beak." What refinement, and what limitations, the teeth betray!

"Beware you don't laugh," said the wise mother, "for then you show all your faults."

Balzac left in manuscript a chapter, which he called "Theorie de la demarche," in which he says: "The look,

the voice, the respiration, and the attitude or walk, are identical. But, as it has not been given to man, the

power to stand guard, at once, over these four different simultaneous expressions of his thought, watch that

Palaces interest us mainly in the exhibition of manners, which, in the idle and expensive society dwelling in

them, are raised to a high art. The maxim of courts is, that manner is power. A calm and resolute bearing, a

polished speech, an embellishment of trifles, and the art of hiding all uncomfortable feeling, are essential to

the courtier: and Saint Simon, and Cardinal de Retz, and R;oederer, and an encyclopaedia of Memoires, will

instruct you, if you wish, in those potent secrets. Thus, it is a point of pride with kings, to remember faces and

names. It is reported of one prince, that his head had the air of leaning downwards, in order not to humble the

crowd. There are people who come in ever like a child with a piece of good news. It was said of the late Lord

Holland, that he always came down to breakfast with the air of a man who had just met with some signal

goodfortune. In "Notre Dame," the grandee took his place on the dais, with the look of one who is thinking

Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others. A scholar may be a wellbred man, or he may not.

The enthusiast is introduced to polished scholars in society, and is chilled and silenced by finding himself not

in their element. They all have somewhat which he has not, and, it seems, ought to have. But if he finds the

scholar apart from his companions, it is then the enthusiast's turn, and the scholar has no defence, but must

deal on his terms. Now they must fight the battle out on their private strengths. What is the talent of that

character so common, the successful man of the world, in all marts, senates, and drawingrooms?

Manners: manners of power; sense to see his advantage, and manners up to it. See him approach his man. He

knows that troops behave as they are handled at first; that is his cheap secret; just what happens to every

two persons who meet on any affair, one instantly perceives that he has the key of the situation, that his

will comprehends the other's will, as the cat does the mouse; and he has only to use courtesy, and furnish

goodnatured reasons to his victim to cover up the chain, lest he be shamed into resistance.

The theatre in which this science of manners has a formal importance is not with us a court, but dresscircles,

wherein, after the close of the day's business, men and women meet at leisure, for mutual entertainment, in

ornamented drawingrooms. Of course, it has every variety of attraction and merit; but, to earnest persons, to

youths or maidens who have great objects at heart, we cannot extol it highly. A welldressed, talkative

company, where each is bent to amuse the other, yet the highborn Turk who came hither fancied that

every woman seemed to be suffering for a chair; that all the talkers were brained and exhausted by the

deoxygenated air: it spoiled the best persons: it put all on stilts. Yet here are the secret biographies written

and read. The aspect of that man is repulsive; I do not wish to deal with him. The other is irritable, shy, and

on his guard. The youth looks humble and manly: I choose him. Look on this woman. There is not beauty,

nor brilliant sayings, nor distinguished power to serve you; but all see her gladly; her whole air and

impression are healthful. Here come the sentimentalists, and the invalids. Here is Elise, who caught cold in

coming into the world, and has always increased it since. Here are creepmouse manners; and thievish

manners. "Look at Northcote," said Fuseli; "he looks like a rat that has seen a cat." In the shallow company,

easily excited, easily tired, here is the columnar Bernard: the Alleghanies do not express more repose than his

behavior. Here are the sweet following eyes of Cecile: it seemed always that she demanded the heart. Nothing

can be more excellent in kind than the Corinthian grace of Gertrude's manners, and yet Blanche, who has no

manners, has better manners than she; for the movements of Blanche are the sallies of a spirit which is

sufficient for the moment, and she can afford to express every thought by instant action.

Manners have been somewhat cynically defined to be a contrivance of wise men to keep fools at a distance.

Fashion is shrewd to detect those who do not belong to her train, and seldom wastes her attentions. Society is

very swift in its instincts, and, if you do not belong to it, resists and sneers at you; or quietly drops you. The

first weapon enrages the party attacked; the second is still more effective, but is not to be resisted, as the date

of the transaction is not easily found. People grow up and grow old under this infliction, and never suspect

the truth, ascribing the solitude which acts on them very injuriously, to any cause but the right one.

The basis of good manners is selfreliance. Necessity is the law of all who are not selfpossessed. Those who

are not selfpossessed, obtrude, and pain us. Some men appear to feel that they belong to a Pariah caste.

They fear to offend, they bend and apologize, and walk through life with a timid step. As we sometimes

dream that we are in a welldressed company without any coat, so Godfrey acts ever as if he suffered from

some mortifying circumstance. The hero should find himself at home, wherever he is: should impart comfort

by his own security and goodnature to all beholders. The hero is suffered to be himself. A person of strong

mind comes to perceive that for him an immunity is secured so long as he renders to society that service

which is native and proper to him, an immunity from all the observances, yea, and duties, which society

so tyrannically imposes on the rank and file of its members. "Euripides," says Aspasia, "has not the fine

manners of Sophocles; but," she adds goodhumoredly, "the movers and masters of our souls have surely

a right to throw out their limbs as carelessly as they please, on the world that belongs to them, and before the

Manners require time, as nothing is more vulgar than haste. Friendship should be surrounded with ceremonies

and respects, and not crushed into corners. Friendship requires more time than poor busy men can usually

command. Here comes to me Roland, with a delicacy of sentiment leading and inwrapping him like a divine

cloud or holy ghost. 'Tis a great destitution to both that this should not be entertained with large leisures, but

But through this lustrous varnish, the reality is ever shining. 'Tis hard to keep the what from breaking through

this pretty painting of the how. The core will come to the surface. Strong will and keen perception overpower

old manners, and create new; and the thought of the present moment has a greater value than all the past. In

persons of character, we do not remark manners, because of their instantaneousness. We are surprised by the

thing done, out of all power to watch the way of it. Yet nothing is more charming than to recognize the great

style which runs through the actions of such. People masquerade before us in their fortunes, titles, offices,

and connections, as academic or civil presidents, or senators, or professors, or great lawyers, and impose on

the frivolous, and a good deal on each other, by these fames. At least, it is a point of prudent good manners to

treat these reputations tenderly, as if they were merited. But the sad realist knows these fellows at a glance,

and they know him; as when in Paris the chief of the police enters a ballroom, so many diamonded pretenders

shrink and make themselves as inconspicuous as they can, or give him a supplicating look as they pass. "I had

received," said a sibyl, "I had received at birth the fatal gift of penetration:" and these Cassandras are

Manners impress as they indicate real power. A man who is sure of his point, carries a broad and contented

expression, which everybody reads. And you cannot rightly train one to an air and manner, except by making

him the kind of man of whom that manner is the natural expression. Nature forever puts a premium on reality.

What is done for effect, is seen to be done for effect; what is done for love, is felt to be done for love. A man

inspires affection and honor, because he was not lying in wait for these. The things of a man for which we

visit him, were done in the dark and the cold. A little integrity is better than any career. So deep are the

sources of this surfaceaction, that even the size of your companion seems to vary with his freedom of

thought. Not only is he larger, when at ease, and his thoughts generous, but everything around him becomes

variable with expression. No carpenter's rule, no rod and chain, will measure the dimensions of any house or

houselot: go into the house: if the proprietor is constrained and deferring, 'tis of no importance how large his

house, how beautiful his grounds, you quickly come to the end of all: but if the man is selfpossessed,

happy, and at home, his house is deepfounded, indefinitely large and interesting, the roof and dome buoyant

as the sky. Under the humblest roof, the commonest person in plain clothes sits there massive, cheerful, yet

Neither Aristotle, nor Leibnitz, nor Junius, nor Champollion has set down the grammarrules of this dialect,

older than Sanscrit; but they who cannot yet read English, can read this. Men take each other's measure, when

they meet for the first time, and every time they meet. How do they get this rapid knowledge, even before

they speak, of each other's power and dispositions? One would say, that the persuasion of their speech is not

in what they say, or, that men do not convince by their argument, but by their personality, by who they

are, and what they said and did heretofore. A man already strong is listened to, and everything he says is

applauded. Another opposes him with sound argument, but the argument is scouted, until by and by it gets

Selfreliance is the basis of behavior, as it is the guaranty that the powers are not squandered in too much

demonstration. In this country, where school education is universal, we have a superficial culture, and a

profusion of reading and writing and expression. We parade our nobilities in poems and orations, instead of

working them up into happiness. There is a whisper out of the ages to him who can understand it,

`whatever is known to thyself alone, has always very great value.' There is some reason to believe, that, when

a man does not write his poetry, it escapes by other vents through him, instead of the one vent of writing;

clings to his form and manners, whilst poets have often nothing poetical about them except their verses.

Jacobi said, that "when a man has fully expressed his thought, he has somewhat less possession of it." One

would say, the rule is, What a man is irresistibly urged to say, helps him and us. In explaining his thought

to others, he explains it to himself: but when he opens it for show, it corrupts him.

Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are their literature. Novels are the journal or record

of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate

the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily. The novels used to be all alike, and had a quite vulgar

tone. The novels used to lead us on to a foolish interest in the fortunes of the boy and girl they described. The

boy was to be raised from a humble to a high position. He was in want of a wife and a castle, and the object

of the story was to supply him with one or both. We watched sympathetically, step by step, his climbing,

until, at last, the point is gained, the wedding day is fixed, and we follow the gala procession home to the

castle, when the doors are slammed in our face, and the poor reader is left outside in the cold, not enriched by

But the victories of character are instant, and victories for all. Its greatness enlarges all. We are fortified by

every heroic anecdote. The novels are as useful as Bibles, if they teach you the secret, that the best of life is

conversation, and the greatest success is confidence, or perfect understanding between sincere people. 'Tis a

French definition of friendship, rien que s'entendre, good understanding. The highest compact we can make

with our fellow, is, `Let there be truth between us two forevermore.' That is the charm in all good novels,

as it is the charm in all good histories, that the heroes mutually understand, from the first, and deal loyally,

and with a profound trust in each other. It is sublime to feel and say of another, I need never meet, or speak,

or write to him: we need not reinforce ourselves, or send tokens of remembrance: I rely on him as on myself:

In all the superior people I have met, I notice directness, truth spoken more truly, as if everything of

obstruction, of malformation, had been trained away. What have they to conceal? What have they to exhibit?

Between simple and noble persons, there is always a quick intelligence: they recognize at sight, and meet on

a better ground than the talents and skills they may chance to possess, namely, on sincerity and uprightness.

For, it is not what talents or genius a man has, but how he is to his talents, that constitutes friendship and

character. The man that stands by himself, the universe stands by him also. It is related of the monk Basle,

that, being excommunicated by the Pope, he was, at his death, sent in charge of an angel to find a fit place of

suffering in hell: but, such was the eloquence and goodhumor of the monk, that, wherever he went he was

received gladly, and civilly treated, even by the most uncivil angels: and, when he came to discourse with

them, instead of contradicting or forcing him, they took his part, and adopted his manners: and even good

angels came from far, to see him, and take up their abode with him. The angel that was sent to find a place of

torment for him, attempted to remove him to a worse pit, but with no better success; for such was the

contented spirit of the monk, that he found something to praise in every place and company, though in hell,

and made a kind of heaven of it. At last the escorting angel returned with his prisoner to them that sent him,

saying, that no phlegethon could be found that would burn him; for that, in whatever condition, Basle

remained incorrigibly Basle. The legend says, his sentence was remitted, and he was allowed to go into

There is a stroke of magnanimity in the correspondence of Bonaparte with his brother Joseph, when the latter

was King of Spain, and complained that he missed in Napoleon's letters the affectionate tone which had

marked their childish correspondence. "I am sorry," replies Napoleon, "you think you shall find your brother

again only in the Elysian Fields. It is natural, that at forty, he should not feel towards you as he did at twelve.

But his feelings towards you have greater truth and strength. His friendship has the features of his mind."

How much we forgive to those who yield us the rare spectacle of heroic manners! We will pardon them the

want of books, of arts, and even of the gentler virtues. How tenaciously we remember them! Here is a lesson

which I brought along with me in boyhood from the Latin School, and which ranks with the best of Roman

anecdotes. Marcus Scaurus was accused by Quintus Varius Hispanus, that he had excited the allies to take

arms against the Republic. But he, full of firmness and gravity, defended himself in this manner: "Quintus

Varius Hispanus alleges that Marcus Scaurus, President of the Senate, excited the allies to arms: Marcus

Scaurus, President of the Senate, denies it. There is no witness. Which do you believe, Romans?" "Utri

creditis, Quirites?" When he had said these words, he was absolved by the assembly of the people.

I have seen manners that make a similar impression with personal beauty; that give the like exhilaration, and

refine us like that; and, in memorable experiences, they are suddenly better than beauty, and make that

superfluous and ugly. But they must be marked by fine perception, the acquaintance with real beauty. They

must always show selfcontrol: you shall not be facile, apologetic, or leaky, but king over your word; and

every gesture and action shall indicate power at rest. Then they must be inspired by the good heart. There is

no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us. 'Tis

good to give a stranger a meal, or a night's lodging. 'Tis better to be hospitable to his good meaning and

thought, and give courage to a companion. We must be as courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which

we are willing to give the advantage of a good light. Special precepts are not to be thought of: the talent of

welldoing contains them all. Every hour will show a duty as paramount as that of my whim just now; and

yet I will write it, that there is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all wellbred, to all rational mortals,

namely, their distempers. If you have not slept, or if you have slept, or if you have headache, or sciatica, or

leprosy, or thunderstroke, I beseech you, by all angels, to hold your peace, and not pollute the morning, to

which all the housemates bring serene and pleasant thoughts, by corruption and groans. Come out of the

azure. Love the day. Do not leave the sky out of your landscape. The oldest and the most deserving person

should come very modestly into any newly awaked company, respecting the divine communications, out of

which all must be presumed to have newly come. An old man who added an elevating culture to a large

experience of life, said to me, "When you come into the room, I think I will study how to make humanity

As respects the delicate question of culture, I do not think that any other than negative rules can be laid down.

For positive rules, for suggestion, Nature alone inspires it. Who dare assume to guide a youth, a maid, to

perfect manners? the golden mean is so delicate, difficult, say frankly, unattainable. What finest hands

would not be clumsy to sketch the genial precepts of the young girl's demeanor? The chances seem infinite

against success; and yet success is continually attained. There must not be secondariness, and 'tis a thousand

to one that her air and manner will at once betray that she is not primary, but that there is some other one or

many of her class, to whom she habitually postpones herself. But Nature lifts her easily, and without knowing

it, over these impossibilities, and we are continually surprised with graces and felicities not only unteachable,

Some of my friends have complained, when the preceding papers were read, that we discussed Fate, Power,

and Wealth, on too low a platform; gave too much line to the evil spirit of the times; too many cakes to

Cerberus; that we ran Cudworth's risk of making, by excess of candor, the argument of atheism so strong, that

he could not answer it. I have no fears of being forced in my own despite to play, as we say, the devil's

attorney. I have no infirmity of faith; no belief that it is of much importance what I or any man may say: I am

sure that a certain truth will be said through me, though I should be dumb, or though I should try to say the

reverse. Nor do I fear skepticism for any good soul. A just thinker will allow full swing to his skepticism. I

dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I am not afraid of falling into my inkpot. I have no sympathy with a

poor man I knew, who, when suicides abounded, told me he dared not look at his razor. We are of different

opinions at different hours, but we always may be said to be at heart on the side of truth.

I see not why we should give ourselves such sanctified airs. If the Divine Providence has hid from men

neither disease, nor deformity, nor corrupt society, but has stated itself out in passions, in war, in trade, in the

love of power and pleasure, in hunger and need, in tyrannies, literatures, and arts, let us not be so nice that

we cannot write these facts down coarsely as they stand, or doubt but there is a counterstatement as

ponderous, which we can arrive at, and which, being put, will make all square. The solar system has no

anxiety about its reputation, and the credit of truth and honesty is as safe; nor have I any fear that a skeptical

bias can be given by leaning hard on the sides of fate, of practical power, or of trade, which the doctrine of

Faith cannot downweigh. The strength of that principle is not measured in ounces and pounds: it tyrannizes

at the centre of Nature. We may well give skepticism as much line as we can. The spirit will return, and fill

We are born loyal. The whole creation is made of hooks and eyes, of bitumen, of stickingplaster, and

whether your community is made in Jerusalem or in California, of saints or of wreckers, it coheres in a

perfect ball. Men as naturally make a state, or a church, as caterpillars a web. If they were more refined, it

would be less formal, it would be nervous, like that of the Shakers, who, from long habit of thinking and

feeling together, it is said, are affected in the same way, at the same time, to work and to play, and as they go

with perfect sympathy to their tasks in the field or shop, so are they inclined for a ride or a journey at the

same instant, and the horses come up with the family carriage unbespoken to the door.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs, as a tree bears apples. A selfpoise belongs to every particle; and

a rectitude to every mind, and is the Nemesis and protector of every society. I and my neighbors have been

bred in the notion, that, unless we came soon to some good church, Calvinism, or Behmenism, or

Romanism, or Mormonism, there would be a universal thaw and dissolution. No Isaiah or Jeremy has

arrived. Nothing can exceed the anarchy that has followed in our skies. The stern old faiths have all

pulverized. 'Tis a whole population of gentlemen and ladies out in search of religions. 'Tis as flat anarchy in

our ecclesiastic realms, as that which existed in Massachusetts, in the Revolution, or which prevails now on

the slope of the Rocky Mountains or Pike's Peak. Yet we make shift to live. Men are loyal. Nature has

selfpoise in all her works; certain proportions in which oxygen and azote combine, and, not less a harmony

The decline of the influence of Calvin, or Fenelon, or Wesley, or Channing, need give us no uneasiness. The

builder of heaven has not so ill constructed his creature as that the religion, that is, the public nature, should

fall out: the public and the private element, like north and south, like inside and outside, like centrifugal and

centripetal, adhere to every soul, and cannot be subdued, except the soul is dissipated. God builds his temple

In the last chapters, we treated some particulars of the question of culture. But the whole state of man is a

state of culture; and its flowering and completion may be described as Religion, or Worship. There is always

some religion, some hope and fear extended into the invisible, from the blind boding which nails a

horseshoe to the mast or the threshold, up to the song of the Elders in the Apocalypse. But the religion cannot

rise above the state of the votary. Heaven always bears some proportion to earth. The god of the cannibals

will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant. In all ages, souls out of time,

extraordinary, prophetic, are born, who are rather related to the system of the world, than to their particular

age and locality. These announce absolute truths, which, with whatever reverence received, are speedily

dragged down into a savage interpretation. The interior tribes of our Indians, and some of the Pacific

islanders, flog their gods, when things take an unfavorable turn. The Greek poets did not hesitate to let loose

their petulant wit on their deities also. Laomedon, in his anger at Neptune and Apollo, who had built Troy for

him, and demanded their price, does not hesitate to menace them that he will cut their ears off. (*) Among our

Norse forefathers, King Olaf's mode of converting Eyvind to Christianity was to put a pan of glowing coals

on his belly, which burst asunder. "Wilt thou now, Eyvind, believe in Christ?" asks Olaf, in excellent faith.

Another argument was an adder put into the mouth of the reluctant disciple Rand, who refused to believe.

Christianity, in the romantic ages, signified European culture, the grafted or meliorated tree in a crab

forest. And to marry a pagan wife or husband, was to marry Beast, and voluntarily to take a step backwards

What Gothic mixtures the Christian creed drew from the pagan sources, Richard of Devizes's chronicle of

Richard I.'s crusade, in the twelfth century, may show. King Richard taunts God with forsaking him: "O fie!

O how unwilling should I be to forsake thee, in so forlorn and dreadful a position, were I thy lord and

advocate, as thou art mine. In sooth, my standards will in future be despised, not through my fault, but

through thine: in sooth, not through any cowardice of my warfare, art thou thyself, my king and my God

conquered, this day, and not Richard thy vassal." The religion of the early English poets is anomalous, so

devout and so blasphemous, in the same breath. Such is Chaucer's extraordinary confusion of heaven and

With these grossnesses, we complacently compare our own taste and decorum. We think and speak with

more temperance and gradation, but is not indifferentism as bad as superstition?

We live in a transition period, when the old faiths which comforted nations, and not only so, but made

nations, seem to have spent their force. I do not find the religions of men at this moment very creditable to

them, but either childish and insignificant, or unmanly and effeminating. The fatal trait is the divorce between

religion and morality. Here are knownothing religions, or churches that proscribe intellect; scortatory

religions; slaveholding and slavetrading religions; and, even in the decent populations, idolatries wherein

the whiteness of the ritual covers scarlet indulgence. The lover of the old religion complains that our

contemporaries, scholars as well as merchants, succumb to a great despair, have corrupted into a timorous

conservatism, and believe in nothing. In our large cities, the population is godless, materialized, no bond,

no fellowfeeling, no enthusiasm. These are not men, but hungers, thirsts, fevers, and appetites walking. How

is it people manage to live on, so aimless as they are? After their peppercorn aims are gained, it seems as

if the lime in their bones alone held them together, and not any worthy purpose. There is no faith in the

intellectual, none in the moral universe. There is faith in chemistry, in meat, and wine, in wealth, in

machinery, in the steamengine, galvanic battery, turbinewheels, sewing machines, and in public opinion,

but not in divine causes. A silent revolution has loosed the tension of the old religious sects, and, in place of

the gravity and permanence of those societies of opinion, they run into freak and extravagance. In creeds

never was such levity; witness the heathenisms in Christianity, the periodic "revivals," the Millennium

mathematics, the peacock ritualism, the retrogression to Popery, the maundering of Mormons, the squalor of

Mesmerism, the deliration of rappings, the rat and mouse revelation, thumps in tabledrawers, and black art.

The architecture, the music, the prayer, partake of the madness: the arts sink into shift and makebelieve. Not

knowing what to do, we ape our ancestors; the churches stagger backward to the mummeries of the dark ages.

By the irresistible maturing of the general mind, the Christian traditions have lost their hold. The dogma of

the mystic offices of Christ being dropped, and he standing on his genius as a moral teacher, 'tis impossible to

maintain the old emphasis of his personality; and it recedes, as all persons must, before the sublimity of the

moral laws. From this change, and in the momentary absence of any religious genius that could offset the

immense material activity, there is a feeling that religion is gone. When Paul Leroux offered his article

"Dieu" to the conductor of a leading French journal, he replied, "La question de Dieu manque d'actualite." In

Italy, Mr. Gladstone said of the late King of Naples, "it has been a proverb, that he has erected the negation of

God into a system of government." In this country, the like stupefaction was in the air, and the phrase "higher

law" became a political jibe. What proof of infidelity, like the toleration and propagandism of slavery? What,

like the direction of education? What, like the facility of conversion? What, like the externality of churches

that once sucked the roots of right and wrong, and now have perished away till they are a speck of whitewash

on the wall? What proof of skepticism like the base rate at which the highest mental and moral gifts are held?

Let a man attain the highest and broadest culture that any American has possessed, then let him die by

seastorm, railroad collision, or other accident, and all America will acquiesce that the best thing has

happened to him; that, after the education has gone far, such is the expensiveness of America, that the best

Another scar of this skepticism is the distrust in human virtue. It is believed by welldressed proprietors that

there is no more virtue than they possess; that the solid portion of society exist for the arts of comfort: that

life is an affair to put somewhat between the upper and lower mandibles. How prompt the suggestion of a low

motive! Certain patriots in England devoted themselves for years to creating a public opinion that should

break down the cornlaws and establish free trade. `Well,' says the man in the street, `Cobden got a stipend

out of it.' Kossuth fled hither across the ocean to try if he could rouse the New World to a sympathy with

European liberty. `Aye,' says New York, `he made a handsome thing of it, enough to make him comfortable

See what allowance vice finds in the respectable and wellconditioned class. If a pickpocket intrude into the

society of gentlemen, they exert what moral force they have, and he finds himself uncomfortable, and glad to

get away. But if an adventurer go through all the forms, procure himself to be elected to a post of trust, as of

senator, or president, though by the same arts as we detest in the housethief, the same gentlemen who

agree to discountenance the private rogue, will be forward to show civilities and marks of respect to the

public one: and no amount of evidence of his crimes will prevent them giving him ovations, complimentary

dinners, opening their own houses to him, and priding themselves on his acquaintance. We were not deceived

by the professions of the private adventurer, the louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our

spoons; but we appeal to the sanctified preamble of the messages and proclamations of the public sinner, as

the proof of sincerity. It must be that they who pay this homage have said to themselves, On the whole, we

Even welldisposed, good sort of people are touched with the same infidelity, and for brave, straightforward

action, use halfmeasures and compromises. Forgetful that a little measure is a great error, forgetful that a

wise mechanic uses a sharp tool, they go on choosing the dead men of routine. But the official men can in

nowise help you in any question of today, they deriving entirely from the old dead things. Only those can

help in counsel or conduct who did not make a party pledge to defend this or that, but who were appointed by

God Almighty, before they came into the world, to stand for this which they uphold.

It has been charged that a want of sincerity in the leading men is a vice general throughout American society.

But the multitude of the sick shall not make us deny the existence of health. In spite of our imbecility and

terrors, and "universal decay of religion," the moral sense reappears today with the same morning newness

that has been from of old the fountain of beauty and strength. You say, there is no religion now. 'Tis like

saying in rainy weather, there is no sun, when at that moment we are witnessing one of his superlative effects.

The religion of the cultivated class now, to be sure, consists in an avoidance of acts and engagements which it

was once their religion to assume. But this avoidance will yield spontaneous forms in their due hour. There is

a principle which is the basis of things, which all speech aims to say, and all action to evolve, a simple, quiet,

undescribed, undescribable presence, dwelling very peacefully in us, our rightful lord: we are not to do, but to

let do; not to work, but to be worked upon; and to this homage there is a consent of all thoughtful and just

men in all ages and conditions. To this sentiment belong vast and sudden enlargements of power. 'Tis

remarkable that our faith in ecstasy consists with total inexperience of it. It is the order of the world to

educate with accuracy the senses and the understanding; and the enginery at work to draw out these powers in

priority, no doubt, has its office. But we are never without a hint that these powers are mediate and servile,

and that we are one day to deal with real being, essences with essences. Even the fury of material activity

has some results friendly to moral health. The energetic action of the times develops individualism, and the

religious appear isolated. I esteem this a step in the right direction. Heaven deals with us on no representative

system. Souls are not saved in bundles. The Spirit saith to the man, `How is it with thee? thee personally? is it

well? is it ill?' For a great nature, it is a happiness to escape a religious training, religion of character is so

apt to be invaded. Religion must always be a crab fruit: it cannot be grafted and keep its wild beauty. "I have

seen," said a traveller who had known the extremes of society, "I have seen human nature in all its forms, it is

We say, the old forms of religion decay, and that a skepticism devastates the community. I do not think it can

be cured or stayed by any modification of theologic creeds, much less by theologic discipline. The cure for

false theology is motherwit. Forget your books and traditions, and obey your moral perceptions at this hour.

That which is signified by the words "moral" and "spiritual," is a lasting essence, and, with whatever illusions

we have loaded them, will certainly bring back the words, age after age, to their ancient meaning. I know no

words that mean so much. In our definitions, we grope after the spiritual by describing it as invisible. The

true meaning of spiritual is real; that law which executes itself, which works without means, and which

cannot be conceived as not existing. Men talk of "mere morality," which is much as if one should say,

`poor God, with nobody to help him.' I find the omnipresence and the almightiness in the reaction of every

atom in Nature. I can best indicate by examples those reactions by which every part of Nature replies to the

purpose of the actor, beneficently to the good, penally to the bad. Let us replace sentimentalism by

realism, and dare to uncover those simple and terrible laws which, be they seen or unseen, pervade and

Every man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he

do not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well. He has changed his marketcart into a chariot of the sun. What

a day dawns, when we have taken to heart the doctrine of faith! to prefer, as a better investment, being to

doing; being to seeming; logic to rhythm and to display; the year to the day; the life to the year; character to

performance; and have come to know, that justice will be done us; and, if our genius is slow, the term will

'Tis certain that worship stands in some commanding relation to the health of man, and to his highest powers,

so as to be, in some manner, the source of intellect. All the great ages have been ages of belief. I mean, when

there was any extraordinary power of performance, when great national movements began, when arts

appeared, when heroes existed, when poems were made, the human soul was in earnest, and had fixed its

thoughts on spiritual verities, with as strict a grasp as that of the hands on the sword, or the pencil, or the

trowel. It is true that genius takes its rise out of the mountains of rectitude; that all beauty and power which

men covet, are somehow born out of that Alpine district; that any extraordinary degree of beauty in man or

woman involves a moral charm. Thus, I think, we very slowly admit in another man a higher degree of moral

sentiment than our own, a finer conscience, more impressionable, or, which marks minuter degrees; an ear

to hear acuter notes of right and wrong, than we can. I think we listen suspiciously and very slowly to any

evidence to that point. But, once satisfied of such superiority, we set no limit to our expectation of his genius.

For such persons are nearer to the secret of God than others; are bathed by sweeter waters; they hear notices,

they see visions, where others are vacant. We believe that holiness confers a certain insight, because not by

our private, but by our public force, can we share and know the nature of things.

There is an intimate interdependence of intellect and morals. Given the equality of two intellects, which

will form the most reliable judgments, the good, or the bad hearted? "The heart has its arguments, with which

the understanding is not acquainted." For the heart is at once aware of the state of health or disease, which is

the controlling state, that is, of sanity or of insanity, prior, of course, to all question of the ingenuity of

arguments, the amount of facts, or the elegance of rhetoric. So intimate is this alliance of mind and heart, that

talent uniformly sinks with character. The bias of errors of principle carries away men into perilous courses,

as soon as their will does not control their passion or talent. Hence the extraordinary blunders, and final

wrong head, into which men spoiled by ambition usually fall. Hence the remedy for all blunders, the cure of

blindness, the cure of crime, is love. "As much love, so much mind," said the Latin proverb. The superiority

that has no superior; the redeemer and instructor of souls, as it is their primal essence, is love.

The moral must be the measure of health. If your eye is on the eternal, your intellect will grow, and your

opinions and actions will have a beauty which no learning or combined advantages of other men can rival.

The moment of your loss of faith, and acceptance of the lucrative standard, will be marked in the pause, or

solstice of genius, the sequent retrogression, and the inevitable loss of attraction to other minds. The vulgar

are sensible of the change in you, and of your descent, though they clap you on the back, and congratulate

Our recent culture has been in natural science. We have learned the manners of the sun and of the moon, of

the rivers and the rains, of the mineral and elemental kingdoms, of plants and animals. Man has learned to

weigh the sun, and its weight neither loses nor gains. The path of a star, the moment of an eclipse, can be

determined to the fraction of a second. Well, to him the book of history, the book of love, the lures of

passion, and the commandments of duty are opened: and the next lesson taught, is, the continuation of the

inflexible law of matter into the subtile kingdom of will, and of thought; that, if, in sidereal ages, gravity and

projection keep their craft, and the ball never loses its way in its wild path through space, a secreter

gravitation, a secreter projection, rule not less tyrannically in human history, and keep the balance of power

from age to age unbroken. For, though the new element of freedom and an individual has been admitted, yet

the primordial atoms are prefigured and predetermined to moral issues, are in search of justice, and ultimate

right is done. Religion or worship is the attitude of those who see this unity, intimacy, and sincerity; who see

that, against all appearances, the nature of things works for truth and right forever.

'Tis a short sight to limit our faith in laws to those of gravity, of chemistry, of botany, and so forth. Those

laws do not stop where our eyes lose them, but push the same geometry and chemistry up into the invisible

plane of social and rational life, so that, look where we will, in a boy's game, or in the strifes of races, a

perfect reaction, a perpetual judgment keeps watch and ward. And this appears in a class of facts which

Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances: It was somebody's name, or he happened to be there

at the time, or, it was so then, and another day it would have been otherwise. Strong men believe in cause and

effect. The man was born to do it, and his father was born to be the father of him and of this deed, and, by

looking narrowly, you shall see there was no luck in the matter, but it was all a problem in arithmetic, or an

experiment in chemistry. The curve of the flight of the moth is preordained, and all things go by number, rule,

Skepticism is unbelief in cause and effect. A man does not see, that, as he eats, so he thinks: as he deals, so he

is, and so he appears; he does not see, that his son is the son of his thoughts and of his actions; that fortunes

are not exceptions but fruits; that relation and connection are not somewhere and sometimes, but everywhere

and always; no miscellany, no exemption, no anomaly, but method, and an even web; and what comes

out, that was put in. As we are, so we do; and as we do, so is it done to us; we are the builders of our fortunes;

cant and lying and the attempt to secure a good which does not belong to us, are, once for all, balked and

vain. But, in the human mind, this tie of fate is made alive. The law is the basis of the human mind. In us, it is

inspiration; out there in Nature, we see its fatal strength. We call it the moral sentiment.

We owe to the Hindoo Scriptures a definition of Law, which compares well with any in our Western books.

"Law it is, which is without name, or color, or hands, or feet; which is smallest of the least, and largest of the

large; all, and knowing all things; which hears without ears, sees without eyes, moves without feet, and seizes

If any reader tax me with using vague and traditional phrases, let me suggest to him, by a few examples, what

kind of a trust this is, and how real. Let me show him that the dice are loaded; that the colors are fast, because

they are the native colors of the fleece; that the globe is a battery, because every atom is a magnet; and that

the police and sincerity of the Universe are secured by God's delegating his divinity to every particle; that

The countryman leaving his native village, for the first time, and going abroad, finds all his habits broken up.

In a new nation and language, his sect, as Quaker, or Lutheran, is lost. What! it is not then necessary to the

order and existence of society? He misses this, and the commanding eye of his neighborhood, which held him

to decorum. This is the peril of New York, of New Orleans, of London, of Paris, to young men. But after a

little experience, he makes the discovery that there are no large cities, none large enough to hide in; that

the censors of action are as numerous and as near in Paris, as in Littleton or Portland; that the gossip is as

prompt and vengeful. There is no concealment, and, for each offence, a several vengeance; that, reaction, or

nothing for nothing, or, things are as broad as they are long, is not a rule for Littleton or Portland, but for the

We cannot spare the coarsest muniment of virtue. We are disgusted by gossip; yet it is of importance to keep

the angels in their proprieties. The smallest fly will draw blood, and gossip is a weapon impossible to exclude

from the privatest, highest, selectest. Nature created a police of many ranks. God has delegated himself to a

million deputies. From these low external penalties, the scale ascends. Next come the resentments, the fears,

which injustice calls out; then, the false relations in which the offender is put to other men; and the reaction

You cannot hide any secret. If the artist succor his flagging spirits by opium or wine, his work will

characterize itself as the effect of opium or wine. If you make a picture or a statue, it sets the beholder in that

state of mind you had, when you made it. If you spend for show, on building, or gardening, or on pictures, or

on equipages, it will so appear. We are all physiognomists and penetrators of character, and things themselves

are detective. If you follow the suburban fashion in building a sumptuouslooking house for a little money, it

will appear to all eyes as a cheap dear house. There is no privacy that cannot be penetrated. No secret can be

kept in the civilized world. Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it

by hiding. If a man wish to conceal anything he carries, those whom he meets know that he conceals

somewhat, and usually know what he conceals. Is it otherwise if there be some belief or some purpose he

would bury in his breast? 'Tis as hard to hide as fire. He is a strong man who can hold down his opinion. A

man cannot utter two or three sentences, without disclosing to intelligent ears precisely where he stands in

life and thought, namely, whether in the kingdom of the senses and the understanding, or, in that of ideas and

imagination, in the realm of intuitions and duty. People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also

a confession of character. We can only see what we are, and if we misbehave we suspect others. The fame of

Shakspeare or of Voltaire, of Thomas a Kempis, or of Bonaparte, characterizes those who give it. As

gaslight is found to be the best nocturnal police, so the universe protects itself by pitiless publicity.

Each must be armed not necessarily with musket and pike. Happy, if, seeing these, he can feel that he has

better muskets and pikes in his energy and constancy. To every creature is his own weapon, however skilfully

concealed from himself, a good while. His work is sword and shield. Let him accuse none, let him injure

none. The way to mend the bad world, is to create the right world. Here is a low political economy plotting to

cut the throat of foreign competition, and establish our own; excluding others by force, or making war on

them; or, by cunning tariffs, giving preference to worse wares of ours. But the real and lasting victories are

those of peace, and not of war. The way to conquer the foreign artisan, is, not to kill him, but to beat his

work. And the Crystal Palaces and World Fairs, with their committees and prizes on all kinds of industry, are

the result of this feeling. The American workman who strikes ten blows with his hammer, whilst the foreign

workman only strikes one, is as really vanquishing that foreigner, as if the blows were aimed at and told on

his person. I look on that man as happy, who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a

reply, not into the market, not into opinion, not into patronage. In every variety of human employment, in the

mechanical and in the fine arts, in navigation, in farming, in legislating, there are among the numbers who do

their task perfunctorily, as we say, or just to pass, and as badly as they dare, there are the workingmen,

on whom the burden of the business falls, those who love work, and love to see it rightly done, who finish

their task for its own sake; and the state and the world is happy, that has the most of such finishers. The world

will always do justice at last to such finishers: it cannot otherwise. He who has acquired the ability, may wait

securely the occasion of making it felt and appreciated, and know that it will not loiter. Men talk as if victory

were something fortunate. Work is victory. Wherever work is done, victory is obtained. There is no chance,

and no blanks. You want but one verdict: if you have your own, you are secure of the rest. And yet, if

witnesses are wanted, witnesses are near. There was never a man born so wise or good, but one or more

companions came into the world with him, who delight in his faculty, and report it. I cannot see without awe,

that no man thinks alone, and no man acts alone, but the divine assessors who came up with him into life,

now under one disguise, now under another, like a police in citizens' clothes, walk with him, step for step,

This reaction, this sincerity is the property of all things. To make our word or act sublime, we must make it

real. It is our system that counts, not the single word or unsupported action. Use what language you will, you

can never say anything but what you are. What I am, and what I think, is conveyed to you, in spite of my

efforts to hold it back. What I am has been secretly conveyed from me to another, whilst I was vainly making

As men get on in life, they acquire a love for sincerity, and somewhat less solicitude to be lulled or amused.

In the progress of the character, there is an increasing faith in the moral sentiment, and a decreasing faith in

propositions. Young people admire talents, and particular excellences. As we grow older, we value total

powers and effects, as the spirit, or quality of the man. We have another sight, and a new standard; an insight

which disregards what is done for the eye, and pierces to the doer; an ear which hears not what men say, but

There was a wise, devout man who is called, in the Catholic Church, St. Philip Neri, of whom many

anecdotes touching his discernment and benevolence are told at Naples and Rome. Among the nuns in a

convent not far from Rome, one had appeared, who laid claim to certain rare gifts of inspiration and

prophecy, and the abbess advised the Holy Father, at Rome, of the wonderful powers shown by her novice.

The Pope did not well know what to make of these new claims, and Philip coming in from a journey, one

day, he consulted him. Philip undertook to visit the nun, and ascertain her character. He threw himself on his

mule, all travelsoiled as he was, and hastened through the mud and mire to the distant convent. He told the

abbess the wishes of his Holiness, and begged her to summon the nun without delay. The nun was sent for,

and, as soon as she came into the apartment, Philip stretched out his leg all bespattered with mud, and desired

her to draw off his boots. The young nun, who had become the object of much attention and respect, drew

back with anger, and refused the office: Philip ran out of doors, mounted his mule, and returned instantly to

the Pope; "Give yourself no uneasiness, Holy Father, any longer: here is no miracle, for here is no humility."

We need not much mind what people please to say, but what they must say; what their natures say, though

their busy, artful, Yankee understandings try to hold back, and choke that word, and to articulate something

different. If we will sit quietly, what they ought to say is said, with their will, or against their will. We do

not care for you, let us pretend what we will: we are always looking through you to the dim dictator

behind you. Whilst your habit or whim chatters, we civilly and impatiently wait until that wise superior shall

speak again. Even children are not deceived by the false reasons which their parents give in answer to their

questions, whether touching natural facts, or religion, or persons. When the parent, instead of thinking how it

really is, puts them off with a traditional or a hypocritical answer, the children perceive that it is traditional or

hypocritical. To a sound constitution the defect of another is at once manifest: and the marks of it are only

concealed from us by our own dislocation. An anatomical observer remarks, that the sympathies of the chest,

abdomen, and pelvis, tell at last on the face, and on all its features. Not only does our beauty waste, but it

leaves word how it went to waste. Physiognomy and phrenology are not new sciences, but declarations of the

soul that it is aware of certain new sources of information. And now sciences of broader scope are starting up

behind these. And so for ourselves, it is really of little importance what blunders in statement we make, so

only we make no wilful departures from the truth. How a man's truth comes to mind, long after we have

forgotten all his words! How it comes to us in silent hours, that truth is our only armor in all passages of life

and death! Wit is cheap, and anger is cheap; but if you cannot argue or explain yourself to the other party,

cleave to the truth against me, against thee, and you gain a station from which you cannot be dislodged. The

other party will forget the words that you spoke, but the part you took continues to plead for you.

Why should I hasten to solve every riddle which life offers me? I am well assured that the Questioner, who

brings me so many problems, will bring the answers also in due time. Very rich, very potent, very cheerful

Giver that he is, he shall have it all his own way, for me. Why should I give up my thought, because I cannot

answer an objection to it? Consider only, whether it remains in my life the same it was. That only which we

have within, can we see without. If we meet no gods, it is because we harbor none. If there is grandeur in you,

you will find grandeur in porters and sweeps. He only is rightly immortal, to whom all things are immortal. I

have read somewhere, that none is accomplished, so long as any are incomplete; that the happiness of one

The Buddhists say, "No seed will die:" every seed will grow. Where is the service which can escape its

remuneration? What is vulgar, and the essence of all vulgarity, but the avarice of reward? 'Tis the difference

of artisan and artist, of talent and genius, of sinner and saint. The man whose eyes are nailed not on the nature

of his act, but on the wages, whether it be money, or office, or fame, is almost equally low. He is great,

whose eyes are opened to see that the reward of actions cannot be escaped, because he is transformed into his

action, and taketh its nature, which bears its own fruit, like every other tree. A great man cannot be hindered

of the effect of his act, because it is immediate. The genius of life is friendly to the noble, and in the dark

brings them friends from far. Fear God, and where you go, men shall think they walk in hallowed cathedrals.

And so I look on those sentiments which make the glory of the human being, love, humility, faith, as being

also the intimacy of Divinity in the atoms; and, that, as soon as the man is right, assurances and previsions

emanate from the interior of his body and his mind; as, when flowers reach their ripeness, incense exhales

from them, and, as a beautiful atmosphere is generated from the planet by the averaged emanations from all

Thus man is made equal to every event. He can face danger for the right. A poor, tender, painful body, he can

run into flame or bullets or pestilence, with duty for his guide. He feels the insurance of a just employment. I

am not afraid of accident, as long as I am in my place. It is strange that superior persons should not feel that

they have some better resistance against cholera, than avoiding green peas and salads. Life is hardly

respectable, is it? if it has no generous, guaranteeing task, no duties or affections, that constitute a

necessity of existing. Every man's task is his lifepreserver. The conviction that his work is dear to God and

cannot be spared, defends him. The lightningrod that disarms the cloud of its threat is his body in its duty. A

high aim reacts on the means, on the days, on the organs of the body. A high aim is curative, as well as

arnica. "Napoleon," says Goethe, "visited those sick of the plague, in order to prove that the man who could

vanquish fear, could vanquish the plague also; and he was right. 'Tis incredible what force the will has in

such cases: it penetrates the body, and puts it in a state of activity, which repels all hurtful influences; whilst

It is related of William of Orange, that, whilst he was besieging a town on the continent, a gentleman sent to

him on public business came to his camp, and, learning that the King was before the walls, he ventured to go

where he was. He found him directing the operation of his gunners, and, having explained his errand, and

received his answer, the King said, "Do you not know, sir, that every moment you spend here is at the risk of

your life?" "I run no more risk," replied the gentleman, "than your Majesty." "Yes," said the King, "but my

duty brings me here, and yours does not." In a few minutes, a cannonball fell on the spot, and the gentleman

Thus can the faithful student reverse all the warnings of his early instinct, under the guidance of a deeper

instinct. He learns to welcome misfortune, learns that adversity is the prosperity of the great. He learns the

greatness of humility. He shall work in the dark, work against failure, pain, and illwill. If he is insulted, he

The moral equalizes all; enriches, empowers all. It is the coin which buys all, and which all find in their

pocket. Under the whip of the driver, the slave shall feel his equality with saints and heroes. In the greatest

destitution and calamity, it surprises man with a feeling of elasticity which makes nothing of loss.

I recall some traits of a remarkable person whose life and discourse betrayed many inspirations of this

sentiment. Benedict was always great in the present time. He had hoarded nothing from the past, neither in

his cabinets, neither in his memory. He had no designs on the future, neither for what he should do to men,

nor for what men should do for him. He said, `I am never beaten until I know that I am beaten. I meet

powerful brutal people to whom I have no skill to reply. They think they have defeated me. It is so published

in society, in the journals; I am defeated in this fashion, in all men's sight, perhaps on a dozen different lines.

My leger may show that I am in debt, cannot yet make my ends meet, and vanquish the enemy so. My race

may not be prospering: we are sick, ugly, obscure, unpopular. My children may be worsted. I seem to fail in

my friends and clients, too. That is to say, in all the encounters that have yet chanced, I have not been

weaponed for that particular occasion, and have been historically beaten; and yet, I know, all the time, that I

have never been beaten; have never yet fought, shall certainly fight, when my hour comes, and shall beat.' "A

man," says the Vishnu Sarma, "who having well compared his own strength or weakness with that of others,

`I spent,' he said, `ten months in the country. Thickstarred Orion was my only companion. Wherever a

squirrel or a bee can go with security, I can go. I ate whatever was set before me; I touched ivy and dogwood.

When I went abroad, I kept company with every man on the road, for I knew that my evil and my good did

not come from these, but from the Spirit, whose servant I was. For I could not stoop to be a circumstance, as

they did, who put their life into their fortune and their company. I would not degrade myself by casting about

in my memory for a thought, nor by waiting for one. If the thought come, I would give it entertainment. It

should, as it ought, go into my hands and feet; but if it come not spontaneously, it comes not rightly at all. If

it can spare me, I am sure I can spare it. It shall be the same with my friends. I will never woo the loveliest. I

will not ask any friendship or favor. When I come to my own, we shall both know it. Nothing will be to be

asked or to be granted.' Benedict went out to seek his friend, and met him on the way; but he expressed no

surprise at any coincidences. On the other hand, if he called at the door of his friend, and he was not at home,

He had the whim not to make an apology to the same individual whom he had wronged. For this, he said, was

a piece of personal vanity; but he would correct his conduct in that respect in which he had faulted, to the

Mira came to ask what she should do with the poor Genesee woman who had hired herself to work for her, at

a shilling a day, and, now sickening, was like to be bedridden on her hands. Should she keep her, or should

she dismiss her? But Benedict said, `Why ask? One thing will clear itself as the thing to be done, and not

another, when the hour comes. Is it a question, whether to put her into the street? Just as much whether to

thrust the little Jenny on your arm into the street. The milk and meal you give the beggar, will fatten Jenny.

Thrust the woman out, and you thrust your babe out of doors, whether it so seem to you or not.'

In the Shakers, so called, I find one piece of belief, in the doctrine which they faithfully hold, that encourages

them to open their doors to every wayfaring man who proposes to come among them; for, they say, the Spirit

will presently manifest to the man himself, and to the society, what manner of person he is, and whether he

belongs among them. They do not receive him, they do not reject him. And not in vain have they worn their

clay coat, and drudged in their fields, and shuffled in their Bruin dance, from year to year, if they have truly

Honor him whose life is perpetual victory; him, who, by sympathy with the invisible and real, finds support

in labor, instead of praise; who does not shine, and would rather not. With eyes open, he makes the choice of

virtue, which outrages the virtuous; of religion, which churches stop their discords to burn and exterminate;

Miracle comes to the miraculous, not to the arithmetician. Talent and success interest me but moderately. The

great class, they who affect our imagination, the men who could not make their hands meet around their

objects, the rapt, the lost, the fools of ideas, they suggest what they cannot execute. They speak to the

ages, and are heard from afar. The Spirit does not love cripples and malformations. If there ever was a good

And so in relation to that future hour, that spectre clothed with beauty at our curtain by night, at our table by

day, the apprehension, the assurance of a coming change. The race of mankind have always offered at

least this implied thanks for the gift of existence, namely, the terror of its being taken away; the insatiable

curiosity and appetite for its continuation. The whole revelation that is vouchsafed us, is, the gentle trust,

which, in our experience we find, will cover also with flowers the slopes of this chasm.

Of immortality, the soul, when well employed, is incurious. It is so well, that it is sure it will be well. It asks

no questions of the Supreme Power. The son of Antiochus asked his father, when he would join battle? "Dost

thou fear," replied the King, "that thou only in all the army wilt not hear the trumpet?" 'Tis a higher thing to

confide, that, if it is best we should live, we shall live, 'tis higher to have this conviction, than to have the

lease of indefinite centuries and millenniums and aeons. Higher than the question of our duration is the

question of our deserving. Immortality will come to such as are fit for it, and he who would be a great soul in

future, must be a great soul now. It is a doctrine too great to rest on any legend, that is, on any man's

experience but our own. It must be proved, if at all, from our own activity and designs, which imply an

What is called religion effeminates and demoralizes. Such as you are, the gods themselves could not help

you. Men are too often unfit to live, from their obvious inequality to their own necessities, or, they suffer

from politics, or bad neighbors, or from sickness, and they would gladly know that they were to be dismissed

from the duties of life. But the wise instinct asks, `How will death help them?' These are not dismissed when

they die. You shall not wish for death out of pusillanimity. The weight of the Universe is pressed down on the

shoulders of each moral agent to hold him to his task. The only path of escape known in all the worlds of God

is performance. You must do your work, before you shall be released. And as far as it is a question of fact

respecting the government of the Universe, Marcus Antoninus summed the whole in a word, "It is pleasant to

And so I think that the last lesson of life, the choral song which rises from all elements and all angels, is, a

voluntary obedience, a necessitated freedom. Man is made of the same atoms as the world is, he shares the

same impressions, predispositions, and destiny. When his mind is illuminated, when his heart is kind, he

throws himself joyfully into the sublime order, and does, with knowledge, what the stones do by structure.

The religion which is to guide and fulfil the present and coming ages, whatever else it be, must be

intellectual. The scientific mind must have a faith which is science. "There are two things," said Mahomet,

"which I abhor, the learned in his infidelities, and the fool in his devotions." Our times are impatient of both,

and specially of the last. Let us have nothing now which is not its own evidence. There is surely enough for

the heart and imagination in the religion itself. Let us not be pestered with assertions and halftruths, with

There will be a new church founded on moral science, at first cold and naked, a babe in a manger again, the

algebra and mathematics of ethical law, the church of men to come, without shawms, or psaltery, or sackbut;

but it will have heaven and earth for its beams and rafters; science for symbol and illustration; it will fast

enough gather beauty, music, picture, poetry. Was never stoicism so stern and exigent as this shall be. It shall

send man home to his central solitude, shame these social, supplicating manners, and make him know that

much of the time he must have himself to his friend. He shall expect no cooperation, he shall walk with no

companion. The nameless Thought, the nameless Power, the superpersonal Heart, he shall repose alone on

that. He needs only his own verdict. No good fame can help, no bad fame can hurt him. The Laws are his

consolers, the good Laws themselves are alive, they know if he have kept them, they animate him with the

leading of great duty, and an endless horizon. Honor and fortune exist to him who always recognizes the

Although this garrulity of advising is born with us, I confess that life is rather a subject of wonder, than of

didactics. So much fate, so much irresistible dictation from temperament and unknown inspiration enters into

it, that we doubt we can say anything out of our own experience whereby to help each other. All the

professions are timid and expectant agencies. The priest is glad if his prayers or his sermon meet the

condition of any soul; if of two, if of ten, 'tis a signal success. But he walked to the church without any

assurance that he knew the distemper, or could heal it. The physician prescribes hesitatingly out of his few

resources, the same tonic or sedative to this new and peculiar constitution, which he has applied with various

success to a hundred men before. If the patient mends, he is glad and surprised. The lawyer advises the client,

and tells his story to the jury, and leaves it with them, and is as gay and as much relieved as the client, if it

turns out that he has a verdict. The judge weighs the arguments, and puts a brave face on the matter, and,

since there must be a decision, decides as he can, and hopes he has done justice, and given satisfaction to the

community; but is only an advocate after all. And so is all life a timid and unskilful spectator. We do what we

must, and call it by the best names. We like very well to be praised for our action, but our conscience says,

"Not unto us." 'Tis little we can do for each other. We accompany the youth with sympathy, and manifold old

sayings of the wise, to the gate of the arena, but 'tis certain that not by strength of ours, or of the old sayings,

but only on strength of his own, unknown to us or to any, he must stand or fall. That by which a man

conquers in any passage, is a profound secret to every other being in the world, and it is only as he turns his

back on us and on all men, and draws on this most private wisdom, that any good can come to him. What we

have, therefore, to say of life, is rather description, or, if you please, celebration, than available rules.

Yet vigor is contagious, and whatever makes us either think or feel strongly, adds to our power, and enlarges

our field of action. We have a debt to every great heart, to every fine genius; to those who have put life and

fortune on the cast of an act of justice; to those who have added new sciences; to those who have refined life

by elegant pursuits. 'Tis the fine souls who serve us, and not what is called fine society. Fine society is only a

selfprotection against the vulgarities of the street and the tavern. Fine society, in the common acceptation,

has neither ideas nor aims. It renders the service of a perfumery, or a laundry, not of a farm or factory. 'Tis an

exclusion and a precinct. Sidney Smith said, "A few yards in London cement or dissolve friendship." It is an

unprincipled decorum; an affair of clean linen and coaches, of gloves, cards, and elegance in trifles. There are

other measures of selfrespect for a man, than the number of clean shirts he puts on every day. Society

wishes to be amused. I do not wish to be amused. I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the

days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant. Now we reckon them as bankdays, by some debt which is to be

paid us, or which we are to pay, or some pleasure we are to taste. Is all we have to do to draw the breath in,

and blow it out again? Porphyry's definition is better; "Life is that which holds matter together." The babe in

arms is a channel through which the energies we call fate, love, and reason, visibly stream. See what a

cometary train of auxiliaries man carries with him, of animals, plants, stones, gases, and imponderable

elements. Let us infer his ends from this pomp of means. Mirabeau said, "Why should we feel ourselves to be

men, unless it be to succeed in everything, everywhere. You must say of nothing, That is beneath me, nor feel

that anything can be out of your power. Nothing is impossible to the man who can will. Is that necessary?

That shall be: this is the only law of success." Whoever said it, this is in the right key. But this is not the

tone and genius of the men in the street. In the streets, we grow cynical. The men we meet are coarse and

torpid. The finest wits have their sediment. What quantities of fribbles, paupers, invalids, epicures,

antiquaries, politicians, thieves, and triflers of both sexes, might be advantageously spared! Mankind divides

itself into two classes, benefactors and malefactors. The second class is vast, the first a handful. A person

seldom falls sick, but the bystanders are animated with a faint hope that he will die: quantities of poor

lives; of distressing invalids; of cases for a gun. Franklin said, "Mankind are very superficial and dastardly:

they begin upon a thing, but, meeting with a difficulty, they fly from it discouraged: but they have capacities,

if they would employ them." Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the

minority, surely. 'Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by

Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands

and influence, and need not to be flattered but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to

tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them. The worst of charity is, that the lives

you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving. Masses! the calamity is the masses. I do not wish any

mass at all, but honest men only, lovely, sweet, accomplished women only, and no shovelhanded,

narrowbrained, gindrinking million stockingers or lazzaroni at all. If government knew how, I should like

to see it check, not multiply the population. When it reaches its true law of action, every man that is born will

be hailed as essential. Away with this hurrah of masses, and let us have the considerate vote of single men

spoken on their honor and their conscience. In old Egypt, it was established law, that the vote of a prophet be

reckoned equal to a hundred hands. I think it was much underestimated. "Clay and clay differ in dignity," as

we discover by our preferences every day. What a vicious practice is this of our politicians at Washington

pairing off! as if one man who votes wrong, going away, could excuse you, who mean to vote right, for going

away; or, as if your presence did not tell in more ways than in your vote. Suppose the three hundred heroes at

Thermopylae had paired off with three hundred Persians: would it have been all the same to Greece, and to

history? Napoleon was called by his men Cent Mille. Add honesty to him, and they might have called him

Nature makes fifty poor melons for one that is good, and shakes down a tree full of gnarled, wormy, unripe

crabs, before you can find a dozen dessert apples; and she scatters nations of naked Indians, and nations of

clothed Christians, with two or three good heads among them. Nature works very hard, and only hits the

white once in a million throws. In mankind, she is contented if she yields one master in a century. The more

difficulty there is in creating good men, the more they are used when they come. I once counted in a little

neighborhood, and found that every ablebodied man had, say from twelve to fifteen persons dependent on

him for material aid, to whom he is to be for spoon and jug, for backer and sponsor, for nursery and

hospital, and many functions beside: nor does it seem to make much difference whether he is bachelor or

patriarch; if he do not violently decline the duties that fall to him, this amount of helpfulness will in one way

or another be brought home to him. This is the tax which his abilities pay. The good men are employed for

private centres of use, and for larger influence. All revelations, whether of mechanical or intellectual or moral

science, are made not to communities, but to single persons. All the marked events of our day, all the cities,

all the colonizations, may be traced back to their origin in a private brain. All the feats which make our

Meantime, this spawning productivity is not noxious or needless. You would say, this rabble of nations might

be spared. But no, they are all counted and depended on. Fate keeps everything alive so long as the smallest

thread of public necessity holds it on to the tree. The coxcomb and bully and thief class are allowed as

proletaries, every one of their vices being the excess or acridity of a virtue. The mass are animal, in pupilage,

and near chimpanzee. But the units, whereof this mass is composed are neuters, every one of which may be

grown to a queenbee. The rule is, we are used as brute atoms, until we think: then, we use all the rest.

Nature turns all malfaisance to good. Nature provided for real needs. No sane man at last distrusts himself.

His existence is a perfect answer to all sentimental cavils. If he is, he is wanted, and has the precise properties

that are required. That we are here, is proof we ought to be here. We have as good right, and the same sort of

To say then, the majority are wicked, means no malice, no bad heart in the observer, but, simply, that the

majority are unripe, and have not yet come to themselves, do not yet know their opinion. That, if they knew

it, is an oracle for them and for all. But in the passing moment, the quadruped interest is very prone to

prevail: and this beastforce, whilst it makes the discipline of the world, the school of heroes, the glory of

martyrs, has provoked, in every age, the satire of wits, and the tears of good men. They find the journals, the

clubs, the governments, the churches, to be in the interest, and the pay of the devil. And wise men have met

this obstruction in their times, like Socrates, with his famous irony; like Bacon, with lifelong dissimulation;

like Erasmus, with his book "The Praise of Folly;" like Rabelais, with his satire rending the nations. "They

were the fools who cried against me, you will say," wrote the Chevalier de Boufflers to Grimm; "aye, but the

fools have the advantage of numbers, and 'tis that which decides. 'Tis of no use for us to make war with them;

we shall not weaken them; they will always be the masters. There will not be a practice or an usage

In front of these sinister facts, the first lesson of history is the good of evil. Good is a good doctor, but Bad is

sometimes a better. 'Tis the oppressions of William the Norman, savage forestlaws, and crushing despotism,

that made possible the inspirations of Magna Charta under John. Edward I. wanted money, armies, castles,

and as much as he could get. It was necessary to call the people together by shorter, swifter ways, and the

House of Commons arose. To obtain subsidies, he paid in privileges. In the twentyfourth year of his reign,

he decreed, "that no tax should be levied without consent of Lords and Commons;" which is the basis of

the English Constitution. Plutarch affirms that the cruel wars which followed the march of Alexander,

introduced the civility, language, and arts of Greece into the savage East; introduced marriage; built seventy

cities; and united hostile nations under one government. The barbarians who broke up the Roman empire did

not arrive a day too soon. Schiller says, the Thirty Years' War made Germany a nation. Rough, selfish

despots serve men immensely, as Henry VIII. in the contest with the Pope; as the infatuations no less than the

wisdom of Cromwell; as the ferocity of the Russian czars; as the fanaticism of the French regicides of 1789.

The frost which kills the harvest of a year, saves the harvests of a century, by destroying the weevil or the

locust. Wars, fires, plagues, break up immovable routine, clear the ground of rotten races and dens of

distemper, and open a fair field to new men. There is a tendency in things to right themselves, and the war or

revolution or bankruptcy that shatters a rotten system, allows things to take a new and natural order. The

sharpest evils are bent into that periodicity which makes the errors of planets, and the fevers and distempers

of men, selflimiting. Nature is upheld by antagonism. Passions, resistance, danger, are educators. We

acquire the strength we have overcome. Without war, no soldier; without enemies, no hero. The sun were

insipid, if the universe were not opaque. And the glory of character is in affronting the horrors of depravity,

to draw thence new nobilities of power: as Art lives and thrills in new use and combining of contrasts, and

mining into the dark evermore for blacker pits of night. What would painter do, or what would poet or saint,

but for crucifixions and hells? And evermore in the world is this marvellous balance of beauty and disgust,

magnificence and rats. Not Antoninus, but a poor washerwoman said, "The more trouble, the more lion;

I do not think very respectfully of the designs or the doings of the people who went to California, in 1849. It

was a rush and a scramble of needy adventurers, and, in the western country, a general jaildelivery of all the

rowdies of the rivers. Some of them went with honest purposes, some with very bad ones, and all of them

with the very commonplace wish to find a short way to wealth. But Nature watches over all, and turns this

malfaisance to good. California gets peopled and subdued, civilized in this immoral way, and, on this

fiction, a real prosperity is rooted and grown. 'Tis a decoyduck; 'tis tubs thrown to amuse the whale: but real

ducks, and whales that yield oil, are caught. And, out of Sabine rapes, and out of robbers' forays, real Romes

In America, the geography is sublime, but the men are not: the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one

is sometimes ashamed of. The agencies by which events so grand as the opening of California, of Texas, of

Oregon, and the junction of the two oceans, are effected, are paltry, coarse selfishness, fraud, and

conspiracy: and most of the great results of history are brought about by discreditable means.

The benefaction derived in Illinois, and the great West, from railroads is inestimable, and vastly exceeding

any intentional philanthropy on record. What is the benefit done by a good King Alfred, or by a Howard, or

Pestalozzi, or Elizabeth Fry, or Florence Nightingale, or any lover, less or larger, compared with the

involuntary blessing wrought on nations by the selfish capitalists who built the Illinois, Michigan, and the

network of the Mississippi valley roads, which have evoked not only all the wealth of the soil, but the energy

of millions of men. 'Tis a sentence of ancient wisdom, "that God hangs the greatest weights on the smallest

What happens thus to nations, befalls every day in private houses. When the friends of a gentleman brought

to his notice the follies of his sons, with many hints of their danger, he replied, that he knew so much

mischief when he was a boy, and had turned out on the whole so successfully, that he was not alarmed by the

dissipation of boys; 'twas dangerous water, but, he thought, they would soon touch bottom, and then swim to

the top. This is bold practice, and there are many failures to a good escape. Yet one would say, that a good

understanding would suffice as well as moral sensibility to keep one erect; the gratifications of the passions

are so quickly seen to be damaging, and, what men like least, seriously lowering them in social rank.

"Croyez moi, l'erreur aussi a son merite," said Voltaire. We see those who surmount, by dint of some

egotism or infatuation, obstacles from which the prudent recoil. The right partisan is a heady narrow man,

who, because he does not see many things, sees some one thing with heat and exaggeration, and, if he falls

among other narrow men, or on objects which have a brief importance, as some trade or politics of the hour,

he prefers it to the universe, and seems inspired, and a godsend to those who wish to magnify the matter, and

carry a point. Better, certainly, if we could secure the strength and fire which rude, passionate men bring into

society, quite clear of their vices. But who dares draw out the linchpin from the wagonwheel? 'Tis so

manifest, that there is no moral deformity, but is a good passion out of place; that there is no man who is not

indebted to his foibles; that, according to the old oracle, "the Furies are the bonds of men;" that the poisons

are our principal medicines, which kill the disease, and save the life. In the high prophetic phrase, He causes

the wrath of man to praise him, and twists and wrenches our evil to our good. Shakspeare wrote,

and great educators and lawgivers, and especially generals, and leaders of colonies, mainly rely on this stuff,

and esteem men of irregular and passional force the best timber. A man of sense and energy, the late head of

the Farm School in Boston harbor, said to me, "I want none of your good boys, give me the bad ones."

And this is the reason, I suppose, why, as soon as the children are good, the mothers are scared, and think

they are going to die. Mirabeau said, "There are none but men of strong passions capable of going to

greatness; none but such capable of meriting the public gratitude." Passion, though a bad regulator, is a

powerful spring. Any absorbing passion has the effect to deliver from the little coils and cares of every day:

'tis the heat which sets our human atoms spinning, overcomes the friction of crossing thresholds, and first

addresses in society, and gives us a good start and speed, easy to continue, when once it is begun. In short,

there is no man who is not at some time indebted to his vices, as no plant that is not fed from manures. We

only insist that the man meliorate, and that the plant grow upward, and convert the base into the better nature.

The wise workman will not regret the poverty or the solitude which brought out his working talents. The

youth is charmed with the fine air and accomplishments of the children of fortune. But all great men come

out of the middle classes. 'Tis better for the head; 'tis better for the heart. Marcus Antoninus says, that Fronto

told him, "that the socalled highborn are for the most part heartless;" whilst nothing is so indicative of

deepest culture as a tender consideration of the ignorant. Charles James Fox said of England, "The history of

this country proves, that we are not to expect from men in affluent circumstances the vigilance, energy, and

exertion without which the House of Commons would lose its greatest force and weight. Human nature is

prone to indulgence, and the most meritorious public services have always been performed by persons in a

condition of life removed from opulence." And yet what we ask daily, is to be conventional. Supply, most

kind gods! this defect in my address, in my form, in my fortunes, which puts me a little out of the ring:

supply it, and let me be like the rest whom I admire, and on good terms with them. But the wise gods say, No,

we have better things for thee. By humiliations, by defeats, by loss of sympathy, by gulfs of disparity, learn a

wider truth and humanity than that of a fine gentleman. A FifthAvenue landlord, a WestEnd householder,

is not the highest style of man: and, though good hearts and sound minds are of no condition, yet he who is to

be wise for many, must not be protected. He must know the huts where poor men lie, and the chores which

poor men do. The firstclass minds, Aesop, Socrates, Cervantes, Shakspeare, Franklin, had the poor man's

feeling and mortification. A rich man was never insulted in his life: but this man must be stung. A rich man

was never in danger from cold, or hunger, or war, or ruffians, and you can see he was not, from the

moderation of his ideas. 'Tis a fatal disadvantage to be cockered, and to eat too much cake. What tests of

manhood could he stand? Take him out of his protections. He is a good bookkeeper; or he is a shrewd

adviser in the insurance office: perhaps he could pass a college examination, and take his degrees: perhaps he

can give wise counsel in a court of law. Now plant him down among farmers, firemen, Indians, and

emigrants. Set a dog on him: set a highwayman on him: try him with a course of mobs: send him to Kansas,

to Pike's Peak, to Oregon: and, if he have true faculty, this may be the element he wants, and he will come out

of it with broader wisdom and manly power. Aesop, Saadi, Cervantes, Regnard, have been taken by corsairs,

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss. As we go gladly to

Faneuil Hall, to be played upon by the stormy winds and strong fingers of enraged patriotism, so is a fanatical

persecution, civil war, national bankruptcy, or revolution, more rich in the central tones than languid years of

prosperity. What had been, ever since our memory, solid continent, yawns apart, and discloses its

composition and genesis. We learn geology the morning after the earthquake, on ghastly diagrams of cloven

In our life and culture, everything is worked up, and comes in use, passion, war, revolt, bankruptcy, and

not less, folly and blunders, insult, ennui, and bad company. Nature is a ragmerchant, who works up every

shred and ort and end into new creations; like a good chemist, whom I found, the other day, in his laboratory,

converting his old shirts into pure white sugar. Life is a boundless privilege, and when you pay for your

ticket, and get into the car, you have no guess what good company you shall find there. You buy much that is

not rendered in the bill. Men achieve a certain greatness unawares, when working to another aim.

If now in this connection of discourse, we should venture on laying down the first obvious rules of life, I will

not here repeat the first rule of economy, already propounded once and again, that every man shall maintain

himself, but I will say, get health. No labor, pains, temperance, poverty, nor exercise, that can gain it,

must be grudged. For sickness is a cannibal which eats up all the life and youth it can lay hold of, and absorbs

its own sons and daughters. I figure it as a pale, wailing, distracted phantom, absolutely selfish, heedless of

what is good and great, attentive to its sensations, losing its soul, and afflicting other souls with meanness and

mopings, and with ministration to its voracity of trifles. Dr. Johnson said severely, "Every man is a rascal as

soon as he is sick." Drop the cant, and treat it sanely. In dealing with the drunken, we do not affect to be

drunk. We must treat the sick with the same firmness, giving them, of course, every aid, but withholding

ourselves. I once asked a clergyman in a retired town, who were his companions? what men of ability he

saw? he replied, that he spent his time with the sick and the dying. I said, he seemed to me to need quite other

company, and all the more that he had this: for if people were sick and dying to any purpose, we would leave

all and go to them, but, as far as I had observed, they were as frivolous as the rest, and sometimes much more

frivolous. Let us engage our companions not to spare us. I knew a wise woman who said to her friends,

"When I am old, rule me." And the best part of health is fine disposition. It is more essential than talent, even

in the works of talent. Nothing will supply the want of sunshine to peaches, and, to make knowledge

valuable, you must have the cheerfulness of wisdom. Whenever you are sincerely pleased, you are nourished.

The joy of the spirit indicates its strength. All healthy things are sweettempered. Genius works in sport, and

goodness smiles to the last; and, for the reason, that whoever sees the law which distributes things, does not

despond, but is animated to great desires and endeavors. He who desponds betrays that he has not seen it.

'Tis a Dutch proverb, that "paint costs nothing," such are its preserving qualities in damp climates. Well,

sunshine costs less, yet is finer pigment. And so of cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is spent, the

more of it remains. The latent heat of an ounce of wood or stone is inexhaustible. You may rub the same chip

of pine to the point of kindling, a hundred times; and the power of happiness of any soul is not to be

computed or drained. It is observed that a depression of spirits develops the germs of a plague in individuals

It is an old commendation of right behavior, "Aliis laetus, sapiens sibi," which our English proverb

translates, "Be merry and wise." I know how easy it is to men of the world to look grave and sneer at your

sanguine youth, and its glittering dreams. But I find the gayest castles in the air that were ever piled, far better

for comfort and for use, than the dungeons in the air that are daily dug and caverned out by grumbling,

discontented people. I know those miserable fellows, and I hate them, who see a black star always riding

through the light and colored clouds in the sky overhead: waves of light pass over and hide it for a moment,

but the black star keeps fast in the zenith. But power dwells with cheerfulness; hope puts us in a working

mood, whilst despair is no muse, and untunes the active powers. A man should make life and Nature happier

to us, or he had better never been born. When the political economist reckons up the unproductive classes, he

should put at the head this class of pitiers of themselves, cravers of sympathy, bewailing imaginary disasters.

There are three wants which never can be satisfied: that of the rich, who wants something more; that of the

sick, who wants something different; and that of the traveller, who says, `Anywhere but here.' The Turkish

cadi said to Layard, "After the fashion of thy people, thou hast wandered from one place to another, until thou

art happy and content in none." My countrymen are not less infatuated with the rococo toy of Italy. All

America seems on the point of embarking for Europe. But we shall not always traverse seas and lands with

light purposes, and for pleasure, as we say. One day we shall cast out the passion for Europe, by the passion

for America. Culture will give gravity and domestic rest to those who now travel only as not knowing how

else to spend money. Already, who provoke pity like that excellent family party just arriving in their

wellappointed carriage, as far from home and any honest end as ever? Each nation has asked successively,

`What are they here for?' until at last the party are shamefaced, and anticipate the question at the gates of each

Genial manners are good, and power of accommodation to any circumstance, but the high prize of life, the

crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and

happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statutes, or songs. I doubt not this

was the meaning of Socrates, when he pronounced artists the only truly wise, as being actually, not

In childhood, we fancied ourselves walled in by the horizon, as by a glass bell, and doubted not, by distant

travel, we should reach the baths of the descending sun and stars. On experiment, the horizon flies before us,

and leaves us on an endless common, sheltered by no glass bell. Yet 'tis strange how tenaciously we cling to

that bellastronomy, of a protecting domestic horizon. I find the same illusion in the search after happiness,

which I observe, every summer, recommenced in this neighborhood, soon after the pairing of the birds. The

young people do not like the town, do not like the seashore, they will go inland; find a dear cottage deep in

the mountains, secret as their hearts. They set forth on their travels in search of a home: they reach Berkshire;

they reach Vermont; they look at the farms; good farms, high mountainsides: but where is the seclusion?

The farm is near this; 'tis near that; they have got far from Boston, but 'tis near Albany, or near Burlington, or

near Montreal. They explore a farm, but the house is small, old, thin; discontented people lived there, and are

gone: there's too much sky, too much outdoors; too public. The youth aches for solitude. When he comes

to the house, he passes through the house. That does not make the deep recess he sought. `Ah! now, I

perceive,' he says, `it must be deep with persons; friends only can give depth.' Yes, but there is a great dearth,

this year, of friends; hard to find, and hard to have when found: they are just going away: they too are in the

whirl of the flitting world, and have engagements and necessities. They are just starting for Wisconsin; have

letters from Bremen: see you again, soon. Slow, slow to learn the lesson, that there is but one depth, but

one interior, and that is his purpose. When joy or calamity or genius shall show him it, then woods, then

farms, then city shopmen and cabdrivers, indifferently with prophet or friend, will mirror back to him its

The uses of travel are occasional, and short; but the best fruit it finds, when it finds it, is conversation; and

this is a main function of life. What a difference in the hospitality of minds! Inestimable is he to whom we

can say what we cannot say to ourselves. Others are involuntarily hurtful to us, and bereave us of the power

of thought, impound and imprison us. As, when there is sympathy, there needs but one wise man in a

company, and all are wise, so, a blockhead makes a blockhead of his companion. Wonderful power to

benumb possesses this brother. When he comes into the office or public room, the society dissolves; one after

another slips out, and the apartment is at his disposal. What is incurable but a frivolous habit? A fly is as

untamable as a hyena. Yet folly in the sense of fun, fooling, or dawdling can easily be borne; as Talleyrand

said, "I find nonsense singularly refreshing;" but a virulent, aggressive fool taints the reason of a household. I

have seen a whole family of quiet, sensible people unhinged and beside themselves, victims of such a rogue.

For the steady wrongheadedness of one perverse person irritates the best: since we must withstand absurdity.

But resistance only exasperates the acrid fool, who believes that Nature and gravitation are quite wrong, and

he only is right. Hence all the dozen inmates are soon perverted, with whatever virtues and industries they

have, into contradictors, accusers, explainers, and repairers of this one malefactor; like a boat about to be

overset, or a carriage run away with, not only the foolish pilot or driver, but everybody on board is forced

to assume strange and ridiculous attitudes, to balance the vehicle and prevent the upsetting. For remedy,

whilst the case is yet mild, I recommend phlegm and truth: let all the truth that is spoken or done be at the

zero of indifferency, or truth itself will be folly. But, when the case is seated and malignant, the only safety is

in amputation; as seamen say, you shall cut and run. How to live with unfit companions? for, with such,

life is for the most part spent: and experience teaches little better than our earliest instinct of selfdefence,

namely, not to engage, not to mix yourself in any manner with them; but let their madness spend itself

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are

practising every day while they live. Our habit of thought, take men as they rise, is not satisfying; in

the common experience, I fear, it is poor and squalid. The success which will content them, is, a bargain, a

lucrative employment, an advantage gained over a competitor, a marriage, a patrimony, a legacy, and the like.

With these objects, their conversation deals with surfaces: politics, trade, personal defects, exaggerated bad

news, and the rain. This is forlorn, and they feel sore and sensitive. Now, if one comes who can illuminate

this dark house with thoughts, show them their native riches, what gifts they have, how indispensable each is,

what magical powers over nature and men; what access to poetry, religion, and the powers which constitute

character; he wakes in them the feeling of worth, his suggestions require new ways of living, new books, new

men, new arts and sciences, then we come out of our eggshell existence into the great dome, and see the

zenith over and the nadir under us. Instead of the tanks and buckets of knowledge to which we are daily

confined, we come down to the shore of the sea, and dip our hands in its miraculous waves. 'Tis wonderful

the effect on the company. They are not the men they were. They have all been to California, and all have

come back millionnaires. There is no book and no pleasure in life comparable to it. Ask what is best in our

experience, and we shall say, a few pieces of plaindealing with wise people. Our conversation once and

again has apprised us that we belong to better circles than we have yet beheld; that a mental power invites us,

whose generalizations are more worth for joy and for effect than anything that is now called philosophy or

literature. In excited conversation, we have glimpses of the Universe, hints of power native to the soul,

fardarting lights and shadows of an Andes landscape, such as we can hardly attain in lone meditation. Here

are oracles sometimes profusely given, to which the memory goes back in barren hours.

Add the consent of will and temperament, and there exists the covenant of friendship. Our chief want in life,

is, somebody who shall make us do what we can. This is the service of a friend. With him we are easily great.

There is a sublime attraction in him to whatever virtue is in us. How he flings wide the doors of existence!

What questions we ask of him! what an understanding we have! how few words are needed! It is the only real

But few writers have said anything better to this point than Hafiz, who indicates this relation as the test of

mental health: "Thou learnest no secret until thou knowest friendship, since to the unsound no heavenly

knowledge enters." Neither is life long enough for friendship. That is a serious and majestic affair, like a

royal presence, or a religion, and not a postilion's dinner to be eaten on the run. There is a pudency about

friendship, as about love, and though fine souls never lose sight of it, yet they do not name it. With the first

class of men our friendship or good understanding goes quite behind all accidents of estrangement, of

condition, of reputation. And yet we do not provide for the greatest good of life. We take care of our health;

we lay up money; we make our roof tight, and our clothing sufficient; but who provides wisely that he shall

not be wanting in the best property of all, friends? We know that all our training is to fit us for this, and

we do not take the step towards it. How long shall we sit and wait for these benefactors?

It makes no difference, in looking back five years, how you have been dieted or dressed; whether you have

been lodged on the first floor or the attic; whether you have had gardens and baths, good cattle and horses,

have been carried in a neat equipage, or in a ridiculous truck: these things are forgotten so quickly, and leave

no effect. But it counts much whether we have had good companions, in that time; almost as much as

what we have been doing. And see the overpowering importance of neighborhood in all association. As it is

marriage, fit or unfit, that makes our home, so it is who lives near us of equal social degree, a few people

at convenient distance, no matter how bad company, these, and these only, shall be your life's

companions: and all those who are native, congenial, and by many an oath of the heart, sacramented to you,

are gradually and totally lost. You cannot deal systematically with this fine element of society, and one may

take a good deal of pains to bring people together, and to organize clubs and debating societies, and yet no

result come of it. But it is certain that there is a great deal of good in us that does not know itself, and that a

habit of union and competition brings people up and keeps them up to their highest point; that life would be

twice or ten times life, if spent with wise and fruitful companions. The obvious inference is, a little useful

But we live with people on other platforms; we live with dependents, not only with the young whom we are

to teach all we know, and clothe with the advantages we have earned, but also with those who serve us

directly, and for money. Yet the old rules hold good. Let not the tie be mercenary, though the service is

measured by money. Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any. This point is

acquiring new importance in American social life. Our domestic service is usually a foolish fracas of

unreasonable demand on one side, and shirking on the other. A man of wit was asked, in the train, what was

his errand in the city? He replied, "I have been sent to procure an angel to do cooking." A lady complained to

me, that, of her two maidens, one was absentminded, and the other was absentbodied. And the evil

increases from the ignorance and hostility of every shipload of the immigrant population swarming into

houses and farms. Few people discern that it rests with the master or the mistress what service comes from

the man or the maid; that this identical hussy was a tutelar spirit in one house, and a haridan in the other. All

sensible people are selfish, and nature is tugging at every contract to make the terms of it fair. If you are

proposing only your own, the other party must deal a little hardly by you. If you deal generously, the other,

though selfish and unjust, will make an exception in your favor, and deal truly with you. When I asked an

ironmaster about the slag and cinder in railroad iron, "O," he said, "there's always good iron to be had: if

But why multiply these topics, and their illustrations, which are endless? Life brings to each his task, and,

whatever art you select, algebra, planting, architecture, poems, commerce, politics, all are attainable, even

to the miraculous triumphs, on the same terms, of selecting that for which you are apt; begin at the

beginning, proceed in order, step by step. 'Tis as easy to twist iron anchors, and braid cannons, as to braid

straw, to boil granite as to boil water, if you take all the steps in order. Wherever there is failure, there is

some giddiness, some superstition about luck, some step omitted, which Nature never pardons. The happy

conditions of life may be had on the same terms. Their attraction for you is the pledge that they are within

your reach. Our prayers are prophets. There must be fidelity, and there must be adherence. How respectable

the life that clings to its objects! Youthful aspirations are fine things, your theories and plans of life are fair

and commendable: but will you stick? Not one, I fear, in that Common full of people, or, in a thousand,

but one: and, when you tax them with treachery, and remind them of their high resolutions, they have

forgotten that they made a vow. The individuals are fugitive, and in the act of becoming something else, and

irresponsible. The race is great, the ideal fair, but the men whiffling and unsure. The hero is he who is

immovably centred. The main difference between people seems to be, that one man can come under

obligations on which you can rely, is obligable; and another is not. As he has not a law within him, there's

'Tis inevitable to name particulars of virtue, and of condition, and to exaggerate them. But all rests at last on

that integrity which dwarfs talent, and can spare it. Sanity consists in not being subdued by your means.

Fancy prices are paid for position, and for the culture of talent, but to the grand interests, superficial success

is of no account. The man, it is his attitude, not feats, but forces, not on set days and public

occasions, but, at all hours, and in repose alike as in energy, still formidable, and not to be disposed of. The

populace says, with Horne Tooke, "If you would be powerful, pretend to be powerful." I prefer to say, with

the old prophet, "Seekest thou great things? seek them not:" or, what was said of a Spanish prince, "The

more you took from him, the greater he looked." Plus on lui ote, plus il est grand.

The secret of culture is to learn, that a few great points steadily reappear, alike in the poverty of the obscurest

farm, and in the miscellany of metropolitan life, and that these few are alone to be regarded, the escape

from all false ties; courage to be what we are; and love of what is simple and beautiful; independence, and

cheerful relation, these are the essentials, these, and the wish to serve, to add somewhat to the

The spiral tendency of vegetation infects education also. Our books approach very slowly the things we most

wish to know. What a parade we make of our science, and how far off, and at arm's length, it is from its

objects! Our botany is all names, not powers: poets and romancers talk of herbs of grace and healing; but

what does the botanist know of the virtues of his weeds? The geologist lays bare the strata, and can tell them

all on his fingers: but does he know what effect passes into the man who builds his house in them? what

effect on the race that inhabits a granite shelf? what on the inhabitants of marl and of alluvium?

We should go to the ornithologist with a new feeling, if he could teach us what the social birds say, when

they sit in the autumn council, talking together in the trees. The want of sympathy makes his record a dull

dictionary. His result is a dead bird. The bird is not in its ounces and inches, but in its relations to Nature; and

the skin or skeleton you show me, is no more a heron, than a heap of ashes or a bottle of gases into which his

body has been reduced, is Dante or Washington. The naturalist is led from the road by the whole distance of

his fancied advance. The boy had juster views when he gazed at the shells on the beach, or the flowers in the

meadow, unable to call them by their names, than the man in the pride of his nomenclature. Astrology

interested us, for it tied man to the system. Instead of an isolated beggar, the farthest star felt him, and he felt

the star. However rash and however falsified by pretenders and traders in it,onsmustfurnish the hint was true

and divine, the soul's avowal of its large relations, and, that climate, century, remote natures, as well as near,

are part of its biography. Chemistry takes to pieces, but it does not construct. Alchemy which sought to

transmute one element into another, to prolong life, to arm with power, that was in the right direction. All

our science lacks a human side. The tenant is more than the house. Bugs and stamens and spores, on which

we lavish so many years, are not finalities, and man, when his powers unfold in order, will take Nature along

with him, and emit light into all her recesses. The human heart concerns us more than the poring into

microscopes, and is larger than can be measured by the pompous figures of the astronomer.

We are just so frivolous and skeptical. Men hold themselves cheap and vile: and yet a man is a fagot of

thunderbolts. All the elements pour through his system: he is the flood of the flood, and fire of the fire; he

feels the antipodes and the pole, as drops of his blood: they are the extension of his personality. His duties are

measured by that instrument he is; and a right and perfect man would be felt to the centre of the Copernican

system. 'Tis curious that we only believe as deep as we live. We do not think heroes can exert any more awful

power than that surfaceplay which amuses us. A deep man believes in miracles, waits for them, believes in

magic, believes that the orator will decompose his adversary; believes that the evil eye can wither, that the

heart's blessing can heal; that love can exalt talent; can overcome all odds. From a great heart secret

magnetisms flow incessantly to draw great events. But we prize very humble utilities, a prudent husband, a

good son, a voter, a citizen, and deprecate any romance of character; and perhaps reckon only his money

value, his intellect, his affection, as a sort of bill of exchange, easily convertible into fine chambers,

The motive of science was the extension of man, on all sides, into Nature, till his hands should touch the

stars, his eyes see through the earth, his ears understand the language of beast and bird, and the sense of the

wind; and, through his sympathy, heaven and earth should talk with him. But that is not our science. These

geologies, chemistries, astronomies, seem to make wise, but they leave us where they found us. The invention

is of use to the inventor, of questionable help to any other. The formulas of science are like the papers in your

pocketbook, of no value to any but the owner. Science in England, in America, is jealous of theory, hates

the name of love and moral purpose. There's a revenge for this inhumanity. What manner of man does

science make? The boy is not attracted. He says, I do not wish to be such a kind of man as my professor is.

The collector has dried all the plants in his herbal, but he has lost weight and humor. He has got all snakes

and lizards in his phials, but science has done for him also, and has put the man into a bottle. Our reliance on

the physician is a kind of despair of ourselves. The clergy have bronchitis, which does not seem a certificate

of spiritual health. Macready thought it came of the falsetto of their voicing. An Indian prince, Tisso, one day

riding in the forest, saw a herd of elk sporting. "See how happy," he said, "these browsing elks are! Why

should not priests, lodged and fed comfortably in the temples, also amuse themselves?" Returning home, he

imparted this reflection to the king. The king, on the next day, conferred the sovereignty on him, saying,

"Prince, administer this empire for seven days: at the termination of that period, I shall put thee to death." At

the end of the seventh day, the king inquired, "From what cause hast thou become so emaciated?" He

answered, "From the horror of death." The monarch rejoined: "Live, my child, and be wise. Thou hast ceased

to taonsmustfurnishke recreation, saying to thyself, in seven days I shall be put to death. These priests in the

temple incessantly meditate on death; how can they enter into healthful diversions?" But the men of science

or the doctors or the clergy are not victims of their pursuits, more than others. The miller, the lawyer, and the

merchant, dedicate themselves to their own details, and do not come out men of more force. Have they

divination, grand aims, hospitality of soul, and the equality to any event, which we demand in man, or only

No object really interests us but man, and in man only his superiorities; and, though we are aware of a perfect

law in Nature, it has fascination for us only through its relation to him, or, as it is rooted in the mind. At the

birth of Winckelmann, more than a hundred years ago, side by side with this arid, departmental, post

mortem science, rose an enthusiasm in the study of Beauty; and perhaps some sparks from it may yet light a

conflagration in the other. Knowledge of men, knowledge of manners, the power of form, and our sensibility

to personal influence, never go out of fashion. These are facts of a science which we study without book,

So inveterate is our habit of criticism, that much of our knowledge in this direction belongs to the chapter of

pathology. The crowd in the street oftener furnishes degradations than angels or redeemers: but they all prove

the transparency. Every spirit makes its house; and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the

inhabitant. But not less does Nature furnish us with every sign of grace and goodness. The delicious faces of

children, the beauty of schoolgirls, "the sweet seriousness of sixteen," the lofty air of wellborn, wellbred

boys, the passionate histories in the looks and manners of youth and early manhood, and the varied power in

all that wellknown company that escort uonsmustfurnishs through life, we know how these forms thrill,

Beauty is the form under which the intellect prefers to study the world. All privilege is that of beauty; for

there are many beauties; as, of general nature, of the human face and form, of manners, of brain, or method,

The ancients believed that a genius or demon took possession at birth of each mortal, to guide him; that these

genii were sometimes seen as a flame of fire partly immersed in the bodies which they governed; on an

evil man, resting on his head; in a good man, mixed with his substance. They thought the same genius, at the

death of its ward, entered a newborn child, and they pretended to guess the pilot, by the sailing of the ship.

We recognize obscurely the same fact, though we give it our own names. We say, that every man is entitled

to be valued by his best moment. We measure our friends so. We know, they have intervals of folly, whereof

we take no heed, but wait the reappearings of the genius, which are sure and beautiful. On the other side,

everybody knows people who appear beridden, and who, with all degrees of ability, never impress us with the

air of free agency. They know it too, and peep with their eyes to see if you detect their sad plight. We fancy,

could we pronounce the solving word, and disenchant them, the cloud would roll up, the little rider would be

discovered and unseated, and they would regain their freedom. The remedy seems never to be far off, since

the first step into thought lifts this mountain of necessity. Thought is the pent airball which can rive the

planet, and the beauty which certain objects have for him, is the friendly fire which expands the thought, and

The question of Beauty takes us out of surfaces, to thinking of the foundations of things. Goethe said, "The

beautiful is a manifestation ofonsmustfurnish secret laws of Nature, which, but for this appearance, had been

forever concealed from us." And the working of this deep instinct makes all the excitement much of it

superficial and absurd enough about works of art, which leads armies of vain travellers every year to Italy,

Greece, and Egypt. Every man values every acquisition he makes in the science of beauty, above his

possessions. The most useful man in the most useful world, so long as only commodity was served, would

remain unsatisfied. But, as fast as he sees beauty, life acquires a very high value.

I am warned by the ill fate of many philosophers not to attempt a definition of Beauty. I will rather enumerate

a few of its qualities. We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which

exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes. It is the most

enduring quality, and the most ascending quality. We say, love is blind, and the figure of Cupid is drawn with

a bandage round his eyes. Blind: yes, because he does not see what he does not like; but the

sharpestsighted hunter in the universe is Love, for finding what he seeks, and only that; and the

mythologists tell us, that Vulcan was painted lame, and Cupid blind, to call attention to the fact, that one was

all limbs, and the other, all eyes. In the true mythology, Love is an immortal child, and Beauty leads him as a

guide: nor can we express a deeper sense than when we say, Beauty is the pilot of the young soul.

Beyond their sensuous delight, the forms and colors of Nature have a new charm for us in our perception, that

not one ornament was added for ornament, but is a sign of some better health, or more excellent action.

Elegance of form in bird or beast, or in the human figure, marks some excellence of structure: or beauty is

only an invitation from what belongs to us. 'Tis a law of botany, that in plants, the same virtues follow the

same forms. It is onsmustfurnisha rule of largest application, true in a plant, true in a loaf of bread, that in the

construction of any fabric or organism, any real increase of fitness to its end, is an increase of beauty.

The lesson taught by the study of Greek and of Gothic art, of antique and of PreRaphaelite painting, was

worth all the research, namely, that all beauty must be organic; that outside embellishment is deformity. It

is the soundness of the bones that ultimates itself in a peachbloom complexion: health of constitution that

makes the sparkle and the power of the eye. 'Tis the adjustment of the size and of the joining of the sockets of

the skeleton, that gives grace of outline and the finer grace of movement. The cat and the deer cannot move

or sit inelegantly. The dancingmaster can never teach a badly built man to walk well. The tint of the flower

proceeds from its root, and the lustres of the seashell begin with its existence. Hence our taste in building

rejects paint, and all shifts, and shows the original grain of the wood: refuses pilasters and columns that

support nothing, and allows the real supporters of the house honestly to show themselves. Every necessary or

organic action pleases the beholder. A man leading a horse to water, a farmer sowing seed, the labors of

haymakers in the field, the carpenter building a ship, the smith at his forge, or, whatever useful labor, is

becoming to the wise eye. But if it is done to be seen, it is mean. How beautiful are ships on the sea! but ships

in the theatre, or ships kept for picturesque effect on Virginia Water, by George IV., and men hired to

stand in fitting costumes at a penny an hour! What a difference in effect between a battalion of troops

marching to action, and one of our independent companies on a holiday! In the midst of a military show, and

a festal procession gay with banners, I saw a boy seize an old tin pan that lay rusting under a wall, and

poising it on the top of a stick, he set onsmustfurnishit turning, and made it describe the most elegant

imaginable curves, and drew away attention from the decorated procession by this startling beauty.

Another text from the mythologists. The Greeks fabled that Venus was born of the foam of the sea. Nothing

interests us which is stark or bounded, but only what streams with life, what is in act or endeavor to reach

somewhat beyond. The pleasure a palace or a temple gives the eye, is, that an order and method has been

communicated to stones, so that they speak and geometrize, become tender or sublime with expression.

Beauty is the moment of transition, as if the form were just ready to flow into other forms. Any fixedness,

heaping, or concentration on one feature, a long nose, a sharp chin, a humpback, is the reverse of the

flowing, and therefore deformed. Beautiful as is the symmetry of any form, if the form can move, we seek a

more excellent symmetry. The interruption of equilibrium stimulates the eye to desire the restoration of

symmetry, and to watch the steps through which it is attained. This is the charm of running water, seawaves,

the flight of birds, and the locomotion of animals. This is the theory of dancing, to recover continually in

changes the lost equilibrium, not by abrupt and angular, but by gradual and curving movements. I have been

told by persons of experience in matters of taste, that the fashions follow a law of gradation, and are never

arbitrary. The new mode is always only a step onward in the same direction as the last mode; and a cultivated

eye is prepared for and predicts the new fashion. This fact suggests the reason of all mistakes and offence in

our own modes. It is necessary in music, when you strike a discord, to let down the ear by an intermediate

note or two to the accord again: and many a good experiment, born of good sense, and destined to succeed,

fails, only because it is offensively sudden. I suppose, the Parisian milliner who dresses the world from her

onsmustfurnishimperious boudoir will know how to reconcile the Bloomer costume to the eye of mankind,

and make it triumphant over Punch himself, by interposing the just gradations. I need not say, how wide the

same law ranges; and how much it can be hoped to effect. All that is a little harshly claimed by progressive

parties, may easily come to be conceded without question, if this rule be observed. Thus the circumstances

may be easily imagined, in which woman may speak, vote, argue causes, legislate, and drive a coach, and all

the most naturally in the world, if only it come by degrees. To this streaming or flowing belongs the beauty

that all circular movement has; as, the circulation of waters, the circulation of the blood, the periodical

motion of planets, the annual wave of vegetation, the action and reaction of Nature: and, if we follow it out,

this demand in our thought for an everonward action, is the argument for the immortality.

One more text from the mythologists is to the same purpose, Beauty rides on a lion. Beauty rests on

necessities. The line of beauty is the result of perfect economy. The cell of the bee is built at that angle which

gives the most strength with the least wax; the bone or the quill of the bird gives the most alar strength, with

the least weight. "It is the purgation of superfluities," said Michel Angelo. There is not a particle to spare in

natural structures. There is a compelling reason in the uses of the plant, for every novelty of color or form:

and our art saves material, by more skilful arrangement, and reaches beauty by taking every superfluous

ounce that can be spared from a wall, and keeping all its strength in the poetry of columns. In rhetoric, this art

of omission is a chief secret of power, and, in general, it is proof of high culture, to say the greatest matters in

Veracity first of all, and forever. Rien de beau que le vrai. In all design, art lies in making your object

pronsmustfurnishominent, but there is a prior art in choosing objects that are prominent. The fine arts have

Beauty is the quality which makes to endure. In a house that I know, I have noticed a block of spermaceti

lying about closets and mantelpieces, for twenty years together, simply because the tallowman gave it the

form of a rabbit; and, I suppose, it may continue to be lugged about unchanged for a century. Let an artist

scrawl a few lines or figures on the back of a letter, and that scrap of paper is rescued from danger, is put in

portfolio, is framed and glazed, and, in proportion to the beauty of the lines drawn, will be kept for centuries.

Burns writes a copy of verses, and sends them to a newspaper, and the human race take charge of them that

As the flute is heard farther than the cart, see how surely a beautiful form strikes the fancy of men, and is

copied and reproduced without end. How many copies are there of the Belvedere Apollo, the Venus, the

Psyche, the Warwick Vase, the Parthenon, and the Temple of Vesta? These are objects of tenderness to all. In

our cities, an ugly building is soon removed, and is never repeated, but any beautiful building is copied and

improved upon, so that all masons and carpenters work to repeat and preserve the agreeable forms, whilst the

The felicities of design in art, or in works of Nature, are shadows or forerunners of that beauty which reaches

its perfection in the human form. All men are its lovers. Wherever it goes, it creates joy and hilarity, and

everything is permitted to it. It reaches its height in woman. "To Eve," say the Mahometans, "God gave two

thirds of all beauty." A beautiful woman is a practical poet, taming her savage mate, planting tenderness,

hope, and eloquence, in all whom she approaches. Some favors of condition must go with it, since a certain

serenity is essential, onsmustfurnishbut we love its reproofs and superiorities. Nature wishes that woman

should attract man, yet she often cunningly moulds into her face a little sarcasm, which seems to say, `Yes, I

am willing to attract, but to attract a little better kind of a man than any I yet behold.' French memoires of the

fifteenth century celebrate the name of Pauline de Viguiere, a virtuous and accomplished maiden, who so

fired the enthusiasm of her contemporaries, by her enchanting form, that the citizens of her native city of

Toulouse obtained the aid of the civil authorities to compel her to appear publicly on the balcony at least

twice a week, and, as often as she showed herself, the crowd was dangerous to life. Not less, in England, in

the last century, was the fame of the Gunnings, of whom, Elizabeth married the Duke of Hamilton; and

Maria, the Earl of Coventry. Walpole says, "the concourse was so great, when the Duchess of Hamilton was

presented at court, on Friday, that even the noble crowd in the drawingroom clambered on chairs and tables

to look at her. There are mobs at their doors to see them get into their chairs, and people go early to get places

at the theatres, when it is known they will be there." "Such crowds," he adds, elsewhere, "flock to see the

Duchess of Hamilton, that seven hundred people sat up all night, in and about an inn, in Yorkshire, to see her

But why need we console ourselves with the fames of Helen of Argos, or Corinna, or Pauline of Toulouse, or

the Duchess of Hamilton? We all know this magic very well, or can divine it. It does not hurt weak eyes to

look into beautiful eyes never so long. Women stand related to beautiful Nature around us, and the enamored

youth mixes their form with moon and stars, with woods and waters, and the pomp of summer. They heal us

of awkwardness by their words and looks. We observe their intellectual influence on the most serious student.

They refine and consmustfurnishlear his mind; teach him to put a pleasing method into what is dry and

difficult. We talk to them, and wish to be listened to; we fear to fatigue them, and acquire a facility of

That Beauty is the normal state, is shown by the perpetual effort of Nature to attain it. Mirabeau had an ugly

face on a handsome ground; and we see faces every day which have a good type, but have been marred in the

casting: a proof that we are all entitled to beauty, should have been beautiful, if our ancestors had kept the

laws, as every lily and every rose is well. But our bodies do not fit us, but caricature and satirize us. Thus,

short legs, which constrain us to short, mincing steps, are a kind of personal insult and contumely to the

owner; and long stilts, again, put him at perpetual disadvantage, and force him to stoop to the general level of

mankind. Martial ridicules a gentleman of his day whose countenance resembled the face of a swimmer seen

under water. Saadi describes a schoolmaster "so ugly and crabbed, that a sight of him would derange the

ecstasies of the orthodox." Faces are rarely true to any ideal type, but are a record in sculpture of a thousand

anecdotes of whim and folly. Portrait painters say that most faces and forms are irregular and unsymmetrical;

have one eye blue, and one gray; the nose not straight; and one shoulder higher than another; the hair

unequally distributed, etc. The man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches,

A beautiful person, among the Greeks, was thought to betray by this sign some secret favor of the immortal

gods: and we can pardon pride, when a woman possesses such a figure, that wherever she stands, or moves,

or leaves a shadow on the wall, or sits for a portrait to the artist, she confers a favor on the world. And yet

it is not beauty that inspires the deepesonsmustfurnisht passion. Beauty without grace is the hook without the

bait. Beauty, without expression, tires. Abbe Menage said of the President Le Bailleul, "that he was fit for

nothing but to sit for his portrait." A Greek epigram intimates that the force of love is not shown by the

courting of beauty, but when the like desire is inflamed for one who is illfavored. And petulant old

gentlemen, who have chanced to suffer some intolerable weariness from pretty people, or who have seen cut

flowers to some profusion, or who see, after a world of pains have been successfully taken for the costume,

how the least mistake in sentiment takes all the beauty out of your clothes, affirm, that the secret of

We love any forms, however ugly, from which great qualities shine. If command, eloquence, art, or

invention, exist in the most deformed person, all the accidents that usually displease, please, and raise esteem

and wonder higher. The great orator was an emaciated, insignificant person, but he was all brain. Cardinal De

Retz says of De Bouillon, "With the physiognomy of an ox, he had the perspicacity of an eagle." It was said

of Hooke, the friend of Newton, "he is the most, and promises the least, of any man in England." "Since I am

so ugly," said Du Guesclin, "it behooves that I be bold." Sir Philip Sidney, the darling of mankind, Ben

Jonson tells us, "was no pleasant man in countenance, his face being spoiled with pimples, and of high blood,

and long." Those who have ruled human destinies, like planets, for thousands of years, were not handsome

men. If a man can raise a small city to be a great kingdom, can make bread cheap, can irrigate deserts, can

join oceans by canals, can subdue steam, can organize victory, can lead the opinions of mankind, can enlarge

knowledge, 'tis no matter whether his nose is parallel to his spine, as it ought to be, or whether he has a nose

at all; whether honsmustfurnishis legs are straight, or whether his legs are amputated; his deformities will

come to be reckoned ornamental, and advantageous on the whole. This is the triumph of expression,

degrading beauty, charming us with a power so fine and friendly and intoxicating, that it makes admired

persons insipid, and the thought of passing our lives with them insupportable. There are faces so fluid with

expression, so flushed and rippled by the play of thought, that we can hardly find what the mere features

really are. When the delicious beauty of lineaments loses its power, it is because a more delicious beauty has

appeared; that an interior and durable form has been disclosed. Still, Beauty rides on her lion, as before. Still,

"it was for beauty that the world was made." The lives of the Italian artists, who established a despotism of

genius amidst the dukes and kings and mobs of their stormy epoch, prove how loyal men in all times are to a

finer brain, a finer method, than their own. If a man can cut such a head on his stone gatepost as shall draw

and keep a crowd about it all day, by its beauty, good nature, and inscrutable meaning; if a man can build

a plain cottage with such symmetry, as to make all the fine palaces look cheap and vulgar; can take such

advantage of Nature, that all her powers serve him; making use of geometry, instead of expense; tapping a

mountain for his waterjet; causing the sun and moon to seem only the decorations of his estate; this is still

The radiance of the human form, though sometimes astonishing, is only a burst of beauty for a few years or a

few months, at the perfection of youth, and in most, rapidly declines. But we remain lovers of it, only

transferring our interest to interior excellence. And it is not only admirable in singular and salient talents, but

But the sovereign attribute remains to be noted. Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant,

handsoonsmustfurnishme, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful. This is the reason why

beauty is still escaping out of all analysis. It is not yet possessed, it cannot be handled. Proclus says, "it swims

on the light of forms." It is properly not in the form, but in the mind. It instantly deserts possession, and flies

to an object in the horizon. If I could put my hand on the north star, would it be as beautiful? The sea is

lovely, but when we bathe in it, the beauty forsakes all the near water. For the imagination and senses cannot

be gratified at the same time. Wordsworth rightly speaks of "a light that never was on sea or land," meaning,

that it was supplied by the observer, and the Welsh bard warns his countrywomen, that

The new virtue which constitutes a thing beautiful, is a certain cosmical quality, or, a power to suggest

relation to the whole world, and so lift the object out of a pitiful individuality. Every natural feature, sea,

sky, rainbow, flowers, musical tone, has in it somewhat which is not private, but universal, speaks of that

central benefit which is the soul of Nature, and thereby is beautiful. And, in chosen men and women, I find

somewhat in form, speech, and manners, which is not of their person and family, but of a humane, catholic,

and spiritual character, and we love them as the sky. They have a largeness of suggestion, and their face and

The feat of the imagination is in showing the convertibility of every thing into every other thing. Facts which

had never before left their stark common sense, suddenly figure as Eleusinian mysteries. My boots and chair

and candlestick are fairies in disguise, meteors and constellations. All the facts in Nature are nouns of the

intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word has a double, treble, or

centupleonsmustfurnish use and meaning. What! has my stove and pepperpot a false bottom! I cry you

mercy, good shoebox! I did not know you were a jewelcase. Chaff and dust begin to sparkle, and are

clothed about with immortality. And there is a joy in perceiving the representative or symbolic character of a

fact, which no bare fact or event can ever give. There are no days in life so memorable as those which

The poets are quite right in decking their mistresses with the spoils of the landscape, flowergardens, gems,

rainbows, flushes of morning, and stars of night, since all beauty points at identity, and whatsoever thing does

not express to me the sea and sky, day and night, is somewhat forbidden and wrong. Into every beautiful

object, there enters somewhat immeasurable and divine, and just as much into form bounded by outlines, like

mountains on the horizon, as into tones of music, or depths of space. Polarized light showed the secret

architecture of bodies; and when the secondsight of the mind is opened, now one color or form or gesture,

and now another, has a pungency, as if a more interior ray had been emitted, disclosing its deep holdings in

The laws of this translation we do not know, or why one feature or gesture enchants, why one word or

syllable intoxicates, but the fact is familiar that the fine touch of the eye, or a grace of manners, or a phrase of

poetry, plants wings at our shoulders; as if the Divinity, in his approaches, lifts away mountains of

obstruction, and deigns to draw a truer line, which the mind knows and owns. This is that haughty force of

beauty, "vis superba formae," which the poets praise, under calm and precise outline, the immeasurable

All high beauty has a moral element in it, and I find the antique sculpture as ethical as Marcus Antoninus: and

the beauty ever in proportion tonsmustfurnisho the depth of thought. Gross and obscure natures, however

decorated, seem impure shambles; but character gives splendor to youth, and awe to wrinkled skin and gray

hairs. An adorer of truth we cannot choose but obey, and the woman who has shared with us the moral

sentiment, her locks must appear to us sublime. Thus there is a climbing scale of culture, from the first

agreeable sensation which a sparkling gem or a scarlet stain affords the eye, up through fair outlines and

details of the landscape, features of the human face and form, signs and tokens of thought and character in

manners, up to the ineffable mysteries of the intellect. Wherever we begin, thither our steps tend: an ascent

from the joy of a horse in his trappings, up to the perception of Newton, that the globe on which we ride is

only a larger apple falling from a larger tree; up to the perception of Plato, that globe and universe are rude

and early expressions of an alldissolving Unity, the first stair on the scale to the temple of the Mind.

Some years ago, in company with an agreeable parter day in exploring the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. We

traversed, through spacious galleries affording a solid masonry foundation for the town and county overhead,

the six or eight black miles from the mouth of the cavern to the innermost recess which tourists visit, a

niche or grotto made of one seamless stalactite, and called, I believe, Serena's Bower. I lost the light of one

day. I saw high domes, and bottomless pits; heard the voice of unseen waterfalls; paddled three quarters of a

mile in the deep Echo River, whose waters are peopled with the blind fish; crossed the streams "Lethe" and

"Styx;" plied with music and guns the echoes in these alarming galleries; saw every form of stalagmite and

stalactite in the sculptured and fretted chambers, icicle, orangeflower, acanthus, grapes, and snowball.

We shot Bengal lights into the vaults and groins of the sparry cathedrals, and examined all the masterpieces

which the four combined engineers, water, limestone, gravitation, and time, could make in the dark.

The mysteries and scenery of the cave had the same dignity that belongs to all natural objects, and which

shames the fine things to which we foppishly compare them. I remarked, especially, the mimetic habit, with

which Nature, on new instruments, hums her old tunes, making night to mimic day, and chemistry to ape

vegetation. But I then took notice, and still chiefly remember, that the best thing which the cave had to offer

was an illusion. On arriving at what is called the "StarChamber," our lamps were taken from us by the

guide, and extinguished or put aside, and, on looking upwards, I saw or seemed to see the night heaven thick

with stars glimmering more or less brightly over our heads, and even what seemed a comet flaming among

them. All the party were touched with astonishment and pleasure. Our musical friends sung with much

feeling a pretty song, "The stars are in the quiet sky," and I sat down on the rocky floor to enjoy the serene

picture. Some crystal specks in the black ceiling high overhead, reflecting the light of a halfhid lamp,

I own, I did not like the cave so well for eking out its sublimities with this theatrical trick. But I have had

many experiences like it, before and since; and we must be content to be pleased without too curiously

analyzing the occasions. Our conversation with Nature is not just what it seems. The cloudrack, the sunrise

and sunset glories, rainbows, and northern lights are not quite so spheral as our childhood thought them; and

the part our organization plays in them is too large. The senses interfere everywhere, and mix their own

structure with all they report of. Once, we fancied the earth a plane, and stationary. In admiring the sunset, we

The same interference from our organization creates the most of our pleasure and pain. Our first mistake is

the belief that the circumstance gives the joy which we give to the circumstance. Life is an ecstasy. Life is

sweet as nitrous oxide; and the fisherman dripping all day over a cold pond, the switchman at the railway

intersection, the farmer in the field, the negro in the riceswamp, the fop in the street, the hunter in the

woods, the barrister with the jury, the belle at the ball, all ascribe a certain pleasure to their employment,

which they themselves give it. Health and appetite impart the sweetness to sugar, bread, and meat. We fancy

We live by our imaginations, by our admirations, by our sentiments. The child walks amid heaps of illusions,

which he does not like to have disturbed. The boy, how sweet to him is his fancy! how dear the story of

barons and battles! What a hero he is, whilst he feeds on his heroes! What a debt is his to imaginative books!

He has no better friend or influence, than Scott, Shakspeare, Plutarch, and Homer. The man lives to other

objects, but who dare affirm that they are more real? Even the prose of the streets is full of refractions. In the

life of the dreariest alderman, fancy enters into all details, and colors them with rosy hue. He imitates the air

and actions of people whom he admires, and is raised in his own eyes. He pays a debt quicker to a rich man

than to a poor man. He wishes the bow and compliment of some leader in the state, or in society; weighs what

he says; perhaps he never comes nearer to him for that, but dies at last better contented for this amusement of

The world rolls, the din of life is never hushed. In London, in Paris, in Boston, in San Francisco, the carnival,

the masquerade is at its height. Nobody drops his domino. The unities, the fictions of the piece it would be an

impertinence to break. The chapter of fascinations is very long. Great is paint; nay, God is the painter; and we

rightly accuse the critic who destroys too many illusions. Society does not love its unmaskers. It was wittily,

if somewhat bitterly, said by D'Alembert, "qu'un etat de vapeur etait un etat tres facheux, parcequ'il nous

faisait voir les choses comme elles sont." I find men victims of illusion in all parts of life. Children, youths,

adults, and old men, all are led by one bawble or another. Yoganidra, the goddess of illusion, Proteus, or

Momus, or Gylfi's Mocking, for the Power has many names, is stronger than the Titans, stronger than

Apollo. Few have overheard the gods, or surprised their secret. Life is a succession of lessons which must be

lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle. There are as many pillows of

illusion as flakes in a snowstorm. We wake from one dream into another dream. The toys, to be sure, are

various, and are graduated in refinement to the quality of the dupe. The intellectual man requires a fine bait;

the sots are easily amused. But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all

Amid the joyous troop who give in to the charivari, comes now and then a sadeyed boy, whose eyes lack the

requisite refractions to clothe the show in due glory, and who is afflicted with a tendency to trace home the

glittering miscellany of fruits and flowers to one root. Science is a search after identity, and the scientific

whim is lurking in all corners. At the State Fair, a friend of mine complained that all the varieties of fancy

pears in our orchards seem to have been selected by somebody who had a whim for a particular kind of pear,

and only cultivated such as had that perfume; they were all alike. And I remember the quarrel of another

youth with the confectioners, that, when he racked his wit to choose the best comfits in the shops, in all the

endless varieties of sweetmeat he could only find three flavors, or two. What then? Pears and cakes are good

for something; and because you, unluckily, have an eye or nose too keen, why need you spoil the comfort

which the rest of us find in them? I knew a humorist, who, in a good deal of rattle, had a grain or two of

sense. He shocked the company by maintaining that the attributes of God were two, power and risibility;

and that it was the duty of every pious man to keep up the comedy. And I have known gentlemen of great

stake in the community, but whose sympathies were cold, presidents of colleges, and governors, and

senators, who held themselves bound to sign every temperance pledge, and act with Bible societies, and

missions, and peacemakers, and cry Histaboy! to every good dog. We must not carry comity too far, but

we all have kind impulses in this direction. When the boys come into my yard for leave to gather

horsechestnuts, I own I enter into Nature's game, and affect to grant the permission reluctantly, fearing that

any moment they will find out the imposture of that showy chaff. But this tenderness is quite unnecessary;

the enchantments are laid on very thick. Their young life is thatched with them. Bare and grim to tears is the

lot of the children in the hovel I saw yesterday; yet not the less they hung it round with frippery romance, like

the children of the happiest fortune, and talked of "the dear cottage where so many joyful hours had flown."

Well, this thatching of hovels is the custom of the country. Women, more than all, are the element and

kingdom of illusion. Being fascinated, they fascinate. They see through ClaudeLorraines. And how dare any

one, if he could, pluck away the coulisses, stage effects, and ceremonies, by which they live? Too pathetic,

too pitiable, is the region of affection, and its atmosphere always liable to mirage.

We are not very much to blame for our bad marriages. We live amid hallucinations; and this especial trap is

laid to trip up our feet with, and all are tripped up first or last. But the mighty Mother who had been so sly

with us, as if she felt that she owed us some indemnity, insinuates into the Pandorabox of marriage some

deep and serious benefits, and some great joys. We find a delight in the beauty and happiness of children, that

makes the heart too big for the body. In the worstassorted connections there is ever some mixture of true

marriage. Teague and his jade get some just relations of mutual respect, kindly observation, and fostering of

each other, learn something, and would carry themselves wiselier, if they were now to begin.

'Tis fine for us to point at one or another fine madman, as if there were any exempts. The scholar in his

library is none. I, who have all my life heard any number of orations and debates, read poems and

miscellaneous books, conversed with many geniuses, am still the victim of any new page; and, if

Marmaduke, or Hugh, or Moosehead, or any other, invent a new style or mythology, I fancy that the world

will be all brave and right, if dressed in these colors, which I had not thought of. Then at once I will daub

with this new paint; but it will not stick. 'Tis like the cement which the peddler sells at the door; he makes

broken crockery hold with it, but you can never buy of him a bit of the cement which will make it hold when

Men who make themselves felt in the world avail themselves of a certain fate in their constitution, which they

know how to use. But they never deeply interest us, unless they lift a corner of the curtain, or betray never so

slightly their penetration of what is behind it. 'Tis the charm of practical men, that outside of their practicality

are a certain poetry and play, as if they led the good horse Power by the bridle, and preferred to walk, though

they can ride so fiercely. Bonaparte is intellectual, as well as Caesar; and the best soldiers, seacaptains, and

railway men have a gentleness, when off duty; a goodnatured admission that there are illusions, and who

shall say that he is not their sport? We stigmatize the castiron fellows, who cannot so detach themselves, as

"dragonridden," "thunderstricken," and fools of fate, with whatever powers endowed.

Since our tuition is through emblems and indirections, 'tis well to know that there is method in it, a fixed

scale, and rank above rank in the phantasms. We begin low with coarse masks, and rise to the most subtle and

beautiful. The red men told Columbus, "they had an herb which took away fatigue;" but he found the illusion

of "arriving from the east at the Indies" more composing to his lofty spirit than any tobacco. Is not our faith in

the impenetrability of matter more sedative than narcotics? You play with jackstraws, balls, bowls, horse and

gun, estates and politics; but there are finer games before you. Is not time a pretty toy? Life will show you

masks that are worth all your carnivals. Yonder mountain must migrate into your mind. The fine stardust

and nebulous blur in Orion, "the portentous year of Mizar and Alcor," must come down and be dealt with in

your household thought. What if you shall come to discern that the play and playground of all this pompous

history are radiations from yourself, and that the sun borrows his beams? What terrible questions we are

learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up,

and all trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men's minds all

vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were framed upon.

There are deceptions of the senses, deceptions of the passions, and the structural, beneficent illusions of

sentiment and of the intellect. There is the illusion of love, which attributes to the beloved person all which

that person shares with his or her family, sex, age, or condition, nay, with the human mind itself. 'Tis these

which the lover loves, and Anna Matilda gets the credit of them. As if one shut up always in a tower, with

one window, through which the face of heaven and earth could be seen, should fancy that all the marvels he

beheld belonged to that window. There is the illusion of time, which is very deep; who has disposed of it? or

come to the conviction that what seems the succession of thought is only the distribution of wholes into

causal series? The intellect sees that every atom carries the whole of Nature; that the mind opens to

omnipotence; that, in the endless striving and ascents, the metamorphosis is entire, so that the soul doth not

know itself in its own act, when that act is perfected. There is illusion that shall deceive even the elect. There

is illusion that shall deceive even the performer of the miracle. Though he make his body, he denies that he

makes it. Though the world exist from thought, thought is daunted in presence of the world. One after the

other we accept the mental laws, still resisting those which follow, which however must be accepted. But all

our concessions only compel us to new profusion. And what avails it that science has come to treat space and

time as simply forms of thought, and the material world as hypothetical, and withal our pretension of

property and even of selfhood are fading with the rest, if, at last, even our thoughts are not finalities; but the

incessant flowing and ascension reach these also, and each thought which yesterday was a finality, today is

With such volatile elements to work in, 'tis no wonder if our estimates are loose and floating. We must work

and affirm, but we have no guess of the value of what we say or do. The cloud is now as big as your hand,

and now it covers a county. That story of Thor, who was set to drain the drinkinghorn in Asgard, and to

wrestle with the old woman, and to run with the runner Lok, and presently found that he had been drinking up

the sea, and wrestling with Time, and racing with Thought, describes us who are contending, amid these

seeming trifles, with the supreme energies of Nature. We fancy we have fallen into bad company and squalid

condition, low debts, shoebills, broken glass to pay for, pots to buy, butcher's meat, sugar, milk, and coal.

`Set me some great task, ye gods! and I will show my spirit.' `Not so,' says the good Heaven; `plod and

plough, vamp your old coats and hats, weave a shoestring; great affairs and the best wine by and by.' Well,

'tis all phantasm; and if we weave a yard of tape in all humility, and as well as we can, long hereafter we shall

see it was no cotton tape at all, but some galaxy which we braided, and that the threads were Time and

We cannot write the order of the variable winds. How can we penetrate the law of our shifting moods and

susceptibility? Yet they differ as all and nothing. Instead of the firmament of yesterday, which our eyes

require, it is today an eggshell which coops us in; we cannot even see what or where our stars of destiny are.

From day to day, the capital facts of human life are hidden from our eyes. Suddenly the mist rolls up, and

reveals them, and we think how much good time is gone, that might have been saved, had any hint of these

things been shown. A sudden rise in the road shows us the system of mountains, and all the summits, which

have been just as near us all the year, but quite out of mind. But these alternations are not without their order,

and we are parties to our various fortune. If life seem a succession of dreams, yet poetic justice is done in

dreams also. The visions of good men are good; it is the undisciplined will that is whipped with bad thoughts

and bad fortunes. When we break the laws, we lose our hold on the central reality. Like sick men in hospitals,

we change only from bed to bed, from one folly to another; and it cannot signify much what becomes of such

castaways, wailing, stupid, comatose creatures, lifted from bed to bed, from the nothing of life to the

In this kingdom of illusions we grope eagerly for stays and foundations. There is none but a strict and faithful

dealing at home, and a severe barring out of all duplicity or illusion there. Whatever games are played with

us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth. I look upon

the simple and childish virtues of veracity and honesty as the root of all that is sublime in character. Speak as

you think, be what you are, pay your debts of all kinds. I prefer to be owned as sound and solvent, and my

word as good as my bond, and to be what cannot be skipped, or dissipated, or undermined, to all the eclat in

the universe. This reality is the foundation of friendship, religion, poetry, and art. At the top or at the bottom

of all illusions, I set the cheat which still leads us to work and live for appearances, in spite of our conviction,

in all sane hours, that it is what we really are that avails with friends, with strangers, and with fate or fortune.

One would think from the talk of men, that riches and poverty were a great matter; and our civilization

mainly respects it. But the Indians say, that they do not think the white man with his brow of care, always

toiling, afraid of heat and cold, and keeping within doors, has any advantage of them. The permanent interest

of every man is, never to be in a false position, but to have the weight of Nature to back him in all that he

does. Riches and poverty are a thick or thin costume; and our life the life of all of us identical. For we

transcend the circumstance continually, and taste the real quality of existence; as in our employments, which

only differ in the manipulations, but express the same laws; or in our thoughts, which wear no silks, and taste

The early Greek philosophers Heraclitus and Xenophanes measured their force on this problem of identity.

Diogenes of Apollonia said, that unless the atoms were made of one stuff, they could never blend and act

with one another. But the Hindoos, in their sacred writings, express the liveliest feeling, both of the essential

identity, and of that illusion which they conceive variety to be. "The notions, `I am,' and `This is mine,' which

influence mankind, are but delusions of the mother of the world. Dispel, O Lord of all creatures! the conceit

of knowledge which proceeds from ignorance." And the beatitude of man they hold to lie in being freed from

The intellect is stimulated by the statement of truth in a trope, and the will by clothing the laws of life in

illusions. But the unities of Truth and of Right are not broken by the disguise. There need never be any

confusion in these. In a crowded life of many parts and performers, on a stage of nations, or in the obscurest

hamlet in Maine or California, the same elements offer the same choices to each new comer, and, according

to his election, he fixes his fortune in absolute Nature. It would be hard to put more mental and moral

There is no chance, and no anarchy, in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in

his sphere. The young mortal enters the hall of the firmament: there is he alone with them alone, they pouring

on him benedictions and gifts, and beckoning him up to their thrones. On the instant, and incessantly, fall

snowstorms of illusions. He fancies himself in a vast crowd which sways this way and that, and whose

movement and doings he must obey: he fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. The mad crowd drives

hither and thither, now furiously commanding this thing to be done, now that. What is he that he should resist

their will, and think or act for himself? Every moment, new changes, and new showers of deceptions, to

baffle and distract him. And when, by and by, for an instant, the air clears, and the cloud lifts a little, there are