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ESSAYS.
LONDON:
PRINTED BY ROBSON, LEVEY, AND FRANKLYN,
Great New Street, Fetter Lane.
ESSAYS:
BY
R. W. EMERSON,
л
OF CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS.
With Preface
BY THOMAS CARLYLE.
LONDON:
JAMES FRASER, REGENT STREET.
MDCCCXLI.
Libaakian
C. Keriss
5.9.10
40416
PREFACE
BY
THE ENGLISH EDITOR.
To the great reading public entering Mr. Fraser's
and other shops in quest of daily provender, it may be
as well to state, on the very threshold, that this little
Reprint of an American Book of Essays is in no
wise the thing suited for them; that not the great
reading public, but only the small thinking public,
and perhaps only a portion of these, have any ques-
tion to ask concerning it. No Editor or Reprinter
can expect such a Book ever to become popular
here. But, thank Heaven, the small thinking public
has now also a visible existence among us, is visibly
enlarging itself. At the present time it can be pre-
dicted, what some years ago it could not be, that a
certain number of human creatures will be found
extant in England to whom the words of a man
speaking from the heart of him, in what fashion so-
ever, under what obstructions soever, will be wel-
vi
EDITOR'S PREFACE.
come ; — welcome, perhaps, as a brother's voice, to
'wanderers in the labyrinthic Night! For these, and
not for any other class of persons, is this little Book
reprinted and recommended. Let such read, and
try; ascertain for themselves, whether this is a kind
of articulate human voice speaking words, or only
another of the thousand thousand ventriloquisms,
mimetic echoes, hysteric shrieks, hollow laughters,
and mere inarticulate mechanical babblements, the
soul-confusing din of which already fills all places?
I will not anticipate their verdict; but I reckon it
safe enough, and even a kind of duty in these cir-
cumstances, to invite them to try.
The name of Ralph Waldo Emerson is not en-
tirely new in England: distinguished Travellers bring
us tidings of such a man; fractions of his writings
have found their way into the hands of the curious
here; fitful hints that there is, in New England, some
spiritual Notability called Emerson, glide through
Reviews and Magazines. Whether these hints were
true or not true, readers are now to judge for them-
selves a little better.
Emerson's writings and speakings amount to
something:—and yet hitherto, as seems to me, this
Emerson is perhaps far less notable for what he has
spoken or done, than for the many things he has not
spoken and has forborne to do. With uncommon in-
EDITOR'S PREFACE.
vii
terest I have learned that this, and in such a never-
resting locomotive country too, is one of those rare
men who have withal the invaluable talent of sitting
still! That an educated man of good gifts and op-
portunities, after looking at the public arena, and
even trying, not with ill success, what its tasks and its
prizes might amount to, should retire for long years
into rustic obscurity; and, amid the all-pervading
jingle of dollars and loud chaffering of ambitions and
promotions, should quietly, with cheerful deliberate-
ness, sit down to spend his life not in Mammon-
worship, or the hunt for reputation, influence, place
or any outward advantage whatsoever: this, when
we get notice of it, is a thing really worth noting.
As Paul Louis Courrier said: "Ce qui me distingue
de tous mes contemporains c'est que je n'ai
prétention d'être roi." 'All my contemporaries ;
poor contemporaries! It is as if the man said: Yes,
ye contemporaries, be it known to you, or let it re-
main unknown, There is one man who does not need
to be a king; king neither of nations, nor of parishes
or cliques, nor even of cent-per-annums; nor indeed
of anything at all save of himself only. 'Realities?"
Yes, your dollars are real, your cotton and molasses
are real; so are Presidentships, Senatorships, cele-
brations, reputations, and the wealth of Rothschild :
but to me, on the whole, they are not the reality that
pas
la
viii
EDITOR'S PREFACE.
will suffice. To me, without some other reality,
they are mockery, and amount to zero, nay to a
negative quantity. ETERNITIES surround this god-
given Life of mine: what will all the dollars in crea-
tion do for me? Dollars, dignities, senate-addresses,
review-articles, gilt coaches or cavalcades, with world-
wide huzzaings and parti-coloured beef-eaters never
so many: O Heaven, what were all these? Behold,
ye shall have all these, and I will endeavour for a
thing other than these. Behold, we will entirely
agree to differ in this matter; I to be in your eyes
nothing, you to be something, to be much, to be all
things:wherefore, adieu in God's name; go ye that
way, I go this !—
Pity that a man, for such cause,
should be so distinguished from all his contempo-
raries! It is a misfortune partly of these our pecu-
liar times. Times and nations of any strength have
always privately held in them many such men. Times
and nations that hold none or few of such, may in-
deed seem to themselves strong and great, but are
only bulky, loud; no heart or solidity in them;
great, as the blown bladder is, which by and by will
collapse and become small enough!
For myself I have looked over with no common
feeling to this brave Emerson, seated by his rustic
hearth, on the other side of the Ocean (yet not alto-
gether parted from me either), silently communing
EDITOR'S PREFACE.
ix
with his own soul, and with the God's World it finds
itself alive in yonder. Pleasures of Virtue, Pro-
gress of the Species, Black Emancipation, New
Tarif, Eclecticism, Locofocoism, ghost of Improved-
Socinianism: these with many other ghosts and sub-
stances are squeaking, jabbering, according to their
capabilities, round this man; to one man among
the sixteen millions their jabber is all unmusical.
The silent voices of the Stars above, and of the
green Earth beneath, are profitabler to him,-tell
him gradually that these others are but ghosts,
which will shortly have to vanish; that the Life-
Fountain these proceeded out of does not vanish!
The words of such a man, what words he finds good
to speak, are worth attending to. By degrees a
small circle of living souls eager to hear is gathered.
The silence of this man has to become speech may
this too, in its due season, prosper for him!-Emer-
son has gone to lecture, various times, to special
audiences, in Boston, and occasionally elsewhere.
Three of those Lectures, already printed, are known
to some here; as is the little Pamphlet called Nature,
of somewhat earlier date. It may be said, a great
meaning lies in these pieces, which as yet finds
no adequate expression for itself. A noteworthy.
though very unattractive work, moreover, is that
new Periodical they call The Dial, in which he
X
EDITOR'S PREface.
occasionally writes; which appears indeed generally
to be imbued with his way of thinking, and to pro-
ceed from the circle that learns of him.
This pre-
An un-
sent little Volume of Essays, printed in Boston a
few months ago, is Emerson's first Book.
pretending little Book, composed probably, in good
part, from mere Lectures which already lay writ-
ten. It affords us, on several sides, in such man-
ner as it can, a direct glimpse into the man and that
spiritual world of his.
Emerson, I understand, was bred to Theology;
of which primary bent his latest way of thought
still bears traces. In a very enigmatic way, we hear
much of the 'universal soul,' of the &c. &c. flick-
ering like bright bodiless Northern Streamers, no-
tions and half-notions of a metaphysic, theosophic,
theologic kind are seldom long wanting in these Es-
says. I do not advise the British Public to trouble
itself much with all that; still less, to take offence
at it. Whether this Emerson be a Pantheist,' or
what kind of Theist or Ist he may be, can perhaps
as well remain undecided. If he prove a devout-
minded, veritable, original man, this for the present
will suffice. Ists and Isms are rather growing a
weariness. Such a man does not readily range him-
self under Isms. A man to whom the 'open secret
of the universe' is no longer a closed one, what
EDITOR'S PREFACE.
xi
can his speech of it be in these days? All human
speech, in the best days, all human thought that can
or could articulate itself in reference to such things,
what is it but the eager stammering and struggling as
of a wondering infant,-in view of the Unnameable!
That this little Book has no 'system,' and points or
stretches far beyond all systems, is one of its merits.
We will call it the soliloquy of a true soul, alone
under the stars, in this day. In England as elsewhere
the voice of a true soul, any voice of such, may be
welcome to some. For in England as eleswhere
old dialects and formulas are mostly lying dead;
some dim suspicion, or clear knowledge, indicates
on all hands that they are as good as dead; — and
how can the skilfullest galvanizing make them any
more live? For they are dead: and their galvanic
motions, O Heavens, are not of a pleasant sort!
That one man more, in the most modern dialect
of this year 1841, recognises the oldest everlasting
truths here is a thing worth seeing, among the
others. One man more who knows, and believes
of very certainty, that Man's Soul is still alive,
that God's Universe is still godlike, that of all Ages
of Miracles ever seen, or dreamt of, by far the
most miraculous is this age in this hour; and who
with all these devout beliefs has dared, like a va-
liant man, to bid chimeras, "Be chimerical; dis-
xii
EDITOR'S PREFACE.
appear, and let us have an end of you is
not this worth something? In a word, while so
many Benthamisms, Socialisms, Fourrierisms, pro-
fessing to have no soul, go staggering and lowing
like monstrous mooncalves, the product of a heavy-
laden moonstruck age; and, in this same baleful
' twelfth hour of the night,' even galvanic Puseyisms,
as we say, are visible, and dancings of the sheeted
dead, shall not any voice of a living man be wel-
come to us, even because it is alive?
For the rest, what degree of mere literary talent
lies in these utterances, is but a secondary question;
which every reader may gradually answer for him-
self. What Emerson's talent is, we will not alto-
gether estimate by this Book. The utterance is
abrupt, fitful; the great idea not yet embodied
struggles towards an embodiment. Yet everywhere
there is the true heart of a man; which is the parent
of all talent; which without much talent cannot exist.
A breath as of the green country,— all the wel-
comer that it is New-England country, not second-
hand but first-hand country,-meets us wholesomely
everywhere in these Essays: the authentic green
Earth is there, with her mountains, rivers, with her
mills and farms. Sharp gleams of insight arrest
us by their pure intellectuality; here and there, in
heroic rusticism, a tone of modest manfulness, of
I
EDITOR'S PREFACE.
xiii
mild invincibility, low-voiced but lion-strong, makes
us too thrill with a noble pride. Talent? Such
ideas as dwell in this man, how can they ever speak
themselves with enough of talent? The talent is
not the chief question here. The idea, that is the
chief question. Of the living acorn you do not ask
first, How large an acorn art thou? The smallest
living acorn is fit to be the parent of oaktrees without
end, could clothe all New England with oaktrees
by and by. You ask it, first of all: Art thou a living
acorn? Certain, now, that thou art not a dead
mushroom, as the most are?
But, on the whole, our Book is short; the Pre-
face should not grow too long. Closing these ques-
tionable parables and intimations, let me in plain
English recommend this little Book as the Book of
an original veridical man, worthy the acquaintance
of those who delight in such; and so: Welcome
to it whom it may concern!
London, 11th August, 1841.
T. CARLYLE.
CONTENTS.
ESSAY I.
HISTORY
PAGE
1
ESSAY II.
SELF-RELIANCE
43
ESSAY III.
COMPENSATION
91
ESSAY IV.
SPIRITUAL LAWS
129
ESSAY V.
LOVE
167
ESSAY VI.
FRIENDSHIP
191
ESSAY VII.
PRUDENCE
221
xvi
CONTENTS.
HEROISM
ESSAY VIII.
PAGE
245
ESSAY IX.
THE OVER-SOUL
267
ESSAY X.
CIRCLES
301
ESSAY XI.
INTELLECT
325
ESSAY XII.
ART
351
་་
HISTORY.
There is no great and no small
To the Soul that maketh all :
And where it cometh, all things are;
And it cometh every where.
B
I am owner of the sphere,
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
Of Cæsar's hand, and Plato's brain,
Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakspeare's strain.
ESSAY I.
HISTORY.
THERE is one mind common to all individual
men. Every man is an inlet to the same and
to all of the same. He that is once admitted
to the right of reason is made a freeman of the
whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may
think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what
at any time has befallen any man, he can under-
stand. Who hath access to this universal mind,
is a party to all that is or can be done, for this
is the only and sovereign agent.
Of the works of this mind history is the re-
cord. Its genius is illustrated by the entire
series of days. Man is explicable by nothing
less than all his history. Without hurry, with-
out rest, the human spirit goes forth from
the beginning to embody every faculty, every
thought, every emotion, which belongs to it, in
appropriate events. But always the thought is
4
ESSAY I.
prior to the fact; all the facts of history pre-
exist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is
made by circumstances predominant, and the
limits of nature give power to but one at a time.
A man is the whole encyclopædia of facts. The
creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn;
and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, Ame-
rica, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch
after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic,
democracy, are merely the application of his
manifold spirit to the manifold world.
This human mind wrote history, and this
must read it. The Sphinx must solve her own
riddle. If the whole of history is in one man,
it is all to be explained from individual experi-
ence. There is a relation between the hours of
our life and the centuries of time. As the air
I breathe is drawn from the great repositories
of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by
a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the
poise of my body depends on the equilibrium
of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the
hours should be instructed by the ages, and the
ages explained by the hours. Of the universal
mind each individual man is one more incarna-
tion. All its properties consist in him. Every
step in his private experience flashes a light on
what great bodies of men have done, and the
HISTORY.
5
10
crises of his life refer to national crises. Every
revolution was first a thought in one man's
mind; and when the same thought occurs to
another man, it is the key to that era. Every
reform was once a private opinion; and when it
shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the
problem of the age. The fact narrated must
correspond to something in me to be credible
or intelligible. We as we read must become
Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, mar-
tyr and executioner, must fasten these images
to some reality in our secret experience, or we
shall see nothing, learn nothing, keep nothing.
What befel Asdrubal or Cæsar Borgia is as
much an illustration of the mind's powers and
depravations as what has befallen us. Each
new law and political movement has meaning
for you. Stand before each of its tablets and
say, 'Here is one of my coverings. Under this
fantastic, or odious, or graceful mask did my
Proteus nature hide itself." This remedies the
defect of our too great nearness to ourselves.
This throws our own actions into perspective:
and as crabs, goats, scorpions, the balance and
the waterpot, lose all their meanness when hung
as signs in the zodiac, so I can see my own vices
without heat in the distant persons of Solomon,
Alcibiades, and Catiline.
6
ESSAY I.
It is this universal nature which gives worth
to particular men and things. Human life as
containing this is mysterious and inviolable, and
we hedge it round with penalties and laws. All
laws derive hence their ultimate reason, all ex-
press at last reverence for some command of this
supreme illimitable essence. Property also holds
of the soul, covers great spiritual facts, and in-
stinctively we at first hold to it with swords and
laws, and wide and complex combinations. The
obscure consciousness of this fact is the light of
all our day, the claim of claims; the plea for
education, for justice, for charity, the founda-
tion of friendship and love, and of the heroism
and grandeur which belongs to acts of self-reli-
ance. It is remarkable that involuntarily we
always read as superior beings. Universal his-
tory, the poets, the romancers, do not in their
stateliest pictures,—in the sacerdotal, the impe-
rial palaces, in the triumphs of will, or of genius,
any where lose our ear, any where make us feel
that we intrude, that this is for our betters; but
rather is it true, that in their grandest strokes,
there we feel most at home. All that Shak-
speare says of the king, yonder slip of a boy
that reads in the corner feels to be true of
himself. We sympathise in the great mo-
ments of history, in the great discoveries, the
HISTORY.
7
great resistances, the great prosperities, of
men;- because there law was enacted, the sea
was searched, the land was found, or the blow
was struck for us, as we ourselves in that place
would have done or applauded.
So is it in respect to condition and character.
We honour the rich, because they have exter-
nally the freedom, power, and grace which we
feel to be proper to man, proper to us. So all
that is said of the wise man by stoic, or ori-
ental or modern essayist, describes to each man
his own idea, describes his unattained but at-
tainable self. All literature writes the charac-
ter of the wise man. All books, monuments,
pictures, conversation, are portraits in which
the wise man finds the lineaments he is forming.
The silent and the loud praise him, and accost
him, and he is stimulated wherever he moves as
by personal allusions. A wise and good soul,
therefore, never needs look for allusions per-
sonal and laudatory in discourse. He hears the
commendation, not of himself, but more sweet,
of that character he seeks, in every word that is
said concerning character, yea, further, in every
fact that befals,—in the running river and the
rustling corn. Praise is looked, homage ten-
dered, love flows from mute nature, from the
mountains and the lights of the firmament.
8
ESSAY I.
These hints, dropped as it were from sleep
and night, let us use in broad day. The stu-
dent is to read history actively and not pas-
sively; to esteem his own life the text, and
books the commentary. Thus compelled, the
muse of history will utter oracles, as never to
those who do not respect themselves. I have
no expectation that any man will read history
aright, who thinks that what was done in a
remote age, by men whose names have re-
sounded far, has any deeper sense than what
he is doing to-day.
The world exists for the education of each
man. There is no age or state of society, or
mode of action in history, to which there is
not somewhat corresponding in his life. Every
thing tends in a most wonderful manner to ab-
breviate itself and yield its own virtue to him.
He should see that he can live all history in his
own person. He must sit at home with might
and main, and not suffer himself to be bullied
by kings or empires, but know that he is greater
than all the geography and all the government
of the world; he must transfer the point of
view from which history is commonly read,
from Rome and Athens and London to him-
self, and not deny his conviction that he is the
Court, and if England or Egypt have any thing
HISTORY.
9
to say to him, he will try the case; if not, let
them forever be silent. He must attain and
- maintain that lofty sight where facts yield their
secret sense, and poetry and annals are alike.
The instinct of the mind, the purpose of nature
betrays itself in the use we make of the signal
narrations of history. Time dissipates to shining
ether the solid angularity of facts. No anchor,
no cable, no fences avail to keep a fact a fact.
Babylon and Troy and Tyre, and even early
Rome, are passing already into fiction. The
Garden of Eden, the Sun standing still in
Gibeon, is poetry thenceforward to all nations.
Who cares what the fact was, when we have
thus made a constellation of it to hang in heaven
an immortal sign? London and Paris and New
York must go the same way. "What is his-
tory," said Napoleon, “but a fable agreed
upon?"
This life of ours is stuck round with
Egypt, Greece, Gaul, England, War, Coloni-
sation, Church, Court, and Commerce, as with
so many flowers and wild ornaments grave and
gay. I will not make more account of them.
I believe in Eternity. I can find Greece, Pa-
lestine, Italy, Spain, and the Islands,—the ge-
nius and creative principle of each and of all
eras in my own mind.
We are always coming up with the facts that
B 2
10
ESSAY I.
What
have moved us in history in our private experi-
ence, and verifying them here. All history be-
comes subjective; in other words, there is pro-
perly no History; only Biography. Every soul
must know the whole lesson for itself—must go
over the whole ground. What it does not see,
what it does not live, it will not know.
the former age has epitomised into a formula
or rule for manipular convenience, it will lose
all the good of verifying for itself, by means of
the wall of that rule. Somewhere or other,
some time or other, it will demand and find
compensation for that loss by doing the work
itself. Ferguson discovered many things in as-
tronomy which had long been known. The
better for him.
History must be this, or it is nothing. Every
law which the state enacts indicates a fact in
human nature; that is all. We must in our
own nature see the necessary reason of every
fact, see how it could and must be. So stand
before every public, every private work; before
an oration of Burke, before a victory of Na-
poleon, before a martyrdom of Sir Thomas
More, of Sidney, of Marmaduke Robinson, be-
fore a French Reign of Terror, and a Salem
hanging of witches, before a fanatic Revival,
and the Animal Magnetism in Paris, or in Pro-
HISTORY.
11
vidence. We assume that we under like in-
fluence should be alike affected, and should
achieve the like; and we aim to master intel-
lectually the steps, and reach the same height
or the same degradation that our fellow, our
proxy has done.
All inquiry into antiquity,—all curiosity
respecting the pyramids, the excavated cities,
Stonehenge, the Ohio Circles, Mexico, Mem-
phis, is the desire to do away this wild, savage
and preposterous There or Then, and introduce
in its place the Here and the Now. It is to
banish the Not me, and supply the Me. It is
to abolish difference, and restore unity. Bel-
zoni digs and measures in the mummy-pits and
pyramids of Thebes, until he can see the end
of the difference between the monstrous work
and himself. When he has satisfied himself, in
general and in detail, that it was made by such
a person as himself, so armed and so motived,
and to ends to which he himself in given cir-
cumstances should also have worked, the pro-
blem is then solved; his thought lives along the
whole line of temples and sphinxes and cata-
combs, passes through them all like a creative
soul, with satisfaction, and they live again to
the mind, or are now.
A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done
12
ESSAY I.
But we
by us, and not done by us. Surely it was by
man, but we find it not in our man.
apply ourselves to the history of its production.
We put ourselves into the place and historical
state of the builder. We remember the forest-
dwellers, the first temples, the adherence to the
first type, and the decoration of it as the wealth
of the nation increased; the value which is given
to wood by carving led to the carving over the
whole mountain of stone of a cathedral. When
we have gone through this process, and added
thereto the Catholic Church, its cross, its music,
its processions, its Saints' days and image-wor-
ship, we have, as it were, been the man that
made the minster; we have seen how it could
and must be. We have the sufficient reason.
The difference between men is in their prin-
ciple of association. Some men classify objects.
by colour and size and other accidents of appear-
ance; others by intrinsic likeness, or by the re-
lation of cause and effect. The progress of the
intellect consists in the clearer vision of causes,
which overlooks surface-differences. To the
poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things
are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all
days holy, all men divine. For the eye is fast-
ened on the life, and slights the circumstance.
Every chemical substance, every plant, every
HISTORY.
13
animal in its growth, teaches the unity of cause,
the variety of appearance.
Why, being as we are surrounded by this
all-creating nature, soft and fluid as a cloud or
the air, should we be such hard pedants, and
magnify a few forms? Why should we make
account of time, or of magnitude, or of form?
The soul knows them not, and genius, obeying
its law, knows how to play with them as a young
child plays with greybeards and in churches.
Genius studies the causal thought, and far back
in the womb of things sees the rays parting
from one orb, that diverge ere they fall by in-
finite diameters. Genius watches the monad
through all his masks as he performs the me-
tempsychosis of nature. Genius detects through
the fly, through the caterpillar, through the
grub, through the egg, the constant type of the
individual; through countless individuals the
fixed species; through many species the genus;
through all genera the steadfast type; through
all the kingdoms of organised life the eternal
unity. Nature is a mutable cloud, which is
always and never the same. She casts the same
thought into troops of forms, as a poet makes
twenty fables with one moral. Beautifully shines
a spirit through the bruteness and toughness of
matter. Alone omnipotent, it converts all things
14
ESSAY I.
to its own end. The adamant streams into soft-
est but precise form before it, but, whilst I look
at it, its outline and texture are changed alto-
gether. Nothing is so fleeting as form. Yet
never does it quite deny itself. In man we still
trace the rudiments or hints of all that we esteem
badges of servitude in the lower races, yet in him
they enhance his nobleness and grace; as Io, in
Eschylus, transformed to a cow, offends the
imagination, but how changed when as Isis in
Egypt she meets Jove, a beautiful woman, with
nothing of the metamorphosis left but the lunar
horns as the splendid ornament of her brows!
How
The identity of history is equally intrinsic,
the diversity equally obvious. There is at the
surface infinite variety of things; at the centre
there is simplicity and unity of cause.
many are the acts of one man in which we re-
cognise the same character! See the variety of
the sources of our information in respect to the
Greek genius. Thus at first we have the civil
history of that people, as Herodotus, Thucy-
dides, Xenophon, Plutarch have given it-a
very sufficient account of what manner of per-
sons they were, and what they did. Then we
have the same soul expressed for us again in
their literature; in poems, drama, and philoso-
phy: a very complete form. Then we have it
HISTORY.
15
once more in their architecture,—the purest
sensuous beauty, -the perfect medium never
overstepping the limit of charming propriety and
grace. Then we have it once more in sculp-
ture, "the tongue on the balance of expres-
sion," those forms in every action, at every age
of life, ranging through all the scale of condi-
tion, from god to beast, and never transgressing
the ideal serenity, but in convulsive exertion the
liege of order and of law. Thus, of the genius
of one remarkable people, we have a fourfold
representation, the most various expression of
one moral thing: and to the senses what more
unlike than an ode of Pindar, a marble Cen-
taur, the Peristyle of the Parthenon, and the
last actions of Phocion? Yet do these varied
external expressions proceed from one national
mind.
Every one must have observed faces and forms
which, without any resembling feature, make a
like impression on the beholder. A particular
picture or copy of verses, if it do not awaken
the same train of images, will yet superinduce
the same sentiment as some wild mountain walk,
although the resemblance is nowise obvious to
the senses, but is occult and out of the reach of
the understanding. Nature is an endless com-
bination and repetition of a very few laws. She
16
ESSAY I.
hums the old well-known air through innumer-
able variations.
Nature is full of a sublime family-likeness
throughout her works. She delights in startling
us with resemblances in the most unexpected
quarters. I have seen the head of an old sachem
of the forest, which at once reminded the eye of
a bald mountain summit, and the furrows of the
brow suggested the strata of the rock. There
are men whose manners have the same essential
splendour as the simple and awful sculpture on
the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains
of the earliest Greek art. And there are com-
positions of the same strain to be found in the
books of all ages. What is Guido's Rospigliosi
Aurora but a morning thought, as the horses in
it are only a morning cloud. If any one will
but take pains to observe the variety of actions
to which he is equally inclined in certain moods
of mind, and those to which he is averse, he will
see how deep is the chain of affinity.
A painter told me that nobody could draw a
tree without in some sort becoming a tree; or
draw a child by studying the outlines of its form
merely, but, by watching for a time his mo-
tions and plays, the painter enters his nature,
and can then draw him at will in every attitude.
So Roos "entered into the inmost nature of a
HISTORY.
17
sheep." I knew a draughtsman employed in
a public survey, who found that he could not
sketch the rocks until their geological structure
was first explained to him.
By de-
What is to be inferred from these facts but
this; that in a certain state of thought is the
common origin of very diverse works? It is the
spirit and not the fact that is identical.
scending far down into the depths of the soul,
and not primarily by a painful acquisition of
many manual skills, the artist attains the power
of awakening other souls to a given activity.
It has been said that "6 common souls pay
with what they do; nobler souls with that
which they are." And why? Because a soul,
living from a great depth of being, awakens in
us by its actions and words, by its very looks
and manners, the same power and beauty that a
gallery of sculpture, or of pictures, are wont to
animate.
Civil history, natural history, the history of
art, and the history of literature, -all must be
explained from individual history, or must re-
main words. There is nothing but is related to
us, nothing that does not interest us-kingdom,
college, tree, horse, or iron shoe, the roots of all
things are in man. It is in the soul that archi-
tecture exists. Santa Croce and the Dome of
18
ESSAY I.
St. Peter's are lame copies after a divine model.
Strasburg Cathedral is a material counterpart of
the soul of Erwin of Steinbach. The true poem
is the poet's mind; the true ship is the ship-
builder. In the man, could we lay him open,
we should see the sufficient reason for the last
flourish and tendril of his work, as every spine
and tint in the sea-shell preëxist in the secret-
ing organs of the fish. The whole of heraldry
and of chivalry is in courtesy. A man of fine
manners shall pronounce your name with all the
ornament that titles of nobility could ever add.
The trivial experience of every day is always
verifying some old prediction to us, and convert-
ing into things for us also the words and signs
which we had heard and seen without heed.
Let me add a few examples, such as fall within
the scope of every man's observation, of trivial
facts which go to illustrate great and conspicu-
ous facts.
A lady, with whom I was riding in the fo-
rest, said to me, that the woods always seemed
to her to wait, as if the genii who inhabit them
suspended their deeds until the wayfarer has
passed onward. This is precisely the thought
which poetry has celebrated in the dance of the
fairies, which breaks off on the approach of hu-
man feet. The man who has seen the rising
HISTORY.
19
moon break out of the clouds at midnight, has
been present like an archangel at the creation
of light and of the world. I remember that
being abroad one summer day, my companion
pointed out to me a broad cloud, which might
extend a quarter of a mile parallel to the hori-
zon, quite accurately in the form of a cherub as
painted over churches,-a round block in the
centre, which it was easy to animate with eyes
and mouth, supported on either side by wide-
stretched symmetrical wings. What appears once
in the atmosphere may appear often, and it was
undoubtedly the archetype of that familiar or-
nament. I have seen in the sky a chain of sum-
mer lightning which at once revealed to me that
the Greeks drew from nature when they painted
the thunderbolt in the hand of Jove. I have
seen a snow-drift along the sides of the stone
wall which obviously gave the idea of the com-
mon architectural scroll to abut a tower.
By simply throwing ourselves into new cir-
cumstances we do continually invent anew the
orders and the ornaments of architecture, as
we see how each people merely decorated its
primitive abodes. The Doric temple still pre-
sents the semblance of the wooden cabin in
which the Dorian dwelt. The Chinese pagoda
is plainly a Tartar tent. The Indian and Egyp-
20
ESSAY I.
tian temples still betray the mounds and subter-
ranean houses of their forefathers.
"The cus-
tom of making houses and tombs in the living
rock," (says Heeren, in his Researches on the
Ethiopians)" determined very naturally the
principal character of the Nubian Egyptian ar-
chitecture to the colossal form which it assumed.
In these caverns already prepared by nature,
the eye was accustomed to dwell on huge shapes
and masses, so that when art came to the assist-
ance of nature, it could not move on a small
scale without degrading itself. What would
statues of the usual size, or neat porches and
wings have been, associated with those gigantic
halls before which only Colossi could sit as
watchmen, or lean on the pillars of the inte-
rior?"
The Gothic church plainly originated in a
rude adaptation of the forest trees with all their
boughs to a festal or solemn arcade, as the bands.
about the cleft pillars still indicate the green
withes that tied them. No one can walk in a
road cut through pine woods, without being
struck with the architectural appearance of the
grove, especially in winter, when the bareness
of all other trees shews the low arch of the
Saxons. In the woods in a winter afternoon
one will see as readily the origin of the stained
HISTORY.
21
glass window with which the Gothic cathedrals
are adorned, in the colours of the western sky
seen through the bare and crossing branches of
the forest. Nor can any lover of nature enter the
old piles of Oxford and the English cathedrals
without feeling that the forest overpowered the
mind of the builder, and that his chisel, his saw,
and plane still reproduced its ferns, its spikes of
flowers, its locust, its pine, its oak, its fir, its
spruce.
The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in
stone subdued by the insatiable demand of har-
mony in man. The mountain of granite blooms
into an eternal flower with the lightness and de-
licate finish as well as the aerial proportions and
perspective of vegetable beauty.
As
In like manner all public facts are to be in-
dividualised, all private facts are to be general-
ised. Then at once History becomes fluid and
true, and Biography deep and sublime.
the Persian imitated in the slender shafts and
capitals of his architecture the stem and flower
of the lotus and palm, so the Persian court in
its magnificent era never gave over the Nomad-
ism of its barbarous tribes, but travelled from
Ecbatana, where the spring was spent, to Susa
in summer, and to Babylon for the winter.
In the early history of Asia and Africa, No-
22
ESSAY I.
madism and Agriculture are the two antagonist
facts. The geography of Asia and of Africa
necessitated a nomadic life. But the nomads
were the terror of all those whom the soil or the
advantages of a market had induced to build
towns. Agriculture therefore was a religious
injunction because of the perils of the state
from nomadism. And in these late and civil
countries of England and America, the contest
of these propensities still fights out the old battle
in each individual. We are all rovers and all
fixtures by turns, and pretty rapid turns. The
nomads of Africa are constrained to wander by
the attacks of the gad-fly, which drives the cattle
mad, and so compels the tribe to emigrate in
the rainy season and drive off the cattle to the
higher sandy regions. The nomads of Asia fol-
low the pasturage from month to month. In
America and Europe the nomadism is of trade
and curiosity. A progress certainly from the
gad-fly of Astaboras to the Anglo and Italo-
mania of Boston Bay. The difference between
men in this respect is the faculty of rapid do-
mestication, the power to find his chair and
bed everywhere, which one man has, and ano-
ther has not. Some men have so much of the
Indian left, have constitutionally such habits of
accommodation, that at sea, or in the forest, or
HISTORY.
23
in the snow, they sleep as warm, and dine with
as good appetite, and associate as happily, as in
their own house. And to push this old fact still
one degree nearer, we may find it a representa-
tive of a permanent fact in human nature. The
intellectual nomadism is the faculty of objec-
tiveness, or of eyes which everywhere feed them-
selves. Who hath such eyes, everywhere falls
into easy relations with his fellow-men. Every
man, every thing is a prize, a study, a property
to him, and this love smooths his brow, joins
him to men, and makes him beautiful and be-
loved in their sight. His house is a wagon; he
roams through all latitudes as easily as a Calmuc.
Every thing the individual sees without him,
corresponds to his states of mind, and every
thing is in turn intelligible to him, as his on-
ward thinking leads him into the truth to which
that fact or series belongs.
The primeval world, the Fore-World, as the
Germans say, I can dive to it in myself as well
as grope for it with researching fingers in cata-
combs, libraries, and the broken reliefs and
torsos of ruined villas.
What is the foundation of that interest all
men feel in Greek history, letters, art, and
poetry, in all its periods, from the heroic or
Homeric age, down to the domestic life of the
24
ESSAY I.
Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries
later? This period draws us because we are
Greeks. It is a state through which every
man in some sort passes. The Grecian state
is the era of the bodily nature, the perfection
of the senses, of the spiritual nature unfolded
in strict unity with the body. In it existed
those human forms which supplied the sculptor
with his models of Hercules, Phoebus, and
Jove; not like the forms abounding in the
streets of modern cities, wherein the face is a
confused blur of features, but composed of in-
corrupt, sharply defined and symmetrical fea-
tures, whose eye-sockets are so formed that it
would be impossible for such eyes to squint,
and take furtive glances on this side and on
that, but they must turn the whole head.
The manners of that period are plain and
fierce. The reverence exhibited is for personal
qualities, courage, address, self-command, jus-
tice, strength, swiftness, a loud voice, a broad
chest. Luxury is not known, nor elegance. A
sparse population and want make every man his
own valet, cook, butcher, and soldier; and the
habit of supplying his own needs educates the
body to wonderful performances. Such are the
Agamemnon and Diomed of Homer, and not
far different is the picture Xenophon gives of
HISTORY.
25
himself and his compatriots in the Retreat of
the Ten Thousand. • After the army had
crossed the river Teleboas in Armenia, there
fell much snow, and the troops lay miserably
on the ground, covered with it. But Xeno-
phon arose naked, and taking an axe, began
to split wood; whereupon others arose and did
the like.' Throughout his army seemed to be
a boundless liberty of speech. They quarrel for
plunder, they wrangle with the generals on each
new order, and Xenophon is as sharp-tongued
as any, and sharper-tongued than most, and so
gives as good as he gets. Who does not see
that this is a gang of great boys, with such a
code of honour and such lax discipline as great
boys have?
The costly charm of the ancient tragedy, and
indeed of all the old literature, is, that the per-
sons speak simply-speak as persons who have
great good sense without knowing it, before yet
the reflective habit has become the predominant
habit of the mind. Our admiration of the an-
tique is not admiration of the old, but of the
natural. The Greeks are not reflective but
perfect in their senses, perfect in their health,
with the finest physical organisation in the
world. Adults acted with the simplicity and
grace of boys. They made vases, tragedies,
C
26
ESSAY I.
and statues such as
that is, in good taste.
tinued to be made in all ages, and are now,
wherever a healthy physique exists; but, as
a class, from their superior organisation, they
have surpassed all. They combine the energy
of manhood with the engaging unconsciousness
of childhood. Our reverence for them is our
reverence for childhood. Nobody can reflect
upon an unconscious act with regret or con-
tempt. Bard or hero cannot look down on the
word or gesture of a child. It is as great as
they. The attraction of these manners is, that
they belong to man, and are known to every
man in virtue of his being once a child; beside
that always there are individuals who retain
these characteristics. A person of childlike
genius and inborn energy is still a Greek, and
revives our love of the muse of Hellas. A great
boy, a great girl, with good sense, is a Greek.
Beautiful is the love of nature in the Philoc-
tetes. But in reading those fine apostrophes
to sleep, to the stars, rocks, mountains, and
waves, I feel time passing away as an ebbing
sea. I feel the eternity of man, the identity of
his thought. The Greek had, it seems, the
same fellow beings as I. The sun and moon,
water and fire, met his heart precisely as they
healthy senses should-
Such things have con-
HISTORY.
27
meet mine. Then the vaunted distinction be-
tween Greek and English, between Classic and
Romantic schools, seems superficial and pedantic.
When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to
me,-when a truth that fired the soul of Pin-
dar fires mine, time is no more. When I feel
that we two meet in a perception, that our two
souls are tinged with the same hue, and do, as
it were, run into one, why should I measure
degrees of latitude, why should I count Egyp-
tian years?
The student interprets the age of chivalry
by his own age of chivalry, and the days of ma-
ritime adventure and circumnavigation by quite
parallel miniature experiences of his own. To
the sacred history of the world he has the same
key. When the voice of a prophet out of the
deeps of antiquity merely echoes to him a sen-
timent of his infancy, a prayer of his youth, he
then pierces to the truth through all the confu-
sion of tradition and the caricature of institu-
tions.
Rare, extravagant spirits come by us at in-
tervals, who disclose to us new facts in nature.
I see that men of God have always, from time
to time, walked among men, and made their
commission felt in the heart and soul of the
commonest hearer. Hence, evidently, the tri-
28
ESSAY I,
pod, the priest, the priestess inspired by the
divine afflatus.
Jesus astonishes and overpowers sensual peo-
ple. They cannot unite him to history, or re-
concile him with themselves. As they come to
revere their intuitions and aspire to live holily,
their own piety explains every fact, every word.
How easily these old worships of Moses, of
Zoroaster, of Menu, of Socrates, domesticate
themselves in the mind! I cannot find any an-
tiquity in them. They are mine as much as
theirs.
Then I have seen the first monks and ancho-
rets without crossing seas or centuries. More
than once some individual has appeared to me
with such negligence of labour and such com-
manding contemplation, a haughty beneficiary,
begging in the name of God, as made good to
the nineteenth century Simeon the Stylite, the
Thebais, and the first Capuchins.
The priestcraft of the East and West, of the
Magian, Brahmin, Druid and Inca, is expounded
in the individual's private life. The cramping
influence of a hard formalist on a young child
in repressing his spirits and courage, paralysing
the understanding, and that without producing
indignation, but only fear and obedience, and
even much sympathy with the tyranny, —is a
HISTORY.
29
familiar fact explained to the child when he be-
comes a man, only by seeing that the oppressor
of his youth is himself a child tyrannised over
by those names and words and forms, of whose
influence he was merely the organ to the youth.
The fact teaches him how Belus was worshipped,
and how the pyramids were built, better than
the discovery by Champollion of the names of
all the workmen and the cost of every tile. He
finds Assyria and the Mounds of Cholula at his
door, and himself has laid the courses.
Again, in that protest which each conside-
rate person makes against the superstition of
his times, he reacts step for step the part of
old reformers, and in the search after truth
finds like them new perils to virtue. He learns.
again what moral vigour is needed to supply the
girdle of a superstition. A great licentiousness
treads on the heels of a reformation. How many
times in the history of the world has the Luther
of the day had to lament the decay of piety in
his own household! "Doctor," said his wife to
Martin Luther one day, "how is it that whilst
subject to papacy we prayed so often and with
such fervour, whilst now we pray with the ut-
most coldness and very seldom?"
The advancing man discovers how deep a
property he hath in all literature,—in all fable
30
ESSAY 1.
as well as in all history. He finds that the poet
was no odd fellow who described strange and
impossible situations, but that universal man
wrote by his pen a confession true for one and
true for all. His own secret biography he finds
in lines wonderfully intelligible to him, yet dot-
ted down before he was born. One after ano-
ther he comes up in his private adventures with
every fable of Æsop, of Homer, of Hafiz, of
Ariosto, of Chaucer, of Scott, and verifies them
with his own head and hands.
The beautiful fables of the Greeks, being
proper creations of the Imagination and not of
the Fancy, are universal verities. What a range
of meanings and what perpetual pertinence has
the story of Prometheus! Beside its primary
value as the first chapter of the history of Eu-
rope, (the mythology thinly veiling authentic
facts, the invention of the mechanic arts, and
the migration of colonies,) it gives the history
of religion with some closeness to the faith of
later ages. Prometheus is the Jesus of the old
mythology. He is the friend of man; stands
between the unjust 'justice' of the Eternal Fa-
ther, and the race of mortals; and readily suffers
all things on their account. But where it de-
parts from the Calvinistic Christianity, and ex-
hibits him as the defier of Jove, it represents a
HISTORY.
31
state of mind which readily appears wherever the
doctrine of Theism is taught in a crude, objec-
tive form, and which seems the self-defence of
man against this untruth, namely, a discontent
with the believed fact that a God exists, and a
feeling that the obligation of reverence is oner-
ous. It would steal, if it could, the fire of the
Creator, and live apart from him, and indepen-
dent of him. The Prometheus Vinctus is the
Not less true to all
romance of scepticism.
time are all the details of that stately apologue.
Apollo kept the flocks of Admetus, said the
poets. Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god
playing the fool. It seems as if heaven had sent
its insane angels into our world as to an asylum,
and here they will break out into their native
music and utter at intervals the words they have
heard in heaven; then the mad fit returns, and
they mope and wallow like dogs. When the
gods come among them, they are not known.
Jesus was not; Socrates and Shakspeare were
not. Antæus was suffocated by the gripe of
Hercules, but every time he touched his mother
earth, his strength was renewed. Man is the
broken giant, and in all his weakness, both his
body and his mind are invigorated by habits of
conversation with nature. The power of music,
the power of poetry to unfix, and, as it were,
32
ESSAY I.
Tan-
clap wings to all solid nature, interprets the riddle
of Orpheus, which was to his childhood an idle
tale. The philosophical perception of identity
through endless mutations of form makes him
know the Proteus. What else am I who laughed
or wept yesterday, who slept last night like a
corpse, and this morning stood and ran? And
what see I on any side but the transmigrations
of Proteus? I can symbolise my thought by
using the name of any creature, of any fact, be-
cause every creature is man agent or patient.
Tantalus is but a name for you and me.
talus means the impossibility of drinking the
waters of thought which are always gleaming
and waving within sight of the soul. The trans-
migration of souls: that too is no fable.
would it were; but men and women are only
half human. Every animal of the barn-yard,
the field and the forest, of the earth and of the
waters that are under the earth, has contrived
to get a footing, and to leave the print of its
features and form in some one or other of these
upright, heaven-facing speakers. Ah, brother,
hold fast to the man and awe the beast; stop
the ebb of thy soul-ebbing downward into the
forms into whose habits thou hast now for many
years slid.
As near and proper to us is also
that old fable of the Sphinx, who was said to
I
HISTORY.
33
sit in the roadside and put riddles to every pas-
senger. If the man could not answer, she swal-
lowed him alive. If he could solve the riddle,
the Sphinx was slain. What is our life but an
endless flight of winged facts or events? In
splendid variety these changes come, all putting
questions to the human spirit. Those men who
cannot answer by a superior wisdom these facts
or questions of time, serve them. Facts encum-
ber them, tyrannise over them, and make the
men of routine, the men of sense, in whom a
literal obedience to facts has extinguished every
spark of that light by which man is truly man.
But if the man is true to his better instincts or
sentiments, and refuses the dominion of facts,
as one that comes of a higher race, remains fast
by the soul and sees the principle, then the
facts fall aptly and supple into their places;
they know their master, and the meanest of
them glorifies him.
See in Goethe's Helena the same desire that
every word should be a thing. These figures, he
would say, these Chirons, Griffins, Phorkyas,
Helen, and Leda, are somewhat, and do exert a
specific influence on the mind. So far then are
they eternal entities, as real to-day as in the first
Olympiad. Much revolving them, he writes.
out freely his humour, and gives them body to
c 2
34
ESSAY L.
his own imagination. And although that poem
be as vague and fantastic as a dream, yet it is
much more attractive than the more regular
dramatic pieces of the same author, for the
reason that it operates a wonderful relief to
the mind from the routine of customary images,
-awakens the reader's invention and fancy
by the wild freedom of the design, and by
the unceasing succession of brisk shocks of
surprise.
The universal nature, too strong for the
petty nature of the bard, sits on his neck and
writes through his hand; so that when he seems.
to vent a mere caprice and wild romance, the
issue is an exact allegory. Hence Plato said
that "poets utter great and wise things which
they do not themselves understand." All the
fictions of the Middle Age explain themselves
as a masked or frolic expression of that which,
in grave earnest, the mind of that period toiled
to achieve. Magic, and all that is ascribed to
it, is manifestly a deep presentiment of the
powers of science. The shoes of swiftness, the
sword of sharpness, the power of subduing the
elements, of using the secret virtues of minerals,
of understanding the voices of birds, are the ob-
scure efforts of the mind in a right direction.
The preternatural prowess of the hero, the gift
HISTORY.
35
of perpetual youth, and the like, are alike the
endeavour of the human spirit "to bend the
shows of things to the desires of the mind."
In Perceforest and Amadis de Gaul, a gar-
land and a rose bloom on the head of her who
is faithful, and fade on the brow of the inconstant.
In the story of the Boy and the Mantle, even a
mature reader may be surprised with a glow of
virtuous pleasure at the triumph of the gentle
Genelas; and, indeed, all the postulates of
elfin annals, that the Fairies do not like to
be named; that their gifts are capricious and
not to be trusted; that who seeks a treasure
must not speak; and the like, I find true in
Concord, however they might be in Cornwall
or Bretagne.
Is it otherwise in the newest romance? I read
the Bride of Lammermoor. Sir William Ashton
is a mask for a vulgar temptation, Ravenswood
Castle, a fine name for proud poverty, and the
foreign mission of state only a Bunyan disguise
for honest industry. We may all shoot a wild
bull that would toss the good and beautiful, by
fighting down the unjust and sensual. Lucy
Ashton is another name for fidelity, which is
always beautiful and always liable to calamity
in this world.
But along with the civil and metaphysical
36
ESSAY I.
history of man, another history goes daily for-
ward-that of the external world,-in which
he is not less strictly implicated. He is the
compend of time: he is also the correlative of
nature. The power of man consists in the mul-
titude of his affinities, in the fact that his life
is intertwined with the whole chain of organic
and inorganic being. In the age of the Cæsars,
out from the Forum at Rome proceeded the
great highways north, south, east, west, to the
centre of every province of the empire, making
each market-town of Persia, Spain, and Britain,
pervious to the soldiers of the capital: so out of
the human heart go, as it were, highways to the
heart of every object in nature, to reduce it
under the dominion of man. A man is a bundle
of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and
fruitage is the world. All his faculties refer to
natures out of him. All his faculties predict
the world he is to inhabit, as the fins of the fish
foreshow that water exists, or the wings of an
eagle in the egg presuppose a medium like air.
Insulate, and you destroy him. He cannot live
without a world. Put Napoleon in an island-
prison, let his faculties find no men to act on,
no Alps to climb, no stake to play for, and he
would beat the air and appear stupid. Trans-
port him to large countries, dense population,
HISTORY.
37
complex interests, and antagonist power, and
you shall see that the man Napoleon, bounded,
that is, by such a profile and outline, is not the
virtual Napoleon. This is but Talbot's shadow ;
"His substance is not here:
For what you see is but the smallest part,
And least proportion of humanity;
But were the whole frame here,
It is of such a spacious, lofty pitch,
Your roof were not sufficient to contain it."
Henry VI.
Columbus needs a planet to shape his course
upon. Newton and Laplace need myriads of
ages and thick-strown celestial areas.
One may
say a gravitating solar system is already prophe-
sied in the nature of Newton's mind. Not less
does the brain of Davy and Gay-Lussac from
childhood, exploring always the affinities and
repulsions of particles, anticipate the laws of
organisation. Does not the eye of the human
embryo predict the light? the ear of Handel
predict the witchcraft of harmonic sound? Do
not the constructive fingers of Watt, Fulton,
Whittemore, Arkwright predict the fusible, hard,
and temperable texture of metals, the properties
of stone, water, and wood? the lovely attributes
of the maiden child predict the refinements and
decorations of civil society? Here also we are
reminded of the action of man on man.
A
38
ESSAY I.
mind might ponder its thought for ages, and
not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion
of love shall teach it in a day. Who knows
himself before he has been thrilled with indig-
nation at an outrage, or has heard an eloquent
tongue, or has shared the throb of thousands in
a national exultation or alarm? No man can
antedate his experience, or guess what faculty
or feeling a new object shall unlock, any more
than he can draw to-day the face of a per-
son whom he shall see to-morrow for the first
time.
I will not now go behind the general state-
ment to explore the reason of this correspond-
ency. Let it suffice that in the light of these
two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and
that nature is its correlative, history is to be
read and written.
Thus in all ways does the soul concentrate
and reproduce its treasures for each pupil, for
each new-born man. He too shall pass through
the whole cycle of experience. He shall collect
into a focus the rays of nature. History no
longer shall be a dull book. It shall walk in-
carnate in every just and wise man. You shall
not tell me by languages and titles a catalogue
of the volumes you have read. You shall make
me feel what periods you have lived. A man
HISTORY.
39
shall be the Temple of Fame. He shall walk,
as the poets have described that goddess, in a
robe painted all over with wonderful events and
experiences; his own form and features by
their exalted intelligence shall be that varie-
gated vest. I shall find in him the Foreworld;
in his childhood the Age of Gold; the Ap-
ples of Knowledge; the Argonautic Expedi-
tion; the calling of Abraham; the building of
the Temple; the Advent of Christ; Dark Ages;
the Revival of Letters; the Reformation; the
discovery of new lands, the opening of new
sciences, and new regions in man. He shall be
the priest of Pan, and bring with him into
humble cottages the blessing of the morning
stars and all the recorded benefits of heaven and
earth.
Is there somewhat overweening in this claim?
Then I reject all I have written; for what is the
use of pretending to know what we know not?
But it is the fault of our rhetoric that we can-
not strongly state one fact without seeming to
belie some other. I hold our actual knowledge
very cheap. Hear the rats in the wall, see the
lizard on the fence, the fungus under foot, the
lichen on the log. What do I know sympathe-
tically, morally, of either of these worlds of life?
As long as the Caucasian man—perhaps longer
4.0
ESSAY I.
these creatures have kept their counsel be-
side him, and there is no record of any word or
sign that has passed from one to the other.
Nay, what does history yet record of the meta-
physical annals of man? What light does it
shed on those mysteries which we hide under
the names Death and Immortality? Yet every
history should be written in a wisdom which
divined the range of our affinities, and looked
at facts as symbols. I am ashamed to see what
a shallow village-tale our so-called History is.
How many times we must say Rome, and Paris,
and Constantinople. What does Rome know
of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and
Consulates to these neighbouring systems of
being? Nay, what food or experience or suc-
cour have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter,
for the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman,
the stevedore, the porter?
Broader and deeper we must write our an-
nals-from an ethical reformation, from an in-
flux of the ever-new, ever-sanative conscience,
if we would truelier express our central and
wide-related nature, instead of this old chrono-
logy of selfishness and pride to which we have
too long lent our eyes. Already that day exists.
for us, shines in on us at unawares; but the path
of science and of letters is not the way into na-
HISTORY.
41
ture, but from it rather. The idiot, the Indian,
the child, and the unschooled farmer's boy, come
much nearer to these,― understand them better
than the dissector or the antiquary.
SELF-RELIANCE.
Ne te quæsiveris extra.
"Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate,
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."
Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's Fortune.
Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat:
Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be hands and feet.
ESSAY II.
SELF-RELIANCE.
I READ the other day some verses written by an
eminent painter which were original and not
conventional. Always the soul hears an admo-
nition in such lines, let the subject be what it
may. The sentiment they instil is of more value
than any thought they may contain. To believe
your own thought, to believe that what is true
for you in your private heart, is true for all
men,- that is genius. Speak your latent con-
viction, and it shall be the universal sense; for
always the inmost becomes the outmost,-and
our first thought is rendered back to us by the
trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as
the voice of the mind is to each, the highest
merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton,
is that they set at naught books and traditions,
and spoke not what men but what they thought.
A man should learn to detect and watch that
46
ESSAY II.
Yet he dismisses with-
because it is his. In
gleam of light which flashes across his mind
from within, more than the lustre of the firma-
ment of bards and sages.
out notice his thought,
every work of genius we recognise our own re-
jected thoughts: they come back to us with a
certain alienated majesty. Great works of art
have no more affecting lesson for us than this.
They teach us to abide by our spontaneous im-
pression with good-humoured inflexibility then
most when the whole cry of voices is on the
other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say
with masterly good sense precisely what we have
thought and felt all the time, and we shall be
forced to take with shame our own opinion
from another.
There is a time in every man's education
when he arrives at the conviction that envy is
ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he
must take himself for better, for worse, as his
portion; that though the wide universe is full
of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come
to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot
of ground which is given to him to till. The
power which resides in him is new in nature,
and none but he knows what that is which he
can do, nor does he know until he has tried.
Not for nothing one face, one character, one
SELF-RELIANCE.
47
fact makes much impression on him, and an-
It is not without preëstablished
other none.
harmony, this sculpture in the memory. The
eye was placed where one ray should fall, that
it might testify of that particular ray. Bravely
let him speak the utmost syllable of his con-
fession. We but half express ourselves, and
are ashamed of that divine idea which each of
us represents. It may be safely trusted as pro-
portionate and of good issues, so it be faith-
fully imparted, but God will not have his work
made manifest by cowards. It needs a divine
man to exhibit any thing divine. A man is re-
lieved and gay when he has put his heart into
his work and done his best; but what he has
said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace.
It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In
the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse
befriends; no invention, no hope.
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that
iron string. Accept the place the divine Pro-
vidence has found for you; the society of your
contemporaries, the connexion of events. Great
men have always done so, and confided them-
selves childlike to the genius of their age, be-
traying their perception that the Eternal wast
stirring at their heart, working through their
hands, predominating in all their being. And
4.8
ESSAY II.
we are now men, and must accept in the highest
mind the same transcendent destiny; and not
pinched in a corner, not cowards fleeing before a
revolution, but redeemers and benefactors, pious
aspirants to be noble clay plastic under the
Almighty effort, let us advance and advance on
Chaos and the Dark.
Their
What pretty oracles nature yields us on
this text in the face and behaviour of children,
babes and even brutes! That divided and rebel
mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our
arithmetic has computed the strength and means.
opposed to our purpose, these have not.
mind being whole, their eye is as yet uncon-
quered; and when we look in their faces, we
are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody:
all conform to it, so that one babe commonly
makes four or five out of the adults who prattle
and play to it. So God has armed youth and
puberty and manhood no less with its own
piquancy and charm, and made it enviable and
gracious, and its claims not to be put by, if it
will stand by itself. Do not think the youth
has no force because he cannot speak to you
and me.
Hark! in the next room, who spoke
so clear and emphatic? Good Heaven! it is he!
it is that very lump of bashfulness and phlegm
which for weeks has done nothing but eat when
SELF-RELIANCE.
49
you were by, that now rolls out these words like
bell-strokes. It seems he knows how to speak
to his contemporaries. Bashful or bold, then,
he will know how to make us seniors very un-
necessary.
The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a
dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to
do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy
attitude of human nature. How is a boy the
master of society! Independent, irresponsible,
looking out from his corner on such people and
facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on
their merits, in the swift summary way of boys,
as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, trouble-
some. He cumbers himself never about conse-
quences, about interests; he gives an independ-
ent, genuine verdict. You must court him; he
does not court you. But the man is, as it were,
clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon
as he has once acted or spoken with éclat, he is
a committed person, watched by the sympathy
or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must
now enter into his account. There is no Lethe
for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his
neutral, godlike independence! Who can thus
lose all pledge, and having observed, observe
again from the same unaffected, unbiassed, un-
bribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always.
D
50
ESSAY II.
be formidable, must always engage the poet's
and the man's regards. Of such an immortal
youth the force would be felt. He would utter
opinions on all passing affairs, which being seen
to be not private, but necessary, would sink like
darts into the ear of men, and put them in fear.
These are the voices which we hear in soli-
tude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we
enter into the world. (Society everywhere is in
conspiracy against the manhood of every one of
its members. Society is a joint-stock company,
in which the members agree, for the better se-
curing of his bread to each shareholder, to sur-
render the liberty and culture of the eater. The
virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reli-
ance is its aversion. It loves not realities and
creators, but names and customs.
Whoso would be a man must be a noncon-
formist. He who would gather immortal palms
must not be hindered by the name of goodness,
but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing
is at last sacred but the integrity of our own
mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall
have the suffrage of the world. I remember an
answer which, when quite young, I was prompted
to make to a valued adviser who was wont to
importune me with the dear old doctrines of the
church. On my saying, What have I to do with
SELF-RELIANCE.
51
the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from
within? my friend suggested-"But these im-
pulses may be from below, not from above." I
replied, "They do not seem to me to be such;
but if I am the devil's child, I will live then
from the devil." No law can be sacred to me
but that of my nature. Good and bad are but
names, very readily transferable to that or this;
the only right is what is after my constitution,
the only wrong what is against it. A man is
to carry himself in the presence of all opposition.
as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but
he. I am ashamed to think how easily we ca-
pitulate to badges and names, to large societies.
and dead institutions. Every decent and well-
spoken individual affects and sways me more
than is right. I ought to go upright and vital,
and speak the rude truth in all ways. If malice
and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall
that pass? If an angry bigot assumes this
bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me
with his last news from Barbadoes, why should
I not say to him, "Go, love thy infant; love thy
wood-chopper: be good-natured and modest;
have that grace; and never varnish your hard,
uncharitable ambition with this incredible ten-
derness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy
52
ESSAY II.
1
love afar is spite at home." Rough and grace-
less would be such greeting, but truth is hand-
somer than the affectation of love. Your good-
ness must have some edge to it-else it is none.
The doctrine of hatred must be preached, as the
counteraction of the doctrine of love when that
pules and whines. I shun father and mother
and wife and brother, when my genius calls me.
I would write on the lintels of the door-post,
Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim
at last, but we cannot spend the day in explana-
tion. Expect me not to shew cause why I seek
or why I exclude company. Then, again, do
not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my
obligation to put all poor men in good situa-
tions. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou
foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar,
the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not
belong to me, and to whom I do not belong.
There is a class of persons to whom by all spiri-
tual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I
will go to prison, if need be; but your miscel-
laneous popular charities; the education at col-
lege of fools; the building of meeting-houses to
the vain end to which many now stand; alms to
sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies;-
though I confess with shame I sometimes suc-
SELF-RELIANCE.
53
cumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar
which by and by I shall have the manhood to
withhold.
Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather
the exception than the rule. There is the man
and his virtues. Men do what is called a good
action, as some piece of courage or charity, much
as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily
non-appearance on parade. Their works are
done as an apology or extenuation of their liv-
ing in the world,—as invalids and the insane.
pay a high board. Their virtues are penances.
I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life
is not an apology, but a life. It is for itself,
and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it
should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and
equal, than that it should be glittering and un-
steady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and
not to need diet and bleeding. My life should
be unique; it should be an alms, a battle, a con-
quest, a medicine. I ask primary evidence that
you are a man, and refuse this appeal from the
man to his actions. I know that for myself it
makes no difference whether I do or forbear
those actions which are reckoned excellent. I
cannot consent to pay for a privilege where I
have intrinsic right. Few and mean as my gifts
may be, I actually am, and do not need for my
54
ESSAY II.
own assurance or the assurance of my fellows
any secondary testimony.
What I must do, is all that concerns me; not
what the people think. This rule, equally ar-
duous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve
for the whole distinction between greatness and
meanness. It is the harder, because you will
always find those who think they know what is
your duty better than you know it. It is easy
in the world to live after the world's opinion; it
is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the
great man is he who in the midst of the crowd
keeps with perfect sweetness the independence
of solitude.
The objection to conforming to usages that
have become dead to you, is, that it scatters
your force. It loses your time, and blurs the
impression of your character. If you maintain
a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-So-
ciety, vote with a great party either for the
Government or against it, spread your table like
base housekeepers, under all these screens,
have difficulty to detect the precise man you are.
And, of course, so much force is withdrawn from
your proper life. But do your thing, and I shall
know you. Do your work, and you shall re-
inforce yourself. A man must consider what a
blind-man's-buff is this game of conformity. If
I
SELF-RELIANCE.
55
I know your sect, I anticipate your argument.
I hear a preacher announce for his text and
topic the expediency of one of the institutions
of his church. Do I not know beforehand that
not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous
word? Do I not know that with all this osten-
tation of examining the grounds of the institu-
tion, he will do no such thing? Do I not know
that he is pledged to himself not to look but at
one side; the permitted side, not as a man, but
as a parish minister? He is a retained attorney,
and these airs of the bench are the emptiest af-
fectation. Well, most men have bound their
eyes with one or another handkerchief, and at-
tached themselves to some one of these commu-
nities of opinion. This conformity makes them
not false in a few particulars, authors of a few
lies, but false in all particulars. Their every
truth is not quite true. Their two is not the
real two, their four not the real four: so that
every word they say chagrins us, and we know
not where to begin to set them right. Mean-
time nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-
uniform of the party to which we adhere. We
come to wear one cut of face and figure, and
acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expres-
sion. There is a mortifying experience in par-
ticular which does not fail to wreak itself also
56
ESSAY II.
in the general history; I mean, 'the foolish face
of praise,' the forced smile which we put on in
company where we do not feel at ease in answer
to conversation which does not interest us. The
muscles, not spontaneously moved, but moved
by a low usurping wilfulness, grow tight about
the outline of the face, and make the most dis-
agreeable sensation, a sensation of rebuke and
warning which no brave young man will suffer
twice,
For nonconformity the world whips you
with its displeasure. And therefore a man must
know how to estimate a sour face. The by-
standers look askance on him in the public street
or in the friend's parlour. If this aversation had
its origin in contempt and resistance like his
own, he might well go home with a sad coun-
tenance; but the sour faces of the multitude,
like their sweet faces, have no deep cause,
disguise no god, but are put on and off as the
wind blows and a newspaper directs. Yet is
the discontent of the multitude more formidable
than that of the senate and the college. It is
easy enough for a firm man who knows the
world to brook the rage of the cultivated classes.
Their rage is decorous and prudent; for they are
timid, as being very vulnerable themselves. But
when to their feminine rage the indignation of
SELF-RELIANCE.
57
the people is added, when the ignorant and the
poor are aroused, when the unintelligent brute
force that lies at the bottom of society is made
to growl and mow, it needs the habit of magna-
nimity and religion to treat it godlike as a trifle
of no concernment.
The other terror that scares us from self-
trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past
act or word, because the eyes of others have no
other data for computing our orbit than our past
acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.
But why should you keep your head over
your shoulder? Why drag about this mon-
strous corpse of your memory, lest you contra-
dict somewhat you have stated in this or that
public place? Suppose you should contradict
yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of
wisdom never to rely on your memory alone,
scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but bring
the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed
present, and live ever in a new day. Trust
your emotion. In your metaphysics you have
denied personality to the Deity: yet when the
devout motions of the soul come, yield to them
heart and life, though they should clothe God
with shape and colour. Leave your theory, as
Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and
flee.
D 2
58
ESSAY II.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of
little minds, adored by little statesmen and phi-
losophers and divines. With consistency a great
soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well
concern himself with his shadow on the wall.
Out upon your guarded lips! Sew them up
with packthread, do. Else, if you would be a
man, speak what you think to-day in words as
hard as cannon-balls, and to-morrow speak what
to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though
it contradict every thing you said to-day. Ah,
then, exclaim the aged ladies, you shall be sure
to be misunderstood. Misunderstood! It is
a right fool's word. Is it so bad then to be
misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood,
and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Coper-
nicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure
and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great
is to be misunderstood.
I suppose no man can violate his nature.
All the sallies of his will are rounded in by the
law of his being, as the inequalities of Andes and
Himmaleh are insignificant in the curve of the
sphere. Nor does it matter how you gauge and
try him.
A character is like an acrostic or
Alexandrian stanza;-read it forward, back-
ward, or across, it still spells the same thing.
In this pleasing contrite wood-life which God
SELF-RELIANCE.
59
allows me, let me record day by day my honest
thought, without prospect or retrospect, and I
cannot doubt it will be found symmetrical, though
I mean it not, and see it not. My book should
smell of pines and resound with the hum of in-
sects. The swallow over my window should
interweave that thread or straw he carries in his
bill into my web also. We pass for what we are.
Character teaches above our wills. Men ima-
gine that they communicate their virtue or vice
only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue
or vice emit a breath every moment.
Fear never but you shall be consistent in
whatever variety of actions, so they be each
honest and natural in their hour. For of one
will the actions will be harmonious, however
unlike they seem. These varieties are lost sight
of when seen at a little distance, at a little
height of thought. One tendency unites them
all. The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag
line of a hundred tacks. This is only micro-
scopic criticism. See the line from a sufficient
distance, and it straightens itself to the average
tendency. Your genuine action will explain
itself, and will explain your other genuine
actions. Your conformity explains nothing.
Act singly, and what you have already done
singly will justify you now.
Greatness always
60
ESSAY II.
appeals to the future. If I can be great enough
now to do right and scorn eyes, I must have done
so much right before as to defend me now. Be it
how it will, do right now. Always scorn appear-
ances, and you always may. The force of charac-
ter is cumulative. All the forgone days of virtue
work their health into this. What makes the ma-
jesty of the heroes of the senate and the field,
which so fills the imagination? The conscious-
ness of a train of great days and victories behind.
There they all stand, and shed an united light
on the advancing actor. He is attended as by a
visible escort of angels to every man's eye. That
is it which throws thunder into Chatham's voice,
and dignity into Washington's port, and America
into Adams's eye. Honour is venerable to us,
because it is no ephemeris. It is always ancient
virtue. We worship it to-day, because it is not
of to-day. We love it and pay it homage, be-
cause it is not a trap for our love and homage,
but is self-dependent, self-derived, and therefore
of an old immaculate pedigree, even if shewn in
a young person.
I hope in these days we have heard the last
of conformity and consistency. Let the words
be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward. In-
stead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle
from the Spartan fife. Let us bow and apolo-
SELF-RELIANCE.
61
gise never more.
at my house. I do
He measures
You are con-
Ordinarily
A great man is coming to eat
not wish to please him: I wish
that he should wish to please me. I will stand
here for humanity; and though I would make it
kind, I would make it true. Let us affront and
reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid
contentment of the times, and hurl in the face
of custom, and trade, and office, the fact which
is the upshot of all history, that there is a great
responsible Thinker and Actor moving wherever
moves a man; that a true man belongs to no
other time or place, but is the centre of things.
Where he is, there is nature.
you, and all men, and all events.
strained to accept his standard.
every body in society reminds us of somewhat
else or of some other person. Character, rea-
lity, reminds you of nothing else. It takes place
of the whole creation. The man must be so
much that he must make all circumstances in-
different,put all means into the shade. This
all great men are and do. Every true man is a
cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite
spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish
his thought; — and posterity seem to follow his
steps as a procession. A man Cæsar is born,
and for ages after we have a Roman Empire.
Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow
62
ESSAY II.
and cleave to his genius, that he is confounded
with virtue and the possible of man. An insti-
tution is the lengthened shadow of one man;
as, the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of
Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of
Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called 'the height
of Rome;' and all history resolves itself very
easily into the biography of a few stout and ear-
nest persons.
Let a man, then, know his worth, and keep
things under his feet. Let him not peep or
steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a
charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper, in the
world which exists for him. But the man in
the street, finding no worth in himself which
corresponds to the force which built a tower or
sculptured a marble god, feels poor when he
looks on these. To him a palace, a statue, or
a costly book have an alien and forbidding air,
much like a gay equipage, and seem to say like
that, "Who are you, sir?" Yet they all are his,
suitors for his notice, petitioners to his faculties
that they will come out and take possession.
The picture waits for my verdict: it is not to
command me, but I am to settle its claims to
praise. That popular fable of the sot who was
picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to
the duke's house, washed and dressed and laid
SELF-RELIANCE.
63
in the duke's bed, and, on his waking, treated
with all obsequious ceremony like the duke,
and assured that he had been insane,
owes its
popularity to the fact, that it symbolises so well
the state of man, who is in the world a sort of
sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his
reason, and finds himself a true prince.
Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic.
In history, our imagination makes fools of us,
plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, power
and estate, are a gaudier vocabulary than private
John and Edward in a small house and common
day's work: but the things of life are the same
to both; the sum - total of both is the same.
Why all this deference to Alfred, and Scander-
beg, and Gustavus? Suppose they were vir-
tuous: did they wear out virtue? As great a
stake depends on your private act to-day, as fol-
lowed their public and renowned steps. When
private men shall act with vast views, the lustre
will be transferred from the actions of kings to
those of gentlemen.
The world has indeed been instructed by its
kings, who have so magnetised the eyes of na-
tions. It has been taught by this colossal sym-
bol the mutual reverence that is due from man
to man. The joyful loyalty with which men
have everywhere suffered the king, the noble,
64
ESSAY II.
or the great proprietor to walk among them by
a law of his own; make his own scale of men
and things, and reverse theirs; pay for benefits
not with money but with honour, and represent
the Law in his person,-was the hieroglyphic by
which they obscurely signified their conscious-
ness of their own right and comeliness, the right
of every man.
The magnetism which all original action ex-
erts is explained when we inquire the reason of
self-trust. Who is the Trustee? What is the
aboriginal Self on which a universal reliance
may be grounded? What is the nature and
power of that science-baffling star, without pa-
rallax, without calculable elements, which shoots
a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure
actions, if the least mark of independence ap-
pear? The inquiry leads us to that source, at
once the essence of genius, the essence of virtue,
and the essence of life, which we call Spontaneity
or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom
as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tui-
tions. In that deep force, the last fact, behind
which analysis cannot go, all things find their
common origin. For the sense of being, which
in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the
soul, is not diverse from things, from space,
from light, from time, from man, but one with
SELF-RELIANCE.
65
them, and proceedeth obviously from the same
source whence their life and being also proceed-
eth. We first share the life by which things
exist, and afterwards see them as appearances
in nature, and forget that we have shared their
cause. Here is the fountain of action and the
fountain of thought. Here are the lungs of
that inspiration which giveth man wisdom, of
that inspiration of man which cannot be denied.
without impiety and atheism. We lie in the
lap of immense intelligence, which makes us
organs of its activity and receivers of its truth.
When we discern justice, when we discern truth,
we do nothing of ourselves but allow a passage
to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if
we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all
metaphysics, all philosophy is at fault. Its pre-
sence or its absence is all we can affirm. Every
man discerns between the voluntary acts of his
mind, and his involuntary perceptions. And to
his involuntary perceptions he knows a perfect
respect is due. He may err in the expression
of them, but he knows that these things are so,
like day and night, not to be disputed. All my
wilful actions and acquisitions are but roving;
the most trivial reverie, the faintest native
emotion are domestic and divine. Thoughtless
people contradict as readily the statement of
66
ESSAY II.
perceptions as of opinions, or rather much more
readily; for they do not distinguish between per-
ception and notion. They fancy that I choose
to see this or that thing. But perception is not
whimsical, but fatal. If I see a trait, my chil-
dren will see it after me, and in course of time
all mankind, although it may chance that no
one has seen it before me. For my perception
of it is as much a fact as the sun.
The relations of the soul to the divine spirit
are so pure that it is profane to seek to inter-
pose helps. It must be that when God speak-
eth, he should communicate not one thing, but
all things; should fill the world with his voice;
should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls,
from the centre of the present thought; and
new date and new create the whole. Whenever
a mind is simple, and receives a divine wisdom,
then old things pass away,-means, teachers,
texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs
past and future into the present hour. All
things are made sacred by relation to it,-one
thing as much as another. All things are dis-
solved to their centre by their cause, and in the
universal miracle petty and particular miracles
disappear. This is and must be. If, therefore,
a man claims to know and speak of God, and
carries you backward to the phraseology of some
SELF-RELIANCE.
67
old mouldered nation in another country, in an-
other world, believe him not. Is the acorn
better than the oak which is its fulness and
completion? Is the parent better than the
child into whom he has cast his ripened being?
Whence then this worship of the past? The
centuries are conspirators against the sanity and
majesty of the soul. Time and space are but
physiological colours which the eye maketh, but
the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it
was, is night; and history is an impertinence
and an injury, if it be anything more than a
cheerful apologue or parable of my being and
becoming.
Man is timid and apologetic. He is no
longer upright. He dares not say "I think,"
"I am," but quotes some saint or sage. He is
ashamed before the blade of grass or the blow-
ing rose. These roses under my window make
no reference to former roses or to better ones;
they are for what they are; they exist with
God to-day. There is no time to them. There
is simply the rose; it is perfect in every mo-
ment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has
burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown
flower there is no more; in the leafless root
there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it
satisfies nature, in all moments alike. There is
68
ESSAY II.
no time to it. But man postpones or remembers;
he does not live in the present, but with reverted
eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches
that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee
the future. He cannot be happy and strong
until he too lives with nature in the present,
above time.
This should be plain enough. Yet see what
strong intellects dare not yet hear God himself,
unless he speak the phraseology of I know not
what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall
not always set so great a price on a few texts,
on a few lives. We are like children who re-
peat by rote the sentences of grandames and
tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men of
talents and character they chance to see,-pain-
fully recollecting the exact words they spoke;
afterwards, when they come into the point of
view which those had who uttered these sayings,
they understand them, and are willing to let the
words go; for, at any time, they can use words
as good, when occasion comes. So was it with
us; so will it be, if we proceed. If we live truly,
we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong
man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be
weak. When we have new perception, we shall
gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded
treasures as old rubbish. When a man lives
SELF-RELIANCE.
69
with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the
murmur of the brook and the rustle of the
corn.
And now at last the highest truth on this
subject remains unsaid, probably cannot be
said; for all that we say is the far-off re-
membering of the intuition. That thought, by
what I can now nearest approach to say it, is
this. When good is near you, when you have
life in yourself, it is not by any known or ap-
pointed way; you shall not discern the foot-
prints of any other; you shall not see the face
of man; you shall not hear any name; - the
way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly
strange and new. It shall exclude all other
being. You take the way from man, not to
man. All persons that ever existed are its
fugitive ministers. There shall be no fear in
it. Fear and hope are alike beneath it. It asks
nothing. There is somewhat low even in hope.
We are then in vision. There is nothing that
can be called gratitude nor properly joy. The
soul is raised over passion. It seeth identity
and eternal causation. It is a perceiving that
Truth and Right are. Hence it becomes a
Tranquillity out of the knowing that all things
Vast spaces of nature, the Atlantic
Ocean, the South Sea; vast intervals of time,
go well.
70
ESSAY II.
years, centuries, are of no account. This which
I think and feel, underlay that former state
of life and circumstances, as it does underlie
my present, and will always all circumstance,
and what is called life, and what is called
death.
Life only avails, not the having lived. Power
ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the
moment of transition from a past to a new state;
in the shooting of the gulf; in the darting to
an aim. This one fact the world hates, that the
soul becomes; for that forever degrades the past;
turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a
shame; confounds the saint with the rogue;
shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside. Why
Inasmuch
then do we prate of self-reliance?
as the soul is present, there will be power not
confident but agent. To talk of reliance, is a
poor external way of speaking. Speak rather
of that which relies, because it works and is.
Who has more soul than I masters me, though
he should not raise his finger. Round him I
must revolve by the gravitation of spirits;
who has less, I rule with like facility. We
fancy it rhetoric when we speak of eminent vir-
tue. We do not yet see that virtue is Height,
and that a man or a company of men plastic and
permeable to principles, by the law of nature
SELF-RELIANCE.
71
must overpower and ride all cities, nations,
kings, rich men, poets, who are not.
This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly
reach on this as on every topic, the resolution
of all into the ever-blessed ONE. Virtue is the
governor, the creator, the reality. All things
real are so by so much of virtue as they contain.
Hardship, husbandry, hunting, whaling, war,
eloquence, personal weight, are somewhat, and
engage my respect as examples of the soul's pre-
sence and impure action. I see the same law
working in nature for conservation and growth.
The poise of a planet, the bended tree recover-
ing itself from the strong wind, the vital re-
sources of every vegetable and animal, are
also demonstrations of the self-sufficing, and
therefore self-relying soul. All history, from
its highest to its trivial passages, is the various
record of this power.
Thus all concentrates: let us not rove; let
us sit at home with the cause. Let us stun and
astonish the intruding rabble of men and books
and institutions by a simple declaration of the
divine fact. Bid them take their shoes from
off their feet, for God is here within. Let our
simplicity judge them, and our docility to our
own law demonstrate the poverty of nature and
fortune beside our native riches.
72
ESSAY II.
But now we are a mob. Man does not stand
in awe of man, nor is the soul admonished to
stay at home, to put itself in communication
with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to
beg a cup of water of the urns of men.
We
must go alone. Isolation must precede true
society. I like the silent church before the
service begins, better than any preaching. How
far off, how cool, how chaste the persons look,
begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary!
So let us always sit. Why should we assume
the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or
child, because they sit around our hearth, or
are said to have the same blood?
have my blood, and I have all men's.
All men
Not for
that will I adopt their petulance or folly, even
to the extent of being ashamed of it. But your
isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual,
that is, must be elevation. At times the whole
world seems to be in conspiracy to importune
you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child,
sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once
at thy closet-door and say, "Come out unto us.
-Do not spill thy soul; do not all descend;
keep thy state; stay at home in thine own hea-
ven; come not for a moment into their facts,
into their hubbub of conflicting appearances,
but let in the light of thy law on their confu-
SELF-RELIANCE.
73
sion. The power men possess to annoy me, I
give them by a weak curiosity. No man can
come near me but through my act.
• What
we love, that we have; but by desire we bereave
ourselves of the love.'
If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of
obedience and faith, let us at least resist our
temptations, let us enter into the state of war,
and wake Thor and Woden, courage and con-
stancy, in our Saxon breasts. This is to be done.
in our smooth times by speaking the truth.
Check this lying hospitality and lying affection.
Live no longer to the expectation of these
deceived and deceiving people with whom we
converse. Say to them, O father, O mother, O
wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you
after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I
am the truth's. Be it known unto you that
henceforward I obey no law less than the eter-
nal law. I will have no covenants but proxi-
mities. I shall endeavour to nourish my pa-
rents, to support my family, to be the chaste
husband of one wife, but these relations I
must fill after a new and unprecedented way.
I appeal from your customs. I must be my-
self. I cannot break myself any longer for you,
or you. If you can love me for what I am, we
shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still
E
74
ESSAY II.
seek to deserve that you should. I must be
myself. I will not hide my tastes or aversions.
I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I
will do strongly before the sun and moon what-
ever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints.
If you are noble, I will love you; if you are
not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocri-
tical attentions. If you are true, but not in the
same truth with me, cleave to your companions;
I will seek my own.
I do this not selfishly, but
humbly and truly. It is alike your interest and
mine and all men's, however long we have dwelt
in lies, to live in truth. Does this sound harsh
to-day? You will soon love what is dictated by
your nature as well as mine; and if we follow
the truth, it will bring us out safe at last.—But
so you may give these friends pain. Yes, but I
cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save
their sensibility. Besides, all persons have their
moments of reason, when they look out into the
region of absolute truth; then will they justify
me and do the same thing.
The populace think that your rejection of
popular standards is a rejection of all standard,
and mere antinomianism; and the bold sensualist
will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes.
But the law of consciousness abides. There are
two confessionals, in one or the other of which
SELF-RELIANCE.
75
we must be shriven. You may fulfil your round
of duties by clearing yourself in the direct, or
in the reflex way. Consider whether you have
satisfied your relations to father, mother, cousin,
neighbour, town, cat, and dog; whether any of
these can upbraid you. But I may also neglect
this reflex standard, and absolve me to myself.
I have my own stern claims and perfect circle.
It denies the name of duty to many offices that
are called duties. But if I can discharge its
debts, it enables me to dispense with the po-
pular code. If any one imagines that this law
is lax, let him keep its commandment one day.
And truly it demands something godlike in
him who has cast off the common motives of
humanity, and has ventured to trust himself for
a task-master. High be his heart, faithful his
will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest
be doctrine, society, law to himself, that a simple
purpose may be to him as strong as iron neces-
sity is to others.
If any man consider the present aspects of
what is called by distinction society, he will see
the need of these ethics. The sinew and heart
of man seem to be drawn out, and we are be-
come timorous desponding whimperers. We are
afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death,
and afraid of each other. Our age yields no
76
ESSAY II.
great and perfect persons.
We want men and
women who shall renovate life and our social
state, but we see that most natures are insol-
vent; cannot satisfy their own wants, have an
ambition out of all proportion to their practical
force, and so do lean and beg day and night con-
tinually. Our housekeeping is mendicant; our
arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion
we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us.
We are parlour soldiers. The rugged battle of
fate, where strength is born, we shun.
If our young men miscarry in their first en-
terprizes, they lose all heart. If the young mer-
chant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest
genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not
installed in an office within one year afterwards
in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York,
it seems to his friends and to himself that he is
right in being disheartened and in complaining the
rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hamp-
shire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the pro-
fessions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a
school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Con-
gress, buys a township, and so forth, in succes-
sive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his
feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He
walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame
in not studying a profession,' for he does not
6
SELF-RELIANCE.
77
He has not
Let a stoic.
postpone his life, but lives already.
one chance, but a hundred chances.
arise who shall reveal the resources of man, and
tell men they are not leaning willows, but can
and must detach themselves; that with the ex-
ercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear;
that a man is the word made flesh, born to
shed healing to the nations; that he should be
ashamed of our compassion; and that the mo-
ment he acts from himself, tossing the laws,
the books, idolatries, and customs out of the
window, we pity him no more, but thank and
revere him;—and that teacher shall restore the
life of man to splendour, and make his name
dear to all History.
It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance,
-a new respect for the divinity in man,—must
work a revolution in all the offices and relations
. men; in their religion; in their education;
in their pursuits; their modes of living; their
association; in their property; in their specu-
lative views.
1. In what prayers do men allow themselves!
That which they call a holy office, is not so much
as brave and manly. Prayer looks abroad, and
asks for some foreign addition to come through
some foreign virtue, and loses itself in endless
mazes of natural and supernatural, and media-
78
ESSAY II.
torial and miraculous. Prayer that craves a
particular commodity-any thing less than all
good, is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation
of the facts of life from the highest point of
view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and
jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronoun-
cing his works good. But prayer as a means to
effect a private end, is theft and meanness. It
supposes dualism and not unity in nature and
consciousness. As soon as the man is at one
with God, he will not beg. He will then see
prayer in all action. The prayer of the farmer
kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the
rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are
true prayers heard throughout nature, though
for cheap ends. Caratach, in Fletcher's Bon-
duca, when admonished to inquire the mind of
the god Audate, replies,
"His hidden meaning lies in our endeavours,
Our valours are our best gods.”
Another sort of false prayers are our regrets.
Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is in-
firmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can
thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your
own work, and already the evil begins to be
repaired. Our sympathy is just as base. We
come to them who weep foolishly, and sit down
and cry for company, instead of imparting to
SELF-RELIANCE.
79
them truth and health in rough electric shocks,
putting them once more in communication with
the soul. The secret of fortune is joy in our
hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is
the self-helping man. For him all doors are
flung wide. Him all tongues greet, all honours
crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love
goes out to him and embraces him, because he
did not need it. We solicitously and apologeti-
cally caress and celebrate him, because he held
on his way and scorned our disapprobation. The
gods love him, because men hated him.
"To
the persevering mortal," said Zoroaster, "the
blessed Immortals are swift."
As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so
are their creeds a disease of the intellect. They
say with those foolish Israelites, "Let not God
speak to us, lest we die. Speak thou, speak
any man with us, and we will obey." Every-
where I am bereaved of meeting God in my
brother, because he has shut his own temple-
doors, and recites fables merely of his brother's,
or his brother's brother's God. Every new mind
is a new classification. If it prove a mind of
uncommon activity and power, a Locke, a La-
voisier, a Hutton, a Bentham, a Spurzheim, it
imposes its classification on other men, and lo!
a new system. In proportion always to the
80
ESSAY II.
depth of the thought, and so to the number of
the objects it touches and brings within reach
of the pupil, is his complacency. But chiefly
is this apparent in creeds and churches, which
are also classifications of some powerful mind
acting on the great elemental thought of Duty,
and man's relation to the Highest. Such is Cal-
vinism, Quakerism, Swedenborgianism. The
pupil takes the same delight in subordinating
every thing to the new terminology, that a girl
does who has just learned botany, in seeing a
new earth and new seasons thereby. It will
happen for a time, that the pupil will feel a real
debt to the teacher, will find his intellectual
power has grown by the study of his writings.
This will continue until he has exhausted his
master's mind. But in all unbalanced minds
the classification is idolised, passes for the end,
and not for a speedily exhaustible means, so that
the walls of the system blend to their eye in the
remote horizon with the walls of the universe ;
the luminaries of heaven seem to them hung on
the arch their master built. They cannot ima-
gine how you aliens have any right to see,-
how you can see; "It must be somehow that
you stole the light from us." They do not yet
perceive, that light unsystematic, indomitable,
will break into any cabin, even into theirs. Let
SELF-RELIANCE.
81
If they
them chirp awhile and call it their own.
are honest and do well, presently their neat new
pinfold will be too strait and low, will crack,
will lean, will rot and vanish, and the immortal
light, all young and joyful, million-orbed, mil-
lion-coloured, will beam over the universe as on
the first morning.
2. It is for want of self-culture that the idol
of Travelling, the idol of Italy, of England, of
Egypt, remains for all educated Americans.
They who made England, Italy, or Greece vene-
rable in the imagination, did so not by ram-
bling round creation as a moth round a lamp,
but by sticking fast where they were, like an
axis of the earth. In manly hours we feel that
duty is our place, and that the merrymen of cir-
cumstance should follow as they may. The soul
is no traveller: the wise man stays at home with
the soul; and when his necessities, his duties, on
any occasion call him from his house, or into
foreign lands, he is at home still, and is not gad-
ding abroad from himself, and shall make men
sensible by the expression of his countenance,
that he goes the missionary of wisdom and vir-
tue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign,
and not like an interloper or a valet.
I have no churlish objection to the circum-
navigation of the globe for the purposes of art,
E 2
82
ESSAY II.
of study, and benevolence, so that the man is
first domesticated, or does not go abroad with
the hope of finding somewhat greater than he
knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get
somewhat which he does not carry, travels away
from himself, and grows old even in youth among
old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and
mind have become old and dilapidated as they.
He carries ruins to ruins.
Travelling is a fool's paradise. We owe to
our first journeys the discovery that place is
nothing. At home I dream that at Naples, at
Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and
lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace
my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake
up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern
Fact, the sad Self, unrelenting, identical, that I
fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces.
I affect to be intoxicated with sights and sug-
gestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant
goes with me wherever I go.
3. But the rage of travelling is itself only a
symptom of a deeper unsoundness, affecting the
whole intellectual action. The intellect is vaga-
bond, and the universal system of education fos-
ters restlessness. Our minds travel when our
bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate;
and what is imitation but the travelling of the
SELF-RELIANCE.
83
mind? Our houses are built with foreign taste;
our shelves are garnished with foreign orna-
ments; our opinions, our tastes, our whole minds
lean, and follow the Past and the Distant, as the
eyes of a maid follow her mistress. The soul
created the arts wherever they have flourished.
It was in his own mind that the artist sought his
model. It was an application of his own thought
to the thing to be done and the conditions to be
observed. And why need we copy the Doric or
the Gothic model? Beauty, convenience, gran-
deur of thought, and quaint expression, are as
near to us as to any; and if the American artist
will study with hope and love the precise thing
to be done by him, considering the climate, the
soil, the length of the day, the wants of the
people, the habit and form of the government,
he will create a house in which all these will
find themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment
will be satisfied also.
Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own
gift you can present every moment with the
cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation;
but of the adopted talent of another you have.
only an extemporaneous, half possession. That
which each can do best, none but his Maker can
teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor
can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is
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ESSAY II.
the master who could have taught Shakspeare?
Where is the master who could have instructed
Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton?
Every great man is an unique. The Scipionism
of Scipio is precisely that part he could not bor-
row. If any body will tell me whom the great
man imitates in the original crisis when he per-
forms a great act, I will tell him who else than
himself can teach him. Shakspeare will never
be made by the study of Shakspeare. Do that
which is assigned thee, and thou canst not hope
too much or dare too much. There is at this
moment, there is for me an utterance bare and
grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or
trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses, or
Dante, but different from all these. Not pos-
sibly will the soul all rich, all eloquent, with
thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself;
but if I can hear what these patriarchs say,
surely I can reply to them in the same pitch of
voice: for the ear and the tongue are two organs
of one nature. Dwell up there in the simple
and noble regions of thy life, obey thy heart,
and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld again.
4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art
look abroad, so does our spirit of society. All
men plume themselves on the improvement of
society, and no man improves.
SELF-RELIANCE.
85
Society never advances. It recedes as fast
on one side as it gains on the other. Its pro-
gress is only apparent, like the workers of a
treadmill. It undergoes continual changes: it
is barbarous, it is civilised, it is christianised, it
is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not
amelioration. For every thing that is given,
something is taken. Society acquires new arts,
and loses old instincts. What a contrast be-
tween the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking
American, with a watch, a pencil, and a bill of
exchange in his pocket, and the naked New
Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a
mat, and an undivided twentieth of a shed to
sleep under! But compare the health of the
two men, and you shall see that his aboriginal
strength the white man has lost. If the tra-
veller tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad
axe, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite
and heal as if you struck the blow into soft
pitch, and the same blow shall send the white
to his grave.
The civilised man has built a coach, but has
lost the use of his feet. He is supported on
crutches, but loses so much support of muscle.
He has got a fine Geneva watch, but he has lost
the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Green-
wich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure
86
ESSAY II.
of the information when he wants it, the man in
the street does not know a star in the sky. The
solstice he does not observe; the equinox he
knows as little; and the whole bright calendar
of the year is without a dial in his mind. His
note-books impair his memory; his libraries
overload his wit; the insurance-office increases
the number of accidents; and it may be a ques-
tion whether machinery does not encumber;
whether we have not lost by refinement some
energy, by a christianity entrenched in esta-
blishments and forms some vigour of wild vir-
tue. For every stoic was a stoic; but in Chris-
tendom where is the Christian?
A
There is no more deviation in the moral
standard than in the standard of height or bulk.
No greater men are now than ever were.
singular equality may be observed between the
great men of the first and of the last ages; nor
can all the science, art, religion, and philosophy
of the nineteenth century avail to educate greater
men than Plutarch's heroes, three or four and
twenty centuries ago. Not in time is the race
progressive. Phocion, Socrates, Anaxagoras,
Diogenes, are great men, but they leave no class.
He who is really of their class will not be called
by their name, but be wholly his own man, and
in his turn the founder of a sect. The arts and
SELF-RELIANCE.
87
inventions of each period are
and do not invigorate men.
only its costume,
The harm of the
improved machinery may compensate its good.
Hudson and Behring accomplished so much in
their fishing-boats, as to astonish Parry and
Franklin, whose equipment exhausted the re-
sources of science and art. Galileo, with an
opera-glass, discovered a more splendid series
of facts than any one since. Columbus found
the New World in an undecked boat. It is
curious to see the periodical disuse and perish-
ing of means and machinery which were intro-
duced with loud laudation a few years or cen-
The great genius returns to
turies before.
essential man.
We reckoned the improvements
of the art of war among the triumphs of science,
and yet Napoleon conquered Europe by the Bi-
vouac, which consisted of falling back on naked
valour, and disencumbering it of all aids. The
Emperor held it impossible to make a perfect
army, says Las Casas, without abolishing our
arms, magazines, commissaries, and carriages;
until, in imitation of the Roman custom, the
soldier should receive his supply of corn, grind
it in his hand-mill, and bake his bread himself."
Society is a wave. The wave moves onward,
but the water of which it is composed does not.
The same particle does not rise from the valley
88
ESSAY II.
to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal.
The persons who make up a nation to-day, next.
year die, and their experience with them.
And so the reliance on Property, including
the reliance on governments which protect it, is
the want of self-reliance. Men have looked
away from themselves and at things so long, that
they have come to esteem what they call the
soul's progress, namely, the religious, learned,
and civil institutions, as guards of property, and
they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel
them to be assaults on property. They measure
their esteem of each other by what each has, and
not by what each is. But a cultivated man be-
comes ashamed of his property, ashamed of what
he has, out of new respect for his being. Espe-
cially he hates what he has, if he see that it is
accidental, came to him by inheritance, or gift,
or crime; then he feels that it is not having; it
does not belong to him, has no root in him, and
merely lies there, because no revolution or no
robber takes it away. But that which a man is,
does always by necessity acquire, and what the
man acquires is permanent and living property,
which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs,
or revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies,
but perpetually renews itself wherever the man
"Thy lot or portion of life," said the
is put.
SELF-RELIANCE.
89
Caliph Ali, "is seeking after thee; therefore be
at rest from seeking after it." Our dependence
on these foreign goods leads us to our slavish
respect for numbers. The political parties meet
in numerous conventions; the greater the con-
course, and with each new uproar of announce-
ment, The delegation from Essex! The Demo-
crats from New Hampshire! The Whigs of
Maine! the young patriot feels himself stronger
than before by a new thousand of eyes and arms.
In like manner the reformers summon conven-
tions, and vote and resolve in multitude. But
not so, O friends! will the God deign to enter
and inhabit you; but by a method precisely the
reverse. It is only as a man puts off from him-
self all external support, and stands alone, that
I see him to be strong and to prevail. He is
weaker by every recruit to his banner. Is not
a man better than a town? Ask nothing of
men, and in the endless mutation, thou only
firm column must appear the upholder of all
that surrounds thee. He who knows that power
is in the soul, that he is weak only because he
has looked for good out of him and elsewhere,
and so perceiving, throws himself unhesitat-
ingly on his thought, instantly rights himself,
stands in the erect position, commands his
limbs, works miracles; just as a man who stands
90
ESSAY II.
on his feet is stronger than a man who stands
on his head.
In the Will
So use all that is called Fortune. Most men
gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as
her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as un-
lawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and
Effect, the chancellors of God.
work and acquire, and thou hast chained the
wheel of Chance, and shalt always drag her
after thee. A political victory, a rise of rents,
the recovery of your sick, or the return of your
absent friend, or some other quite external
event, raises your spirits, and you think good
days are preparing for you. Do not believe it.
It can never be so. Nothing can bring you
peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you
peace but the triumph of principles.
COMPENSATION.
ESSAY III.
COMPENSATION.
EVER since I was a boy, I have wished to write
a discourse on Compensation: for it seemed to
me when very young, that, on this subject, Life
was ahead of theology, and the people knew
more than the preachers taught. The docu-
ments, too, from which the doctrine is to be
drawn, charmed my fancy by their endless vari-
ety, and lay always before me, even in sleep; for
they are the tools in our hands, the bread in our
basket, the transactions of the street, the farm,
and the dwelling-house, the greetings, the re-
lations, the debts and credits, the influence of
character, the nature and endowment of all men.
It seemed to me also that in it might be shewn
men a ray of divinity, the present action of the
Soul of this world, clean from all vestige of tra-
dition, and so the heart of man might be bathed
by an inundation of eternal love, conversing
94
ESSAY III.
with that which he knows was always and al-
ways must be, because it really is now.
It ap-
peared, moreover, that if this doctrine could be
stated in terms with any resemblance to those
bright intuitions in which this truth is some-
times revealed to us, it would be a star in many
dark hours and crooked passages in our journey,
that would not suffer us to lose our way.
I was lately confirmed in these desires by
hearing a sermon at church. The preacher, a
man esteemed for his orthodoxy, unfolded in
the ordinary manner the doctrine of the Last
Judgment. He assumed that judgment is not
executed in this world; that the wicked are
successful; that the good are miserable; and
then urged from reason and from Scripture
a compensation to be made to both parties in
the next life. No offence appeared to be taken.
by the congregation at this doctrine. As far
as I could observe, when the meeting broke
up, they separated without remark on the ser-
mon.
Yet what was the import of this teaching?
What did the preacher mean by saying that the
good are miserable in the present life? Was
it that houses and lands, offices, wine, horses,
dress, luxury, are had by unprincipled men,
whilst the saints are poor and despised; and
COMPENSATION.
95
that a compensation is to be made to these last
hereafter, by giving them the like gratifications
another day,-bank-stock and doubloons, veni-
son and champagne? This must be the compen-
sation intended; for what else? Is it that they
are to have leave to pray and praise? to love
and serve men? Why, that they can do now.
The legitimate inference the disciple would
draw, was: "We are to have such a good time
as the sinners have now; "-or, to push it to its
extreme import: "You sin now; we shall sin
by and by: we would sin now, if we could; not
being successful, we expect our revenge to-
morrow."
The fallacy lay in the immense concession
that the bad are successful; that justice is not
done now. The blindness of the preacher con-
sisted in deferring to the base estimate of the
market of what constitutes a manly success, in-
stead of confronting and convicting the world
from the truth; announcing the Presence of the
Soul, the omnipotence of the Will; and so es-
tablishing the standard of good and ill, of suc-
cess and falsehood, and summoning the dead to
its present tribunal.
I find a similar base tone in the popular re-
ligious works of the day, and the same doctrines
assumed by the literary men when occasionally
96
ESSAY III.
they treat the related topics. I think that our
popular theology has gained in decorum, and
not in principle, over the superstitions it has
displaced. But men are better than this the-
ology. Their daily life gives it the lie. Every
ingenuous and aspiring soul leaves the doctrine
behind him in his own experience; and all men
feel sometimes the falsehood which they cannot
demonstrate. For men are wiser than they
know. That which they hear in schools and
pulpits without afterthought, if said in con-
versation would probably be questioned in si-
lence. If a man dogmatise in a mixed com-
pany on Providence and the divine laws, he is
answered by a silence which conveys well enough
to an observer the dissatisfaction of the hearer,
but his incapacity to make his own statement.
I shall attempt in this and the following
chapter to record some facts that indicate the
path of the law of Compensation; happy be-
yond my expectation, if I shall truly draw the
smallest arc of this circle.
POLARITY, or action and reaction, we meet
in every part of nature; in darkness and light;
in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow of waters;
in male and female; in the inspiration and ex-
piration of plants and animals; in the systole
COMPENSATION.
97
and diastole of the heart; in the undulations of
fluids and of sound; in the centrifugal and cen-
tripetal gravity; in electricity, galvanism, and
chemical affinity. Superinduce magnetism at
one end of a needle, the opposite magnetism
takes place at the other end. If the south at-
tracts, the north repels. To empty here, you
must condense there. An inevitable dualism
bisects nature, so that each thing is a half, and
suggests another thing to make it whole; as
spirit, matter; man, woman; subjective, objec-
tive; in, out; upper, under; motion, rest ;
yea, nay.
Whilst the world is thus dual, so is every
one of its parts. The entire system of things
gets represented in every particle. There is
somewhat that resembles the ebb and flow of
the sea, day and night, man and woman, in a
single needle of the pine, in a kernel of corn,
in each individual of every animal tribe. The
reaction so grand in the elements is repeated
within these small boundaries. For example,
in the animal kingdom, the physiologist has ob-
served that no creatures are favourites, but a
certain compensation balances every gift and
every defect. A surplusage given to one part is
paid out of a reduction from another part of
the same creature. If the head and neck are
F
98
ESSAY III.
enlarged, the trunk and extremities are cut
short.
The theory of the mechanic forces is another
example. What we gain in power is lost in
time; and the converse. The periodic or com-
pensating errors of the planets is another in-
stance. The influences of climate and soil in
political history are another. The cold climate
invigorates; the barren soil does not breed
fevers, crocodiles, tigers, or scorpions.
For everything you
The same dualism underlies the nature and
condition of man. Every excess causes a de-
fect; every defect an excess. Every sweet hath
its sour; every evil its good. Every faculty
which is a receiver of pleasure, has an equal
penalty put on its abuse. It is to answer for its
moderation with its life. For every grain of wit
there is a grain of folly.
have missed, you have gained something else;
and for everything you gain, you lose something.
If riches increase, they are increased that use
them. If the gatherer gathers too much, na-
ture takes out of the man what she puts into his
chest; swells the estate, but kills the owner.
Nature hates monopolies and exceptions. The
waves of the sea do not more speedily seek a
level from their loftiest tossing, than the varie-
ties of condition tend to equalise themselves.
COMPENSATION.
99
There is always some levelling circumstance,
that puts down the overbearing, the strong,
the rich, the fortunate, substantially on the
same ground with all others. Is a man too
strong and fierce for society, and by temper and
position a bad citizen, -a morose ruffian with
a dash of the pirate in him;-nature sends
him a troop of pretty sons and daughters, who
are getting along in the dame's classes at the
village-school, and love and fear for them
smooths his grim scowl to courtesy. Thus she
contrives to intenerate the granite and felspar,
takes the boar out and puts the lamb in, and
keeps her balance true.
The farmer imagines power and place are
fine things. But the President has paid dear
for his White House. It has commonly cost
him all his peace and the best of his manly at-
tributes. To preserve for a short time so con-
spicuous an appearance before the world, he is
content to eat dust before the real masters, who
stand erect behind the throne. Or, do men de-
sire the more substantial and permanent gran-
deur of genius? Neither has this an immunity.
He who by force of will or of thought is great,
and overlooks thousands, has the responsibility
of overlooking. With every influx of light
comes new danger. Has he light? he must bear
100
ESSAY III.
witness to the light, and always outrun that
sympathy which gives him such keen satisfac-
tion, by his fidelity to new revelations of the in-
cessant soul. He must hate father and mother,
wife and child. Has he all that the world loves
and admires and covets? he must cast behind
him their admiration, and afflict them by faith-
fulness to his truth, and become a by-word and
a hissing.
This Law writes the laws of cities and na-
tions. It will not be baulked of its end in the
smallest iota. It is in vain to build or plot or
combine against it. Things refuse to be mis-
managed long. Res nolunt diu male administrari.
Though no checks to a new evil appear, the
checks exist, and will appear. If the govern-
ment is cruel, the governor's life is not safe. If
you tax too high, the revenue will yield no-
thing. If you make the criminal code sangui-
nary, juries will not convict. Nothing arbitrary,
nothing artificial can endure. The true life and
satisfactions of man seem to elude the utmost
rigours or felicities of condition, and to establish
themselves with great indifferency under all va-
rieties of circumstance. Under all governments
the influence of character remains the same,
in Turkey and in New England about alike.
Under the primeval despots of Egypt, history
COMPENSATION.
101
honestly confesses that man must have been as
free as culture could make him.
These appearances indicate the fact that the
universe is represented in every one of its parti-
cles. Every thing in nature contains all the
powers of nature. Every thing is made of one
hidden stuff; as the naturalist sees one type un-
der every metamorphosis, and regards a horse as
a running man, a fish as a swimming man, a bird
as a flying man, a tree as a rooted man. Each
new form repeats not only the main character
of the type, but part for part all the details, all
the aims, furtherances, hinderances, energies,
and whole system of every other. Every occupa-
tion, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the
world, and a correlative of every other. Each
one is an entire emblem of human life; of its
good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course, and
its end. And each one must somehow accommo-
date the whole man, and recite all his destiny.
The world globes itself in a drop of dew.
The microscope cannot find the animalcule which
is less perfect for being little. Eyes, ears, taste,
smell, motion, resistance, appetite, and organs
of reproduction that take hold on eternity,-all
find room to consist in the small creature. So
do we put our life into every act. The true
doctrine of omnipresence is, that God reappears.
102
ESSAY III.
with all his parts in every moss and cobweb.
The value of the universe contrives to throw it-
self into every point. If the good is there, so is
the evil; if the affinity, so the repulsion; if the
force, so the limitation.
Thus is the universe alive. All things are
moral. That soul which within us is a senti-
ment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspi-
rations; out there in history we can see its fatal
strength. It is almighty. All nature feels its
grasp. It is in the world, and the world was
made by it.' It is eternal, but it enacts itself
in time and space. Justice is not postponed. A
perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts of
life. Οἱ κύβοι Διὸς ἀεὶ εὐπίπτουσι. The dice
of God are always loaded. The world looks.
like a multiplication - table or a mathematical
equation, which, turn it how you will, balances
itself. Take what figure you will, its exact
value, nor more nor less, still returns to you.
Every secret is told, every crime is punished,
every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed,
in silence and certainty. What we call retri-
bution, is the universal necessity by which the
whole appears wherever a part appears. If you
see smoke, there must be fire. If you see a
hand or a limb, you know that the trunk to
which it belongs is there behind.
COMPENSATION.
103
Every act rewards itself, or, in other words,
integrates itself, in a twofold manner; first, in
the thing, or in real nature; and secondly, in
the circumstance, or in apparent nature.
Men
call the circumstance the retribution. The causal
retribution is in the thing, and is seen by the
soul. The retribution in the circumstance is
seen by the understanding; it is inseparable from
the thing, but is often spread over a long time,
and so does not become distinct until after many
years. The specific stripes may follow late after
the offence, but they follow because they accom-
pany it. Crime and punishment grow out of
one stem. Punishment is a fruit that unsus-
pected ripens within the flower of the pleasure
which concealed it. Cause and effect, means
and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for
the effect already blooms in the cause, the end
preëxists in the means, the fruit in the seed.
Whilst thus the world will be whole, and
refuses to be disparted, we seek to act partially,
to sunder, to appropriate; for example, -to
gratify the senses, we sever the pleasure of the
senses from the needs of the character. The in-
genuity of man has been dedicated always to the
solution of one problem, how to detach the
sensual sweet, the sensual strong, the sensual
bright, &c. from the moral sweet, the moral
104
ESSAY III.
deep, the moral fair; that is, again, to contrive
to cut clean off this upper surface so thin as to
leave it bottomless; to get a one end, without an
other end. The soul says, Eat; the body would
feast. The soul says, The man and woman shall
be one flesh and one soul; the body would join
the flesh only. The soul says, Have dominion
over all things to the ends of virtue; the body
would have the power over things to its own
ends.
The soul strives amain to live and work
through all things. It would be the only fact.
All things shall be added unto it,-power, plea-
sure, knowledge, beauty. The particular man
aims to be somebody; to set up for himself;
to truck and higgle for a private good; and, in
particulars, to ride, that he may ride; to dress,
that he may be dressed; to eat, that he may
eat; and to govern, that he may be seen. Men
seek to be great; they would have offices, wealth,
power, and fame. They think that to be great
is to get only one side of nature—the sweet,
without the other side-the bitter.
Steadily is this dividing and detaching coun-
teracted. Up to this day, it must be owned, no
projector has had the smallest success. The
parted water reunites behind our hand. Plea-
sure is taken out of pleasant things, profit out
COMPENSATION.
105
of profitable things, power out of strong things,
the moment we seek to separate them from the
whole. We can no more halve things, and get
the sensual good by itself, than we can get an
inside that shall have no outside, or a light
without a shadow. Drive out nature with a
fork, she comes running back.'
Life invests itself with inevitable conditions,
which the unwise seek to dodge, which one and
another brags that he does not know; brags that
they do not touch him;-but the brag is on hist
lips, the conditions are in his soul. If he escapes
them in one part, they attack him in another
more vital part. If he has escaped them in
form and in the appearance, it is that he has
resisted his life and fled from himself; and the
retribution is so much death. So signal is the
failure of all attempts to make this separation.
of the good from the tax, that the experiment
would not be tried,—since to try it is to be
mad,-but for the circumstance, that when the
disease begins in the will, of rebellion and sepa-
ration, the intellect is at once infected, so that
the man ceases to see God whole in each object,
but is able to see the sensual allurement of an
object, and not see the sensual hurt; he sees the
mermaid's head, but not the dragon's tail; and
thinks he can cut off that which he would have,
F 2
106
ESSAY III.
from that which he would not have.
• How
secret art thou who dwellest in the highest hea-
vens in silence, O thou only great God, sprink-
ling with an unwearied Providence certain penal
blindnesses upon such as have unbridled de-
sires !'*
The human soul is true to these facts in the
painting of fable, of history, of law, of proverbs,
of conversation. It finds a tongue in literature
unawares. Thus the Greeks called Jupiter, Su-
preme Mind; but having traditionally ascribed
to him many base actions, they involuntarily
made amends to Reason, by tying up the hands
of so bad a god. He is made as helpless as a
king of England. Prometheus knows one se-
cret, which Jove must bargain for; Minerva,
another. He cannot get his own thunders;
Minerva keeps the key of them.
"Of all the gods I only know the keys
That ope the solid doors within whose vaults
His thunders sleep."
A plain confession of the in-working of the
All, and of its moral aim. The Indian mytho-
logy ends in the same ethics; and indeed it
would seem impossible for any fable to be in-
vented and get any currency which was not
*St. Augustine: Confessions, book i.
COMPENSATION.
107
moral. Aurora forgot to ask youth for her
lover, and so though Tithonus is immortal, he
is old. Achilles is not quite invulnerable; for
Thetis held him by the heel when she dipped
him in the Styx, and the sacred waters did not
wash that part. Siegfried, in the Nibelungen,
is not quite immortal, for a leaf fell on his back
whilst he was bathing in the Dragon's blood,
and that spot which it covered is mortal. And
so it always is. There is a crack in every thing
God has made. Always, it would seem, there
is this vindictive circumstance stealing in at un-
awares, even into the wild poesy in which the
human fancy attempted to make bold holyday,
and to shake itself free of the old laws,-this
back-stroke, this kick of the gun, certifying that
the law is fatal; that in Nature nothing can be
given, all things are sold.
This is that ancient doctrine of Nemesis, who
keeps watch in the Universe, and lets no offence
go unchastised. The Furies, they said, are at-
tendants on Justice, and if the sun in heaven
should transgress his path, they would punish
him. The poets related that stone walls, and
iron swords, and leathern thongs, had an occult
sympathy with the wrongs of their owners; that
the belt which Ajax gave Hector dragged the
Trojan hero over the field at the wheels of the
108
ESSAY III.
car of Achilles; and the sword which Hector
gave Ajax was that on whose point Ajax fell.
They recorded, that when the Thasians erected
a statue to Theogenes, a victor in the games,
one of his rivals went to it by night, and endea-
voured to throw it down by repeated blows,
until at last he moved it from its pedestal, and
was crushed to death beneath its fall.
This voice of fable has in it somewhat di-
vine. It came from thought above the will of
the writer. That is the best part of each writer
which has nothing private in it. That is the
best part of each which he does not know, that
which flowed out of his constitution, and not
from his too active invention; that which in the
study of a single artist you might not easily find,
but in the study of many you would abstract
as the spirit of them all. Phidias it is not, but
the work of man in that early Hellenic world,
that I would know. The name and circum-
stance of Phidias, however convenient for his-
tory, embarrasses when we come to the highest
criticism. We are to see that which man was
tending to do in a given period, and was hin-
dered, or, if you will, modified in doing, by the
interfering volitions of Phidias, of Dante, of
Shakspeare, the organ whereby man at the mo-
ment wrought.
COMPENSATION.
109
Still more striking is the expression of this
fact in the proverbs of all nations, which are
always the literature of Reason, or the state-
ments of an absolute truth without qualifica-
tion. Proverbs, like the sacred books of each
nation, are the sanctuary of the Intuitions.
That which the droning world, chained to ap-
pearances, will not allow the realist to say in
his own words, it will suffer him to say in pro-
verbs without contradiction. And this law of
laws, which the pulpit, the senate, and the col-
lege deny, is hourly preached in all markets
and all languages by flights of proverbs, whose
teaching is as true and as omnipresent as that
of birds and flies.
All things are double, one against another.
-Tit for tat; an eye for an eye; a tooth for a
tooth; blood for blood; measure for measure;
love for love.—Give, and it shall be given you.
-He that watereth shall be watered himself.-
What will you have? quoth God; pay for it,
and take it.-Nothing venture, nothing have.--
Thou shalt be paid exactly for what thou hast
done, no more, no less. Who doth not work
shall not eat.-Harm watch, harm catch.—
Curses always recoil on the head of him who
imprecates them.-If you put a chain around
the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself
110
ESSAY III.
around your own.-Bad counsel confounds the
adviser. The devil is an ass.
It is thus written, because it is thus in life.
Our action is overmastered and characterised
above our will by the law of nature.
We aim
at a petty end, quite aside from the public good,
but our act arranges itself by irresistible mag-
netism in a line with the poles of the world.
A man cannot speak but he judges himself.
With his will, or against his will, he draws his
portrait to the eye of his companions by every
word. Every opinion reacts on him who utters
it. It is a threadball thrown at a mark, but the
other end remains in the thrower's bag. Or
rather, it is a harpoon thrown at the whale, un-
winding, as it flies, a coil of cord in the boat;
and if the harpoon is not good, or not well
thrown, it will go nigh to cut the steersman in
twain, or to sink the boat.
You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.
'No man had ever a point of pride that was not
injurious to him,' said Burke. The exclusive
in fashionable life does not see that he excludes
himself from enjoyment, in the attempt to ap-
propriate it. The exclusionist in religion does
not see that he shuts the door of heaven on him-
self, in striving to shut out others. Treat men
as pawns and ninepins, and you shall suffer as
COMPENSATION.
111
well as they. If you leave out their heart, you
The senses would make
shall lose your own.
things of all persons; of women, of children, of
the poor. The vulgar proverb, "I will get it.
from his purse or get it from his skin," is sound.
philosophy.
All infractions of love and equity in our so-
cial relations are speedily punished. They are
punished by Fear. Whilst I stand in simple re-
lations to my fellow man, I have no displeasure
in meeting him. We meet as water meets water,
or a current of air meets another, with perfect
diffusion and interpenetration of nature. But as
soon as there is any departure from simplicity
and attempt at halfness, or good for me that is
not good for him, my neighbour feels the wrong;
he shrinks from me as far as I have shrunk from
him; his eyes no longer seek mine; there is war
between us; there is hate in him, and fear in me.
All the old abuses in society, the great and
universal, and the petty and particular, all un-
just accumulations of property and power, are
avenged in the same manner. Fear is an in-
structer of great sagacity, and the herald of all
revolutions. One thing he always teaches, that
there is rottenness where he appears. He is a
carrion crow; and though you see not well what
he hovers for, there is death somewhere. Our
112
ESSAY III.
property is timid, our laws are timid, our cul-
tivated classes are timid. Fear for ages has
boded and mowed and gibbered over govern-
ment and property. That obscene bird is not
there for nothing. He indicates great wrongs,
which must be revised.
Of the like nature is that expectation of
change which instantly follows the suspension
of our voluntary activity. The terror of cloud-
less noon, the emerald of Polycrates, the awe of
prosperity, the instinct which leads every gene-
rous soul to impose on itself tasks of a noble
asceticism and vicarious virtue, are the trem-
blings of the balance of justice through the
heart and mind of man.
Experienced men of the world know very
well that it is always best to pay scot and lot as
they go along, and that a man often pays dear
for a small frugality. The borrower runs in his
own debt. Has a man gained any thing who
has received a hundred favours and rendered
none? Has he gained by borrowing, through
indolence or cunning, his neighbour's wares, or
horses, or money? There arises on the deed
the instant acknowledgment of benefit on the
one part, and of debt on the other; that is, of
superiority and inferiority. The transaction re-
mains in the memory of himself and his neigh-
COMPENSATION.
113
bour; and every new transaction alters, accord-
ing to its nature, their relation to each other.
He may soon come to see that he had better
have broken his own bones than to have ridden
in his neighbour's coach, and that the highest
price he can pay for a thing is to ask for it.'
6
A wise man will extend this lesson to all
parts of life, and know that it is always the part
of prudence to face every claimant, and pay
every just demand on your time, your talents,
or your heart. Always pay; for, first or last,
you must pay your entire debt. Persons and
events may stand for a time between you and
justice, but it is only a postponement. You
must pay at last your own debt. If you are
wise, you will dread a prosperity which only
loads you with more. Benefit is the end of na-
ture. But for every benefit which you receive, a
tax is levied. He is great who confers the most
benefits. He is base, and that is the one base
thing in the universe,-to receive favours, and
render none. In the order of nature we cannot
render benefits to those from whom we receive
them, or only seldom. But the benefit we re-
ceive must be rendered again, line for line, deed
for deed, cent for cent, to somebody. Beware of
too much good staying in your hand. It will fast
114
ESSAY III.
corrupt and worm worms. Pay it away quickly
in some sort.
Labour is watched over by the same pitiless
laws. Cheapest, say the prudent, is the dearest
labour. What we buy in a broom, a mat, a
wagon, a knife, is some application of good sense
to a common want. It is best to pay in your
land a skilful gardener, or to buy good sense ap-
plied to gardening; in your sailor, good sense
applied to navigation; in the house, good sense
applied to cooking, sewing, serving; in your
agent, good sense applied to accounts and af-
fairs. So do you multiply your presence, or
spread yourself throughout your estate. But
because of the dual constitution of all things, in
labour as in life there can be no cheating. The
thief steals from himself. The swindler swindles
himself. For the real price of labour is know-
ledge and virtue, whereof wealth and credit are
signs. These signs, like paper-money, may be
counterfeited or stolen, but that which they re-
present, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot
be counterfeited or stolen. These ends of la-
bour cannot be answered but by real exertions
of the mind, and in obedience to pure motives.
The cheat, the defaulter, the gambler, cannot
extort the benefit, cannot extort the knowledge
COMPENSATION.
115
of material and moral nature, which his honest.
care and pains yield to the operative. The law
of nature is, Do the thing, and you shall have
the power: but they who do not the thing have
not the power.
Human labour, through all its forms, from
the sharpening of a stake to the construction of
a city or an epic, is one immense illustration of
the perfect compensation of the universe. Every
where and always this law is sublime. The ab-
solute balance of Give and Take, the doctrine
that every thing has its price; and if that price
is not paid, not that thing, but something else, is
obtained, and that it is impossible to get any
thing without its price, this doctrine is not less
sublime in the columns of a ledger than in the
budgets of states, in the laws of light and dark-
ness, in all the action and reaction of nature.
cannot doubt that the high laws which each man
sees ever implicated in those processes with which
he is conversant, the stern ethics which sparkle
on his chisel-edge, which are measured out by his
plumb and foot-rule, which stand as manifest in
the footing of the shop-bill as in the history of a
state, do recommend to him his trade, and,
though seldom named, exalt his business to his
imagination.
I
116
ESSAY III.
The league between virtue and nature en-
gages all things to assume a hostile front to vice.
The beautiful laws and substances of the world
persecute and whip the traitor. He finds that
things are arranged for truth and benefit, but
there is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue.
There is no such thing as concealment. Commit
a crime, and the earth is made of glass. Com-
mit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow
fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods
the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel
and mole. You cannot recall the spoken word,
you cannot wipe out the foot-track, you cannot
draw up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet or
clew. Always some damning circumstance tran-
spires. The laws and substances of nature,
water, snow, wind, gravitation, become penalties
to the thief.
On the other hand, the law holds with equal
sureness for all right action. Love, and you
shall be loved. All love is mathematically just,
as much as the two sides of an algebraic equa-
tion. The good man has absolute good, which
like fire turns every thing to its own nature, so
that you cannot do him any harm; but as the
royal armies sent against Napoleon, when he
approached, cast down their colours, and from
COMPENSATION.
117
enemies became friends, so do disasters of all
kinds, as sickness, offence, poverty, prove bene-
factors.
'Winds blow and waters roll
Strength to the brave, and power and deity,
Yet in themselves are nothing.'
The good are befriended even by weakness and
defect. As no man had ever a point of pride
that was not injurious to him, so no man had
ever a defect that was not somewhere made use-
ful to him. The stag in the fable admired his
horns and blamed his feet; but when the hunter
came, his feet saved him, and afterwards, caught
in the thicket, his horns destroyed him. Every
man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults.
As no man thoroughly understands a truth until
first he has contended against it, so no man has
a thorough acquaintance with the hinderances or
talents of men, until he has suffered from the
one, and seen the triumph of the other over his
own want of the same. Has he a defect of tem-
per that unfits him to live in society? There-
by he is driven to entertain himself alone, and
acquire habits of self-help; and thus, like the
wounded oyster, he mends his shell with pearl.
Our strength grows out of our weakness.
Not until we are pricked and stung and sorely
shot at, awakens the indignation which arms.
118
ESSAY III.
A great man is al-
Whilst he sits on the
itself with secret forces.
ways willing to be little.
cushion of advantages, he goes to sleep. When
he is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a
chance to learn something; he has been put on
his wits, on his manhood; he has gained facts;
learns his ignorance; is cured of the insanity of
conceit; has got moderation and real skill. The
wise man always throws himself on the side of
his assailants. It is more his interest than it is
theirs to find his weak point. The wound cica-
trises and falls off from him, like a dead skin;
and when they would triumph, lo! he has passed
on invulnerable. Blame is safer than praise. I
hate to be defended in a newspaper. As long
as all that is said, is said against me, I feel a
certain assurance of success. But as soon as
honied words of praise are spoken for me, I feel
as one that lies unprotected before his enemies.
In general, every evil to which we do not suc-
cumb is a benefactor. As the Sandwich Islan-
der believes that the strength and valour of the
enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain
the strength of the temptation we resist.
The same guards which protect us from dis-
aster, defect, and enmity, defend us, if we will,
from selfishness and fraud. Bolts and bars are
not the best of our institutions, nor is shrewdness
COMPENSATION.
119
in trade a mark of wisdom. Men suffer all their
life long under the foolish superstition that they
can be cheated. But it is as impossible for a
man to be cheated by any one but himself, as
for a thing to be and not to be at the same time.
There is a third silent party to all our bargains.
The nature and soul of things takes on itself the
guaranty of the fulfilment of every contract, so
that honest service cannot come to loss. If you
serve an ungrateful master, serve him the more.
Put God in your debt. Every stroke shall be
repaid. The longer the payment is withholden,
the better for you; for compound interest on
compound interest is the rate and usage of this
exchequer.
The history of persecution is a history of en-
deavours to cheat nature, to make water run up
hill, to twist a rope of sand. It makes no differ-
ence whether the actors be many or one, a tyrant
or a mob. A mob is a society of bodies volun-
tarily bereaving themselves of reason and travers-
ing its work. The mob is man voluntarily de-
scending to the nature of the beast. Its fit hour
of activity is night. Its actions are insane, like
its whole constitution. It persecutes a princi-
ple; it would whip a right; it would tar-and-
feather justice, by inflicting fire and outrage
upon the houses and persons of those who have
120
ESSAY III.
these. It resembles the prank of boys who run
with fire-engines to put out the ruddy aurora
streaming to the stars. The inviolate spirit turns
their spite against the wrong-doers. The martyr
cannot be dishonoured. Every lash inflicted is
a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious
abode; every burned book or house enlightens
the world; every suppressed or expunged word
reverberates through the earth from side to side.
The minds of men are at last aroused; reason
looks out and justifies her own, and malice finds
all her work vain. It is the whipper who is
whipped, and the tyrant who is undone.
Thus do all things preach the indifferency of
circumstances. The man is all. Every thing
has two sides, a good and an evil. Every ad-
vantage has its tax. I learn to be content. But
the doctrine of compensation is not the doctrine
of indifferency. The thoughtless say, on hear-
ing these representations: What boots it to do
well? there is one event to good and evil: if I
gain any good, I must pay for it; if I lose any
good, I gain some other; all actions are indif-
ferent.
There is a deeper fact in the soul than com-
pensation; to wit, its own nature.
not a compensation, but a life.
The soul is
The soul is.
COMPENSATION.
121
Under all this running sea of circumstance, whose
waters ebb and flow with perfect balance, lies the
aboriginal abyss of real Being. Existence, or
God, is not a relation, or a part, but the whole.
Being is the vast affirmative, excluding nega-
tion, self-balanced, and swallowing up all rela-
tions, parts, and times, within itself. Nature,
truth, virtue, are the influx from thence. Vice
is the absence or departure of the same. No-
thing, Falsehood, may indeed stand as the great
Night or shade, on which, as a background, the
living universe paints itself forth; but no fact is
begotten by it; it cannot work; for it is not.
It cannot work any good; it cannot work any
harm. It is harm, inasmuch as it is worse not
to be than to be.
We feel defrauded of the retribution due to
evil acts, because the criminal adheres to his vice
and contumacy, and does not come to a crisis or
judgment anywhere in visible nature. There
is no stunning confutation of his nonsense before
men and angels. Has he therefore outwitted
the law? Inasmuch as he carries the malignity
and the lie with him, he so far deceases from
nature. In some manner there will be a de-
monstration of the wrong to the understanding
also; but should we not see it, this deadly de-
duction makes square the eternal account.
G
122
ESSAY III.
Neither can it be said, on the other hand,
that the gain of rectitude must be bought by
any loss. There is no penalty to virtue; no
penalty to wisdom; they are proper additions of
being. In a virtuous action, I properly am; in
a virtuous act, I add to the world; I plant into
deserts conquered from Chaos and Nothing, and
see the darkness receding on the limits of the
horizon. There can be no excess to love, none
to knowledge, none to beauty, when these at-
tributes are considered in the purest sense.
The
soul refuses all limits. It affirms in man always
an Optimism, never a Pessimism.
His life is a progress, and not a station. His
instinct is trust. Our instinct uses 'more' and
'less' in application to man, always of the pre-
sence of the soul, and not of its absence: the
brave man is greater than the coward; the true,
the benevolent, the wise, is more a man, and not
less, than the fool and knave. There is, there-
fore, no tax on the good of virtue; for that is
the incoming of God himself, or absolute ex-
istence, without any comparative. All external
good has its tax; and if it came without desert
or sweat, has no root in me, and the next wind
will blow it away. But all the good of nature
is the soul's, and may be had, if paid for in na-
ture's lawful coin, that is, by labour, which the
COMPENSATION.
123
heart and the head allow. I no longer wish to
meet a good I do not earn-for example, to find
a pot of buried gold-knowing that it brings
with it new responsibility. I do not wish more
external goods,-neither possessions, nor ho-
nours, nor powers, nor persons. The gain is
apparent, the tax is certain. But there is no
tax on the knowledge that the compensation
exists, and that it is not desirable to dig up
treasure. Herein I rejoice with a serene eternal
peace. I contract the boundaries of possible
mischief. I learn the wisdom of St. Bernard:
Nothing can work me damage except myself;
the harm that I sustain, I carry about with
me, and never am a real sufferer but by my
own fault."
66
In the nature of the soul is the compensation
for the inequalities of condition. The radical
tragedy of nature seems to be the distinction
of More and Less. How can Less not feel the
pain; how not feel indignation or malevolence
towards More? Look at those who have less
faculty, and one feels sad, and knows not well
what to make of it. Almost he shuns their eye;
almost he fears they will upbraid God. What
should they do? It seems a great injustice.
But face the facts, and see them nearly, and
these mountainous inequalities vanish. Love
124
ESSAY III.
reduces them all, as the sun melts the iceberg
in the sea. The heart and soul of all men being
one, this bitterness of His and Mine ceases.
His is mine. I am my brother, and my brother
is me.
If I feel overshadowed and outdone by
great neighbours, I can yet love; I can still
receive; and he that loveth maketh his own the
grandeur he loves. Thereby I make the dis-
covery that my brother is my guardian, acting
for me with the friendliest designs, and the
estate I so admired and envied is my own.
is the eternal nature of the soul to appropriate
and make all things its own. Jesus and Shak-
speare are fragments of the soul, and by love
I conquer and incorporate them in my own
conscious domain. His virtue, -is not that
mine? His wit,
His wit, —if it cannot be made mine,
it is not wit.
It
Such, also, is the natural history of calamity.
The changes which break up at short intervals
the prosperity of men are advertisements of a
nature whose law is growth. Evermore it is
the order of nature to grow, and every soul is
by this intrinsic necessity quitting its whole
system of things, its friends, and home, and
laws, and faith, as the shell-fish crawls out of
its beautiful but stony case, because it no longer
admits of its growth, and slowly forms a new
COMPENSATION.
125
house. In proportion to the vigour of the in-
dividual, these revolutions are frequent, until
in some happier mind they are incessant, and
all worldly relations hang very loosely about
him, becoming, as it were, a transparent fluid
membrane through which the form is alway
seen, and not, as in most men, an indurated
heterogeneous fabric of many dates, and of no
settled character, in which the man is imprisoned.
Then there can be enlargement, and the man
of to-day scarcely recognises the man of yester-
day. And such should be the outward biography
of man in time,—a putting off of dead circum-
stances day by day, as he renews his raiment day
by day. But to us, in our lapsed estate, resting
not advancing, resisting not coöperating with the
divine expansion, this growth comes by shocks.
We cannot part with our friends. We can-
not let our angels go. We do not see that they
only go out that archangels may come in. We
are idolaters of the Old. We do not believe in
the riches of the soul, in its proper eternity and
omnipresence. We do not believe there is any
force in to-day to rival or re-create that beautiful
yesterday. We linger in the ruins of the old
tent, where once we had bread and shelter and
organs, nor believe that the spirit can feed,
cover, and nerve us again. We cannot again
126
ESSAY III.
:
find aught so dear, so sweet, so graceful. But
we sit and weep in vain. The voice of the
Almighty saith, "Up and onward forevermore!"
We cannot stay amid the ruins. Neither will
we rely on the New: and so we walk ever with
reverted eyes, like those monsters who look
backwards.
The
And yet the compensations of calamity are
made apparent to the understanding also, after
long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a
cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of
friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and
unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep
remedial force that underlies all facts.
death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover,
which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat
later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius ;
for it commonly operates revolutions in our way
of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of
youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up
a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of
living, and allows the formation of new ones
more friendly to the growth of character. It
permits or constrains the formation of new ac-
quaintances, and the reception of new influences,
that prove of the first importance to the next
years; and the man or woman who would have
remained a sunny garden-flower, with no room
COMPENSATION.
127
for its roots, and too much sunshine for its head,
by the falling of the walls and the neglect of
the gardener, is made the banian of the forest,
yielding shade and fruit to wide neighbourhoods
of men.
SPIRITUAL LAWS.
G 2
ESSAY IV.
SPIRITUAL LAWS.
WHEN the act of reflection takes place in the
mind, when we look at ourselves in the light
of thought, we discover that our life is em-
bosomed in beauty. Behind us, as we go, all
things assume pleasing forms, as clouds do far
off. Not only things familiar and stale, but
even the tragic and terrible are comely, as they
take their place in the pictures of memory.
The river-bank, the weed at the water-side,
the old house, the foolish person, however
neglected in the passing,- have a grace in the
past. Even the corpse that has lain in the
chambers has added a solemn ornament to the
house. The soul will not know either deformity
or pain. If in the hours of clear reason we
should speak the severest truth, we should say,
that we had never made a sacrifice. In these
hours the mind seems so great, that nothing can
132
ESSAY IV.
be taken from us that seems much. All loss,
all pain is particular: the universe remains to
the heart unhurt. Distress never, trifles never
abate our trust. No man ever stated his griefs
as lightly as he might. Allow for exaggeration
in the most patient and sorely ridden hack that
ever was driven. For it is only the finite that
has wrought and suffered; the infinite lies
stretched in smiling repose.
The intellectual life may be kept clean and
healthful, if man will live the life of nature, and
not import into his mind difficulties which are
none of his. No man need be perplexed in his
speculations. Let him do and say what strictly
belongs to him, and, though very ignorant of
books, his nature shall not yield him any intellec-
tual obstructions and doubts. Our young peo-
ple are diseased with the theological problems
of original sin, origin of evil, predestination,
and the like. These never presented a prac-
tical difficulty to any man, never darkened
across any man's road, who did not go out of
his way to seek them. These are the soul's
mumps and measles and whooping-coughs; and
those who have not caught them cannot de-
scribe their health or prescribe the cure. A
simple mind will not know these enemies. It
is quite another thing that he should be able to
SPIRITUAL LAWS.
133
give account of his faith, and expound to an-
other the theory of his self-union and freedom.
This requires rare gifts. Yet without this self-
knowledge, there may be a sylvan strength and
integrity in that which he is. A few strong
instincts and a few plain rules' suffice us.
My will never gave the images in my mind
the rank they now take. The regular course of
studies, the years of academical and professional
education, have not yielded me better facts than
some idle books under the bench at the Latin
school. What we do not call education is more
precious than that which we call so. We form
no guess at the time of receiving a thought, of
its comparative value. And education often
wastes its effort in attempts to thwart and baulk
this natural magnetism, which with sure discri-
mination selects its own.
In like manner, our moral nature is vitiated
by any interference of our will. People repre-
sent virtue as a struggle, and take to themselves
great airs upon their attainments; and the ques-
tion is everywhere vexed, when a noble nature
is commended, Whether the man is not better
who strives with temptation? But there is no
merit in the matter. Either God is there, or he
is not there. We love characters in proportion
as they are impulsive and spontaneous. The
134
ESSAY IV.
less a man thinks or knows about his virtues,
the better we like him. Timoleon's victories
are the best victories; which ran and flowed
like Homer's verses, Plutarch said. When we
see a soul whose acts are all regal, graceful and
pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such
things can be and are, and not turn sourly on
the angel, and say, "Crump is a better man with
his grunting resistance to all his native devils."
Not less conspicuous is the preponderance of
nature over will in all practical life. There is less
intention in history than we ascribe to it. We
impute deep-laid, far-sighted plans to Cæsar and
Napoleon; but the best of their power was in
nature, not in them. Men of an extraordinary
success, in their honest moments have always
sung," Not unto us, not unto us." According to
the faith of their times, they have built altars to
Fortune or to Destiny, or to St. Julian. Their
success lay in their parallelism to the course of
thought, which found in them an unobstructed
channel; and the wonders of which they were
the visible conductors seemed to the eye their
deed. Did the wires generate the galvanism?
It is even true that there was less in them on
which they could reflect than in another; as
the virtue of a pipe is to be smooth and hollow.
That which externally seemed will and immov-
SPIRITUAL LAWS.
135
ableness, was willingness and self-annihilation.
Could Shakspeare give a theory of Shakspeare?
Could ever a man of prodigious mathematical
genius convey to others any insight into his
methods? If he could communicate that secret,
instantly it would lose all its exaggerated value,
blending with the daylight and the vital energy,
the power to stand and to go.
The lesson is forcibly taught by these obser-
vations, that our life might be much easier and
simpler than we make it; that the world might
be a happier place than it is; that there is no
need of struggles, convulsions, and despairs, of
the wringing of the hands and the gnashing of
the teeth; that we miscreate our own evils. We
interfere with the optimism of nature; for, when-
ever we get this vantage-ground of the past, or
of a wiser mind in the present, we are able to
discern that we are begirt with spiritual laws
which execute themselves.
The face of external nature teaches the same
lesson with calm superiority. Nature will not
have us fret and fume. She does not like our
benevolence or our learning, much better than
she likes our frauds and wars. When we come
out of the caucus, or the bank, or the Aboli-
tion-convention, or the Temperance - meeting,
or the Transcendental club, into the fields
136
ESSAY IV.
and woods, she says to us, "So hot? my little
sir."
We are full of mechanical actions. We must
needs intermeddle, and have things in our own
way, until the sacrifices and virtues of society are
odious. Love should make joy; but our bene-
volence is unhappy. Our Sunday-schools, and
churches, and pauper-societies, are yokes to the
neck. We pain ourselves to please nobody.
There are natural ways of arriving at the same
ends at which these aim, but do not arrive. Why
should all virtue work in one and the same way?
Why should all give dollars? It is very incon-
venient to us country folk, and we do not think
any good will come of it. We have not dollars.
Merchants have: let them give them. Farmers
will give corn. Poets will sing. Women will
Labourers will lend a hand. The child-
ren will bring flowers. And why drag this dead
weight of a Sunday-school over the whole Chris-
tendom? It is natural and beautiful that child-
hood should inquire, and maturity should teach;
but it is time enough to answer questions when
they are asked. Do not shut up the young peo-
ple against their will in a pew, and force the
children to ask them questions for an hour
against their will.
sew.
If we look wider, things are all alike; laws,
SPIRITUAL LAWS.
137
and letters, and creeds, and modes of living, seem
a travestie of truth. Our society is encumbered
by ponderous machinery, which resembles the
endless aqueducts which the Romans built over
hill and dale, and which are superseded by the
discovery of the law that water rises to the level
of its source. It is a Chinese wall, which any
nimble Tartar can leap over. It is a standing
army, not so good as a peace. It is a graduated,
titled, richly appointed Empire, quite superflu-
ous when Town-meetings are found to answer
just as well.
Let us draw a lesson from nature, which al-
ways works by short ways. When the fruit is
ripe, it falls. When the fruit is despatched, the
leaf falls. The circuit of the waters is mere fall-
ing. The walking of man and all animals is a
falling forward. All our manual labour and
works of strength, as prying, splitting, digging,
rowing, and so forth, are done by dint of con-
tinual falling; and the globe, earth, moon, comet,
sun, star, fall forever and ever.
The simplicity of the universe is very differ-
ent from the simplicity of a machine. He who
sees moral nature out and out, and thoroughly
knows how knowledge is acquired and character
formed, is a pedant. The simplicity of nature
is not that which may easily be read, but is in-
138
ESSAY IV.
exhaustible. The last analysis can no wise be
made. We judge of a man's wisdom by his
hope, knowing that the perception of the inex-
haustibleness of nature is an immortal youth.
The wild fertility of nature is felt in comparing
our rigid names and reputations with our fluid
consciousness. We pass in the world for sects
and schools, for erudition and piety; and we are
all the time jejune babes. One sees very well
how Pyrrhonism grew up. Every man sees that
he is that middle point whereof every thing may
be affirmed and denied with equal reason. He
is old, he is young, he is very wise, he is al-
together ignorant. He hears and feels what
you say of the seraphim and of the tin-pedlar.
There is no permanent wise man, except in the
figment of the stoics. We side with the hero,
as we read or paint, against the coward and the
robber; but we have been ourselves that coward
and robber, and shall be again, not in the low
circumstance, but in comparison with the gran-
deurs possible to the soul.
A little consideration of what takes place
around us every day would shew us that a
higher law than that of our will regulates
events; that our painful labours are very un-
necessary, and altogether fruitless; that only in
our easy, simple, spontaneous action are we
SPIRITUAL LAWS.
139
strong, and by contenting ourselves with obe-
dience we become divine. Belief and love,—a
believing love will relieve us of a vast load of
care. O my brothers, God exists. There is a
soul at the centre of nature, and over the will of
every man, so that none of us can wrong the
universe. It has so infused its strong enchant-
ment into nature, that we prosper when we ac-
cept its advice; and when we struggle to wound
its creatures, our hands are glued to our sides,
or they beat our own breasts. The whole course
of things goes to teach us faith. We need only
obey. There is guidance for each of us, and by
lowly listening we shall hear the right word.
Why need you choose so painfully your place,
and occupation, and associates, and modes of
action and of entertainment? Certainly there
is a possible right for you, that precludes the
need of balance and wilful election. For you
there is a reality, a fit place and congenial du-
ties. Place yourself in the middle of the stream
of power and wisdom which flows into you as
life, place yourself in the full centre of that
flood, then you are without effort impelled to
truth, to right, and a perfect contentment.
Then you put all gainsayers in the wrong.
Then you are the world, the measure of right,
of truth, of beauty. If we will not be mar-
140
ESSAY IV.
plots with our miserable interferences, the work,
the society, letters, arts, science, religion of men,
would go on far better than now; and the Hea-
ven predicted from the beginning of the world,
and still predicted from the bottom of the heart,
would organise itself, as do now the rose and the
air and the sun.
I say, do not choose; but that is a figure of
speech by which I would distinguish what is
commonly called choice among men, and which
is a partial act, the choice of the hands, of the
eyes, of the appetites, and not a whole act of
the man.
But that which I call right or good-
ness, is the choice of my constitution; and that
which I call heaven, and inwardly aspire after,
is the state or circumstance desirable to my
constitution; and the action which I in all my
years tend to do, is the work for my faculties.
We must hold a man amenable to reason for
the choice of his daily craft or profession. It
is not an excuse any longer for his deeds that
they are the custom of his trade. What busi-
ness has he with an evil trade? Has he not a
calling in his character?
Each man has his own vocation. The talent
is the call.
There is one direction in which all
space is open to him.
to him. He has faculties silently
inviting him thither to endless exertion. He is
SPIRITUAL LAWS.
141
like a ship in a river; he runs against obstruc-
tions on every side but one; on that side, all
obstruction is taken away, and he sweeps se-
renely over God's depths into an infinite sea.
This talent and this call depend on his organi-
sation, or the mode in which the general soul
incarnates itself in him. He inclines to do
something which is easy to him, and good when
it is done, but which no other man can do. He
has no rival. For the more truly he consults his
own powers, the more difference will his work
exhibit from the work of any other. When he
is true and faithful, his ambition is exactly pro-
portioned to his powers. The height of the
pinnacle is determined by the breadth of the
base. Every man has this call of the power to
do somewhat unique, and no man has any other
call. The pretence that he has another call, a
summons by name and personal election and
outward signs that mark him extraordinary,
and not in the roll of common men,' is fanati-
cism, and betrays obtuseness to perceive that
there is one mind in all the individuals, and no
respect of persons therein.
(
By doing his work, he makes the need felt
which he can supply. He creates the taste by
which he is enjoyed. He provokes the wants to
which he can minister. By doing his own work,
142
ESSAY IV.
he unfolds himself. It is the vice of our public
speaking, that it has not abandonment. Some-
where, not only every orator, but every man,
should let out all the length of all the reins;
should find or make a frank and hearty expres-
sion of what force and meaning is in him. The
common experience is, that the man fits himself
as well as he can to the customary details of
that work or trade he falls into, and tends it as
a dog turns a spit. Then is he a part of the
machine he moves; the man is lost. Until he
can manage to communicate himself to others
in his full stature and proportion as a wise and
good man, he does not yet find his vocation.
He must find in that an outlet for his character,
so that he may justify himself to their eyes for
doing what he does. If the labour is trivial, let
him by his thinking and character make it libe-
ral. Whatever he knows and thinks, whatever
in his apprehension is worth doing, that let him
communicate, or men will never know and ho-
nour him aright. Foolish, whenever you take
the meanness and formality of that thing you
do, instead of converting it into the obedient
spiracle of your character and aims.
We like only such actions as have already
long had the praise of men; and do not perceive
that any thing man can do may be divinely done.
SPIRITUAL LAWS.
143
We think greatness entailed or organised in
some places or duties, in certain offices or oc-
casions; and do not see that Paganini can ex-
tract rapture from a catgut, and Eulenstein from
a jews-harp, and a nimble-fingered lad out of
shreds of paper with his scissors, and Land-
seer out of swine, and the hero out of the
pitiful habitation and company in which he
was hidden. What we call obscure condition
or vulgar society, is that condition and society
whose poetry is not yet written, but which
you shall presently make as enviable and re-
nowned as any. Accept your genius, and say
what you think. In our estimates, let us take
a lesson from kings. The parts of hospitality,
the connexion of families, the impressiveness
of death, and a thousand other things, royalty
makes its own estimate of, and a royal mind
will. To make habitually a new estimate,-
that is elevation.
What a man does, that he has. What has
he to do with hope or fear? In himself is his
might. Let him regard no good as solid but
that which is in his nature, and which must
grow out of him as long as he exists. The goods
of fortune may come and go like summer leaves;
let him play with them, and scatter them on
144
ESSAY IV.
every wind, as the momentary signs of his infi-
nite productiveness.
He may have his own. A man's genius,
the quality that differences him from every
other, the susceptibility to one class of influ-
ences, the selection of what is fit for him,
the rejection of what is unfit, determines for
him the character of the universe. As a man
thinketh, so is he; and as a man chooseth, so
is he and so is nature. A man is a method, a
progressive arrangement; a selecting principle,
gathering his like to him, wherever he goes.
He takes only his own, out of the multiplicity
that sweeps and circles round him. He is like
one of those booms which are set out from the
shore on rivers to catch drift-wood, or like the
loadstone amongst splinters of steel.
Those facts, words, persons, which dwell in
his memory without his being able to say why,
remain, because they have a relation to him
not less real for being as yet unapprehended.
They are symbols of value to him, as they can
interpret parts of his consciousness which he
would vainly seek words for in the conventional
images of books and other minds. What at-
tracts my attention shall have it; as I will go to
the man who knocks at my door, whilst a thou-
SPIRITUAL LAWS.
145
sand persons, as worthy, go by it, to whom I
give no regard. It is enough that these par-
ticulars speak to me. A few anecdotes, a few
traits of character, manners, face, a few incidents,
have an emphasis in your memory out of all
proportion to their apparent significance, if you
measure them by the ordinary standards. They
relate to your gift. Let them have their weight,
and do not reject them, and cast about for illus-
tration and facts more usual in literature. Re-
spect them, for they have their origin in deepest
nature. What your heart thinks great, is great.
The soul's emphasis is always right.
Over all things that are agreeable to his
nature and genius the man has the highest
right. Everywhere he may take what belongs
to his spiritual estate, nor can he take any thing
else, though all doors were open, nor can all the
force of men hinder him from taking so much.
It is vain to attempt to keep a secret from one
who has a right to know it. It will tell itself.
That mood into which a friend can bring us
is his dominion over us. To the thoughts of
that state of mind he has a right. All the se-
crets of that state of mind he can compel. This
is a law which statesmen use in practice. All
the terrors of the French Republic, which held
Austria in awe, were unable to command her
H
146
ESSAY IV.
diplomacy. But Napoleon sent to Vienna M.
de Narbonne, one of the old noblesse, with the
morals, manners, and name of that interest, say-
ing that it was indispensable to send to the old
aristocracy of Europe men of the same con-
nexion, which, in fact, constitutes a sort of free-
masonry. M. Narbonne in less than a fort-
night penetrated all the secrets of the Imperial
Cabinet.
A mutual understanding is ever the firmest
chain. Nothing seems so easy as to speak and
to be understood. Yet a man may come to find
that the strongest of defences and of ties,—that
he has been understood; and he who has re-
ceived an opinion may come to find it the most
inconvenient of bonds.
If a teacher have any opinion which he
wishes to conceal, his pupils will become as
fully indoctrinated into that as into any which
he publishes. If you pour water into a vessel
twisted into coils and angles, it is vain to say,
I will pour it only into this or that;—it will find
its own level in all. Men feel and act the conse-
quences of your doctrine, without being able to
shew how they follow. Shew us an arc of the
curve, and a good mathematician will find out
the whole figure. We are always reasoning
from the seen to the unseen. Hence the per-
SPIRITUAL LAWS.
147
fect intelligence that subsists between wise men
of remote ages. A man cannot bury his mean-
ings so deep in his book, but time and like-
minded men will find them. Plato had a secret
doctrine, had he? What secret can he con-
ceal from the eyes of Bacon? of Montaigne ?
of Kant? Therefore Aristotle said of his works,
they are published and not published.'
(
No man can learn what he has not prepara-
tion for learning, however near to his eyes is the
object. A chemist may tell his most precious
secrets to a carpenter, and he shall be never the
wiser, the secrets he would not utter to a
chemist for an estate. God screens us ever-
more from premature ideas. Our eyes are
holden that we cannot see things that stare us
in the face, until the hour arrives when the
mind is ripened, then we behold them, and
the time when we saw them not is like a
dream.
Not in nature but in man is all the beauty
and worth he sees. The world is very empty,
and is indebted to this gilding, exalting soul for
all its pride. Earth fills her lap with splen-
dours' not her own. The vale of Tempe, Tivoli,
and Rome, are earth and water, rocks and sky.
There are as good earth and water in a thousand
places, yet how unaffecting!
148
ESSAY IV.
People are not the better for the sun and
moon, the horizon and the trees; as it is not
observed that the keepers of Roman galleries,
or the valets of painters, have any elevation of
thought, or that librarians are wiser men than
others. There are graces in the demeanour of a
polished and noble person, which are lost upon
the eye of a churl. These are like the stars
whose light has not yet reached us.
He may see what he maketh. Our dreams
are the sequel of our waking knowledge. The
visions of the night always bear some proportion
to the visions of the day. Hideous dreams are
only exaggerations of the sins of the day. We
see our own evil affections embodied in bad
physiognomies. On the Alps, the traveller some-
times sees his own shadow magnified to a giant,
so that every gesture of his hand is terrific. "My
children," said an old man to his boys scared by
a figure in the dark entry, my children, you
will never see any thing worse than yourselves.”
As in dreams, so in the scarcely less fluid events
of the world, every man sees himself in colossal,
without knowing that it is himself that he sees.
The good which he sees, compared to the evil
which he sees, is as his own good to his own
evil. Every quality of his mind is magnified in
some one acquaintance, and every emotion of
SPIRITUAL LAWS.
149
his heart in some one. He is like a quincunx
of trees, which counts five, east, west, north,
or south; or an initial, medial, and terminal
acrostic. And why not? He cleaves to one per-
son, and avoids another, according to their like-
ness or unlikeness to himself, truly seeking him-
self in his associates, and moreover in his trade,
and habits, and gestures, and meats, and drinks;
and comes at last to be faithfully represented
by every view you take of his circumstances.
What can
He may read what he writeth.
we see or acquire, but what we are? You have
seen a skilful man reading Virgil. Well, that
author is a thousand books to a thousand per-
sons. Take the book into your two hands, and
read your eyes out, you will never find what I
find. If any ingenious reader would have a
monopoly of the wisdom or delight he gets, he
is as secure now the book is Englished, as if
it were imprisoned in the Pelews tongue. It is
with a good book as it is with good company.
Introduce a base person among gentlemen:
it is all to no purpose: he is not their fellow.
Every society protects itself. The company is
perfectly safe, and he is not one of them, though
his body is in the room.
What avails it to fight with the eternal laws
of mind, which adjust the relation of all persons.
150
ESSAY IV.
to each other, by the mathematical measure
of their havings and beings? Gertrude is en-
amoured of Guy; how high, how aristocratic,
how Roman his mien and manners! to live
with him were life indeed: and no purchase is
too great; and heaven and earth are moved to
that end. Well, Gertrude has Guy: but what
now avails how high, how aristocratic, how
Roman his mien and manners, if his heart and
aims are in the senate, in the theatre, and in
the billiard-room, and she has no aims, no con-
versation that can enchant her graceful lord?
He shall have his own society. We can
love nothing but nature. The most wonderful
talents, the most meritorious exertions really
avail very little with us; but nearness or like-
ness of nature, - how beautiful is the ease of
its victory! Persons approach us famous for
their beauty, for their accomplishments, worthy
of all wonder for their charms and gifts: they
dedicate their whole skill to the hour and the
company, with very imperfect result. To be
sure, it would be very ungrateful in us not to
praise them very loudly. Then, when all is
done, a person of related mind, a brother or sis-
ter by nature, comes to us so softly and easily,
so nearly and intimately, as if it were the blood
in our proper veins, that we feel as if some one
SPIRITUAL LAWS.
151
was gone, instead of another having come: we
are utterly relieved and refreshed: it is a sort
of joyful solitude. We foolishly think, in our
days of sin, that we must court friends by com-
pliance to the customs of society, to its dress,
its breeding and its estimates. But later, if we
are so happy, we learn that only that soul can
be my friend, which I encounter on the line of
my own march, that soul to which I do not de-
cline, and which does not decline to me, but,
native of the same celestial latitude, repeats in
its own all my experience. The scholar and
the prophet forget themselves, and ape the cus-
toms and costumes of the man of the world, to
deserve the smile of beauty. He is a fool, and
follows some giddy girl, and not with religious
ennobling passion a woman with all that is se-
rene, oracular, and beautiful in her soul. Let
him be great, and love shall follow him. No-
thing is more deeply punished than the neglect
of the affinities by which alone society should be
formed, and the insane levity of choosing asso-
ciates by others' eyes.
He may set his own rate. It is an universal
maxim, worthy of all acceptation, that a man
may have that allowance he takes. Take the
place and attitude to which you see your un-
questionable right, and all men acquiesce. The
152
ESSAY IV.
world must be just. It always leaves every
man with profound unconcern to set his own
rate. Hero or driveller, it meddles not in the
matter. It will certainly accept your own mea-
sure of your doing and being, whether you
sneak about and deny your own name, or whe-
ther you see your work produced to the con-
cave sphere of the heavens, one with the revo-
lution of the stars.
:
The same reality pervades all teaching. The
man may teach by doing, and not otherwise.
If he can communicate himself, he can teach,
but not by words. He teaches who gives, and
he learns who receives. There is no teaching
until the pupil is brought into the same state
or principle in which you are; a transfusion
takes place he is you, and you are he; then is
a teaching, and by no unfriendly chance or bad
company can he ever quite lose the benefit.
But your propositions run out of one ear as
they ran in at the other. We see it advertised
that Mr. Grand will deliver an oration on the
fourth of July, and Mr. Hand before the Me-
chanics' Association, and we do not go thither,
because we know that these gentlemen will not
communicate their own character and being to
the audience. If we had reason to expect such
a communication, we should go through all in-
SPIRITUAL LAWS.
153
convenience and opposition. The sick would
be carried in litters. But a public oration is an
escapade, a non-committal, an apology, a gag,
and not a communication, not a speech, not a
man.
A like Nemesis presides over all intellectual
works. We have yet to learn that the thing
uttered in words is not therefore affirmed. It
must affirm itself, or no forms of grammar and
no plausibility can give it evidence, and no array
of arguments. The sentence must also contain
its own apology for being spoken.
The effect of any writing on the public mind
is mathematically measurable by its depth of
thought. How much water does it draw? If
it awaken you to think; if it lift you from
your feet with the great voice of eloquence;
then the effect is to be wide, slow, permanent,
over the minds of men; if the pages instruct
you not, they will die like flies in the hour.
The way to speak and write what shall not go
out of fashion, is to speak and write sincerely.
The argument which has not power to reach
my own practice, I may well doubt will fail to
reach yours. But take Sidney's maxim: "Look
in thy heart, and write." He that writes to him-
self writes to an eternal public. That state-
ment only is fit to be made public which you
H 2
154
ESSAY IV.
have come at in attempting to satisfy your own
curiosity. The writer who takes his subject
from his ear and not from his heart, should
know that he has lost as much as he seems to
have gained; and when the empty book has
gathered all its praise, and half the people say
"What poetry! what genius!" it still needs
fuel to make fire. That only profits which is
profitable. Life alone can impart life; and
though we should burst, we can only be valued
as we make ourselves valuable. There is no
luck in literary reputation. They who make
up the final verdict upon every book, are not
the partial and noisy readers of the hour when
it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not
to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to
be overawed, decides upon every man's title to
fame. Only those books come down which de-
serve to last. All the gilt edges and vellum and
morocco, all the presentation-copies to all the
libraries, will not preserve a book in circulation
beyond its intrinsic date. It must go with all
Walpole's Royal and Noble Authors to its fate.
Blackmore, Kotzebue, or Pollok, may endure
for a night, but Moses and Homer stand for-
ever. There are not in the world at any one
time more than a dozen persons who read and
understand Plato:-never enough to pay for an
SPIRITUAL LAWS.
155
edition of his works; yet to every generation
these come duly down, for the sake of those
few persons, as if God brought them in his
hand. No book,' said Bentley, 'was ever
written down by any but itself."
The perma-
nence of all books is fixed by no effort friendly
or hostile, but by their own specific gravity, or
the intrinsic importance of their contents to the
constant mind of man. “Do not trouble your-
self too much about the light on your statue,"
said Michael Angelo to the young sculptor;
"the light of the public square will test its
value."
In like manner the effect of every action is
measured by the depth of the sentiment from
which it proceeds. The great man knew not
that he was great. It took a century or two
for that fact to appear. What he did, he did
because he must; he used no election; it was
the most natural thing in the world, and grew
out of the circumstances of the moment. But
now, every thing he did, even to the lifting of
his finger, or the eating of bread, looks large,
all-related, and is called an institution.
These are the demonstrations, in a few parti-
culars, of the genius of nature: they shew the
direction of the stream. But the stream is blood:
every drop is alive. Truth has not single victo-
156
ESSAY IV.
ries; all things are its organs, not only dust and
stones, but errors and lies. The laws of disease,
physicians say, are as beautiful as the laws of
health. Our philosophy is affirmative, and
readily accepts the testimony of negative facts,
as every shadow points to the sun. By a divine
necessity, every fact in nature is constrained to
offer its testimony.
Human character does evermore publish it-
self. It will not be concealed. It hates dark-
ness,—it rushes into light. The most fugitive.
deed and word, the mere air of doing a thing,
the intimated purpose, expresses character. If
you act, you shew character; if you sit still, you
shew it; if you sleep, you shew it. You think
because you have spoken nothing, when others
spoke, and have given no opinion on the times,
on the church, on slavery, on the college, on
parties and persons, that your verdict is still ex-
pected with curiosity as a reserved wisdom. Far
otherwise; your silence answers very loud. You
have no oracle to utter, and your fellow men
have learned that you cannot help them; for
oracles speak. Doth not wisdom cry, and un-
derstanding put forth her voice?
Dreadful limits are set in nature to the
powers of dissimulation. Truth tyrannises over
the unwilling members of the body. Faces
SPIRITUAL LAWS.
157
never lie, it is said. No man need be deceived,
who will study the changes of expression. When
a man speaks the truth in the spirit of truth, his
eye is as clear as the heavens. When he has
base ends, and speaks falsely, the eye is muddy
and sometimes asquint.
I have heard an experienced counsellor say,
that he feared never the effect upon a jury of a
lawyer who does not believe in his heart that his
client ought to have a verdict. If he does not
believe it, his unbelief will appear to the jury,
despite all his protestations, and will become
their unbelief. This is that law whereby a work
of art, of whatever kind, sets us in the same state
of mind wherein the artist was when he made it.
That which we do not believe, we cannot ade-
quately say, though we may repeat the words
never so often. It was this conviction which
Swedenborg expressed, when he described a
group of persons in the spiritual world endea-
vouring in vain to articulate a proposition which
they did not believe: but they could not, though
they twisted and folded their lips even to indig-
nation.
A man passes for that he is worth. Very
idle is all curiosity concerning other people's
estimate of us, and idle is all fear of remaining
unknown. If a man know that he can do any
158
ESSAY IV.
else,
thing,—that he can do it better than any one
he has a pledge of the acknowledgment
of that fact by all persons. The world is full of
judgment-days, and into every assembly that a
man enters, in every action he attempts he is
gauged and stamped. In every troop of boys
that whoop and run in each yard and square, a
new-comer is as well and accurately weighed in
the balance, in the course of a few days, and
stamped with his right number, as if he had un-
dergone a formal trial of his strength, speed, and
temper. A stranger comes from a distant school,
with better dress, with trinkets in his pockets,
with airs, and pretension: an old boy sniffs there-
at, and says to himself, 'It's of no use: we
shall find him out to-morrow.' • What hath
he done?' is the divine question which searches
men, and transpierces every false reputation. A
fop may sit in any chair of the world, nor be
distinguished for his hour from Homer and
Washington; but there can never be any doubt
concerning the respective ability of human
beings, when we seek the truth. Pretension
may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never
feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension
never wrote an Iliad, nor drove back Xerxes,
nor christianised the world, nor abolished sla-
very.
SPIRITUAL LAWS.
159
Always as much virtue as there is, so much
appears; as much goodness as there is, so much
reverence it commands. All the devils respect
virtue. The high, the generous, the self-de-
voted sect will always instruct and command
mankind. Never a sincere word was utterly
lost. Never a magnanimity fell to the ground.
Always the heart of man greets and accepts
it unexpectedly. A man passes for that he is
worth. What he is, engraves itself on his face,
on his form, on his fortunes, in letters of light,
which all men may read but himself. Conceal-
ment avails him nothing; boasting, nothing.
There is confession in the glances of our eyes,
in our smiles, in salutations, and the grasp of
hands. His sin bedaubs him, mars all his good
impression. Men know not why they do not
trust him; but they do not trust him. His vice
glasses his eye, demeans his cheek, pinches the
nose, sets the mark of the beast on the back of
the head, and writes, O fool! fool! on the fore-
head of a king.
If you would not be known to do any thing,
never do it. A man may play the fool in the
drifts of a desert, but every grain of sand shall
seem to see. He may be a solitary eater, but
he cannot keep his foolish counsel. A broken
complexion, a swinish look, ungenerous acts,
160
ESSAY IV.
and the want of due knowledge,--all blab. Can
a cook, a Chiffinch, an Iachimo, be mistaken for
Zeno or Paul? Confucius exclaimed, 'How
can a man be concealed! How can a man be
concealed!'
On the other hand, the hero fears not, that
if he withhold the avowal of a just and brave
act, it will go unwitnessed and unloved. One
knows it, — himself,—and is pledged by it to
sweetness of peace, and to nobleness of aim,
which will prove in the end a better procla-
mation of it than the relating of the incident.
Virtue is the adherence in action to the nature
of things, and the nature of things makes it
prevalent. It consists in a perpetual substitu-
tion of being for seeming, and with sublime pro-
priety God is described as saying, I AM.
The lesson which all these observations con-
vey, is, Be, and not seem. Let us acquiesce.
Let us take our bloated nothingness out of the
path of the divine circuits. Let us unlearn our
wisdom of the world. Let us lie low in the
Lord's power, and learn that truth alone makes
rich and great.
If you visit your friend, why need you apo-
logise for not having visited him, and waste his
time and deface your own act? Visit him now.
Let him feel that the highest love has come to
SPIRITUAL LAWS.
161
see him, in thee its lowest organ. Or why need
you torment yourself and friend by secret self-
reproaches that you have not assisted him or
complimented him with gifts and salutations
heretofore? Be a gift and a benediction. Shine
with real light, and not with the borrowed re-
flection of gifts. Common men are apologies
for men; they bow the head, they excuse them-
selves with prolix reasons, they accumulate ap-
pearances, because the substance is not.
We are full of these superstitions of sense,
the worship of magnitude. God loveth not size:
whale and minnow are of like dimension. But
we call the poet inactive, because he is not a
president, a merchant, or a porter. We adore
an institution, and do not see that it is founded
on a thought which we have. But real action
is in silent moments. The epochs of our life
are not in the visible facts of our choice of a
calling, our marriage, our acquisition of an
office, and the like; but in a silent thought by
the way-side as we walk; in a thought which
revises our entire manner of life, and says,
'Thus hast thou done, but it were better thus.'
And all our after years, like menials, do serve
and wait on this, and according to their ability
do execute its will. This revisal or correction
is a constant force, which, as a tendency, reaches
162
ESSAY IV.
through our lifetime. The object of the man,
the aim of these moments, is to make daylight
shine through him, to suffer the law to traverse
his whole being without obstruction, so that, on
what point soever of his doing your eye falls, it
shall report truly of his character, whether it be
his diet, his house, his religious forms, his so-
ciety, his mirth, his vote, his opposition. Now
he is not homogeneous, but heterogeneous, and
the ray does not traverse; there are no thorough
lights: but the eye of the beholder is puzzled,
detecting many unlike tendencies, and a life not
yet at one.
Why should we make it a point with our
false modesty to disparage that man we are, and
that form of being assigned to us? A good man
is contented. I love and honour Epaminondas,
but I do not wish to be Epaminondas. I hold
it more just to love the world of this hour than
the world of his hour. Nor can you, if I am
true, excite me to the least uneasiness by saying,
'he acted, and thou sittest still.' I see action
to be good, when the need is, and sitting still to
be also good. Epaminondas, if he was the man
I take him for, would have sat still with joy and
peace, if his lot had been mine. Heaven is large,
and affords space for all modes of love and for-
titude. Why should we be busy-bodies and
SPIRITUAL LAWS.
163
superserviceable? Action and inaction are alike
to the true. One piece of the tree is cut for a
weathercock, and one for the sleeper of a bridge;
the virtue of the wood is apparent in both.
I desire not to disgrace the soul. The fact
that I am here, certainly shews me that the soul
had need of an organ here. Shall I not assume
the post? Shall I skulk and dodge and duck
with my unseasonable apologies and vain mo-
desty, and imagine my being here impertinent?
less pertinent than Epaminondas or Homer being
there? and that the soul did not know its own
needs? Besides, without any reasoning on the
matter, I have no discontent. The good soul
nourishes me alway, unlocks new magazines of
power and enjoyment to me every day. I will
not meanly decline the immensity of good, be-
cause I have heard that it has come to others in
another shape.
Besides, why should we be cowed by the
name of Action? 'Tis a trick of the senses,
no more. We know that the ancestor of every
action is a thought. The poor mind does not.
seem to itself to be any thing, unless it have an
outside badge,some Gentoo diet, or Quaker
coat, or Calvinistic prayer-meeting, or philan-
thropic society, or a great donation, or a high
office, or, any how, some wild contrasting action
164
ESSAY IV.
to testify that it is somewhat. The rich mind
lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature. To
think is to act.
Let us, if we must have great actions, make
our own so. All action is of an infinite elasti-
city, and the least admits of being inflated with
the celestial air until it eclipses the sun and
moon. Let us seek one peace by fidelity. Let
me do my duties. Why need I go gadding into
the scenes and philosophy of Greek and Italian
history, before I have washed my own face, or
justified myself to my own benefactors? How
dare I read Washington's campaigns, when I
have not answered the letters of my own corre-
spondents? Is not that a just objection to much
of our reading? It is a pusillanimous desertion
of our work to gaze after our neighbours. It is
peeping. Byron says of Jack Bunting,
"He knew not what to say, and so he swore.'
I may say it of our preposterous use of books:
'He knew not what to do, and so he read.' I can
think of nothing to fill my time with, and so,
without any constraint, I find the life of Brant.
It is a very extravagant compliment to pay to
Brant, or to General Schuyler, or to General
Washington. My time should be as good as
their time: my world, my facts, all my net of
SPIRITUAL LAWS.
165
relations as good as theirs, or either of theirs.
Rather let me do my work so well that other
idlers, if they choose, may compare my texture
with the texture of these, and find it identical
with the best.
This over-estimate of the possibilities of Paul
and Pericles, this under-estimate of our own,
comes from a neglect of the fact of an identical
nature. Buonaparte knew but one Merit, and
rewarded in one and the same way the good
soldier, the good astronomer, the good poet, the
good player. Thus he signified his sense of a
great fact.
The poet uses the names of Cæsar,
of Tamerlane, of Bonduca, of Belisarius; the
painter uses the conventional story of the Virgin
Mary, of Paul, of Peter. He does not, there-
fore, defer to the nature of these accidental men,
of these stock heroes. If the poet write a true
drama, then he is Cæsar, and not the player of
Cæsar; then the self-same strain of thought,
emotion as pure, wit as subtle, motions as swift,
mounting, extravagant, and a heart as great,
self-sufficing, dauntless, which on the waves of
its love and hope can uplift all that is reckoned
solid and precious in the world, palaces, gar-
dens, money, navies, kingdoms,-marking its
own incomparable worth by the slight it casts
on these gauds of men,—these all are his, and
166
ESSAY IV.
by the power of these he rouses the nations.
But the great names cannot stead him, if he
have not life himself. Let a man believe in
God, and not in names and places and persons.
Let the great soul incarnated in some woman's
form, poor and sad and single, in some Dolly
or Joan, go out to service, and sweep chambers
and scour floors, and its effulgent day-beams
cannot be muffled or hid, but to sweep and
scour will instantly appear supreme and beauti-
ful actions, the top and radiance of human life,
and all people will get mops and brooms; until,
lo, suddenly the great soul has enshrined itself
in some other form, and done some other deed,
and that is now the flower and head of all living
nature.
We are the photometers, we the irritable
goldleaf and tinfoil that measure the accumula-
tions of the subtle element. We know the au-
thentic effects of the true fire through every one
of its million disguises.
LOVE.
ESSAY V.
LOVE.
EVERY soul is a celestial Venus to every other
soul. The heart has its sabbaths and jubilees,
in which the world appears as a hymeneal feast,
and all natural sounds and the circle of the sea-
sons are erotic odes and dances. Love is omni-
present in nature as motive and reward. Love
is our highest word, and the synonym of God.
Every promise of the soul has innumerable ful-
filments; each of its joys ripens into a new want.
Nature, uncontainable, flowing, forelooking, in
the first sentiment of kindness anticipates al-
ready a benevolence which shall lose all par-
ticular regards in its general light. The intro-
duction to this felicity is in a private and tender
relation of one to one, which is the enchantment
of human life; which, like a certain divine rage
and enthusiasm, seizes on man at one period,
and works a revolution in his mind and body;
1
170
ESSAY V.
unites him to his race, pledges him to the do-
mestic and civic relations, carries him with new
sympathy into nature, enhances the power of
the senses, opens the imagination, adds to his
character heroic and sacred attributes, esta-
blishes marriage, and gives permanence to hu-
man society.
The natural association of the sentiment of
love with the heyday of the blood seems to re-
quire that in order to portray it in vivid tints,
which every youth and maid should confess to
be true to their throbbing experience, one must
not be too old. The delicious fancies of youth
reject the least savour of a mature philosophy,
as chilling with age and pedantry their purple
bloom. And therefore I know I incur the im-
putation of unnecessary hardness and stoicism
from those who compose the Court and Parlia-
ment of Love. But from these formidable cen-
sors I shall appeal to my seniors. For it is to
be considered, that this passion of which we
speak, though it begin with the young, yet for-
sakes not the old, or rather suffers no one who
is truly its servant to grow old, but makes the
aged participators of it, not less than the tender
maiden, though in a different and nobler sort.
For it is a fire that, kindling its first embers
in the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught
LOVE.
171
from a wandering spark out of another private
heart, glows and enlarges until it warms and
beams upon multitudes of men and women, upon
the universal heart of all, and so lights up the
whole world and all nature with its generous
flames. It matters not, therefore, whether we
attempt to describe the passion at twenty, at
thirty, or at eighty years. He who paints it at
the first period will lose some of its later, he
who paints it at the last, some of its earlier
traits. Only it is to be hoped that, by patience
and the Muses' aid, we may attain to that in-
ward view of the law, which shall describe a
truth ever young, ever beautiful, so central that
it shall commend itself to the eye at whatever
angle beholden.
And the first condition is, that we must leave
a too close and lingering adherence to the actual,
to facts, and study the sentiment as it appeared
in hope and not in history. For each man sees
his own life defaced and disfigured, as the life
of man is not, to his imagination. Each man
sees over his own experience a certain slime of
error, whilst that of other men looks fair and
ideal. Let any man go back to those delicious
relations which make the beauty of his life,
which have given him sincerest instruction and
nourishment, he will shrink and shrink. Alas!
172
ESSAY V.
I know not why, but infinite compunctions em-
bitter in mature life all the remembrances of
budding sentiment, and cover every beloved
name. Every thing is beautiful seen from the
point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is
sour, if seen as experience. Details are always
melancholy; the plan is seemly and noble. It
is strange how painful is the actual world,-
the painful kingdom of time and place. There
dwells care and canker and fear. With thought,
with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of
joy. Round it all the Muses sing. But with
names and persons, and the partial interests of
to-day and yesterday, is grief.
The strong bent of nature is seen in the
proportion which this topic of personal relations
usurps in the conversation of society. What
do we wish to know of any worthy person so
much as how he has sped in the history of this
sentiment? What books in the circulating li-
braries circulate ? How we glow over these
novels of passion, when the story is told with
any spark of truth and nature! And what fas-▲
tens attention, in the intercourse of life, like
any passage betraying affection between two
parties? Perhaps we never saw them before,
and never shall meet them again. But we see
them exchange a glance, or betray a deep emo-
LOVE.
173
tion, and we are no longer strangers. We un-
derstand them, and take the warmest interest in
the development of the romance. All mankind
love a lover. The earliest demonstrations of
complacency and kindness are nature's most win-
ning pictures. It is the dawn of civility and
grace in the coarse and rustic. The rude vil-
lage boy teazes the girls about the school-house
door; but to-day he comes running into the
entry, and meets one fair child arranging her
satchel; he holds her books to help her, and
instantly it seems to him as if she removed her-
self from him infinitely, and was a sacred pre-
cinct. Among the throng of girls he runs rudely
enough, but one alone distances him: and these
two little neighbours, that were so close just
now, have learned to respect each other's per-
sonality. Or who can avert his eyes from the
engaging, half-artful, half-artless ways of school-
girls who go into the country shops to buy a
skein of silk or a sheet of paper, and talk half
an hour about nothing with the broad-faced,
good-natured shop-boy? In the village they
are on a perfect equality, which love delights
in, and without any coquetry the happy, affec-.
tionate nature of woman flows out in this pretty
gossip. The girls may have little beauty, yet
plainly do they establish between them and the
1
174
ESSAY V.
good boy the most agreeable, confiding relations,
what with their fun and their earnest, about
Edgar, and Jonas, and Almira, and who was in-
vited to the party, and who danced at the dan-
cing school, and when the singing school would
begin, and other nothings concerning which the
parties cooed. By and by that boy wants a wife,
and very truly and heartily will he know where
to find a sincere and sweet mate, without any
risk such as Milton deplores as incident to scho-
lars and great men.
I have been told that my philosophy is un-
social, and that, in public discourses, my rever-
ence for the intellect makes me unjustly cold
to the personal relations. But now I almost
shrink at the remembrance of such disparaging
words. For persons are love's world, and the
coldest philosopher cannot recount the debt of
the young soul wandering here in nature to the
power of love, without being tempted to unsay,
as treasonable to nature, aught derogatory to the
social instincts. For, though the celestial rap-
ture falling out of heaven seizes only upon those
of tender age, and although a beauty overpower-
ing all analysis or comparison, and putting us
quite beside ourselves, we can seldom see after
thirty years, yet the remembrance of these vi-
sions outlasts all other remembrances, and is a
LOVE.
175
wreath of flowers on the oldest brows. But
here is a strange fact; it may seem to many
men, in revising their experience, that they
have no fairer page in their life's book than the
delicious memory of some passages wherein af-
fection contrived to give a witchcraft surpassing
the deep attraction of its own truth to a parcel
of accidental and trivial circumstances. In look-
ing backward, they may find that several things
which were not the charm have more reality to
this groping memory than the charm itself which
embalmed them. But be our experience in par-
ticulars what it may, no man ever forgot the
visitations of that power to his heart and brain,
which created all things new; which was the
dawn in him of music, poetry, and art; which
made the face of nature radiant with purple
light, the morning and the night varied en-
chantments; when a single tone of one voice
could make the heart beat, and the most trivial
circumstance associated with one form is put in
the amber of memory; when we became all eye
when one was present, and all memory when
one was gone; when the youth becomes a
watcher of windows, and studious of a glove, a
veil, a ribbon, or the wheels of a carriage; when
no place is too solitary and none too silent for
him who has richer company and sweeter con-
176
ESSAY V.
versation in his new thoughts than any old
friends, though best and purest, can give him;
for the figures, the motions, the words of the
beloved object are not like other images written
in water, but, as Plutarch said, ' enamelled in
fire,' and make the study of midnight.
'
• Thou art not gone being gone, where'er thou art ;
Thou leav'st in him thy watchful eyes, in him thy loving
heart.'
In the noon and the afternoon of life we still
throb at the recollection of days when happiness.
was not happy enough, but must be drugged
with the relish of pain and fear; for he touched
the secret of the matter who said of love,
· All other pleasures are not worth its pains :'
and when the day was not long enough, but the
night too must be consumed in keen recollec-
tions; when the head boiled all night on the
pillow with the generous deed it resolved on ;
when the moonlight was a pleasing fever, and
the stars were letters, and the flowers ciphers,
and the air was coined into song; when all
business seemed an impertinence, and all the
men and women running to and fro in the streets
mere pictures.
The passion re-makes the world for the
youth. It makes all things alive and signifi-
cant. Nature grows conscious. Every bird on
LOVE.
177
The
the boughs of the tree sings now to his heart
and soul. Almost the notes are articulate. The
clouds have faces as he looks on them.
trees of the forest, the waving grass, and the
peeping flowers, have grown intelligent; and
almost he fears to trust them with the secret
which they seem to invite. Yet nature soothes
and sympathises. In the green solitude he finds
a dearer home than with men.
• Fountain-heads and pathless groves,
Places which pale passion loves,
Moonlight walks, when all the fowls
Are safely housed, save bats and owls,
A midnight bell, a passing groan,-
These are the sounds we feed upon.'
Behold there in the wood the fine madman !
He is a palace of sweet sounds and sights; he
dilates; he is twice a man; he walks with arms
akimbo; he soliloquises; he accosts the grass and
the trees; he feels the blood of the violet, the
clover, and the lily, in his veins; and he talks
with the brook that wets his foot.
The causes that have sharpened his percep-
tions of natural beauty have made him love
music and verse. It is a fact often observed,
that men have written good verses under the
inspiration of passion, who cannot write well
under any other circumstances.
I 2
178
ESSAY V.
The like force has the passion over all his
nature. It expands the sentiment; it makes
the clown gentle, and gives the coward heart.
Into the most pitiful and abject it will infuse a
heart and courage to defy the world, so only it
have the countenance of the beloved object. In
giving him to another, it still more gives him to
himself. He is a new man, with new percep-
tions, new and keener purposes, and a religious
solemnity of character and aims. He does not
longer appertain to his family and society. He
is somewhat. He is a person. He is a soul.
And here let us examine a little nearer the
nature of that influence which is thus potent
over the human youth. Let us approach and
admire Beauty, whose revelation to man we
now celebrate,- beauty, welcome as the sun
wherever it pleases to shine, which pleases
everybody with it and with themselves. Won-
derful is its charm. It seems sufficient to itself.
The lover cannot paint his maiden to his fancy
poor and solitary. Like a tree in flower, so
much soft, budding, informing loveliness is
society for itself, and she teaches his eye why
Beauty was ever painted with Loves and Graces
attending her steps. Her existence makes the
world rich. Though she excludes all other per-
sons from his attention as cheap and unworthy,
LOVE.
179
yet she indemnifies him by carrying out her
own being into somewhat impersonal, large,
mundane, so that the maiden stands to him for
a representative of all select things and virtues.
For that reason the lover sees never personal
resemblances in his mistress to her kindred or
to others. His friends find in her a likeness to
her mother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her
blood. The lover sees no resemblance except
to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to
rainbows and the song of birds.
Beauty is ever that divine thing the ancients
esteemed it. It is, they said, the flowering of
virtue. Who can analyse the nameless charm
which glances from one and another face and
form? We are touched with emotions of ten-
derness and complacency, but we cannot find
whereat this dainty emotion, this wandering
gleam points. It is destroyed for the imagina-
tion by any attempt to refer it to organisation.
Nor does it point to any relations of friendship
or love that society knows and has; but, as it
seems to me, to a quite other and unattainable.
sphere, to relations of transcendant delicacy and
sweetness, a true faerie land; to what roses and
violets hint and foreshew. We cannot get at
beauty. Its nature is like opaline doves'-neck
lustres, hovering and evanescent. Herein it re-
180
ESSAY V.
the plastic arts.
sembles the most excellent things, which all
have this rainbow character, defying all at-
tempts at appropriation and use. What else
did Jean Paul Richter signify, when he said
to music, "Away! away! thou speakest to
me of things which in all my endless life I
have found not, and shall not find." The
same fact may be observed in every work of
The statue is then beautiful,
when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it
is passing out of criticism, and can no longer be
defined by compass and measuring wand, but
demands an active imagination to go with it,
and to say what it is in the act of doing. The
god or hero of the sculptor is always represented
in a transition from that which is representable
to the senses, to that which is not. Then first
it ceases to be a stone. The same remark holds
of painting. And of poetry, the success is not
attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when
it astonishes and fires us with new endeavours
after the unattainable. Concerning it, Landor
inquires, whether it is not to be referred to
some purer state of sensation and existence.'
(
So must it be with personal beauty, which
love worships. Then first is it charming and
itself, when it dissatisfies us with any end;
when it becomes a story without an end; when
LOVE.
181
it suggests gleams and visions, and not earthly
satisfactions; when it seems
'too bright and good
For human nature's daily food;'
when it makes the beholder feel his unworthi-
ness; when he cannot feel his right to it, though
he were Cæsar; he cannot feel more right to it
than to the firmament and the splendours of a
sunset.
"If I love you,
say so, because
Hence arose the saying,
what is that to you?" We
we feel that what we love is not in your will,
but above it. It is the radiance of you, and not
you. It is that which you know not in your-
self, and can never know.
This agrees well with that high philosophy
of Beauty which the ancient writers delighted
in; for they said, that the soul of man, em-
bodied here on earth, went roaming up and
down in quest of that other world of its own,
out of which it came into this, but was soon
stupified by the light of the natural sun, and
unable to see any other objects than those of
this world, which are but shadows of real things.
Therefore the Deity sends the glory of youth
before the soul, that it may avail itself of beau-
tiful bodies as aids to its recollection of the
celestial good and fair; and the man beholding
182
ESSAY V.
such a person in the female sex, runs to her,
and finds the highest joy in contemplating the
form, movement, and intelligence of this person,
because it suggests to him the presence of that
which indeed is within the beauty, and the
cause of the beauty.
If, however, from too much conversing with
material objects, the soul was gross, and mis-
placed its satisfaction in the body, it reaped no-
thing but sorrow; body being unable to fulfil
the promise which beauty holds out; but if,
accepting the hint of these visions and sugges-
tions which beauty makes to his mind, the soul
passes through the body, and falls to admire
strokes of character, and the lovers contemplate
one another in their discourses and their actions,
then they pass to the true palace of Beauty,
more and more inflame their love of it, and by
this love extinguishing the base affection, as the
sun puts out the fire by shining on the hearth,
they become pure and hallowed. By conver-
sation with that which is in itself excellent, mag-
nanimous, lowly, and just, the lover comes to
a warmer love of these nobilities, and a quicker
apprehension of them. Then he passes from
loving them in one, to loving them in all; and
so is the one beautiful soul only the door
through which he enters to the society of all
LOVE.
183
true and pure souls. In the particular society
of his mate he attains a clearer sight of any
spot, any taint, which her beauty has contracted
from this world, and is able to point it out, and
this with mutual joy that they are now able
without offence to indicate blemishes and hin-
derances in each other, and give to each all help
and comfort in curing the same. And, behold-
ing in many souls the traits of the divine beauty,
and separating in each soul that which is divine
from the taint which they have contracted in
the world, the lover ascends ever to the highest
beauty, to the love and knowledge of the Divi-
nity, by steps on this ladder of created souls.
Somewhat like this have the truly wise told
us of love in all ages. The doctrine is not old,
nor is it new. If Plato, Plutarch, and Apuleius,
taught it, so have Petrarch, Angelo, and Mil-
ton. It awaits a truer unfolding, in opposition.
and rebuke to that subterranean prudence which
presides at marriages with words that take hold
of the upper world, whilst one eye is eternally
boring down into the cellar, so that its gravest
discourse has ever a slight savour of hams and
powdering-tubs. Worst, when the snout of this
sensualism intrudes into the education of young
women, and withers the hope and affection of
human nature, by teaching that marriage signi-
184
ESSAY V.
fies nothing but a housewife's thrift, and that
woman's life has no other aim.
But this dream of love, though beautiful, is
only one scene in our play. In the procession
of the soul from within outward, it enlarges its
circles ever, like the pebble thrown into the pond,
or the light proceeding from an orb. The rays
of the soul alight first on things nearest, on every
utensil and toy, on nurses and domestics, on the
house and yard and passengers, on the circle of
household acquaintance, on politics, and geogra-
phy, and history. But by the necessity of our
constitution, things are ever grouping them-
selves according to higher or more interior laws.
Neighbourhood, size, numbers, habits, persons,
lose by degrees their power over us. Cause and
effect, real affinities, the longing for harmony
between the soul and the circumstance, the high
progressive idealising instinct, these predomi-
nate later, and ever the step backward from the
higher to the lower relations is impossible. Thus
even love, which is the deification of persons,
must become more impersonal every day. Of
this at first it gives no hint. Little think the
youth and maiden who are glancing at each
other across crowded rooms, with eyes so full of
mutual intelligence,-of the precious fruit long
hereafter to proceed from this new, quite exter-
LOVE.
185
nal stimulus. The work of vegetation begins
first in the irritability of the bark and leaf-buds.
From exchanging glances, they advance to acts
of courtesy, of gallantry, then to fiery passion,
to plighting troth and marriage. Passion beholds
its object as a perfect unit. The soul is wholly
embodied, and the body is wholly ensouled.
• Her
pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,
That one might almost say her body thought.'
Romeo, if dead, should be cut up into little
stars to make the heavens fine. Life, with this
pair, has no other aim, asks no more than Juliet,
-than Romeo. Night, day, studies, talents,
kingdoms, religion, are all contained in this
form full of soul, in this soul which is all form.
The lovers delight in endearments, in avowals
of love, in comparisons of their regards. When
alone, they solace themselves with the remem-
bered image of the other. Does that other see
the same star, the same melting cloud, read the
same book, feel the same emotion, that now de-
light me? They try and weigh their affection, and
adding up all costly advantages, friends, oppor-
tunities, properties, exult in discovering that
willingly, joyfully, they would give all as a ran-
som for the beautiful, the beloved head, not one
hair of which shall be harmed. But the lot of
186
ESSAY V.
humanity is on these children. Danger, sorrow,
and pain arrive to them, as to all. Love prays.
It makes covenants with Eternal Power, in be-
half of this dear mate. The union which is thus
effected, and which adds a new value to every
atom in nature,—for it transmutes every thread
throughout the whole web of relation into a
golden ray, and bathes the soul in a new and
sweeter element,-is yet a temporary state. Not
always can flowers, pearls, poetry, protestations,
nor even home in another heart, content the
awful soul that dwells in clay. It arouses itself
at last from these endearments, as toys, and puts
on the harness, and aspires to vast and universal
aims. The soul which is in the soul of each,
craving for a perfect beatitude, detects incon-
gruities, defects, and disproportion in the beha-
viour of the other. Hence arises surprise, ex-
postulation, and pain. Yet that which drew
them to each other was signs of loveliness, signs
of virtue and these virtues are there, however
eclipsed. They appear and reappear, and con-
tinue to attract; but the regard changes, quits
the sign, and attaches to the substance. This
repairs the wounded affection. Meantime, as
life wears on, it proves a game of permutation
and combination of all possible positions of the
parties, to extort all the resources of each, and
LOVE.
187
acquaint each with the whole strength and
weakness of the other. For it is the nature
and end of this relation, that they should repre-
sent the human race to each other. All that is
in the world which is or ought to be known, is
cunningly wrought into the texture of man, of
woman.
'The person love does to us fit,
Like manna, has the taste of all in it.'
The world rolls: the circumstances vary
every hour. All the angels that inhabit this
temple of the body appear at the windows, and
all the gnomes and vices also. By all the vir-
tues they are united. If there be virtue, all the
vices are known as such; they confess and flee.
Their once flaming regard is sobered by time in
either breast, and losing in violence what it gains
in extent, it becomes a thorough good under-
standing. They resign each other, without com-
plaint, to the good offices which man and woman
are severally appointed to discharge in time; and
exchange the passion, which once could not lose
sight of its object, for a cheerful, disengaged
furtherance, whether present or absent, of each
other's designs. At last they discover that all
which at first drew them together, those once
sacred features, that magical play of charms,-
was deciduous, had a prospective end, like the
188
ESSAY V.
scaffolding by which the house was built; and
the purification of the intellect and the heart,
from year to year, is the real marriage, foreseen
and prepared from the first, and wholly above
their consciousness. Looking at these aims,
with which two persons, a man and a woman,
so variously and correlatively gifted, are shut
up in one house to spend in the nuptial society
forty or fifty years, I do not wonder at the
emphasis with which the heart prophesies this
crisis from early infancy, at the profuse beauty
with which the instincts deck the nuptial bower,
and nature and intellect and art emulate each
other in the gifts and the melody they bring to
the epithalamium.
Thus are we put in training for a love which
knows not sex, nor person, nor partiality, but
which seeketh virtue and wisdom everywhere,
to the end of increasing virtue and wisdom. We
are by nature observers, and thereby learners:
that is our permanent state. But we are often
made to feel that our affections are but tents of
a night. Though slowly and with pain, the ob-
jects of the affections change, as the objects of
thought do. There are moments when the af-
fections rule and absorb the man, and make his
happiness dependent on a person or persons.
But in health the mind is presently seen again,
LOVE.
189
-its overarching vault, bright with galaxies of
immutable lights, and the warm loves and fears
that swept over us as clouds, must lose their
finite character, and blend with God, to attain
their own perfection. But we need not fear
that we can lose any thing by the progress of
the soul. The soul may be trusted to the end.
That which is so beautiful and attractive as
these relations, must be succeeded and sup-
planted only by what is more beautiful, and so
on for ever.

FRIENDSHIP.
ESSAY VI.
FRIENDSHIP.
We have a great deal more kindness than is
ever spoken. Maugre all the selfishness that
hills like east winds the world, the whole
man family is bathed with an element of love
a fine ether. How many persons we meet
houses, whom we scarcely speak to, whom
yet we honour, and who honour us! How many
we see in the street, or sit with in church, whom,
though silently, we warmly rejoice to be with!
Read the language of these wandering eye-
beams. The heart knoweth.
The effect of the indulgence of this human
affection is a certain cordial exhilaration. In
poetry and in common speech, the emotions of
benevolence and complacency which are felt to-
wards others are likened to the material effects
of fire; so swift, or much more swift, more ac-
tive, more cheering, are these fine inward irradi-
K
194
ESSAY VI.
ations. From the highest degree of passionate
love, to the lowest degree of good will, they
make the sweetness of life.
Our intellectual and active powers increase
with our affection. The scholar sits down to
write, and all his years of meditation do not fur-
nish him with one good thought or happy ex-
pression; but it is necessary to write a letter
to a friend, and forthwith troops of gentle
thoughts invest themselves, on every hand, with
chosen words. See, in any house where virtue
and self-respect abide, the palpitation which the
approach of a stranger causes.
A commended
stranger is expected and announced, and an un-
easiness betwixt pleasure and pain invades all
the hearts of a household. His arrival almost
brings fear to the good hearts that would wel-
come him. The house is dusted, all things fly
into their places, the old coat is exchanged for
the new, and they must get up a dinner if they
can. Of a commended stranger, only the good
report is told by others, only the good and new
is heard by us.
He stands to us for humanity.
He is what we wish. Having imagined and in-
vested him, we ask how we should stand related
in conversation and action with such a man, and
are uneasy with fear.
conversation with him.
The same idea exalts
We talk better than
FRIENDSHIP.
195
we are wont. We have the nimblest fancy, a
richer memory, and our dumb devil has taken
leave for the time. For long hours we can con-
tinue a series of sincere, graceful, rich commu-
nications, drawn from the oldest, secretest expe-
rience, so that they who sit by, of our own kins-
folk and acquaintance, shall feel a lively surprise
at our unusual powers. But as soon as the
stranger begins to intrude his partialities, his
definitions, his defects, into the conversation, it
is all over. He has heard the first, the last and
best, he will ever hear from us. He is no stranger
now. Vulgarity, ignorance, misapprehension,
are old acquaintances. Now, when he comes,
he may get the order, the dress, and the dinner,
-but the throbbing of the heart, and the com-
munications of the soul, no more.
Pleasant are these jets of affection, which
relume a young world for me again. Delicious
is a just and firm encounter of two in a thought,
in a feeling. How beautiful, on their approach
to this beating heart, the steps and forms of the
gifted and the true! The moment we indulge
our affections, the earth is metamorphosed: there
is no winter, and no night: all tragedies, all
ennuis vanish; all duties even; nothing fills the
proceeding eternity but the forms all radiant of
beloved persons.
Let the soul be assured that
196
ESSAY VI.
somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its
friend, and it would be content and cheerful
alone for a thousand years.
I awoke this morning with devout thanks-
giving for my friends, the old and the new. Shall
I not call God the Beautiful, who daily sheweth
himself so to me in his gifts? I chide society, I
embrace solitude, and yet I am not so ungrateful
as not to see the wise, the lovely, and the noble-
minded, as from time to time they pass my gate.
Who hears me, who understands me, becomes
mine,—a possession for all time. Nor is nature
so poor, but she gives me this joy several times,
and thus we weave social threads of our own, a
new web of relations; and, as many thoughts in
succession substantiate themselves, we shall by
and by stand in a new world of our own crea-
tion, and no longer strangers and pilgrims in a
traditionary globe. My friends have come to
me unsought. The great God gave them to me.
By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue
with itself, I find them, or rather, not I, but the
Deity in me and in them, both deride and cancel
the thick walls of individual character, relation,
age, sex, and circumstance, at which he usually
connives, and now makes many one. High
thanks I owe you, excellent lovers, who carry
out the world for me to new and noble depths,
FRIENDSHIP.
197
and enlarge the meaning of all my thoughts.
These are not stark and stiffened persons, but
the new-born poetry of God,-poetry without
stop,―hymn, ode, and epic, poetry still flowing,
and not yet caked in dead books with annota-
tion and grammar, but Apollo and the Muses
chanting still. Will these two separate them-
selves from me again, or some of them?
know not, but I fear it not; for my relation to
them is so pure, that we hold by simple affinity,
and the Genius of my life being thus social, the
same affinity will exert its energy on whomso-
ever is as noble as these men and women, wher-
ever I may be.
I
I confess to an extreme tenderness of nature
on this point. It is almost dangerous to me to
'crush the sweet poison of misused wine' of
the affections. A new person is to me always
a great event, and hinders me from sleep. I
have had such fine fancies lately about two or
three persons, as have given me delicious hours;
but the joy ends in the day: it yields no fruit.
Thought is not born of it; my action is very
little modified. I must feel pride in my friend's
accomplishments, as if they were mine,—wild,
delicate, throbbing property in his virtues. I
feel as warmly when he is praised, as the lover
when he hears applause of his engaged maiden.
198
ESSAY VI.
We over-estimate the conscience of our friend.
His goodness seems better than our goodness,
his nature finer, his temptations less. Every
thing that is his, his name, his form, his dress,
books, and instruments, fancy enhances. Our
own thought sounds new and larger from his
mouth.
Yet the systole and diastole of the heart are
not without their analogy in the ebb and flow
of love. Friendship, like the immortality of the
soul, is too good to be believed. The lover, be-
holding his maiden, half knows that she is not
verily that which he worships; and in the golden
hour of friendship, we are surprised with shades
of suspicion and unbelief. We doubt that we
bestow on our hero the virtues in which he
shines, and afterwards worship the form to which
we have ascribed this divine inhabitation. In
strictness, the soul does not respect men as it
respects itself. In strict science, all persons un-
derlie the same condition of an infinite remote-
ness. Shall we fear to cool our love by facing
the fact, by mining for the metaphysical foun-
dation of this Elysian temple? Shall I not be
as real as the things I see? If I am, I shall
not fear to know them for what they are. Their
essence is not less beautiful than their appear-
ance, though it needs finer organs for its appre-
FRIENDSHIP.
199
hension. The root of the plant is not unsightly
to science, though for chaplets and festoons we
cut the stem short. And I must hazard the
production of the bald fact amidst these pleasing
reveries, though it should prove an Egyptian
skull at our banquet. A man who stands united
with his thought conceives magnificently of him-
self. He is conscious of a universal success, even
though bought by uniform particular failures.
No advantages, no powers, no gold or force can
be
any match for him. I cannot choose but rely
on my own poverty more than on your wealth.
I cannot make your consciousness tantamount
to mine. Only the star dazzles; the planet has
a faint, moon-like ray. I hear what you say of
the admirable parts and tried temper of the party
you praise, but I see well that for all his purple
cloaks I shall not like him, unless he is at last
a poor Greek like me. I cannot deny it, O
friend, that the vast shadow of the Phenomenal
includes thee also in its pied and painted im-
mensity, thee also, compared with whom all
else is shadow. Thou art not Being, as Truth
is, as Justice is, thou art not my soul, but a
picture and effigy of that. Thou hast come to
me lately, and already thou art seizing thy hat
and cloak. Is it not that the soul puts forth
friends, as the tree puts forth leaves, and pre-
200
ESSAY VI.
sently, by the germination of new buds, ex-
trudes the old leaf? The law of nature is
alternation forevermore. Each electrical state
superinduces the opposite. The soul environs
itself with friends, that it may enter into a
grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it
goes alone for a season, that it may exalt its
conversation or society. This method betrays
itself along the whole history of our personal
relations. Ever the instinct of affection revives
the hope of union with our mates, and ever the
returning sense of insulation recalls us from the
chase. Thus every man passes his life in the
search after friendship; and if he should record
his true sentiment, he might write a letter like
this to each new candidate for his love.
DEAR FRIEND,
If I was sure of thee, sure
of thy capacity, sure to match my mood with
thine, I should never think again of trifles, in
relation to thy comings and goings. I am not
very wise; my moods are quite attainable: and
I respect thy genius: it is to me as yet unfa-
thomed; yet dare I not presume in thee a per-
fect intelligence of me, and so thou art to me a
delicious torment. Thine ever, or never.
FRIENDSHIP.
201
Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains
are for curiosity, and not for life. They are
not to be indulged. This is to weave cobweb,
and not cloth. Our friendships hurry to short
and poor conclusions, because we have made
them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of
the tough fibre of the human heart. The laws
of friendship are great, austere, and eternal, of
one web with the laws of nature and of morals.
But we have aimed at a swift and petty benefit,
to suck a sudden sweetness. We snatch at the
slowest fruit in the whole garden of God, which
many summers and many winters must ripen.
We seek our friend not sacredly, but with an
adulterate passion, which would appropriate him
to ourselves. In vain. We are armed all over
with subtle antagonisms, which, as soon as we
meet, begin to play, and translate all poetry into
stale prose. Almost all people descend to meet.
All association must be a compromise, and, what
is worst, the very flower and aroma of the flower
of each of the beautiful natures disappears as
they approach each other. What a perpetual
disappointment is actual society, even of the
virtuous and gifted! After interviews have been
compassed with long foresight, we must be tor-
mented presently by baffled blows, by sudden,
unseasonable apathies, by epilepsies of wit and
K 2
202
ESSAY VI.
of animal spirits, in the hey-day of friendship
and thought. Our faculties do not play us true,
and both parties are relieved by solitude.
I ought to be equal to every relation. It
makes no difference how many friends I have,
and what content I can find in conversing with
each, if there be one to whom I am not equal.
If I have shrunk unequal from one contest, in-
stantly the joy I find in all the rest becomes
mean and cowardly. I should hate myself, if
then I made my other friends my asylum.
'The valiant warrior famoused for fight,
After a hundred victories, once foiled,
Is from the book of honour razed quite,
And all the rest forgot for which he toiled.'
Our impatience is thus sharply rebuked.
Bashfulness and apathy are a tough husk, in
which a delicate organisation is protected from
premature ripening. It would be lost, if it knew
itself before any of the best souls were yet ripe
enough to know and own it. Respect the Na-
turlangsamkeit which hardens the ruby in a mil-
lion years, and works in duration, in which Alps
and Andes come and go as rainbows. The good
spirit of our life has no heaven which is the
price of rashness. Love, which is the essence
of God, is not for levity, but for the total worth
of man.
Let us not have this childish luxury
FRIENDSHIP.
203
in our regards, but the austerest worth; let us
approach our friend with an audacious trust in
the truth of his heart, in the breadth, impossible
to be overturned, of his foundations.
The attractions of this subject are not to be
resisted; and I leave, for the time, all account of
subordinate social benefit, to speak of that se-
lect and sacred relation which is a kind of abso-
lute, and which even leaves the language of love.
suspicious and common, so much is this purer,
and nothing is so much divine.
I do not wish to treat friendships daintily,
but with roughest courage. When they are
real, they are not glass threads or frost-work,
but the solidest thing we know. For now,
after so many ages of experience, what do we
know of nature, or of ourselves? Not one step
has man taken toward the solution of the pro-
blem of his destiny. In one condemnation of
folly stand the whole universe of men. But
the sweet sincerity of joy and peace, which I
draw from this alliance with my brother's soul,
is the nut itself whereof all nature and all thought
is but the husk and shell. Happy is the house
that shelters a friend! It might well be built,
like a festal bower or arch, to entertain him a
single day. Happier, if he know the solemnity
of that relation, and honour its law! It is no idle.
204
ESSAY VI.
band, no holyday engagement. He who offers
himself a candidate for that covenant comes up,
like an Olympian, to the great games, where
the first-born of the world are the competitors.
He proposes himself for contests where Time,
Want, Danger, are in the lists, and he alone is
victor who has truth enough in his constitution
to preserve the delicacy of his beauty from the
wear and tear of all these. The gifts of fortune
may be present or absent, but all the hap in that
contest depends on intrinsic nobleness, and the
contempt of trifles. There are two elements
that go to the composition of friendship, each so
sovereign, that I can detect no superiority in
either, no reason why either should be first named.
One is Truth. A friend is a person with whom I
may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud.
I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so
real and equal, that I may drop even those un-
dermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and
second thought, which men never put off, and
may deal with him with the simplicity and
wholeness with which one chemical atom meets
another. Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like
diadems and authority, only to the highest rank,
that being permitted to speak truth, as having
none above it to court or conform unto. Every
man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a
FRIENDSHIP.
205
second person, hypocrisy begins. We parry
and fend the approach of our fellow man by
compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by
affairs. We cover up our thought from him
under a hundred folds. I knew a man who,
under a certain religious frensy, cast off this
drapery, and, omitting all compliment and com-
monplace, spoke to the conscience of every
person he encountered, and that with great
insight and beauty. At first he was resisted,
and all men agreed he was mad. But persist-
ing, as indeed he could not help doing, for
some time in this course, he attained to the
advantage of bringing every man of his acquaint-
ance into true relations with him. No man
would think of speaking falsely with him, or
of putting him off with any chat of markets or
reading-rooms. But every man was constrained
by so much sincerity to face him, and what
love of nature, what poetry, what symbol of
truth he had, he did certainly shew him. But
to most of us society shews not its face and eye,
but its side and its back. To stand in true re-
lations with men in a false age is worth a fit of
insanity, is it not? We can seldom go erect.
Almost every man we meet requires some civi-
lity, requires to be humoured; -he has some
fame, some talent, some whim of religion or
206
ESSAY VI.
philanthropy in his head that is not to be ques-
tioned, and so spoils all conversation with him.
But a friend is a sane man who exercises not
my ingenuity, but me. My friend gives me
entertainment without requiring me to stoop,
or to lisp, or to mask myself. A friend, there-
fore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I who
alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose
existence I can affirm with equal evidence to
my own, behold now the semblance of my being
in all its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated
in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be
reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
The other element of friendship is Tender-
ness. We are holden to men by every sort of
tie, by blood, by pride, by fear, by hope, by
lucre, by lust, by hate, by admiration, by every
circumstance and badge and trifle, but we can
scarce believe that so much character can sub-
sist in another as to draw us by love. Can
another be so blessed, and we so pure, that we
can offer him tenderness? When a man be-
comes dear to me, I have touched the goal of
fortune. I find very little written directly to
the heart of this matter in books. And
And yet I
have one text which I cannot choose but re-
member. My author says, I offer myself
faintly and bluntly to those whose I effectually
FRIENDSHIP.
207
We
am, and tender myself least to him to whom I
am the most devoted.' I wish that friendship
should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence.
It must plant itself on the ground, before it
walks over the moon. I wish it to be a little
of a citizen, before it is quite a cherub.
chide the citizen because he makes love a com-
modity. It is an exchange of gifts, of useful
loans; it is good neighbourhood; it watches
with the sick; it holds the pall at the funeral;
and quite loses sight of the delicacies and nobi-
lity of the relation. But though we cannot find
the god under this disguise of a sutler, yet, on
the other hand, we cannot forgive the poet, if he
spins his thread too fine, and does not substan-
tiate his romance by the municipal virtues of
justice, punctuality, fidelity, and pity. I hate
the prostitution of the name of friendship to
signify modish and worldly alliances. I much
prefer the company of plough-boys and tin-ped-
lars to the silken and perfumed amity which
only celebrates its days of encounter by a fri-
volous display, by rides in a curricle, and din-
ners at the best taverns. The end of friendship
is a commerce the most strict and homely that
can be joined; more strict than any of which
we have experience. It is for aid and comfort
through all the relations and passages of life and
208
ESSAY VI.
death. It is fit for serene days, and graceful
gifts, and country rambles, but also for rough
roads and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty, and
persecution. It keeps company with the sallies
of the wit and the trances of religion. We are
to dignify to each other the daily needs and
offices of man's life, and embellish it by courage,
wisdom, and unity. It should never fall into
something usual and settled, but should be alert
and inventive, and add rhyme and reason to what
was drudgery.
For perfect friendship it may be said to re-
quire natures so rare and costly, so well tem-
pered each, and so happily adapted, and withal
so circumstanced, (for even in that particular, a
poet says, love demands that the parties be al-
together paired,) that very seldom can its satis-
faction be realised. It cannot subsist in its per-
fection, say some of those who are learned in
this warm lore of the heart, betwixt more than
two. I am not quite so strict in my terms,
perhaps because I have never known so high a
fellowship as others. I please my imagination
more with a circle of godlike men and women
variously related to each other, and between
whom subsists a lofty intelligence. But I find
this law of one to one peremptory for conversa-
tion, which is the practice and consummation of
FRIENDSHIP.
209
friendship. Do not mix waters too much. The
best mix as ill as good and bad. You shall have
very useful and cheering discourse at several
times with two several men; but let all three of
you come together, and you shall not have one
new and hearty word. Two may talk and one
may hear, but three cannot take part in a con-
versation of the most sincere and searching sort.
In good company there is never such discourse
between two, across the table, as takes place
when you leave them alone. In good company
the individuals at once merge their egotism into
a social soul exactly coextensive with the several
consciousnesses there present. No partialities
of friend to friend, no fondnesses of brother to
sister, of wife to husband, are there pertinent,
but quite otherwise. Only he may then speak
who can sail on the common thought of the
party, and not poorly limited to his own. Now
this convention, which good sense demands, de-
stroys the high freedom of great conversation,
which requires an absolute running of two souls
into one.
No two men but being left alone with each
other enter into simpler relations. Yet it is
affinity that determines which two shall con-
verse. Unrelated men give little joy to each
other; will never suspect the latent powers of
210
ESSAY VI.
each. We talk sometimes of a great talent for
conversation, as if it were a permanent property
in some individuals. Conversation is an evan-
escent relation,—no more. A man is reputed
to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for
all that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle.
They accuse his silence with as much reason as
they would blame the insignificance of a dial in
the shade. In the sun it will mark the hour.
Among those who enjoy his thought, he will
regain his tongue.
Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt
likeness and unlikeness, that piques each with
the presence of power and of consent in the
other party. Let me be alone to the end of
the world, rather than that my friend should
overstep by a word or a look his real sympathy.
I am equally baulked by antagonism and by
compliance. Let him not cease an instant to
be himself. The only joy I have in his being
mine, is that the not mine is mine. It turns the
stomach, it blots the daylight, where I looked
for a manly furtherance, or at least a manly re-
sistance, to find a mush of concession. Better
be a nettle in the side of your friend than his
echo. The condition which high friendship
demands is, ability to do without it. To be
capable of that high office requires great and
FRIENDSHIP.
211
sublime parts. There must be very two, before
there can be very one. Let it be an alliance of
two large formidable natures, mutually beheld,
mutually feared, before yet they recognise the
deep identity which beneath these disparities.
unites them.
He only is fit for this society who is mag-
nanimous. He must be so, to know its law.
He must be one who is sure that greatness and
goodness are always economy. He must be one
who is not swift to intermeddle with his for-
tunes. Let him not dare to intermeddle with
this. Leave to the diamond its ages to grow,
nor expect to accelerate the births of the eter-
nal. Friendship demands a religious treatment.
We must not be wilful, we must not provide.
We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are
self-elected. Reverence is a great part of it.
Treat your friend as a spectacle. Of course, if
he be a man, he has merits that are not yours,
and that you cannot honour, if you must needs
hold him close to your person. Stand aside.
Give those merits room. Let them mount and
expand. Be not so much his friend that you
can never know his peculiar energies; like fond
mammas who shut up their boy in the house
until he is almost grown a girl. Are you the
friend of your friend's buttons, or of his thought?
212
ESSAY VI.
To a great heart he will still be a stranger in a
thousand particulars, that he may come near in
the holiest ground. Leave it to girls and boys
to regard a friend as property, and to suck a
short and all-confounding pleasure instead of
the pure nectar of God.
Let us buy our entrance to this guild by
a long probation. Why should we desecrate
noble and beautiful souls by intruding on them?
Why insist on rash personal relations with your
friend? Why go to his house, or know his mo-
ther and brother and sisters? Why be visited
by him at your own
? Are these things ma-
terial to our covenant? Leave this touching
and clawing. Let him be to me a spirit. A
message, a thought, a sincerity, a glance from
him, I want, but not news, nor pottage. I can
get politics, and chat, and neighbourly conveni-
ences, from cheaper companions. Should not
the society of my friend be to me poetic, pure,
universal, and great as nature itself? Ought I
to feel that our tie is profane in comparison with
yonder bar of cloud that sleeps on the horizon,
or that clump of waving grass that divides the
brook? Let us not vilify, but raise it to that
standard. That great defying eye, that scorn-
ful beauty of his mien and action, do not pique
yourself on reducing, but rather fortify and en-
FRIENDSHIP.
213
hance. Worship his superiorities. Wish him
not less by a thought, but hoard and tell them
all. Guard him as thy great counterpart; have
a princedom to thy friend. Let him be to thee
forever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable,
devoutly revered; and not a trivial conveniency,
to be soon outgrown and cast aside. The hues
of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to
be seen, if the eye is too near. To my friend I
write a letter, and from him I receive a letter.
That seems to you a little. Me it suffices. It
is a spiritual gift worthy of him to give and of
me to receive. It profanes nobody. In these
warm lines the heart will trust itself, as it will
not to the tongue, and pour out the prophecy
of a godlier existence than all the annals of hero-
ism have yet made good.
Respect so far the holy laws of this fellow-
ship as not to prejudice its perfect flower by
your impatience for its opening. We must be
our own, before we can be another's. There is
at least this satisfaction in crime, according to
the Latin proverb, you can speak to your ac-
complice on even terms. Crimen, quos inquinat,
æquat. To those whom we admire and love, at
first we cannot. Yet the least defect of self-
possession vitiates, in my judgment, the entire
relation. There can never be deep peace be-
214
ESSAY VI.
tween two spirits, never mutual respect, until, in
their dialogue, each stands for the whole world.
What is so great as friendship, let us carry
with what grandeur of spirit we can.
Let us
be silent, so we may hear the whisper of the
gods. Let us not interfere. Who set you to
cast about what you should say to the select
souls, or to say any thing to such? No matter
how ingenious, no matter how graceful and
bland. There are innumerable degrees of folly
and wisdom; and for you to say aught is to
be frivolous. Wait, and thy soul shall speak.
Wait until the necessary and everlasting over-
powers you, until day and night avail them-
selves of your lips. The only money of God is
God. He pays never with any thing less or
any thing else. The only reward of virtue is
virtue: the only way to have a friend is to be
one. Vain to hope to come nearer a man by
getting into his house. If unlike, his soul only
flees the faster from you, and you shall catch
never a true glance of his eye. We see the
noble afar off, and they repel us; why should
we intrude? Late—very late—we perceive that
no arrangements, no introductions, no consue-
tudes, or habits of society, would be of any
avail to establish us in such relations with them
as we desire, but solely the uprise of nature
FRIENDSHIP.
215
in us to the same degree it is in them: then
shall we meet as water with water: and if we
should not meet them then, we shall not want
them, for we are already they. In the last ana-
lysis, love is only the reflection of a man's own
worthiness from other men. Men have some-
times exchanged names with their friends, as
if they would signify that in their friend each
loved his own soul.
The higher the style we demand of friend-
ship, of course the less easy to establish it with
flesh and blood. We walk alone in the world.
Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables.
But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful
heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the
universal power, souls are now acting, enduring,
and daring, which can love us, and which we
can love. We may congratulate ourselves that
the period of nonage, of follies, of blunders,
and of shame, is passed in solitude, and when
we are finished men, we shall grasp heroic hands
in heroic hands. Only be admonished by what
you already see, not to strike leagues of friend-
ship with cheap persons, where no friendship
can be.
Our impatience betrays us into rash
and foolish alliances, which no God attends. By
persisting in your path, though you forfeit the
little, you gain the great. You become pro-
216
ESSAY VI.
nounced. You demonstrate yourself, so as to
put yourself out of the reach of false relations,
and you draw to you the first-born of the
world, — those rare pilgrims whereof only one
or two wander in nature at once, and before
whom the vulgar great shew as spectres and
shadows merely.
Let us
of man.
We go
It is foolish to be afraid of making our ties
too spiritual, as if so we could lose any genuine
love. Whatever correction of our popular views
we make from insight, nature will be sure to
bear us out in, and though it seem to rob us of
some joy, will repay us with a greater.
feel, if we will, the absolute insulation
We are sure that we have all in us.
to Europe, or we pursue persons, or we read
books, in the instinctive faith that these will
call it out and reveal us to ourselves. Beggars
all. The persons are such as we; the Europe,
an old faded garment of dead persons; the books,
their ghosts. Let us drop this idolatry. Let
us give over this mendicancy. Let us even bid
our dearest friends farewell, and defy them,
saying, "Who are you? Unhand me: I will
be dependent no more." Ah! seest thou not,
O brother, that thus we part only to meet again
on a higher platform, and only be more each
other's, because we are
are more our own? A
FRIENDSHIP.
217
friend is Janus-faced: he looks to the past and
the future. He is the child of all my forego-
ing hours, the prophet of those to come. He
is the harbinger of a greater friend. It is the
property of the divine to be reproductive.
I do, then, with my friends as I do with
my books.
I would have them where I can
find them, but I seldom use them. We must
have society on our own terms, and admit or
exclude it on the slightest cause. I cannot
afford to speak much with my friend. If he is
great, he makes me so great that I cannot de-
scend to converse. In the great days, presenti-
ments hover before me, far before me in the
firmament. I ought then to dedicate myself to
them. I go in that I may seize them, I go out
that I may seize them. I fear only that I may
lose them receding into the sky in which now
they are only a patch of brighter light. Then,
though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to
talk with them and study their visions, lest I
lose my own. It would indeed give me a cer-
tain household joy to quit this lofty seeking,
this spiritual astronomy, or search of stars, and
come down to warm sympathies with you; but
then I know well I shall mourn always the
vanishing of my mighty gods. It is true, next
week I shall have languid times, when I can
L
218
ESSAY VI.
well afford to occupy myself with foreign ob-
jects; then I shall regret the lost literature of
your mind, and wish you were by my side again.
But if you come, perhaps you will fill my mind
only with new visions, not with yourself, but
with your lustres, and I shall not be able any
more than now to converse with you. So I will
owe to my friends this evanescent intercourse.
I will receive from them not what they have,
but what they are. They shall give me that
which properly they cannot give me, but which
radiates from them. But they shall not hold
me by any relations less subtle and pure. We
will meet as though we met not, and part as
though we parted not.
It has seemed to me lately more possible
than I knew, to carry a friendship greatly, on
one side, without due correspondence on the
other. Why should I cumber myself with the
poor fact that the receiver is not capacious? It
never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall
wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a
small part on the reflecting planet. Let your
greatness educate the crude and cold companion.
If he is unequal, he will presently pass away;
but thou art enlarged by thy own shining, and,
no longer a mate for frogs and worms, dost soar
and burn with the gods of the empyrean. It is
FRIENDSHIP.
219
thought a disgrace to love unrequited. But the
great will see that true love cannot be unre-
quited. True love transcends instantly the un-
worthy object, and dwells and broods on the
eternal; and when the poor, interposed mask
crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much.
earth, and feels its independency the surer. Yet
these things may hardly be said without a sort
of treachery to the relation. The essence of
friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and
trust. It must not surmise or provide for in-
firmity. It treats its object as a god, that it
may deify both.
PRUDENCE.
ESSAY VII.
PRUDENCE.
WHAT right have I to write on Prudence,
whereof I have little, and that of the negative
sort? My prudence consists in avoiding and
going without, not in the inventing of means
and methods, not in adroit steering, not in
gentle repairing. I have no skill to make mo-
ney spend well, no genius in my economy, and
whoever sees my garden discovers that I must
have some other garden. Yet I love facts, and
hate lubricity and people without perception.
Then I have the same title to write on pru-
dence, that I have to write on poetry or
holiness. We write from aspiration and anta-
gonism, as well as from experience. We paint
those qualities which we do not possess. The
poet admires the man of energy and tactics;
the merchant breeds his son for the church or
the bar: and where a man is not vain and ego-
224
ESSAY VII.
tistic, you shall find what he has not by his
praise. Moreover it would be hardly honest
in me not to balance these fine lyric words of
Love and Friendship with words of coarser
sound, and whilst my debt to my senses is real
and constant, not to own it in passing.
Prudence is the virtue of the senses. It is
the science of appearances. It is the outmost
action of the inward life. It is God taking
thought for oxen. It moves matter after the
laws of matter. It is content to seek health
of body by complying with physical conditions,
and health of mind by the laws of the intellect.
The world of the senses is a world of shows;
it does not exist for itself, but has a symbolic
character; and a true prudence or law of shows
recognises the co-presence of other laws, and
knows that its own office is subaltern, knows
that it is surface and not centre where it works.
Prudence is false when detached. It is legiti-
mate when it is the Natural History of the soul
incarnate; when it unfolds the beauty of laws
within the narrow scope of the senses.
There are all degrees of proficiency in know-
ledge of the world. It is sufficient to our pre-
sent purpose to indicate three. One class live
to the utility of the symbol; esteeming health
and wealth a final good. Another class live
PRUDENCE.
225
above this mark, to the beauty of the symbol;
as the poet, and artist, and the naturalist, and
man of science. A third class live above the
beauty of the symbol, to the beauty of the thing
signified; these are wise men. The first class
have common sense; the second, taste; and the
third, spiritual perception. Once in a long
time a man traverses the whole scale, and sees
and enjoys the symbol solidly; then also has a
clear eye for its beauty; and lastly, whilst he
pitches his tent on this sacred volcanic isle of
nature, does not offer to build houses and barns
thereon, reverencing the splendour of the God
which he sees bursting through each chink and
cranny.
The world is filled with the proverbs and
acts and winkings of a base prudence, which is
a devotion to matter, as if we possessed no other
faculties than the palate, the nose, the touch,
the eye, and ear; a prudence which adores the
Rule of Three, which never subscribes, which
gives never, which lends seldom, and asks but
one question of any project— Will it bake
bread? This is a disease like a thickening of the
skin until the vital organs are destroyed. But
culture, revealing the high origin of the appa-
rent world, and aiming at the perfection of the
L 2
226
ESSAY VII.
man as the end, degrades every thing else, as
health and bodily life, into means.
It sees pru-
dence not to be a several faculty, but a name
for wisdom and virtue conversing with the body
and its wants. Cultivated men always feel and
speak so, as if a great fortune, the achievement
of a civil or social measure, great personal influ-
ence, a graceful and commanding address, had
their value as proofs of the energy of the spirit.
If a man lose his balance, and immerse himself
in any trades or pleasures for their own sake, he
may be a good wheel or pin, but he is not a cul-
tivated man.
The spurious prudence, making the senses
final, is the god of sots and cowards, and is the
subject of all comedy. It is nature's joke, and
therefore literature's. The true prudence limits
this sensualism by admitting the knowledge of
an internal and real world. This recognition
once made,—the order of the world and the dis-
tribution of affairs and times being studied with
the co-perception of their subordinate place,
will reward any degree of attention. For, our
existence thus apparently attached in nature to
the sun and the returning moon and the periods
which they mark,-so susceptible to climate and
to country, so alive to social good and evil, so
PRUDENCE.
227
fond of splendour, and so tender to hunger and
cold and debt,―reads all its primary lessons out
of these books.
Prudence does not go behind nature, and
ask, whence it is? It takes the laws of the
world, whereby man's being is conditioned, as
they are, and keeps these laws, that it may en-
joy their proper good. It respects space and
time, climate, want, sleep, the law of polarity,
growth, and death. There revolve, to give bound
and period to his being, on all sides, the sun
and moon, the great formalists in the sky here
lies stubborn matter, and will not swerve from
its chemical routine. Here is a planted globe,
pierced and belted with natural laws, and fenced.
and distributed externally with civil partitions
and properties which impose new restraints on
the young inhabitant.
We eat of the bread which grows in the
field. We live by the air which blows around
us; and we are poisoned by the air that is too
cold or too hot, too dry or too wet. Time,
which shews so vacant, indivisible, and divine in
its coming, is slit and peddled into trifles and
tatters. A door is to be painted, a lock to be
repaired. I want wood, or oil, or meal, or salt;
the house smokes, or I have a headache; then
the tax; and an affair to be transacted with a
228
ESSAY VII.
Do what we
man without heart or brains; and the stinging
recollection of an injurious or very awkward
word, — these eat up the hours.
can, summer will have its flies. If we walk in
the woods, we must feed musquitoes. If we go
a-fishing, we must expect a wet coat. Then
climate is a great impediment to idle persons.
We often resolve to give up the care of the
weather, but still we regard the clouds and the
rain.
We are instructed by these petty experiences
which usurp the hours and years. The hard soil
and four months of snow make the inhabitant
of the northern temperate zone wiser and abler
than his fellow who enjoys the fixed smile of
the tropics. The islander may ramble all day
at will. At night he may sleep on a mat under
the moon; and wherever a wild date-tree grows,
nature has, without a prayer even, spread a table
for his morning meal. The northerner is per-
force a householder. He must brew, bake, salt
and preserve his food. He must pile wood and
coal. But as it happens that not one stroke can
labour lay-to, without some new acquaintance
with nature, and as nature is inexhaustibly sig-
nificant, the inhabitants of these climates have
always excelled the southerner in force. Such
is the value of these matters, that a man who
PRUDENCE.
229
knows other things, can never know too much
of these. Let him have accurate perceptions.
Let him, if he have hands, handle; if eyes,
measure and discriminate; let him accept and
hive every fact of chemistry, natural history,
and economics; the more he has, the less is he
willing to spare any one. Time is always bring-
ing the occasions that disclose their value. Some
wisdom comes out of every natural and innocent
action. The domestic man, who loves no music
so well as his kitchen clock, and the airs which
the logs sing to him as they burn on the hearth,
has solaces which others never dream of. The
application of means to ends ensures victory
and the songs of victory not less in a farm or a
shop than in the tactics of party or of war.
The good husband finds method as efficient in
the packing of fire-wood in a shed, or in the
harvesting of fruits in the cellar, as in Penin-
sular campaigns or the files of the Department
of State. In the rainy day he builds a work-
bench, or gets his tool-box set in the corner of
the barn-chamber, and stored with nails, gimlet,
pincers, screwdriver, and chisel. Herein he
tastes an old joy of youth and childhood, the
cat-like love of garrets, presses, and corn-cham-
bers, and of the conveniences of long housekeep-
ing. His garden or his poultry-yard, — very
230
ESSAY VII.
paltry places, it may be,-tell him many plea-
sant anecdotes. One might find argument for
optimism in the abundant flow of this saccha-
rine element of pleasure in every suburb and
extremity of the good world. Let a man keep
the law, any law, and his way will be strown
with satisfactions. There is more difference in
the quality of our pleasures than in the amount.
On the other hand, nature punishes any ne-
glect of prudence. If you think the senses
final, obey their law. If you believe in the
soul, do not clutch at sensual sweetness before
it is ripe on the slow tree of cause and effect.
It is vinegar to the eyes, to deal with men of
loose and imperfect perception. Dr. Johnson
is reported to have said, 'If the child says he
looked out of this window, when he looked out
of that,-whip him.' Our American character
is marked by a more than average delight in ac-
curate perception, which is shewn by the cur-
rency of the by-word, 'No mistake.' But the
discomfort of unpunctuality, of confusion of
thought about facts, of inattention to the wants
of to-morrow, is of no nation. The beautiful
laws of time and space once dislocated by our
inaptitude, are holes and dens. If the hive be
disturbed by rash and stupid hands, instead of
honey, it will yield us bees. Our words and
PRUDENCE.
231
6
6
actions to be fair must be timely. A gay and
pleasant sound is the whetting of the scythe in
the mornings of June; yet what is more lone-
some and sad than the sound of a whetstone or
mower's rifle, when it is too late in the season
to make hay? Scatter-brained and afternoon
men' spoil much more than their own affair, in
spoiling the temper of those who deal with
them. I have seen a criticism on some paint-
ings, of which I am reminded when I see the
shiftless and unhappy men who are not true to
their senses. The last Grand Duke of Weimar,
a man of superior understanding, said; I have
sometimes remarked in the presence of great
works of art, and just now especially, in Dres-
den, how much a certain property contributes to
the effect which gives life to the figures, and to
the life an irresistible truth. This property is
the hitting, in all the figures we draw, the right
centre of gravity. I mean, the placing the figures
firm upon their feet, making the hands grasp, and
fastening the eyes on the spot where they should.
look. Even lifeless figures, as vessels and stools,
-let them be drawn ever so correctly,-lose all
effect so soon as they lack the resting upon their
centre of gravity, and have a certain swimming
and oscillating appearance. The Raphael, in
the Dresden gallery, (the only greatly affecting
232
ESSAY VII.
picture which I have seen), is the quietest and
most passionless piece you can imagine; a couple
of saints who worship the Virgin and Child.
Nevertheless it awakens a deeper impression
than the contortions of ten crucified martyrs.
For, beside all the resistless beauty of form, it
possesses in the highest degree the property of
the perpendicularity of all the figures.'—This
perpendicularity we demand of all the figures in
this picture of life. Let them stand on their feet,
and not float and swing. Let us know where to
find them. Let them discriminate between what
they remember, and what they dreamed. Let
them call a spade a spade. Let them give us
facts, and honour their own senses with trust.
But what man shall dare tax another with
imprudence? Who is prudent? The men we
call greatest are least in this kingdom. There
is a certain fatal dislocation in our relation to
nature, distorting all our modes of living, and
making every law our enemy, which seems at
last to have aroused all the wit and virtue in
the world to ponder the question of Reform.
We must call the highest prudence to counsel,
and ask why health and beauty and genius.
should now be the exception, rather than the
rule of human nature? We do not know the
properties of plants and animals, and the laws of
PRUDENCE.
233
nature, through our sympathy with the same;
but this remains the dream of poets. Poetry
and prudence should be coincident. Poets
should be lawgivers; that is, the boldest lyric
inspiration should not chide and insult, but
should announce and lead the civil code and
the day's work. But now the two things seem
irreconcilably parted. We have violated law
upon law, until we stand amidst ruins; and
when by chance we espy a coincidence between
reason and the phenomena, we are surprised.
Beauty should be the dowry of every man and
woman, as invariably as sensation; but it is
rare. Health or sound organisation should be
universal. Genius should be the child of ge-
nius, and every child should be inspired; but
now it is not to be predicted of any child, and
nowhere is it pure. We call partial half-lights,
by courtesy, genius; talent which converts itself
to money, talent which glitters to-day, that it
may dine and sleep well to-morrow; and so-
ciety is officered by men of parts, as they are
properly called, and not by divine men. These
use their gifts to refine luxury, not to abolish it.
Genius is always ascetic, and piety and love.
Appetite shews to the finer souls as a disease,
and they find beauty in rites and bounds that
resist it.
234
ESSAY VII.
We have found out fine names to cover our
sensuality withal, but no gifts can raise intem-
perance. The man of talent affects to call his
transgressions of the laws of the senses trivial,
and to count them nothing considered with his
devotion to his art. His art rebukes him. That
never taught him lewdness, nor the love of wine,
nor the wish to reap where he had not sowed.
His art is less for every deduction from his holi-
ness, and less for every defect of common sense.
On him who scorned the world, as he said, the
scorned world wreaks its revenge.
He that de-
spiseth small things will perish by little and
little. Goethe's Tasso is very likely to be a
pretty fair historical portrait, and that is true
tragedy. It does not seem to me so genuine
grief when some tyrannous Richard III. op-
presses and slays a score of innocent persons, as
when Antonio and Tasso, both apparently right,
wrong each other. One living after the maxims
of this world, and consistent and true to them;
the other fired with all divine sentiments, yet
grasping also at the pleasures of sense, without
submitting to their law. That is a grief we all
feel, a knot we cannot untie. Tasso's is no in-
frequent case in modern biography. A man of
genius, of an ardent temperament, reckless of
physical laws, self-indulgent, becomes presently
།
PRUDENCE.
235
unfortunate, querulous, a 'discomfortable cou-
sin,' a thorn to himself and to others.
The scholar shames us by his bifold life.
Whilst something higher than prudence is ac-
tive, he is admirable; when common sense is
wanted, he is an incumbrance. Yesterday
Cæsar was not so great; to-day Job not so
miserable. Yesterday radiant with the light of
an ideal world, in which he lives, the first of
men, and now oppressed by wants and by sick-
ness, for which he must thank himself, none is
so poor to do him reverence. He resembles the
opium-eaters, whom travellers describe as fre-
quenting the bazaars of Constantinople, who
skulk about all day, the most pitiful drivellers,
yellow, emaciated, ragged, and sneaking: then,
at evening, when the bazaars are open, they
slink to the opium-shop, swallow their morsel,
and become tranquil, glorious, and great. And
who has not seen the tragedy of imprudent ge-
nius, struggling for years with paltry pecuniary
difficulties, at last sinking, chilled, exhausted,
and fruitless, like a giant slaughtered by pins?
Is it not better that a man should accept the
first pains and mortifications of this sort, which
nature is not slack in sending him, as hints that
he must expect no other good than the just fruit
of his own labour and self-denial? Health,
236
ESSAY VII.
bread, climate, social position, have their im-
portance, and he will give them their due. Let
him esteem Nature a perpetual counsellor, and
her perfections the exact measure of our devia-
tions. Let him make the night night, and the
day day. Let him control the habit of expense.
Let him see that as much wisdom may be ex-
pended on a private economy as on an empire,
and as much wisdom may be drawn from it.
The laws of the world are written out for him
on every piece of money in his hand. There is
nothing he will not be the better for knowing,
were it only the wisdom of Poor Richard; or
the State-street prudence of buying by the acre,
to sell by the foot; or the thrift of the agricul-
turist, to stick a tree between whiles, because it
will grow whilst he sleeps; or the prudence which
consists in husbanding little strokes of the tool,
little portions of time, particles of stock, and
small gains. The eye of prudence may never
shut. Iron, if kept at the ironmonger's, will
rust. Beer, if not brewed in the right state of
the atmosphere, will sour. Timber of ships will
rot at sea, or, if laid up high and dry, will strain,
warp, and dry-rot. Money, if kept by us, yields
no rent, and is liable to loss; if invested, is liable
to depreciation of the particular kind of stock.
Strike, says the smith; the iron is white. Keep
PRUDENCE.
237
the rake, says the haymaker, as nigh the scythe
as you can, and the cart as nigh the rake. Our
Yankee trade is reputed to be very much on the
extreme of this prudence. It saves itself by its
activity. It takes bank notes-good, bad, clean,
ragged, and saves itself by the speed with which
it passes them off. Iron cannot rust, nor beer
sour, nor timber rot, nor calicoes go out of
fashion, nor money-stocks depreciate, in the few
swift moments which the Yankee suffers any
one of them to remain in his possession. In
skating over thin ice, our safety is in our
speed.
Let him learn a prudence of a higher strain.
Let him learn that every thing in nature, even
motes and feathers, go by law and not by luck,
and that what he sows, he reaps. By diligence
and self-command, let him put the bread he eats
at his own disposal, and not at that of others,
that he may not stand in bitter and false rela-
tions to other men; for the best good of wealth
is freedom. Let him practise the minor virtues.
How much of human life is lost in waiting! Let
him not make his fellow-creatures wait. How
many words and promises are promises of con-
versation! Let his be words of fate. When
he sees a folded and sealed scrap of paper float
round the globe in a pine ship, and come safe
238
ESSAY VII.
to the eye for which it was written, amidst a
swarming population, let him likewise feel the
admonition to integrate his being across all these
distracting forces, and keep a slender human
word among the storms, distances, and accidents
that drive us hither and thither, and, by persist-
ency, make the paltry force of one man reappear
to redeem its pledge, after months and years, in
the most distant climates.
We must not try to write the laws of any
one virtue, looking at that only. Human na-
ture loves no contradictions, but is symmetrical.
The prudence which secures an outward well-
being is not to be studied by one set of men,
whilst heroism and holiness are studied by an-
other, but they are reconcilable. Prudence con-
cerns the present time, persons, property, and
existing forms. But as every fact hath its roots
in the soul, and if the soul were changed, would
cease to be, or would become some other thing,
therefore the proper administration of outward
things will always rest on a just apprehension of
their cause and origin; that is, the good man
will be the wise man, and the single-hearted
the politic man. Every violation of truth is not
only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at
the health of human society. On the most pro-
fitable lie the course of events presently lays a
PRUDENCE.
239
destructive tax; whilst frankness proves to be
the best tactics, for it invites frankness, puts
the parties on a convenient footing, and makes
their business a friendship. Trust men, and
they will be true to you; treat them greatly,
and they will shew themselves great, though
they make an exception in your favour to all
their rules of trade.
So, in regard to disagreeable and formidable
things, prudence does not consist in evasion, or
in flight, but in courage. He who wishes to
walk in the most peaceful parts of life with any
serenity must screw himself up to resolution.
Let him front the object of his worst apprehen-
sion, and his stoutness will commonly make his
fear groundless. The Latin proverb says, that
' in battles the eye is first overcome.'
The eye
is daunted, and greatly exaggerates the perils of
the hour. Entire self-possession may make a
battle very little more dangerous to life than a
match at foils or at foot-ball. Examples are
cited by soldiers, of men who have seen the
cannon pointed, and the fire given to it, and
who have stepped aside from the path of the
ball. The terrors of the storm are chiefly con-
fined to the parlour and the cabin. The drover,
the sailor, buffets it all day, and his health re-
240
ESSAY VII.
news itself at as vigorous a pulse under the sleet,
as under the sun of June.
In the occurrence of unpleasant things among
neighbours fear comes readily to heart, and mag-
nifies the consequence of the other party; but it
is a bad counsellor. Every man is actually weak,
and apparently strong. To himself, he seems
weak; to others, formidable. You are afraid of
Grim; but Grim also is afraid of you. You are
solicitous of the good will of the meanest person,
uneasy at his ill will. But the sturdiest offender
of
your peace and of the neighbourhood, if you
rip up his claims, is as thin and timid as any;
and the peace of society is often kept, because,
as children say, one is afraid, and the other dares
not. Far off, men swell, bully, and threaten :
bring them hand to hand, and they are a feeble
folk.
C
It is a proverb, that courtesy costs nothing;'
but calculation might come to value love for its
profit. Love is fabled to be blind; but kindness
is necessary to perception; love is not a hood,
but an eye-water. If you meet a sectary, or a
hostile partisan, never recognise the dividing
lines; but meet on what common ground re-
mains,—if only that the sun shines, and the rain
rains for both, the area will widen very fast,
PRUDENCE.
241
and ere you know it, the boundary mountains, on
which the eye had fastened, have melted into air.
If he set out to contend, almost St. Paul will
lie, almost St. John will hate. What low, poor,
paltry, hypocritical people, an argument on re-
ligion will make of the pure and chosen souls!
Shuffle they will, and crow, crook, and hide,
feign to confess here, only that they may brag
and conquer there, and not a thought has en-
riched either party, and not an emotion of
bravery, modesty, or hope. So neither should
you put yourself in a false position to your con-
temporaries, by indulging a vein of hostility and
bitterness. Though your views are in straight
antagonism to theirs, assume an identity of sen-
timent, assume that you are saying precisely that
which all think, and in the flow of wit and love
roll out your paradoxes in solid column, with
not the infirmity of a doubt. So at least shall
you get an adequate deliverance. The natural
motions of the soul are so much better than the
voluntary ones, that you will never do yourself
justice in dispute. The thought is not then
taken hold of by the right handle, does not
shew itself proportioned, and in its true bear-
ings, but bears extorted, hoarse, and half wit-
ness. But assume a consent, and it shall pre-
sently be granted, since really, and underneath
M
242
ESSAY VII.
all their external diversities, all men are of one
heart and mind.
Wisdom will never let us stand with any
man or men on an unfriendly footing. We re-
fuse sympathy and intimacy with people, as if
we waited for some better sympathy and inti-
macy to come. But whence and when? To-
morrow will be like to-day. Life wastes itself
whilst we are preparing to live. Our friends
and fellow-workers die off from us. Scarcely
can we say, we see new men, new women ap-
proaching us. We are too old to regard fashion,
too old to expect patronage of any greater or
more powerful. Let us suck the sweetness of
those affections and consuetudes that grow near
us. These old shoes are easy to the feet. Un-
doubtedly, we can easily pick faults in our com-
pany, can easily whisper names prouder, and
that tickle the fancy more. Every man's ima-
gination hath its friends; and pleasant would
life be with such companions. But if you can-
not have them on good mutual terms, you can-
not have them. If not the Deity, but our
ambition hews and shapes the new relations,
their virtue escapes, as strawberries lose their
flavour in garden-beds.
Thus truth, frankness, courage, love, humi-
lity, and all the virtues, range themselves on the
PRUDENCE.
243
side of prudence, or the art of securing a pre-
sent well-being. I do not know if all matter
will be found to be made of one element, as
oxygen or hydrogen, at last; but the world of
manners and actions is wrought of one stuff,
and begin where we will, we are pretty sure in
a short space to be mumbling our ten command-
ments.
HEROISM.
'Paradise is under the shadow of swords.'
Mahomet.
ESSAY VIII
HEROIS M.
IN the elder English dramatists, and mainly in
the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, there is a
constant recognition of gentility, as if a noble
behaviour were as easily marked in the society
of their age, as colour is in our American popu-
lation. When any Rodrigo, Pedro, or Valerio
enters, though he be a stranger, the duke or
governor exclaims, This is a gentleman,— and
proffers civilities without end; but all the rest
are slag and refuse. In harmony with this de-
light in personal advantages, there is in their
plays a certain heroic cast of character and
dialogue, as in Bonduca, Sophocles, the Mad
Lover, the Double Marriage, wherein the
speaker is so earnest and cordial, and on such
deep grounds of character, that the dialogue,
on the slightest additional incident in the plot,
rises naturally into poetry. Among many texts,
248
ESSAY VIII.
take the following. The Roman Martius has
conquered Athens,-all but the invincible spirits
of Sophocles the duke of Athens, and Dorigen
his wife. The beauty of the latter inflames Mar-
tius, and he seeks to save her husband; but So-
phocles will not ask his life, although assured
that a word will save him, and the execution of
both proceeds.
Valerius. Bid thy wife farewell.
Soph. No, I will take no leave. My Dorigen,
Yonder above, 'bout Ariadne's crown,
My spirit shall hover for thee. Prithee, haste.
Dor. Stay, Sophocles,-with this tie up my sight;
Let not soft nature so transformed be,
And lose her gentler-sexed humanity,
To make me see my lord bleed. So, 'tis well;
Never one object underneath the sun
Will I behold before my Sophocles.
Farewell; now teach the Romans how to die.
Mar. Dost know what 'tis to die?
Soph. Thou dost not, Martius,
And therefore not what 'tis to live. To die
Is to begin to live; it is to end
An old, stale, weary work, and to commence
A newer and a better; 'tis to leave
Deceitful knaves for the society
Of gods and goodness. Thou thyself must part
At last from all thy garlands, pleasures, triumphs,
And prove thy fortitude what then 'twill do.
Val. But art not grieved nor vexed to leave thy life thus ?
Soph. Why should I grieve or vex for being sent
To them I ever loved best? Now I'll kneel,
HEROISM.
249
But with my back toward thee; 'tis the last duty
This trunk can do the gods.
Mar. Strike, strike, Valerius,
Or Martius' heart will leap out at his mouth :
This is a man, a woman!
Kiss thy lord,
And live with all the freedom you were wont.
O love! thou doubly hast afflicted me
With virtue and with beauty. Treacherous heart,
My hand shall cast thee quick into my urn,
Ere thou transgress this knot of piety.
Val. What ails my brother?
Soph. Martius, O Martius,
Thou now hast found a way to conquer me.
Dor. O star of Rome! what gratitude can speak
Fit words to follow such a deed as this?
Mar. This admirable duke, Valerius,
With his disdain of fortune and of death,
Captived himself, has captivated me,
And though my arm hath ta'en his body here,
His soul hath subjugated Martius' soul.
By Romulus, he is all soul, I think;
He hath no flesh, and spirit cannot be gyved.
Then we have vanquished nothing; he is free,
And Martius walks now in captivity.'
I do not readily remember any poem, play,
sermon, novel, or oration, that our press vents
in the last few years, which goes to the same
tune. We have a great many flutes and flageo-
lets, but not often the sound of any fife. Yet
Wordsworth's Laodamia, and the ode of ' Dion,'
and some sonnets, have a certain noble music;
and Scott will sometimes draw a stroke like the
M 2
250
ESSAY VIII.
portrait of Lord Evandale, given by Balfour of
Burley. Thomas Carlyle, with his natural taste.
for what is manly and daring in character, has
suffered no heroic trait in his favourites to drop
from his biographical and historical pictures.
Earlier, Robert Burns has given us a song or
two. In the Harleian Miscellanies there is an
account of the battle of Lutzen, which deserves
to be read. And Simon Ockley's History of the
Saracens recounts the prodigies of individual
valour with admiration, all the more evident
on the part of the narrator, that he seems to
think that his place in Christian Oxford re-
quires of him some proper protestations of ab-
horrence. But if we explore the literature of
Heroism, we shall quickly come to Plutarch,
who is its doctor and historian. To him we
owe the Brasidas, the Dion, the Epaminondas,
the Scipio of old; and I must think we are more
deeply indebted to him than to all the ancient
writers. Each of his Lives' is a refutation to
the despondency and cowardice of our religious
and political theorists. A wild courage, a stoi-
cism not of the schools, but of the blood, shines
in every anecdote, and has given that book its
immense fame.
6
We need books of this tart cathartic virtue,
more than books of political science or of pri-
HEROISM.
251
vate economy. Life is a festival only to the
wise. Seen from the nook and chimney-side of
prudence, it wears a ragged and dangerous front.
The violations of the laws of nature by our pre-
decessors and our contemporaries are punished
in us also. The disease and deformity around
us certify the infraction of natural, intellectual,
and moral laws, and often violation on violation
to breed such compound misery. A lock-jaw,
that bends a man's head back to his heels; hy-
drophobia, that makes him bark at his wife and
babes; insanity, that makes him eat grass; war,
plague, cholera, famine, indicate a certain
ferocity in nature, which, as it had its inlet by
human crime, must have its outlet by human
suffering. Unhappily, almost no man exists.
who has not in his own person become, to
some amount, a stockholder in the sin, and
so made himself liable to a share in the ex-
piation.
Our culture, therefore, must not omit the
arming of the man. Let him hear in season,
that he is born into the state of war, and that
the commonwealth and his own well-being re-
quire that he should not go dancing in the
weeds of peace; but warned, self-collected, and
neither defying nor dreading the thunder, let
him take both reputation and life in his hand,
252
ESSAY VIII.
and with perfect urbanity dare the gibbet and
the mob by the absolute truth of his speech and
the rectitude of his behaviour.
Towards all this external evil the man within
the breast assumes a warlike attitude, and affirms
his ability to cope single-handed with the infi-
nite army of enemies. To this military attitude
of the soul we give the name of Heroism. Its
rudest form is the contempt for safety and ease,
which makes the attractiveness of war.
It is a
self-trust which slights the restraints of prudence,
in the plenitude of its energy and power to re-
pair the harms it may suffer. The hero is a
mind of such balance that no disturbances can
shake his will; but pleasantly, and as it were
merrily, he advances to his own music, alike in
frightful alarms and in the tipsy mirth of uni-
versal dissoluteness. There is somewhat not phi-
losophical in heroism; there is somewhat not holy
in it; it seems not to know that other souls are
of one texture with it; it hath pride; it is the
extreme of individual nature. Nevertheless we
must profoundly revere it. There is somewhat
in great actions, which does not allow us to go
behind them. Heroism feels and never reasons,
and therefore is always right; and although a
different breeding, different religion, and greater
intellectual activity, would have modified or even
HEROISM.
253
reversed the particular action, yet for the hero,
that thing he does is the highest deed, and is
not open to the censure of philosophers or di-
vines. It is the avowal of the unschooled man,
that he finds a quality in him that is negligent
of expense, of health, of life, of danger, of ha-
tred, of reproach, and that he knows that his
will is higher and more excellent than all actual
and all possible antagonists.
Heroism works in contradiction to the voice
of mankind, and in contradiction, for a time, to
the voice of the great and good. Heroism is an
obedience to a secret impulse of an individual's
character. Now to no other man can its wisdom
appear as it does to him, for every man must be
supposed to see a little farther on his own proper
path than any one else. Therefore, just and
wise men take umbrage at his act, until after
some little time be past; then they see it to be
in unison with their acts. All prudent men see
that the action is clean contrary to a sensual
prosperity; for every heroic act measures itself
by its contempt of some external good. But it
finds its own success at last, and then the pru-
dent also extol.
Self-trust is the essence of Heroism. It is
the state of the soul at war; and its ultimate
objects are the last defiance of falsehood and
254
ESSAY VIII.
wrong, and the power to bear all that can be
inflicted by evil agents. It speaks the truth, and
it is just. It is generous, hospitable, temperate,
scornful of petty calculations, and scornful of
being scorned. It persists; it is of an un-
daunted boldness, and of a fortitude not to be
wearied out. Its jest is the littleness of com-
mon life. That false prudence which dotes on
health and wealth is the foil, the butt and mer-
riment of heroism. Heroism, like Plotinus, is
almost ashamed of its body. What shall it say,
then, to the sugar-plums and cats'-cradles, to the
toilet, compliments, quarrels, cards, and custard,
which rack the wit of all human society? What
joys has kind nature provided for us dear crea-
tures ! There seems to be no interval between
greatness and meanness. When the spirit is
not master of the world, then is it its dupe.
Yet the little man takes the great hoax so in-
nocently, works in it so headlong and believing,
is born red, and dies gray, arranging his toilet,
attending on his own health, laying traps for
sweet food and strong wine, setting his heart on
a horse or a rifle, made happy with a little gos-
sip or a little praise, that the great soul cannot
choose but laugh at such earnest nonsense. 'In-
deed, these humble considerations make me out
of love with greatness. What a disgrace is it to

HEROISM.
255
me to take note how many pairs of silk stock-
ings thou hast, namely, these and those that
were the peach-coloured ones; or to bear the
inventory of thy shirts, as one for superfluity,
and one other for use!'
•
Citizens, thinking after the laws of arith-
metic, consider the inconvenience of receiving
strangers at their fireside, reckon narrowly the
loss of time and the unusual display: the soul
of a better quality thrusts back the unseason-
able economy into the vaults of life, and says, I
will obey the God, and the sacrifice and the fire
he will provide. Ibn Hankal, the Arabian geo-
grapher, describes a heroic extreme in the hos-
pitality of Sogd, in Bukharia. When I was in
Sogd, I saw a great building, like a palace, the
gates of which were open and fixed back to the
wall with large nails. I asked the reason, and
was told that the house had not been shut night
or day, for a hundred years. Strangers may
present themselves at any hour, and in what-
ever number; the master has amply provided
for the reception of the men and their animals,
and is never happier than when they tarry for
some time. Nothing of the kind have I seen
in any other country.' The magnanimous know
very well, that they who give time, or money, or
shelter to the stranger- so it be done for love,
256
ESSAY VIII.
and not for ostentation do as it were put God
under obligation to them, so perfect are the
compensations of the universe. In some way,
the time they seem to lose is redeemed, and the
pains they seem to take remunerate themselves.
These men fan the flame of human love, and
raise the standard of civil virtue among man-
kind. But hospitality must be for service, and
not for show, or it pulls down the host. The
brave soul rates itself too high to value itself
by the splendour of its table and draperies. It
gives what it hath, and all it hath; but its own
majesty can lend a better grace to bannocks
and fair water than belong to city feasts.
The temperance of the hero proceeds from
the same wish to do no dishonour to the worthi-
ness he has. But he loves it for its elegancy,
not for its austerity. It seems not worth his
while to be solemn, and denounce with bitter-
ness flesh-eating or wine-drinking, the use of
tobacco, or opium, or tea, or silk, or gold. A
great man scarcely knows how he dines, how
he dresses; but, without railing or precision,
his living is natural and poetic. John Eliot,
the Indian Apostle, drank water, and said of
wine, It is a noble, generous liquor, and
we should be humbly thankful for it; but,
as I remember, water was made before it.'
"
HEROISM.
257
Better still is the temperance of king David,
who poured out on the ground unto the Lord
the water which three of his warriors had
brought him to drink at the peril of their
lives.
It is told of Brutus, that when he fell on
his sword, after the battle of Philippi, he quoted
a line of Euripides, O virtue, I have followed
thee through life, and I find thee at last but a
shade.' I doubt not the hero is slandered by
this report. The heroic soul does not sell its
justice and its nobleness. It does not ask to
dine nicely and to sleep warm. The essence
of greatness is the perception that virtue is
enough. Poverty is its ornament. Plenty it
does not need, and can very well abide its loss.
But that which takes my fancy most, in the
heroic class, is the good humour and hilarity
they exhibit. It is a height to which common
duty can very well attain, to suffer and to dare
with solemnity. But these rare souls set opinion,
success, and life, at so cheap a rate, that they
will not soothe their enemies by petitions, or the
show of sorrow, but wear their own habitual
greatness. Scipio, charged with peculation, re-
fuses to do himself so great a disgrace as to wait
for justification, though he had the scroll of his
accounts in his hands, but tears it to pieces be-
258
ESSAY VIII.
fore the tribunes. Socrates' condemnation of
himself to be maintained in all honour in the
Prytaneum during his life, and Sir Thomas
More's playfulness at the scaffold, are of the
same strain. In Beaumont and Fletcher's 'Sea
Voyage,' Juletta tells the stout captain and his
company,
Jul. Why, slaves, 'tis in our power to hang ye.
Very likely;
Master.
'Tis in our powers, then, to be hanged, and scorn ye.'
These replies are sound and whole. Sport is
the bloom and glow of a perfect health. The
great will not condescend to take any thing
seriously; all must be as gay as the song of a
canary, though it were the building of cities, or
the eradication of old and foolish churches and
nations, which have cumbered the earth long
thousands of years. Simple hearts put all the
history and customs of this world behind them,
and play their own play in innocent defiance of
the Blue-Laws of the world; and such would
appear, could we see the human race assembled
in vision, like little children frolicking together;
though, to the eyes of mankind at large, they
wear a stately and solemn garb of works and
influences.
The interest these fine stories have for us,
the power of a romance over the boy who
HEROISM.
259
grasps the forbidden book under his bench at
school, our delight in the hero, is the main fact
to our purpose. All these great and tran-
scendent properties are ours. If we dilate in
beholding the Greek energy, the Roman pride,
it is that we are already domesticating the same
sentiment. Let us find room for this great
guest in our small houses. The first step of
worthiness will be to disabuse us of our super-
stitious associations with places and times, with
number and size. Why should these words,
Athenian, Roman, Asia, and England, so tingle
in the ear? Let us feel that where the heart is,
there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not
in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Con-
necticut River, and Boston Bay, you think pal-
try places, and the ear loves names of foreign
and classic topography. But here we are;
that is a great fact, and, if we will tarry a little,
we may come to learn that here is best. See to
it, only that thyself is here;-and art and na-
ture, hope and dread, friends, angels, and the
Supreme Being, shall not be absent from the
chamber where thou sittest. Epaminondas,
brave and affectionate, does not seem to us to
need Olympus to die upon, nor the Syrian sun-
shine. He lies very well where he is. The Jer-
seys were handsome ground enough for Wash-
260
ESSAY VIII.
ington to tread, and London streets for the feet
of Milton. A great man illustrates his place,
makes his climate genial in the imagination of
men, and its air the beloved element of all deli-
cate spirits. That country is the fairest which
is inhabited by the noblest minds.
The pic-
tures which fill the imagination in reading the
actions of Pericles, Xenophon, Columbus, Ba-
yard, Sidney, Hampden, teach us how needlessly
mean our life is; that we, by the depth of our
living, should deck it with more than regal or
national splendour, and act on principles that
should interest man and nature in the length of
our days.
We have seen or heard of many extraordi-
nary young men who never ripened, or whose
performance in actual life was not extraordinary.
When we see their air and mien, when we hear
them speak of society, of books, of religion, we
admire their superiority, they seem to throw
contempt on the whole state of the world; theirs
is the tone of a youthful giant, who is sent to
work revolutions. But they enter an active
profession, and the forming Colossus shrinks to
the common size of man. The magic they used
was the ideal tendencies, which always make
the Actual ridiculous; but the tough world had
its revenge the moment they put their horses of
HEROISM.
261
the sun to plough in its furrow. They found
no example and no companion, and their heart
fainted. What then? The lesson they gave in
their first aspirations is yet true; and a better
valour and a purer truth shall one day execute
their will, and put the world to shame. Or why
should a woman liken herself to any historical
woman, and think, because Sappho, or Sévigné,
or De Staël, or the cloistered souls who have
had genius and cultivation, do not satisfy the
imagination and the serene Themis, none can,
-certainly not she? Why not? She has a new
and unattempted problem to solve, perchance
that of the happiest nature that ever bloomed.
Let the maiden with erect soul walk serenely
on her way, accept the hint of each new expe-
rience, try, in turn, all the gifts God offers her,
that she may learn the power and the charm
that, like a new dawn radiating out of the deep
of space, her new-born being is. The fair girl,
who repels interference by a decided and proud
choice of influences, so careless of pleasing, so
wilful and lofty, inspires every beholder with
somewhat of her own nobleness. The silent
heart encourages her; O friend, never strike
sail to a fear. Come into port greatly, or sail
with God the seas. Not in vain you live, for
262
ESSAY VIII.
every passing eye is cheered and refined by the
vision.
The characteristic of a genuine heroism is
its persistency. All men have wandering im-
pulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when
you have resolved to be great, abide by your-
self, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself
with the world. The heroic cannot be the com-
mon, nor the common the heroic. Yet we have
the weakness to expect the sympathy of people
in those actions whose excellence is, that they
outrun sympathy, and appeal to a tardy justice.
If you would serve your brother, because it is
fit for you to serve him, do not take back your
words when you find that prudent people do not
commend you. Be true to your own act, and
congratulate yourself if you have done some-
thing strange and extravagant, and broken the
monotony of a decorous age. It was a high
counsel that I once heard given to a young per-
son, "Always do what you are afraid to do."
A simple manly character need never make an
apology, but should regard its past action with
the calmness of Phocion, when he admitted that
the event of the battle was happy, yet did not
regret his dissuasion from the battle.
There is no weakness or exposure for which
HEROISM.
263
we cannot find consolation in the thought,—this
is a part of my constitution, part of my relation
and office to my fellow-creature. Has nature
covenanted with me that I should never appear
to disadvantage, never make a ridiculous figure?
Let us be generous of our dignity, as well as of
Greatness once and forever has^
our money.
done with opinion. We tell our charities, not
because we wish to be praised for them, not?
because we think they have great merit, but for
our justification. It is a capital blunder; as
you discover, when another man recites his cha-
rities.
To speak the truth even with some austerity,
to live with some rigour of temperance or some
extremes of generosity, seems to be an asceti-
cism which common good nature would appoint
to those who are at ease and in plenty, in sign
that they feel a brotherhood with the great mul-
titude of suffering men. And not only need we
breathe and exercise the soul by assuming the
penalties of abstinence, of debt, of solitude, of
unpopularity, but it behoves the wise man to
look with a bold eye into those rarer dangers
which sometimes invade men, and to familiarise
himself with disgusting forms of disease, with
sounds of execration, and the vision of violent
death.
264
ESSAY VIII.
Times of heroism are generally times of
terror; but the day never shines in which this
element may not work. The circumstances of
man, we say, are historically somewhat better in
this country, and at this hour, than perhaps ever
before. More freedom exists for culture. It
will not now run against an axe at the first step
out of the beaten track of opinion. But whoso
is heroic will always find crises to try his edge.
Human virtue demands her champions and mar-
tyrs, and the trial of persecution always pro-
ceeds. It is but the other day that the brave
Lovejoy gave his breast to the bullets of a mob
for the rights of free speech and opinion, and
died when it was better not to live.
I see not any road of perfect peace which a
man can walk, but to take counsel of his own
bosom. Let him quit too much association; let
him go home much, and stablish himself in
those courses he approves. The unremitting
retention of simple and high sentiments in ob-
scure duties is hardening the character to that
temper which will work with honour, if need
be, in the tumult or on the scaffold. Whatever
outrages have happened to men may befall a
man again; and very easily in a republic, if
there appear any signs of a decay of religion.
Coarse slander, fire, tar and feathers, and the
HEROISM.
265
gibbet, the youth may freely bring home to his
mind, and with what sweetness of temper he
can, and inquire how fast he can fix his sense of
duty, braving such penalties, whenever it may
please the next newspaper, and a sufficient
number of his neighbours, to pronounce his
opinions incendiary.
It may calm the apprehension of calamity in
the most susceptible heart, to see how quick a
bound nature has set to the utmost infliction
of malice. We rapidly approach a brink over
which no enemy can follow us.
'Let them rave:
Thou art quiet in thy grave.'
In the gloom of our ignorance of what shall be
in the hour when we are deaf to the higher
voices, who does not envy them who have seen
safely to an end their manful endeavour? Who
that sees the meanness of our politics, but inly
congratulates Washington that he is long al-
ready wrapped in his shroud, and forever safe;
that he was laid sweet in his grave, the hope of
humanity not yet subjugated in him? Who
does not sometimes envy the good and brave,
who are no more to suffer from the tumults of
the natural world, and await with curious com-
placency the speedy term of his own conversa-
tion with finite nature? And yet the love that
N
266
ESSAY VIII.
will be annihilated sooner than treacherous, has
already made death impossible, and affirms itself
no mortal, but a native of the deeps of absolute
and inextinguishable being.
THE OVER-SOUL.
• But souls that of his own good life partake
He loves as his own self; dear as his eye
They are to Him: He'll never them forsake :
When they shall die, then God himself shall die :
They live, they live in blest eternity.'
HENRY MORE.
ESSAY IX.
THE OVER-SOUL.
THERE is a difference between one and another
hour of life in their authority and subsequent
effect. Our faith comes in moments; our vice
is habitual. Yet is there a depth in those brief
moments, which constrains us to ascribe more
reality to them than to all other experiences.
For this reason, the argument, which is always
forthcoming to silence those who conceive ex-
traordinary hopes of man, namely, the appeal
to experience, is forever invalid and vain.
A
mightier hope abolishes despair. We give up
the past to the objector, and yet we hope. He
must explain this hope. We grant that human
life is mean; but how did we find out that it
was mean? What is the ground of this uneasi-
ness of ours, of this old discontent? What is
the universal sense of want and ignorance, but
270
ESSAY IX.
the fine innuendo by which the great soul makes
its enormous claim? Why do men feel that the
natural history of man has never been written,
but always he is leaving behind what you have.
said of him, and it becomes old, and books of
metaphysics worthless? The philosophy of six
thousand years has not searched the chambers
and magazines of the soul. In its experiments
there has always remained in the last analysis
a residuum it could not resolve. Man is a stream
whose source is hidden. Always our being is
descending into us from we know not whence.
The most exact calculator has no prescience
that somewhat incalculable may not baulk the
very next moment. I am constrained every
moment to acknowledge a higher origin for
events than the will I call mine.
As with events, so is it with thoughts.
When I watch that flowing river, which, out of
regions I see not, pours for a season its streams
into me, I see that I am a pensioner, —not a
cause, but a surprised spectator of this ethereal
water; that I desire and look up, and put my-
self in the attitude of reception, but from some
alien energy the visions come.
The Supreme Critic on all the errors of the
past and the present, and the only prophet of
that which must be, is that great nature in which
THE OVER-SOUL.
271
we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of the
atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-Soul, within
which every man's particular being is contained
and made one with all other; that common
heart, of which all sincere conversation is the
worship, to which all right action is submission;
that overpowering reality which confutes our
tricks and talents, and constrains every one to
pass for what he is, and to speak from his cha-
racter and not from his tongue; and which ever-
more tends and aims to pass into our thought and
hand, and become wisdom, and virtue, and power,
and beauty. We live in succession, in division,
in parts, in particles. Meantime, within man
is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the
universal beauty, to which every part and par-
ticle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And
this deep power in which we exist, and whose
beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-
sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act
of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the
spectacle, the subject and the object, are one.
We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the
moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of
which these are the shining parts, is the soul.
It is only by the vision of that Wisdom, that the
horoscope of the ages can be read, and it is only
by falling back on our better thoughts, by yield-
272
ESSAY IX.
ing to the spirit of prophecy which is innate in
every man, that we can know what it saith.
Every man's words, who speaks from that life,
must sound vain to those who do not dwell in
the same thought on their own part. I dare not
speak for it. My words do not carry its august
sense; they fall short and cold. Only itself can
inspire whom it will, and, behold, their speech
shall be lyrical, and sweet, and universal as the
rising of the wind. Yet I desire, even by pro-
fane words, if sacred I may not use, to indicate
the heaven of this deity, and to report what hints
I have collected of the transcendent simplicity.
and energy of the Highest Law.
If we consider what happens in conversation,
in reveries, in remorse, in times of passion, in
surprises, in the instructions of dreams, wherein
often we see ourselves in masquerade, the droll
disguises only magnifying and enhancing a real
element, and forcing it on our distinct notice,
we shall catch many hints that will broaden and
lighten into knowledge of the secret of nature.
All goes to shew that the soul in man is not an
organ, but animates and exercises all the organs;
is not a function, like the power of memory, of
calculation, of comparison, but uses these as
hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light;
is not the intellect or the will, but the master
THE OVER-SOUL.
273
of the intellect and the will; is the vast back-
ground of our being, in which they lie,—an im-
mensity not possessed and that cannot be pos-
sessed. From within or from behind, a light
shines through us upon things, and makes us
aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.
A man is the façade of a temple, wherein all
wisdom and all good abide. What we commonly
call man,—the eating, drinking, planting, count-
ing man,—does not, as we know him, represent
himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do
not respect; but the soul, whose organ he is, would
he let it appear through his action, would make
our knees bend. When it breathes through his
intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through
his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his
affection, it is love. And the blindness of the
intellect begins, when it would be something of
itself. The weakness of the will begins, when
the individual would be something of himself.
All reform aims, in some one particular, to let
the great soul have its way through us; in other
words, to engage us to obey.
Of this pure nature every man is at some
time sensible. Language cannot paint it with
his colours. It is too subtle. It is undefinable,
unmeasurable; but we know that it pervades and
contains us. We know that all spiritual being
N 2
274
ESSAY IX.
is in man.
A wise old proverb says, 'God
comes to see us without bell:' that is, as there
is no screen or ceiling between our heads and
the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall
in the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and
God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken
away. We lie open on one side to the deeps of
spiritual nature, to all the attributes of God.
Justice we see and know, Love, Freedom, Power.
These natures no man ever got above, but al-
ways they tower over us, and most in the mo-
ment when our interests tempt us to wound
them.
The sovereignty of this nature whereof we
speak is made known by its independency of
those limitations which circumscribe us on every
hand. The soul circumscribeth all things. As
I have said, it contradicts all experience. In
like manner it abolishes time and space. The
influence of the senses has, in most men, over-
powered the mind to that degree, that the walls
of time and space have come to look solid, real,
and insurmountable; and to speak with levity
of these limits is, in the world, the sign of in-
sanity. Yet time and space are but inverse.
measures of the force of the soul. A man is
capable of abolishing them both. The spirit
sports with time-
THE OVER-SOUL.
275
• Can crowd eternity into an hour,
Or stretch an hour to eternity.'
Some
We are often made to feel that there is ano-
ther youth and age than that which is measured
from the year of our natural birth.
thoughts always find us young, and keep us so.
Such a thought is the love of the universal and
eternal beauty. Every man parts from that
contemplation with the feeling that it rather be-
longs to ages than to mortal life. The least
activity of the intellectual powers redeems us in
a degree from the influences of time. In sick-
ness, in languor, give us a strain of poetry or a
profound sentence, and we are refreshed; or
produce a volume of Plato or Shakspeare, or
remind us of their names, and instantly we come
into a feeling of longevity. See how the deep,
divine thought demolishes centuries and millen-
niums, and makes itself present through all ages.
Is the teaching of Christ less effective now than
it was when first his mouth was opened? The
emphasis of facts and persons to my soul has
nothing to do with time. And so, always, the
soul's scale is one; the scale of the senses and
the understanding is another. Before the great
revelations of the soul, Time, Space, and Nature
shrink away. In common speech, we refer all
things to time, as we habitually refer the im-
276
ESSAY IX.
mensely sundered stars to one concave sphere.
And so we say that the Judgment is distant or
near; that the Millennium approaches; that a
day of certain political, moral, social reforms is
at hand; and the like; when we mean, that in
the nature of things, one of the facts we con-
template is external and fugitive, and the other
is permanent and connate with the soul. The
things we now esteem fixed shall, one by one,
detach themselves, like ripe fruit, from our ex-
perience, and fall. The wind shall blow them
none knows whither. The landscape, the figures,
Boston, London, are facts as fugitive as any in-
stitution past, or any whiff of mist or smoke,
and so is society, and so is the world. The soul
looketh steadily forwards, creating a world al-
way before her, and leaving worlds alway be-
hind her. She has no dates, nor rites, nor per-
sons, nor specialties, nor men. The soul knows
only the soul. All else is idle weeds for her
wearing.
After its own law, and not by arithmetic, is
the rate of its progress to be computed. The
soul's advances are not made by gradation, such
as can be represented by motion in a straight.
line; but rather by ascension of state, such as
can be represented by metamorphosis, -from
the egg to the worm, from the worm to the fly.
THE OVER-SOUL.
277
The growths of genius are of a certain total cha-
racter, that does not advance the elect individual
first over John, then Adam, then Richard, and
give to each the pain of discovered inferiority,
but by every throe of growth the man expands
there where he works, passing, at each pulsa-
tion, classes, populations of men. With each
divine impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of
the visible and finite, and comes out into eter-
nity, and inspires and expires its air. It con-
verses with truths that have always been spoken
in the world, and becomes conscious of a closer
sympathy with Zeno and Arrian than with per-
sons in the house.
This is the law of moral and of mental gain.
The simple rise as by specific levity, not into a
particular virtue, but into the region of all the
virtues. They are in the spirit which contains
them all. The soul is superior to all the par-
ticulars of merit. The soul requires purity, but
purity is not it; requires justice, but justice is
not that; requires beneficence, but is somewhat
better: so that there is a kind of descent and
accommodation felt when we leave speaking of
moral nature, to urge a virtue which it enjoins.
For to the soul in her pure action all the vir-
tues are natural, and not painfully acquired.
278
ESSAY IX.
Speak to his heart, and the man becomes sud-
denly virtuous.
Within the same sentiment is the germ of
intellectual growth, which obeys the same law.
Those who are capable of humility, of justice,
of love, of aspiration, are already on a platform
that commands the sciences and arts, speech and
poetry, action and grace. For whoso dwells
in this moral beatitude does already anticipate
those special powers which men prize so highly;
just as love does justice to all the gifts of the
object beloved. The lover has no talent, no
skill, which passes for quite nothing with his
enamoured maiden, however little she may pos-
sess of related faculty. And the heart, which
abandons itself to the Supreme Mind, finds itself
related to all its works, and will travel a royal
road to particular knowledges and powers. For
in ascending to this primary and aboriginal sen-
timent, we have come from our remote station
on the circumference instantaneously to the cen-
tre of the world, where, as in the closet of God,
we see causes, and anticipate the universe, which
is but a slow effect.
One mode of the divine teaching is the in-
carnation of the spirit in a form,-in forms like
my own. I live in society; with persons who
THE OVER-SOUL.
279
answer to thoughts in my own mind, or out-
wardly express to me a certain obedience to the
great instincts to which I live. I see its pre-
sence to them. I am certified of a common na-
ture; and so these other souls, these separated
selves, draw me as nothing else can. They stir
in me the new emotions we call passion; of love,
hatred, fear, admiration, pity; thence comes con-
versation, competition, persuasion, cities, and
war. Persons are supplementary to the pri-
mary teaching of the soul. In youth we are
mad for persons. Childhood and youth see all
the world in them. But the larger experience
of man discovers the identical nature appearing
through them all. Persons themselves acquaint
us with the impersonal. In all conversation be-
tween two persons, tacit reference is made as to
a third party, to a common nature. That third
party or common nature is not social; it is im-
personal, is God. And so in groups where de-
bate is earnest, and especially on great questions
of thought, the company become aware of their
unity; aware that the thought rises to an equal
height in all bosoms, that all have a spiritual
property in what was said, as well as the sayer.
They all wax wiser than they were. It arches
over them like a temple, this unity of thought,
in which every heart beats with nobler sense of
280
ESSAY IX.
power and duty, and thinks and acts with un-
usual solemnity. All are conscious of attaining
to a higher self-possession. It shines for all.
There is a certain wisdom of humanity which is
common to the greatest men with the lowest,
and which our ordinary education often labours
to silence and obstruct. The mind is one; and
the best minds, who love truth for its own sake,
think much less of property in truth. Thank-
fully they accept it everywhere, and do not label
or stamp it with any man's name, for it is theirs
long beforehand. It is theirs from eternity.
The learned and the studious of thought have
no monopoly of wisdom. Their violence of di-
rection in some degree disqualifies them to think
truly. We owe many valuable observations to
people who are not very acute or profound, and
who say the thing without effort, which we want
and have long been hunting in vain. The action
of the soul is oftener in that which is felt and
left unsaid, than in that which is said in any
conversation. It broods over every society, and
they unconsciously seek for it in each other.
We know better than we do. We do not yet
possess ourselves, and we know at the same time
that we are much more. I feel the same truth
how often in my trivial conversation with my
neighbours, that somewhat higher in each of us
THE OVER-SOul.
281
overlooks this by-play, and Jove nods to Jove
from behind each of us.
Men descend to meet. In their habitual and
mean service to the world, for which they for-
sake their native nobleness, they resemble those
Arabian Sheikhs, who dwell in mean houses, and
affect an external poverty, to escape the rapa-
city of the Pasha, and reserve all their display
of wealth for their interior and guarded retire-
ments.
:
As it is present in all persons, so it is in
every period of life. It is adult already in the
infant man. In my dealing with my child, my
Latin and Greek, my accomplishments and my
money, stead me nothing. They are all lost on
him but as much soul as I have avails. If I
am merely wilful, he gives me a Rowland for
an Oliver, sets his will against mine, one for one,
and leaves me, if I please, the degradation of
beating him by my superiority of strength. But
if I renounce my will, and act for the soul, set-
ting that up as umpire between us two, out of
his young eyes looks the same soul; he reveres
and loves with me.
The soul is the perceiver and revealer of
truth. We know truth when we see it, let
sceptic and scoffer say what they choose. Fool-
ish people ask you, when you have spoken what
282
ESSAY IX.
they do not wish to hear, "How do you know it
is truth, and not an error of your own?" We
know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we
know when we are awake that we are awake.
It was a grand sentence of Emanuel Sweden-
borg, which would alone indicate the greatness
of that man's perception, It is no proof of a
man's understanding to be able to affirm what-
ever he pleases; but to be able to discern that
what is true is true, and that what is false is
false, this is the mark and character of intelli-
gence.' In the book I read, the good thought
returns to me, as every truth will, the image of
the whole soul. To the bad thought which
find in it, the same soul becomes a discerning,
separating sword, and lops it away. We are
wiser than we know. If we will not interfere
with our thought, but will act entirely, or see
how the thing stands in God, we know the par-
ticular thing, and every thing, and every man.
For the Maker of all things and all persons
stands behind us, and casts his dread omnisci-
ence through us over things.
But beyond this recognition of its own in
particular passages of the individual's experi-
ence, it also reveals truth. And here we should
seek to reinforce ourselves by its very presence,
and to speak with a worthier, loftier strain of
THE OVER-SOUL.
283
that advent. For the soul's communication of
truth is the highest event in nature; for it then
does not give somewhat from itself, but it gives
itself, or passes into and becomes that man whom
it enlightens; or in proportion to that truth he
receives, it takes him to itself.
We distinguish the announcements of the
soul, its manifestations of its own nature, by the
term Revelation. These are always attended by
the emotion of the sublime. For this commu-
nication is an influx of the Divine mind into
our mind. It is an ebb of the individual rivulet
before the flowing surges of the sea of life.
Every distinct apprehension of this central com-
mandment agitates men with awe and delight.
A thrill passes through all men at the reception
of new truth, or at the performance of a great
action, which comes out of the heart of nature.
In these communications, the power to see is
not separated from the will to do, but the in-
sight proceeds from obedience, and the obedi-
ence proceeds from a joyful perception. Every
moment when the individual feels himself in-
vaded by it is memorable. Always, I believe,
by the necessity of our constitution, a certain
enthusiasm attends the individual's conscious-
ness of that divine presence. The character and
duration of this enthusiasm varies with the state
284
ESSAY IX.
6
of the individual, from an ecstasy and trance
and prophetic inspiration, which is its rarer ap-
pearance, to the faintest glow of virtuous emo-
tion, in which form it warms, like our household
fires, all the families and associations of men,
and makes society possible. A certain tendency
to insanity has always attended the opening of
the religious sense in men, as if blasted with
excess of light.' The trances of Socrates; the
'union' of Plotinus; the vision of Porphyry;
the conversion of Paul; the aurora of Behmen;
the convulsions of George Fox and his Quakers;
the illumination of Swedenborg; are of this kind.
What was in the case of these remarkable per-
sons a ravishment has in innumerable instances
in common life been exhibited in less striking
manner. Everywhere the history of religion
betrays a tendency to enthusiasm. The rapture
of the Moravian and Quietist; the opening of
the internal sense of the Word, in the language
of the New Jerusalem Church; the revival of
the Calvinistic Churches; the experiences of the
Methodists, are varying forms of that shudder
of awe and delight with which the individual.
soul always mingles with the universal soul.
The nature of these revelations is always the
same. They are perceptions of the absolute law:
they are solutions of the soul's own questions.
THE OVER-SOUL.
285
They do not answer the questions which the
understanding asks. The soul answers never by
words, but by the thing itself that is inquired
after.
Revelation is the disclosure of the soul. The
popular notion of a revelation is, that it is a
telling of fortunes. In past oracles of the soul,
the understanding seeks to find answers to sen-
sual questions, and undertakes to tell from God
how long men shall exist, what their hands shall
do, and who shall be their company, adding even
names, and dates and places. But we must pick
no locks. We must check this low curiosity.
An answer in words is delusive; it is really no
answer to the questions you ask. Do not ask a
description of the countries towards which you
sail. The description does not describe them
to you; and to-morrow you arrive there, and
know them by inhabiting them. Men ask of
the immortality of the soul, and the employ-
ments of heaven, and the state of the sinner,
and so forth. They even dream that Jesus has
left replies to precisely these interrogatories.
Never a moment did that sublime spirit speak
in their patois. To truth, justice, love, the at-
tributes of the soul, the idea of immutableness
is essentially associated. Jesus, living in these
moral sentiments, heedless of sensual fortunes,
286
ESSAY IX.
heeding only the manifestations of these, never
made the separation of the idea of duration from
the essence of these attributes; never uttered a
syllable concerning the duration of the soul. It
was left to his disciples to sever duration from
the moral elements, and to teach the immortality
of the soul as a doctrine, and maintain it by
evidences. The moment the doctrine of the
immortality is separately taught, man is already
fallen. In the flowing of love, in the adoration
of humility, there is no question of continuance.
No inspired man ever asks this question, or con-
descends to these evidences. For the soul is
true to itself; and the man in whom it is shed
abroad cannot wander from the present, which
is infinite, to a future, which would be finite.
These questions which we lust to ask about
the future are a confession of sin. God has no
answer for them. No answer in words can reply
to a question of things. It is not in an arbi-
trary' decree of God,' but in the nature of man,
that a veil shuts down on the facts of to-morrow:
for the soul will not have us read any other
cipher but that of cause and effect. By this
veil, which curtains events, it instructs the chil-a
dren of men to live in to-day. The only mode
of obtaining an answer to these questions of the
senses, is to forego all low curiosity, and ac-
THE OVER-SOUL.
287
cepting the tide of being which floats us into
the secret of nature, work and live, work and
live, and all unawares the advancing soul has
built and forged for itself a new condition, and
the question and the answer are one.
Thus is the soul the perceiver and revealer
of truth. By the same fire, serene, impersonal,
perfect, which burns until it shall dissolve all
things into the waves and surges of an ocean of
light, we see and know each other, and what
spirit each is of. Who can tell the grounds of
his knowledge of the character of the several
individuals in his circle of friends? No man.
Yet their acts and words do not disappoint him.
In that man, though he knew no ill of him, he
put no trust. In that other, though they had
seldom met, authentic signs had yet passed to
signify that he might be trusted as one who had
an interest in his own character. We know
each other very well,-which of us has been
just to himself, and whether that which we teach
or behold is only an aspiration, or is our honest
effort also.
We are all discerners of spirits. That diag-
nosis lies aloft in our life or unconscious power,
not in the understanding. The whole inter-
course of society, its trade, its religion, its
friendships, its quarrels,-is one wide judicial
288
ESSAY IX.
investigation of character. In full court, or in
small committee, or confronted face to face, ac-
cuser and accused, men offer themselves to be
judged. Against their will they exhibit those
decisive trifles by which character is read. But
who judges? and what? Not our understand-
ing. We do not read them by learning or craft.
No; the wisdom of the wise man consists herein,
that he does not judge them; he lets them judge
themselves, and merely reads and records their
own verdict.
By virtue of this inevitable nature, private
will is overpowered, and, maugre our efforts or
our imperfections, your genius will speak from
you, and mine from me. That which we are,
we shall teach, not voluntarily, but involuntarily.
Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which
we never left open, and thoughts go out of our
minds through avenues which we never volun-
tarily opened. Character teaches over our head.
The infallible index of true progress is found in
the tone the man takes. Neither his age, nor
his breeding, nor company, nor books, nor ac-
tions, nor talents, nor all together, can hinder
him from being deferential to a higher spirit
than his own.
If he have not found his home
in God, his manners, his forms of speech, the
turn of his sentences, the build, shall I say, of
THE OVER-SOUL.
289
all his opinions, will involuntarily confess it, let
him brave it out how he will. If he have found
his centre, the Deity will shine through him,
through all the disguises of ignorance, of unge-
nial temperament, of unfavourable circumstance.
The tone of seeking is one, and the tone of hav-
ing is another.
The great distinction between teachers sa-
cred or literary, between poets like Herbert,
and poets like Pope; between philosophers like
Spinoza, Kant, and Coleridge, and philoso-
phers like Locke, Paley, Mackintosh, and Stew-
art; between men of the world who are reckoned
accomplished talkers, and here and there a fer-
vent mystic, prophesying half-insane under the
infinitude of his thought, is, that one class speak
from within, or from experience, as parties and
possessors of the fact; and the other class, from
without, as spectators merely, or perhaps as ac-
quainted with the fact on the evidence of third
persons. It is of no use to preach to me from
without. I can do that too easily myself. Jesus
speaks always from within, and in a degree that
transcends all others. In that is the miracle.
That includes the miracle. My soul believes
beforehand that it ought so to be. All men
stand continually in the expectation of the ap-
pearance of such a teacher. But if a man do
O
290
ESSAY IX.
not speak from within the veil, where the word
is one with that it tells of, let him lowly con-
fess it.
The same Omniscience flows into the intel-
lect, and makes what we call genius. Much of
the wisdom of the world is not wisdom, and
the most illuminated class of men are no doubt
superior to literary fame, and are not writers.
Among the multitude of scholars and authors
we feel no hallowing presence; we are sensible
of a knack and skill rather than of inspiration;
they have a light, and know not whence it comes,
and call it their own; their talent is some exag-
gerated faculty, some overgrown member, so that
their strength is a disease. In these instances
the intellectual gifts do not make the impression
of virtue, but almost of vice; and we feel that a
man's talents stand in the way of his advance-
ment in truth. But genius is religious. It is
a larger imbibing of the common heart. It is
not anomalous, but more like, and not less like,
other men. There is in all great poets a wis-
dom of humanity, which is superior to any
talents they exercise. The author, the wit, the
partisan, the fine gentleman, does not take place
of the man. Humanity shines in Homer, in
Chaucer, in Spenser, in Shakspeare, in Milton.
They are content with truth. They use the po-
THE OVER-SOUL.
291
sitive degree. They seem frigid and phlegmatic
to those who have been spiced with the frantic
passion and violent colouring of inferior, but
popular writers. For they are poets by the
free course which they allow to the informing
soul, which through their eyes beholdeth again,
and blesseth the things which it hath made.
The soul is superior to its knowledge, wiser
than any of its works. The great poet makes
us feel our own wealth, and then we think less
of his compositions. His greatest communica-
tion to our mind is, to teach us to despise all he
has done. Shakspeare carries us to such a lofty
strain of intelligent activity, as to suggest a
wealth which beggars his own; and we then feel
that the splendid works which he has created,
and which in other hours we extol as a sort of
self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold of
real nature than the shadow of a passing tra-
veller on the rock. The inspiration which ut-
tered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter
things as good from day to day forever. Why
then should I make account of Hamlet and Lear,
as if we had not the soul from which they fell
as syllables from the tongue?
This energy does not descend into individual
life on any other condition than entire posses-
sion. It comes to the lowly and simple; it
292
ESSAY IX.
comes to whomsoever will put off what is fo-
reign and proud; it comes as insight; it comes
as serenity and grandeur. When we see those
whom it inhabits, we are apprised of new de-
grees of greatness. From that inspiration the
man comes back with a changed tone. He does
not talk with men with an eye to their opinion.
He tries them. It requires of us to be plain
and true. The vain traveller attempts to em-
bellish his life by quoting my Lord, and the
Prince, and the Countess, who thus said or did
to him. The ambitious vulgar shew you their
spoons, and brooches, and rings, and preserve
their cards and compliments. The more culti-
vated, in their account of their own experience,
cull out the pleasing poetic circumstance; the
visit to Rome; the man of genius they saw;
the brilliant friend they know; still further on,
perhaps, the gorgeous landscape, the mountain
lights, the mountain thoughts, they enjoyed yes-
terday, and so seek to throw a romantic colour
over their life. But the soul that ascendeth to
worship the great God is plain and true; has no
rose-colour; no fine friends; no chivalry; no
adventures; does not want admiration; dwells
in the hour that now is, in the earnest expe-
rience of the common day,-by reason of the
present moment and the mere trifle having be-
THE OVER-SOUL.
293
come porous to thought, and bibulous of the sea
of light.
Converse with a mind that is grandly simple,
and literature looks like word-catching. The
simplest utterances are worthiest to be written,
yet are they so cheap, and so things of course,
that in the infinite riches of the soul, it is like
gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or bot-
tling a little air in a phial, when the whole earth
and the whole atmosphere are ours.
The mere
author, in such society, is like a pickpocket
among gentlemen, who has come in to steal a
gold button or a pin. Nothing can pass there,
or make you one of the circle, but the casting
aside your trappings, and dealing man to man
in naked truth, plain confession and omniscient
affirmation.
Souls such as these treat you as gods would;
walk as gods in the earth, accepting without any
admiration your wit, your bounty, your virtue
even, say rather your act of duty,—for your
virtue they own as their proper blood, royal as
themselves, and over-royal, and the father of the
gods. But what rebuke their plain fraternal
bearing casts on the mutual flattery with which
authors solace each other, and wound them-
selves! These flatter not. I do not wonder
that these men go to see Cromwell, and Chris-
294
ESSAY IX.
tina, and Charles II., and James I., and the
Grand Turk. For they are in their own eleva-
tion the fellows of kings, and must feel the ser-
vile tone of conversation in the world. They
must always be a godsend to princes, for they
confront them, a king to a king, without duck-
ing or concession, and give a high nature the
refreshment and satisfaction of resistance, of
plain humanity, of even companionship, and of
new ideas. They leave them wiser and supe-
rior men.
Souls like these make us feel that
sincerity is more excellent than flattery. Deal
so plainly with man and woman, as to constrain
the utmost sincerity, and destroy all hope of
trifling with you. It is the highest compliment
you can pay. Their highest praising,' said
Milton, 'is not flattery; and their plainest ad-
vice is a kind of praising.'
Ineffable is the union of man and God in
every act of the soul. The simplest person,
who in his integrity worships God, becomes
God; yet forever and ever the influx of this
better and universal self is new and unsearch-
able; ever it inspires awe and astonishment. How
dear, how soothing to man, arises the idea of God
peopling the lonely place, effacing the scars of
our mistakes and disappointments! When we
have broken our god of tradition, and ceased
THE OVER-SOUL.
295
from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the
heart with his presence. It is the doubling of
the heart itself, nay, the infinite enlargement of
the heart with a power of growth to a new infi-
nity on every side. It inspires in man an infal-
lible trust. He has not the conviction, but the
sight that the best is the true, and may in that
thought easily dismiss all particular uncertain-
ties and fears, and adjourn to the sure revela-
tion of time the solution of his private riddles.
He is sure that his welfare is dear to the heart
of being. In the presence of law to his mind,
he is overflowed with a reliance so universal,
that it sweeps away all cherished hopes and the
most stable projects of mortal condition in its
flood. He believes that he cannot escape from
his good. The things that are really for thee
gravitate to thee. You are running to seek
your friend. Let your feet run, but your mind
need not. If you do not find him, will you not
acquiesce that it is best you should not find
him? for there is a power, which, as it is in
you, is in him also, and could therefore very
well bring you together, if it were for the best.
You are preparing with eagerness to go and
render a service to which your talent and your
taste invite you, the love of men, and the hope
of fame. Has it not occurred to you, that you
296
ESSAY IX.
have no right to go, unless you are equally will-
ing to be prevented from going? O believe,
as thou livest, that every sound that is spoken
over the round world, which thou oughtest to
hear, will vibrate on thine ear. Every pro-
verb, every book, every by-word that belongs
to thee for aid or comfort, shall surely come
home through open or winding passages. Every
friend whom not thy fantastic will, but the great
and tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee
in his embrace. And this, because the heart in
thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall,
not an intersection is there anywhere in nature,
but one blood rolls uninterruptedly, an endless
circulation, through all men, as the water of
the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide
is one.
Let man, then, learn the revelation of all na-
ture, and all thought to his heart; this, namely,
that the Highest dwells with him; that the
sources of nature are in his own mind, if the
sentiment of duty is there. But if he would
know what the great God speaketh, he must
'go into his closet and shut the door,' as Jesus
said. God will not make himself manifest to
cowards. He must greatly listen to himself,
withdrawing himself from all the accents of
other men's devotion. Their prayers even are
THE OVER-SOUL.
297
hurtful to him, until he have made his own.
The soul makes no appeal from itself. Our
religion vulgarly stands on numbers of believers.
Whenever the appeal is made,-no matter how
indirectly, to numbers, proclamation is then
and there made, that religion is not. He that
finds God a sweet, enveloping thought to him,
never counts his company. When I sit in that
presence, who shall dare to come in? When I
rest in perfect humility, when I burn with pure
love, what can Calvin or Swedenborg say?
It makes no difference whether the appeal is
to numbers or to one. The faith that stands on
authority is not faith. The reliance on autho-
rity measures the decline of religion, the with-
drawal of the soul. The position men have
given to Jesus now for many centuries of his-
tory is a position of authority. It characterises
themselves. It cannot alter the eternal facts.
Great is the soul, and plain. It is no flatterer,
it is no follower; it never appeals from itself.
It always believes in itself. Before the immense
possibilities of man, all mere experience, all past
biography, however spotless and sainted, shrinks
away. Before that holy heaven which our pre-
sentiments foreshew us, we cannot easily praise
any form of life we have seen or read of.
not only affirm that we have few great men, but,
We
0 2
298
ESSAY IX.
absolutely speaking, that we have none; that we
have no history, no record of any character or
mode of living that entirely contents us. The
saints and demigods whom history worships, we
are constrained to accept with a grain of allow-
ance. Though in our lonely hours we draw a
new strength out of their memory, yet pressed
on our attention, as they are by the thoughtless.
and customary, they fatigue and invade. The
soul gives itself alone, original, and pure, to the
Lonely, Original, and Pure, who, on that condi-
tion, gladly inhabits, leads, and speaks through
it. Then is it glad, young, and nimble. It
is not wise, but it sees through all things.
It is not called religious, but it is innocent.
It calls the light its own, and feels that the
grass grows and the stone falls by a law infe-
rior to and dependent on its nature. Behold,
it saith, I am born into the great, the uni-
versal mind. I the imperfect adore my own
Perfect. I am somehow receptive of the great
soul, and thereby I do overlook the sun and the
stars, and feel them to be but the fair accidents
and effects which change and pass. More and
more the surges of everlasting nature enter into
me, and I become public and human in my re-
gards and actions. So come I to live in thoughts,
and act with energies which are immortal. Thus
THE OVER-SOUL.
299
that all history is
represented in an
He will weave no
revering the soul, and learning, as the ancient
said, that its beauty is immense,' man will
come to see that the world is the perennial mi-
racle which the soul worketh, and be less asto-
nished at particular wonders; he will learn that
there is no profane history;
sacred; that the universe is
atom, in a moment of time.
longer a spotted life of shreds
he will live with a divine unity. He will cease
from what is base and frivolous in his own life,
and be content with all places and any service
he can render. He will calmly front the mor-
row in the negligency of that trust which carries
God with it, and so hath already the whole
future in the bottom of the heart.
and patches, but
CIRCLES.
ESSAY X.
CIRCLE S.
THE eye is the first circle; the horizon which it
forms is the second; and throughout nature this
primary figure is repeated without end. It is
the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.
St. Augustine described the nature of God as a
circle whose centre was everywhere, and its cir-
cumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime
reading the copious sense of this first of forms.
One moral we have already deduced in consider-
ing the circular or compensatory character of
every human action. Another analogy we shall
now trace, that every action admits of being
outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the
truth, that around every circle another can be
drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every
end is a beginning; that there is always another
dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep
a lower deep opens.
304
ESSAY X.
This fact, as far as it symbolises the moral
fact of the Unattainable, the flying Perfect,
around which the hands of man can never meet,
at once the inspirer and the condemner of every
success, may conveniently serve us to connect
many illustrations of human power in every de-
partment.
There are no fixtures in nature. The uni-
verse is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a
word of degrees. Our globe seen by God is a
transparent law, not a mass of facts. The law
dissolves the fact and holds it fluid. Our cul-
ture is the predominance of an idea which draws
after it all this train of cities and institutions.
Let us rise into another idea, they will disap-
pear. The Greek sculpture is all melted away,
as if it had been statues of ice, here and there
a solitary figure or fragment remaining, as we
see flecks and scraps of snow left in cold dells
and mountain clefts in June and July. For
the genius that created it creates now some-
what else. The Greek letters last a little lon-
ger, but are already passing under the same
sentence, and tumbling into the inevitable pit
which the creation of new thought opens for all
that is old. The new continents are built out
of the ruins of an old planet; the new races fed
out of the decomposition of the foregoing. New
CIRCLES.
305
arts destroy the old. See the investment of
capital in aqueducts made useless by hydrau-
lics; fortifications, by gunpowder; roads and
canals, by railways; sails, by steam; steam, by
electricity.
You admire this tower of granite, weather-
ing the hurts of so many ages. Yet a little
waving hand built this huge wall, and that
which builds is better than that which is built.
The hand that built can topple it down much
faster. Better than the hand, and nimbler, was
the invisible thought which wrought through it;
and thus ever behind the coarse effect is a fine
cause, which, being narrowly seen, is itself the
effect of a finer cause. Every thing looks per-
manent until its secret is known. A rich estate
appears to women and children a firm and last-
ing fact; to a merchant, one easily created out
of any materials, and easily lost. An orchard,
good tillage, good grounds, seem a fixture, like
a gold mine or a river, to a citizen, but to a
large farmer, not much more fixed than the
state of the crop. Nature looks provokingly
stable and secular, but it has a cause like all the
rest; and when once I comprehend that, will
these fields stretch so immovably wide, these
leaves hang so individually considerable? Per-
manence is a word of degrees. Every thing is
306
ESSAY X.
medial. Moons are no more bounds to spiritual
power than bat-balls.
The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy
and defying though he look, he has a helm which
he obeys, which is, the idea after which all his
facts are classified. He can only be reformed
by shewing him a new idea which commands
his own. The life of man is a self-evolving
circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small,
rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger
circles, and that without end. The extent to
which this generation of circles, wheel without
wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of
the individual soul. For it is the inert effort
of each thought, having formed itself into a cir-
cular wave of circumstance,-as, for instance, an
empire, rules of an art, a local usage, a religious
rite,—to heap itself on that ridge, and to solidify,
and hem in the life. But if the soul is quick
and strong, it bursts over that boundary on all
sides, and expands another orbit on the great
deep, which also runs up into a high wave, with
attempt again to stop and to bind. But the
heart refuses to be imprisoned; in its first and
narrowest pulses it already tends outward with
a vast force, and to immense and innumerable
expansions.
Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new
CIRCLES.
307
series
; every general law only a particular fact
of some more general law presently to disclose
itself. There is no outside, no enclosing wall,
no circumference to us. The man finishes his
story, how good! how final! how it puts a new
face on all things! He fills the sky. Lo, on the
other side rises also a man, and draws a circle
around the circle we had just pronounced the
outline of the sphere. Then already is our first
speaker not man, but only a first speaker. His
only redress is forthwith to draw a circle outside
of his antagonist. And so men do by themselves.
The result of to-day, which haunts the mind and
cannot be escaped, will presently be abridged
into a word; and the principle, that seemed to
explain nature, will itself be included as one
example of a bolder generalisation. In the
thought of to-morrow there is a power to up-
heave all thy creed, all the creeds, all the lite-
ratures of the nations, and marshal thee to a
heaven which no epic dream has yet depicted.
Every man is not so much a workman in the
world, as he is a suggestion of that he should
be. Men walk as prophecies of the next age.
Step by step we scale this mysterious ladder:
the steps are actions; the new prospect is power.
Every several result is threatened and judged
by that which follows. Every one seems to be
308
ESSAY X.
contradicted by the new; it is only limited by
the new.
The new statement is always hated
by the old, and, to those dwelling in the old,
comes like an abyss of scepticism. But the eye
soon gets wonted to it, for the eye and it are
effects of one cause; then its innocency and be-
nefit appear, and presently, all its energy spent,
it pales and dwindles before the revelation of
the new hour.
Fear not the new generalisation. Does the
fact look crass and material, threatening to de-
grade thy theory of spirit? Resist it not; it
goes to refine and raise thy theory of matter
just as much.
.
The
There are no fixtures to men, if we appeal
to consciousness. Every man supposes himself
not to be fully understood; and if there is any
truth in him, if he rests at last on the divine
soul, I see not how it can be otherwise.
last chamber, the last closet, he must feel, was
never opened; there is always a residuum un-
known, unanalysable. That is, every man be-
lieves that he has a greater possibility.
Our moods do not believe in each other.
To-day I am full of thoughts, and can write
what I please. I see no reason why I should
not have the same thought, the same power of
expression to-morrow. What I write, whilst I
CIRCLES.
309
write it, seems the most natural thing in the
world: but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity
in this direction in which now I see so much;
and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder
who he was that wrote so many continuous pages.
Alas for this infirm faith, this will not strenuous,
this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am God in na-
I am a weed by the wall.
ture;
The continual effort to raise himself above
himself, to work a pitch above his last height, be-
trays itself in a man's relations. We thirst for ap-
probation, yet cannot forgive the approver. The
sweet of nature is love; yet if I have a friend,
I am tormented by my imperfections. The love
of me accuses the other party. If he were high
enough to slight me, then could I love him, and
rise by my affection to new heights. A man's
growth is seen in the successive choirs of his
friends. For every friend whom he loses for
truth, he gains a better. I thought, as I walked
in the woods and mused on my friends, why
should I play with them this game of idolatry?
I know and see too well, when not voluntarily
blind, the speedy limits of persons called high
and worthy. Rich, noble, and great, they are
by the liberality of our speech; but truth is
sad. O blessed Spirit, whom I forsake for these,
they are not thee! Every personal considera-
310
ESSAY X.
tion that we allow costs us heavenly state. We
sell the thrones of angels for a short and turbu-
lent pleasure.
How often must we learn this lesson? Men
cease to interest us when we find their limita-
tions. The only sin is limitation. As soon ast
you once come up with a man's limitations, it
is all over with him. Has he talents? has he
enterprises? has he knowledge? it boots not.
Infinitely alluring and attractive was he to you
yesterday, a great hope, a sea to swim in; now
you have found his shores, found it a pond, and
you care not if you never see it again.
Each new step we take in thought recon-
ciles twenty seemingly discordant facts, as ex-
pressions of one law. Aristotle and Plato are
reckoned the respective heads of two schools.
A wise man will see that Aristotle Platonises.
By going one step farther back in thought, dis-
cordant opinions are reconciled, by being seen
to be two extremes of one principle, and we
can never go so far back as to preclude a still
higher vision.
Beware when the great God lets loose a
thinker on this planet. Then all things are at
risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken
out in a great city, and no man knows what is
safe, or where it will end. There is not a piece
CIRCLES.
311
of science, but its flank may be turned to-mor-
row; there is not any literary reputation, not
the so-called eternal names of fame, that may
not be revised and condemned. The very hopes
of man, the thoughts of his heart, the religion
of nations, the manners and morals of mankind,
are all at the mercy of a new generalisation.
Generalisation is always a new influx of the
divinity into the mind.
attends it.
Hence the thrill that
Valour consists in the power of self-recovery,
so that a man cannot have his flank turned, can-
not be out-generaled, but put him where you
will, he stands. This can only be by his pre-
ferring truth to his past apprehension of truth,
and his alert acceptance of it from whatever
quarter; the intrepid conviction that his laws,
his relations to society, his Christianity, his
world, may at any time be superseded and
decease.
There are degrees in idealism. We learn
first to play with it academically; as the magnet
was once a toy. Then we see in the heyday of
youth and poetry that it may be true, that it is
true in gleams and fragments. Then its coun-
tenance waxes stern and grand, and we see that
it must be true. It now shews itself ethical
and practical. We learn that God is; that he
312
ESSAY X.
is in me; and that all things are shadows of
him. The idealism of Berkeley is only a crude
statement of the idealism of Jesus, and that
again is a crude statement of the fact that all
nature is the rapid efflux of goodness executing
and organising itself. Much more obviously is
history and the state of the world at any one
time directly dependent on the intellectual clas-
sification then existing in the minds of men.
The things which are dear to men at this
hour are so on account of the ideas which have
emerged on their mental horizon, and which
cause the present order of things, as a tree bears
its apples. A new degree of culture would
instantly revolutionise the entire system of hu-
man pursuits.
Conversation is a game of circles. In con-
versation we pluck up the termini which bound
the common of silence on every side. The par-
ties are not to be judged by the spirit they par-
take and even express under this Pentecost.
To-morrow they will have receded from this
high-water mark. To-morrow you shall find
them stooping under the old packsaddles. Yet
let us enjoy the cloven flame whilst it glows on
our walls. When each new speaker strikes a
new light, emancipates us from the oppression
of the last speaker, to oppress us with the great-
CIRCLES.
313
ness and exclusiveness of his own thought, then
yields us to another redeemer, we seem to re-
cover our rights, to become men. Q what truths,
profound and executable only in ages and orbs,
are supposed in the announcement of every
truth! In common hours society sits cold and
statuesque. We all stand waiting, empty,
knowing, possibly, that we can be full, sur-
rounded by mighty symbols which are not sym-
bols to us, but prose and trivial toys. Then
cometh the god, and converts the statues into
fiery men, and by a flash of his eye burns up
the veil which shrouded all things; and the
meaning of the very furniture, of cup and saucer,
of chair and clock and tester, is manifest.
facts which loomed so large in the fogs of yes-
terday, — property, climate, breeding, personal
beauty, and the like, have strangely changed
their proportions. All that we reckoned settled
shakes now and rattles; and literatures, cities,
climates, religions, leave their foundations, and
dance before our eyes. And yet here again
see the swift circumscription. Good as is dis-
course, silence is better, and shames it. The
length of the discourse indicates the distance
of thought betwixt the speaker and the hearer.
If they were at a perfect understanding in any
part, no words would be necessary thereon.
Р
The
If
314
ESSAY X.
at one in all parts, no words would be suf-
fered.
Literature is a point outside of our hodier-
nal circle, through which a new one may be de-
scribed. The use of literature is to afford us a
platform whence we may command a view of
our present life, a purchase by which we may
move it. We fill ourselves with ancient learn-
ing; install ourselves the best we can in Greek,
in Punic, in Roman houses, only that we
may wiselier see French, English, and Ameri-
can houses and modes of living. In like man-
ner, we see literature best from the midst of
wild nature, or from the din of affairs, or from
a high religion. The field cannot be well seen
from within the field. The astronomer must
have his diameter of the earth's orbit as a base
to find the parallax of any star.
Therefore we value the poet. All the argu-
ment, and all the wisdom, is not in the ency-
clopedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the
Body of Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play.
In my daily work I incline to repeat my old
steps, and do not believe in remedial force, in
But some
the power of change and reform.
Petrarch or Ariosto, filled with the new wine of
his imagination, writes me an ode, or a brisk
romance, full of daring thought and action. He
CIRCLES.
315
smites and arouses me with his shrill tones,
breaks up my whole chain of habits, and I open
my eye on my own possibilities.
He claps
wings to the sides of all the solid old lumber
of the world, and I am capable once more of
choosing a straight path in theory and practice.
We have the same need to command a view
of the religion of the world. We can never
see Christianity from the catechism:- from the
pastures, from a boat in the pond, from amidst
the songs of wood - birds, we possibly may.
Cleansed by the elemental light and wind,
steeped in the sea of beautiful forms which the
field offers us, we may chance to cast a right
glance back upon biography. Christianity is
rightly dear to the best of mankind; yet was
there never a young philosopher whose breed-
ing had fallen into the Christian church, by
whom that brave text of Paul's was not specially
prized, Then shall also the Son be subject
unto Him who put all things under him, that
God may be all in all.' Let the claims and
virtues of persons be never so great and wel-
come, the instinct of man presses eagerly on-
ward to the impersonal and illimitable, and
gladly arms itself against the dogmatism of
bigots with this generous word, out of the book
itself.
316
ESSAY X.
The natural world may be conceived of as a
system of concentric circles; and we now and
then detect in nature slight dislocations, which
apprise us that this surface on which we now
stand is not fixed, but sliding. These manifold
tenacious qualities, this chemistry and vegeta-
tion, these metals and animals, which seem to
stand there for their own sake, are means and
methods only, are words of God, and as fugitive
as other words. Has the naturalist or chemist
learned his craft, who has explored the gravity
of atoms and the elective affinities, who has not
yet discerned the deeper law whereof this is only
a partial or approximate statement, namely, that
like draws to like; and that the goods which
belong to you gravitate to you, and need not
be pursued with pains and cost? Yet is that
statement approximate also, and not final. Om-
nipresence is a higher fact. Not through subtle,
subterranean channels need friend and fact be
drawn to their counterpart, but, rightly con-
sidered, these things proceed from the eternal
generation of the soul. Cause and effect are
two sides of one fact.
The same law of eternal procession ranges
all that we call the virtues, and extinguishes
each in the light of a better. The great man
will not be prudent in the popular sense; all
CIRCLES.
317
his prudence will be so much deduction from
his grandeur. But it behoves each to see when
he sacrifices prudence, to what god he devotes
it; if to ease and pleasure, he had better be
prudent still; if to a great trust, he can well
spare his mule and panniers, who has a winged
chariot instead. Geoffrey draws on his boots
to go through the woods, that his feet may be
safer from the bite of snakes; Aaron never
thinks of such a peril. In many years, neither
is harmed by such an accident. Yet it seems
to me that with every precaution you take
against such an evil, you put yourself into the
power of the evil. I suppose that the highest
prudence is the lowest prudence. Is this too
sudden a rushing from the centre to the verge
of our orbit? Think how many times we shall
fall back into pitiful calculations, before we
take up our rest in the great sentiment, or
make the verge of to-day the new centre.
Besides, your bravest sentiment is familiar to
the humblest men. The poor and the low have
their way of expressing the last facts of philoso-
phy as well as you. Blessed be nothing,' and
'the worse things are, the better they are,'
are proverbs which express the transcendental-
ism of common life.
One man's justice is another's injustice; one
318
ESSAY X.
man's beauty, another's ugliness; one man's wis-
dom, another's folly, as one beholds the same
objects from a higher point of view. One man
thinks justice consists in paying debts, and has
no measure in his abhorrence of another who is
very remiss in this duty, and makes the creditor
wait tediously. But that second man has his
own way of looking at things; asks himself,
which debt must I pay first, the debt to the
rich, or the debt to the poor? the debt of money,
or the debt of thought to mankind, of genius to
nature? For you, O broker, there is no other
principle but arithmetic. For me, commerce is
of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character,
the aspiration of man, these are sacred: nor
can I detach one duty, like you, from all other
duties, and concentrate my forces mechanically
on the payment of moneys. Let me live on-
ward: you shall find that, though slower, the
progress of my character will liquidate all these
debts without injustice to higher claims. If a
man should dedicate himself to the payment of
notes, would not this be injustice? Owes he
no debt but money? And are all claims on him
to be postponed to a landlord's or a banker's?
There is no virtue which is final; all are
initial. The virtues of society are vices of the
saint. The terror of reform is the discovery
CIRCLES.
319
that we must cast away our virtues, or what we
have always esteemed such, into the same pit
that has consumed our grosser vices.
Forgive his crimes, forgive his virtues too,
Those smaller faults, half converts to the right.'
It is the highest power of divine moments
that they abolish our contritions also. I accuse
myself of sloth and unprofitableness, day by day;
but when these waves of God flow into me, I
no longer reckon lost time. I no longer poorly
compute my possible achievement by what re-
mains to me of the month or the year; for these
moments confer a sort of omnipresence and
omnipotence, which asks nothing of duration,
but sees that the energy of the mind is com-
mensurate with the work to be done, without
time.
And thus, O circular philosopher, I hear
some reader exclaim, you have arrived at a fine
pyrrhonism, at an equivalence and indifferency
of all actions, and would fain teach us, that, if
we are true, forsooth, our crimes may be lively
stones out of which we shall construct the tem-
ple of the true God.
I am not careful to justify myself. I own I
am gladdened by seeing the predominance of
the saccharine principle throughout vegetable
nature, and not less by beholding in morals that
320
ESSAY X.
unrestrained inundation of the principle of good
into every chink and hole that selfishness has
left open, yea, into selfishness and sin itself; so
that no evil is pure; nor hell itself without its
extreme satisfactions. But lest I should mis-
lead any, when I have my own head and obey
my whims, let me remind the reader that I am
only an experimenter. Do not set the least
value on what I do, or the least discredit on
what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any-
thing as true or false. I unsettle all things.
No facts are to me sacred, none are profane; I
simply experiment; an endless seeker, with no
Past at my back.
Yet this incessant movement and progression,
which all things partake, could never become
sensible to us, but by contrast to some principle
of fixture or stability in the soul. Whilst the
eternal generation of circles proceeds, the eternal
generator abides. That central life is somewhat
superior to creation, superior to knowledge and
thought, and contains all its circles. Forever it
labours to create a life and thought as large and
excellent as itself; but in vain; for that which
is made instructs how to make a better.
Thus there is no sleep, no pause, no pre-
servation, but all things renew, germinate, and
spring. Why should we import rags and relics
CIRCLES.
321
into the new hour? Nature abhors the old, and
old age seems the only disease: all others run
into this one. We call it by many names, fever,
intemperance, insanity, stupidity, and crime:
they are all forms of old age; they are rest,
conservatism, appropriation, inertia; not new-
ness, not the way onward. We grizzle every
day. I see no need of it. Whilst we converse
with what is above us, we do not grow old, but
grow young. Infancy, youth, receptive, aspir-
ing, with religious eye looking upward, counts
itself nothing, and abandons itself to the in-
struction flowing from all sides. But the man
and woman of seventy assume to know all;
throw up their hope; renounce aspiration; ac-
cept the actual for the necessary; and talk down
to the young. Let them then become organs of
the Holy Ghost; let them be lovers; let them
behold truth; and their eyes are uplifted, their
wrinkles smoothed, they are perfumed again
with hope and power. This old age ought not
to creep on a human mind.
In nature every
moment is new; the past is always swallowed
and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. No-
thing is secure but life, transition, the energising
spirit. No love can be bound by oath or cove-
nant, to secure it against a higher love. No truth
so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in
P 2
322
ESSAY X.
the light of new thoughts. People wish to be
settled only as far as they are unsettled, is there
any hope for them.
We do not
Life is a series of surprises.
guess to-day the mood, the pleasure, the power
of to-morrow, when we are building up our
being. Of lower states,-of acts of routine and
sense, we can tell somewhat; but the master-
pieces of God, the total growths and universal
movements of the soul, he hideth; they are in-
calculable. I can know that truth is divine and
helpful; but how it shall help me, I can have no
guess, for so to be is the sole inlet of so to know.
The new position of the advancing man has all
the powers of the old, yet has them all new.
It carries in its bosom all the energies of the
past, yet is itself an exhalation of the morning.
I cast away in this new moment all my once-
hoarded knowledge, as vacant and vain. Now
for the first time seem I to know any thing
rightly. The simplest words,—we do not know
what they mean, except when we love and aspire.
The difference between talents and character
is adroitness to keep the old and trodden round,
and power and courage to make a new road to
new and better goals. Character makes an over-
powering present, a cheerful, determined hour,
which fortifies all the company, by making them
CIRCLES.
323
see that much is possible and excellent, that was
not thought of. Character dulls the impression
of particular events. When we see the con-
queror, we do not think much of any one battle
or success. We see that we had exaggerated
the difficulty. It was easy to him. The great
man is not convulsible or tormentable. He is
so much, that events pass over him without
much impression. People say sometimes, "See
what I have overcome; see how cheerful I am;
see how completely I have triumphed over these
black events." Not if they still remind me of
the black event,—they have not yet conquered.
Is it conquest to be a gay and decorated sepul-
chre, or a half-crazed widow hysterically laugh-
ing? True conquest is the causing the black
event to fade and disappear, as an early cloud
of insignificant result in a history so large and
advancing.
The one thing which we seek with insatiable
desire, is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out
of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal me-
mory, and to do something without knowing
how or why; in short, to draw a new circle.
Nothing great was ever achieved without en-
thusiasm. The way of life is wonderful. It is
by abandonment. The great moments of his-
tory are the facilities of performance through
324
ESSAY X.
'
and religion.
the strength of ideas, as the works of genius
C A man,' said Oliver Cromwell,
never rises so high as when he knows not
whither he is going.' Dreams and drunken-
ness, the use of opium and alcohol, are the sem-
blance and counterfeit of this oracular genius,
and hence their dangerous attraction for men.
For the like reason, they ask the aid of wild
passions, as in gaming and war, to ape in some
manner these flames and generosities of the
heart.
INTELLECT.
ESSAY XI.
INTELLECT.
EVERY substance is negatively electric to that
which stands above it in the chemical tables,
positively to that which stands below it. Water
dissolves wood and stone and salt; air dissolves
water; electric fire dissolves air; but the intel-
lect dissolves fire, gravity, laws, method, and the
subtlest unnamed relations of nature, in its re-
sistless menstruum. Intellect lies behind genius,
which is intellect constructive. Intellect is the-
simple power anterior to all action or construc-
tion. Gladly would I unfold in calm degrees a
natural history of the intellect; but what man
has yet been able to mark the steps and bound-
aries of that transparent essence? The first
questions are always to be asked; and the wisest
doctor is gravelled by the inquisitiveness of a
child. How can we speak of the action of the
mind under any divisions,—as, of its knowledge,
328
ESSAY XI.
of its ethics, of its works, and so forth,—since it
melts will into perception, knowledge into act?
Each becomes the other. Itself alone is. Its
vision is not like the vision of the eye, but is
union with the things known.
Intellect and intellection signify, to the com-
mon ear, consideration of abstract truth. The
consideration of time and place, of you and me,
of profit and hurt, tyrannise over most men's
minds. Intellect separates the fact considered
from you, from all local and personal reference,
and discerns it as if it existed for its own sake.
Heraclitus looked upon the affections as dense
and coloured mists. In the fog of good and evil
affections, it is hard for man to walk forward in
a straight line. Intellect is void of affection,
and sees an object as it stands in the light of
science, cool and disengaged. The intellect goes
out of the individual, floats over its own person-
ality, and regards it as a fact, and not as I and
mine. He who is immersed in what concerns
person or place cannot see the problem of exist-
ence. This the intellect always ponders. Na-
ture shews all things formed and bound. The
intellect pierces the form, overleaps the wall,
detects intrinsic likeness between remote things,
and reduces all things into a few principles.
The making a fact the subject of thought
INTELLECT.
329
raises it. All that mass of mental and moral
phenomena which we do not make objects of
voluntary thought come within the power of
fortune; they constitute the circumstance of
daily life; they are subject to change, to fear,
and hope. Every man beholds his human con-
dition with a degree of melancholy. As a ship
aground is battered by the waves, so man, im-
prisoned in mortal life, lies open to the mercy
of coming events. But a truth, separated by
the intellect, is no longer a subject of destiny.
We behold it as a god upraised above care and
fear. And so any fact in our life, or any record
of our fancies or reflections, disentangled from
the web of our unconsciousness, becomes an
object impersonal and immortal. It is the past
restored, but embalmed. A better art than that
of Egypt has taken fear and corruption out of
it. It is eviscerated of care. It is offered for
science. What is addressed to us for contem-
plation does not threaten us, but makes us in-
tellectual beings.
The growth of the intellect is spontaneous
in every step. The mind that grows could not
predict the times, the means, the mode of that
spontaneity. God enters by a private door into
every individual. Long prior to the age of re-
flection is the thinking of the mind. Out of
330
ESSAY XI.
darkness it came insensibly into the marvellous
light of to-day. Over it always reigned a firm
law. In the period of infancy it accepted and
disposed of all impressions from the surrounding
creation after its own way. Whatever any mind
doth or saith is after a law. It has no random
act or word. And this native law remains over
it after it has come to reflection or conscious
thought. In the most worn, pedantic, intro-
verted self-tormentor's life, the greatest part is
incalculable by him, unforeseen, unimaginable,
and must be, until he can take himself up by
his own ears. What am I? What has my will
done to make me that I am? Nothing. I have
been floated into this thought, this hour, this
connexion of events, by might and mind su-
blime, and my ingenuity and wilfulness have
not thwarted, have not aided to an appreciable
degree.
Our spontaneous action is always the best.
You cannot, with your best deliberation and
heed, come so close to any question as your
spontaneous glance shall bring you, whilst you
rise from your bed, or walk abroad in the morn-
ing, after meditating the matter before sleep on
the previous night. Always our thinking is a
pious reception. Our truth of thought is there-
fore vitiated as much by too violent direction
INTELLECT.
331
given by our will, as by too great negligence.
We do not determine what we will think. We
only open our senses, clear away, as we can, all
obstruction from the fact, and suffer the intel-
lect to see.
We have little control over our
thoughts. We are the prisoners of ideas. They
catch us up for moments into their heaven, and
so fully engage us, that we take no thought for
the morrow, gaze like children, without an effort
to make them our own. By and by we fall out
of that rapture, bethink us where we have been,
what we have seen, and repeat, as truly as we
can, what we have beheld. As far as we can
recall these ecstasies, we carry away in the in-
effaceable memory the result, and all men and
all the ages confirm it. It is called Truth. But
the moment we cease to report, and attempt to
correct and contrive, it is not truth.
If we consider what persons have stimulated
and profited us, we shall perceive the superiority
of the spontaneous or intuitive principle over the
arithmetical or logical. The first always con-
tains the second, but virtual and latent.
We
want in every man a long logic; we cannot pardon
the absence of it; but it must not be spoken.
Logic is the procession or proportionate unfold-
ing of the intuition; but its virtue is as silent
method; the moment it would appear as propo-
332
ESSAY XI.
sitions, and have a separate value, it is worth-
less.
In every man's mind some images, words,
and facts remain, without effort on his part to
imprint them, which others forget, and after-
wards these illustrate to him important laws.
All our progress is an unfolding, like the vege-
table bud. You have first an instinct, then an
opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root,
bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end,
though you can render no reason. It is vain to
hurry it. By trusting it to the end, it shall
ripen into truth, and you shall know why you
believe.
And
Each mind has its own method. A true
man never acquires after college rules. What
you have aggregated in a natural manner sur-
prises and delights when it is produced. For
we cannot oversee each other's secret.
hence the differences between men in natural
endowment are insignificant in comparison with
their common wealth. Do you think the porter
and the cook have no anecdotes, no experiences,
no wonders for you? Every body knows as
much as the savant. The walls of rude minds
are scrawled all over with facts, with thoughts.
They shall one day bring a lantern and read the
inscriptions. Every man, in the degree in which
INTELLECT.
333
he has wit and culture, finds his curiosity in-
flamed concerning the modes of living and think-
ing of other men, and especially of those classes
whose minds have not been subdued by the drill
of school education.
This instinctive action never ceases in a
healthy mind, but becomes richer and more fre-
quent in its informations through all states of
culture. At last comes the era of reflection,
when we not only observe, but take pains to
observe; when we of set purpose sit down to
consider an abstract truth; when we keep the
mind's eye open, whilst we converse, whilst we
read, whilst we act, intent to learn the secret
law of some class of facts.
What is the hardest task in the world? To
think. I would put myself in the attitude to
look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot.
I blench and withdraw on this side and on that.
I seem to know what he meant who said, No
man can see God face to face and live. For
example, a man explores the basis of civil go-
vernment. Let him intend his mind without
respite, without rest, in one direction. His
best heed long time avails him nothing. Yet
thoughts are flitting before him. We all but
apprehend, we dimly forebode the truth. We
say, I will walk abroad, and the truth will take
334
ESSAY XI.
form and clearness to me. We go forth, but
cannot find it. It seems as if we needed only
the stillness and composed attitude of the li-
brary to seize the thought. But we come in,
and are as far from it as at first. Then, in a
moment, and unannounced, the truth appears.
A certain wandering light appears, and is the
distinction, the principle we wanted. But the
oracle comes, because we had previously laid
siege to 'the shrine. It seems as if the law of
the intellect resembled that law of nature by
which we now inspire, now expire the breath;
by which the heart now draws in, then hurls
out the blood,—the law of undulation. So now
you must labour with your brains, and now you
must forbear your activity, and see what the
great Soul sheweth.
Our intellections are mainly prospective.
The immortality of man is as legitimately
preached from the intellections as from the
moral volitions. Every intellection is mainly
prospective. Its present value is its least. It
is a little seed. Inspect what delights you in
Plutarch, in Shakspeare, in Cervantes. Each
truth that a writer acquires is a lantern which
he instantly turns full on what facts and
thoughts lay already in his mind, and behold,
all the mats and rubbish which had littered his
INTELLECT.
335
garret become precious. Every trivial fact in
his private biography becomes an illustration
of this new principle, revisits the day, and de-
lights all men by its piquancy and new charm.
Men say, Where did he get this? and think
there was something divine in his life. But
no; they have myriads of facts just as good,
would they only get a lamp to ransack their
attics withal.
We are all wise.
The difference between
persons is not in wisdom, but in art. I knew,
in an academical club, a person who always de-
ferred to me, who, seeing my whim for writing,
fancied that my experiences had somewhat su-
perior; whilst I saw that his experiences were
as good as mine. Give them to me, and I would
make the same use of them. He held the old;
he holds the new; I had the habit of tacking
together the old and the new, which he did not
use to exercise. This may hold in the great
examples. Perhaps if we should meet Shak-
speare, we should not be conscious of any steep
inferiority; no; but of a great equality,—only
that he possessed a strange skill of using, of
classifying his facts, which we lacked. For,
notwithstanding our utter incapacity to pro-
duce any thing like Hamlet and Othello, see
the perfect reception this wit, and immense
336
ESSAY XI.
knowledge of life, and liquid eloquence, find
in us all.
If you gather apples in the sunshine, or
make hay, or hoe corn, and then retire within
doors, and shut your eyes, and press them with
your hand, you shall still see apples hanging in
the bright light, with boughs and leaves thereto,
or the tasselled grass, or the corn-flags; and this
for five or six hours afterwards. There lie the
impressions on the retentive organ, though you
knew it not. So lies the whole series of natural
images with which your life has made you ac-
quainted in your memory, though you know it
not; and a thrill of passion flashes light on their
dark chamber, and the active power seizes in-
stantly the fit image, as the word of its momen-
tary thought.
We
It is long ere we discover how rich we are.
Our history, we are sure, is quite tame.
have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But
our wiser years still run back to the despised
recollections of childhood, and always we are
fishing up some wonderful article out of that
pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect
that the biography of the one foolish person we
know is, in reality, nothing less than the minia-
ture paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the
Universal History.
INTELLECT.
337
In the intellect constructive, which we po-
pularly designate by the word Genius, we ob-
serve the same balance of two elements as in
intellect receptive. The constructive intellect
produces thoughts, sentences, poems, plans,
designs, systems. It is the generation of the
mind, the marriage of thought with nature. To
genius must always go two gifts, the thought
and the publication. The first is revelation,
always a miracle, which no frequency of occur-
rence or incessant study can ever familiarise,
but which must always leave the inquirer stu-
pid with wonder. It is the advent of truth
into the world; a form of thought now for
the first time bursting into the universe; a
child of the old eternal soul; a piece of genu-
ine and immeasurable greatness. It seems, for
the time, to inherit all that has yet existed,
and to dictate to the unborn. It affects every
thought of man, and goes to fashion every in-
stitution. But to make it available, it needs a
vehicle or art by which it is conveyed to men.
To be communicable, it must become picture
or sensible object. We must learn the language
of facts. The most wonderful inspirations die
with their subject, if he has no hand to paint
them to the senses. The ray of light passes
invisible through space, and only when it falls
Q
338
ESSAY XI.
on an object is it seen. When the spiritual
energy is directed on something outward, then
is it a thought. The relation between it and
you first makes you, the value of you, apparent
to me. The rich inventive genius of the painter
must be smothered and lost for want of the
power of drawing; and in our happy hours we
should be inexhaustible poets, if once we could
break through the silence into adequate rhyme.
As all men have some access to primary truth,
so all have some art or power of communication
in their head; but only in the artist does it de-
scend into the hand. There is an inequality,
whose laws we do not yet know, between two
men and between two moments of the same
man, in respect to this faculty. In common
hours we have the same facts as in the uncom-
mon or inspired; but they do not sit for their
portraits, they are not detached, but lie in a
web. The thought of genius is spontaneous;
but the power of picture or expression, in the
most enriched and flowing nature, implies a
mixture of will, a certain control over the spon-
taneous states, without which no production is
possible. It is a conversion of all nature into
the rhetoric of thought, under the eye of judg-
ment, with a strenuous exercise of choice. And
yet the imaginative vocabulary seems to be
INTELLECT.
339
spontaneous also. It does not flow from expe-
rience only or mainly, but from a richer source.
Not by any conscious imitation of particular
forms are the grand strokes of the painter exe-
cuted; but by repairing to the fountain-head of
all forms in his mind. Who is the first drawing-
master? Without instruction we know very
well the ideal of the human form. A child
knows if an arm or a leg be distorted in a pic-
ture, if the attitude be natural, or grand, or
mean, though he has never received any in-
struction in drawing, or heard any conversation
on the subject, nor can himself draw with cor-
rectness a single feature. A good form strikes
all eyes pleasantly long before they have any
science on the subject; and a beautiful face sets
twenty hearts in palpitation prior to all con-
sideration of the mechanical proportions of the
features and head. We may owe to dreams
some light on the fountain of this skill; for as
soon as we let our will go, and let the uncon-
scious states ensue, see what cunning draughts-
men we are! We entertain ourselves with
wonderful forms of men, of women, of animals,
of gardens, of woods, and of monsters; and the
mystic pencil wherewith we then draw has no
awkwardness or inexperience, no meagreness or
poverty; it can design well and group well; its
340
ESSAY XI.
composition is full of art, its colours are well
laid on, and the whole canvass which it paints is
life-like, and apt to touch us with terror, with
tenderness, with desire, and with grief. Neither
are the artist's copies from experience ever
mere copies, but always touched and softened
by tints from this ideal domain.
The conditions essential to a constructive
mind do not appear to be so often combined
but that a good sentence or verse remains fresh
and memorable for a long time. Yet when we
write with ease, and come out into the free air
of thought, we seem to be assured that nothing
is easier than to continue this communication at
pleasure. Up, down, around, the kingdom of
thought has no enclosures, but the Muse makes
us free of her city. Well, the world has a mil-
lion writers. One would think, then, that good
thought would be as familiar as air and water,
and the gifts of each new hour would exclude
the last. Yet we can count all our good books;
nay, I remember any beautiful verse for twenty
years. It is true that the discerning intellect
of the world is always greatly in advance of
the creative, so that always there are many
competent judges of the best book, and few
writers of the best books. But some of the
conditions of intellectual construction are of
INTELLECT.
341
rare occurrence.
The intellect is a whole, and
demands integrity in every work. This is re-
sisted equally by a man's devotion to a single
thought, and by his ambition to combine too
many.
Truth is our element of life; yet if a man
fasten his attention on a single aspect of truth,
and apply himself to that alone for a long time,
the truth becomes distorted, and not itself, but
falsehood; herein resembling the air, which
is our natural element, and the breath of our
nostrils; but if a stream of the same be directed
on the body for a time, it causes cold, fever,
and even death. How wearisome the gram-
marian, the phrenologist, the political or re-
ligious fanatic, or indeed any possessed mortal,
whose balance is lost by the exaggeration of
a single topic! It is incipient insanity. Every
thought is a prison also. I cannot see what
you see, because I am caught up by a strong
wind, and blown so far in one direction, that I
am out of the hoop of your horizon.
Is it any better, if the student, to avoid this
offence and to liberalise himself, aims to make
a mechanical whole of history, or science, or
philosophy, by a numerical addition of all the
facts that fall within his vision? The world
refuses to be analysed by addition and subtrac-
342
ESSAY XI.
tion. When we are young, we spend much
time and pains in filling our note-books with
all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Poli-
tics, Art, in the hope that in the course of a
few years we shall have condensed into our
encyclopedia the net value of all the theories
at which the world has yet arrived. But year
after year our tables get no completeness; and
at last we discover that our curve is a parabola,
whose arcs will never meet.
Neither by detachment, neither by aggre-
gation, is the integrity of the intellect trans-
mitted to its works, but by a vigilance which
brings the intellect in its greatness and best
state to operate every moment. It must have
the same wholeness which nature has. Al-
though no diligence can rebuild the universe
in a model, by the best accumulation or dis-
position of details, yet does the world reappear
in miniature in every event, so that all the laws.
of nature may be read in the smallest fact.
The intellect must have the like perfection in
its apprehension and in its works. For this
reason, an index or mercury of intellectual pro-
ficiency is the perception of identity. We talk
with accomplished persons who appear to be
strangers in nature. The cloud, the tree, the
turf, the bird, are not theirs, have nothing of
INTELLECT.
343
them; the world is only their lodging and table.
But the poet, whose verses are to be spheral
and complete, is one whom nature cannot de-
ceive, whatsoever face of strangeness she may
put on. He feels a strict consanguinity, and
detects more likeness than variety in all her
changes. We are stung by the desire for new
thought; but when we receive a new thought,
it is only the old thought with a new face;
and though we make it our own, we instantly
crave another; we are not really enriched. For
the truth was in us before it was reflected to us
from natural objects; and the profound genius
will cast the likeness of all creatures into every
product of his wit.
But if the constructive powers are rare, and
it is given to few men to be poets, yet every
man is a receiver of this descending Holy Ghost,
and may well study the laws of its influx. Ex-
actly parallel is the whole rule of intellectual
duty to the rule of moral duty. A self-denial
no less austere than the saint's is demanded of
the scholar. He must worship truth, and forego
all things for that, and choose defeat and pain,
so that his treasure in thought is thereby aug-
mented.
God offers to every mind its choice between
truth and repose. Take which you please,-
344
ESSAY XI.
you can never have both. Between these, as a
pendulum, man oscillates ever. He in whom
the love of repose predominates will accept the
first creed, the first philosophy, the first politi-
cal party he meets,—most likely his father's.
He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but
he shuts the door of truth. He in whom the
love of truth predominates will keep himself
aloof from all moorings and afloat. He will
abstain from dogmatism, and recognise all the
opposite negations between which, as walls,
his being is swung. He submits to the in-
convenience of suspense and imperfect opi-
nion; but he is a candidate for truth, as the
other is not, and respects the highest law of
his being.
The circle of the green earth he must mea-
sure with his shoes to find the man who can
yield him truth. He shall then know that there
is somewhat more blessed and great in hearing
than in speaking. Happy is the hearing man;
unhappy the speaking man. As long as I hear
truth, I am bathed by a beautiful element, and
am not conscious of any limits to my nature.
The suggestions are thousandfold that I hear
and see. The waters of the great deep have in-
gress and egress to the soul. But if I speak, I
define, I confine, and am less.
When Socrates
INTELLECT.
345
speaks, Lysis and Menexenus are afflicted by no
shame that they do not speak. They also are
good. He likewise defers to them, loves them,
whilst he speaks. Because a true and natural
man contains and is the same truth which an
eloquent man articulates; but in the eloquent
man, because he can articulate it, it seems some-
thing the less to reside, and he turns to these
silent beautiful with the more inclination and
respect. The ancient sentence said, Let us be
silent, for so are the gods. Silence is a solvent
that destroys personality, and gives us leave to
be great and universal. Every man's progress
is through a succession of teachers, each of whom
seems at the time to have a superlative influence,
but it at last gives place to a new. Frankly let
him accept it all. Jesus says, Leave father, mo-
ther, house and lands, and follow me. Who leaves
all receives more. This is as true intellectually
as morally. Each new mind we approach seems
to require an abdication of all our past and
present possessions. A new doctrine seems, at
first, a subversion of all our opinions, tastes,
and manner of living. Such has Swedenborg,
such has Kant, such has Coleridge, such has
Cousin, seemed to many young men in this
country. Take thankfully and heartily all they
can give. Exhaust them, wrestle with them,
Q 2
346
ESSAY XI.
let them not go until their blessing be won;
and after a short season the dismay will be
overpast, the excess of influence withdrawn,
and they will be no longer an alarming meteor,
but one more bright star shining serenely in
your heaven, and blending its light with all
your day.
But whilst he gives himself up unreservedly
to that which draws him, because that is his
own, he is to refuse himself to that which draws
him not, whatsoever fame and authority may
attend it, because it is not his own. Entire
self-reliance belongs to the intellect. One soul
is a counterpoise of all souls, as a capillary
column of water is a balance for the sea. It
must treat things, and books, and sovereign
genius, as itself also a sovereign. If Æschylus
be that man he is taken for, he has not yet done
his office when he has educated the learned of
Europe for a thousand years. He is now to
approve himself a master of delight to me also.
If he cannot do that, all his fame shall avail him
nothing with me. I were a fool not to sacrifice
a thousand Æschyluses to my intellectual in-
tegrity. Especially take the same ground in
regard to abstract truth, the science of the
mind. The Bacon, the Spinoza, the Hume,
Schelling, Kant, or whosoever propounds to
INTELLECT.
347
you a philosophy of the mind, is only a more
or less awkward translator of things in your
consciousness, which you have also your way
of seeing, perhaps of denominating. Say then,
instead of too timidly poring into his obscure
sense, that he has not succeeded in rendering
back to you your consciousness. He has not
succeeded; now let another try. If Plato can-
not, perhaps Spinoza will. If Spinoza cannot,
then perhaps Kant. Any how, when at last it
is done, you will find it is no recondite, but a
simple, natural, common state, which the writer
restores to you.
(
But let us end these didactics. I will not,
though the subject might provoke it, speak to
the open question between Truth and Love. I
shall not presume to interfere in the old politics
of the skies; The cherubim know most; the
seraphim love most.' The gods shall settle
their own quarrels. But I cannot recite, even
thus rudely, laws of the intellect, without re-
membering that lofty and sequestered class of
men who have been its prophets and oracles,
the high priesthood of the pure reason, the
Trismegisti, the expounders of the principles of
thought from age to age. When, at long inter-
vals, we turn over their abstruse pages, wonder-
ful seems the calm and grand air of these few,
348
ESSAY XI.
these great spiritual lords, who have walked in
the world, these of the old religion,-dwelling
in a worship which makes the sanctities of
christianity look parvenues and popular; for
'persuasion is in soul, but necessity is in intel-
lect.' This band of grandees, Hermes, Hera-
clitus, Empedocles, Plato, Plotinus, Olympio-
dorus, Proclus, Synesius, and the rest, have
somewhat so vast in their logic, so primary in
their thinking, that it seems antecedent to all
the ordinary distinctions of rhetoric and lite-
rature, and to be at once poetry, and music,
and dancing, and astronomy, and mathematics.
I am present at the sowing of the seed of the
world. With a geometry of sunbeams, the
soul lays the foundations of nature. The truth
and grandeur of their thought is proved by its
scope and applicability; for it commands the
entire schedule and inventory of things for
its illustration. But what marks its elevation,
and has even a comic look to us, is the innocent
serenity with which these babe-like Jupiters sit
in their clouds, and from age to age prattle
to each other, and to no contemporary. Well
assured that their speech is intelligible, and
the most natural thing in the world, they add
thesis to thesis, without a moment's heed of
the universal astonishment of the human race
INTELLECT.
349
below, who do not comprehend their plainest
argument; nor do they ever relent so much as
to insert a popular or explaining sentence;
nor testify the least displeasure or petulance
at the dulness of their amazed auditory. The
angels are so enamoured of the language that
is spoken in heaven, that they will not distort
their lips with the hissing and unmusical dia-
lects of men, but speak their own, whether
there be any who understand it or not.
Ꭺ Ꭱ Ꭲ
ESSAY XII.
ART.
BECAUSE the soul is progressive, it never quite
repeats itself, but in every act attempts the pro-
duction of a new and fairer whole. This ap-
pears in works both of the useful and the fine
arts, if we employ the popular distinction of
works according to their aim, either at use or
beauty. Thus in our fine arts, not imitation,
but creation is the aim. In landscapes, the
painter should give the suggestion of a fairer
creation than we know. The details, the prose
of nature, he should omit, and give us only the
spirit and splendour. He should know that the
landscape has beauty for his eye, because it ex-
presses a thought which is to him good and
this, because the same power which sees through
his eyes is seen in that spectacle; and he will
come to value the expression of nature, and
not nature itself, and so exalt in his copy
354
ESSAY XII.
the features that please him. He will give
the gloom of gloom, and the sunshine of sun-
shine. In a portrait he must inscribe the cha-
racter, and not the features, and must esteem
the man who sits to him as himself only an
imperfect picture or likeness of the aspiring
original within.
What is that abridgment and selection we
observe in all spiritual activity, but itself the
creative impulse? for it is the inlet of that
higher illumination which teaches to convey a
larger sense by simpler symbols. What is a
man but nature's finer success in self-explica-
tion? What is a man but a finer and compacter
landscape than the horizon figures,-nature's
eclecticism? and what is his speech, his love of
painting, love of nature, but a still finer success,
-all the weary miles and tons of space and bulk
left out, and the spirit or moral of it contracted
into a musical word, or the most cunning stroke
of the pencil?
But the artist must employ the symbols in
use in his day and nation to convey his enlarged
sense to his fellow-men. Thus the new in art
is always formed out of the old. The Genius
of the Hour always sets his ineffaceable seal on
the work, and gives it an inexpressible charm
for the imagination. As far as the spiritual
ᎪᎡᎢ .
355
character of the period overpowers the artist
and finds expression in his work, so far it will
always retain a certain grandeur, and will re-
present to future beholders the Unknown, the
Inevitable, the Divine. No man can quite ex-
clude this element of Necessity from his labour.
No man can quite emancipate himself from hist
age and country, or produce a model in which
the education, the religion, the politics, usages,
and arts of his times shall have no share. Though
he were never so original, never so wilful and
fantastic, he cannot wipe out of his work every
trace of the thoughts amidst which it grew.
The very avoidance betrays the usage he avoids.
Above his will, and out of his sight, he is ne-
cessitated, by the air he breathes, and the idea
on which he and his contemporaries live and
toil, to share the manner of his times, without
knowing what that manner is. Now that which
is inevitable in the work has a higher charm
than individual talent can ever give, inasmuch
as the artist's pen or chisel seems to have been
held and guided by a gigantic hand to inscribe
a line in the history of the human race.
circumstance gives a value to the Egyptian hiero-
glyphics, to the Indian, Chinese, and Mexican
idols, however gross and shapeless. They de-
note the height of the human soul in that
This
356
ESSAY XII.
hour, and were not fantastic, but sprung from
a necessity as deep as the world. Shall I
now add, that the whole extant product of
the plastic arts has herein its highest value
as history; as a stroke drawn in the portrait
of that fate, perfect and beautiful, according to
whose ordinations all beings advance to their
beatitude?
Thus, historically viewed, it has been the
office of art to educate the perception of beauty.
We are immersed in beauty, but our eyes have
no clear vision. It needs, by the exhibition of
single traits, to assist and lead the dormant taste.
We carve and paint, or we behold what is carved
and painted, as students of the mystery of Form.
The virtue of art lies in detachment, in seques-
tering one object from the embarrassing variety.
Until one thing comes out from the connexion
of things, there can be enjoyment, contempla-
tion, but no thought. Our happiness and un-
happiness are unproductive. The infant lies in
a pleasing trance; but his individual character
and his practical power depend on his daily pro-
gress in the separation of things, and dealing
with one at a time. Love and all the passions
concentrate all existence around a single form.
It is the habit of certain minds to give an all-
excluding fulness to the object, the thought, the
ᎪᎡᎢ .
357
word, they alight upon, and to make that for
the time the deputy of the world. These are
the artists, the orators, the leaders of society.
The power to detach, and to magnify by detach-
ing, is the essence of rhetoric in the hands of the
orator and the poet. This rhetoric, or power
to fix the momentary eminency of an object,
so remarkable in Burke, in Byron, in Carlyle,
the painter and sculptor exhibit in colour and
in stone. The power depends on the depth of
the artist's insight of that object he contem-
plates. For every object has its roots in central
nature, and may of course be so exhibited to us
as to represent the world. Therefore each work
of genius is the tyrant of the hour, and concen-
trates attention on itself. For the time, it is
the only thing worth naming, to do that, be
it a sonnet, an opera, a landscape, a statue, an
oration, the plan of a temple, of a campaign, or
of a voyage of discovery. Presently we pass
to some other object, which rounds itself into
a whole, as did the first; for example, a well-
laid garden,—and nothing seems worth doing
but the laying out of gardens. I should think
fire the best thing in the world, if I were not
acquainted with air, and water, and earth. For
it is the right and property of all natural ob-
jects, of all genuine talents, of all native pro-
358
ESSAY XII.
perties whatsoever, to be for their moment the
top of the world. A squirrel leaping from
bough to bough, and making the wood but one
wide tree for his pleasure, fills the eye not less
than a lion, is beautiful, self-sufficing, and stands
then and there for nature. A good ballad draws
my ear and heart whilst I listen, as much as an
epic has done before. A dog drawn by a master,
or a litter of pigs, satisfies, and is a reality not
less than the frescoes of Angelo. From this
succession of excellent objects learn we at last
the immensity of the world, the opulence of
human nature, which can run out to infinitude
in any direction.
But I also learn that what
astonished and fascinated me in the first work
astonished me in the second work also,—that
excellence of all things is one.
6
The office of painting and sculpture seems
to be merely initial. The best pictures can
easily tell us their last secret. The best pictures
are rude draughts of a few of the miraculous
dots and lines and dyes which make up the
ever-changing landscape with figures' amidst
which we dwell. Painting seems to be to the
eye what dancing is to the limbs. When that
has educated the frame to self-possession, to
nimbleness, to grace, the steps of the dancing-
master are better forgotten: so painting teaches
ᎪᎡᎢ.
359
me the splendour of colour and the expression
of form, and as I see many pictures and higher
genius in the art, I see the boundless opu-
lence of the pencil, the indifferency in which
the artist stands free to choose out of the pos-
sible forms. If he can draw everything, why
draw anything? and then is my eye opened to
the eternal picture which nature paints in the
street, with moving men and children, beggars
and fine ladies, draped in red, and green, and
blue, and grey; long-haired, grizzled, white-
faced, black-faced, wrinkled, giant, dwarf, ex-
panded, elfish,—capped and based by heaven,
earth, and sea.
·
A gallery of sculpture teaches more austerely
the same lesson. As picture teaches the colour-
ing, so sculpture the anatomy of form. When
I have seen fine statues, and afterwards enter
a public assembly, I understand well what he
meant who said, When I have been reading
Homer, all men look like giants.' I too see
that painting and sculpture are gymnastics of
the eye, its training to the niceties and curiosi-
ties of its function. There is no statue like
this living man, with his infinite advantage over
all ideal sculpture, of perpetual variety. What
a gallery of art have I here! No mannerist
made these varied groups and diverse original
360
ESSAY XII.
single figures. Here is the artist himself im-
provising, grim and glad, at his block. Now
one thought strikes him, now another; and
with each moment he alters the whole air,
attitude, and expression of his clay. Away
with your nonsense of oil and easels, of marble
and chisels: except to open your eyes to the
witchcraft of eternal art, they are hypocritical
rubbish.
The reference of all production at last to an
Aboriginal Power explains the traits common
to all works of the highest art,-that they are
universally intelligible, that they restore to us
the simplest states of mind, and are religious.
Since what skill is therein shewn is the re-
appearance of the original soul, a jet of pure
light, it should produce a similar impression
to that made by natural objects. In happy
hours nature appears to us one with art; art
perfected,— the work of genius. And the in-
dividual in whom simple tastes, and suscepti-
bility to all the great human influences, over-
power the accidents of a local and special cul-
ture, is the best critic of art. Though we travel
the world over to find the beautiful, we must
carry it with us, or we find it not. The best
of beauty is a finer charm than skill in sur-
faces, in outlines, or rules of art can ever teach,
ᎪᎡᎢ .
361
namely, a radiation, from the work of art,
of human character,-a wonderful expression,
through stone or canvass or musical sound, of
the deepest and simplest attributes of our na-
ture, and therefore most intelligible at last to
those souls which have these attributes. In
the sculptures of the Greeks, in the masonry
of the Romans, and in the pictures of the Tus-
can and Venetian masters, the highest charm
is the universal language they speak. A con-
fession of moral nature, of purity, love, and
hope, breathes from them all. That which we
carry to them, the same we bring back more
fairly illustrated in the memory. The traveller
who visits the Vatican, and passes from chamber
to chamber through galleries of statues, vases,
sarcophagi, and candelabra, through all forms
of beauty, cut in the richest materials, is in
danger of forgetting the simplicity of the prin-
ciples out of which they all sprung, and that
they had their origin from thoughts and laws in
his own breast. He studies the technical rules
on these wonderful remains, but forgets that
these works were not always thus constellated;
that they are the contributions of many ages and
many countries; that each came out of the soli-
tary workshop of one artist, who toiled perhaps
in ignorance of the existence of other sculpture,
R
362
ESSAY XII.
created his work without other model save life,
household life, and the sweet and smart of
personal relations, of beating hearts, and meet-
ing eyes, of poverty, and necessity, and hope,
and fear. These were his inspirations, and
these are the effects he carries home to your
heart and mind. In proportion to his force,
the artist will find in his work an outlet for his
proper character. He must not be in any man-
ner pinched or hindered by his material, but
through his necessity of imparting himself, the
adamant will be wax in his hands, and will allow
an adequate communication of himself in his full
stature and proportion. Not a conventional na-
ture and culture need he cumber himself with,
nor ask what is the mode in Rome or in Paris;
but that house, and weather, and manner of liv-
ing, which poverty and the fate of birth have
made at once so odious and so dear, in the grey
unpainted wood cabin on the corner of a New
Hampshire farm, or in the log-hut of the back-
woods, or in the narrow lodging where he has
endured the constraints and seeming of a city
poverty, will serve as well as any other con-
dition as the symbol of a thought which pours
itself indifferently through all.
I remember, when in my younger days I
had heard of the wonders of Italian painting, I
ART.
363
fancied the great pictures would be great stran-
gers; some surprising combination of colour and
form; a foreign wonder, barbaric pearl and gold,
like the spontoons and standards of the militia,
which play such pranks in the eyes and imagin-
ations of school-boys. I was to see and acquire
I knew not what. When I came at last to
Rome, and saw with eyes the pictures, I found
that genius left to novices the gay and fantastic
and ostentatious, and itself pierced directly to
the simple and true; that it was familiar and
sincere; that it was the old, eternal fact I had
met already in so many forms; unto which I
lived; that it was the plain you and me I knew
so well, — had left at home in so many conver-
sations. I had the same experience already in
a church at Naples. There I saw that nothing
was changed with me but the place, and said to
myself, "Thou foolish child, hast thou come
out hither, over four thousand miles of salt water,
to find that which was perfect to thee there at
home?" That fact I saw again in the Acca-
demia at Naples, in the chambers of sculpture;
and yet again when I came to Rome, and to the
paintings of Raphael, Angelo, Sacchi, Titian,
and Leonardo da Vinci. CC
What, old mole!
workest thou in the earth so fast?" It had tra-
velled by my side: that which I fancied I had
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ESSAY XII.
left in Boston was here in the Vatican, and
again at Milan, and at Paris, and made all tra-
velling ridiculous as a treadmill. I now require
this of all pictures, that they domesticate me,
not that they dazzle me. Pictures must not be
too picturesque. Nothing astonishes men so
much as common sense and plain dealing. All
great actions have been simple, and all great
pictures are.
The Transfiguration, by Raphael, is an emi-
nent example of this peculiar merit. A calm,
benignant beauty shines over all this picture,
and goes directly to the heart. It seems almost
to call you by name. The sweet and sublime
face of Jesus is beyond praise, yet how it dis-
appoints all florid expectations! This fami-
liar, simple, home-speaking countenance is as
if one should meet a friend. The knowledge
of picture-dealers has its value; but listen not
to their criticism when your heart is touched
by genius. It was not painted for them,-it
was painted for you; for such as had eyes ca-
pable of being touched by simplicity and lofty
emotions.
Yet when we have said all our fine things
about the arts, we must end with a frank con-
fession, that the arts, as we know them, are but
initial. Our best praise is given to what they
ᎪᎡᎢ .
365
aimed and promised, not to the actual result.
He has conceived meanly of the resources of
man who believes that the best age of produc-
tion is past. The real value of the Iliad or the
Transfiguration is as signs of power; billows or
ripples they are of the great stream of tendency;
tokens of the everlasting effort to produce, which
even in its worst estate the soul betrays. Art
has not yet come to its maturity, if it do not put
itself abreast with the most potent influences of
the world, if it is not practical and moral, if it
do not stand in connexion with the conscience,
if it do not make the poor and uncultivated feel
that it addresses them with a voice of lofty cheer.
There is higher work for Art than the arts.
They are abortive births of an imperfect or
vitiated instinct. Art is the need to create ;
but in its essence, immense and universal, it is
impatient of working with lame or tied hands,
and of making cripples and monsters, such as all
pictures and statues are. Nothing less than the
creation of man and nature is its end. A man
should find in it an outlet for his whole energy.
He may paint and carve only as long as he can
do that. Art should exhilarate, and throw down
the walls of circumstance on every side, awaken-
ing in the beholder the same sense of universal
relation and power which the work evinced in
366
ESSAY XII.
the artist, and its highest effect is to make new
artists.
Already History is old enough to witness
the old age and disappearance of particular arts.
The art of sculpture is long ago perished to any
real effect. It was originally an useful art, a
mode of writing, a savage's record of gratitude
or devotion; and among a people possessed of a
wonderful perception of form, this childish cary-
ing was refined to the utmost splendour of effect.
But it is the game of a rude and youthful people,
and not the manly labour of a wise and spiritual
nation. Under an oak-tree loaded with leaves
and nuts, under a sky full of eternal eyes, I stand
in a thoroughfare; but in the works of our plas-
tic arts, and especially of sculpture, creation is
driven into a corner. I cannot hide from myself
that there is a certain appearance of paltriness,
as of toys, and the trumpery of a theatre, in
sculpture. Nature transcends all our moods of
thought, and its secret we do not yet find. But
the gallery stands at the mercy of our moods,
and there is a moment when it becomes frivo-
lous. I do not wonder that Newton, with an
attention habitually engaged on the path of pla-
nets and suns, should have wondered what the
Earl of Pembroke found to admire in stone
dolls.' Sculpture may serve to teach the pupil
ᎪᎡᎢ .
367
how deep is the secret of form, how purely the
spirit can translate its meanings into that elo-
quent dialect.
But the statue will look cold
and false before that new activity, which needs
to roll through all things, and is impatient of
counterfeits and things not alive. Picture and
sculpture are the celebrations and festivities of
form. But true art is never fixed, but always
flowing. The sweetest music is not in the ora-
torio, but in the human voice when it speaks
from its instant life tones of tenderness, truth,
or courage. The oratorio has already lost its
relation to the morning, to the sun and the
earth, but that persuading voice is in tune with
these. All works of art should not be detached,
but extempore performances. A great man is
a new statue in every attitude and action. A
beautiful woman is a picture which drives all
beholders nobly mad. Life may be lyric or
epic, as well as a poem or a romance.
A true announcement of the law of creation,
if a man were found worthy to declare it, would
carry art up into the kingdom of nature, and de-
stroy its separate and contrasted existence. The
fountains of invention and beauty in modern
society are all but dried up. A popular novel,
a theatre, or a ball-room, makes us feel that we
are all paupers in the alms-house of this world,
368
ESSAY XII.
without dignity, without skill or industry. Art
is as poor and low. The old tragic Necessity,
which lowers on the brows even of the Venuses
and the Cupids of the antique, and furnishes
the sole apology for the intrusion of such ano-
malous figures into nature,-namely, that they
were inevitable, that the artist was drunk with
a passion for form, which he could not resist,
and which vented itself in these fine extrava-
gances, no longer dignifies the chisel or the
pencil. But the artist and the connoisseur now
seek in art the exhibition of their talent, or an
asylum from the evils of life. Men are not well
pleased with the figure they make in their own
imagination, and they flee to art, and convey
their better sense in an oratorio, a statue, or a
picture. Art makes the same effort which a
sensual prosperity makes, namely, to detach the
beautiful from the useful, to do up the work as
unavoidable, and hating it, pass on to enjoy-
ment. These solaces and compensations, this
division of beauty from use, the laws of nature
do not permit. As soon as beauty is sought
not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it
degrades the seeker. High beauty is no longer
attainable by him in canvass or in stone, in
sound or in lyrical construction; an effeminate,
prudent, sickly beauty, which is not beauty, is
ᎪᎡᎢ .
369
all that can be formed; for the hand can never
execute any thing higher than the character can
inspire.
The art that thus separates is itself first se-
parated. Art must not be a superficial talent,
but must begin farther back in man. Now men
do not see nature to be beautiful, and they go
to make a statue which shall be. They abhor
men as tasteless, dull, and inconvertible, and con-
sole themselves with colour-bags and blocks of
marble. They reject life as prosaic, and create
a death which they call poetic. They despatch
the day's weary chores, and fly to voluptuous
reveries. They eat and drink, that they may
afterwards execute the ideal. Thus is art vili-
fied; the name conveys to the mind its secondary
and bad senses; it stands in the imagination as
somewhat contrary to nature, and struck with
death from the first. Would it not be better
to begin higher up,-to serve the ideal before
they eat and drink; to serve the ideal in eat-
ing and drinking, in drawing the breath, and in
the functions of life? Beauty must come back
to the useful arts, and the distinction between
the fine and the useful arts be forgotten. If
history were truly told, if life were nobly spent,
it would be no longer easy or possible to distin-
guish the one from the other. In nature all is
S
370
ESSAY XII.
useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful
because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is
therefore useful because it is symmetrical and
fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a legis-
lature, nor will it repeat in England or America
its history in Greece. It will come, as always,
unannounced, and spring up between the feet of
brave and earnest men. It is in vain that we
look for genius to reiterate its miracles in the
old arts; it is its instinct to find beauty and
holiness in new and necessary facts, in the field
and roadside, in the shop and mill. Proceeding
from a religious heart, it will raise to a divine
use the railroad, the insurance-office, the joint-
stock company, our law, our primary assemblies,
our commerce, the galvanic battery, the electric
jar, the prism, and the chemist's retort, in which
we seek now only an economical use. Is not the
selfish and even cruel aspect which belongs to
our great mechanical works, to mills, railways,
and machinery, the effect of the mercenary im-
pulses which these works obey? When its
errands are noble and adequate, a steam-boat
bridging the Atlantic between Old and New
England, and arriving at its ports with the
punctuality of a planet,-is a step of man into
harmony with nature. The boat at St. Peters-
burgh, which plies along the Lena by magnetism,
ᎪᎡᎢ .
371
needs little to make it sublime. When science is
learned in love, and its powers are wielded by
love, they will appear the supplements and con-
tinuations of the material creation.
THE END.
LONDON:
PRINTED BY ROBSON, LEVEY, AND FRANKLYN,
Great New Street, Fetter Lane.

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