I: FATE
II: POWER
III: WEALTH
IV: CULTURE
V: BEHAVIOR
VI: WORSHIP
VII: CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY
VIII: BEAUTY
IX: ILLUSIONS



I: FATE


Delicate omens traced in air
To the lone bard true witness bare;
Birds with auguries on their wings
Chanted undeceiving things
Him to beckon, him to warn;
Well might then the poet scorn
To learn of scribe or courier
Hints writ in vaster character;
And on his mind, at dawn of day,
Soft shadows of the evening lay.
For the prevision is allied
Unto the thing so signified;
Or say, the foresight that awaits
Is the same Genius that creates.



Fate


It chanced during one winter, a few years ago, that our cities were bent on discussing the
theory of the Age. By an odd coincidence, four or five noted men were each reading a
discourse to the citizens of Boston or New York, on the Spirit of the Times. It so
happened that the subject had the same prominence in some remarkable pamphlets
and journals issued in London in the same season. To me, however, the question of the
times resolved itself into a practical question of the conduct of life. How shall I live? We
are incompetent to solve the times. Our geometry cannot span the huge orbits of the
prevailing ideas, behold their return, and reconcile their opposition. We can only obey
our own polarity. 'Tis fine for us to speculate and elect our course, if we must accept an
irresistible dictation.

In our first steps to gain our wishes, we come upon immovable limitations. We are fired
with the hope to reform men. After many experiments, we find that we must begin
earlier,--at school. But the boys and girls are not docile; we can make nothing of them.
We decide that they are not of good stock. We must begin our reform earlier still,--at
generation: that is to say, there is Fate, or laws of the world.

But if there be irresistible dictation, this dictation understands itself. If we must accept
Fate, we are not less compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the
grandeur of duty, the power of character. This is true, and that other is true. But our
geometry cannot span these extreme points, and reconcile them. What to do? By
obeying each thought frankly, by harping, or, if you will, pounding on each string, we
learn at last its power. By the same obedience to other thoughts, we learn theirs, and
then comes some reasonable hope of harmonizing them. We are sure, that, though we
know not how, necessity does comport with liberty, the individual with the world, my
polarity with the spirit of the times. The riddle of the age has for each a private solution.
If one would study his own time, it must be by this method of taking up in turn each of
the leading topics which belong to our scheme of human life, and, by firmly stating all
that is agreeable to experience on one, and doing the same justice to the opposing facts
in the others, the true limitations will appear. Any excess of emphasis, on one part,
would be corrected, and a just balance would be made.

But let us honestly state the facts. Our America has a bad name for superficialness.
Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the
terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it. The Spartan, embodying his
religion in his country, dies before its majesty without a question. The Turk, who believes
his doom is written on the iron leaf in the moment when he entered the world, rushes
on the enemy's sabre with undivided will. The Turk, the Arab, the Persian, accepts the
foreordained fate.

"On two days, it steads not to run from thy grave,
The appointed, and the unappointed day;
On the first, neither balm nor physician can save,
Nor thee, on the second, the Universe slay."

The Hindoo, under the wheel, is as firm. Our Calvinists, in the last generation, had
something of the same dignity. They felt that the weight of the Universe held them down
to their place. What could they do? Wise men feel that there is something which cannot
be talked or voted away,--a strap or belt which girds the world.

"The Destiny, minister general,
That executeth in the world o'er all,
The purveyance which God hath seen beforne,
So strong it is, that tho' the world had sworn
The contrary of a thing by yea or nay,
Yet sometime it shall fallen on a day
That falleth not oft in a thousand year;
For, certainly, our appetites here,
Be it of war, or peace, or hate, or love,
All this is ruled by the sight above."
Chaucer: The Knighte's Tale.

The Greek Tragedy expressed the same sense: "Whatever is fated, that will take place.
The great immense mind of Jove is not to be transgressed." Savages cling to a local god
of one tribe or town. The broad ethics of Jesus were quickly narrowed to village
theologies, which preach an election or favoritism. And, now and then, an amiable
parson, like Jung Stilling, or Robert Huntington, believes in a pistareen-Providence,
which, whenever the good man wants a dinner, makes that somebody shall knock at his
door, and leave a half-dollar. But Nature is no sentimentalist,--does not cosset or
pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a
man or a woman; but swallows your ship like a grain of dust. The cold, inconsiderate of
persons, tingles your blood, benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple. The
diseases, the elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect no persons. The way of
Providence is a little rude. The habit of snake and spider, the snap of the tiger and other
leapers and bloody jumpers, the crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the
anaconda,--these are in the system, and our habits are like theirs. You have just dined,
and, however scrupulously the slaughter-house is concealed in the graceful distance of
miles, there is complicity,--expensive races,--race living at the expense of race. The
planet is liable to shocks from comets, perturbations from planets, rendings from
earthquake and volcano, alterations of climate, precessions of equinoxes. Rivers dry up
by opening of the forest. The sea changes its bed. Towns and counties fall into it. At
Lisbon, an earthquake killed men like flies. At Naples, three years ago, ten thousand
persons were crushed in a few minutes. The scurvy at sea; the sword of the climate in
the west of Africa, at Cayenne, at Panama, at New Orleans, cut off men like a massacre.
Our western prairie shakes with fever and ague. The cholera, the small-pox, have proved
as mortal to some tribes, as a frost to the crickets, which, having filled the summer with
noise, are silenced by a fall of the temperature of one night. Without uncovering what
does not concern us, or counting how many species of parasites hang on a bombyx; or
groping after intestinal parasites, or infusory biters, or the obscurities of alternate
generation;--the forms of the shark, the labrus, the jaw of the sea-wolf paved with
crushing teeth, the weapons of the grampus, and other warriors hidden in the sea, --
are hints of ferocity in the interiors of nature. Let us not deny it up and down. Providence
has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its
huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and
white neckcloth of a student in divinity.

Will you say, the disasters which threaten mankind are exceptional, and one need not lay
his account for cataclysms every day? Aye, but what happens once, may happen again,
and so long as these strokes are not to be parried by us, they must be feared.
But these shocks and ruins are less destructive to us, than the stealthy power of other
laws which act on us daily. An expense of ends to means is fate;--organization
tyrannizing over character. The menagerie, or forms and powers of the spine, is a book
of fate: the bill of the bird, the skull of the snake, determines tyrannically its limits. So is
the scale of races, of temperaments; so is sex; so is climate; so is the reaction of talents
imprisoning the vital power in certain directions. Every spirit makes its house; but
afterwards the house confines the spirit.

The gross lines are legible to the dull: the cabman is phrenologist so far: he looks in your
face to see if his shilling is sure. A dome of brow denotes one thing; a pot-belly another;
a squint, a pug-nose, mats of hair, the pigment of the epidermis, betray character.
People seem sheathed in their tough organization. Ask Spurzheim, ask the doctors, ask
Quetelet, if temperaments decide nothing? or if there be any-thing they do not decide?
Read the description in medical books of the four temperaments, and you will think you
are reading your own thoughts which you had not yet told. Find the part which black
eyes, and which blue eyes, play severally in the company. How shall a man escape from
his ancestors, or draw off from his veins the black drop which he drew from his father's
or his mother's life? It often appears in a family, as if all the qualities of the progenitors
were potted in several jars,--some ruling quality in each son or daughter of the house,
-- and sometimes the unmixed temperament, the rank unmitigated elixir, the family vice,
is drawn off in a separate individual, and the others are proportionally relieved. We
sometimes see a change of expression in our companion, and say, his father, or his
mother, comes to the windows of his eyes, and sometimes a remote relative. In different
hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight
of us rolled up in each man's skin,? seven or eight ancestors at least,--and they con-
stitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is. At the corner
of the street, you read the possibility of each passenger, in the facial angle, in the
complexion, in the depth of his eye. His parentage determines it. Men are what their
mothers made them. You may as well ask a loom which weaves huckaback, why it does
not make cashmere, as expect poetry from this engineer, or a chemical discovery from
that jobber. Ask the digger in the ditch to explain Newton's laws: the fine organs of his
brain have been pinched by overwork and squalid poverty from father to son, for a
hundred years. When each comes forth from his mother's womb, the gate of gifts closes
behind him. Let him value his hands and feet, he has but one pair. So he has but one
future, and that is already predetermined in his lobes, and described in that little fatty
face, pig-eye, and squat form. All the privilege and all the legislation of the world cannot
meddle or help to make a poet or a prince of him.

Jesus said, "When he looketh on her, he hath committed adultery." But he is an adulterer
before he has yet looked on the woman, by the superfluity of animal, and the defect of
thought, in his constitution. Who meets him, or who meets her, in the street, sees that
they are ripe to be each other's victim.

In certain men, digestion and sex absorb the vital force, and the stronger these are, the
individual is so much weaker. The more of these drones perish, the better for the hive. If,
later, they give birth to some superior individual, with force enough to add to this animal
a new aim, and a complete apparatus to work it out, all the ancestors are gladly
forgotten. Most men and most women are merely one couple more. Now and then, one
has a new cell or camarilla opened in his brain,--an architectural, a musical, or a
philological knack, some stray taste or talent for flowers, or chemistry, or pigments, or
story-telling, a good hand for drawing, a good foot for dancing, an athletic frame for wide
journeying, &c.--which skill nowise alters rank in the scale of nature, but serves to pass
the time, the life of sensation going on as before. At last, these hints and tendencies are
fixed in one, or in a succession. Each absorbs so much food and force, as to become itself
a new centre. The new talent draws off so rapidly the vital force, that not enough remains
for the animal functions, hardly enough for health; so that, in the second generation, if
the like genius appear, the health is visibly deteriorated, and the generative force
impaired.

People are born with the moral or with the material bias;--uterine brothers with this
diverging destination: and I suppose, with high magnifiers, Mr. Frauenhofer or Dr.
Carpenter might come to distinguish in the embryo at the fourth day, this is a Whig, and
that a Free-soiler.

It was a poetic attempt to lift this mountain of Fate, to reconcile this despotism of race
with liberty, which led the Hindoos to say, "Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a
prior state of existence." I find the coincidence of the extremes of eastern and western
speculation in the daring statement of Schelling, "there is in every man a certain feeling,
that he has been what he is from all eternity, and by no means became such in time." To
say it less sublimely,--in the history of the individual is always an account of his condition,
and he knows himself to be a party to his present estate.

A good deal of our politics is physiological. Now and then, a man of wealth in the heyday
of youth adopts the tenet of broadest freedom. In England, there is always some man of
wealth and large connection planting himself, during all his years of health, on the side
of progress, who, as soon as he begins to die, checks his forward play, calls in his troops,
and becomes conservative. All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have
been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their
parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive. But strong natures,
backwoodsmen, New Hampshire giants, Napoleons, Burkes, Broughams, Websters,
Kossuths, are inevitable patriots, until their life ebbs, and their defects and gout, palsy
and money, warp them.

The strongest idea incarnates itself in majorities and nations, in the healthiest and
strongest. Probably, the election goes by avoirdupois weight, and, if you could weigh
bodily the tonnage of any hundred of the Whig and the Democratic party in a town, on
the Dearborn balance, as they passed the hayscales, you could predict with certainty
which party would carry it. On the whole, it would be rather the speediest way of
deciding the vote, to put the selectmen or the mayor and aldermen at the hayscales.

In science, we have to consider two things: power and circumstance. All we know of the
egg, from each successive discovery, is, another vesicle; and if, after five hundred years,
you get a better observer, or a better glass, he finds within the last observed another. In
vegetable and animal tissue, it is just alike, and all that the primary power or spasm
operates, is, still, vesicles, vesicles. Yes,--but the tyrannical Circumstance! A vesicle in
new circumstances, a vesicle lodged in darkness, Oken thought, became animal; in light,
a plant. Lodged in the parent animal, it suffers changes, which end in unsheathing
miraculous capability in the unaltered vesicle, and it unlocks itself to fish, bird, or
quadruped, head and foot, eye and claw. The Circumstance is Nature. Nature is, what
you may do. There is much you may not. We have two things,--the circumstance, and
the life. Once we thought, positive power was all. Now we learn, that negative power, or
circumstance, is half. Nature is the tyrannous circumstance, the thick skull, the sheathed
snake, the ponderous, rock-like jaw; necessitated activity; violent direction; the
conditions of a tool, like the locomotive, strong enough on its track, but which can do
nothing but mischief off of it; or skates, which are wings on the ice, but fetters on the
ground.

The book of Nature is the book of Fate. She turns the gigantic pages,--leaf after leaf, --
never returning one. One leaf she lays down, a floor of granite; then a thousand ages,
and a bed of slate; a thousand ages, and a measure of coal; a thousand ages, and a layer
of marl and mud: vegetable forms appear; her first misshapen animals, zoophyte,
trilobium, fish; then, saurians,--rude forms, in which she has only blocked her future
statue, concealing under these unwieldly monsters the fine type of her coming king. The
face of the planet cools and dries, the races meliorate, and man is born. But when a race
has lived its term, it comes no more again.

The population of the world is a conditional population not the best, but the best that
could live now; and the scale of tribes, and the steadiness with which victory adheres to
one tribe, and defeat to another, is as uniform as the superposition of strata. We know in
history what weight belongs to race. We see the English, French, and Germans planting
themselves on every shore and market of America and Australia, and monopolizing the
commerce of these countries. We like the nervous and victorious habit of our own
branch of the family. We follow the step of the Jew, of the Indian, of the Negro. We see
how much will has been expended to extinguish the Jew, in vain. Look at the unpalatable
conclusions of Knox, in his "Fragment of Races,"--a rash and unsatisfactory writer, but
charged with pungent and unforgetable truths. "Nature respects race, and not hybrids."
"Every race has its own habitat." "Detach a colony from the race, and it deteriorates to
the crab." See the shades of the picture. The German and Irish millions, like the Negro,
have a great deal of guano in their destiny. They are ferried over the Atlantic, and carted
over America, to ditch and to drudge, to make corn cheap, and then to lie down
prematurely to make a spot of green grass on the prairie.

One more fagot of these adamantine bandages, is, the new science of Statistics. It is a
rule, that the most casual and extraordinary events--if the basis of population is broad
enough--become matter of fixed calculation. It would not be safe to say when a captain
like Bonaparte, a singer like Jenny Lind, or a navigator like Bowditch, would be born in
Boston: but, on a population of twenty or two hundred millions, something like accuracy
may be had.

'Tis frivolous to fix pedantically the date of particular inventions. They have all been
invented over and over fifty times. Man is the arch machine, of which all these shifts
drawn from himself are toy models. He helps himself on each emergency by copying or
duplicating his own structure, just so far as the need is. 'Tis hard to find the right Homer
Zoroaster, or Menu; harder still to find the Tubal Cain, or Vulcan, or Cadmus, or
Copernicus, or Fust, or Fulton, the indisputable inventor. There are scores and centuries
of them. "The air is full of men." This kind of talent so abounds, this constructive tool-
making efficiency, as if it adhered to the chemic atoms, as if the air he breathes were
made of Vaucansons, Franklins, and Watts.

Doubtless, in every million there will be an astronomer, a mathematician, a comic poet, a
mystic. No one can read the history of astronomy, without perceiving that Copernicus,
Newton, Laplace, are not new men, or a new kind of men, but that Thales, Anaximenes,
Hipparchus, Empedocles, Aristarchus, Pythagoras, ;Oenipodes, had anticipated them;
each had the same tense geometrical brain, apt for the same vigorous computation and
logic, a mind parallel to the movement of the world. The Roman mile probably rested on
a measure of a degree of the meridian. Mahometan and Chinese know what we know of
leap-year, of the Gregorian calendar, and of the precession of the equinoxes. As, in every
barrel of cowries, brought to New Bedford, there shall be one orangia, so there will, in a
dozen millions of Malays and Mahometans, be one or two astronomical skulls. In a large
city, the most casual things, and things whose beauty lies in their casualty, are produced
as punctually and to order as the baker's muffin for breakfast. Punch makes exactly one
capital joke a week; and the journals contrive to furnish one good piece of news every
day.

And not less work the laws of repression, the penalties of violated functions. Famine,
typhus, frost, war, suicide, and effete races, must be reckoned calculable parts of the
system of the world.

These are pebbles from the mountain, hints of the terms by which our life is walled up,
and which show a kind of mechanical exactness, as of a loom or mill, in what we call
casual or fortuitous events.

The force with which we resist these torrents of tendency looks so ridiculously
inadequate, that it amounts to little more than a criticism or a protest made by a
minority of one, under compulsion of millions. I seemed, in the height of a tempest, to
see men overboard struggling in the waves, and driven about here and there. They
glanced intelligently at each other, but 'twas little they could do for one another; 'twas
much if each could keep afloat alone. Well, they had a right to their eye-beams, and all
the rest was Fate.


We cannot trifle with this reality, this cropping-out in our planted gardens of the core of
the world. No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A
man's power is hooped in by a necessity, which, by many experiments, he touches on
every side, until he learns its arc.

The element running through entire nature, which we popularly call Fate, is known to us
as limitation. Whatever limits us, we call Fate. If we are brute and barbarous, the fate
takes a brute and dreadful shape. As we refine, our checks become finer. If we rise to
spiritual culture, the antagonism takes a spiritual form. In the Hindoo fables, Vishnu
follows Maya through all her ascending changes, from insect and crawfish up to ele-
phant; whatever form she took, he took the male form of that kind, until she became
at last woman and goddess, and he a man and a god. The limitations refine as the soul
purifies, but the ring of necessity is always perched at the top.

When the gods in the Norse heaven were unable to bind the Fenris Wolf with steel or
with weight of mountains,--the one he snapped and the other he spurned with his
heel,--they put round his foot a limp band softer than silk or cobweb, and this held him:
the more he spurned it, the stiffer it drew. So soft and so stanch is the ring of Fate.
Neither brandy, nor nectar, nor sulphuric ether, nor hell-fire, nor ichor, nor poetry, nor
genius, can get rid of this limp band. For if we give it the high sense in which the poets
use it, even thought itself is not above Fate: that too must act according to eternal laws,
and all that is wilful and fantastic in it is in opposition to its fundamental essence.

And, last of all, high over thought, in the world of morals, Fate appears as vindicator,
levelling the high, lifting the low, requiring justice in man, and always striking soon or
late, when justice is not done. What is useful will last; what is hurtful will sink. "The doer
must suffer," said the Greeks: "you would soothe a Deity not to be soothed." "God
himself cannot procure good for the wicked," said the Welsh triad. "God may consent,
but only for a time," said the bard of Spain. The limitation is impassable by any insight of
man. In its last and loftiest ascensions, insight itself, and the freedom of the will, is one of
its obedient members. But we must not run into generalizations too large, but show the
natural bounds or essential distinctions, and seek to do justice to the other elements as
well.


Thus we trace Fate, in matter, mind, and morals,--in race, in retardations of strata, and
in thought and character as well. It is everywhere bound or limitation. But Fate has its
lord; limitation its limits; is different seen from above and from below; from within and
from without. For, though Fate is immense, so is power, which is the other fact in the
dual world, immense. If Fate follows and limits power, power attends and antagonizes
Fate. We must respect Fate as natural history, but there is more than natural history. For
who and what is this criticism that pries into the matter? Man is not order of nature, sack
and sack, belly and members, link in a chain, nor any ignominious baggage, but a
stupendous antagonism, a dragging together of the poles of the Universe. He betrays his
relation to what is below him,--thick-skulled, small-brained, fishy, quadrumanous, --
quadruped ill-disguised, hardly escaped into biped, and has paid for the new powers by
loss of some of the old ones. But the lightning which explodes and fashions planets,
maker of planets and suns, is in him. On one side, elemental order, sandstone and
granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and shore; and, on the other part, thought, the
spirit which composes and decomposes nature,--here they are, side by side, god and
devil, mind and matter, king and conspirator, belt and spasm, riding peacefully together
in the eye and brain of every man.

Nor can he blink the freewill. To hazard the contradiction,--freedom is necessary. If you
please to plant yourself on the side of Fate, and say, Fate is all; then we say, a part of
Fate is the freedom of man. Forever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting in the
soul. Intellect annuls Fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free. And though nothing is more
disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant
mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a "Declaration of Independence," or
the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act, yet it is
wholesome to man to look not at Fate, but the other way: the practical view is the other.
His sound relation to these facts is to use and command, not to cringe to them. "Look
not on nature, for her name is fatal," said the oracle. The too much contemplation of
these limits induces meanness. They who talk much of destiny, their birth-star, &c., are in
a lower dangerous plane, and invite the evils they fear.

I cited the instinctive and heroic races as proud believers in Destiny. They conspire with
it; a loving resignation is with the event. But the dogma makes a different impression,
when it is held by the weak and lazy. 'Tis weak and vicious people who cast the blame on
Fate. The right use of Fate is to bring up our conduct to the loftiness of nature. Rude and
invincible except by themselves are the elements. So let man be. Let him empty his
breast of his windy conceits, and show his lordship by manners and deeds on the scale
of nature. Let him hold his purpose as with the tug of gravitation. No power, no
persuasion, no bribe shall make him give up his point. A man ought to compare
advantageously with a river, an oak, or a mountain. He shall have not less the flow, the
expansion, and the resistance of these.

'Tis the best use of Fate to teach a fatal courage. Go face the fire at sea, or the cholera in
your friend's house, or the burglar in your own, or what danger lies in the way of duty,
knowing you are guarded by the cherubim of Destiny. If you believe in Fate to your
harm, believe it, at least, for your good.

For, if Fate is so prevailing, man also is part of it, and can confront fate with fate. If the
Universe have these savage accidents, our atoms are as savage in resistance. We should
be crushed by the atmosphere, but for the reaction of the air within the body. A tube
made of a film of glass can resist the shock of the ocean, if filled with the same water. If
there be omnipotence in the stroke, there is omnipotence of recoil.

I. But Fate against Fate is only parrying and defence: there are, also, the noble creative
forces. The revelation of Thought takes man out of servitude into freedom. We rightly say
of ourselves, we were born, and afterward we were born again, and many times. We have
successive experiences so important, that the new forgets the old, and hence the
mythology of the seven or the nine heavens. The day of days, the great day of the feast
of life, is that in which the inward eye opens to the Unity in things, to the omnipresence
of law;--sees that what is must be, and ought to be, or is the best. This beatitude dips
from on high down on us, and we see. It is not in us so much as we are in it. If the air
come to our lungs, we breathe and live; if not, we die. If the light come to our eyes, we
see; else not. And if truth come to our mind, we suddenly expand to its dimensions, as if
we grew to worlds. We are as lawgivers; we speak for Nature; we prophesy and divine.

This insight throws us on the party and interest of the Universe, against all and sundry;
against ourselves, as much as others. A man speaking from insight affirms of himself
what is true of the mind: seeing its immortality, he says, I am immortal; seeing its in-
vincibility, he says, I am strong. It is not in us, but we are in it. It is of the maker, not of
what is made. All things are touched and changed by it. This uses, and is not used. It
distances those who share it, from those who share it not. Those who share it not are
flocks and herds. It dates from itself;--not from former men or better men,--gospel, or
constitution, or college, or custom. Where it shines, Nature is no longer intrusive, but all
things make a musical or pictorial impression. The world of men show like a comedy
without laughter:--populations, interests, government, history;--'tis all toy figures in a
toy house. It does not overvalue particular truths. We hear eagerly every thought and
word quoted from an intellectual man. But, in his presence, our own mind is roused to
activity, and we forget very fast what he says, much more interested in the new play of
our own thought, than in any thought of his. 'Tis the majesty into which we have
suddenly mounted, the impersonality, the scorn of egotisms, the sphere of laws, that
engage us. Once we were stepping a little this way, and a little that way; now, we are as
men in a balloon, and do not think so much of the point we have left, or the point we
would make, as of the liberty and glory of the way.

Just as much intellect as you add, so much organic power. He who sees through the
design, presides over it, and must will that which must be. We sit and rule, and, though
we sleep, our dream will come to pass. Our thought, though it were only an hour old,
affirms an oldest necessity, not to be separated from thought, and not to be separated
from will. They must always have coexisted. It apprises us of its sovereignty and
godhead, which refuse to be severed from it. It is not mine or thine, but the will of all
mind. It is poured into the souls of all men, as the soul itself which constitutes them men.
I know not whether there be, as is alleged, in the upper region of our atmosphere, a
permanent westerly current, which carries with it all atoms which rise to that height, but
I see, that when souls reach a certain clearness of perception, they accept a knowledge
and motive above selfishness. A breath of will blows eternally through the universe of
souls in the direction of the Right and Necessary. It is the air which all intellects inhale
and exhale, and it is the wind which blows the worlds into order and orbit.

Thought dissolves the material universe, by carrying the mind up into a sphere where all
is plastic. Of two men, each obeying his own thought, he whose thought is deepest will
be the strongest character. Always one man more than another represents the will of
Divine Providence to the period.

2. If thought makes free, so does the moral sentiment. The mixtures of spiritual
chemistry refuse to be analyzed. Yet we can see that with the perception of truth is
joined the desire that it shall prevail. That affection is essential to will. Moreover, when a
strong will appears, it usually results from a certain unity of organization, as if the whole
energy of body and mind flowed in one direction. All great force is real and elemental.
There is no manufacturing a strong will. There must be a pound to balance a pound.
Where power is shown in will, it must rest on the universal force. Alaric and Bonaparte
must believe they rest on a truth, or their will can be bought or bent. There is a bribe
possible for any finite will. But the pure sympathy with universal ends is an infinite force,
and cannot be bribed or bent. Whoever has had experience of the moral sentiment
cannot choose but believe in unlimited power. Each pulse from that heart is an oath
from the Most High. I know not what the word sublime means, if it be not the intimations
in this infant of a terrific force. A text of heroism, a name and anecdote of courage, are
not arguments, but sallies of freedom. One of these is the verse of the Persian Hafiz, "'Tis
written on the gate of Heaven, `Wo unto him who suffers himself to be betrayed by
Fate!'" Does the reading of history make us fatalists? What courage does not the opposite
opinion show! A little whim of will to be free gallantly contending against the universe of
chemistry.

But insight is not will, nor is affection will. Perception is cold, and goodness dies in
wishes; as Voltaire said, 'tis the misfortune of worthy people that they are cowards; "un
des plus grands malheurs des honnetes gens c'est qu'ils sont des lafaches." There must
be a fusion of these two to generate the energy of will. There can be no driving force,
except through the conversion of the man into his will, making him the will, and the will
him. And one may say boldly, that no man has a right perception of any truth, who has not
been reacted on by it, so as to be ready to be its martyr.

The one serious and formidable thing in nature is a will. Society is servile from want of
will, and therefore the world wants saviours and religions. One way is right to go: the
hero sees it, and moves on that aim, and has the world under him for root and support.
He is to others as the world. His approbation is honor; his dissent, infamy. The glance of
his eye has the force of sunbeams. A personal influence towers up in memory only
worthy, and we gladly forget numbers, money, climate, gravitation, and the rest of Fate.


We can afford to allow the limitation, if we know it is the meter of the growing man. We
stand against Fate, as children stand up against the wall in their father's house, and
notch their height from year to year. But when the boy grows to man, and is master of
the house, he pulls down that wall, and builds a new and bigger. 'Tis only a question of
time. Every brave youth is in training to ride and rule this dragon. His science is to make
weapons and wings of these passions and retarding forces. Now whether, seeing these
two things, fate and power, we are permitted to believe in unity? The bulk of mankind
believe in two gods. They are under one dominion here in the house, as friend and
parent, in social circles, in letters, in art, in love, in religion: but in mechanics, in dealing
with steam and climate, in trade, in politics, they think they come under another; and
that it would be a practical blunder to transfer the method and way of working of one
sphere, into the other. What good, honest, generous men at home, will be wolves and
foxes on change! What pious men in the parlor will vote for what reprobates at the polls!
To a certain point, they believe themselves the care of a Providence. But, in a steamboat,
in an epidemic, in war, they believe a malignant energy rules.

But relation and connection are not somewhere and sometimes, but everywhere and
always. The divine order does not stop where their sight stops. The friendly power works
on the same rules, in the next farm, and the next planet. But, where they have not
experience, they run against it, and hurt themselves. Fate, then, is a name for facts not
yet passed under the fire of thought;--for causes which are unpenetrated.

But every jet of chaos which threatens to exterminate us, is convertible by intellect into
wholesome force. Fate is unpenetrated causes. The water drowns ship and sailor, like a
grain of dust. But learn to swim, trim your bark, and the wave which drowned it, will be
cloven by it, and carry it, like its own foam, a plume and a power. The cold is incon-
siderate of persons, tingles your blood, freezes a man like a dew-drop. But learn to
skate, and the ice will give you a graceful, sweet, and poetic motion. The cold will brace
your limbs and brain to genius, and make you foremost men of time. Cold and sea will
train an imperial Saxon race, which nature cannot bear to lose, and, after cooping it up
for a thousand years in yonder England, gives a hundred Englands, a hundred Mexicos.
All the bloods it shall absorb and domineer: and more than Mexicos,--the secrets of
water and steam, the spasms of electricity, the ductility of metals, the chariot of the air,
the ruddered balloon are awaiting you.

The annual slaughter from typhus far exceeds that of war; but right drainage destroys
typhus. The plague in the sea-service from scurvy is healed by lemon juice and other
diets portable or procurable: the depopulation by cholera and small-pox is ended by
drainage and vaccination; and every other pest is not less in the chain of cause and
effect, and may be fought off. And, whilst art draws out the venom, it commonly extorts
some benefit from the vanquished enemy. The mischievous torrent is taught to drudge
for man: the wild beasts he makes useful for food, or dress, or labor; the chemic
explosions are controlled like his watch. These are now the steeds on which he rides.
Man moves in all modes, by legs of horses, by wings of wind, by steam, by gas of balloon,
by electricity, and stands on tiptoe threatening to hunt the eagle in his own element.
There's nothing he will not make his carrier.

Steam was, till the other day, the devil which we dreaded. Every pot made by any human
potter or brazier had a hole in its cover, to let off the enemy, lest he should lift pot and
roof, and carry the house away. But the Marquis of Worcester, Watt, and Fulton
bethought themselves, that, where was power, was not devil, but was God; that it must
be availed of, and not by any means let off and wasted. Could he lift pots and roofs and
houses so handily? he was the workman they were in search of. He could be used to lift
away, chain, and compel other devils, far more reluctant and dangerous, namely, cubic
miles of earth, mountains, weight or resistance of water, machinery, and the labors of all
men in the world; and time he shall lengthen, and shorten space.

It has not fared much otherwise with higher kinds of steam. The opinion of the million
was the terror of the world, and it was attempted, either to dissipate it, by amusing
nations, or to pile it over with strata of society,--a layer of soldiers; over that, a layer of
lords; and a king on the top; with clamps and hoops of castles, garrisons, and police. But,
sometimes, the religious principle would get in, and burst the hoops, and rive every
mountain laid on top of it. The Fultons and Watts of politics, believing in unity, saw that it
was a power, and, by satisfying it, (as justice satisfies everybody,) through a different
disposition of society,--grouping it on a level, instead of piling it into a mountain, --
they have contrived to make of his terror the most harmless and energetic form of a
State.

Very odious, I confess, are the lessons of Fate. Who likes to have a dapper phrenologist
pronouncing on his fortunes? Who likes to believe that he has hidden in his skull, spine,
and pelvis, all the vices of a Saxon or Celtic race, which will be sure to pull him down, --
with what grandeur of hope and resolve he is fired,--into a selfish, huckstering, servile,
dodging animal? A learned physician tells us, the fact is invariable with the Neapolitan,
that, when mature, he assumes the forms of the unmistakable scoundrel. That is a little
overstated,--but may pass.

But these are magazines and arsenals. A man must thank his defects, and stand in some
terror of his talents. A transcendent talent draws so largely on his forces, as to lame him;
a defect pays him revenues on the other side. The sufferance, which is the badge of the
Jew, has made him, in these days, the ruler of the rulers of the earth. If Fate is ore and
quarry, if evil is good in the making, if limitation is power that shall be, if calamities,
oppositions, and weights are wings and means,--we are reconciled.

Fate involves the melioration. No statement of the Universe can have any soundness,
which does not admit its ascending effort. The direction of the whole, and of the parts,
is toward benefit, and in proportion to the health. Behind every individual, closes
organization: before him, opens liberty,--the Better, the Best. The first and worst races
are dead. The second and imperfect races are dying out, or remain for the maturing of
higher. In the latest race, in man, every generosity, every new perception, the love and
praise he extorts from his fellows, are certificates of advance out of fate into freedom.
Liberation of the will from the sheaths and clogs of organization which he has outgrown,
is the end and aim of this world. Every calamity is a spur and valuable hint; and where
his endeavors do not yet fully avail, they tell as tendency. The whole circle of animal life,
-- tooth against tooth,--devouring war, war for food, a yelp of pain and a grunt of
triumph, until, at last, the whole menagerie, the whole chemical mass is mellowed and
refined for higher use,--pleases at a sufficient perspective.

But to see how fate slides into freedom, and freedom into fate, observe how far the
roots of every creature run, or find, if you can, a point where there is no thread of
connection. Our life is consentaneous and far-related. This knot of nature is so well tied,
that nobody was ever cunning enough to find the two ends. Nature is intricate,
overlapped, interweaved, and endless. Christopher Wren said of the beautiful King's
College chapel, "that, if anybody would tell him where to lay the first stone, he would
build such another." But where shall we find the first atom in this house of man, which is
all consent, inosculation, and balance of parts?

The web of relation is shown in habitat, shown in hybernation. When hybernation was
observed, it was found, that, whilst some animals became torpid in winter, others were
torpid in summer: hybernation then was a false name. The long sleep is not an effect of
cold, but is regulated by the supply of food proper to the animal. It becomes torpid when
the fruit or prey it lives on is not in season, and regains its activity when its food is ready.

Eyes are found in light; ears in auricular air; feet on land; fins in water; wings in air; and,
each creature where it was meant to be, with a mutual fitness. Every zone has its own
Fauna. There is adjustment between the animal and its food, its parasite, its enemy.
Balances are kept. It is not allowed to diminish in numbers, nor to exceed. The like
adjustments exist for man. His food is cooked, when he arrives; his coal in the pit; the
house ventilated; the mud of the deluge dried; his companions arrived at the same hour,
and awaiting him with love, concert, laughter, and tears. These are coarse adjustments,
but the invisible are not less. There are more belongings to every creature than his air
and his food. His instincts must be met, and he has predisposing power that bends and
fits what is near him to his use. He is not possible until the invisible things are right for
him, as well as the visible. Of what changes, then, in sky and earth, and in finer skies and
earths, does the appearance of some Dante or Columbus apprise us!

How is this effected? Nature is no spendthrift, but takes the shortest way to her ends. As
the general says to his soldiers, "if you want a fort, build a fort," so nature makes every
creature do its own work and get its living,--is it planet, animal, or tree. The planet
makes itself. The animal cell makes itself;--then, what it wants. Every creature,--wren
or dragon,--shall make its own lair. As soon as there is life, there is self-direction, and
absorbing and using of material. Life is freedom,--life in the direct ratio of its amount.
You may be sure, the new-born man is not inert. Life works both voluntarily and
supernaturally in its neighborhood. Do you suppose, he can be estimated by his weight
in pounds, or, that he is contained in his skin,--this reaching, radiating, jaculating
fellow? The smallest candle fills a mile with its rays, and the papillae of a man run out to
every star.

When there is something to be done, the world knows how to get it done. The vegetable
eye makes leaf, pericarp, root, bark, or thorn, as the need is; the first cell converts itself
into stomach, mouth, nose, or nail, according to the want: the world throws its life into a
hero or a shepherd; and puts him where he is wanted. Dante and Columbus were
Italians, in their time: they would be Russians or Americans to-day. Things ripen, new
men come. The adaptation is not capricious. The ulterior aim, the purpose beyond itself,
the correlation by which planets subside and crystallize, then animate beasts and men,
will not stop, but will work into finer particulars, and from finer to finest.

The secret of the world is, the tie between person and event. Person makes event, and
event person. The "times," "the age," what is that, but a few profound persons and a few
active persons who epitomize the times?--Goethe, Hegel, Metternich, Adams, Calhoun,
Guizot, Peel, Cobden, Kossuth, Rothschild, Astor, Brunel, and the rest. The same fitness
must be presumed between a man and the time and event, as between the sexes, or
between a race of animals and the food it eats, or the inferior races it uses. He thinks his
fate alien, because the copula is hidden. But the soul contains the event that shall befall
it, for the event is only the actualization of its thoughts; and what we pray to ourselves
for is always granted. The event is the print of your form. It fits you like your skin. What
each does is proper to him. Events are the children of his body and mind. We learn that
the soul of Fate is the soul of us, as Hafiz sings,

Alas! till now I had not known,
My guide and fortune's guide are one.

All the toys that infatuate men, and which they play for,--houses, land, money, luxury,
power, fame, are the selfsame thing, with a new gauze or two of illusion overlaid. And of
all the drums and rattles by which men are made willing to have their heads broke, and
are led out solemnly every morning to parade,--the most admirable is this by which we
are brought to believe that events are arbitrary, and independent of actions. At the
conjuror's, we detect the hair by which he moves his puppet, but we have not eyes sharp
enough to descry the thread that ties cause and effect.

Nature magically suits the man to his fortunes, by making these the fruit of his character.
Ducks take to the water, eagles to the sky, waders to the sea margin, hunters to the
forest, clerks to counting-rooms, soldiers to the frontier. Thus events grow on the same
stem with persons; are sub-persons. The pleasure of life is according to the man that
lives it, and not according to the work or the place. Life is an ecstasy. We know what
madness belongs to love,--what power to paint a vile object in hues of heaven. As
insane persons are indifferent to their dress, diet, and other accommodations, and, as
we do in dreams, with equanimity, the most absurd acts, so, a drop more of wine in our
cup of life will reconcile us to strange company and work. Each creature puts forth from
itself its own condition and sphere, as the slug sweats out its slimy house on the pearleaf,
and the woolly aphides on the apple perspire their own bed, and the fish its shell. In
youth, we clothe ourselves with rainbows, and go as brave as the zodiac. In age, we put
out another sort of perspiration,--gout, fever, rheumatism, caprice, doubt, fretting, and
avarice.

A man's fortunes are the fruit of his character. A man's friends are his magnetisms. We
go to Herodotus and Plutarch for examples of Fate; but we are examples. "Quisque suos
patimur manes." The tendency of every man to enact all that is in his constitution is
expressed in the old belief, that the efforts which we make to escape from our destiny
only serve to lead us into it: and I have noticed, a man likes better to be complimented
on his position, as the proof of the last or total excellence, than on his merits.

A man will see his character emitted in the events that seem to meet, but which exude
from and accompany him. Events expand with the character. As once he found himself
among toys, so now he plays a part in colossal systems, and his growth is declared in his
ambition, his companions, and his performance. He looks like a piece of luck, but is a
piece of causation;--the mosaic, angulated and ground to fit into the gap he fills. Hence
in each town there is some man who is, in his brain and performance, an explanation of
the tillage, production, factories, banks, churches, ways of living, and society, of that
town. If you do not chance to meet him, all that you see will leave you a little puzzled: if
you see him, it will become plain. We know in Massachusetts who built New Bedford,
who built Lynn, Lowell, Lawrence, Clinton, Fitchburg, Holyoke, Portland, and many
another noisy mart. Each of these men, if they were transparent, would seem to you not
so much men, as walking cities, and, wherever you put them, they would build one.

History is the action and reaction of these two,--Nature and Thought;--two boys
pushing each other on the curb-stone of the pavement. Everything is pusher or pushed:
and matter and mind are in perpetual tilt and balance, so. Whilst the man is weak, the
earth takes up him. He plants his brain and affections. By and by he will take up the
earth, and have his gardens and vineyards in the beautiful order and productiveness of
his thought. Every solid in the universe is ready to become fluid on the approach of the
mind, and the power to flux it is the measure of the mind. If the wall remain adamant, it
accuses the want of thought. To a subtler force, it will stream into new forms, expressive
of the character of the mind. What is the city in which we sit here, but an aggregate of
incongruous materials, which have obeyed the will of some man? The granite was
reluctant, but his hands were stronger, and it came. Iron was deep in the ground, and
well combined with stone; but could not hide from his fires. Wood, lime, stuffs, fruits,
gums, were dispersed over the earth and sea, in vain. Here they are, within reach of
every man's day-labor,--what he wants of them. The whole world is the flux of matter
over the wires of thought to the poles or points where it would build. The races of men
rise out of the ground preoccupied with a thought which rules them, and divided into
parties ready armed and angry to fight for this metaphysical abstraction. The quality of
the thought differences the Egyptian and the Roman, the Austrian and the American. The
men who come on the stage at one period are all found to be related to each other.
Certain ideas are in the air. We are all impressionable, for we are made of them; all
impressionable, but some more than others, and these first express them. This explains
the curious contemporaneousness of inventions and discoveries. The truth is in the air,
and the most impressionable brain will announce it first, but all will announce it a few
minutes later. So women, as most susceptible, are the best index of the coming hour.
So the great man, that is, the man most imbued with the spirit of the time, is the
impressionable man,--of a fibre irritable and delicate, like iodine to light. He feels the
infinitesimal attractions. His mind is righter than others, because he yields to a current
so feeble as can be felt only by a needle delicately poised.

The correlation is shown in defects. Moller, in his Essay on Architecture, taught that the
building which was fitted accurately to answer its end, would turn out to be beautiful,
though beauty had not been intended. I find the like unity in human structures rather
virulent and pervasive; that a crudity in the blood will appear in the argument; a hump in
the shoulder will appear in the speech and handiwork. If his mind could be seen, the
hump would be seen. If a man has a seesaw in his voice, it will run into his sentences,
into his poem, into the structure of his fable, into his speculation, into his charity. And, as
every man is hunted by his own daemon, vexed by his own disease, this checks all his
activity.

So each man, like each plant, has his parasites. A strong, astringent, bilious nature has
more truculent enemies than the slugs and moths that fret my leaves. Such an one has
curculios, borers, knife-worms: a swindler ate him first, then a client, then a quack, then
smooth, plausible gentlemen, bitter and selfish as Moloch.

This correlation really existing can be divined. If the threads are there, thought can follow
and show them. Especially when a soul is quick and docile; as Chaucer sings,

"Or if the soul of proper kind
Be so perfect as men find,
That it wot what is to come,
And that he warneth all and some
Of every of their aventures,
By previsions or figures;
But that our flesh hath not might
It to understand aright
For it is warned too darkly." --

Some people are made up of rhyme, coincidence, omen, periodicity, and presage: they
meet the person they seek; what their companion prepares to say to them, they first say
to him; and a hundred signs apprise them of what is about to befall.

Wonderful intricacy in the web, wonderful constancy in the design this vagabond life
admits. We wonder how the fly finds its mate, and yet year after year we find two men,
two women, without legal or carnal tie, spend a great part of their best time within a few
feet of each other. And the moral is, that what we seek we shall find; what we flee from
flees from us; as Goethe said, "what we wish for in youth, comes in heaps on us in old
age," too often cursed with the granting of our prayer: and hence the high caution, that,
since we are sure of having what we wish, we beware to ask only for high things.

One key, one solution to the mysteries of human condition, one solution to the old knots
of fate, freedom, and foreknowledge, exists, the propounding, namely, of the double
consciousness. A man must ride alternately on the horses of his private and his public
nature, as the equestrians in the circus throw themselves nimbly from horse to horse, or
plant one foot on the back of one, and the other foot on the back of the other. So when a
man is the victim of his fate, has sciatica in his loins, and cramp in his mind; a club-foot
and a club in his wit; a sour face, and a selfish temper; a strut in his gait, and a conceit in
his affection; or is ground to powder by the vice of his race; he is to rally on his relation
to the Universe, which his ruin benefits. Leaving the daemon who suffers, he is to take
sides with the Deity who secures universal benefit by his pain.

To offset the drag of temperament and race, which pulls down, learn this lesson, namely,
that by the cunning copresence of two elements, which is throughout nature, whatever
lames or paralyzes you, draws in with it the divinity, in some form, to repay. A good
intention clothes itself with sudden power. When a god wishes to ride, any chip or pebble
will bud and shoot out winged feet, and serve him for a horse.

Let us build altars to the Blessed Unity which holds nature and souls in perfect solution,
and compels every atom to serve an universal end. I do not wonder at a snow-flake, a
shell, a summer landscape, or the glory of the stars; but at the necessity of beauty under
which the universe lies; that all is and must be pictorial; that the rainbow, and the curve
of the horizon, and the arch of the blue vault are only results from the organism of the
eye. There is no need for foolish amateurs to fetch me to admire a garden of flowers, or
a sun-gilt cloud, or a waterfall, when I cannot look without seeing splendor and grace.
How idle to choose a random sparkle here or there, when the indwelling necessity plants
the rose of beauty on the brow of chaos, and discloses the central intention of Nature to
be harmony and joy.

Let us build altars to the Beautiful Necessity. If we thought men were free in the sense,
that, in a single exception one fantastical will could prevail over the law of things, it were
all one as if a child's hand could pull down the sun. If, in the least particular, one could
derange the order of nature,--who would accept the gift of life?

Let us build altars to the Beautiful Necessity, which secures that all is made of one piece;
that plaintiff and defendant, friend and enemy, animal and planet, food and eater, are of
one kind. In astronomy, is vast space, but no foreign system; in geology, vast time, but
the same laws as to-day. Why should we be afraid of Nature, which is no other than
"philosophy and theology embodied"? Why should we fear to be crushed by savage
elements, we who are made up of the same elements? Let us build to the Beautiful
Necessity, which makes man brave in believing that he cannot shun a danger that is
appointed, nor incur one that is not; to the Necessity which rudely or softly educates him
to the perception that there are no contingencies; that Law rules throughout existence, a
Law which is not intelligent but intelligence,--not personal nor impersonal,--it
disdains words and passes understanding; it dissolves persons; it vivifies nature; yet
solicits the pure in heart to draw on all its omnipotence.




II. POWER



His tongue was framed to music,
And his hand was armed with skill,
His face was the mould of beauty,
And his heart the throne of will.


There is not yet any inventory of a man’s faculties, any more than a bible of his opinions.
Who shall set a limit to the influence of a human being? There are men, who, by their
sympathetic attractions, carry nations with them, and lead the activity of the human
race. And if there be such a tie, that, wherever the mind of man goes, nature will
accompany him, perhaps there are men whose magnetisms are of that force to draw
material and elemental powers, and, where they appear, immense instrumentalities
organize around them. Life is a search after power; and this is an element with which the
world is so saturated,--there is no chink or crevice in which it is not lodged,--that no
honest seeking goes unrewarded. A man should prize events and possessions as the ore
in which this fine mineral is found; and he can well afford to let events and possessions,
and the breath of the body go, if their value has been added to him in the shape of
power. If he have secured the elixir, he can spare the wide gardens from which it was
distilled. A cultivated man, wise to know and bold to perform, is the end to which nature
works, and the education of the will is the flowering and result of all this geology and
astronomy.

All successful men have agreed in one thing,--they were causationists. They believed
that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in
the chain that joins the first and last of things. A belief in causality, or strict connection
between every trifle and the principle of being, and, in consequence, belief in
compensation, or, that nothing is got for nothing,--characterizes all valuable minds, and
must control every effort that is made by an industrious one. The most valiant men are
the best believers in the tension of the laws. “All the great captains,” said Bonaparte,
“have performed vast achievements by conforming with the rules of the art,--by
adjusting efforts to obstacles.”

The key to the age may be this, or that, or the other, as the young orators describe; --
the key to all ages is--Imbecility; imbecility in the vast majority of men, at all times, and,
even in heroes, in all but certain eminent moments; victims of gravity, custom, and fear.
This gives force to the strong,--that the multitude have no habit of self-reliance or
original action.

We must reckon success a constitutional trait. Courage,--the old physicians taught, (and
their meaning holds, if their physiology is a little mythical,)--courage, or the degree of
life, is as the degree of circulation of the blood in the arteries. “During passion, anger,
fury, trials of strength, wrestling, fighting, a large amount of blood is collected in the
arteries, the maintenance of bodily strength requiring it, and but little is sent into the
veins. This condition is constant with intrepid persons.” Where the arteries hold their
blood, is courage and adventure possible. Where they pour it unrestrained into the
veins, the spirit is low and feeble. For performance of great mark, it needs extraordinary
health. If Eric is in robust health, and has slept well, and is at the top of his condition, and
thirty years old, at his departure from Greenland, he will steer west, and his ships will
reach Newfoundland. But take out Eric, and put in a stronger and bolder man,--Biorn,
or Thorfin,--and the ships will, with just as much ease, sail six hundred, one thousand,
fifteen hundred miles further, and reach Labrador and New England. There is no chance
in results. With adults, as with children, one class enter cordially into the game, and whirl
with the whirling world; the others have cold hands, and remain bystanders; or are only
dragged in by the humor and vivacity of those who can carry a dead weight. The first
wealth is health. Sickness is poor-spirited, and cannot serve any one: it must husband its
resources to live. But health or fulness answers its own ends, and has to spare, runs
over, and inundates the neighborhoods and creeks of other men’s necessities.

All power is of one kind, a sharing of the nature of the world. The mind that is parallel
with the laws of nature will be in the current of events, and strong with their strength.
One man is made of the same stuff of which events are made; is in sympathy with the
course of things; can predict it. Whatever befalls, befalls him first; so that he is equal to
whatever shall happen. A man who knows men, can talk well on politics, trade, law, war,
religion. For, everywhere, men are led in the same manners.

The advantage of a strong pulse is not to be supplied by any labor, art, or concert. It is
like the climate, which easily rears a crop, which no glass, or irrigation, or tillage, or
manures, can elsewhere rival. It is like the opportunity of a city like New York, or
Constantinople, which needs no diplomacy to force capital or genius or labor to it. They
come of themselves, as the waters flow to it. So a broad, healthy, massive understanding
seems to lie on the shore of unseen rivers, of unseen oceans, which are covered with
barks, that, night and day, are drifted to this point. That is poured into its lap, which
other men lie plotting for. It is in everybody’s secret; anticipates everybody’s discovery;
and if it do not command every fact of the genius and the scholar, it is because it is large
and sluggish, and does not think them worth the exertion which you do.

This affirmative force is in one, and is not in another, as one horse has the spring in him,
and another in the whip. “On the neck of the young man,” said Hafiz, “sparkles no gem
so gracious as enterprise.” Import into any stationary district, as into an old Dutch
population in New York or Pennsylvania, or among the planters of Virginia, a colony of
hardy Yankees, with seething brains, heads full of steam-hammer, pulley, crank, and
toothed wheel,--and everything begins to shine with values. What enhancement to all
the water and land in England, is the arrival of James Watt or Brunel! In every company,
there is not only the active and passive sex, but, in both men and women, a deeper and
more important sex of mind, namely, the inventive or creative class of both men and
women, and the uninventive or accepting class. Each plus man represents his set, and, if
he have the accidental advantage of personal ascendency,--which implies neither more
nor less of talent, but merely the temperamental or taming eye of a soldier or a schoo-
master, (which one has, and one has not, as one has a black moustache and one a
blond,) then quite easily and without envy or resistance, all his coadjutors and feeders
will admit his right to absorb them. The merchant works by book-keeper and cashier; the
lawyer’s authorities are hunted up by clerks; the geologist reports the surveys of his
subalterns; Commander Wilkes appropriates the results of all the naturalists attached to
the Expedition; Thorwaldsen’s statue is finished by stone-cutters; Dumas has
journeymen; and Shakspeare was theatre-manager, and used the labor of many young
men, as well as the playbooks.

There is always room for a man of force, and he makes room for many. Society is a troop
of thinkers, and the best heads among them take the best places. A feeble man can see
the farms that are fenced and tilled, the houses that are built. The strong man sees the
possible houses and farms. His eye makes estates, as fast as the sun breeds clouds.

When a new boy comes into school, when a man travels, and encounters strangers every
day, or, when into any old club a new comer is domesticated, that happens which befalls,
when a strange ox is driven into a pen or pasture where cattle are kept; there is at once
a trial of strength between the best pair of horns and the new comer, and it is settled
thenceforth which is the leader. So now, there is a measuring of strength, very courteous,
but decisive, and an acquiescence thenceforward when these two meet. Each reads his
fate in the other’s eyes. The weaker party finds, that none of his information or wit quite
fits the occasion. He thought he knew this or that: he finds that he omitted to learn the
end of it. Nothing that he knows will quite hit the mark, whilst all the rival’s arrows are
good, and well thrown. But if he knew all the facts in the encyclopaedia, it would not help
him: for this is an affair of presence of mind, of attitude, of aplomb: the opponent has
the sun and wind, and, in every cast, the choice of weapon and mark; and, when he
himself is matched with some other antagonist, his own shafts fly well and hit. ‘Tis a
question of stomach and constitution. The second man is as good as the first,--perhaps
better; but has not stoutness or stomach, as the first has, and so his wit seems over-fine
or under-fine.

Health is good,--power, life, that resists disease, poison, and all enemies, and is
conservative, as well as creative. Here is question, every spring, whether to graft with
wax, or whether with clay; whether to whitewash or to potash, or to prune; but the one
point is the thrifty tree. A good tree, that agrees with the soil, will grow in spite of blight,
or bug, or pruning, or neglect, by night and by day, in all weathers and all treatments.
Vivacity, leadership, must be had, and we are not allowed to be nice in choosing. We
must fetch the pump with dirty water, if clean cannot be had. If we will make bread, we
must have contagion, yeast, emptyings, or what not, to induce fermentation into the
dough: as the torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or
by fiend, by prayer or by wine. And we have a certain instinct, that where is great amount
of life, though gross and peccant, it has its own checks and purifications, and will be
found at last in harmony with moral laws.

We watch in children with pathetic interest, the degree in which they possess
recuperative force. When they are hurt by us, or by each other, or go to the bottom of
the class, or miss the annual prizes, or are beaten in the game,--if they lose heart, and
remember the mischance in their chamber at home, they have a serious check. But if
they have the buoyancy and resistance that preoccupies them with new interest in the
new moment,--the wounds cicatrize, and the fibre is the tougher for the hurt.

One comes to value this plus health, when he sees that all difficulties vanish before it. A
timid man listening to the alarmists in Congress, and in the newspapers, and observing
the profligacy of party,--sectional interests urged with a fury which shuts its eyes to
consequences, with a mind made up to desperate extremities, ballot in one hand, and
rifle in the other,--might easily believe that he and his country have seen their best
days, and he hardens himself the best he can against the coming ruin. But, after this has
been foretold with equal confidence fifty times, and government six per cents have not
declined a quarter of a mill, he discovers that the enormous elements of strength which
are here in play, make our politics unimportant. Personal power, freedom, and the
resources of nature strain every faculty of every citizen. We prosper with such vigor, that,
like thrifty trees, which grow in spite of ice, lice, mice, and borers, so we do not suffer
from the profligate swarms that fatten on the national treasury. The huge animals
nourish huge parasites, and the rancor of the disease attests the strength of the
constitution. The same energy in the Greek Demos drew the remark, that the evils of
popular government appear greater than they are; there is compensation for them in
the spirit and energy it awakens. The rough and ready style which belongs to a people
of sailors, foresters, farmers, and mechanics, has its advantages. Power educates the
potentate. As long as our people quote English standards they dwarf their own pro-
portions. A Western lawyer of eminence said to me he wished it were a penal offence
to bring an English law-book into a court in this country, so pernicious had he found in
his experience our deference to English precedent. The very word `commerce’ has only
an English meaning, and is pinched to the cramp exigencies of English experience. The
commerce of rivers, the commerce of railroads, and who knows but the commerce of
air-balloons, must add an American extension to the pond-hole of admiralty. As long as
our people quote English standards, they will miss the sovereignty of power; but let
these rough riders,--legislators in shirt-sleeves,--Hoosier, Sucker, Wolverine, Badger,
-- or whatever hard head Arkansas, Oregon, or Utah sends, half orator, half assassin, to
represent its wrath and cupidity at Washington,--let these drive as they may; and the
disposition of territories and public lands, the necessity of balancing and keeping at bay
the snarling majorities of German, Irish, and of native millions, will bestow promptness,
address, and reason, at last, on our buffalo-hunter, and authority and majesty of
manners. The instinct of the people is right. Men expect from good whigs, put into office
by the respectability of the country, much less skill to deal with Mexico, Spain, Britain, or
with our own malcontent members, than from some strong transgressor, like Jefferson,
or Jackson, who first conquers his own government, and then uses the same genius to
conquer the foreigner. The senators who dissented from Mr. Polk’s Mexican war, were
not those who knew better, but those who, from political position, could afford it; not
Webster, but Benton and Calhoun.

This power, to be sure, is not clothed in satin. ‘Tis the power of Lynch law, of soldiers
and pirates; and it bullies the peaceable and loyal. But it brings its own antidote; and
here is my point,--that all kinds of power usually emerge at the same time; good ener-
gy, and bad; power of mind, with physical health; the ecstasies of devotion, with the
exasperations of debauchery. The same elements are always present, only sometimes
these conspicuous, and sometimes those; what was yesterday foreground, being to-day
background,--what was surface, playing now a not less effective part as basis. The
longer the drought lasts, the more is the atmosphere surcharged with water. The faster
the ball falls to the sun, the force to fly off is by so much augmented. And, in morals, wild
liberty breeds iron conscience; natures with great impulses have great resources, and
return from far. In politics, the sons of democrats will be whigs; whilst red republicanism,
in the father, is a spasm of nature to engender an intolerable tyrant in the next age. On
the other hand, conservatism, ever more timorous and narrow, disgusts the children,
and drives them for a mouthful of fresh air into radicalism.

Those who have most of this coarse energy,--the `bruisers,’ who have run the gauntlet
of caucus and tavern through the county or the state, have their own vices, but they have
the good nature of strength and courage. Fierce and unscrupulous, they are usually frank
and direct, and above falsehood. Our politics fall into bad hands, and churchmen and
men of refinement, it seems agreed, are not fit persons to send to Congress. Politics
is a deleterious profession, like some poisonous handicrafts. Men in power have no
opinions, but may be had cheap for any opinion, for any purpose,--and if it be only a
question between the most civil and the most forcible, I lean to the last. These Hoosiers
and Suckers are really better than the snivelling opposition. Their wrath is at least of a
bold and manly cast. They see, against the unanimous declarations of the people, how
much crime the people will bear; they proceed from step to step, and they have
calculated but too justly upon their Excellencies, the New England governors, and upon
their Honors, the New England legislators. The messages of the governors and the
resolutions of the legislatures, are a proverb for expressing a sham virtuous indignation,
which, in the course of events, is sure to be belied.

In trade, also, this energy usually carries a trace of ferocity. Philanthropic and religious
bodies do not commonly make their executive officers out of saints. The communities
hitherto founded by Socialists,--the Jesuits, the Port-Royalists, the American
communities at New Harmony, at Brook Farm, at Zoar, are only possible, by installing
Judas as steward. The rest of the offices may be filled by good burgesses. The pious and
charitable proprietor has a foreman not quite so pious and charitable. The most amiable
of country gentlemen has a certain pleasure in the teeth of the bull-dog which guards his
orchard. Of the Shaker society, it was formerly a sort of proverb in the country, that they
always sent the devil to market. And in representations of the Deity, painting, poetry,
and popular religion have ever drawn the wrath from Hell. It is an esoteric doctrine of
society, that a little wickedness is good to make muscle; as if conscience were not good
for hands and legs, as if poor decayed formalists of law and order cannot run like wild
goats, wolves, and conies; that, as there is a use in medicine for poisons, so the world
cannot move without rogues; that public spirit and the ready hand are as well found
among the malignants. ‘Tis not very rare, the coincidence of sharp private and political
practice, with public spirit, and good neighborhood.

I knew a burly Boniface who for many years kept a public-house in one of our rural
capitals. He was a knave whom the town could ill spare. He was a social, vascular
creature, grasping and selfish. There was no crime which he did not or could not commit.
But he made good friends of the selectmen, served them with his best chop, when they
supped at his house, and also with his honor the Judge, he was very cordial, grasping his
hand. He introduced all the fiends, male and female, into the town, and united in his
person the functions of bully, incendiary, swindler, barkeeper, and burglar. He girdled
the trees, and cut off the horses’ tails of the temperance people, in the night. He led the
`rummies’ and radicals in town-meeting with a speech. Meantime, he was civil, fat, and
easy, in his house, and precisely the most public-spirited citizen. He was active in getting
the roads repaired and planted with shade-trees; he subscribed for the fountains, the
gas, and the telegraph; he introduced the new horse-rake, the new scraper, the baby-
jumper, and what not, that Connecticut sends to the admiring citizens. He did this the
easier, that the peddler stopped at his house, and paid his keeping, by setting up his new
trap on the landlord’s premises.

Whilst thus the energy for originating and executing work, deforms itself by excess, and
so our axe chops off our own fingers,--this evil is not without remedy. All the elements
whose aid man calls in, will sometimes become his masters, especially those of most
subtle force. Shall he, then, renounce steam, fire, and electricity, or, shall he learn to deal
with them? The rule for this whole class of agencies is,--all plus is good; only put it in
the right place.

Men of this surcharge of arterial blood cannot live on nuts, herb-tea, and elegies; cannot
read novels, and play whist; cannot satisfy all their wants at the Thursday Lecture, or the
Boston Athenaeum. They pine for adventure, and must go to Pike’s Peak; had rather die
by the hatchet of a Pawnee, than sit all day and every day at a counting-room desk. They
are made for war, for the sea, for mining, hunting, and clearing; for hair-breadth
adventures, huge risks, and the joy of eventful living. Some men cannot endure an hour
of calm at sea. I remember a poor Malay cook, on board a Liverpool packet, who, when
the wind blew a gale, could not contain his joy; “Blow!” he cried, “me do tell you, blow!”
Their friends and governors must see that some vent for their explosive complexion is
provided. The roisters who are destined for infamy at home, if sent to Mexico, will “cover
you with glory,” and come back heroes and generals. There are Oregons, Californias, and
Exploring Expeditions enough appertaining to America, to find them in files to gnaw, and
in crocodiles to eat. The young English are fine animals, full of blood, and when they
have no wars to breathe their riotous valors in, they seek for travels as dangerous as
war, diving into Maelstroms; swimming Hellesponts; wading up the snowy Himmaleh;
hunting lion, rhinoceros, elephant, in South Africa; gypsying with Borrow in Spain and
Algiers; riding alligators in South America with Waterton; utilizing Bedouin, Sheik, and
Pacha, with Layard; yachting among the icebergs of Lancaster Sound; peeping into
craters on the equator; or running on the creases of Malays in Borneo.

The excess of virility has the same importance in general history, as in private and
industrial life. Strong race or strong individual rests at last on natural forces, which are
best in the savage, who, like the beasts around him, is still in reception of the milk from
the teats of Nature. Cut off the connection between any of our works, and this aboriginal
source, and the work is shallow. The people lean on this, and the mob is not quite so
bad an argument as we sometimes say, for it has this good side. “March without the
people,” said a French deputy from the tribune, “and you march into night: their instincts
are a finger-pointing of Providence, always turned toward real benefit. But when you
espouse an Orleans party, or a Bourbon, or a Montalembert party, or any other but an
organic party, though you mean well, you have a personality instead of a principle, which
will inevitably drag you into a corner.”

The best anecdotes of this force are to be had from savage life, in explorers, soldiers,
and buccaneers. But who cares for fallings-out of assassins, and fights of bears, or
grindings of icebergs? Physical force has no value, where there is nothing else. Snow in
snow-banks, fire in volcanoes and solfataras is cheap. The luxury of ice is in tropical
countries, and midsummer days. The luxury of fire is, to have a little on our hearth: and
of electricity, not volleys of the charged cloud, but the manageable stream on the
battery-wires. So of spirit, or energy; the rests or remains of it in the civil and moral man,
are worth all the cannibals in the Pacific.

In history, the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all
his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty:--and you have
Pericles and Phidias,--not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in
nature and the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow
plentifully from nature, but their astringency or acridity is got out by ethics and
humanity.

The triumphs of peace have been in some proximity to war. Whilst the hand was still
familiar with the sword-hilt, whilst the habits of the camp were still visible in the port and
complexion of the gentleman, his intellectual power culminated: the compression and
tension of these stern conditions is a training for the finest and softest arts, and can
rarely be compensated in tranquil times, except by some analogous vigor drawn from
occupations as hardy as war.

We say that success is constitutional; depends on a plus condition of mind and body, on
power of work, on courage; that it is of main efficacy in carrying on the world, and,
though rarely found in the right state for an article of commerce, but oftener in the
supersaturate or excess, which makes it dangerous and destructive, yet it cannot be
spared, and must be had in that form, and absorbents provided to take off its edge.
The affirmative class monopolize the homage of mankind. They originate and execute all
the great feats. What a force was coiled up in the skull of Napoleon! Of the sixty
thousand men making his army at Eylau, it seems some thirty thousand were thieves
and burglars. The men whom, in peaceful communities, we hold if we can, with iron at
their legs, in prisons, under the muskets of sentinels, this man dealt with, hand to hand,
dragged them to their duty, and won his victories by their bayonets.

This aboriginal might gives a surprising pleasure when it appears under conditions of
supreme refinement, as in the proficients in high art. When Michel Angelo was forced to
paint the Sistine Chapel in fresco, of which art he knew nothing, he went down into the
Pope’s gardens behind the Vatican, and with a shovel dug out ochres, red and yellow,
mixed them with glue and water with his own hands, and having, after many trials, at
last suited himself, climbed his ladders, and painted away, week after week, month after
month, the sibyls and prophets. He surpassed his successors in rough vigor, as much as
in purity of intellect and refinement. He was not crushed by his one picture left
unfinished at last. Michel was wont to draw his figures first in skeleton, then to clothe
them with flesh, and lastly to drape them. “Ah!” said a brave painter to me, thinking on
these things, “if a man has failed, you will find he has dreamed instead of working. There
is no way to success in our art, but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a
digger on the railroad, all day and every day.”

Success goes thus invariably with a certain plus or positive power: an ounce of power
must balance an ounce of weight. And, though a man cannot return into his mother’s
womb, and be born with new amounts of vivacity, yet there are two economies, which
are the best succedanea which the case admits. The first is, the stopping off decisively
our miscellaneous activity, and concentrating our force on one or a few points; as the
gardener, by severe pruning, forces the sap of the tree into one or two vigorous limbs,
instead of suffering it to spindle into a sheaf of twigs.

“Enlarge not thy destiny,” said the oracle: “endeavor not to do more than is given thee
in charge.” The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation: and it
makes no difference whether our dissipations are coarse or fine; property and its cares,
friends, and a social habit, or politics, or music, or feasting. Everything is good which
takes away one plaything and delusion more, and drives us home to add one stroke of
faithful work. Friends, books, pictures, lower duties, talents, flatteries, hopes,--all are
distractions which cause oscillations in our giddy balloon, and make a good poise and a
straight course impossible. You must elect your work; you shall take what your brain can,
and drop all the rest. Only so, can that amount of vital force accumulate, which can make
the step from knowing to doing. No matter how much faculty of idle seeing a man has,
the step from knowing to doing is rarely taken. ‘Tis a step out of a chalk circle of
imbecility into fruitfulness. Many an artist lacking this, lacks all: he sees the masculine
Angelo or Cellini with despair. He, too, is up to Nature and the First Cause in his thought.
But the spasm to collect and swing his whole being into one act, he has not. The poet
Campbell said, that “a man accustomed to work was equal to any achievement he
resolved on, and, that, for himself, necessity not inspiration was the prompter of his
muse.”

Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short, in all
management of human affairs. One of the high anecdotes of the world is the reply of
Newton to the inquiry, “how he had been able to achieve his discoveries?”--“By al-
ways intending my mind.” Or if you will have a text from politics, take this from Plu-
tarch: “There was, in the whole city, but one street in which Pericles was ever seen,
the street which led to the market-place and the council house. He declined all invita-
tions to banquets, and all gay assemblies and company. During the whole period of his
administration, he never dined at the table of a friend.” Or if we seek an example from
trade,--“I hope,” said a good man to Rothyschild, “your children are not too fond of
money and business: I am sure you would not wish that.”--“I am sure I should wish
that: I wish them to give mind, soul, heart, and body to business,--that is the way to be
happy. It requires a great deal of boldness and a great deal of caution, to make a great
fortune, and when you have got it, it requires ten times as much wit to keep it. If I were
to listen to all the projects proposed to me, I should ruin myself very soon. Stick to one
business, young man. Stick to your brewery, (he said this to young Buxton,) and you will
be the great brewer of London. Be brewer, and banker, and merchant, and manufacturer,
and you will soon be in the Gazette.”

Many men are knowing, many are apprehensive and tenacious, but they do not rush to a
decision. But in our flowing affairs a decision must be made,--the best, if you can; but
any is better than none. There are twenty ways of going to a point, and one is the
shortest; but set out at once on one. A man who has that presence of mind which can
bring to him on the instant all he knows, is worth for action a dozen men who know as
much, but can only bring it to light slowly. The good Speaker in the House is not the man
who knows the theory of parliamentary tactics, but the man who decides off-hand. The
good judge is not he who does hair-splitting justice to every allegation, but who, aiming
at substantial justice, rules something intelligible for the guidance of suitors. The good
lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and
qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he
can get you out of a scrape. Dr. Johnson said, in one of his flowing sentences, “Miser-
able beyond all names of wretchedness is that unhappy pair, who are doomed to reduce
beforehand to the principles of abstract reason all the details of each domestic day.
There are cases where little can be said, and much must be done.”

The second substitute for temperament is drill, the power of use and routine. The hack
is a better roadster than the Arab barb. In chemistry, the galvanic stream, slow, but
continuous, is equal in power to the electric spark, and is, in our arts, a better agent. So
in human action, against the spasm of energy, we offset the continuity of drill. We spread
the same amount of force over much time, instead of condensing it into a moment. ‘Tis
the same ounce of gold here in a ball, and there in a leaf. At West Point, Col. Buford, the
chief engineer, pounded with a hammer on the trunnions of a cannon, until he broke
them off. He fired a piece of ordnance some hundred times in swift succession, until it
burst. Now which stroke broke the trunnion? Every stroke. Which blast burst the piece?
Every blast. “Diligence passe sens,” Henry VIII. was wont to say, or, great is drill. John
Kemble said, that the worst provincial company of actors would go through a play better
than the best amateur company. Basil Hall likes to show that the worst regular troops
will beat the best volunteers. Practice is nine tenths. A course of mobs is good practice
for orators. All the great speakers were bad speakers at first. Stumping it through
England for seven years, made Cobden a consummate debater. Stumping it through
New England for twice seven, trained Wendell Phillips. The way to learn German, is, to
read the same dozen pages over and over a hundred times, till you know every word
and particle in them, and can pronounce and repeat them by heart. No genius can recite
a ballad at first reading, so well as mediocrity can at the fifteenth or twentieth readying.
The rule for hospitality and Irish `help,’ is, to have the same dinner every day throughout
the year. At last, Mrs. O’Shaughnessy learns to cook it to a nicety, the host learns to carve
it, and the guests are well served. A humorous friend of mine thinks, that the reason why
Nature is so perfect in her art, and gets up such inconceivably fine sunsets, is, that she
has learned how, at last, by dint of doing the same thing so very often. Cannot one
converse better on a topic on which he has experience, than on one which is new? Men
whose opinion is valued on ‘Change, are only such as have a special experience, and off
that ground their opinion is not valuable. “More are made good by exercitation, than by
nature,” said Democritus. The friction in nature is so enormous that we cannot spare any
power. It is not question to express our thought, to elect our way, but to overcome
resistances of the medium and material in everything we do. Hence the use of drill, and
the worthlessness of amateurs to cope with practitioners. Six hours every day at the
piano, only to give facility of touch; six hours a day at painting, only to give command of
the odious materials, oil, ochres, and brushes. The masters say, that they know a master
in music, only by seeing the pose of the hands on the keys;--so difficult and vital an act
is the command of the instrument. To have learned the use of the tools, by thousands of
manipulations; to have learned the arts of reckoning, by endless adding and dividing, is
the power of the mechanic and the clerk.

I remarked in England, in confirmation of a frequent experience at home, that, in literary
circles, the men of trust and consideration, bookmakers, editors, university deans and
professors, bishops, too, were by no means men of the largest literary talent, but usually
of a low and ordinary intellectuality, with a sort of mercantile activity and working talent.
Indifferent hacks and mediocrities tower, by pushing their forces to a lucrative point, or
by working power, over multitudes of superior men, in Old as in New England.

I have not forgotten that there are sublime considerations which limit the value of talent
and superficial success. We can easily overpraise the vulgar hero. There are sources on
which we have not drawn. I know what I abstain from. I adjourn what I have to say on this
topic to the chapters on Culture and Worship. But this force or spirit, being the means
relied on by Nature for bringing the work of the day about,--as far as we attach
importance to household life, and the prizes of the world, we must respect that. And I
hold, that an economy may be applied to it; it is as much a subject of exact law and
arithmetic as fluids and gases are; it may be husbanded, or wasted; every man is efficient
only as he is a container or vessel of this force, and never was any signal act or
achievement in history, but by this expenditure. This is not gold, but the gold-maker; not
the fame, but the exploit.

If these forces and this husbandry are within reach of our will, and the laws of them can
be read, we infer that all success, and all conceivable benefit for man, is also, first or last,
within his reach, and has its own sublime economies by which it may be attained. The
world is mathematical, and has no casualty, in all its vast and flowing curve. Success has
no more eccentricity, than the gingham and muslin we weave in our mills. I know no
more affecting lesson to our busy, plotting New England brains, than to go into one of
the factories with which we have lined all the watercourses in the States. A man hardly
knows how much he is a machine, until he begins to make telegraph, loom, press, and
locomotive, in his own image. But in these, he is forced to leave out his follies and
hindrances, so that when we go to the mill, the machine is more moral than we. Let a
man dare go to a loom, and see if he be equal to it. Let machine confront machine, and
see how they come out. The world-mill is more complex than the calico-mill, and the
architect stooped less. In the gingham-mill, a broken thread or a shred spoils the web
through a piece of a hundred yards, and is traced back to the girl that wove it, and
lessens her wages. The stockholder, on being shown this, rubs his hands with delight.
Are you so cunning, Mr. Profitloss, and do you expect to swindle your master and
employer, in the web you weave? A day is a more magnificent cloth than any muslin, the
mechanism that makes it is infinitely cunninger, and you shall not conceal the sleezy,
fraudulent, rotten hours you have slipped into the piece, nor fear that any honest thread,
or straighter steel, or more inflexible shaft, will not testify in the web.




III. WEALTH




Who shall tell what did befall,
Far away in time, when once,
Over the lifeless ball,
Hung idle stars and suns?
What god the element obeyed?
Wings of what wind the lichen bore,
Wafting the puny seeds of power,
Which, lodged in rock, the rock abrade?
And well the primal pioneer
Knew the strong task to it assigned
Patient through Heaven’s enormous year
To build in matter home for mind.
From air the creeping centuries drew
The matted thicket low and wide,
This must the leaves of ages strew
The granite slab to clothe and hide,
Ere wheat can wave its golden pride.
What smiths, and in what furnace, rolled
(In dizzy aeons dim and mute
The reeling brain can ill compute)
Copper and iron, lead, and gold?
What oldest star the fame can save
Of races perishing to pave
The planet with a floor of lime?
Dust is their pyramid and mole:
Who saw what ferns and palms were pressed
Under the tumbling mountain’s breast,
In the safe herbal of the coal?
But when the quarried means were piled,
All is waste and worthless, till
Arrives the wise selecting will,
And, out of slime and chaos, Wit
Draws the threads of fair and fit.
Then temples rose, and towns, and marts,
The shop of toil, the hall of arts;
Then flew the sail across the seas
To feed the North from tropic trees;
The storm-wind wove, the torrent span,
Where they were bid the rivers ran;
New slaves fulfilled the poet’s dream,
Galvanic wire, strong-shouldered steam.
Then docks were built, and crops were stored,
And ingots added to the hoard.
But, though light-headed man forget,
Remembering Matter pays her debt:
Still, through her motes and masses, draw
Electric thrills and ties of Law,
Which bind the strengths of Nature wild
To the conscience of a child.



As soon as a stranger is introduced into any company, one of the first questions which all
wish to have answered, is, How does that man get his living? And with reason. He is no
whole man until he knows how to earn a blameless livelihood. Society is barbarous, until
every industrious man can get his living without dishonest customs.

Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He fails to make his place good in
the world, unless he not only pays his debt, but also adds something to the common
wealth. Nor can he do justice to his genius, without making some larger demand on the
world than a bare subsistence. He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich.

Wealth has its source in applications of the mind to nature, from the rudest strokes of
spade and axe, up to the last secrets of art. Intimate ties subsist between thought and all
production; because a better order is equivalent to vast amounts of brute labor. The
forces and the resistances are Nature’s, but the mind acts in bringing things from where
they abound to where they are wanted; in wise combining; in directing the practice of the
useful arts, and in the creation of finer values, by fine art, by eloquence, by song, or the
reproductions of memory. Wealth is in applications of mind to nature; and the art of
getting rich consists not in industry, much less in saving, but in a better order, in
timeliness, in being at the right spot. One man has stronger arms, or longer legs; another
sees by the course of streams, and growth of markets, where land will be wanted, makes
a clearing to the river, goes to sleep, wakes up rich. Steam is no stronger now, than it was
a hundred years ago; but is put to better use. A clever fellow was acquainted with the
expansive force of steam; he also saw the wealth of wheat and grass rotting in Michigan.
Then he cunningly screws on the steam-pipe to the wheat-crop. Puff now, O Steam! The
steam puffs and expands as before, but this time it is dragging all Michigan at its back to
hungry New York and hungry England. Coal lay in ledges under the ground since the
Flood, until a laborer with pick and windlass brings it to the surface. We may well call it
black diamonds. Every basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate. It
carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle: and it is the means of
transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear
of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal
carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta, and with its
comfort brings its industrial power.

When the farmer’s peaches are taken from under the tree, and carried into town, they
have a new look, and a hundredfold value over the fruit which grew on the same bough,
and lies fulsomely on the ground. The craft of the merchant is this bringing a thing from
where it abounds, to where it is costly..

Wealth begins in a tight roof that keeps the rain and wind out; in a good pump that yields
you plenty of sweet water; in two suits of clothes, so to change your dress when you are
wet; in dry sticks to burn; in a good double-wick lamp; and three meals; in a horse, or a
locomotive, to cross the land; in a boat to cross the sea; in tools to work with; in books to
read; and so, in giving, on all sides, by tools and auxiliaries, the greatest possible
extension to our powers, as if it added feet, and hands, and eyes, and blood, length to
the day, and knowledge, and good-will.

Wealth begins with these articles of necessity. And here we must recite the iron law
which Nature thunders in these northern climates. First, she requires that each man
should feed himself. If, happily, his fathers have left him no inheritance, he must go to
work, and by making his wants less, or his gains more, he must draw himself out of that
state of pain and insult in which she forces the beggar to lie. She gives him no rest until
this is done: she starves, taunts, and torments him, takes away warmth, laughter, sleep,
friends, and daylight, until he has fought his way to his own loaf. Then, less peremptorily,
but still with sting enough, she urges him to the acquisition of such things as belong to
him. Every warehouse and shop-window, every fruit-tree, every thought of every hour,
opens a new want to him, which it concerns his power and dignity to gratify. It is of no
use to argue the wants down: the philosophers have laid the greatness of man in making
his wants few; but will a man content himself with a hut and a handful of dried pease?
He is born to be rich. He is thoroughly related; and is tempted out by his appetites and
fancies to the conquest of this and that piece of nature, until he finds his well-being
in the use of his planet, and of more planets than his own. Wealth requires, besides the
crust of bread and the roof,--the freedom of the city, the freedom of the earth, travel-
ling, machinery, the benefits of science, music, and fine arts, the best culture, and
the best company. He is the rich man who can avail himself of all men’s faculties. He
is the richest man who knows how to draw a benefit from the labors of the greatest num-
ber of men, of men in distant countries, and in past times. The same correspondence that
is between thirst in the stomach, and water in the spring, exists between the whole of
man and the whole of nature. The elements offer their service to him. The sea, washing
the equator and the poles, offers its perilous aid, and the power and empire that follow
it,--day by day to his craft and audacity. “Beware of me,” it says, “but if you can
hold me, I am the key to all the lands.” Fire offers, on its side, an equal power. Fire,
steam, lightning, gravity, ledges of rock, mines of iron, lead, quicksilver, tin, and
gold; forests of all woods; fruits of all climates; animals of all habits; the powers of
tillage; the fabrics of his chemic laboratory; the webs of his loom; the masculine draught
of his locomotive, the talismans of the machine-shop; all grand and subtile things, min-
erals, gases, ethers, passions, war, trade, government, are his natural playmates, and,
according to the excellence of the machinery in each human being, is his attraction for
the instruments he is to employ. The world is his tool-chest, and he is successful, or
his education is carried on just so far, as is the marriage of his faculties with nature,
or, the degree in which he takes up things into himself.


The strong race is strong on these terms. The Saxons are the merchants of the world;
now, for a thousand years, the leading race, and by nothing more than their quality of
personal independence, and, in its special modification, pecuniary independence. No
reliance for bread and games on the government, no clanship, no patriarchal style of
living by the revenues of a chief, no marrying-on,--no system of clientship suits them;
but every man must pay his scot. The English are prosperous and peaceable, with their
habit of considering that every man must take care of himself, and has himself to thank,
if he do not maintain and improve his position in society.

The subject of economy mixes itself with morals, inasmuch as it is a peremptory point of
virtue that a man’s independence be secured. Poverty demoralizes. A man in debt is so
far a slave; and Wall-street thinks it easy for a millionaire to be a man of his word, a man
of honor, but, that, in failing circumstances, no man can be relied on to keep his integrity.
And when one observes in the hotels and palaces of our Atlantic capitals, the habit of
expense, the riot of the senses, the absence of bonds, clanship, fellow-feeling of any
kind, he feels, that, when a man or a woman is driven to the wall, the chances of integrity
are frightfully diminished, as if virtue were coming to be a luxury which few could afford,
or, as Burke said, “at a market almost too high for humanity.” He may fix his inventory of
necessities and of enjoyments on what scale he pleases, but if he wishes the power and
privilege of thought, the chalking out his own career, and having society on his own
terms, he must bring his wants within his proper power to satisfy.

The manly part is to do with might and main what you can do. The world is full of fops
who never did anything, and who have persuaded beauties and men of genius to wear
their fop livery, and these will deliver the fop opinion, that it is not respectable to be seen
earning a living; that it is much more respectable to spend without earning; and this
doctrine of the snake will come also from the elect sons of light; for wise men are not
wise at all hours, and will speak five times from their taste or their humor, to once from
their reason. The brave workman, who might betray his feeling of it in his manners, if he
do not succumb in his practice, must replace the grace or elegance forfeited, by the merit
of the work done. No matter whether he make shoes, or statues, or laws. It is the
privilege of any human work which is well done to invest the doer with a certain
haughtiness. He can well afford not to conciliate, whose faithful work will answer for him.
The mechanic at his bench carries a quiet heart and assured manners, and deals on even
terms with men of any condition. The artist has made his picture so true, that it
disconcerts criticism. The statue is so beautiful, that it contracts no stain from the
market, but makes the market a silent gallery for itself. The case of the young lawyer was
pitiful to disgust,--a paltry matter of buttons or tweezer-cases; but the determined
youth saw in it an aperture to insert his dangerous wedges, made the insignificance of
the thing forgotten, and gave fame by his sense and energy to the name and affairs of
the Tittleton snuffbox factory.

Society in large towns is babyish, and wealth is made a toy. The life of pleasure is so
ostentatious, that a shallow observer must believe that this is the agreed best use of
wealth, and, whatever is pretended, it ends in cosseting. But, if this were the main use of
surplus capital, it would bring us to barricades, burned towns, and tomahawks, presently.
Men of sense esteem wealth to be the assimilation of nature to themselves, the
converting of the sap and juices of the planet to the incarnation and nutriment of their
design. Power is what they want,--not candy;--power to execute their design, power
to give legs and feet, form and actuality to their thought, which, to a clear-sighted man,
appears the end for which the Universe exists, and all its resources might be well
applied. Columbus thinks that the sphere is a problem for practical navigation, as well as
for closet geometry, and looks on all kings and peoples as cowardly landsmen, until they
dare fit him out. Few men on the planet have more truly belonged to it. But he was
forced to leave much of his map blank. His successors inherited his map, and inherited
his fury to complete it.

So the men of the mine, telegraph, mill, map, and survey,? the monomaniacs, who talk
up their project in marts, and offices, and entreat men to subscribe:--how did our
factories get built? how did North America get netted with iron rails, except by the
importunity of these orators, who dragged all the prudent men in? Is party the madness
of many for the gain of a few? This speculative genius is the madness of few for the gain
of the world. The projectors are sacrificed, but the public is the gainer. Each of these
idealists, working after his thought, would make it tyrannical, if he could. He is met and
antagonized by other speculators, as hot as he. The equilibrium is preserved by these
counteractions, as one tree keeps down another in the forest, that it may not absorb all
the sap in the ground. And the supply in nature of railroad presidents, copper-miners,
grand-junctioners, smoke-burners, fire-annihilators, &c., is limited by the same law which
keeps the proportion in the supply of carbon, of alum, and of hydrogen.

To be rich is to have a ticket of admission to the master-works and chief men of each
race. It is to have the sea, by voyaging; to visit the mountains, Niagara, the Nile, the
desert, Rome, Paris, Constantinople; to see galleries, libraries, arsenals, manufactories.
The reader of Humboldt’s “Cosmos” follows the marches of a man whose eyes, ears, and
mind are armed by all the science, arts, and implements which mankind have anywhere
accumulated, and who is using these to add to the stock. So is it with Denon, Beckford,
Belzoni, Wilkinson, Layard, Kane, Lepsius, and Livingston. “The rich man,” says Saadi, “is
everywhere expected and at home.” The rich take up something more of the world into
man’s life. They include the country as well as the town, the ocean-side, the White Hills,
the Far West, and the old European homesteads of man, in their notion of available
material. The world is his, who has money to go over it. He arrives at the sea-shore, and
a sumptuous ship has floored and carpeted for him the stormy Atlantic, and made it a
luxurious hotel, amid the horrors of tempests. The Persians say, “‘Tis the same to him
who wears a shoe, as if the whole earth were covered with leather.”

Kings are said to have long arms, but every man should have long arms, and should
pluck his living, his instruments, his power, and his knowing, from the sun, moon, and
stars. Is not then the demand to be rich legitimate? Yet, I have never seen a rich man. I
have never seen a man as rich as all men ought to be, or, with an adequate command of
nature. The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for
wealth; but if men should take these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be
rich, the moralists would rush to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the people,
lest civilization should be undone. Men are urged by their ideas to acquire the command
over nature. Ages derive a culture from the wealth of Roman Caesars, Leo Tenths,
magnificent Kings of France, Grand Dukes of Tuscany, Dukes of Devonshire, Townleys,
Vernons, and Peels, in England; or whatever great proprietors. It is the interest of all
men, that there should be Vaticans and Louvres full of noble works of art; British
Museums, and French Gardens of Plants, Philadelphia Academies of Natural History,
Bodleian, Ambrosian, Royal, Congressional Libraries. It is the interest of all that there
should be Exploring Expeditions; Captain Cooks to voyage round the world, Rosses,
Franklins, Richardsons, and Kanes, to find the magnetic and the geographic poles. We
are all richer for the measurement of a degree of latitude on the earth’s surface. Our
navigation is safer for the chart. How intimately our knowledge of the system of the
Universe rests on that!--and a true economy in a state or an individual will forget its
frugality in behalf of claims like these.

Whilst it is each man’s interest, that, not only ease and convenience of living, but also
wealth or surplus product should exist somewhere, it need not be in his hands. Often it
is very undesirable to him. Goethe said well, “nobody should be rich but those who
understand it.” Some men are born to own, and can animate all their possessions.
Others cannot: their owning is not graceful; seems to be a compromise of their
character: they seem to steal their own dividends. They should own who can administer;
not they who hoard and conceal; not they who, the greater proprietors they are, are only
the greater beggars, but they whose work carves out work for more, opens a path for all.
For he is the rich man in whom the people are rich, and he is the poor man in whom the
people are poor: and how to give all access to the masterpieces of art and nature, is the
problem of civilization. The socialism of our day has done good service in setting men on
thinking how certain civilizing benefits, now only enjoyed by the opulent, can be enjoyed
by all. For example, the providing to each man the means and apparatus of science, and
of the arts. There are many articles good for occasional use, which few men are able to
own. Every man wishes to see the ring of Saturn, the satellites and belts of Jupiter and
Mars; the mountains and craters in the moon: yet how few can buy a telescope! and of
those, scarcely one would like the trouble of keeping it in order, and exhibiting it. So of
electrical and chemical apparatus, and many the like things. Every man may have
occasion to consult books which he does not care to possess, such as cyclopaedias,
dictionaries, tables, charts, maps, and public documents: pictures also of birds, beasts,
fishes, shells, trees, flowers, whose names he desires to know.

There is a refining influence from the arts of Design on a prepared mind, which is as
positive as that of music, and not to be supplied from any other source. But pictures,
engravings, statues, and casts, beside their first cost, entail expenses, as of galleries and
keepers for the exhibition; and the use which any man can make of them is rare, and
their value, too, is much enhanced by the numbers of men who can share their
enjoyment. In the Greek cities, it was reckoned profane, that any person should pretend
a property in a work of art, which belonged to all who could behold it. I think sometimes,
-- could I only have music on my own terms;--could I live in a great city, and know
where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves, --
that were a bath and a medicine.

If properties of this kind were owned by states, towns, and lyceums, they would draw the
bonds of neighborhood closer. A town would exist to an intellectual purpose. In Europe,
where the feudal forms secure the permanence of wealth in certain families, those
families buy and preserve these things, and lay them open to the public. But in America,
where democratic institutions divide every estate into small portions, after a few years,
the public should step into the place of these proprietors, and provide this culture and
inspiration for the citizen.

Man was born to be rich, or, inevitably grows rich by the use of his faculties; by the union
of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires
coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players. Cultivated labor
drives out brute labor. An infinite number of shrewd men, in infinite years, have arrived
at certain best and shortest ways of doing, and this accumulated skill in arts, cultures,
harvestings, curings, manufactures, navigations, exchanges, constitutes the worth of our
world to-day.

Commerce is a game of skill, which every man cannot play, which few men can play well.
The right merchant is one who has the just average of faculties we call common sense; a
man of a strong affinity for facts, who makes up his decision on what he has seen. He is
thoroughly persuaded of the truths of arithmetic. There is always a reason, in the man,
for his good or bad fortune, and so, in making money. Men talk as if there were some
magic about this, and believe in magic, in all parts of life. He knows, that all goes on the
old road, pound for pound, cent for cent,--for every effect a perfect cause,--and that
good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose. He insures himself in every
transaction, and likes small and sure gains. Probity and closeness to the facts are the
basis, but the masters of the art add a certain long arithmetic. The problem is, to
combine many and remote operations, with the accuracy and adherence to the facts,
which is easy in near and small transactions; so to arrive at gigantic results, without any
compromise of safety. Napoleon was fond of telling the story of the Marseilles banker,
who said to his visitor, surprised at the contrast between the splendor of the banker’s
chateau and hospitality, and the meanness of the counting-room in which he had seen
him,--“Young man, you are too young to understand how masses are formed,--the
true and only power,--whether composed of money, water, or men, it is all alike,--a
mass is an immense centre of motion, but it must be begun, it must be kept up:”--and
he might have added, that the way in which it must be begun and kept up, is, by
obedience to the law of particles.

Success consists in close appliance to the laws of the world, and, since those laws are
intellectual and moral, an intellectual and moral obedience. Political Economy is as good
a book wherein to read the life of man, and the ascendency of laws over all private and
hostile influences, as any Bible which has come down to us.

Money is representative, and follows the nature and fortunes of the owner. The coin is a
delicate meter of civil, social, and moral changes. The farmer is covetous of his dollar,
and with reason. It is no waif to him. He knows how many strokes of labor it represents.
His bones ache with the day’s work that earned it. He knows how much land it
represents;--how much rain, frost, and sunshine. He knows that, in the dollar, he gives
you so much discretion and patience so much hoeing, and threshing. Try to lift his dollar;
you must lift all that weight. In the city, where money follows the skit of a pen, or a lucky
rise in exchange, it comes to be looked on as light. I wish the farmer held it dearer, and
would spend it only for real bread; force for force.

The farmer’s dollar is heavy, and the clerk’s is light and nimble; leaps out of his pocket;
jumps on to cards and faro-tables: but still more curious is its susceptibility to
metaphysical changes. It is the finest barometer of social storms, and announces
revolutions.

Every step of civil advancement makes every man’s dollar worth more. In California, the
country where it grew,--what would it buy? A few years since, it would buy a shanty,
dysentery, hunger, bad company, and crime. There are wide countries, like Siberia,
where it would buy little else to-day, than some petty mitigation of suffering. In Rome, it
will buy beauty and magnificence. Forty years ago, a dollar would not buy much in
Boston. Now it will buy a great deal more in our old town, thanks to railroads, telegraphs,
steamers, and the contemporaneous growth of New York, and the whole country. Yet
there are many goods appertaining to a capital city, which are not yet purchasable here,
no, not with a mountain of dollars. A dollar in Florida is not worth a dollar in Mass-
achusetts. A dollar is not value, but representative of value, and, at last, of moral
values. A dollar is rated for the corn it will buy, or to speak strictly, not for the corn or
house-room, but for Athenian corn, and Roman house-room,--for the wit, probity, and
power, which we eat bread and dwell in houses to share and exert. Wealth is mental;
wealth is moral. The value of a dollar is, to buy just things: a dollar goes on increasing in
value with all the genius, and all the virtue of the world. A dollar in a university, is worth
more than a dollar in a jail; in a temperate, schooled, law-abiding community, than in
some sink of crime, where dice, knives, and arsenic, are in constant play.

The “Bank-Note Detector” is a useful publication. But the current dollar, silver or paper, is
itself the detector of the right and wrong where it circulates. Is it not instantly enhanced
by the increase of equity? If a trader refuses to sell his vote, or adheres to some odious
right, he makes so much more equity in Massachusetts; and every acre in the State is
more worth, in the hour of his action. If you take out of State-street the ten honestest
merchants, and put in ten roguish persons, controlling the same amount of capital, --
the rates of insurance will indicate it; the soundness of banks will show it: the highways
will be less secure: the schools will feel it; the children will bring home their little dose of
the poison: the judge will sit less firmly on the bench, and his decisions be less upright;
he has lost so much support and constraint,--which all need; and the pulpit will betray
it, in a laxer rule of life. An apple-tree, if you take out every day for a number of days, a
load of loam, and put in a load of sand about its roots,--will find it out. An apple-tree is
a stupid kind of creature, but if this treatment be pursued for a short time, I think it
would begin to mistrust something. And if you should take out of the powerful class
engaged in trade a hundred good men, and put in a hundred bad, or, what is just the
same thing, introduce a demoralizing institution, would not the dollar, which is not much
stupider than an apple-tree, presently find it out? The value of a dollar is social, as it is
created by society. Every man who removes into this city, with any purchasable talent or
skill in him, gives to every man’s labor in the city, a new worth. If a talent is anywhere
born into the world, the community of nations is enriched; and, much more, with a new
degree of probity. The expense of crime, one of the principal charges of every nation, is
so far stopped. In Europe, crime is observed to increase or abate with the price of bread.
If the Rothschilds at Paris do not accept bills, the people at Manchester, at Paisley, at
Birmingham, are forced into the highway, and landlords are shot down in Ireland. The
police records attest it. The vibrations are presently felt in New York, New Orleans, and
Chicago. Not much otherwise, the economical power touches the masses through the
political lords. Rothschild refuses the Russian loan, and there is peace, and the harvests
are saved. He takes it, and there is war, and an agitation through a large portion of
mankind, with every hideous result, ending in revolution, and a new order.

Wealth brings with it its own checks and balances. The basis of political economy is
noninterference. The only safe rule is found in the self-adjusting meter of demand and
supply. Do not legislate. Meddle, and you snap the sinews with your sumptuary laws.
Give no bounties: make equal laws: secure life and property, and you need not give alms.
Open the doors of opportunity to talent and virtue, and they will do themselves justice,
and property will not be in bad hands. In a free and just commonwealth, property rushes
from the idle and imbecile, to the industrious, brave, and persevering.

The laws of nature play through trade, as a toy-battery exhibits the effects of electricity.
The level of the sea is not more surely kept, than is the equilibrium of value in society, by
the demand and supply: and artifice or legislation punishes itself, by reactions, gluts, and
bankruptcies. The sublime laws play indifferently through atoms and galaxies. Whoever
knows what happens in the getting and spending of a loaf of bread and a pint of beer;
that no wishing will change the rigorous limits of pints and penny loaves; that, for all that
is consumed, so much less remains in the basket and pot; but what is gone out of these
is not wasted, but well spent, if it nourish his body, and enable him to finish his task; --
knows all of political economy that the budgets of empires can teach him. The interest of
petty economy is this symbolization of the great economy; the way in which a house, and
a private man’s methods, tally with the solar system, and the laws of give and take,
throughout nature; and, however wary we are of the falsehoods and petty tricks which
we suicidally play off on each other, every man has a certain satisfaction, whenever his
dealing touches on the inevitable facts; when he sees that things themselves dictate the
price, as they always tend to do, and, in large manufactures, are seen to do. Your paper
is not fine or coarse enough,--is too heavy, or too thin. The manufacturer says, he will
furnish you with just that thickness or thinness you want; the pattern is quite indifferent
to him; here is his schedule;--any variety of paper, as cheaper or dearer, with the prices
annexed. A pound of paper costs so much, and you may have it made up in any pattern
you fancy.

There is in all our dealings a self-regulation that supersedes chaffering. You will rent a
house, but must have it cheap. The owner can reduce the rent, but so he incapacitates
himself from making proper repairs, and the tenant gets not the house he would have,
but a worse one; besides, that a relation a little injurious is established between land-lord
and tenant. You dismiss your laborer, saying, “Patrick, I shall send for you as soon as I
cannot do without you.” Patrick goes off contented, for he knows that the weeds will
grow with the potatoes, the vines must be planted, next week, and, however unwilling
you may be, the cantelopes, crook-necks, and cucumbers will send for him. Who but
must wish that all labor and value should stand on the same simple and surly market? If
it is the best of its kind, it will. We must have joiner, locksmith, planter, priest, poet,
doctor, cook, weaver, ostler; each in turn, through the year.

If a St. Michael’s pear sells for a shilling, it costs a shilling to raise it. If, in Boston, the best
securities offer twelve per cent. for money, they have just six per cent. of insecurity. You
may not see that the fine pear costs you a shilling, but it costs the community so much.
The shilling represents the number of enemies the pear has, and the amount of risk in
ripening it. The price of coal shows the narrowness of the coal-field, and a compulsory
confinement of the miners to a certain district. All salaries are reckoned on contingent, as
well as on actual services. “If the wind were always southwest by west,” said the skipper,
“women might take ships to sea.” One might say, that all things are of one price; that
nothing is cheap or dear; and that the apparent disparities that strike us, are only a
shopman’s trick of concealing the damage in your bargain. A youth coming into the city
from his native New Hampshire farm, with its hard fare still fresh in his remembrance,
boards at a first-class hotel, and believes he must somehow have outwitted Dr. Franklin
and Malthus, for luxuries are cheap. But he pays for the one convenience of a better
dinner, by the loss of some of the richest social and educational advantages. He has lost
what guards! what incentives! He will perhaps find by and by, that he left the Muses at
the door of the hotel, and found the Furies inside. Money often costs too much, and
power and pleasure are not cheap. The ancient poet said, “the gods sell all things at a fair
price.”

There is an example of the compensations in the commercial history of this country.
When the European wars threw the carrying-trade of the world, from 1800 to 1812, into
American bottoms, a seizure was now and then made of an American ship. Of course,
the loss was serious to the owner, but the country was indemnified; for we charged
threepence a pound for carrying cotton, sixpence for tobacco, and so on; which paid for
the risk and loss, and brought into the country an immense prosperity, early marriages,
private wealth, the building of cities, and of states: and, after the war was over, we
received compensation over and above, by treaty, for all the seizures. Well, the
Americans grew rich and great. But the pay-day comes round. Britain, France, and
Germany, which our extraordinary profits had impoverished, send out, attracted by the
fame of our advantages, first their thousands, then their millions, of poor people, to
share the crop. At first, we employ them, and increase our prosperity: but, in the artificial
system of society and of protected labor, which we also have adopted and enlarged,
there come presently checks and stoppages. Then we refuse to employ these poor men.
But they will not so be answered. They go into the poor rates, and, though we refuse
wages, we must now pay the same amount in the form of taxes. Again, it turns out that
the largest proportion of crimes are committed by foreigners. The cost of the crime, and
the expense of courts, and of prisons, we must bear, and the standing army of
preventive police we must pay. The cost of education of the posterity of this great colony,
I will not compute. But the gross amount of these costs will begin to pay back what we
thought was a net gain from our transatlantic customers of 1800. It is vain to refuse this
payment. We cannot get rid of these people, and we cannot get rid of their will to be
supported. That has become an inevitable element of our politics; and, for their votes,
each of the dominant parties courts and assists them to get it executed. Moreover, we
have to pay, not what would have contented them at home, but what they have learned
to think necessary here; so that opinion, fancy, and all manner of moral considerations
complicate the problem.


There are a few measures of economy which will bear to be named without disgust; for
the subject is tender, and we may easily have too much of it; and therein resembles the
hideous animalcules of which our bodies are built up,--which, offensive in the
particular, yet compose valuable and effective masses. Our nature and genius force us to
respect ends, whilst we use means. We must use the means, and yet, in our most
accurate using, somehow screen and cloak them, as we can only give them any beauty,
by a reflection of the glory of the end. That is the good head, which serves the end, and
commands the means. The rabble are corrupted by their means: the means are too
strong for them, and they desert their end.

1. The first of these measures is that each man’s expense must proceed from his
character. As long as your genius buys, the investment is safe, though you spend like a
monarch. Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some
feat impossible to any other, and thus makes him necessary to society. This native
determination guides his labor and his spending. He wants an equipment of means and
tools proper to his talent. And to save on this point, were to neutralize the special
strength and helpfulness of each mind. Do your work, respecting the excellence of the
work, and not its acceptableness. This is so much economy, that, rightly read, it is the
sum of economy. Profligacy consists not in spending years of time or chests of money, --
but in spending them off the line of your career. The crime which bankrupts men and
states, is, job-work;--declining from your main design, to serve a turn here or there.
Nothing is beneath you, if it is in the direction of your life: nothing is great or desirable, if
it is off from that. I think we are entitled here to draw a straight line, and say, that society
can never prosper, but must always be bankrupt, until every man does that which he
was created to do.

Spend for your expense, and retrench the expense which is not yours. Allston, the
painter, was wont to say, that he built a plain house, and filled it with plain furniture,
because he would hold out no bribe to any to visit him, who had not similar tastes to his
own. We are sympathetic, and, like children, want everything we see. But it is a large
stride to independence,? when a man, in the discovery of his proper talent, has sunk the
necessity for false expenses. As the betrothed maiden, by one secure affection, is
relieved from a system of slaveries,--the daily inculcated necessity of pleasing all,--so
the man who has found what he can do, can spend on that, and leave all other spending.
Montaigne said, “When he was a younger brother, he went brave in dress and equipage,
but afterward his chateau and farms might answer for him.” Let a man who belongs to
the class of nobles, those, namely, who have found out that they can do something,
relieve himself of all vague squandering on objects not his. Let the realist not mind
appearances. Let him delegate to others the costly courtesies and decorations of social
life. The virtues are economists, but some of the vices are also. Thus, next to humility, I
have noticed that pride is a pretty good husband. A good pride is, as I reckon it, worth
from five hundred to fifteen hundred a year. Pride is handsome, economical: pride
eradicates so many vices, letting none subsist but itself, that it seems as if it were a great
gain to exchange vanity for pride. Pride can go without domestics, without fine clothes,
can live in a house with two rooms, can eat potato, purslain, beans, lyed corn, can work
on the soil, can travel afoot, can talk with poor men, or sit silent well-contented in fine
saloons. But vanity costs money, labor, horses, men, women, health, and peace, and is
still nothing at last, a long way leading nowhere.--Only one drawback; proud people
are intolerably selfish, and the vain are gentle and giving.

Art is a jealous mistress, and, if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music,
architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband, and an ill provider, and should be
wise in season, and not fetter himself with duties which will embitter his days, and spoil
him for his proper work. We had in this region, twenty years ago, among our educated
men, a sort of Arcadian fanaticism, a passionate desire to go upon the land, and unite
farming to intellectual pursuits. Many effected their purpose, and made the experiment,
and some became downright ploughmen; but all were cured of their faith that
scholarship and practical farming, (I mean, with one’s own hands,) could be united.

With brow bent, with firm intent, the pale scholar leaves his desk to draw a freer breath,
and get a juster statement of his thought, in the garden-walk. He stoops to pull up a
purslain, or a dock, that is choking the young corn, and finds there are two: close behind
the last, is a third; he reaches out his hand to a fourth; behind that, are four thousand
and one. He is heated and untuned, and, by and by, wakes up from his idiot dream of
chickweed and red-root, to remember his morning thought, and to find, that, with his
adamantine purposes, he has been duped by a dandelion. A garden is like those
pernicious machineries we read of, every month, in the newspapers, which catch a man’s
coat-skirt or his hand, and draw in his arm, his leg, and his whole body to irresistible
destruction. In an evil hour he pulled down his wall, and added a field to his homestead.
No land is bad, but land is worse. If a man own land, the land owns him. Now let him
leave home, if he dare. Every tree and graft, every hill of melons, row of corn, or quickset
hedge, all he has done, and all he means to do, stand in his way, like duns, when he
would go out of his gate. The devotion to these vines and trees he finds poisonous. Long
free walks, a circuit of miles, free his brain, and serve his body. Long marches are no
hardship to him. He believes he composes easily on the hills. But this pottering in a few
square yards of garden is dispiriting and drivelling. The smell of the plants has drugged
him, and robbed him of energy. He finds a catalepsy in his bones. He grows peevish and
poor-spirited. The genius of reading and of gardening are antagonistic, like resinous and
vitreous electricity. One is concentrative in sparks and shocks: the other is diffuse
strength; so that each disqualifies its workman for the other’s duties.

An engraver whose hands must be of an exquisite delicacy of stroke, should not lay stone
walls. Sir David Brewster gives exact instructions for microscopic observation:--“Lie
down on your back, and hold the single lens and object over your eye,” &c. &c. How
much more the seeker of abstract truth, who needs periods of isolation, and rapt
concentration, and almost a going out of the body to think!

2. Spend after your genius, and by system. Nature goes by rule, not by sallies and
saltations. There must be system in the economies. Saving and unexpensiveness will not
keep the most pathetic family from ruin, nor will bigger incomes make free spending
safe. The secret of success lies never in the amount of money, but in the relation of
income to outgo; as if, after expense has been fixed at a certain point, then new and
steady rills of income, though never so small, being added, wealth begins. But in
ordinary, as means increase, spending increases faster, so that, large incomes, in
England and elsewhere, are found not to help matters;--the eating quality of debt does
not relax its voracity. When the cholera is in the potato, what is the use of planting larger
crops? In England, the richest country in the universe, I was assured by shrewd
observers, that great lords and ladies had no more guineas to give away than other
people; that liberality with money is as rare, and as immediately famous a virtue as it is
here. Want is a growing giant whom the coat of Have was never large enough to cover. I
remember in Warwickshire, to have been shown a fair manor, still in the same name as
in Shakspeare’s time. The rent-roll, I was told, is some fourteen thousand pounds a year:
but, when the second son of the late proprietor was born, the father was perplexed how
to provide for him. The eldest son must inherit the manor; what to do with this
supernumerary? He was advised to breed him for the Church, and to settle him in the
rectorship, which was in the gift of the family; which was done. It is a general rule in that
country, that bigger incomes do not help anybody. It is commonly observed, that a
sudden wealth, like a prize drawn in a lottery, or a large bequest to a poor family, does
not permanently enrich. They have served no apprenticeship to wealth, and, with the
rapid wealth, come rapid claims: which they do not know how to deny, and the treasure
is quickly dissipated.

A system must be in every economy, or the best single expedients are of no avail. A farm
is a good thing, when it begins and ends with itself, and does not need a salary, or a
shop, to eke it out. Thus, the cattle are a main link in the chain-ring. If the non-conformist
or aesthetic farmer leaves out the cattle, and does not also leave out the want which the
cattle must supply, he must fill the gap by begging or stealing. When men now alive were
born, the farm yielded everything that was consumed on it. The farm yielded no money,
and the farmer got on without. If he fell sick, his neighbors came in to his aid: each gave a
day’s work; or a half day; or lent his yoke of oxen, or his horse, and kept his work even:
hoed his potatoes, mowed his hay, reaped his rye; well knowing that no man could
afford to hire labor, without selling his land. In autumn, a farmer could sell an ox or a
hog, and get a little money to pay taxes withal. Now, the farmer buys almost all he
consumes,--tin-ware, cloth, sugar, tea, coffee, fish, coal, railroad-tickets, and
newspapers.

A master in each art is required, because the practice is never with still or dead subjects,
but they change in your hands. You think farm-buildings and broad acres a solid
property: but its value is flowing like water. It requires as much watching as if you were
decanting wine from a cask. The farmer knows what to do with it, stops every leak, turns
all the streamlets to one reservoir, and decants wine: but a blunderhead comes out of
Cornhill, tries his hand, and it all leaks away. So is it with granite streets, or timber
townships, as with fruit or flowers. Nor is any investment so permanent, that it can be
allowed to remain without incessant watching, as the history of each attempt to lock up
an inheritance through two generations for an unborn inheritor may show.

When Mr. Cockayne takes a cottage in the country, and will keep his cow, he thinks a cow
is a creature that is fed on hay, and gives a pail of milk twice a day. But the cow that he
buys gives milk for three months; then her bag dries up. What to do with a dry cow? who
will buy her? Perhaps he bought also a yoke of oxen to do his work; but they get blown
and lame. What to do with blown and lame oxen? The farmer fats his, after the springwork
is done, and kills them in the fall. But how can Cockayne, who has no pastures, and
leaves his cottage daily in the cars, at business hours, be pothered with fatting and killing
oxen? He plants trees; but there must be crops, to keep the trees in ploughed land. What
shall be the crops? He will have nothing to do with trees, but will have grass. After a year
or two, the grass must be turned up and ploughed: now what crops? Credulous Cockayne!

3. Help comes in the custom of the country, and the rule of Impera parendo. The rule is
not to dictate, nor to insist on carrying out each of your schemes by ignorant wilfulness,
but to learn practically the secret spoken from all nature, that things themselves refuse
to be mismanaged, and will show to the watchful their own law. Nobody need stir hand
or foot. The custom of the country will do it all. I know not how to build or to plant;
neither how to buy wood, nor what to do with the house-lot, the field, or the wood-lot,
when bought. Never fear: it is all settled how it shall be, long beforehand, in the custom
of the country, whether to sand, or whether to clay it, when to plough, and how to dress,
whether to grass, or to corn; and you cannot help or hinder it. Nature has her own best
mode of doing each thing, and she has somewhere told it plainly, if we will keep our eyes
and ears open. If not, she will not be slow in undeceiving us, when we prefer our own
way to hers. How often we must remember the art of the surgeon, which, in replacing
the broken bone, contents itself with releasing the parts from false position; they fly into
place by the action of the muscles. On this art of nature all our arts rely.

Of the two eminent engineers in the recent construction of railways in England, Mr.
Brunel went straight from terminus to terminus, through mountains, over streams,
crossing highways, cutting ducal estates in two, and shooting through this man’s cellar,
and that man’s attic window, and so arriving at his end, at great pleasure to geometers,
but with cost to his company. Mr. Stephenson, on the contrary, believing that the river
knows the way, followed his valley, as implicitly as our Western Railroad follows the
Westfield River, and turned out to be the safest and cheapest engineer. We say the cows
laid out Boston. Well, there are worse surveyors. Every pedestrian in our pastures has
frequent occasion to thank the cows for cutting the best path through the thicket, and
over the hills: and travellers and Indians know the value of a buffalo-trail, which is sure
to be the easiest possible pass through the ridge.

When a citizen, fresh from Dock-square, or Milk-street, comes out and buys land in
the country, his first thought is to a fine outlook from his windows: his library must
command a western view: a sunset every day, bathing the shoulder of Blue Hills,
Wachusett, and the peaks of Monadnoc and Uncanoonuc. What, thirty acres, and all this
magnificence for fifteen hundred dollars! It would be cheap at fifty thousand. He
proceeds at once, his eyes dim with tears of joy, to fix the spot for his corner-stone. But
the man who is to level the ground, thinks it will take many hundred loads of gravel to fill
the hollow to the road. The stone-mason who should build the well thinks he shall have
to dig forty feet: the baker doubts he shall never like to drive up to the door: the practical
neighbor cavils at the position of the barn; and the citizen comes to know that his
predecessor the farmer built the house in the right spot for the sun and wind, the spring,
and water-drainage, and the convenience to the pasture, the garden, the field, and the
road. So Dock-square yields the point, and things have their own way. Use has made the
farmer wise, and the foolish citizen learns to take his counsel. From step to step he
comes at last to surrender at discretion. The farmer affects to take his orders; but the
citizen says, You may ask me as often as you will, and in what ingenious forms, for an
opinion concerning the mode of building my wall, or sinking my well, or laying out my
acre, but the ball will rebound to you. These are matters on which I neither know, nor
need to know anything. These are questions which you and not I shall answer.
Not less, within doors, a system settles itself paramount and tyrannical over master and
mistress, servant and child, cousin and acquaintance. ‘Tis in vain that genius or virtue or
energy of character strive and cry against it. This is fate. And ’tis very well that the poor
husband reads in a book of a new way of living, and resolves to adopt it at home: let him
go home and try it, if he dare.

4. Another point of economy is to look for seed of the same kind as you sow: and not
to hope to buy one kind with another kind. Friendship buys friendship; justice, justice;
military merit, military success. Good husbandry finds wife, children, and household. The
good merchant large gains, ships, stocks, and money. The good poet fame, and literary
credit; but not either, the other. Yet there is commonly a confusion of expectations on
these points. Hotspur lives for the moment; praises himself for it; and despises Furlong,
that he does not. Hotspur, of course, is poor; and Furlong a good provider. The odd
circumstance is, that Hotspur thinks it a superiority in himself, this improvidence, which
ought to be rewarded with Furlong’s lands.

I have not at all completed my design. But we must not leave the topic, without casting
one glance into the interior recesses. It is a doctrine of philosophy, that man is a being of
degrees; that there is nothing in the world, which is not repeated in his body; his body
being a sort of miniature or summary of the world: then that there is nothing in his body,
which is not repeated as in a celestial sphere in his mind: then, there is nothing in his
brain, which is not repeated in a higher sphere, in his moral system.

5. Now these things are so in Nature. All things ascend, and the royal rule of economy
is, that it should ascend also, or, whatever we do must always have a higher aim. Thus it
is a maxim, that money is another kind of blood. Pecunia alter sanguis: or, the estate of
a man is only a larger kind of body, and admits of regimen analogous to his bodily cir-
culations. So there is no maxim of the merchant, e. g., “Best use of money is to pay
debts;” “Every business by itself;” “Best time is present time;” “The right investment
is in tools of your trade;” or the like, which does not admit of an extended sense. The
counting-room maxims liberally expounded are laws of the Universe. The merchant’s
economy is a coarse symbol of the soul’s economy. It is, to spend for power, and not for
pleasure. It is to invest income; that is to say, to take up particulars into generals; days
into integral eras,--literary, emotive, practical, of its life, and still to ascend in its
investment. The merchant has but one rule, absorb and invest: he is to be capitalist: the
scraps and filings must be gathered back into the crucible; the gas and smoke must be
burned, and earnings must not go to increase expense, but to capital again. Well, the
man must be capitalist. Will he spend his income, or will he invest? His body and every
organ is under the same law. His body is a jar, in which the liquor of life is stored. Will he
spend for pleasure? The way to ruin is short and facile. Will he not spend, but hoard for
power? It passes through the sacred fermentations, by that law of Nature whereby
everything climbs to higher platforms, and bodily vigor becomes mental and moral vigor.
The bread he eats is first strength and animal spirits: it becomes, in higher laboratories,
imagery and thought; and in still higher results, courage and endurance. This is the right
compound interest; this is capital doubled, quadrupled, centupled; man raised to his
highest power.

The true thrift is always to spend on the higher plane; to invest and invest, with keener
avarice, that he may spend in spiritual creation, and not in augmenting animal existence.
Nor is the man enriched, in repeating the old experiments of animal sensation, nor
unless through new powers and ascending pleasures, he knows himself by the actual
experience of higher good, to be already on the way to the highest.




IV Culture




Can rules or tutors educate
The semigod whom we await?
He must be musical,
Tremulous, impressional,
Alive to gentle influence
Of landscape and of sky,
And tender to the spirit-touch
Of man’s or maiden’s eye:
But, to his native centre fast,
Shall into Future fuse the Past,
And the world’s flowing fates in
his own mould recast.



The word of ambition at the present day is Culture. Whilst all the world is in pursuit of
power, and of wealth as a means of power, culture corrects the theory of success. A man
is the prisoner of his power. A topical memory makes him an almanac; a talent for
debate, a disputant; skill to get money makes him a miser, that is, a beggar. Culture
reduces these inflammations by invoking the aid of other powers against the dominant
talent, and by appealing to the rank of powers. It watches success. For performance,
Nature has no mercy, and sacrifices the performer to get it done; makes a dropsy or a
tympany of him. If she wants a thumb, she makes one at the cost of arms and legs, and
any excess of power in one part is usually paid for at once by some defect in a
contiguous part.

Our efficiency depends so much on our concentration, that Nature usually in the
instances where a marked man is sent into the world, overloads him with bias, sacrificing
his symmetry to his working power. It is said, no man can write but one book; and if a
man have a defect, it is apt to leave its impression on all his performances. If she creates
a policeman like Fouche, he is made up of suspicions and of plots to circumvent them.
“The air,” said Fouche, “is full of poniards.” The physician Sanctorius spent his life in a pair
of scales, weighing his food. Lord Coke valued Chaucer highly, because the Canon
Yeman’s Tale illustrates the statute Hen. V. Chap. 4, against alchemy. I saw a man who
believed the principal mischiefs in the English state were derived from the devotion to
musical concerts. A freemason, not long since, set out to explain to this country, that the
principal cause of the success of General Washington, was, the aid he derived from the
freemasons.

But worse than the harping on one string, Nature has secured individualism, by giving
the private person a high conceit of his weight in the system. The pest of society is
egotists. There are dull and bright, sacred and profane, coarse and fine egotists. ‘Tis a
disease that, like influenza, falls on all constitutions. In the distemper known to
physicians as chorea, the patient sometimes turns round, and continues to spin slowly
on one spot. Is egotism a metaphysical varioloid of this malady? The man runs round a
ring formed by his own talent, falls into an admiration of it, and loses relation to the
world. It is a tendency in all minds. One of its annoying forms, is a craving for sympathy.
The sufferers parade their miseries, tear the lint from their bruises, reveal their
indictable crimes, that you may pity them. They like sickness, because physical pain will
extort some show of interest from the bystanders, as we have seen children, who, finding
themselves of no account when grown people come in, will cough till they choke, to draw
attention.

This distemper is the scourge of talent,--of artists, inventors, and philosophers.
Eminent spiritualists shall have an incapacity of putting their act or word aloof from
them, and seeing it bravely for the nothing it is. Beware of the man who says, “I am on
the eve of a revelation.” It is speedily punished, inasmuch as this habit invites men to
humor it, and by treating the patient tenderly, to shut him up in a narrower selfism, and
exclude him from the great world of God’s cheerful fallible men and women. Let us
rather be insulted, whilst we are insultable. Religious literature has eminent examples,
and if we run over our private list of poets, critics, philanthropists, and philosophers, we
shall find them infected with this dropsy and elephantiasis, which we ought to have
tapped.

This goitre of egotism is so frequent among notable persons, that we must infer some
strong necessity in nature which it subserves; such as we see in the sexual attraction.
The preservation of the species was a point of such necessity, that Nature has secured it
at all hazards by immensely overloading the passion, at the risk of perpetual crime and
disorder. So egotism has its root in the cardinal necessity by which each individual
persists to be what he is.

This individuality is not only not inconsistent with culture, but is the basis of it. Every
valuable nature is there in its own right, and the student we speak to must have a
motherwit invincible by his culture, which uses all books, arts, facilities, and elegancies of
intercourse, but is never subdued and lost in them. He only is a well-made man who has
a good determination. And the end of culture is not to destroy this, God forbid! but to
train away all impediment and mixture, and leave nothing but pure power. Our student
must have a style and determination, and be a master in his own specialty. But, having
this, he must put it behind him. He must have a catholicity, a power to see with a free
and disengaged look every object. Yet is this private interest and self so overcharged,
that, if a man seeks a companion who can look at objects for their own sake, and without
affection or self-reference, he will find the fewest who will give him that satisfaction;
whilst most men are afflicted with a coldness, an incuriosity, as soon as any object does
not connect with their self-love. Though they talk of the object before them, they are
thinking of themselves, and their vanity is laying little traps for your admiration.

But after a man has discovered that there are limits to the interest which his private
history has for mankind, he still converses with his family, or a few companions, --
perhaps with half a dozen personalities that are famous in his neighborhood. In Boston,
the question of life is the names of some eight or ten men. Have you seen Mr. Allston,
Doctor Channing, Mr. Adams, Mr. Webster, Mr. Greenough? Have you heard Everett,
Garrison, Father Taylor, Theodore Parker? Have you talked with Messieurs Turbinewheel,
Summitlevel, and Lacofrupees? Then you may as well die. In New York, the question is of
some other eight, or ten, or twenty. Have you seen a few lawyers, merchants, and
brokers,--two or three scholars, two or three capitalists, two or three editors of
newspapers? New York is a sucked orange. All conversation is at an end, when we have
discharged ourselves of a dozen personalities, domestic or imported, which make up our
American existence. Nor do we expect anybody to be other than a faint copy of these
heroes.

Life is very narrow. Bring any club or company of intelligent men together again after ten
years, and if the presence of some penetrating and calming genius could dispose them
to frankness, what a confession of insanities would come up! The “causes” to which we
have sacrificed, Tariff or Democracy, Whigism or Abolition, Temperance or Socialism,
would show like roots of bitterness and dragons of wrath: and our talents are as
mischievous as if each had been seized upon by some bird of prey, which had whisked
him away from fortune, from truth, from the dear society of the poets, some zeal, some
bias, and only when he was now gray and nerveless, was it relaxing its claws, and he
awaking to sober perceptions.

Culture is the suggestion from certain best thoughts, that a man has a range of affinities,
through which he can modulate the violence of any master-tones that have a droning
preponderance in his scale, and succor him against himself. Culture redresses his
balance, puts him among his equals and superiors, revives the delicious sense of
sympathy, and warns him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion.

‘Tis not a compliment but a disparagement to consult a man only on horses, or on steam,
or on theatres, or on eating, or on books, and, whenever he appears, considerately to
turn the conversation to the bantling he is known to fondle. In the Norse heaven of our
forefathers, Thor’s house had five hundred and forty floors; and man’s house has five
hundred and forty floors. His excellence is facility of adaptation and of transition through
many related points, to wide contrasts and extremes. Culture kills his exaggeration, his
conceit of his village or his city. We must leave our pets at home, when we go into the
street, and meet men on broad grounds of good meaning and good sense. No performance
is worth loss of geniality. ‘Tis a cruel price we pay for certain fancy goods called fine
arts and philosophy. In the Norse legend, Allfadir did not get a drink of Mimir’s spring,
(the fountain of wisdom,) until he left his eye in pledge. And here is a pedant that
cannot unfold his wrinkles, nor conceal his wrath at interruption by the best, if their
conversation do not fit his impertinency,--here is he to afflict us with his personali-
ties. ‘Tis incident to scholars, that each of them fancies he is pointedly odious in his
community. Draw him out of this limbo of irritability. Cleanse with healthy blood his
parchment skin. You restore to him his eyes which he left in pledge at Mimir’s spring. If
you are the victim of your doing, who cares what you do? We can spare your opera, your
gazetteer, your chemic analysis, your history, your syllogisms. Your man of genius pays
dear for his distinction. His head runs up into a spire, and instead of a healthy man,
merry and wise, he is some mad dominie. Nature is reckless of the individual. When she
has points to carry, she carries them. To wade in marshes and sea-margins is the destiny
of certain birds, and they are so accurately made for this, that they are imprisoned in
those places. Each animal out of its habitat would starve. To the physician, each man,
each woman, is an amplification of one organ. A soldier, a locksmith, a bank-clerk, and a
dancer could not exchange functions. And thus we are victims of adaptation.


The antidotes against this organic egotism, are, the range and variety of attractions, as
gained by acquaintance with the world, with men of merit, with classes of society, with
travel, with eminent persons, and with the high resources of philosophy, art, and
religion: books, travel, society, solitude.

The hardiest skeptic who has seen a horse broken, a pointer trained, or, who has visited
a menagerie, or the exhibition of the Industrious Fleas, will not deny the validity of
education. “A boy,” says Plato, “is the most vicious of all wild beasts;” and, in the same
spirit, the old English poet Gascoigne says, “a boy is better unborn than untaught.” The
city breeds one kind of speech and manners; the back-country a different style; the sea,
another; the army, a fourth. We know that an army which can be confided in, may be
formed by discipline; that, by systematic discipline all men may be made heroes: Marshal
Lannes said to a French officer, “Know, Colonel, that none but a poltroon will boast that
he never was afraid.” A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing
before. And, in all human action, those faculties will be strong which are used. Robert
Owen said, “Give me a tiger, and I will educate him.” ‘Tis inhuman to want faith in the
power of education, since to meliorate, is the law of nature; and men are valued
precisely as they exert onward or melio-rating force. On the other hand, poltroonery is
the acknowledging an inferiority to be incurable.

Incapacity of melioration is the only mortal distemper. There are people who can never
understand a trope, or any second or expanded sense given to your words, or any
humor; but remain literalists, after hearing the music, and poetry, and rhetoric, and wit,
of seventy or eighty years. They are past the help of surgeon or clergy. But even these
can understand pitchforks and the cry of fire! and I have noticed in some of this class a
marked dislike of earthquakes.

Let us make our education brave and preventive. Politics is an after-work, a poor
patching. We are always a little late. The evil is done, the law is passed, and we begin the
up-hill agitation for repeal of that of which we ought to have prevented the enacting. We
shall one day learn to supersede politics by education. What we call our root-and-branch
reforms of slavery, war, gambling, intemperance, is only medicating the symptoms. We
must begin higher up, namely, in Education.

Our arts and tools give to him who can handle them much the same advantage over the
novice, as if you extended his life, ten, fifty, or a hundred years. And I think it the part of
good sense to provide every fine soul with such culture, that it shall not, at thirty or forty
years, have to say, `This which I might do is made hopeless through my want of weapons.’

But it is conceded that much of our training fails of effect; that all success is hazardous
and rare; that a large part of our cost and pains is thrown away. Nature takes the matter
into her own hands, and, though we must not omit any jot of our system, we can seldom
be sure that it has availed much, or, that as much good would not have accrued from a
different system.

Books, as containing the finest records of human wit, must always enter into our notion
of culture. The best heads that ever existed, Pericles, Plato, Julius Caesar, Shakspeare,
Goethe, Milton, were well-read, universally educated men, and quite too wise to
undervalue letters. Their opinion has weight, because they had means of knowing the
opposite opinion. We look that a great man should be a good reader, or, in proportion to
the spontaneous power should be the assimilating power. Good criticism is very rare,
and always precious. I am always happy to meet persons who perceive the transcendent
superiority of Shakspeare over all other writers. I like people who like Plato. Because this
love does not consist with self-conceit.

But books are good only as far as a boy is ready for them. He sometimes gets ready very
slowly. You send your child to the schoolmaster, but ’tis the schoolboys who educate
him. You send him to the Latin class, but much of his tuition comes, on his way to school,
from the shop-windows. You like the strict rules and the long terms; and he finds his
best leading in a by-way of his own, and refuses any companions but of his choosing. He
hates the grammar and Gradus, and loves guns, fishing-rods, horses, and boats. Well,
the boy is right; and you are not fit to direct his bringing up, if your theory leaves out his
gymnastic training. Archery, cricket, gun and fishing-rod, horse and boat, are all
educators, liberalizers; and so are dancing, dress, and the street-talk; and,? provided
only the boy has resources, and is of a noble and ingenuous strain,--these will not
serve him less than the books. He learns chess, whist, dancing, and theatricals. The
father observes that another boy has learned algebra and geometry in the same time.
But the first boy has acquired much more than these poor games along with them. He is
infatuated for weeks with whist and chess; but presently will find out, as you did, that
when he rises from the game too long played, he is vacant and forlorn, and despises
himself. Thenceforward it takes place with other things, and has its due weight in his
experience. These minor skills and accomplishments, for example, dancing, are tickets of
admission to the dress-circle of mankind, and the being master of them enables the
youth to judge intelligently of much, on which, otherwise, he would give a pedantic
squint. Landor said, “I have suffered more from my bad dancing, than from all the
misfortunes and miseries of my life put together.” Provided always the boy is teachable,
(for we are not proposing to make a statue out of punk,) football, cricket, archery,
swimming, skating, climbing, fencing, riding, are lessons in the art of power, which it is
his main business to learn;--riding, specially, of which Lord Herbert of Cherbury said, “a
good rider on a good horse is as much above himself and others as the world can make
him.” Besides, the gun, fishing-rod, boat, and horse, constitute, among all who use them,
secret freemasonries. They are as if they belonged to one club.

There is also a negative value in these arts. Their chief use to the youth, is, not
amusement, but to be known for what they are, and not to remain to him occasions of
heart-burn. We are full of superstitions. Each class fixes its eyes on the advantages it has
not; the refined, on rude strength; the democrat, on birth and breeding. One of the
benefits of a college education is, to show the boy its little avail. I knew a leading man in a
leading city, who, having set his heart on an education at the university, and missed it,
could never quite feel himself the equal of his own brothers who had gone thither. His
easy superiority to multitudes of professional men could never quite countervail to him
this imaginary defect. Balls, riding, wine-parties, and billiards, pass to a poor boy for
something fine and romantic, which they are not; and a free admission to them on an
equal footing, if it were possible, only once or twice, would be worth ten times its cost,
by undeceiving him.

I am not much an advocate for travelling, and I observe that men run away to other
countries, because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own, because
they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters
travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home? I have been quoted as saying
captious things about travel; but I mean to do justice. I think, there is a restlessness in
our people, which argues want of character. All educated Americans, first or last, go to
Europe;--perhaps, because it is their mental home, as the invalid habits of this country
might suggest. An eminent teacher of girls said, “the idea of a girl’s education, is,
whatever qualifies them for going to Europe.” Can we never extract this tape-worm of
Europe from the brain of our countrymen? One sees very well what their fate must be.
He that does not fill a place at home, cannot abroad. He only goes there to hide his
insignificance in a larger crowd. You do not think you will find anything there which you
have not seen at home? The stuff of all countries is just the same. Do you suppose, there
is any country where they do not scald milkpans, and swaddle the infants, and burn the
brushwood, and broil the fish? What is true anywhere is true everywhere. And let him go
where he will, he can only find so much beauty or worth as he carries.

Of course, for some men, travel may be useful. Naturalists, discoverers, and sailors are
born. Some men are made for couriers, exchangers, envoys, missionaries, bearers of
despatches, as others are for farmers and working-men. And if the man is of a light and
social turn, and Nature has aimed to make a legged and winged creature, framed for
locomotion, we must follow her hint, and furnish him with that breeding which gives
currency, as sedulously as with that which gives worth. But let us not be pedantic, but
allow to travel its full effect. The boy grown up on the farm, which he has never left, is
said in the country to have had no chance, and boys and men of that condition look
upon work on a railroad, or drudgery in a city, as opportunity. Poor country boys of
Vermont and Connecticut formerly owed what knowledge they had, to their peddling
trips to the Southern States. California and the Pacific Coast is now the university of this
class, as Virginia was in old times. `To have some chance’ is their word. And the phrase
`to know the world,’ or to travel, is synonymous with all men’s ideas of advantage and
superiority. No doubt, to a man of sense, travel offers advantages. As many languages as
he has, as many friends, as many arts and trades, so many times is he a man. A foreign
country is a point of comparison, wherefrom to judge his own. One use of travel, is, to
recommend the books and works of home; [we go to Europe to be Americanized;] and
another, to find men. For, as Nature has put fruits apart in latitudes, a new fruit in every
degree, so knowledge and fine moral quality she lodges in distant men. And thus, of the
six or seven teachers whom each man wants among his contemporaries, it often
happens, that one or two of them live on the other side of the world.

Moreover, there is in every constitution a certain solstice, when the stars stand still in
our inward firmament, and when there is required some foreign force, some diversion or
alterative to prevent stagnation. And, as a medical remedy, travel seems one of the best.
Just as a man witnessing the admirable effect of ether to lull pain, and meditating on the
contingencies of wounds, cancers, lockjaws, rejoices in Dr. Jackson’s benign discovery,
so a man who looks at Paris, at Naples, or at London, says, `If I should be driven from
my own home, here, at least, my thoughts can be consoled by the most prodigal amuse-
ment and occupation which the human race in ages could contrive and accumulate.’

Akin to the benefit of foreign travel, the aesthetic value of railroads is to unite the
advantages of town and country life, neither of which we can spare. A man should live in
or near a large town, because, let his own genius be what it may, it will repel quite as
much of agreeable and valuable talent as it draws, and, in a city, the total attraction of all
the citizens is sure to conquer, first or last, every repulsion, and drag the most
improbable hermit within its walls some day in the year. In town, he can find the
swimming-school, the gymnasium, the dancing-master, the shooting-gallery, opera,
theatre, and panorama; the chemist’s shop, the museum of natural history; the gallery of
fine arts; the national orators, in their turn; foreign travellers, the libraries, and his club.
In the country, he can find solitude and reading, manly labor, cheap living, and his old
shoes; moors for game, hills for geology, and groves for devotion. Aubrey writes, “I have
heard Thomas Hobbes say, that, in the Earl of Devon’s house, in Derbyshire, there was a
good library and books enough for him, and his lordship stored the library with what
books he thought fit to be bought. But the want of good conversation was a very great
inconvenience, and, though he conceived he could order his thinking as well as another,
yet he found a great defect. In the country, in long time, for want of good conversation,
one’s understanding and invention contract a moss on them, like an old paling in an
orchard.”

Cities give us collision. ‘Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.
A great part of our education is sympathetic and social. Boys and girls who have been
brought up with well-informed and superior people, show in their manners an inesti-
mable grace. Fuller says, that “William, Earl of Nassau, won a subject from the King
of Spain, every time he put off his hat.” You cannot have one well-bred man, without a
whole society of such. They keep each other up to any high point. Especially women;--it
requires a great many cultivated women,--saloons of bright, elegant, reading women,
accustomed to ease and refinement, to spectacles, pictures, sculpture, poetry, and to
elegant society, in order that you should have one Madame de Stael. The head of a
commercial house, or a leading lawyer or politician is brought into daily contact with
troops of men from all parts of the country, and those too the driving-wheels, the
business men of each section, and one can hardly suggest for an apprehensive man a
more searching culture. Besides, we must remember the high social possibilities of a
million of men. The best bribe which London offers to-day to the imagination, is, that, in
such a vast variety of people and conditions, one can believe there is room for persons
of romantic character to exist, and that the poet, the mystic, and the hero may hope to
confront their counterparts.

I wish cities could teach their best lesson,--of quiet manners. It is the foible espec-
ially of American youth,--pretension. The mark of the man of the world is absence of
pretension. He does not make a speech; he takes a low business-tone, avoids all brag,
is nobody, dresses plainly, promises not at all, performs much, speaks in monosyllables,
hugs his fact. He calls his employment by its lowest name, and so takes from evil tongues
their sharpest weapon. His conversation clings to the weather and the news, yet he
allows him-self to be surprised into thought, and the unlocking of his learning and phil-
osophy. How the imagination is piqued by anecdotes of some great man passing incognito,
as a king in gray clothes,--of Napoleon affecting a plain suit at his glittering levee; of
Burns, or Scott, or Beethoven, or Wellington, or Goethe, or any container of trans-
cendent power, passing for nobody; of Epaminondas, “who never says anything, but
will listen eternally;” of Goethe, who preferred trifling subjects and common express-
ions in intercourse with strangers, worse rather than better clothes, and to appear a
little more capricious than he was. There are advantages in the old hat and box-coat.
I have heard, that, throughout this country, a certain respect is paid to good broadcloth;
but dress makes a little restraint: men will not commit themselves. But the box-coat
is like wine; it unlocks the tongue, and men say what they think. An old poet says,

“Go far and go sparing,
For you’ll find it certain,
The poorer and the baser you appear,
The more you’ll look through still.”

(*) Beaumont and Fletcher: The Tamer Tamed.

Not much otherwise Milnes writes, in the “Lay of the Humble,”

“To me men are for what they are,
They wear no masks with me.”

‘Tis odd that our people should have--not water on the brain,--but a little gas there. A
shrewd foreigner said of the Americans, that, “whatever they say has a little the air of a
speech.” Yet one of the traits down in the books as distinguishing the Anglo-Saxon, is, a
trick of self-disparagement. To be sure, in old, dense countries, among a million of good
coats, a fine coat comes to be no distinction, and you find humorists. In an English party,
a man with no marked manners or features, with a face like red dough, unexpectedly
discloses wit, learning, a wide range of topics, and personal familiarity with good men in
all parts of the world, until you think you have fallen upon some illustrious personage.
Can it be that the American forest has refreshed some weeds of old Pietish barbarism
just ready to die out,--the love of the scarlet feather, of beads, and tinsel? The Italians
are fond of red clothes, peacock plumes, and embroidery; and I remember one rainy
morning in the city of Palermo, the street was in a blaze with scarlet umbrellas. The
English have a plain taste. The equipages of the grandees are plain. A gorgeous livery
indicates new and awkward city wealth. Mr. Pitt, like Mr. Pym, thought the title of Mister
good against any king in Europe. They have piqued themselves on governing the whole
world in the poor, plain, dark Committee-room which the House of Commons sat in,
before the fire.

Whilst we want cities as the centres where the best things are found, cities degrade us by
magnifying trifles. The countryman finds the town a chop-house, a barber’s shop. He has
lost the lines of grandeur of the horizon, hills and plains, and with them, sobriety and
elevation. He has come among a supple, glib-tongued tribe, who live for show, servile to
public opinion. Life is dragged down to a fracas of pitiful cares and disasters. You say the
gods ought to respect a life whose objects are their own; but in cities they have betrayed
you to a cloud of insignificant annoyances:

“Mirmidons, race feconde,
Mirmidons,
Enfin nous commandons;
Jupiter livre le monde
Aux mirmidons, aux mirmidons.”
‘Tis heavy odds
Against the gods,
When they will match with myrmidons.
We spawning, spawning myrmidons,
Our turn to-day! we take command,
Jove gives the globe into the hand
Of myrmidons, of myrmidons.
(*) Beranger.

What is odious but noise, and people who scream and bewail? people whose vane points
always east, who live to dine, who send for the doctor, who coddle themselves, who
toast their feet on the register, who intrigue to secure a padded chair, and a corner out
of the draught. Suffer them once to begin the enumeration of their infirmities, and the
sun will go down on the unfinished tale. Let these triflers put us out of conceit with petty
comforts. To a man at work, the frost is but a color: the rain, the wind, he forgot them
when he came in. Let us learn to live coarsely, dress plainly, and lie hard. The least habit
of dominion over the palate has certain good effects not easily estimated. Neither will we
be driven into a quiddling abstemiousness. ‘Tis a superstition to insist on a special diet.
All is made at last of the same chemical atoms.

A man in pursuit of greatness feels no little wants. How can you mind diet, bed, dress, or
salutes or compliments, or the figure you make in company, or wealth, or even the
bringing things to pass, when you think how paltry are the machinery and the workers?
Wordsworth was praised to me, in Westmoreland, for having afforded to his country
neighbors an example of a modest household where comfort and culture were secured,
without display. And a tender boy who wears his rusty cap and outgrown coat, that he
may secure the coveted place in college, and the right in the library, is educated to some
purpose. There is a great deal of self-denial and manliness in poor and middle-class
houses, in town and country, that has not got into literature, and never will, but that
keeps the earth sweet; that saves on superfluities, and spends on essentials; that goes
rusty, and educates the boy; that sells the horse, but builds the school; works early and
late, takes two looms in the factory, three looms, six looms, but pays off the mortgage on
the paternal farm, and then goes back cheerfully to work again.

We can ill spare the commanding social benefits of cities; they must be used; yet
cautiously, and haughtily,--and will yield their best values to him who best can do
without them. Keep the town for occasions, but the habits should be formed to
retirement. Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold,
obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars. He
who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of
other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of
their opinions. “In the morning,--solitude;” said Pythagoras; that Nature may speak to
the imagination, as she does never in company, and that her favorite may make
acquaintance with those divine strengths which disclose themselves to serious and
abstracted thought. ‘Tis very certain that Plato, Plotinus, Archimedes, Hermes, Newton,
Milton, Wordsworth, did not live in a crowd, but descended into it from time to time as
benefactors: and the wise instructor will press this point of securing to the young soul in
the disposition of time and the arrangements of living, periods and habits of solitude.
The high advantage of university-life is often the mere mechanical one, I may call it, of a
separate chamber and fire,--which parents will allow the boy without hesitation at
Cambridge, but do not think needful at home. We say solitude, to mark the character of
the tone of thought; but if it can be shared between two or more than two, it is happier,
and not less noble. “We four,” wrote Neander to his sacred friends, “will enjoy at Halle the
inward blessedness of a civitas Dei, whose foundations are forever friendship. The more
I know you, the more I dissatisfy and must dissatisfy all my wonted companions. Their
very presence stupefies me. The common understanding withdraws itself from the one
centre of all existence.”

Solitude takes off the pressure of present importunities that more catholic and humane
relations may appear. The saint and poet seek privacy to ends the most public and
universal: and it is the secret of culture, to interest the man more in his public, than in his
private quality. Here is a new poem, which elicits a good many comments in the journals,
and in conversation. From these it is easy, at last, to eliminate the verdict which readers
passed upon it; and that is, in the main, unfavorable. The poet, as a craftsman, is only
interested in the praise accorded to him, and not in the censure, though it be just. And
the poor little poet hearkens only to that, and rejects the censure, as proving incapacity
in the critic. But the poet cultivated becomes a stockholder in both companies,--say Mr.
Curfew,--in the Curfew stock, and in the humanity stock; and, in the last, exults as
much in the demonstration of the unsoundness of Curfew, as his interest in the former
gives him pleasure in the currency of Curfew. For, the depreciation of his Curfew stock
only shows the immense values of the humanity stock. As soon as he sides with his critic
against himself, with joy, he is a cultivated man.

We must have an intellectual quality in all property and in all action, or they are nought. I
must have children, I must have events, I must have a social state and history, or my
thinking and speaking want body or basis. But to give these accessories any value, I must
know them as contingent and rather showy possessions, which pass for more to the
people than to me. We see this abstraction in scholars, as a matter of course: but what a
charm it adds when observed in practical men. Bonaparte, like Caesar, was intellectual,
and could look at every object for itself, without affection. Though an egotist a l’outrance,
he could criticize a play, a building, a character, on universal grounds, and give a just
opinion. A man known to us only as a celebrity in politics or in trade, gains largely in our
esteem if we discover that he has some intellectual taste or skill; as when we learn of
Lord Fairfax, the Long Parliament’s general, his passion for antiquarian studies; or of the
French regicide Carnot, his sublime genius in mathematics; or of a living banker, his
success in poetry; or of a partisan journalist, his devotion to ornithology. So, if in
travelling in the dreary wildernesses of Arkansas or Texas, we should observe on the
next seat a man reading Horace, or Martial, or Calderon, we should wish to hug him. In
callings that require roughest energy, soldiers, sea-captains, and civil engineers
sometimes betray a fine insight, if only through a certain gentleness when off duty; a
good-natured admission that there are illusions, and who shall say that he is not their
sport? We only vary the phrase, not the doctrine, when we say, that culture opens the
sense of beauty. A man is a beggar who only lives to the useful, and, however he may
serve as a pin or rivet in the social machine, cannot be said to have arrived at self-
possession. I suffer, every day, from the want of perception of beauty in people. They do
not know the charm with which all moments and objects can be embellished, the charm
of manners, of self-command, of benevolence. Repose and cheerfulness are the badge
of the gentleman,--repose in energy. The Greek battle-pieces are calm; the heroes, in
whatever violent actions engaged, retain a serene aspect; as we say of Niagara, that it
falls without speed. A cheerful, intelligent face is the end of culture, and success enough.
For it indicates the purpose of Nature and wisdom attained.

When our higher faculties are in activity, we are domesticated, and awkwardness and
discomfort give place to natural and agreeable movements. It is noticed, that the
consideration of the great periods and spaces of astronomy induces a dignity of mind,
and an indifference to death. The influence of fine scenery, the presence of mountains,
appeases our irritations and elevates our friendships. Even a high dome, and the
expansive interior of a cathedral, have a sensible effect on manners. I have heard that
stiff people lose something of their awkwardness under high ceilings, and in spacious
halls. I think, sculpture and painting have an effect to teach us manners, and abolish
hurry.

But, over all, culture must reinforce from higher influx the empirical skills of eloquence,
or of politics, or of trade, and the useful arts. There is a certain loftiness of thought and
power to marshal and adjust particulars, which can only come from an insight of their
whole connection. The orator who has once seen things in their divine order, will never
quite lose sight of this, and will come to affairs as from a higher ground, and, though he
will say nothing of philosophy, he will have a certain mastery in dealing with them, and
an incapableness of being dazzled or frighted, which will distinguish his handling from
that of attorneys and factors. A man who stands on a good footing with the heads of
parties at Washington, reads the rumors of the newspapers, and the guesses of
provincial politicians, with a key to the right and wrong in each statement, and sees well
enough where all this will end. Archimedes will look through your Connecticut machine,
at a glance, and judge of its fitness. And much more, a wise man who knows not only
what Plato, but what Saint John can show him, can easily raise the affair he deals with, to
a certain majesty. Plato says, Pericles owed this elevation to the lessons of Anaxagoras.
Burke descended from a higher sphere when he would influence human affairs. Franklin,
Adams, Jefferson, Washington, stood on a fine humanity, before which the brawls of
modern senates are but pot-house politics.

But there are higher secrets of culture, which are not for the apprentices, but for
proficients. These are lessons only for the brave. We must know our friends under ugly
masks. The calamities are our friends. Ben Jonson specifies in his address to the Muse: --

“Get him the time’s long grudge, the court’s ill-will,
And, reconciled, keep him suspected still,
Make him lose all his friends, and, what is worse,
Almost all ways to any better course;
With me thou leav’st a better Muse than thee,
And which thou brought’st me, blessed Poverty.”

We wish to learn philosophy by rote, and play at heroism. But the wiser God says, Take
the shame, the poverty, and the penal solitude, that belong to truth-speaking. Try the
rough water as well as the smooth. Rough water can teach lessons worth knowing.
When the state is unquiet, personal qualities are more than ever decisive. Fear not a
revolution which will constrain you to live five years in one. Don’t be so tender at making
an enemy now and then. Be willing to go to Coventry sometimes, and let the populace
bestow on you their coldest contempts. The finished man of the world must eat of every
apple once. He must hold his hatreds also at arm’s length, and not remember spite. He
has neither friends nor enemies, but values men only as channels of power.

He who aims high, must dread an easy home and popular manners. Heaven sometimes
hedges a rare character about with ungainliness and odium, as the burr that protects the
fruit. If there is any great and good thing in store for you, it will not come at the first or
the second call, nor in the shape of fashion, ease, and city drawing-rooms. Popularity is
for dolls. “Steep and craggy,” said Porphyry, “is the path of the gods.” Open your Marcus
Antoninus. In the opinion of the ancients, he was the great man who scorned to shine,
and who contested the frowns of fortune. They preferred the noble vessel too late for
the tide, contending with winds and waves, dismantled and unrigged, to her companion
borne into harbor with colors flying and guns firing. There is none of the social goods
that may not be purchased too dear, and mere amiableness must not take rank with
high aims and self-subsistency.

Bettine replies to Goethe’s mother, who chides her disregard of dress,--“If I cannot do
as I have a mind, in our poor Frankfort, I shall not carry things far.” And the youth must
rate at its true mark the inconceivable levity of local opinion. The longer we live, the
more we must endure the elementary existence of men and women; and every brave
heart must treat society as a child, and never allow it to dictate.

“All that class of the severe and restrictive virtues,” said Burke, “are almost too costly for
humanity.” Who wishes to be severe? Who wishes to resist the eminent and polite, in
behalf of the poor, and low, and impolite? and who that dares do it, can keep his temper
sweet, his frolic spirits? The high virtues are not debonair, but have their redress in being
illustrious at last. What forests of laurel we bring, and the tears of mankind, to those who
stood firm against the opinion of their contemporaries! The measure of a master is his
success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years later.

Let me say here, that culture cannot begin too early. In talking with scholars, I observe
that they lost on ruder companions those years of boyhood which alone could give
imaginative literature a religious and infinite quality in their esteem. I find, too, that the
chance for appreciation is much increased by being the son of an appreciator, and that
these boys who now grow up are caught not only years too late, but two or three births
too late, to make the best scholars of. And I think it a presentable motive to a scholar,
that, as, in an old community, a well-born proprietor is usually found, after the first heats
of youth, to be a careful husband, and to feel a habitual desire that the estate shall suffer
no harm by his administration, but shall be delivered down to the next heir in as good
condition as he received it;--so, a considerate man will reckon himself a subject of that
secular melioration by which mankind is mollified, cured, and refined, and will shun
every expenditure of his forces on pleasure or gain, which will jeopardize this social and
secular accumulation.

The fossil strata show us that Nature began with rudimental forms, and rose to the more
complex, as fast as the earth was fit for their dwelling-place; and that the lower perish, as
the higher appear. Very few of our race can be said to be yet finished men. We still carry
sticking to us some remains of the preceding inferior quadruped organization. We call
these millions men; but they are not yet men. Half-engaged in the soil, pawing to get free,
man needs all the music that can be brought to disengage him. If Love, red Love, with
tears and joy; if Want with his scourge; if War with his cannonade; if Christianity with its
charity; if Trade with its money; if Art with its portfolios; if Science with her telegraphs
through the deeps of space and time; can set his dull nerves throbbing, and by loud taps
on the tough chrysalis, can break its walls, and let the new creature emerge erect and
free,--make way, and sing paean! The age of the quadruped is to go out,--the age of
the brain and of the heart is to come in. The time will come when the evil forms we have
known can no more be organized. Man’s culture can spare nothing, wants all the
material. He is to convert all impediments into instruments, all enemies into power. The
formidable mischief will only make the more useful slave. And if one shall read the future
of the race hinted in the organic effort of Nature to mount and meliorate, and the
corresponding impulse to the Better in the human being, we shall dare affirm that there
is nothing he will not overcome and convert, until at last culture shall absorb the chaos
and gehenna. He will convert the Furies into Muses, and the hells into benefit.




V. BEHAVIOR



Grace, Beauty, and Caprice
Build this golden portal;
Graceful women, chosen men
Dazzle every mortal:
Their sweet and lofty countenance
His enchanting food;
He need not go to them, their forms
Beset his solitude.
He looketh seldom in their face,
His eyes explore the ground,
The green grass is a looking-glass
Whereon their traits are found.
Little he says to them,
So dances his heart in his breast,
Their tranquil mien bereaveth him
Of wit, of words, of rest.
Too weak to win, too fond to shun
The tyrants of his doom,
The much deceived Endymion
Slips behind a tomb.



The soul which animates Nature is not less significantly published in the figure,
movement, and gesture of animated bodies, than in its last vehicle of articulate speech.
This silent and subtile language is Manners; not what, but how. Life expresses. A statue
has no tongue, and needs none. Good tableaux do not need declamation. Nature tells
every secret once. Yes, but in man she tells it all the time, by form, attitude, gesture,
mien, face, and parts of the face, and by the whole action of the machine. The visible
carriage or action of the individual, as resulting from his organization and his will
combined, we call manners. What are they but thought entering the hands and feet,
controlling the movements of the body, the speech and behavior?

There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the
happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love,--now repeated and
hardened into usage. They form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is
washed, and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dew-drops which give
such a depth to the morning meadows. Manners are very communicable: men catch
them from each other. Consuelo, in the romance, boasts of the lessons she had given
the nobles in manners, on the stage; and, in real life, Talma taught Napoleon the arts of
behavior. Genius invents fine manners, which the baron and the baroness copy very fast,
and, by the advantage of a palace, better the instruction. They stereotype the lesson they
have learned into a mode.

The power of manners is incessant,--an element as unconcealable as fire. The nobility
cannot in any country be disguised, and no more in a republic or a democracy, than in a
kingdom. No man can resist their influence. There are certain manners which are
learned in good society, of that force, that, if a person have them, he or she must be
considered, and is everywhere welcome, though without beauty, or wealth, or genius.
Give a boy address and accomplishments, and you give him the mastery of palaces and
fortunes where he goes. He has not the trouble of earning or owning them: they solicit
him to enter and possess. We send girls of a timid, retreating disposition to the boarding-
school, to the riding-school, to the ballroom, or wheresoever they can come into
acquaintance and nearness of leading persons of their own sex; where they might learn
address, and see it near at hand. The power of a woman of fashion to lead, and also to
daunt and repel, derives from their belief that she knows resources and behaviors not
known to them; but when these have mastered her secret, they learn to confront her,
and recover their self-possession.

Every day bears witness to their gentle rule. People who would obtrude, now do not
obtrude. The mediocre circle learns to demand that which belongs to a high state of
nature or of culture. Your manners are always under examination, and by committees
little suspected,--a police in citizens’ clothes,--but are awarding or denying you very
high prizes when you least think of it.

We talk much of utilities,--but ’tis our manners that associate us. In hours of business,
we go to him who knows, or has, or does this or that which we want, and we do not let
our taste or feeling stand in the way. But this activity over, we return to the indolent
state, and wish for those we can be at ease with; those who will go where we go, whose
manners do not offend us, whose social tone chimes with ours. When we reflect on their
persuasive and cheering force; how they recommend, prepare, and draw people
together; how, in all clubs, manners make the members; how manners make the fortune
of the ambitious youth; that, for the most part, his manners marry him, and, for the most
part, he marries manners; when we think what keys they are, and to what secrets; what
high lessons and inspiring tokens of character they convey; and what divination is
required in us, for the reading of this fine telegraph, we see what range the subject has,
and what relations to convenience, power, and beauty.

Their first service is very low,--when they are the minor morals: but ’tis the beginning
of civility,--to make us, I mean, endurable to each other. We prize them for their rough-
plastic, abstergent force; to get people out of the quadruped state; to get them washed,
clothed, and set up on end; to slough their animal husks and habits; compel them to be
clean; overawe their spite and meanness, teach them to stifle the base, and choose the
generous expression, and make them know how much happier the generous behaviors
are.

Bad behavior the laws cannot reach. Society is infested with rude, cynical, restless, and
frivolous persons who prey upon the rest, and whom, a public opinion concentrated into
good manners, forms accepted by the sense of all, can reach:--the contradictors and
railers at public and private tables, who are like terriers, who conceive it the duty of a
dog of honor to growl at any passer-by, and do the honors of the house by barking him
out of sight:--I have seen men who neigh like a horse when you contradict them, or say
something which they do not understand:--then the overbold, who make their own
invitation to your hearth; the persevering talker, who gives you his society in large,
saturating doses; the pitiers of themselves,--a perilous class; the frivolous Asmodeus,
who relies on you to find him in ropes of sand to twist; the monotones; in short, every
stripe of absurdity;--these are social inflictions which the magistrate cannot cure or
defend you from, and which must be intrusted to the restraining force of custom, and
proverbs, and familiar rules of behavior impressed on young people in their school-days.

In the hotels on the banks of the Mississippi, they print, or used to print, among the rules
of the house, that “no gentleman can be permitted to come to the public table without
his coat;” and in the same country, in the pews of the churches, little placards plead with
the worshipper against the fury of expectoration. Charles Dickens self-sacrificingly
undertook the reformation of our American manners in unspeakable particulars. I think
the lesson was not quite lost; that it held bad manners up, so that the churls could see
the deformity. Unhappily, the book had its own deformities. It ought not to need to print
in a reading-room a caution to strangers not to speak loud; nor to persons who look over
fine engravings, that they should be handled like cobwebs and butterflies’ wings; nor to
persons who look at marble statues, that they shall not smite them with canes. But, even
in the perfect civilization of this city, such cautions are not quite needless in the
Athenaeum and City Library.

Manners are factitious, and grow out of circumstance as well as out of character. If you
look at the pictures of patricians and of peasants, of different periods and countries, you
will see how well they match the same classes in our towns. The modern aristocrat not
only is well drawn in Titian’s Venetian doges, and in Roman coins and statues, but also in
the pictures which Commodore Perry brought home of dignitaries in Japan. Broad lands
and great interests not only arrive to such heads as can manage them, but form manners
of power. A keen eye, too, will see nice gradations of rank, or see in the manners the
degree of homage the party is wont to receive. A prince who is accustomed every day to
be courted and deferred to by the highest grandees, acquires a corresponding
expectation, and a becoming mode of receiving and replying to this homage.

There are always exceptional people and modes. English grandees affect to be farmers.
Claverhouse is a fop, and, under the finish of dress, and levity of behavior, hides the
terror of his war. But Nature and Destiny are honest, and never fail to leave their mark,
to hang out a sign for each and for every quality. It is much to conquer one’s face, and
perhaps the ambitious youth thinks he has got the whole secret when he has learned,
that disengaged manners are commanding. Don’t be deceived by a facile exterior.
Tender men sometimes have strong wills. We had, in Massachusetts, an old statesman,
who had sat all his life in courts and in chairs of state, without overcoming an extreme
irritability of face, voice, and bearing: when he spoke, his voice would not serve him; it
cracked, it broke, it wheezed, it piped;--little cared he; he knew that it had got to pipe,
or wheeze, or screech his argument and his indignation. When he sat down, after
speaking, he seemed in a sort of fit, and held on to his chair with both hands: but
underneath all this irritability, was a puissant will, firm, and advancing, and a memory in
which lay in order and method like geologic strata every fact of his history, and under
the control of his will.

Manners are partly factitious, but, mainly, there must be capacity for culture in the blood.
Else all culture is vain. The obstinate prejudice in favor of blood, which lies at the base of
the feudal and monarchical fabrics of the old world, has some reason in common
experience. Every man,? mathematician, artist, soldier, or merchant,--looks with
confidence for some traits and talents in his own child, which he would not dare to
presume in the child of a stranger. The Orientalists are very orthodox on this point. “Take
a thorn-bush,” said the emir Abdel-Kader, “and sprinkle it for a whole year with water; --
it will yield nothing but thorns. Take a date-tree, leave it without culture, and it will
always produce dates. Nobility is the date-tree, and the Arab populace is a bush of
thorns.”

A main fact in the history of manners is the wonderful expressiveness of the human
body. If it were made of glass, or of air, and the thoughts were written on steel tablets
within, it could not publish more truly its meaning than now. Wise men read very sharply
all your private history in your look and gait and behavior. The whole economy of nature
is bent on expression. The tell-tale body is all tongues. Men are like Geneva watches with
crystal faces which expose the whole movement. They carry the liquor of life flowing up
and down in these beautiful bottles, and announcing to the curious how it is with them.
The face and eyes reveal what the spirit is doing, how old it is, what aims it has. The eyes
indicate the antiquity of the soul, or, through how many forms it has already ascended. It
almost violates the proprieties, if we say above the breath here, what the confessing eyes
do not hesitate to utter to every street passenger.

Man cannot fix his eye on the sun, and so far seems imperfect. In Siberia, a late traveller
found men who could see the satellites of Jupiter with their unarmed eye. In some
respects the animals excel us. The birds have a longer sight, beside the advantage by
their wings of a higher observatory. A cow can bid her calf, by secret signal, probably of
the eye, to run away, or to lie down and hide itself. The jockeys say of certain horses, that
“they look over the whole ground.” The out-door life, and hunting, and labor, give equal
vigor to the human eye. A farmer looks out at you as strong as the horse; his eye-beam is
like the stroke of a staff. An eye can threaten like a loaded and levelled gun, or can insult
like hissing or kicking; or, in its altered mood, by beams of kindness, it can make the
heart dance with joy.

The eye obeys exactly the action of the mind. When a thought strikes us, the eyes fix, and
remain gazing at a distance; in enumerating the names of persons or of countries, as
France, Germany, Spain, Turkey, the eyes wink at each new name. There is no nicety of
learning sought by the mind, which the eyes do not vie in acquiring. “An artist,” said
Michel Angelo, “must have his measuring tools not in the hand, but in the eye;” and there
is no end to the catalogue of its performances, whether in indolent vision, (that of health
and beauty,) or in strained vision, (that of art and labor.)

Eyes are bold as lions,--roving, running, leaping, here and there, far and near. They
speak all languages. They wait for no introduction; they are no Englishmen; ask no leave
of age, or rank; they respect neither poverty nor riches, neither learning nor power, nor
virtue, nor sex, but intrude, and come again, and go through and through you, in a
moment of time. What inundation of life and thought is discharged from one soul into
another, through them! The glance is natural magic. The mysterious communication
established across a house between two entire strangers, moves all the springs of
wonder. The communication by the glance is in the greatest part not subject to the
control of the will. It is the bodily symbol of identity of nature. We look into the eyes to
know if this other form is another self, and the eyes will not lie, but make a faithful
confession what inhabitant is there. The revelations are sometimes terrific. The
confession of a low, usurping devil is there made, and the observer shall seem to feel the
stirring of owls, and bats, and horned hoofs, where he looked for innocence and
simplicity. ‘Tis remarkable, too, that the spirit that appears at the windows of the house
does at once invest himself in a new form of his own, to the mind of the beholder.

The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues, with the advantage, that the ocular
dialect needs no dictionary, but is understood all the world over. When the eyes say one
thing, and the tongue another, a practised man relies on the language of the first. If the
man is off his centre, the eyes show it. You can read in the eyes of your companion,
whether your argument hits him, though his tongue will not confess it. There is a look by
which a man shows he is going to say a good thing, and a look when he has said it. Vain
and forgotten are all the fine offers and offices of hospitality, if there is no holiday in the
eye. How many furtive inclinations avowed by the eye, though dissembled by the lips!
One comes away from a company, in which, it may easily happen, he has said nothing,
and no important remark has been addressed to him, and yet, if in sympathy with the
society, he shall not have a sense of this fact, such a stream of life has been flowing into
him, and out from him, through the eyes. There are eyes, to be sure, that give no more
admission into the man than blueberries. Others are liquid and deep,--wells that a
man might fall into;--others are aggressive and devouring, seem to call out the police,
take all too much notice, and require crowded Broadways, and the security of millions, to
protect individuals against them. The military eye I meet, now darkly sparkling under
clerical, now under rustic brows. ‘Tis the city of Lacedaemon; ’tis a stack of bayonets.
There are asking eyes, asserting eyes, prowling eyes; and eyes full of fate,--some of
good, and some of sinister omen. The alleged power to charm down insanity, or ferocity
in beasts, is a power behind the eye. It must be a victory achieved in the will, before it can
be signified in the eye. ‘Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact
indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it.
A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence. Whoever looked on
him would consent to his will, being certified that his aims were generous and universal.
The reason why men do not obey us, is because they see the mud at the bottom of our
eye.

If the organ of sight is such a vehicle of power, the other features have their own. A man
finds room in the few square inches of the face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the
expression of all his history, and his wants. The sculptor, and Winckelmann, and Lavater,
will tell you how significant a feature is the nose; how its forms express strength or
weakness of will, and good or bad temper. The nose of Julius Caesar, of Dante, and of
Pitt, suggest “the terrors of the beak.” What refinement, and what limitations, the teeth
betray! “Beware you don’t laugh,” said the wise mother, “for then you show all your
faults.”

Balzac left in manuscript a chapter, which he called “Theorie de la demarche,” in which
he says: “The look, the voice, the respiration, and the attitude or walk, are identical. But,
as it has not been given to man, the power to stand guard, at once, over these four
different simultaneous expressions of his thought, watch that one which speaks out the
truth, and you will know the whole man.”

Palaces interest us mainly in the exhibition of manners, which, in the idle and expensive
society dwelling in them, are raised to a high art. The maxim of courts is, that manner is
power. A calm and resolute bearing, a polished speech, an embellishment of trifles, and
the art of hiding all uncomfortable feeling, are essential to the courtier: and Saint Simon,
and Cardinal de Retz, and R;oederer, and an encyclopaedia of Memoires, will instruct
you, if you wish, in those potent secrets. Thus, it is a point of pride with kings, to
remember faces and names. It is reported of one prince, that his head had the air of
leaning downwards, in order not to humble the crowd. There are people who come in
ever like a child with a piece of good news. It was said of the late Lord Holland, that he
always came down to breakfast with the air of a man who had just met with some signal
good-fortune. In “Notre Dame,” the grandee took his place on the dais, with the look of
one who is thinking of something else. But we must not peep and eavesdrop at palacedoors.

Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others. A scholar may be a well-bred
man, or he may not. The enthusiast is introduced to polished scholars in society, and is
chilled and silenced by finding himself not in their element. They all have somewhat
which he has not, and, it seems, ought to have. But if he finds the scholar apart from his
companions, it is then the enthusiast’s turn, and the scholar has no defence, but must
deal on his terms. Now they must fight the battle out on their private strengths. What is
the talent of that character so common,--the successful man of the world,--in all
marts, senates, and drawing-rooms? Manners: manners of power; sense to see his
advantage, and manners up to it. See him approach his man. He knows that troops
behave as they are handled at first;--that is his cheap secret; just what happens to
every two persons who meet on any affair,--one instantly perceives that he has the key
of the situation, that his will comprehends the other’s will, as the cat does the mouse;
and he has only to use courtesy, and furnish good-natured reasons to his victim to cover
up the chain, lest he be shamed into resistance.

The theatre in which this science of manners has a formal importance is not with us a
court, but dress-circles, wherein, after the close of the day’s business, men and women
meet at leisure, for mutual entertainment, in ornamented drawing-rooms. Of course, it
has every variety of attraction and merit; but, to earnest persons, to youths or maidens
who have great objects at heart, we cannot extol it highly. A well-dressed, talkative
company, where each is bent to amuse the other,--yet the high-born Turk who came
hither fancied that every woman seemed to be suffering for a chair; that all the talkers
were brained and exhausted by the deoxygenated air: it spoiled the best persons: it put
all on stilts. Yet here are the secret biographies written and read. The aspect of that man
is repulsive; I do not wish to deal with him. The other is irritable, shy, and on his guard.
The youth looks humble and manly: I choose him. Look on this woman. There is not
beauty, nor brilliant sayings, nor distinguished power to serve you; but all see her gladly;
her whole air and impression are healthful. Here come the sentimentalists, and the
invalids. Here is Elise, who caught cold in coming into the world, and has always
increased it since. Here are creep-mouse manners; and thievish manners. “Look at
Northcote,” said Fuseli; “he looks like a rat that has seen a cat.” In the shallow company,
easily excited, easily tired, here is the columnar Bernard: the Alleghanies do not express
more repose than his behavior. Here are the sweet following eyes of Cecile: it seemed
always that she demanded the heart. Nothing can be more excellent in kind than the
Corinthian grace of Gertrude’s manners, and yet Blanche, who has no manners, has
better manners than she; for the movements of Blanche are the sallies of a spirit which
is sufficient for the moment, and she can afford to express every thought by instant
action.

Manners have been somewhat cynically defined to be a contrivance of wise men to keep
fools at a distance. Fashion is shrewd to detect those who do not belong to her train, and
seldom wastes her attentions. Society is very swift in its instincts, and, if you do not
belong to it, resists and sneers at you; or quietly drops you. The first weapon enrages
the party attacked; the second is still more effective, but is not to be resisted, as the date
of the transaction is not easily found. People grow up and grow old under this infliction,
and never suspect the truth, ascribing the solitude which acts on them very injuriously,
to any cause but the right one.

The basis of good manners is self-reliance. Necessity is the law of all who are not self-
possessed. Those who are not self-possessed, obtrude, and pain us. Some men appear
to feel that they belong to a Pariah caste. They fear to offend, they bend and apologize,
and walk through life with a timid step. As we sometimes dream that we are in a well-
dressed company without any coat, so Godfrey acts ever as if he suffered from some
mortifying circumstance. The hero should find himself at home, wherever he is: should
impart comfort by his own security and good-nature to all beholders. The hero is
suffered to be himself. A person of strong mind comes to perceive that for him an
immunity is secured so long as he renders to society that service which is native and
proper to him,--an immunity from all the observances, yea, and duties, which society
so tyrannically imposes on the rank and file of its members. “Euripides,” says Aspasia,
“has not the fine manners of Sophocles; but,”--she adds good-humoredly, “the movers
and masters of our souls have surely a right to throw out their limbs as carelessly as
they please, on the world that belongs to them, and before the creatures they have
animated.” (*)

(*) Landor: Pericles and Aspasia.

Manners require time, as nothing is more vulgar than haste. Friendship should be
surrounded with ceremonies and respects, and not crushed into corners. Friendship
requires more time than poor busy men can usually command. Here comes to me
Roland, with a delicacy of sentiment leading and inwrapping him like a divine cloud or
holy ghost. ‘Tis a great destitution to both that this should not be entertained with
large leisures, but contrariwise should be balked by importunate affairs.

But through this lustrous varnish, the reality is ever shining. ‘Tis hard to keep the what
from breaking through this pretty painting of the how. The core will come to the surface.
Strong will and keen perception overpower old manners, and create new; and the
thought of the present moment has a greater value than all the past. In persons of
character, we do not remark manners, because of their instantaneousness. We are
surprised by the thing done, out of all power to watch the way of it. Yet nothing is more
charming than to recognize the great style which runs through the actions of such.
People masquerade before us in their fortunes, titles, offices, and connections, as
academic or civil presidents, or senators, or professors, or great lawyers, and impose on
the frivolous, and a good deal on each other, by these fames. At least, it is a point of
prudent good manners to treat these reputations tenderly, as if they were merited. But
the sad realist knows these fellows at a glance, and they know him; as when in Paris the
chief of the police enters a ballroom, so many diamonded pretenders shrink and make
themselves as inconspicuous as they can, or give him a supplicating look as they pass. “I
had received,” said a sibyl, “I had received at birth the fatal gift of penetration:”--and
these Cassandras are always born.

Manners impress as they indicate real power. A man who is sure of his point, carries a
broad and contented expression, which everybody reads. And you cannot rightly train
one to an air and manner, except by making him the kind of man of whom that manner
is the natural expression. Nature forever puts a premium on reality. What is done for
effect, is seen to be done for effect; what is done for love, is felt to be done for love. A
man inspires affection and honor, because he was not lying in wait for these. The things
of a man for which we visit him, were done in the dark and the cold. A little integrity is
better than any career. So deep are the sources of this surface-action, that even the size
of your companion seems to vary with his freedom of thought. Not only is he larger,
when at ease, and his thoughts generous, but everything around him becomes variable
with expression. No carpenter’s rule, no rod and chain, will measure the dimensions of
any house or house-lot: go into the house: if the proprietor is constrained and deferring,
’tis of no importance how large his house, how beautiful his grounds,--you quickly
come to the end of all: but if the man is self-possessed, happy, and at home, his house is
deep-founded, indefinitely large and interesting, the roof and dome buoyant as the sky.
Under the humblest roof, the commonest person in plain clothes sits there massive,
cheerful, yet formidable like the Egyptian colossi.

Neither Aristotle, nor Leibnitz, nor Junius, nor Champollion has set down the grammar-
rules of this dialect, older than Sanscrit; but they who cannot yet read English, can read
this. Men take each other’s measure, when they meet for the first time,--and every time
they meet. How do they get this rapid knowledge, even before they speak, of each other’s
power and dispositions? One would say, that the persuasion of their speech is not in
what they say,--or, that men do not convince by their argument,--but by their
personality, by who they are, and what they said and did heretofore. A man already
strong is listened to, and everything he says is applauded. Another opposes him with
sound argument, but the argument is scouted, until by and by it gets into the mind of
some weighty person; then it begins to tell on the community.

Self-reliance is the basis of behavior, as it is the guaranty that the powers are not
squandered in too much demonstration. In this country, where school education is
universal, we have a superficial culture, and a profusion of reading and writing and
expression. We parade our nobilities in poems and orations, instead of working them up
into happiness. There is a whisper out of the ages to him who can understand it, --
`whatever is known to thyself alone, has always very great value.’ There is some reason
to believe, that, when a man does not write his poetry, it escapes by other vents through
him, instead of the one vent of writing; clings to his form and manners, whilst poets have
often nothing poetical about them except their verses. Jacobi said, that “when a man has
fully expressed his thought, he has somewhat less possession of it.” One would say, the
rule is,--What a man is irresistibly urged to say, helps him and us. In explaining his
thought to others, he explains it to himself: but when he opens it for show, it corrupts
him.

Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are their literature. Novels are
the journal or record of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from
the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more
worthily. The novels used to be all alike, and had a quite vulgar tone. The novels used to
lead us on to a foolish interest in the fortunes of the boy and girl they described. The boy
was to be raised from a humble to a high position. He was in want of a wife and a castle,
and the object of the story was to supply him with one or both. We watched
sympathetically, step by step, his climbing, until, at last, the point is gained, the wedding
day is fixed, and we follow the gala procession home to the castle, when the doors are
slammed in our face, and the poor reader is left outside in the cold, not enriched by so
much as an idea, or a virtuous impulse.

But the victories of character are instant, and victories for all. Its greatness enlarges all.
We are fortified by every heroic anecdote. The novels are as useful as Bibles, if they
teach you the secret, that the best of life is conversation, and the greatest success is
confidence, or perfect understanding between sincere people. ‘Tis a French definition of
friendship, rien que s’entendre, good understanding. The highest compact we can make
with our fellow, is,--`Let there be truth between us two forevermore.’ That is the charm
in all good novels, as it is the charm in all good histories, that the heroes mutually
understand, from the first, and deal loyally, and with a profound trust in each other. It is
sublime to feel and say of another, I need never meet, or speak, or write to him: we need
not reinforce ourselves, or send tokens of remembrance: I rely on him as on myself: if he
did thus or thus, I know it was right.

In all the superior people I have met, I notice directness, truth spoken more truly, as if
everything of obstruction, of malformation, had been trained away. What have they to
conceal? What have they to exhibit? Between simple and noble persons, there is always a
quick intelligence: they recognize at sight, and meet on a better ground than the talents
and skills they may chance to possess, namely, on sincerity and uprightness. For, it is not
what talents or genius a man has, but how he is to his talents, that constitutes friendship
and character. The man that stands by himself, the universe stands by him also. It is
related of the monk Basle, that, being excommunicated by the Pope, he was, at his
death, sent in charge of an angel to find a fit place of suffering in hell: but, such was the
eloquence and good-humor of the monk, that, wherever he went he was received gladly,
and civilly treated, even by the most uncivil angels: and, when he came to discourse with
them, instead of contradicting or forcing him, they took his part, and adopted his
manners: and even good angels came from far, to see him, and take up their abode with
him. The angel that was sent to find a place of torment for him, attempted to remove
him to a worse pit, but with no better success; for such was the contented spirit of the
monk, that he found something to praise in every place and company, though in hell,
and made a kind of heaven of it. At last the escorting angel returned with his prisoner to
them that sent him, saying, that no phlegethon could be found that would burn him; for
that, in whatever condition, Basle remained incorrigibly Basle. The legend says, his
sentence was remitted, and he was allowed to go into heaven, and was canonized as a
saint.

There is a stroke of magnanimity in the correspondence of Bonaparte with his brother
Joseph, when the latter was King of Spain, and complained that he missed in Napoleon’s
letters the affectionate tone which had marked their childish correspondence. “I am
sorry,” replies Napoleon, “you think you shall find your brother again only in the Elysian
Fields. It is natural, that at forty, he should not feel towards you as he did at twelve. But
his feelings towards you have greater truth and strength. His friendship has the features
of his mind.”

How much we forgive to those who yield us the rare spectacle of heroic manners! We will
pardon them the want of books, of arts, and even of the gentler virtues. How tenaciously
we remember them! Here is a lesson which I brought along with me in boyhood from the
Latin School, and which ranks with the best of Roman anecdotes. Marcus Scaurus was
accused by Quintus Varius Hispanus, that he had excited the allies to take arms against
the Republic. But he, full of firmness and gravity, defended himself in this manner:
“Quintus Varius Hispanus alleges that Marcus Scaurus, President of the Senate, excited
the allies to arms: Marcus Scaurus, President of the Senate, denies it. There is no witness.
Which do you believe, Romans?” “Utri creditis, Quirites?” When he had said these words,
he was absolved by the assembly of the people.

I have seen manners that make a similar impression with personal beauty; that give
the like exhilaration, and refine us like that; and, in memorable experiences, they are
suddenly better than beauty, and make that superfluous and ugly. But they must be
marked by fine perception, the acquaintance with real beauty. They must always show
self-control: you shall not be facile, apologetic, or leaky, but king over your word; and
every gesture and action shall indicate power at rest. Then they must be inspired by the
good heart. There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to
scatter joy and not pain around us. ‘Tis good to give a stranger a meal, or a night’s
lodging. ‘Tis better to be hospitable to his good meaning and thought, and give courage
to a companion. We must be as courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are
willing to give the advantage of a good light. Special precepts are not to be thought of:
the talent of well-doing contains them all. Every hour will show a duty as paramount as
that of my whim just now; and yet I will write it,--that there is one topic peremptorily
forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers. If you have
not slept, or if you have slept, or if you have headache, or sciatica, or leprosy, or thun-
derstroke, I beseech you, by all angels, to hold your peace, and not pollute the morning, to
which all the housemates bring serene and pleasant thoughts, by corruption and groans.
Come out of the azure. Love the day. Do not leave the sky out of your landscape. The
oldest and the most deserving person should come very modestly into any newly awaked
company, respecting the divine communications, out of which all must be presumed to
have newly come. An old man who added an elevating culture to a large experience of
life, said to me, “When you come into the room, I think I will study how to make humanity
beautiful to you.”

As respects the delicate question of culture, I do not think that any other than negative
rules can be laid down. For positive rules, for suggestion, Nature alone inspires it. Who
dare assume to guide a youth, a maid, to perfect manners?--the golden mean is so
delicate, difficult,--say frankly, unattainable. What finest hands would not be clumsy to
sketch the genial precepts of the young girl’s demeanor? The chances seem infinite
against success; and yet success is continually attained. There must not be
secondariness, and ’tis a thousand to one that her air and manner will at once betray
that she is not primary, but that there is some other one or many of her class, to whom
she habitually postpones herself. But Nature lifts her easily, and without knowing it, over
these impossibilities, and we are continually surprised with graces and felicities not only
unteachable, but undescribable.




VI. WORSHIP



This is he, who, felled by foes,
Sprung harmless up, refreshed by blows:
He to captivity was sold,
But him no prison-bars would hold:
Though they sealed him in a rock,
Mountain chains he can unlock:
Thrown to lions for their meat,
The crouching lion kissed his feet:
Bound to the stake, no flames appalled,
But arched o’er him an honoring vault.
This is he men miscall Fate,
Threading dark ways, arriving late,
But ever coming in time to crown
The truth, and hurl wrongdoers down.
He is the oldest, and best known,
More near than aught thou call’st thy own,
Yet, greeted in another’s eyes,
Disconcerts with glad surprise.
This is Jove, who, deaf to prayers,
Floods with blessings unawares.
Draw, if thou canst, the mystic line,
Severing rightly his from thine,
Which is human, which divine.



Some of my friends have complained, when the preceding papers were read, that we
discussed Fate, Power, and Wealth, on too low a platform; gave too much line to the evil
spirit of the times; too many cakes to Cerberus; that we ran Cudworth’s risk of making,
by excess of candor, the argument of atheism so strong, that he could not answer it. I
have no fears of being forced in my own despite to play, as we say, the devil’s attorney. I
have no infirmity of faith; no belief that it is of much importance what I or any man may
say: I am sure that a certain truth will be said through me, though I should be dumb, or
though I should try to say the reverse. Nor do I fear skepticism for any good soul. A just
thinker will allow full swing to his skepticism. I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I
am not afraid of falling into my inkpot. I have no sympathy with a poor man I knew, who,
when suicides abounded, told me he dared not look at his razor. We are of different
opinions at different hours, but we always may be said to be at heart on the side of truth.

I see not why we should give ourselves such sanctified airs. If the Divine Providence has
hid from men neither disease, nor deformity, nor corrupt society, but has stated itself
out in passions, in war, in trade, in the love of power and pleasure, in hunger and need,
in tyrannies, literatures, and arts,--let us not be so nice that we cannot write these facts
down coarsely as they stand, or doubt but there is a counter-statement as ponderous,
which we can arrive at, and which, being put, will make all square. The solar system has
no anxiety about its reputation, and the credit of truth and honesty is as safe; nor have I
any fear that a skeptical bias can be given by leaning hard on the sides of fate, of
practical power, or of trade, which the doctrine of Faith cannot down-weigh. The strength
of that principle is not measured in ounces and pounds: it tyrannizes at the centre of
Nature. We may well give skepticism as much line as we can. The spirit will return, and fill
us. It drives the drivers. It counterbalances any accumulations of power.

“Heaven kindly gave our blood a moral flow.”

We are born loyal. The whole creation is made of hooks and eyes, of bitumen, of sticking-
plaster, and whether your community is made in Jerusalem or in California, of saints or
of wreckers, it coheres in a perfect ball. Men as naturally make a state, or a church, as
caterpillars a web. If they were more refined, it would be less formal, it would be nervous,
like that of the Shakers, who, from long habit of thinking and feeling together, it is said,
are affected in the same way, at the same time, to work and to play, and as they go with
perfect sympathy to their tasks in the field or shop, so are they inclined for a ride or a
journey at the same instant, and the horses come up with the family carriage unbespoken
to the door.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs, as a tree bears apples. A self-poise belongs to
every particle; and a rectitude to every mind, and is the Nemesis and protector of every
society. I and my neighbors have been bred in the notion, that, unless we came soon to
some good church,--Calvinism, or Behmenism, or Romanism, or Mormonism,--there
would be a universal thaw and dissolution. No Isaiah or Jeremy has arrived. Nothing can
exceed the anarchy that has followed in our skies. The stern old faiths have all
pulverized. ‘Tis a whole population of gentlemen and ladies out in search of religions. ‘Tis
as flat anarchy in our ecclesiastic realms, as that which existed in Massachusetts, in the
Revolution, or which prevails now on the slope of the Rocky Mountains or Pike’s Peak.
Yet we make shift to live. Men are loyal. Nature has self-poise in all her works; certain
proportions in which oxygen and azote combine, and, not less a harmony in faculties, a
fitness in the spring and the regulator.

The decline of the influence of Calvin, or Fenelon, or Wesley, or Channing, need give us
no uneasiness. The builder of heaven has not so ill constructed his creature as that the
religion, that is, the public nature, should fall out: the public and the private element, like
north and south, like inside and outside, like centrifugal and centripetal, adhere to every
soul, and cannot be subdued, except the soul is dissipated. God builds his temple in the
heart on the ruins of churches and religions.

In the last chapters, we treated some particulars of the question of culture. But the whole
state of man is a state of culture; and its flowering and completion may be described as
Religion, or Worship. There is always some religion, some hope and fear extended into
the invisible,--from the blind boding which nails a horseshoe to the mast or the
threshold, up to the song of the Elders in the Apocalypse. But the religion cannot rise
above the state of the votary. Heaven always bears some proportion to earth. The god of
the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a
merchant. In all ages, souls out of time, extraordinary, prophetic, are born, who are
rather related to the system of the world, than to their particular age and locality. These
announce absolute truths, which, with whatever reverence received, are speedily
dragged down into a savage interpretation. The interior tribes of our Indians, and some
of the Pacific islanders, flog their gods, when things take an unfavorable turn. The Greek
poets did not hesitate to let loose their petulant wit on their deities also. Laomedon, in
his anger at Neptune and Apollo, who had built Troy for him, and demanded their price,
does not hesitate to menace them that he will cut their ears off. (*) Among our Norse
forefathers, King Olaf’s mode of converting Eyvind to Christianity was to put a pan of
glowing coals on his belly, which burst asunder. “Wilt thou now, Eyvind, believe in Christ?”
asks Olaf, in excellent faith. Another argument was an adder put into the mouth of the
reluctant disciple Rand, who refused to believe.
(*) Iliad, Book xxi. l. 455.

Christianity, in the romantic ages, signified European culture,--the grafted or
meliorated tree in a crab forest. And to marry a pagan wife or husband, was to marry
Beast, and voluntarily to take a step backwards towards the baboon.

“Hengist had verament
A daughter both fair and gent,
But she was heathen Sarazine,
And Vortigern for love fine
Her took to fere and to wife,
And was cursed in all his life;
For he let Christian wed heathen,
And mixed our blood as flesh and mathen.”

What Gothic mixtures the Christian creed drew from the pagan sources, Richard of
Devizes’s chronicle of Richard I.’s crusade, in the twelfth century, may show. King Richard
taunts God with forsaking him: “O fie! O how unwilling should I be to forsake thee, in so
forlorn and dreadful a position, were I thy lord and advocate, as thou art mine. In sooth,
my standards will in future be despised, not through my fault, but through thine: in
sooth, not through any cowardice of my warfare, art thou thyself, my king and my God
conquered, this day, and not Richard thy vassal.” The religion of the early English poets is
anomalous, so devout and so blasphemous, in the same breath. Such is Chaucer’s
extraordinary confusion of heaven and earth in the picture of Dido.

“She was so fair,
So young, so lusty, with her eyen glad,
That if that God that heaven and earthe made
Would have a love for beauty and goodness,
And womanhede, truth, and seemliness,
Whom should he loven but this lady sweet?
There n’ is no woman to him half so meet.”

With these grossnesses, we complacently compare our own taste and decorum. We think
and speak with more temperance and gradation,--but is not indifferentism as bad as
superstition?

We live in a transition period, when the old faiths which comforted nations, and not only
so, but made nations, seem to have spent their force. I do not find the religions of men
at this moment very creditable to them, but either childish and insignificant, or unmanly
and effeminating. The fatal trait is the divorce between religion and morality. Here are
know-nothing religions, or churches that proscribe intellect; scortatory religions; slave-
holding and slave-trading religions; and, even in the decent populations, idolatries
wherein the whiteness of the ritual covers scarlet indulgence. The lover of the old
religion complains that our contemporaries, scholars as well as merchants, succumb to a
great despair,--have corrupted into a timorous conservatism, and believe in nothing. In
our large cities, the population is godless, materialized,--no bond, no fellow-feeling, no
enthusiasm. These are not men, but hungers, thirsts, fevers, and appetites walking. How
is it people manage to live on,--so aimless as they are? After their peppercorn aims are
gained, it seems as if the lime in their bones alone held them together, and not any
worthy purpose. There is no faith in the intellectual, none in the moral universe. There is
faith in chemistry, in meat, and wine, in wealth, in machinery, in the steam-engine,
galvanic battery, turbine-wheels, sewing machines, and in public opinion, but not in
divine causes. A silent revolution has loosed the tension of the old religious sects, and, in
place of the gravity and permanence of those societies of opinion, they run into freak
and extravagance. In creeds never was such levity; witness the heathenisms in
Christianity, the periodic “revivals,” the Millennium mathematics, the peacock ritualism,
the retrogression to Popery, the maundering of Mormons, the squalor of Mesmerism,
the deliration of rappings, the rat and mouse revelation, thumps in table-drawers, and
black art. The architecture, the music, the prayer, partake of the madness: the arts sink
into shift and make-believe. Not knowing what to do, we ape our ancestors; the churches
stagger backward to the mummeries of the dark ages. By the irresistible maturing of the
general mind, the Christian traditions have lost their hold. The dogma of the mystic
offices of Christ being dropped, and he standing on his genius as a moral teacher, ’tis
impossible to maintain the old emphasis of his personality; and it recedes, as all persons
must, before the sublimity of the moral laws. From this change, and in the momentary
absence of any religious genius that could offset the immense material activity, there is a
feeling that religion is gone. When Paul Leroux offered his article “Dieu” to the conductor
of a leading French journal, he replied, “La question de Dieu manque d’actualite.” In Italy,
Mr. Gladstone said of the late King of Naples, “it has been a proverb, that he has erected
the negation of God into a system of government.” In this country, the like stupefaction
was in the air, and the phrase “higher law” became a political jibe. What proof of
infidelity, like the toleration and propagandism of slavery? What, like the direction of
education? What, like the facility of conversion? What, like the externality of churches
that once sucked the roots of right and wrong, and now have perished away till they are
a speck of whitewash on the wall? What proof of skepticism like the base rate at which
the highest mental and moral gifts are held? Let a man attain the highest and broadest
culture that any American has possessed, then let him die by sea-storm, railroad
collision, or other accident, and all America will acquiesce that the best thing has
happened to him; that, after the education has gone far, such is the expensiveness of
America, that the best use to put a fine person to, is, to drown him to save his board.

Another scar of this skepticism is the distrust in human virtue. It is believed by well-
dressed proprietors that there is no more virtue than they possess; that the solid portion
of society exist for the arts of comfort: that life is an affair to put somewhat between the
upper and lower mandibles. How prompt the suggestion of a low motive! Certain
patriots in England devoted themselves for years to creating a public opinion that should
break down the corn-laws and establish free trade. `Well,’ says the man in the street,
`Cobden got a stipend out of it.’ Kossuth fled hither across the ocean to try if he could
rouse the New World to a sympathy with European liberty. `Aye,’ says New York, `he
made a handsome thing of it, enough to make him comfortable for life.’
See what allowance vice finds in the respectable and well-conditioned class. If a
pickpocket intrude into the society of gentlemen, they exert what moral force they have,
and he finds himself uncomfortable, and glad to get away. But if an adventurer go
through all the forms, procure himself to be elected to a post of trust, as of senator, or
president,--though by the same arts as we detest in the house-thief,--the same
gentlemen who agree to discountenance the private rogue, will be forward to show
civilities and marks of respect to the public one: and no amount of evidence of his crimes
will prevent them giving him ovations, complimentary dinners, opening their own
houses to him, and priding themselves on his acquaintance. We were not deceived by the
professions of the private adventurer,--the louder he talked of his honor, the faster we
counted our spoons; but we appeal to the sanctified preamble of the messages and
proclamations of the public sinner, as the proof of sincerity. It must be that they who pay
this homage have said to themselves, On the whole, we don’t know about this that you
call honesty; a bird in the hand is better.

Even well-disposed, good sort of people are touched with the same infidelity, and for
brave, straightforward action, use half-measures and compromises. Forgetful that a little
measure is a great error, forgetful that a wise mechanic uses a sharp tool, they go on
choosing the dead men of routine. But the official men can in nowise help you in any
question of to-day, they deriving entirely from the old dead things. Only those can help in
counsel or conduct who did not make a party pledge to defend this or that, but who were
appointed by God Almighty, before they came into the world, to stand for this which they
uphold.

It has been charged that a want of sincerity in the leading men is a vice general
throughout American society. But the multitude of the sick shall not make us deny the
existence of health. In spite of our imbecility and terrors, and “universal decay of
religion,” &c. &c., the moral sense reappears to-day with the same morning newness that
has been from of old the fountain of beauty and strength. You say, there is no religion
now. ‘Tis like saying in rainy weather, there is no sun, when at that moment we are
witnessing one of his superlative effects. The religion of the cultivated class now, to be
sure, consists in an avoidance of acts and engagements which it was once their religion
to assume. But this avoidance will yield spontaneous forms in their due hour. There is a
principle which is the basis of things, which all speech aims to say, and all action to
evolve, a simple, quiet, undescribed, undescribable presence, dwelling very peacefully in
us, our rightful lord: we are not to do, but to let do; not to work, but to be worked upon;
and to this homage there is a consent of all thoughtful and just men in all ages and
conditions. To this sentiment belong vast and sudden enlargements of power. ‘Tis
remarkable that our faith in ecstasy consists with total inexperience of it. It is the order
of the world to educate with accuracy the senses and the understanding; and the
enginery at work to draw out these powers in priority, no doubt, has its office. But we are
never without a hint that these powers are mediate and servile, and that we are one day
to deal with real being,--essences with essences. Even the fury of material activity has
some results friendly to moral health. The energetic action of the times develops
individualism, and the religious appear isolated. I esteem this a step in the right direction.
Heaven deals with us on no representative system. Souls are not saved in bundles. The
Spirit saith to the man, `How is it with thee? thee personally? is it well? is it ill?’ For a great
nature, it is a happiness to escape a religious training,--religion of character is so apt to
be invaded. Religion must always be a crab fruit: it cannot be grafted and keep its wild
beauty. “I have seen,” said a traveller who had known the extremes of society, “I have
seen human nature in all its forms, it is everywhere the same, but the wilder it is, the
more virtuous.”

We say, the old forms of religion decay, and that a skepticism devastates the community.
I do not think it can be cured or stayed by any modification of theologic creeds, much
less by theologic discipline. The cure for false theology is motherwit. Forget your books
and traditions, and obey your moral perceptions at this hour. That which is signified by
the words “moral” and “spiritual,” is a lasting essence, and, with whatever illusions we
have loaded them, will certainly bring back the words, age after age, to their ancient
meaning. I know no words that mean so much. In our definitions, we grope after the
spiritual by describing it as invisible. The true meaning of spiritual is real; that law which
executes itself, which works without means, and which cannot be conceived as not
existing. Men talk of “mere morality,”--which is much as if one should say, `poor God,
with nobody to help him.’ I find the omnipresence and the almightiness in the reaction of
every atom in Nature. I can best indicate by examples those reactions by which every
part of Nature replies to the purpose of the actor,--beneficently to the good, penally to
the bad. Let us replace sentimentalism by realism, and dare to uncover those simple and
terrible laws which, be they seen or unseen, pervade and govern.

Every man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he
begins to care that he do not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well. He has changed his
market-cart into a chariot of the sun. What a day dawns, when we have taken to heart
the doctrine of faith! to prefer, as a better investment, being to doing; being to seeming;
logic to rhythm and to display; the year to the day; the life to the year; character to
performance;--and have come to know, that justice will be done us; and, if our genius is
slow, the term will be long.

‘Tis certain that worship stands in some commanding relation to the health of man, and
to his highest powers, so as to be, in some manner, the source of intellect. All the great
ages have been ages of belief. I mean, when there was any extraordinary power of per-
formance, when great national movements began, when arts appeared, when heroes
existed, when poems were made, the human soul was in earnest, and had fixed its
thoughts on spiritual verities, with as strict a grasp as that of the hands on the sword,
or the pencil, or the trowel. It is true that genius takes its rise out of the mountains
of rectitude; that all beauty and power which men covet, are somehow born out of that
Alpine district; that any extraordinary degree of beauty in man or woman involves a
moral charm. Thus, I think, we very slowly admit in another man a higher degree of
moral sentiment than our own,--a finer conscience, more impressionable, or, which
marks minuter degrees; an ear to hear acuter notes of right and wrong, than we can. I
think we listen suspiciously and very slowly to any evidence to that point. But, once
satisfied of such superiority, we set no limit to our expectation of his genius. For such
persons are nearer to the secret of God than others; are bathed by sweeter waters; they
hear notices, they see visions, where others are vacant. We believe that holiness confers
a certain insight, because not by our private, but by our public force, can we share and
know the nature of things.

There is an intimate interdependence of intellect and morals. Given the equality of two
intellects,--which will form the most reliable judgments, the good, or the bad hearted?
“The heart has its arguments, with which the understanding is not acquainted.” For the
heart is at once aware of the state of health or disease, which is the controlling state,
that is, of sanity or of insanity, prior, of course, to all question of the ingenuity of
arguments, the amount of facts, or the elegance of rhetoric. So intimate is this alliance of
mind and heart, that talent uniformly sinks with character. The bias of errors of principle
carries away men into perilous courses, as soon as their will does not control their
passion or talent. Hence the extraordinary blunders, and final wrong head, into which
men spoiled by ambition usually fall. Hence the remedy for all blunders, the cure of
blindness, the cure of crime, is love. “As much love, so much mind,” said the Latin
proverb. The superiority that has no superior; the redeemer and instructor of souls, as
it is their primal essence, is love.

The moral must be the measure of health. If your eye is on the eternal, your intellect will
grow, and your opinions and actions will have a beauty which no learning or combined
advantages of other men can rival. The moment of your loss of faith, and acceptance of
the lucrative standard, will be marked in the pause, or solstice of genius, the sequent
retrogression, and the inevitable loss of attraction to other minds. The vulgar are
sensible of the change in you, and of your descent, though they clap you on the back,
and congratulate you on your increased common sense.

Our recent culture has been in natural science. We have learned the manners of the sun
and of the moon, of the rivers and the rains, of the mineral and elemental kingdoms, of
plants and animals. Man has learned to weigh the sun, and its weight neither loses nor
gains. The path of a star, the moment of an eclipse, can be determined to the fraction of
a second. Well, to him the book of history, the book of love, the lures of passion, and the
commandments of duty are opened: and the next lesson taught, is, the continuation of
the inflexible law of matter into the subtile kingdom of will, and of thought; that, if, in
sidereal ages, gravity and projection keep their craft, and the ball never loses its way in
its wild path through space,--a secreter gravitation, a secreter projection, rule not less
tyrannically in human history, and keep the balance of power from age to age unbroken.
For, though the new element of freedom and an individual has been admitted, yet the
primordial atoms are prefigured and predetermined to moral issues, are in search of
justice, and ultimate right is done. Religion or worship is the attitude of those who see
this unity, intimacy, and sincerity; who see that, against all appearances, the nature of
things works for truth and right forever.

‘Tis a short sight to limit our faith in laws to those of gravity, of chemistry, of botany, and
so forth. Those laws do not stop where our eyes lose them, but push the same geometry
and chemistry up into the invisible plane of social and rational life, so that, look where
we will, in a boy’s game, or in the strifes of races, a perfect reaction, a perpetual
judgment keeps watch and ward. And this appears in a class of facts which concerns all
men, within and above their creeds.

Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances: It was somebody’s name, or he
happened to be there at the time, or, it was so then, and another day it would have been
otherwise. Strong men believe in cause and effect. The man was born to do it, and his
father was born to be the father of him and of this deed, and, by looking narrowly, you
shall see there was no luck in the matter, but it was all a problem in arithmetic, or an
experiment in chemistry. The curve of the flight of the moth is preordained, and all
things go by number, rule, and weight.

Skepticism is unbelief in cause and effect. A man does not see, that, as he eats, so he
thinks: as he deals, so he is, and so he appears; he does not see, that his son is the son
of his thoughts and of his actions; that fortunes are not exceptions but fruits; that
relation and connection are not somewhere and sometimes, but everywhere and
always; no miscellany, no exemption, no anomaly,--but method, and an even web; and
what comes out, that was put in. As we are, so we do; and as we do, so is it done to us;
we are the builders of our fortunes; cant and lying and the attempt to secure a good
which does not belong to us, are, once for all, balked and vain. But, in the human mind,
this tie of fate is made alive. The law is the basis of the human mind. In us, it is
inspiration; out there in Nature, we see its fatal strength. We call it the moral sentiment.

We owe to the Hindoo Scriptures a definition of Law, which compares well with any in
our Western books. “Law it is, which is without name, or color, or hands, or feet; which is
smallest of the least, and largest of the large; all, and knowing all things; which hears
without ears, sees without eyes, moves without feet, and seizes without hands.”

If any reader tax me with using vague and traditional phrases, let me suggest to him, by a
few examples, what kind of a trust this is, and how real. Let me show him that the dice
are loaded; that the colors are fast, because they are the native colors of the fleece; that
the globe is a battery, because every atom is a magnet; and that the police and sincerity
of the Universe are secured by God’s delegating his divinity to every particle; that there is
no room for hypocrisy, no margin for choice.

The countryman leaving his native village, for the first time, and going abroad, finds all
his habits broken up. In a new nation and language, his sect, as Quaker, or Lutheran, is
lost. What! it is not then necessary to the order and existence of society? He misses this,
and the commanding eye of his neighborhood, which held him to decorum. This is the
peril of New York, of New Orleans, of London, of Paris, to young men. But after a little
experience, he makes the discovery that there are no large cities,--none large enough
to hide in; that the censors of action are as numerous and as near in Paris, as in Littleton
or Portland; that the gossip is as prompt and vengeful. There is no concealment, and, for
each offence, a several vengeance; that, reaction, or nothing for nothing, or, things are as
broad as they are long, is not a rule for Littleton or Portland, but for the Universe.

We cannot spare the coarsest muniment of virtue. We are disgusted by gossip; yet it is of
importance to keep the angels in their proprieties. The smallest fly will draw blood, and
gossip is a weapon impossible to exclude from the privatest, highest, selectest. Nature
created a police of many ranks. God has delegated himself to a million deputies. From
these low external penalties, the scale ascends. Next come the resentments, the fears,
which injustice calls out; then, the false relations in which the offender is put to other
men; and the reaction of his fault on himself, in the solitude and devastation of his mind.

You cannot hide any secret. If the artist succor his flagging spirits by opium or wine, his
work will characterize itself as the effect of opium or wine. If you make a picture or a
statue, it sets the beholder in that state of mind you had, when you made it. If you spend
for show, on building, or gardening, or on pictures, or on equipages, it will so appear. We
are all physiognomists and penetrators of character, and things themselves are
detective. If you follow the suburban fashion in building a sumptuous-looking house for a
little money, it will appear to all eyes as a cheap dear house. There is no privacy that
cannot be penetrated. No secret can be kept in the civilized world. Society is a masked
ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding. If a man wish to
conceal anything he carries, those whom he meets know that he conceals somewhat,
and usually know what he conceals. Is it otherwise if there be some belief or some
purpose he would bury in his breast? ‘Tis as hard to hide as fire. He is a strong man who
can hold down his opinion. A man cannot utter two or three sentences, without
disclosing to intelligent ears precisely where he stands in life and thought, namely,
whether in the kingdom of the senses and the understanding, or, in that of ideas and
imagination, in the realm of intuitions and duty. People seem not to see that their
opinion of the world is also a confession of character. We can only see what we are, and
if we misbehave we suspect others. The fame of Shakspeare or of Voltaire, of Thomas a
Kempis, or of Bonaparte, characterizes those who give it. As gas-light is found to be the
best nocturnal police, so the universe protects itself by pitiless publicity.

Each must be armed--not necessarily with musket and pike. Happy, if, seeing these, he
can feel that he has better muskets and pikes in his energy and constancy. To every
creature is his own weapon, however skilfully concealed from himself, a good while. His
work is sword and shield. Let him accuse none, let him injure none. The way to mend the
bad world, is to create the right world. Here is a low political economy plotting to cut the
throat of foreign competition, and establish our own;--excluding others by force, or
making war on them; or, by cunning tariffs, giving preference to worse wares of ours. But
the real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war. The way to conquer the
foreign artisan, is, not to kill him, but to beat his work. And the Crystal Palaces and World
Fairs, with their committees and prizes on all kinds of industry, are the result of this
feeling. The American workman who strikes ten blows with his hammer, whilst the
foreign workman only strikes one, is as really vanquishing that foreigner, as if the blows
were aimed at and told on his person. I look on that man as happy, who, when there is
question of success, looks into his work for a reply, not into the market, not into opinion,
not into patronage. In every variety of human employment, in the mechanical and in the
fine arts, in navigation, in farming, in legislating, there are among the numbers who do
their task perfunctorily, as we say, or just to pass, and as badly as they dare,--there are
the working-men, on whom the burden of the business falls,--those who love work,
and love to see it rightly done, who finish their task for its own sake; and the state and
the world is happy, that has the most of such finishers. The world will always do justice
at last to such finishers: it cannot otherwise. He who has acquired the ability, may wait
securely the occasion of making it felt and appreciated, and know that it will not loiter.
Men talk as if victory were something fortunate. Work is victory. Wherever work is done,
victory is obtained. There is no chance, and no blanks. You want but one verdict: if you
have your own, you are secure of the rest. And yet, if witnesses are wanted, witnesses
are near. There was never a man born so wise or good, but one or more companions
came into the world with him, who delight in his faculty, and report it. I cannot see
without awe, that no man thinks alone, and no man acts alone, but the divine assessors
who came up with him into life,--now under one disguise, now under another,--like a
police in citizens’ clothes, walk with him, step for step, through all the kingdom of time.

This reaction, this sincerity is the property of all things. To make our word or act sublime,
we must make it real. It is our system that counts, not the single word or unsupported
action. Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are. What I
am, and what I think, is conveyed to you, in spite of my efforts to hold it back. What I am
has been secretly conveyed from me to another, whilst I was vainly making up my mind
to tell him it. He has heard from me what I never spoke.

As men get on in life, they acquire a love for sincerity, and somewhat less solicitude to be
lulled or amused. In the progress of the character, there is an increasing faith in the
moral sentiment, and a decreasing faith in propositions. Young people admire talents,
and particular excellences. As we grow older, we value total powers and effects, as the
spirit, or quality of the man. We have another sight, and a new standard; an insight which
disregards what is done for the eye, and pierces to the doer; an ear which hears not
what men say, but hears what they do not say.

There was a wise, devout man who is called, in the Catholic Church, St. Philip Neri, of
whom many anecdotes touching his discernment and benevolence are told at Naples
and Rome. Among the nuns in a convent not far from Rome, one had appeared, who laid
claim to certain rare gifts of inspiration and prophecy, and the abbess advised the Holy
Father, at Rome, of the wonderful powers shown by her novice. The Pope did not well
know what to make of these new claims, and Philip coming in from a journey, one day,
he consulted him. Philip undertook to visit the nun, and ascertain her character. He
threw himself on his mule, all travel-soiled as he was, and hastened through the mud
and mire to the distant convent. He told the abbess the wishes of his Holiness, and
begged her to summon the nun without delay. The nun was sent for, and, as soon as she
came into the apartment, Philip stretched out his leg all bespattered with mud, and
desired her to draw off his boots. The young nun, who had become the object of much
attention and respect, drew back with anger, and refused the office: Philip ran out of
doors, mounted his mule, and returned instantly to the Pope; “Give yourself no
uneasiness, Holy Father, any longer: here is no miracle, for here is no humility.”

We need not much mind what people please to say, but what they must say; what their
natures say, though their busy, artful, Yankee understandings try to hold back, and
choke that word, and to articulate something different. If we will sit quietly,--what they
ought to say is said, with their will, or against their will. We do not care for you, let us
pretend what we will:--we are always looking through you to the dim dictator behind
you. Whilst your habit or whim chatters, we civilly and impatiently wait until that wise
superior shall speak again. Even children are not deceived by the false reasons which
their parents give in answer to their questions, whether touching natural facts, or
religion, or persons. When the parent, instead of thinking how it really is, puts them off
with a traditional or a hypocritical answer, the children perceive that it is traditional or
hypocritical. To a sound constitution the defect of another is at once manifest: and the
marks of it are only concealed from us by our own dislocation. An anatomical observer
remarks, that the sympathies of the chest, abdomen, and pelvis, tell at last on the face,
and on all its features. Not only does our beauty waste, but it leaves word how it went to
waste. Physiognomy and phrenology are not new sciences, but declarations of the soul
that it is aware of certain new sources of information. And now sciences of broader
scope are starting up behind these. And so for ourselves, it is really of little importance
what blunders in statement we make, so only we make no wilful departures from the
truth. How a man’s truth comes to mind, long after we have forgotten all his words! How
it comes to us in silent hours, that truth is our only armor in all passages of life and
death! Wit is cheap, and anger is cheap; but if you cannot argue or explain yourself to the
other party, cleave to the truth against me, against thee, and you gain a station from
which you cannot be dislodged. The other party will forget the words that you spoke, but
the part you took continues to plead for you.

Why should I hasten to solve every riddle which life offers me? I am well assured that the
Questioner, who brings me so many problems, will bring the answers also in due time.
Very rich, very potent, very cheerful Giver that he is, he shall have it all his own way, for
me. Why should I give up my thought, because I cannot answer an objection to it?
Consider only, whether it remains in my life the same it was. That only which we have
within, can we see without. If we meet no gods, it is because we harbor none. If there is
grandeur in you, you will find grandeur in porters and sweeps. He only is rightly
immortal, to whom all things are immortal. I have read somewhere, that none is
accomplished, so long as any are incomplete; that the happiness of one cannot consist
with the misery of any other.

The Buddhists say, “No seed will die:” every seed will grow. Where is the service which
can escape its remuneration? What is vulgar, and the essence of all vulgarity, but the
avarice of reward? ‘Tis the difference of artisan and artist, of talent and genius, of sinner
and saint. The man whose eyes are nailed not on the nature of his act, but on the wages,
whether it be money, or office, or fame,--is almost equally low. He is great, whose eyes
are opened to see that the reward of actions cannot be escaped, because he is
transformed into his action, and taketh its nature, which bears its own fruit, like every
other tree. A great man cannot be hindered of the effect of his act, because it is
immediate. The genius of life is friendly to the noble, and in the dark brings them friends
from far. Fear God, and where you go, men shall think they walk in hallowed cathedrals.

And so I look on those sentiments which make the glory of the human being, love,
humility, faith, as being also the intimacy of Divinity in the atoms; and, that, as soon as
the man is right, assurances and previsions emanate from the interior of his body and
his mind; as, when flowers reach their ripeness, incense exhales from them, and, as a
beautiful atmosphere is generated from the planet by the averaged emanations from all
its rocks and soils.

Thus man is made equal to every event. He can face danger for the right. A poor, tender,
painful body, he can run into flame or bullets or pestilence, with duty for his guide. He
feels the insurance of a just employment. I am not afraid of accident, as long as I am in
my place. It is strange that superior persons should not feel that they have some better
resistance against cholera, than avoiding green peas and salads. Life is hardly
respectable,--is it? if it has no generous, guaranteeing task, no duties or affections, that
constitute a necessity of existing. Every man’s task is his life-preserver. The conviction
that his work is dear to God and cannot be spared, defends him. The lightning-rod that
disarms the cloud of its threat is his body in its duty. A high aim reacts on the means, on
the days, on the organs of the body. A high aim is curative, as well as arnica. “Napoleon,”
says Goethe, “visited those sick of the plague, in order to prove that the man who could
vanquish fear, could vanquish the plague also; and he was right. ‘Tis incredible what
force the will has in such cases: it penetrates the body, and puts it in a state of activity,
which repels all hurtful influences; whilst fear invites them.”

It is related of William of Orange, that, whilst he was besieging a town on the continent, a
gentleman sent to him on public business came to his camp, and, learning that the King
was before the walls, he ventured to go where he was. He found him directing the
operation of his gunners, and, having explained his errand, and received his answer, the
King said, “Do you not know, sir, that every moment you spend here is at the risk of your
life?” “I run no more risk,” replied the gentleman, “than your Majesty.” “Yes,” said the King,
“but my duty brings me here, and yours does not.” In a few minutes, a cannon-ball fell on
the spot, and the gentleman was killed.

Thus can the faithful student reverse all the warnings of his early instinct, under the
guidance of a deeper instinct. He learns to welcome misfortune, learns that adversity is
the prosperity of the great. He learns the greatness of humility. He shall work in the dark,
work against failure, pain, and ill-will. If he is insulted, he can be insulted; all his affair is
not to insult. Hafiz writes,

At the last day, men shall wear
On their heads the dust,
As ensign and as ornament
Of their lowly trust.

The moral equalizes all; enriches, empowers all. It is the coin which buys all, and which
all find in their pocket. Under the whip of the driver, the slave shall feel his equality with
saints and heroes. In the greatest destitution and calamity, it surprises man with a
feeling of elasticity which makes nothing of loss.

I recall some traits of a remarkable person whose life and discourse betrayed many
inspirations of this sentiment. Benedict was always great in the present time. He had
hoarded nothing from the past, neither in his cabinets, neither in his memory. He had no
designs on the future, neither for what he should do to men, nor for what men should do
for him. He said, `I am never beaten until I know that I am beaten. I meet powerful
brutal people to whom I have no skill to reply. They think they have defeated me. It is so
published in society, in the journals; I am defeated in this fashion, in all men’s sight,
perhaps on a dozen different lines. My leger may show that I am in debt, cannot yet
make my ends meet, and vanquish the enemy so. My race may not be prospering: we
are sick, ugly, obscure, unpopular. My children may be worsted. I seem to fail in my
friends and clients, too. That is to say, in all the encounters that have yet chanced, I have
not been weaponed for that particular occasion, and have been historically beaten; and
yet, I know, all the time, that I have never been beaten; have never yet fought, shall
certainly fight, when my hour comes, and shall beat.’ “A man,” says the Vishnu Sarma,
“who having well compared his own strength or weakness with that of others, after all
doth not know the difference, is easily overcome by his enemies.”

`I spent,’ he said, `ten months in the country. Thick-starred Orion was my only
companion. Wherever a squirrel or a bee can go with security, I can go. I ate whatever
was set before me; I touched ivy and dogwood. When I went abroad, I kept company
with every man on the road, for I knew that my evil and my good did not come from
these, but from the Spirit, whose servant I was. For I could not stoop to be a
circumstance, as they did, who put their life into their fortune and their company. I
would not degrade myself by casting about in my memory for a thought, nor by waiting
for one. If the thought come, I would give it entertainment. It should, as it ought, go into
my hands and feet; but if it come not spontaneously, it comes not rightly at all. If it can
spare me, I am sure I can spare it. It shall be the same with my friends. I will never woo
the loveliest. I will not ask any friendship or favor. When I come to my own, we shall both
know it. Nothing will be to be asked or to be granted.’ Benedict went out to seek his
friend, and met him on the way; but he expressed no surprise at any coincidences. On
the other hand, if he called at the door of his friend, and he was not at home, he did not
go again; concluding that he had misinterpreted the intimations.

He had the whim not to make an apology to the same individual whom he had wronged.
For this, he said, was a piece of personal vanity; but he would correct his conduct in that
respect in which he had faulted, to the next person he should meet. Thus, he said,
universal justice was satisfied.

Mira came to ask what she should do with the poor Genesee woman who had hired
herself to work for her, at a shilling a day, and, now sickening, was like to be bedridden
on her hands. Should she keep her, or should she dismiss her? But Benedict said, `Why
ask? One thing will clear itself as the thing to be done, and not another, when the hour
comes. Is it a question, whether to put her into the street? Just as much whether to
thrust the little Jenny on your arm into the street. The milk and meal you give the beggar,
will fatten Jenny. Thrust the woman out, and you thrust your babe out of doors, whether
it so seem to you or not.’

In the Shakers, so called, I find one piece of belief, in the doctrine which they faithfully
hold, that encourages them to open their doors to every wayfaring man who proposes to
come among them; for, they say, the Spirit will presently manifest to the man himself,
and to the society, what manner of person he is, and whether he belongs among them.
They do not receive him, they do not reject him. And not in vain have they worn their clay
coat, and drudged in their fields, and shuffled in their Bruin dance, from year to year, if
they have truly learned thus much wisdom.

Honor him whose life is perpetual victory; him, who, by sympathy with the invisible and
real, finds support in labor, instead of praise; who does not shine, and would rather not.
With eyes open, he makes the choice of virtue, which outrages the virtuous; of religion,
which churches stop their discords to burn and exterminate; for the highest virtue is
always against the law.

Miracle comes to the miraculous, not to the arithmetician. Talent and success interest
me but moderately. The great class, they who affect our imagination, the men who could
not make their hands meet around their objects, the rapt, the lost, the fools of ideas, --
they suggest what they cannot execute. They speak to the ages, and are heard from afar.
The Spirit does not love cripples and malformations. If there ever was a good man, be
certain, there was another, and will be more.

And so in relation to that future hour, that spectre clothed with beauty at our curtain by
night, at our table by day,--the apprehension, the assurance of a coming change. The
race of mankind have always offered at least this implied thanks for the gift of existence,
-- namely, the terror of its being taken away; the insatiable curiosity and appetite for its
continuation. The whole revelation that is vouchsafed us, is, the gentle trust, which, in
our experience we find, will cover also with flowers the slopes of this chasm.

Of immortality, the soul, when well employed, is incurious. It is so well, that it is sure it
will be well. It asks no questions of the Supreme Power. The son of Antiochus asked his
father, when he would join battle? “Dost thou fear,” replied the King, “that thou only in all
the army wilt not hear the trumpet?” ‘Tis a higher thing to confide, that, if it is best we
should live, we shall live,--’tis higher to have this conviction, than to have the lease of
indefinite centuries and millenniums and aeons. Higher than the question of our
duration is the question of our deserving. Immortality will come to such as are fit for it,
and he who would be a great soul in future, must be a great soul now. It is a doctrine too
great to rest on any legend, that is, on any man’s experience but our own. It must be
proved, if at all, from our own activity and designs, which imply an interminable future
for their play.

What is called religion effeminates and demoralizes. Such as you are, the gods
themselves could not help you. Men are too often unfit to live, from their obvious
inequality to their own necessities, or, they suffer from politics, or bad neighbors, or
from sickness, and they would gladly know that they were to be dismissed from the
duties of life. But the wise instinct asks, `How will death help them?’ These are not
dismissed when they die. You shall not wish for death out of pusillanimity. The weight of
the Universe is pressed down on the shoulders of each moral agent to hold him to his
task. The only path of escape known in all the worlds of God is performance. You must
do your work, before you shall be released. And as far as it is a question of fact
respecting the government of the Universe, Marcus Antoninus summed the whole in a
word, “It is pleasant to die, if there be gods; and sad to live, if there be none.”

And so I think that the last lesson of life, the choral song which rises from all elements
and all angels, is, a voluntary obedience, a necessitated freedom. Man is made of the
same atoms as the world is, he shares the same impressions, predispositions, and
destiny. When his mind is illuminated, when his heart is kind, he throws himself joyfully
into the sublime order, and does, with knowledge, what the stones do by structure.

The religion which is to guide and fulfil the present and coming ages, whatever else it be,
must be intellectual. The scientific mind must have a faith which is science. “There are
two things,” said Mahomet, “which I abhor, the learned in his infidelities, and the fool in
his devotions.” Our times are impatient of both, and specially of the last. Let us have
nothing now which is not its own evidence. There is surely enough for the heart and
imagination in the religion itself. Let us not be pestered with assertions and half-truths,
with emotions and snuffle.

There will be a new church founded on moral science, at first cold and naked, a babe in a
manger again, the algebra and mathematics of ethical law, the church of men to come,
without shawms, or psaltery, or sackbut; but it will have heaven and earth for its beams
and rafters; science for symbol and illustration; it will fast enough gather beauty, music,
picture, poetry. Was never stoicism so stern and exigent as this shall be. It shall send man
home to his central solitude, shame these social, supplicating manners, and make him
know that much of the time he must have himself to his friend. He shall expect no
cooperation, he shall walk with no companion. The nameless Thought, the nameless
Power, the superpersonal Heart,--he shall repose alone on that. He needs only his own
verdict. No good fame can help, no bad fame can hurt him. The Laws are his consolers,
the good Laws themselves are alive, they know if he have kept them, they animate him
with the leading of great duty, and an endless horizon. Honor and fortune exist to him
who always recognizes the neighborhood of the great, always feels himself in the
presence of high causes.




VII: CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY



Hear what British Merlin sung,
Of keenest eye and truest tongue.
Say not, the chiefs who first arrive
Usurp the seats for which all strive;
The forefathers this land who found
Failed to plant the vantage-ground;
Ever from one who comes to-morrow
Men wait their good and truth to borrow.
But wilt thou measure all thy road,
See thou lift the lightest load.
Who has little, to him who has less, can spare,
And thou, Cyndyllan’s son! beware
Ponderous gold and stuffs to bear,
To falter ere thou thy task fulfil, --
Only the light-armed climb the hill.
The richest of all lords is Use,
And ruddy Health the loftiest Muse.
Live in the sunshine, swim the sea,
Drink the wild air’s salubrity:
Where the star Canope shines in May,
Shepherds are thankful, and nations gay.
The music that can deepest reach,
And cure all ill, is cordial speech:
Mask thy wisdom with delight,
Toy with the bow, yet hit the white.
Of all wit’s uses, the main one
Is to live well with who has none.
Cleave to thine acre; the round year
Will fetch all fruits and virtues here:
Fool and foe may harmless roam,
Loved and lovers bide at home.
A day for toil, an hour for sport,
But for a friend is life too short.



Although this garrulity of advising is born with us, I confess that life is rather a subject
of wonder, than of didactics. So much fate, so much irresistible dictation from
temperament and unknown inspiration enters into it, that we doubt we can say anything
out of our own experience whereby to help each other. All the professions are timid and
expectant agencies. The priest is glad if his prayers or his sermon meet the condition of
any soul; if of two, if of ten, ’tis a signal success. But he walked to the church without any
assurance that he knew the distemper, or could heal it. The physician prescribes
hesitatingly out of his few resources, the same tonic or sedative to this new and peculiar
constitution, which he has applied with various success to a hundred men before. If the
patient mends, he is glad and surprised. The lawyer advises the client, and tells his story
to the jury, and leaves it with them, and is as gay and as much relieved as the client, if it
turns out that he has a verdict. The judge weighs the arguments, and puts a brave face
on the matter, and, since there must be a decision, decides as he can, and hopes he has
done justice, and given satisfaction to the community; but is only an advocate after all.
And so is all life a timid and unskilful spectator. We do what we must, and call it by the
best names. We like very well to be praised for our action, but our conscience says, “Not
unto us.” ‘Tis little we can do for each other. We accompany the youth with sympathy,
and manifold old sayings of the wise, to the gate of the arena, but ’tis certain that not by
strength of ours, or of the old sayings, but only on strength of his own, unknown to us or
to any, he must stand or fall. That by which a man conquers in any passage, is a
profound secret to every other being in the world, and it is only as he turns his back on
us and on all men, and draws on this most private wisdom, that any good can come to
him. What we have, therefore, to say of life, is rather description, or, if you please,
celebration, than available rules.

Yet vigor is contagious, and whatever makes us either think or feel strongly, adds to our
power, and enlarges our field of action. We have a debt to every great heart, to every fine
genius; to those who have put life and fortune on the cast of an act of justice; to those
who have added new sciences; to those who have refined life by elegant pursuits. ‘Tis the
fine souls who serve us, and not what is called fine society. Fine society is only a self-
protection against the vulgarities of the street and the tavern. Fine society, in the
common acceptation, has neither ideas nor aims. It renders the service of a perfumery,
or a laundry, not of a farm or factory. ‘Tis an exclusion and a precinct. Sidney Smith said,
“A few yards in London cement or dissolve friendship.” It is an unprincipled decorum; an
affair of clean linen and coaches, of gloves, cards, and elegance in trifles. There are other
measures of self-respect for a man, than the number of clean shirts he puts on every
day. Society wishes to be amused. I do not wish to be amused. I wish that life should not
be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant. Now we reckon
them as bank-days, by some debt which is to be paid us, or which we are to pay, or some
pleasure we are to taste. Is all we have to do to draw the breath in, and blow it out again?
Porphyry’s definition is better; “Life is that which holds matter together.” The babe in
arms is a channel through which the energies we call fate, love, and reason, visibly
stream. See what a cometary train of auxiliaries man carries with him, of animals, plants,
stones, gases, and imponderable elements. Let us infer his ends from this pomp of
means. Mirabeau said, “Why should we feel ourselves to be men, unless it be to succeed
in everything, everywhere. You must say of nothing, That is beneath me, nor feel that
anything can be out of your power. Nothing is impossible to the man who can will. Is that
necessary? That shall be:--this is the only law of success.” Whoever said it, this is in the
right key. But this is not the tone and genius of the men in the street. In the streets, we
grow cynical. The men we meet are coarse and torpid. The finest wits have their
sediment. What quantities of fribbles, paupers, invalids, epicures, antiquaries, politicians,
thieves, and triflers of both sexes, might be advantageously spared! Mankind divides
itself into two classes,? benefactors and malefactors. The second class is vast, the first a
handful. A person seldom falls sick, but the bystanders are animated with a faint hope
that he will die:--quantities of poor lives; of distressing invalids; of cases for a gun.
Franklin said, “Mankind are very superficial and dastardly: they begin upon a thing, but,
meeting with a difficulty, they fly from it discouraged: but they have capacities, if they
would employ them.” Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority?
By the minority, surely. ‘Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square
miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.

Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade,
pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered but to be
schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break
them up, and draw individuals out of them. The worst of charity is, that the lives you are
asked to preserve are not worth preserving. Masses! the calamity is the masses. I do not
wish any mass at all, but honest men only, lovely, sweet, accomplished women only, and
no shovel-handed, narrow-brained, gin-drinking million stockingers or lazzaroni at all. If
government knew how, I should like to see it check, not multiply the population. When it
reaches its true law of action, every man that is born will be hailed as essential. Away
with this hurrah of masses, and let us have the considerate vote of single men spoken on
their honor and their conscience. In old Egypt, it was established law, that the vote of a
prophet be reckoned equal to a hundred hands. I think it was much under-estimated.
“Clay and clay differ in dignity,” as we discover by our preferences every day. What a
vicious practice is this of our politicians at Washington pairing off! as if one man who
votes wrong, going away, could excuse you, who mean to vote right, for going away; or,
as if your presence did not tell in more ways than in your vote. Suppose the three
hundred heroes at Thermopylae had paired off with three hundred Persians: would it
have been all the same to Greece, and to history? Napoleon was called by his men Cent
Mille. Add honesty to him, and they might have called him Hundred Million.

Nature makes fifty poor melons for one that is good, and shakes down a tree full of
gnarled, wormy, unripe crabs, before you can find a dozen dessert apples; and she
scatters nations of naked Indians, and nations of clothed Christians, with two or three
good heads among them. Nature works very hard, and only hits the white once in a
million throws. In mankind, she is contented if she yields one master in a century. The
more difficulty there is in creating good men, the more they are used when they come. I
once counted in a little neighborhood, and found that every able-bodied man had, say
from twelve to fifteen persons dependent on him for material aid,--to whom he is to be
for spoon and jug, for backer and sponsor, for nursery and hospital, and many functions
beside: nor does it seem to make much difference whether he is bachelor or patriarch; if
he do not violently decline the duties that fall to him, this amount of helpfulness will in
one way or another be brought home to him. This is the tax which his abilities pay. The
good men are employed for private centres of use, and for larger influence. All
revelations, whether of mechanical or intellectual or moral science, are made not to
communities, but to single persons. All the marked events of our day, all the cities, all the
colonizations, may be traced back to their origin in a private brain. All the feats which
make our civility were the thoughts of a few good heads.

Meantime, this spawning productivity is not noxious or needless. You would say, this
rabble of nations might be spared. But no, they are all counted and depended on. Fate
keeps everything alive so long as the smallest thread of public necessity holds it on to the
tree. The coxcomb and bully and thief class are allowed as proletaries, every one of their
vices being the excess or acridity of a virtue. The mass are animal, in pupilage, and near
chimpanzee. But the units, whereof this mass is composed are neuters, every one of
which may be grown to a queen-bee. The rule is, we are used as brute atoms, until we
think: then, we use all the rest. Nature turns all malfaisance to good. Nature provided for
real needs. No sane man at last distrusts himself. His existence is a perfect answer to all
sentimental cavils. If he is, he is wanted, and has the precise properties that are
required. That we are here, is proof we ought to be here. We have as good right, and the
same sort of right to be here, as Cape Cod or Sandy Hook have to be there.

To say then, the majority are wicked, means no malice, no bad heart in the observer, but,
simply, that the majority are unripe, and have not yet come to themselves, do not yet
know their opinion. That, if they knew it, is an oracle for them and for all. But in the
passing moment, the quadruped interest is very prone to prevail: and this beast-force,
whilst it makes the discipline of the world, the school of heroes, the glory of martyrs, has
provoked, in every age, the satire of wits, and the tears of good men. They find the
journals, the clubs, the governments, the churches, to be in the interest, and the pay of
the devil. And wise men have met this obstruction in their times, like Socrates, with his
famous irony; like Bacon, with life-long dissimulation; like Erasmus, with his book “The
Praise of Folly;” like Rabelais, with his satire rending the nations. “They were the fools
who cried against me, you will say,” wrote the Chevalier de Boufflers to Grimm; “aye, but
the fools have the advantage of numbers, and ’tis that which decides. ‘Tis of no use for
us to make war with them; we shall not weaken them; they will always be the masters.
There will not be a practice or an usage introduced, of which they are not the authors.”

In front of these sinister facts, the first lesson of history is the good of evil. Good is a
good doctor, but Bad is sometimes a better. ‘Tis the oppressions of William the Norman,
savage forest-laws, and crushing despotism, that made possible the inspirations of
Magna Charta under John. Edward I. wanted money, armies, castles, and as much as he
could get. It was necessary to call the people together by shorter, swifter ways,--and
the House of Commons arose. To obtain subsidies, he paid in privileges. In the twenty-
fourth year of his reign, he decreed, “that no tax should be levied without consent of
Lords and Commons;”--which is the basis of the English Constitution. Plutarch affirms
that the cruel wars which followed the march of Alexander, introduced the civility,
language, and arts of Greece into the savage East; introduced marriage; built seventy
cities; and united hostile nations under one government. The barbarians who broke up
the Roman empire did not arrive a day too soon. Schiller says, the Thirty Years’ War
made Germany a nation. Rough, selfish despots serve men immensely, as Henry VIII. in
the contest with the Pope; as the infatuations no less than the wisdom of Cromwell; as
the ferocity of the Russian czars; as the fanaticism of the French regicides of 1789. The
frost which kills the harvest of a year, saves the harvests of a century, by destroying the
weevil or the locust. Wars, fires, plagues, break up immovable routine, clear the ground
of rotten races and dens of distemper, and open a fair field to new men. There is a
tendency in things to right themselves, and the war or revolution or bankruptcy that
shatters a rotten system, allows things to take a new and natural order. The sharpest
evils are bent into that periodicity which makes the errors of planets, and the fevers and
distempers of men, self-limiting. Nature is upheld by antagonism. Passions, resistance,
danger, are educators. We acquire the strength we have overcome. Without war, no
soldier; without enemies, no hero. The sun were insipid, if the universe were not opaque.
And the glory of character is in affronting the horrors of depravity, to draw thence new
nobilities of power: as Art lives and thrills in new use and combining of contrasts, and
mining into the dark evermore for blacker pits of night. What would painter do, or what
would poet or saint, but for crucifixions and hells? And evermore in the world is this
marvellous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats. Not Antoninus, but a
poor washer-woman said, “The more trouble, the more lion; that’s my principle.”

I do not think very respectfully of the designs or the doings of the people who went to
California, in 1849. It was a rush and a scramble of needy adventurers, and, in the
western country, a general jail-delivery of all the rowdies of the rivers. Some of them
went with honest purposes, some with very bad ones, and all of them with the very
commonplace wish to find a short way to wealth. But Nature watches over all, and turns
this malfaisance to good. California gets peopled and subdued,--civilized in this
immoral way,--and, on this fiction, a real prosperity is rooted and grown. ‘Tis a decoy-
duck; ’tis tubs thrown to amuse the whale: but real ducks, and whales that yield oil, are
caught. And, out of Sabine rapes, and out of robbers’ forays, real Romes and their
heroisms come in fulness of time.

In America, the geography is sublime, but the men are not: the inventions are excellent,
but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of. The agencies by which events so grand
as the opening of California, of Texas, of Oregon, and the junction of the two oceans, are
effected, are paltry,--coarse selfishness, fraud, and conspiracy: and most of the great
results of history are brought about by discreditable means.

The benefaction derived in Illinois, and the great West, from railroads is inestimable, and
vastly exceeding any intentional philanthropy on record. What is the benefit done by a
good King Alfred, or by a Howard, or Pestalozzi, or Elizabeth Fry, or Florence Nightingale,
or any lover, less or larger, compared with the involuntary blessing wrought on nations
by the selfish capitalists who built the Illinois, Michigan, and the network of the
Mississippi valley roads, which have evoked not only all the wealth of the soil, but the
energy of millions of men. ‘Tis a sentence of ancient wisdom, “that God hangs the
greatest weights on the smallest wires.”

What happens thus to nations, befalls every day in private houses. When the friends of a
gentleman brought to his notice the follies of his sons, with many hints of their danger,
he replied, that he knew so much mischief when he was a boy, and had turned out on
the whole so successfully, that he was not alarmed by the dissipation of boys; ’twas
dangerous water, but, he thought, they would soon touch bottom, and then swim to the
top. This is bold practice, and there are many failures to a good escape. Yet one would
say, that a good understanding would suffice as well as moral sensibility to keep one
erect; the gratifications of the passions are so quickly seen to be damaging, and,--what
men like least,--seriously lowering them in social rank. Then all talent sinks with
character.

“Croyez moi, l’erreur aussi a son merite,” said Voltaire. We see those who surmount, by
dint of some egotism or infatuation, obstacles from which the prudent recoil. The right
partisan is a heady narrow man, who, because he does not see many things, sees some
one thing with heat and exaggeration, and, if he falls among other narrow men, or on
objects which have a brief importance, as some trade or politics of the hour, he prefers it
to the universe, and seems inspired, and a godsend to those who wish to magnify the
matter, and carry a point. Better, certainly, if we could secure the strength and fire which
rude, passionate men bring into society, quite clear of their vices. But who dares draw
out the linchpin from the wagon-wheel? ‘Tis so manifest, that there is no moral
deformity, but is a good passion out of place; that there is no man who is not indebted to
his foibles; that, according to the old oracle, “the Furies are the bonds of men;” that the
poisons are our principal medicines, which kill the disease, and save the life. In the high
prophetic phrase, He causes the wrath of man to praise him, and twists and wrenches
our evil to our good. Shakspeare wrote, --

“‘Tis said, best men are moulded of their faults;”

and great educators and lawgivers, and especially generals, and leaders of colonies,
mainly rely on this stuff, and esteem men of irregular and passional force the best
timber. A man of sense and energy, the late head of the Farm School in Boston harbor,
said to me, “I want none of your good boys,--give me the bad ones.” And this is the
reason, I suppose, why, as soon as the children are good, the mothers are scared, and
think they are going to die. Mirabeau said, “There are none but men of strong passions
capable of going to greatness; none but such capable of meriting the public gratitude.”
Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring. Any absorbing passion has the
effect to deliver from the little coils and cares of every day: ’tis the heat which sets our
human atoms spinning, overcomes the friction of crossing thresholds, and first
addresses in society, and gives us a good start and speed, easy to continue, when once it
is begun. In short, there is no man who is not at some time indebted to his vices, as no
plant that is not fed from manures. We only insist that the man meliorate, and that the
plant grow upward, and convert the base into the better nature.

The wise workman will not regret the poverty or the solitude which brought out his
working talents. The youth is charmed with the fine air and accomplishments of the
children of fortune. But all great men come out of the middle classes. ‘Tis better for the
head; ’tis better for the heart. Marcus Antoninus says, that Fronto told him, “that the so-
called high-born are for the most part heartless;” whilst nothing is so indicative of
deepest culture as a tender consideration of the ignorant. Charles James Fox said of
England, “The history of this country proves, that we are not to expect from men in
affluent circumstances the vigilance, energy, and exertion without which the House of
Commons would lose its greatest force and weight. Human nature is prone to
indulgence, and the most meritorious public services have always been performed by
persons in a condition of life removed from opulence.” And yet what we ask daily, is to be
conventional. Supply, most kind gods! this defect in my address, in my form, in my
fortunes, which puts me a little out of the ring: supply it, and let me be like the rest
whom I admire, and on good terms with them. But the wise gods say, No, we have better
things for thee. By humiliations, by defeats, by loss of sympathy, by gulfs of disparity,
learn a wider truth and humanity than that of a fine gentleman. A Fifth-Avenue landlord,
a West-End householder, is not the highest style of man: and, though good hearts and
sound minds are of no condition, yet he who is to be wise for many, must not be
protected. He must know the huts where poor men lie, and the chores which poor men
do. The first-class minds, Aesop, Socrates, Cervantes, Shakspeare, Franklin, had the poor
man’s feeling and mortification. A rich man was never insulted in his life: but this man
must be stung. A rich man was never in danger from cold, or hunger, or war, or ruffians,
and you can see he was not, from the moderation of his ideas. ‘Tis a fatal disadvantage
to be cockered, and to eat too much cake. What tests of manhood could he stand? Take
him out of his protections. He is a good book-keeper; or he is a shrewd adviser in the
insurance office: perhaps he could pass a college examination, and take his degrees:
perhaps he can give wise counsel in a court of law. Now plant him down among farmers,
firemen, Indians, and emigrants. Set a dog on him: set a highwayman on him: try him
with a course of mobs: send him to Kansas, to Pike’s Peak, to Oregon: and, if he have
true faculty, this may be the element he wants, and he will come out of it with broader
wisdom and manly power. Aesop, Saadi, Cervantes, Regnard, have been taken by
corsairs, left for dead, sold for slaves, and know the realities of human life.

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss. As
we go gladly to Faneuil Hall, to be played upon by the stormy winds and strong fingers of
enraged patriotism, so is a fanatical persecution, civil war, national bankruptcy, or
revolution, more rich in the central tones than languid years of prosperity. What had
been, ever since our memory, solid continent, yawns apart, and discloses its composition
and genesis. We learn geology the morning after the earthquake, on ghastly diagrams of
cloven mountains, upheaved plains, and the dry bed of the sea.

In our life and culture, everything is worked up, and comes in use,--passion, war, revolt,
bankruptcy, and not less, folly and blunders, insult, ennui, and bad company. Nature is a
rag-merchant, who works up every shred and ort and end into new creations; like a good
chemist, whom I found, the other day, in his laboratory, converting his old shirts into
pure white sugar. Life is a boundless privilege, and when you pay for your ticket, and get
into the car, you have no guess what good company you shall find there. You buy much
that is not rendered in the bill. Men achieve a certain greatness unawares, when working
to another aim.

If now in this connection of discourse, we should venture on laying down the first
obvious rules of life, I will not here repeat the first rule of economy, already propounded
once and again, that every man shall maintain himself,--but I will say, get health. No
labor, pains, temperance, poverty, nor exercise, that can gain it, must be grudged. For
sickness is a cannibal which eats up all the life and youth it can lay hold of, and absorbs
its own sons and daughters. I figure it as a pale, wailing, distracted phantom, absolutely
selfish, heedless of what is good and great, attentive to its sensations, losing its soul, and
afflicting other souls with meanness and mopings, and with ministration to its voracity of
trifles. Dr. Johnson said severely, “Every man is a rascal as soon as he is sick.” Drop the
cant, and treat it sanely. In dealing with the drunken, we do not affect to be drunk. We
must treat the sick with the same firmness, giving them, of course, every aid,--but
withholding ourselves. I once asked a clergyman in a retired town, who were his
companions? what men of ability he saw? he replied, that he spent his time with the sick
and the dying. I said, he seemed to me to need quite other company, and all the more
that he had this: for if people were sick and dying to any purpose, we would leave all and
go to them, but, as far as I had observed, they were as frivolous as the rest, and
sometimes much more frivolous. Let us engage our companions not to spare us. I knew a
wise woman who said to her friends, “When I am old, rule me.” And the best part of
health is fine disposition. It is more essential than talent, even in the works of talent.
Nothing will supply the want of sunshine to peaches, and, to make knowledge valuable,
you must have the cheerfulness of wisdom. Whenever you are sincerely pleased, you are
nourished. The joy of the spirit indicates its strength. All healthy things are sweet-tem-
pered. Genius works in sport, and goodness smiles to the last; and, for the reason,
that whoever sees the law which distributes things, does not despond, but is animated to
great desires and endeavors. He who desponds betrays that he has not seen it.

‘Tis a Dutch proverb, that “paint costs nothing,” such are its preserving qualities in damp
climates. Well, sunshine costs less, yet is finer pigment. And so of cheerfulness, or a good
temper, the more it is spent, the more of it remains. The latent heat of an ounce of wood
or stone is inexhaustible. You may rub the same chip of pine to the point of kindling, a
hundred times; and the power of happiness of any soul is not to be computed or
drained. It is observed that a depression of spirits develops the germs of a plague in
individuals and nations.

It is an old commendation of right behavior, “Aliis laetus,--sapiens sibi,” which our
English proverb translates, “Be merry and wise.” I know how easy it is to men of the
world to look grave and sneer at your sanguine youth, and its glittering dreams. But I
find the gayest castles in the air that were ever piled, far better for comfort and for use,
than the dungeons in the air that are daily dug and caverned out by grumbling,
discontented people. I know those miserable fellows, and I hate them, who see a black
star always riding through the light and colored clouds in the sky overhead: waves of
light pass over and hide it for a moment, but the black star keeps fast in the zenith. But
power dwells with cheerfulness; hope puts us in a working mood, whilst despair is no
muse, and untunes the active powers. A man should make life and Nature happier to us,
or he had better never been born. When the political economist reckons up the
unproductive classes, he should put at the head this class of pitiers of themselves,
cravers of sympathy, bewailing imaginary disasters. An old French verse runs, in my
translation: --

Some of your griefs you have cured,
And the sharpest you still have survived;
But what torments of pain you endured
From evils that never arrived!

There are three wants which never can be satisfied: that of the rich, who wants
something more; that of the sick, who wants something different; and that of the
traveller, who says, `Anywhere but here.’ The Turkish cadi said to Layard, “After the
fashion of thy people, thou hast wandered from one place to another, until thou art
happy and content in none.” My countrymen are not less infatuated with the rococo toy
of Italy. All America seems on the point of embarking for Europe. But we shall not always
traverse seas and lands with light purposes, and for pleasure, as we say. One day we
shall cast out the passion for Europe, by the passion for America. Culture will give gravity
and domestic rest to those who now travel only as not knowing how else to spend
money. Already, who provoke pity like that excellent family party just arriving in their
well-appointed carriage, as far from home and any honest end as ever? Each nation has
asked successively, `What are they here for?’ until at last the party are shamefaced, and
anticipate the question at the gates of each town.

Genial manners are good, and power of accommodation to any circumstance, but the
high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit,
which finds him in employment and happiness,--whether it be to make baskets, or
broadswords, or canals, or statutes, or songs. I doubt not this was the meaning of
Socrates, when he pronounced artists the only truly wise, as being actually, not
apparently so.

In childhood, we fancied ourselves walled in by the horizon, as by a glass bell, and
doubted not, by distant travel, we should reach the baths of the descending sun and
stars. On experiment, the horizon flies before us, and leaves us on an endless common,
sheltered by no glass bell. Yet ’tis strange how tenaciously we cling to that bell-
astronomy, of a protecting domestic horizon. I find the same illusion in the search after
happiness, which I observe, every summer, recommenced in this neighborhood, soon
after the pairing of the birds. The young people do not like the town, do not like the
seashore, they will go inland; find a dear cottage deep in the mountains, secret as their
hearts. They set forth on their travels in search of a home: they reach Berkshire; they
reach Vermont; they look at the farms;--good farms, high mountain-sides: but where is
the seclusion? The farm is near this; ’tis near that; they have got far from Boston, but ’tis
near Albany, or near Burlington, or near Montreal. They explore a farm, but the house is
small, old, thin; discontented people lived there, and are gone:--there’s too much sky,
too much out-doors; too public. The youth aches for solitude. When he comes to the
house, he passes through the house. That does not make the deep recess he sought.
`Ah! now, I perceive,’ he says, `it must be deep with persons; friends only can give
depth.’ Yes, but there is a great dearth, this year, of friends; hard to find, and hard to
have when found: they are just going away: they too are in the whirl of the flitting world,
and have engagements and necessities. They are just starting for Wisconsin; have letters
from Bremen:--see you again, soon. Slow, slow to learn the lesson, that there is but
one depth, but one interior, and that is--his purpose. When joy or calamity or genius
shall show him it, then woods, then farms, then city shopmen and cab-drivers,
indifferently with prophet or friend, will mirror back to him its unfathomable heaven, its
populous solitude.

The uses of travel are occasional, and short; but the best fruit it finds, when it finds it, is
conversation; and this is a main function of life. What a difference in the hospitality of
minds! Inestimable is he to whom we can say what we cannot say to ourselves. Others
are involuntarily hurtful to us, and bereave us of the power of thought, impound and
imprison us. As, when there is sympathy, there needs but one wise man in a company,
and all are wise,--so, a blockhead makes a blockhead of his companion. Wonderful
power to benumb possesses this brother. When he comes into the office or public room,
the society dissolves; one after another slips out, and the apartment is at his disposal.
What is incurable but a frivolous habit? A fly is as untamable as a hyena. Yet folly in the
sense of fun, fooling, or dawdling can easily be borne; as Talleyrand said, “I find
nonsense singularly refreshing;” but a virulent, aggressive fool taints the reason of a
household. I have seen a whole family of quiet, sensible people unhinged and beside
themselves, victims of such a rogue. For the steady wrongheadedness of one perverse
person irritates the best: since we must withstand absurdity. But resistance only
exasperates the acrid fool, who believes that Nature and gravitation are quite wrong,
and he only is right. Hence all the dozen inmates are soon perverted, with whatever
virtues and industries they have, into contradictors, accusers, explainers, and repairers of
this one malefactor; like a boat about to be overset, or a carriage run away with,--not
only the foolish pilot or driver, but everybody on board is forced to assume strange and
ridiculous attitudes, to balance the vehicle and prevent the upsetting. For remedy, whilst
the case is yet mild, I recommend phlegm and truth: let all the truth that is spoken or
done be at the zero of indifferency, or truth itself will be folly. But, when the case is
seated and malignant, the only safety is in amputation; as seamen say, you shall cut and
run. How to live with unfit companions?--for, with such, life is for the most part spent:
and experience teaches little better than our earliest instinct of self-defence, namely, not
to engage, not to mix yourself in any manner with them; but let their madness spend
itself unopposed;--you are you, and I am I.

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that
which all are practising every day while they live. Our habit of thought,--take men as
they rise,--is not satisfying; in the common experience, I fear, it is poor and squalid. The
success which will content them, is, a bargain, a lucrative employment, an advantage
gained over a competitor, a marriage, a patrimony, a legacy, and the like. With these
objects, their conversation deals with surfaces: politics, trade, personal defects,
exaggerated bad news, and the rain. This is forlorn, and they feel sore and sensitive.
Now, if one comes who can illuminate this dark house with thoughts, show them their
native riches, what gifts they have, how indispensable each is, what magical powers over
nature and men; what access to poetry, religion, and the powers which constitute
character; he wakes in them the feeling of worth, his suggestions require new ways of
living, new books, new men, new arts and sciences,--then we come out of our egg-shell
existence into the great dome, and see the zenith over and the nadir under us. Instead
of the tanks and buckets of knowledge to which we are daily confined, we come down to
the shore of the sea, and dip our hands in its miraculous waves. ‘Tis wonderful the effect
on the company. They are not the men they were. They have all been to California, and
all have come back millionnaires. There is no book and no pleasure in life comparable to
it. Ask what is best in our experience, and we shall say, a few pieces of plain-dealing with
wise people. Our conversation once and again has apprised us that we belong to better
circles than we have yet beheld; that a mental power invites us, whose generalizations
are more worth for joy and for effect than anything that is now called philosophy or
literature. In excited conversation, we have glimpses of the Universe, hints of power
native to the soul, far-darting lights and shadows of an Andes landscape, such as we can
hardly attain in lone meditation. Here are oracles sometimes profusely given, to which
the memory goes back in barren hours.

Add the consent of will and temperament, and there exists the covenant of friendship.
Our chief want in life, is, somebody who shall make us do what we can. This is the service
of a friend. With him we are easily great. There is a sublime attraction in him to whatever
virtue is in us. How he flings wide the doors of existence! What questions we ask of him!
what an understanding we have! how few words are needed! It is the only real society.
An Eastern poet, Ali Ben Abu Taleb, writes with sad truth, --

“He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare,
And he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.”

But few writers have said anything better to this point than Hafiz, who indicates this
relation as the test of mental health: “Thou learnest no secret until thou knowest
friendship, since to the unsound no heavenly knowledge enters.” Neither is life long
enough for friendship. That is a serious and majestic affair, like a royal presence, or a
religion, and not a postilion’s dinner to be eaten on the run. There is a pudency about
friendship, as about love, and though fine souls never lose sight of it, yet they do not
name it. With the first class of men our friendship or good understanding goes quite
behind all accidents of estrangement, of condition, of reputation. And yet we do not
provide for the greatest good of life. We take care of our health; we lay up money; we
make our roof tight, and our clothing sufficient; but who provides wisely that he shall not
be wanting in the best property of all,--friends? We know that all our training is to fit us
for this, and we do not take the step towards it. How long shall we sit and wait for these
benefactors?

It makes no difference, in looking back five years, how you have been dieted or dressed;
whether you have been lodged on the first floor or the attic; whether you have had
gardens and baths, good cattle and horses, have been carried in a neat equipage, or in a
ridiculous truck: these things are forgotten so quickly, and leave no effect. But it counts
much whether we have had good companions, in that time;--almost as much as what
we have been doing. And see the overpowering importance of neighborhood in all
association. As it is marriage, fit or unfit, that makes our home, so it is who lives near us
of equal social degree,--a few people at convenient distance, no matter how bad
company,--these, and these only, shall be your life’s companions: and all those who are
native, congenial, and by many an oath of the heart, sacramented to you, are gradually
and totally lost. You cannot deal systematically with this fine element of society, and one
may take a good deal of pains to bring people together, and to organize clubs and
debating societies, and yet no result come of it. But it is certain that there is a great deal
of good in us that does not know itself, and that a habit of union and competition brings
people up and keeps them up to their highest point; that life would be twice or ten times
life, if spent with wise and fruitful companions. The obvious inference is, a little useful
deliberation and preconcert, when one goes to buy house and land.

But we live with people on other platforms; we live with dependents, not only with the
young whom we are to teach all we know, and clothe with the advantages we have
earned, but also with those who serve us directly, and for money. Yet the old rules hold
good. Let not the tie be mercenary, though the service is measured by money. Make
yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any. This point is acquiring
new importance in American social life. Our domestic service is usually a foolish fracas of
unreasonable demand on one side, and shirking on the other. A man of wit was asked, in
the train, what was his errand in the city? He replied, “I have been sent to procure an
angel to do cooking.” A lady complained to me, that, of her two maidens, one was
absent-minded, and the other was absent-bodied. And the evil increases from the
ignorance and hostility of every ship-load of the immigrant population swarming into
houses and farms. Few people discern that it rests with the master or the mistress what
service comes from the man or the maid; that this identical hussy was a tutelar spirit in
one house, and a haridan in the other. All sensible people are selfish, and nature is
tugging at every contract to make the terms of it fair. If you are proposing only your own,
the other party must deal a little hardly by you. If you deal generously, the other, though
selfish and unjust, will make an exception in your favor, and deal truly with you. When I
asked an iron-master about the slag and cinder in railroad iron,--“O,” he said, “there’s
always good iron to be had: if there’s cinder in the iron, ’tis because there was cinder in
the pay.”

But why multiply these topics, and their illustrations, which are endless? Life brings to
each his task, and, whatever art you select, algebra, planting, architecture, poems,
commerce, politics,--all are attainable, even to the miraculous triumphs, on the same
terms, of selecting that for which you are apt;--begin at the beginning, proceed in
order, step by step. ‘Tis as easy to twist iron anchors, and braid cannons, as to braid
straw, to boil granite as to boil water, if you take all the steps in order. Wherever there is
failure, there is some giddiness, some superstition about luck, some step omitted, which
Nature never pardons. The happy conditions of life may be had on the same terms.
Their attraction for you is the pledge that they are within your reach. Our prayers are
prophets. There must be fidelity, and there must be adherence. How respectable the life
that clings to its objects! Youthful aspirations are fine things, your theories and plans of
life are fair and commendable:--but will you stick? Not one, I fear, in that Common full
of people, or, in a thousand, but one: and, when you tax them with treachery, and
remind them of their high resolutions, they have forgotten that they made a vow. The
individuals are fugitive, and in the act of becoming something else, and irresponsible.
The race is great, the ideal fair, but the men whiffling and unsure. The hero is he who is
immovably centred. The main difference between people seems to be, that one man can
come under obligations on which you can rely,--is obligable; and another is not. As he
has not a law within him, there’s nothing to tie him to.

‘Tis inevitable to name particulars of virtue, and of condition, and to exaggerate them.
But all rests at last on that integrity which dwarfs talent, and can spare it. Sanity consists
in not being subdued by your means. Fancy prices are paid for position, and for the
culture of talent, but to the grand interests, superficial success is of no account. The man,
-- it is his attitude,--not feats, but forces,--not on set days and public occasions, but,
at all hours, and in repose alike as in energy, still formidable, and not to be disposed of.
The populace says, with Horne Tooke, “If you would be powerful, pretend to be
powerful.” I prefer to say, with the old prophet, “Seekest thou great things? seek them
not:”--or, what was said of a Spanish prince, “The more you took from him, the greater
he looked.” Plus on lui ote, plus il est grand.

The secret of culture is to learn, that a few great points steadily reappear, alike in the
poverty of the obscurest farm, and in the miscellany of metropolitan life, and that these
few are alone to be regarded,--the escape from all false ties; courage to be what we
are; and love of what is simple and beautiful; independence, and cheerful relation, these
are the essentials,--these, and the wish to serve,--to add somewhat to the well-being
of men.




VIII. BEAUTY



Was never form and never face
So sweet to SEYD as only grace
Which did not slumber like a stone
But hovered gleaming and was gone.
Beauty chased he everywhere,
In flame, in storm, in clouds of air.
He smote the lake to feed his eye
With the beryl beam of the broken wave;
He flung in pebbles well to hear
The moment's music which they gave.
Oft pealed for him a lofty tone
From nodding pole and belting zone.
He heard a voice none else could hear
From centred and from errant sphere.
The quaking earth did quake in rhyme,
Seas ebbed and flowed in epic chime.
In dens of passion, and pits of wo,
He saw strong Eros struggling through,
To sun the dark and solve the curse,
And beam to the bounds of the universe.
While thus to love he gave his days
In loyal worship, scorning praise,
How spread their lures for him, in vain,
Thieving Ambition and paltering Gain!
He thought it happier to be dead,
To die for Beauty, than live for bread.




The spiral tendency of vegetation infects education also. Our books approach very slowly
the things we most wish to know. What a parade we make of our science, and how far
off, and at arm's length, it is from its objects! Our botany is all names, not powers: poets
and romancers talk of herbs of grace and healing; but what does the botanist know of
the virtues of his weeds? The geologist lays bare the strata, and can tell them all on his
fingers: but does he know what effect passes into the man who builds his house in
them? what effect on the race that inhabits a granite shelf? what on the inhabitants of
marl and of alluvium?

We should go to the ornithologist with a new feeling, if he could teach us what the social
birds say, when they sit in the autumn council, talking together in the trees. The want of
sympathy makes his record a dull dictionary. His result is a dead bird. The bird is not in
its ounces and inches, but in its relations to Nature; and the skin or skeleton you show
me, is no more a heron, than a heap of ashes or a bottle of gases into which his body has
been reduced, is Dante or Washington. The naturalist is led from the road by the whole
distance of his fancied advance. The boy had juster views when he gazed at the shells on
the beach, or the flowers in the meadow, unable to call them by their names, than the
man in the pride of his nomenclature. Astrology interested us, for it tied man to the
system. Instead of an isolated beggar, the farthest star felt him, and he felt the star.
However rash and however falsified by pretenders and traders in it, the hint was true
and divine, the soul's avowal of its large relations, and, that climate, century, remote
natures, as well as near, are part of its biography. Chemistry takes to pieces, but it does
not construct. Alchemy which sought to transmute one element into another, to prolong
life, to arm with power,-- that was in the right direction. All our science lacks a human
side. The tenant is more than the house. Bugs and stamens and spores, on which we
lavish so many years, are not finalities, and man, when his powers unfold in order, will
take Nature along with him, and emit light into all her recesses. The human heart
concerns us more than the poring into microscopes, and is larger than can be measured
by the pompous figures of the astronomer.

We are just so frivolous and skeptical. Men hold themselves cheap and vile: and yet a
man is a fagot of thunderbolts. All the elements pour through his system: he is the flood
of the flood, and fire of the fire; he feels the antipodes and the pole, as drops of his
blood: they are the extension of his personality. His duties are measured by that
instrument he is; and a right and perfect man would be felt to the centre of the
Copernican system. 'Tis curious that we only believe as deep as we live. We do not think
heroes can exert any more awful power than that surface-play which amuses us. A deep
man believes in miracles, waits for them, believes in magic, believes that the orator will
decompose his adversary; believes that the evil eye can wither, that the heart's blessing
can heal; that love can exalt talent; can overcome all odds. From a great heart secret
magnetisms flow incessantly to draw great events. But we prize very humble utilities, a
prudent husband, a good son, a voter, a citizen, and deprecate any romance of
character; and perhaps reckon only his money value,-- his intellect, his affection, as a
sort of bill of exchange, easily convertible into fine chambers, pictures, music, and wine.

The motive of science was the extension of man, on all sides, into Nature, till his hands
should touch the stars, his eyes see through the earth, his ears understand the language
of beast and bird, and the sense of the wind; and, through his sympathy, heaven and
earth should talk with him. But that is not our science. These geologies, chemistries,
astronomies, seem to make wise, but they leave us where they found us. The invention is
of use to the inventor, of questionable help to any other. The formulas of science are like
the papers in your pocket-book, of no value to any but the owner. Science in England, in
America, is jealous of theory, hates the name of love and moral purpose. There's a
revenge for this inhumanity. What manner of man does science make? The boy is not
attracted. He says, I do not wish to be such a kind of man as my professor is. The
collector has dried all the plants in his herbal, but he has lost weight and humor. He has
got all snakes and lizards in his phials, but science has done for him also, and has put
the man into a bottle. Our reliance on the physician is a kind of despair of ourselves. The
clergy have bronchitis, which does not seem a certificate of spiritual health. Macready
thought it came of the falsetto of their voicing. An Indian prince, Tisso, one day riding in
the forest, saw a herd of elk sporting. "See how happy," he said, "these browsing elks
are! Why should not priests, lodged and fed comfortably in the temples, also amuse
themselves?" Returning home, he imparted this reflection to the king. The king, on the
next day, conferred the sovereignty on him, saying, "Prince, administer this empire for
seven days: at the termination of that period, I shall put thee to death." At the end of the
seventh day, the king inquired, "From what cause hast thou become so emaciated?" He
answered, "From the horror of death." The monarch rejoined: "Live, my child, and be
wise. Thou hast ceased to take recreation, saying to thyself, in seven days I shall be put
to death. These priests in the temple incessantly meditate on death; how can they enter
into healthful diversions?" But the men of science or the doctors or the clergy are not
victims of their pursuits, more than others. The miller, the lawyer, and the merchant,
dedicate themselves to their own details, and do not come out men of more force. Have
they divination, grand aims, hospitality of soul, and the equality to any event, which we
demand in man, or only the reactions of the mill, of the wares, of the chicane?

No object really interests us but man, and in man only his superiorities; and, though we
are aware of a perfect law in Nature, it has fascination for us only through its relation to
him, or, as it is rooted in the mind. At the birth of Winckelmann, more than a hundred
years ago, side by side with this arid, departmental, post mortem science, rose an
enthusiasm in the study of Beauty; and perhaps some sparks from it may yet light a
conflagration in the other. Knowledge of men, knowledge of manners, the power of
form, and our sensibility to personal influence, never go out of fashion. These are facts
of a science which we study without book, whose teachers and subjects are always near
us.

So inveterate is our habit of criticism, that much of our knowledge in this direction
belongs to the chapter of pathology. The crowd in the street oftener furnishes
degradations than angels or redeemers: but they all prove the transparency. Every spirit
makes its house; and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant. But
not less does Nature furnish us with every sign of grace and goodness. The delicious
faces of children, the beauty of school-girls, "the sweet seriousness of sixteen," the lofty
air of well-born, well-bred boys, the passionate histories in the looks and manners of
youth and early manhood, and the varied power in all that well-known company that
escort us through life,-- we know how these forms thrill, paralyze, provoke, inspire, and
enlarge us.

Beauty is the form under which the intellect prefers to study the world. All privilege is
that of beauty; for there are many beauties; as, of general nature, of the human face and
form, of manners, of brain, or method, moral beauty, or beauty of the soul.

The ancients believed that a genius or demon took possession at birth of each mortal, to
guide him; that these genii were sometimes seen as a flame of fire partly immersed in
the bodies which they governed;-- on an evil man, resting on his head; in a good man,
mixed with his substance. They thought the same genius, at the death of its ward,
entered a new-born child, and they pretended to guess the pilot, by the sailing of the
ship. We recognize obscurely the same fact, though we give it our own names. We say,
that every man is entitled to be valued by his best moment. We measure our friends so.
We know, they have intervals of folly, whereof we take no heed, but wait the
reappearings of the genius, which are sure and beautiful. On the other side, everybody
knows people who appear beridden, and who, with all degrees of ability, never impress
us with the air of free agency. They know it too, and peep with their eyes to see if you
detect their sad plight. We fancy, could we pronounce the solving word, and disenchant
them, the cloud would roll up, the little rider would be discovered and unseated, and
they would regain their freedom. The remedy seems never to be far off, since the first
step into thought lifts this mountain of necessity. Thought is the pent air-ball which can
rive the planet, and the beauty which certain objects have for him, is the friendly fire
which expands the thought, and acquaints the prisoner that liberty and power await him.

The question of Beauty takes us out of surfaces, to thinking of the foundations of things.
Goethe said, "The beautiful is a manifestation of secret laws of Nature, which, but for this
appearance, had been forever concealed from us." And the working of this deep instinct
makes all the excitement-- much of it superficial and absurd enough-- about works of
art, which leads armies of vain travellers every year to Italy, Greece, and Egypt. Every
man values every acquisition he makes in the science of beauty, above his possessions.
The most useful man in the most useful world, so long as only commodity was served,
would remain unsatisfied. But, as fast as he sees beauty, life acquires a very high value.

I am warned by the ill fate of many philosophers not to attempt a definition of Beauty. I
will rather enumerate a few of its qualities. We ascribe beauty to that which is simple;
which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to
all things; which is the mean of many extremes. It is the most enduring quality, and the
most ascending quality. We say, love is blind, and the figure of Cupid is drawn with a
bandage round his eyes. Blind:-- yes, because he does not see what he does not like;
but the sharpest-sighted hunter in the universe is Love, for finding what he seeks, and
only that; and the mythologists tell us, that Vulcan was painted lame, and Cupid blind, to
call attention to the fact, that one was all limbs, and the other, all eyes. In the true
mythology, Love is an immortal child, and Beauty leads him as a guide: nor can we
express a deeper sense than when we say, Beauty is the pilot of the young soul.

Beyond their sensuous delight, the forms and colors of Nature have a new charm for us
in our perception, that not one ornament was added for ornament, but is a sign of some
better health, or more excellent action. Elegance of form in bird or beast, or in the
human figure, marks some excellence of structure: or beauty is only an invitation from
what belongs to us. 'Tis a law of botany, that in plants, the same virtues follow the same
forms. It is a rule of largest application, true in a plant, true in a loaf of bread, that in the
construction of any fabric or organism, any real increase of fitness to its end, is an
increase of beauty.

The lesson taught by the study of Greek and of Gothic art, of antique and of Pre-
Raphaelite painting, was worth all the research,-- namely, that all beauty must be
organic; that outside embellishment is deformity. It is the soundness of the bones that
ultimates itself in a peach-bloom complexion: health of constitution that makes the
sparkle and the power of the eye. 'Tis the adjustment of the size and of the joining of the
sockets of the skeleton, that gives grace of outline and the finer grace of movement. The
cat and the deer cannot move or sit inelegantly. The dancing-master can never teach a
badly built man to walk well. The tint of the flower proceeds from its root, and the lustres
of the sea-shell begin with its existence. Hence our taste in building rejects paint, and all
shifts, and shows the original grain of the wood: refuses pilasters and columns that
support nothing, and allows the real supporters of the house honestly to show
themselves. Every necessary or organic action pleases the beholder. A man leading a
horse to water, a farmer sowing seed, the labors of haymakers in the field, the carpenter
building a ship, the smith at his forge, or, whatever useful labor, is becoming to the wise
eye. But if it is done to be seen, it is mean. How beautiful are ships on the sea! but ships
in the theatre,-- or ships kept for picturesque effect on Virginia Water, by George IV.,
and men hired to stand in fitting costumes at a penny an hour!-- What a difference in
effect between a battalion of troops marching to action, and one of our independent
companies on a holiday! In the midst of a military show, and a festal procession gay with
banners, I saw a boy seize an old tin pan that lay rusting under a wall, and poising it on
the top of a stick, he set it turning, and made it describe the most elegant imaginable
curves, and drew away attention from the decorated procession by this startling beauty.

Another text from the mythologists. The Greeks fabled that Venus was born of the foam
of the sea. Nothing interests us which is stark or bounded, but only what streams with
life, what is in act or endeavor to reach somewhat beyond. The pleasure a palace or a
temple gives the eye, is, that an order and method has been communicated to stones, so
that they speak and geometrize, become tender or sublime with expression. Beauty is
the moment of transition, as if the form were just ready to flow into other forms. Any
fixedness, heaping, or concentration on one feature,-- a long nose, a sharp chin, a
hump-back,-- is the reverse of the flowing, and therefore deformed. Beautiful as is the
symmetry of any form, if the form can move, we seek a more excellent symmetry. The
interruption of equilibrium stimulates the eye to desire the restoration of symmetry, and
to watch the steps through which it is attained. This is the charm of running water, sea-
waves, the flight of birds, and the locomotion of animals. This is the theory of dancing, to
recover continually in changes the lost equilibrium, not by abrupt and angular, but by
gradual and curving movements. I have been told by persons of experience in matters of
taste, that the fashions follow a law of gradation, and are never arbitrary. The new mode
is always only a step onward in the same direction as the last mode; and a cultivated eye
is prepared for and predicts the new fashion. This fact suggests the reason of all
mistakes and offence in our own modes. It is necessary in music, when you strike a
discord, to let down the ear by an intermediate note or two to the accord again: and
many a good experiment, born of good sense, and destined to succeed, fails, only
because it is offensively sudden. I suppose, the Parisian milliner who dresses the world
from her imperious boudoir will know how to reconcile the Bloomer costume to the eye
of mankind, and make it triumphant over Punch himself, by interposing the just
gradations. I need not say, how wide the same law ranges; and how much it can be
hoped to effect. All that is a little harshly claimed by progressive parties, may easily come
to be conceded without question, if this rule be observed. Thus the circumstances may
be easily imagined, in which woman may speak, vote, argue causes, legislate, and drive a
coach, and all the most naturally in the world, if only it come by degrees. To this
streaming or flowing belongs the beauty that all circular movement has; as, the
circulation of waters, the circulation of the blood, the periodical motion of planets, the
annual wave of vegetation, the action and reaction of Nature: and, if we follow it out, this
demand in our thought for an ever-onward action, is the argument for the immortality.

One more text from the mythologists is to the same purpose,-- Beauty rides on a lion.
Beauty rests on necessities. The line of beauty is the result of perfect economy. The cell
of the bee is built at that angle which gives the most strength with the least wax; the
bone or the quill of the bird gives the most alar strength, with the least weight. "It is the
purgation of superfluities," said Michel Angelo. There is not a particle to spare in natural
structures. There is a compelling reason in the uses of the plant, for every novelty of
color or form: and our art saves material, by more skilful arrangement, and reaches
beauty by taking every superfluous ounce that can be spared from a wall, and keeping all
its strength in the poetry of columns. In rhetoric, this art of omission is a chief secret of
power, and, in general, it is proof of high culture, to say the greatest matters in the
simplest way.

Veracity first of all, and forever. Rien de beau que le vrai. In all design, art lies in making
your object prominent, but there is a prior art in choosing objects that are prominent.
The fine arts have nothing casual, but spring from the instincts of the nations that
created them.

Beauty is the quality which makes to endure. In a house that I know, I have noticed a
block of spermaceti lying about closets and mantel-pieces, for twenty years together,
simply because the tallow-man gave it the form of a rabbit; and, I suppose, it may
continue to be lugged about unchanged for a century. Let an artist scrawl a few lines or
figures on the back of a letter, and that scrap of paper is rescued from danger, is put in
portfolio, is framed and glazed, and, in proportion to the beauty of the lines drawn, will
be kept for centuries. Burns writes a copy of verses, and sends them to a newspaper,
and the human race take charge of them that they shall not perish. 6/11
As the flute is heard farther than the cart, see how surely a beautiful form strikes the
fancy of men, and is copied and reproduced without end. How many copies are there of
the Belvedere Apollo, the Venus, the Psyche, the Warwick Vase, the Parthenon, and the
Temple of Vesta? These are objects of tenderness to all. In our cities, an ugly building is
soon removed, and is never repeated, but any beautiful building is copied and improved
upon, so that all masons and carpenters work to repeat and preserve the agreeable
forms, whilst the ugly ones die out.

The felicities of design in art, or in works of Nature, are shadows or forerunners of that
beauty which reaches its perfection in the human form. All men are its lovers. Wherever
it goes, it creates joy and hilarity, and everything is permitted to it. It reaches its height in
woman. "To Eve," say the Mahometans, "God gave two thirds of all beauty." A beautiful
woman is a practical poet, taming her savage mate, planting tenderness, hope, and
eloquence, in all whom she approaches. Some favors of condition must go with it, since
a certain serenity is essential, but we love its reproofs and superiorities. Nature wishes
that woman should attract man, yet she often cunningly moulds into her face a little
sarcasm, which seems to say, `Yes, I am willing to attract, but to attract a little better kind
of a man than any I yet behold.' French memoires of the fifteenth century celebrate the
name of Pauline de Viguiere, a virtuous and accomplished maiden, who so fired the
enthusiasm of her contemporaries, by her enchanting form, that the citizens of her
native city of Toulouse obtained the aid of the civil authorities to compel her to appear
publicly on the balcony at least twice a week, and, as often as she showed herself, the
crowd was dangerous to life. Not less, in England, in the last century, was the fame of the
Gunnings, of whom, Elizabeth married the Duke of Hamilton; and Maria, the Earl of
Coventry. Walpole says, "the concourse was so great, when the Duchess of Hamilton was
presented at court, on Friday, that even the noble crowd in the drawing-room clambered
on chairs and tables to look at her. There are mobs at their doors to see them get into
their chairs, and people go early to get places at the theatres, when it is known they will
be there." "Such crowds," he adds, elsewhere, "flock to see the Duchess of Hamilton, that
seven hundred people sat up all night, in and about an inn, in Yorkshire, to see her get
into her post-chaise next morning."

But why need we console ourselves with the fames of Helen of Argos, or Corinna, or
Pauline of Toulouse, or the Duchess of Hamilton? We all know this magic very well, or
can divine it. It does not hurt weak eyes to look into beautiful eyes never so long. Women
stand related to beautiful Nature around us, and the enamored youth mixes their form
with moon and stars, with woods and waters, and the pomp of summer. They heal us of
awkwardness by their words and looks. We observe their intellectual influence on the
most serious student. They refine and clear his mind; teach him to put a pleasing
method into what is dry and difficult. We talk to them, and wish to be listened to; we fear
to fatigue them, and acquire a facility of expression which passes from conversation into
habit of style.

That Beauty is the normal state, is shown by the perpetual effort of Nature to attain it.
Mirabeau had an ugly face on a handsome ground; and we see faces every day which
have a good type, but have been marred in the casting: a proof that we are all entitled to
beauty, should have been beautiful, if our ancestors had kept the laws,-- as every lily
and every rose is well. But our bodies do not fit us, but caricature and satirize us. Thus,
short legs, which constrain us to short, mincing steps, are a kind of personal insult and
contumely to the owner; and long stilts, again, put him at perpetual disadvantage, and
force him to stoop to the general level of mankind. Martial ridicules a gentleman of his
day whose countenance resembled the face of a swimmer seen under water. Saadi
describes a schoolmaster "so ugly and crabbed, that a sight of him would derange the
ecstasies of the orthodox." Faces are rarely true to any ideal type, but are a record in
sculpture of a thousand anecdotes of whim and folly. Portrait painters say that most
faces and forms are irregular and unsymmetrical; have one eye blue, and one gray; the
nose not straight; and one shoulder higher than another; the hair unequally distributed,
etc. The man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches,
borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.

A beautiful person, among the Greeks, was thought to betray by this sign some secret
favor of the immortal gods: and we can pardon pride, when a woman possesses such a
figure, that wherever she stands, or moves, or leaves a shadow on the wall, or sits for a
portrait to the artist, she confers a favor on the world. And yet-- it is not beauty that
inspires the deepest passion. Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait. Beauty,
without expression, tires. Abbe Menage said of the President Le Bailleul, "that he was fit
for nothing but to sit for his portrait." A Greek epigram intimates that the force of love is
not shown by the courting of beauty, but when the like desire is inflamed for one who is
ill-favored. And petulant old gentlemen, who have chanced to suffer some intolerable
weariness from pretty people, or who have seen cut flowers to some profusion, or who
see, after a world of pains have been successfully taken for the costume, how the least
mistake in sentiment takes all the beauty out of your clothes,-- affirm, that the secret of
ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.

We love any forms, however ugly, from which great qualities shine. If command,
eloquence, art, or invention, exist in the most deformed person, all the accidents that
usually displease, please, and raise esteem and wonder higher. The great orator was an
emaciated, insignificant person, but he was all brain. Cardinal De Retz says of De
Bouillon, "With the physiognomy of an ox, he had the perspicacity of an eagle." It was
said of Hooke, the friend of Newton, "he is the most, and promises the least, of any man
in England." "Since I am so ugly," said Du Guesclin, "it behooves that I be bold." Sir Philip
Sidney, the darling of mankind, Ben Jonson tells us, "was no pleasant man in
countenance, his face being spoiled with pimples, and of high blood, and long." Those
who have ruled human destinies, like planets, for thousands of years, were not
handsome men. If a man can raise a small city to be a great kingdom, can make bread
cheap, can irrigate deserts, can join oceans by canals, can subdue steam, can organize
victory, can lead the opinions of mankind, can enlarge knowledge, 'tis no matter whether
his nose is parallel to his spine, as it ought to be, or whether he has a nose at all;
whether his legs are straight, or whether his legs are amputated; his deformities will
come to be reckoned ornamental, and advantageous on the whole. This is the triumph of
expression, degrading beauty, charming us with a power so fine and friendly and
intoxicating, that it makes admired persons insipid, and the thought of passing our lives
with them insupportable. There are faces so fluid with expression, so flushed and
rippled by the play of thought, that we can hardly find what the mere features really are.
When the delicious beauty of lineaments loses its power, it is because a more delicious
beauty has appeared; that an interior and durable form has been disclosed. Still, Beauty
rides on her lion, as before. Still, "it was for beauty that the world was made." The lives
of the Italian artists, who established a despotism of genius amidst the dukes and kings
and mobs of their stormy epoch, prove how loyal men in all times are to a finer brain, a
finer method, than their own. If a man can cut such a head on his stone gate-post as
shall draw and keep a crowd about it all day, by its beauty, good nature, and inscrutable
meaning;-- if a man can build a plain cottage with such symmetry, as to make all the
fine palaces look cheap and vulgar; can take such advantage of Nature, that all her
powers serve him; making use of geometry, instead of expense; tapping a mountain for
his water-jet; causing the sun and moon to seem only the decorations of his estate; this
is still the legitimate dominion of beauty.

The radiance of the human form, though sometimes astonishing, is only a burst of
beauty for a few years or a few months, at the perfection of youth, and in most, rapidly
declines. But we remain lovers of it, only transferring our interest to interior excellence.
And it is not only admirable in singular and salient talents, but also in the world of
manners.

But the sovereign attribute remains to be noted. Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant,
handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful. This is the reason
why beauty is still escaping out of all analysis. It is not yet possessed, it cannot be
handled. Proclus says, "it swims on the light of forms." It is properly not in the form, but
in the mind. It instantly deserts possession, and flies to an object in the horizon. If I could
put my hand on the north star, would it be as beautiful? The sea is lovely, but when we
bathe in it, the beauty forsakes all the near water. For the imagination and senses
cannot be gratified at the same time. Wordsworth rightly speaks of "a light that never
was on sea or land," meaning, that it was supplied by the observer, and the Welsh bard
warns his countrywomen, that

--"half of their charms with Cadwallon shall die."

The new virtue which constitutes a thing beautiful, is a certain cosmical quality, or, a
power to suggest relation to the whole world, and so lift the object out of a pitiful
individuality. Every natural feature,-- sea, sky, rainbow, flowers, musical tone,-- has in it
somewhat which is not private, but universal, speaks of that central benefit which is the
soul of Nature, and thereby is beautiful. And, in chosen men and women, I find
somewhat in form, speech, and manners, which is not of their person and family, but of
a humane, catholic, and spiritual character, and we love them as the sky. They have a
largeness of suggestion, and their face and manners carry a certain grandeur, like time
and justice.

The feat of the imagination is in showing the convertibility of every thing into every other
thing. Facts which had never before left their stark common sense, suddenly figure as
Eleusinian mysteries. My boots and chair and candlestick are fairies in disguise, meteors
and constellations. All the facts in Nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the
grammar of the eternal language. Every word has a double, treble, or centuple use and
meaning. What! has my stove and pepper-pot a false bottom! I cry you mercy, good
shoe-box! I did not know you were a jewel-case. Chaff and dust begin to sparkle, and are
clothed about with immortality. And there is a joy in perceiving the representative or
symbolic character of a fact, which no bare fact or event can ever give. There are no days
in life so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination.

The poets are quite right in decking their mistresses with the spoils of the landscape,
flower-gardens, gems, rainbows, flushes of morning, and stars of night, since all beauty
points at identity, and whatsoever thing does not express to me the sea and sky, day and
night, is somewhat forbidden and wrong. Into every beautiful object, there enters
somewhat immeasurable and divine, and just as much into form bounded by outlines,
like mountains on the horizon, as into tones of music, or depths of space. Polarized light
showed the secret architecture of bodies; and when the second-sight of the mind is
opened, now one color or form or gesture, and now another, has a pungency, as if a
more interior ray had been emitted, disclosing its deep holdings in the frame of things.

The laws of this translation we do not know, or why one feature or gesture enchants, why
one word or syllable intoxicates, but the fact is familiar that the fine touch of the eye, or
a grace of manners, or a phrase of poetry, plants wings at our shoulders; as if the
Divinity, in his approaches, lifts away mountains of obstruction, and deigns to draw a
truer line, which the mind knows and owns. This is that haughty force of beauty, "vis
superba formae," which the poets praise,-- under calm and precise outline, the
immeasurable and divine: Beauty hiding all wisdom and power in its calm sky.

All high beauty has a moral element in it, and I find the antique sculpture as ethical as
Marcus Antoninus: and the beauty ever in proportion to the depth of thought. Gross and
obscure natures, however decorated, seem impure shambles; but character gives
splendor to youth, and awe to wrinkled skin and gray hairs. An adorer of truth we cannot
choose but obey, and the woman who has shared with us the moral sentiment,-- her
locks must appear to us sublime. Thus there is a climbing scale of culture, from the first
agreeable sensation which a sparkling gem or a scarlet stain affords the eye, up through
fair outlines and details of the landscape, features of the human face and form, signs
and tokens of thought and character in manners, up to the ineffable mysteries of the
intellect. Wherever we begin, thither our steps tend: an ascent from the joy of a horse in
his trappings, up to the perception of Newton, that the globe on which we ride is only a
larger apple falling from a larger tree; up to the perception of Plato, that globe and
universe are rude and early expressions of an all-dissolving Unity,-- the first stair on the
scale to the temple of the Mind.




IX. ILLUSIONS



Flow, flow the waves hated,
Accursed, adored,
The waves of mutation:
No anchorage is.
Sleep is not, death is not;
Who seem to die live.
House you were born in,
Friends of your spring-time,
Old man and young maid,
Day’s toil and its guerdon,
They are all vanishing,
Fleeing to fables,
Cannot be moored.
See the stars through them,
Through treacherous marbles.
Know, the stars yonder,
The stars everlasting,
Are fugitive also,
And emulate, vaulted,
The lambent heat-lightning,
And fire-fly’s flight.
When thou dost return
On the wave’s circulation,
Beholding the shimmer,
The wild dissipation,
And, out of endeavor
To change and to flow,
The gas become solid,
And phantoms and nothings
Return to be things,
And endless imbroglio
Is law and the world,--
Then first shalt thou know,
That in the wild turmoil,
Horsed on the Proteus,
Thou ridest to power,
And to endurance.




Some years ago, in company with an agreeable party, I spent a long summer day in
exploring the Mammoth Cave Web Site in Kentucky. We traversed, through spacious
galleries affording a solid masonry foundation for the town and county overhead, the six
or eight black miles from the mouth of the cavern to the innermost recess which tourists
visit,--a niche or grotto made of one seamless stalactite, and called, I believe, Serena’s
Bower. I lost the light of one day. I saw high domes, and bottomless pits; heard the voice
of unseen waterfalls; paddled three quarters of a mile in the deep Echo River, whose
waters are peopled with the blind fish; crossed the streams “Lethe” and “Styx;” plied with
music and guns the echoes in these alarming galleries; saw every form of stalagmite and
stalactite in the sculptured and fretted chambers,-- icicle, orange-flower, acanthus,
grapes, and snowball. We shot Bengal lights into the vaults and groins of the sparry
cathedrals, and examined all the masterpieces which the four combined engineers,
water, limestone, gravitation, and time, could make in the dark.

The mysteries and scenery of the cave had the same dignity that belongs to all natural
objects, and which shames the fine things to which we foppishly compare them. I
remarked, especially, the mimetic habit, with which Nature, on new instruments, hums
her old tunes, making night to mimic day, and chemistry to ape vegetation. But I then
took notice, and still chiefly remember, that the best thing which the cave had to offer
was an illusion. On arriving at what is called the “Star-Chamber,” our lamps were taken
from us by the guide, and extinguished or put aside, and, on looking upwards, I saw or
seemed to see the night heaven thick with stars glimmering more or less brightly over
our heads, and even what seemed a comet flaming among them. All the party were
touched with astonishment and pleasure. Our musical friends sung with much feeling a
pretty song, “The stars are in the quiet sky,” &c., and I sat down on the rocky floor to
enjoy the serene picture. Some crystal specks in the black ceiling high overhead,
reflecting the light of a half-hid lamp, yielded this magnificent effect.

I own, I did not like the cave so well for eking out its sublimities with this theatrical trick.
But I have had many experiences like it, before and since; and we must be content to be
pleased without too curiously analyzing the occasions. Our conversation with Nature is
not just what it seems. The cloud-rack, the sunrise and sunset glories, rainbows, and
northern lights are not quite so spheral as our childhood thought them; and the part our
organization plays in them is too large. The senses interfere everywhere, and mix their
own structure with all they report of. Once, we fancied the earth a plane, and stationary.
In admiring the sunset, we do not yet deduct the rounding, coordinating, pictorial powers
of the eye.

The same interference from our organization creates the most of our pleasure and pain.
Our first mistake is the belief that the circumstance gives the joy which we give to the
circumstance. Life is an ecstasy. Life is sweet as nitrous oxide; and the fisherman
dripping all day over a cold pond, the switchman at the railway intersection, the farmer
in the field, the negro in the rice-swamp, the fop in the street, the hunter in the woods,
the barrister with the jury, the belle at the ball, all ascribe a certain pleasure to their
employment, which they themselves give it. Health and appetite impart the sweetness to
sugar, bread, and meat. We fancy that our civilization has got on far, but we still come
back to our primers.

We live by our imaginations, by our admirations, by our sentiments. The child walks amid
heaps of illusions, which he does not like to have disturbed. The boy, how sweet to him is
his fancy! how dear the story of barons and battles! What a hero he is, whilst he feeds on
his heroes! What a debt is his to imaginative books! He has no better friend or influence,
than Scott, Shakspeare, Plutarch, and Homer. The man lives to other objects, but who
dare affirm that they are more real? Even the prose of the streets is full of refractions. In
the life of the dreariest alderman, fancy enters into all details, and colors them with rosy
hue. He imitates the air and actions of people whom he admires, and is raised in his own
eyes. He pays a debt quicker to a rich man than to a poor man. He wishes the bow and
compliment of some leader in the state, or in society; weighs what he says; perhaps he
never comes nearer to him for that, but dies at last better contented for this amusement
of his eyes and his fancy.

The world rolls, the din of life is never hushed. In London, in Paris, in Boston, in San
Francisco, the carnival, the masquerade is at its height. Nobody drops his domino. The
unities, the fictions of the piece it would be an impertinence to break. The chapter of
fascinations is very long. Great is paint; nay, God is the painter; and we rightly accuse the
critic who destroys too many illusions. Society does not love its un-maskers. It was wittily,
if somewhat bitterly, said by D’Alembert, “qu’un etat de vapeur etait un etat tres facheux,
parcequ’il nous faisait voir les choses comme elles sont.” I find men victims of illusion in
all parts of life. Children, youths, adults, and old men, all are led by one bawble or
another. Yoganidra, the goddess of illusion, Proteus, or Momus, or Gylfi’s Mocking,-- for
the Power has many names,-- is stronger than the Titans, stronger than Apollo. Few
have overheard the gods, or surprised their secret. Life is a succession of lessons which
must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.
There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one
dream into another dream. The toys, to be sure, are various, and are graduated in
refinement to the quality of the dupe. The intellectual man requires a fine bait; the sots
are easily amused. But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant
marches at all hours, with music and banner and badge.

Amid the joyous troop who give in to the charivari, comes now and then a sad-eyed boy,
whose eyes lack the requisite refractions to clothe the show in due glory, and who is
afflicted with a tendency to trace home the glittering miscellany of fruits and flowers to
one root. Science is a search after identity, and the scientific whim is lurking in all
corners. At the State Fair, a friend of mine complained that all the varieties of fancy pears
in our orchards seem to have been selected by somebody who had a whim for a
particular kind of pear, and only cultivated such as had that perfume; they were all alike.
And I remember the quarrel of another youth with the confectioners, that, when he
racked his wit to choose the best comfits in the shops, in all the endless varieties of
sweetmeat he could only find three flavors, or two. What then? Pears and cakes are good
for something; and because you, unluckily, have an eye or nose too keen, why need you
spoil the comfort which the rest of us find in them? I knew a humorist, who, in a good
deal of rattle, had a grain or two of sense. He shocked the company by maintaining that
the attributes of God were two,-- power and risibility; and that it was the duty of every
pious man to keep up the comedy. And I have known gentlemen of great stake in the
community, but whose sympathies were cold,-- presidents of colleges, and governors,
and senators,-- who held themselves bound to sign every temperance pledge, and act
with Bible societies, and missions, and peace-makers, and cry Hist-a-boy! to every good
dog. We must not carry comity too far, but we all have kind impulses in this direction.
When the boys come into my yard for leave to gather horse-chestnuts, I own I enter into
Nature’s game, and affect to grant the permission reluctantly, fearing that any moment
they will find out the imposture of that showy chaff. But this tenderness is quite
unnecessary; the enchantments are laid on very thick. Their young life is thatched with
them. Bare and grim to tears is the lot of the children in the hovel I saw yesterday; yet
not the less they hung it round with frippery romance, like the children of the happiest
fortune, and talked of “the dear cottage where so many joyful hours had flown.” Well,
this thatching of hovels is the custom of the country. Women, more than all, are the
element and kingdom of illusion. Being fascinated, they fascinate. They see through
Claude-Lorraines. And how dare any one, if he could, pluck away the coulisses, stage
effects, and ceremonies, by which they live? Too pathetic, too pitiable, is the region of
affection, and its atmosphere always liable to mirage.

We are not very much to blame for our bad marriages. We live amid hallucinations; and
this especial trap is laid to trip up our feet with, and all are tripped up first or last. But the
mighty Mother who had been so sly with us, as if she felt that she owed us some
indemnity, insinuates into the Pandora-box of marriage some deep and serious benefits,
and some great joys. We find a delight in the beauty and happiness of children, that
makes the heart too big for the body. In the worst-assorted connections there is ever
some mixture of true marriage. Teague and his jade get some just relations of mutual
respect, kindly observation, and fostering of each other, learn something, and would
carry themselves wiselier, if they were now to begin.

‘Tis fine for us to point at one or another fine madman, as if there were any exempts.
The scholar in his library is none. I, who have all my life heard any number of orations and
debates, read poems and miscellaneous books, conversed with many geniuses, am still
the victim of any new page; and, if Marmaduke, or Hugh, or Moosehead, or any other,
invent a new style or mythology, I fancy that the world will be all brave and right, if
dressed in these colors, which I had not thought of. Then at once I will daub with this
new paint; but it will not stick. ‘Tis like the cement which the peddler sells at the door;
he makes broken crockery hold with it, but you can never buy of him a bit of the cement
which will make it hold when he is gone.

Men who make themselves felt in the world avail themselves of a certain fate in their
constitution, which they know how to use. But they never deeply interest us, unless they
lift a corner of the curtain, or betray never so slightly their penetration of what is behind
it. ‘Tis the charm of practical men, that outside of their practicality are a certain poetry
and play, as if they led the good horse Power by the bridle, and preferred to walk, though
they can ride so fiercely. Bonaparte is intellectual, as well as Caesar; and the best
soldiers, sea-captains, and railway men have a gentleness, when off duty; a good-natured
admission that there are illusions, and who shall say that he is not their sport? We
stigmatize the cast-iron fellows, who cannot so detach themselves, as “dragon-ridden,”
“thunder-stricken,” and fools of fate, with whatever powers endowed.

Since our tuition is through emblems and indirections, ’tis well to know that there is
method in it, a fixed scale, and rank above rank in the phantasms. We begin low with
coarse masks, and rise to the most subtle and beautiful. The red men told Columbus,
“they had an herb which took away fatigue;” but he found the illusion of “arriving from
the east at the Indies” more composing to his lofty spirit than any tobacco. Is not our
faith in the impenetrability of matter more sedative than narcotics? You play with
jackstraws, balls, bowls, horse and gun, estates and politics; but there are finer games
before you. Is not time a pretty toy? Life will show you masks that are worth all your
carnivals. Yonder mountain must migrate into your mind. The fine star-dust and
nebulous blur in Orion, “the portentous year of Mizar and Alcor,” must come down and
be dealt with in your household thought. What if you shall come to discern that the play
and playground of all this pompous history are radiations from yourself, and that the
sun borrows his beams? What terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men
believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and all trace of
them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men’s minds all
vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were framed upon.

There are deceptions of the senses, deceptions of the passions, and the structural,
beneficent illusions of sentiment and of the intellect. There is the illusion of love, which
attributes to the beloved person all which that person shares with his or her family, sex,
age, or condition, nay, with the human mind itself. ‘Tis these which the lover loves, and
Anna Matilda gets the credit of them. As if one shut up always in a tower, with one
window, through which the face of heaven and earth could be seen, should fancy that all
the marvels he beheld belonged to that window. There is the illusion of time, which is
very deep; who has disposed of it? or come to the conviction that what seems the
succession of thought is only the distribution of wholes into causal series? The intellect
sees that every atom carries the whole of Nature; that the mind opens to omnipotence;
that, in the endless striving and ascents, the metamorphosis is entire, so that the soul
doth not know itself in its own act, when that act is perfected. There is illusion that shall
deceive even the elect. There is illusion that shall deceive even the performer of the
miracle. Though he make his body, he denies that he makes it. Though the world exist
from thought, thought is daunted in presence of the world. One after the other we
accept the mental laws, still resisting those which follow, which however must be
accepted. But all our concessions only compel us to new profusion. And what avails it
that science has come to treat space and time as simply forms of thought, and the
material world as hypothetical, and withal our pretension of property and even of self-
hood are fading with the rest, if, at last, even our thoughts are not finalities; but the
incessant flowing and ascension reach these also, and each thought which yesterday was
a finality, to-day is yielding to a larger generalization?

With such volatile elements to work in, ’tis no wonder if our estimates are loose and
floating. We must work and affirm, but we have no guess of the value of what we say or
do. The cloud is now as big as your hand, and now it covers a county. That story of Thor,
who was set to drain the drinking-horn in Asgard, and to wrestle with the old woman,
and to run with the runner Lok, and presently found that he had been drinking up the
sea, and wrestling with Time, and racing with Thought, describes us who are contending,
amid these seeming trifles, with the supreme energies of Nature. We fancy we have
fallen into bad company and squalid condition, low debts, shoe-bills, broken glass to pay
for, pots to buy, butcher’s meat, sugar, milk, and coal. `Set me some great task, ye gods!
and I will show my spirit.’ `Not so,’ says the good Heaven; `plod and plough, vamp your
old coats and hats, weave a shoestring; great affairs and the best wine by and by.’ Well,
’tis all phantasm; and if we weave a yard of tape in all humility, and as well as we can,
long hereafter we shall see it was no cotton tape at all, but some galaxy which we
braided, and that the threads were Time and Nature.

We cannot write the order of the variable winds. How can we penetrate the law of our
shifting moods and susceptibility? Yet they differ as all and nothing. Instead of the
firmament of yesterday, which our eyes require, it is to-day an eggshell which coops us
in; we cannot even see what or where our stars of destiny are. From day to day, the
capital facts of human life are hidden from our eyes. Suddenly the mist rolls up, and
reveals them, and we think how much good time is gone,that might have been saved,
had any hint of these things been shown. A sudden rise in the road shows us the system
of mountains, and all the summits, which have been just as near us all the year, but quite
out of mind. But these alternations are not without their order, and we are parties to our
various fortune. If life seem a succession of dreams, yet poetic justice is done in dreams
also. The visions of good men are good; it is the undisciplined will that is whipped with
bad thoughts and bad fortunes. When we break the laws, we lose our hold on the central
reality. Like sick men in hospitals, we change only from bed to bed, from one folly to
another; and it cannot signify much what becomes of such castaways,-- wailing, stupid,
comatose creatures,-- lifted from bed to bed, from the nothing of life to the nothing of
death.

In this kingdom of illusions we grope eagerly for stays and foundations. There is none
but a strict and faithful dealing at home, and a severe barring out of all duplicity or
illusion there. Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with
ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth. I look upon the simple
and childish virtues of veracity and honesty as the root of all that is sublime in character.
Speak as you think, be what you are, pay your debts of all kinds. I prefer to be owned as
sound and solvent, and my word as good as my bond, and to be what cannot be skipped,
or dissipated, or undermined, to all the eclat in the universe. This reality is the
foundation of friendship, religion, poetry, and art. At the top or at the bottom of all
illusions, I set the cheat which still leads us to work and live for appearances, in spite of
our conviction, in all sane hours, that it is what we really are that avails with friends, with
strangers, and with fate or fortune.

One would think from the talk of men, that riches and poverty were a great matter; and
our civilization mainly respects it. But the Indians say, that they do not think the white
man with his brow of care, always toiling, afraid of heat and cold, and keeping within
doors, has any advantage of them. The permanent interest of every man is, never to be
in a false position, but to have the weight of Nature to back him in all that he does.
Riches and poverty are a thick or thin costume; and our life-- the life of all of us--
identical. For we transcend the circumstance continually, and taste the real quality of
existence; as in our employments, which only differ in the manipulations, but express
the same laws; or in our thoughts, which wear no silks, and taste no ice-creams. We see
God face to face every hour, and know the savor of Nature.

The early Greek philosophers Heraclitus and Xenophanes measured their force on this
problem of identity. Diogenes of Apollonia said, that unless the atoms were made of one
stuff, they could never blend and act with one another. But the Hindoos, in their sacred
writings, express the liveliest feeling, both of the essential identity, and of that illusion
which they conceive variety to be. “The notions, `I am,’ and `This is mine,’ which
influence mankind, are but delusions of the mother of the world. Dispel, O Lord of all
creatures! the conceit of knowledge which proceeds from ignorance.” And the beatitude
of man they hold to lie in being freed from fascination.

The intellect is stimulated by the statement of truth in a trope, and the will by clothing
the laws of life in illusions. But the unities of Truth and of Right are not broken by the
disguise. There need never be any confusion in these. In a crowded life of many parts
and performers, on a stage of nations, or in the obscurest hamlet in Maine or California,
the same elements offer the same choices to each new comer, and, according to his
election, he fixes his fortune in absolute Nature. It would be hard to put more mental
and moral philosophy than the Persians have thrown into a sentence:--

“Fooled thou must be, though wisest of the wise:
Then be the fool of virtue, not of vice.”

There is no chance, and no anarchy, in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every
god is there sitting in his sphere. The young mortal enters the hall of the firmament:
there is he alone with them alone, they pouring on him benedictions and gifts, and
beckoning him up to their thrones. On the instant, and incessantly, fall snow-storms of
illusions. He fancies himself in a vast crowd which sways this way and that, and whose
movement and doings he must obey: he fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant.
The mad crowd drives hither and thither, now furiously commanding this thing to be
done, now that. What is he that he should resist their will, and think or act for himself?
Every moment, new changes, and new showers of deceptions, to baffle and distract him.
And when, by and by, for an instant, the air clears, and the cloud lifts a little, there are
the gods still sitting around him on their thrones,-- they alone with him alone.

THE END

　　　　　　Richest Passages

1　　2　　3　　4　　5　　6　　7　　8　　9　　10

11　　12　　13　　14　　15　　16　　17　　18

19　　20　　21　　22　　23　　24　　25　　26

27　　28　　29　　30　　31　　32　　33　　34

35　　36　　37　　38　　39　　40　　41　　42

43　　44　　45　　46　　47　　48　　49　　50

51　　52　　53　　54　　55　　56　　57　　58

59

(1860)