THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

BY
RALPH WALDO EMERSON

1860
 The Conduct of Life by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

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CONTENTS
1. Fate
2. Power
3. Wealth
4. Culture
5. Behavior
6. Worship
7. Considerations by the Way
8. Beauty
9. Illusions
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1. 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.

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.
 2

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."

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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 couldthey 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 Knight’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
 4

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
 5

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 pugnose, mats of hair, the
pigment of the epidermis, betray character. People seem sheathed in
their tough organization. Ask Spurzheim, ask the doctors, ask Quetelet, if
temperaments decide nothing? or if there be anything they do not
decide? Read the description in medical books of the four temperaments,
and you will think you are reading your own thoughts which you had not
yet told. Find the part which black eyes, and which blue eyes, play
severally in the company. How shall a man escape from his ancestors, or
draw off from his veins the black drop which he drew from his father’s or
his mother’s life? It often appears in a family, as if all the qualities of the
progenitors were potted in several jars,—some ruling quality in each son
or daughter of the house,—and sometimes the unmixed temperament,
the rank unmitigated elixir, the family vice, is drawn off in a separate
individual, and the others are proportionally relieved. We sometimes see
a change of expression in our companion, and say, his father, or his
mother, comes to the windows of his eyes, and sometimes a remote
relative. In different hours, a man represents each of several of his
ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man’s
skin,—seven or eight ancestors at least,—and they constitute the variety
of notes for that new piece of music which his life is. At the corner of the
street, you read the possibility of each passenger, in the facial angle, in
the complexion, in the depth of his eye. His parentage determines it.
Men are what their mothers made them. You may as well ask a loom
which weaves huckaback, why it does not make cashmere, as expect
poetry from this engineer, or a chemical discovery from that jobber. Ask
the digger in the ditch to explain Newton’s laws: the fine organs of his
brain have been pinched by overwork and squalid poverty from father to
son, for a hundred years. When each comes forth from his mother’s
womb, the gate of gifts closes behind him. Let him value his hands and
feet, he has but one pair. So he has but one future, and that is already
predetermined in his lobes, and described in that little fatty face, 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.
 6

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, etc.—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.
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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
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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 re–turning 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
 9

like Bowditch, would be born in Boston: but, on a population of twenty

or two hundred millions, something like accuracy may be had. 1

’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, Œnopides, 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.

1"Everything which pertains to the human species, considered as a whole, belongs to the order of
physical facts. The greater the number of individuals, the more does the influence of the individual
will disappear, leaving predominance to a series of general facts dependent on causes by which society
exists, and is preserved."—QUETELET.
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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
elephant; whatever form she took, he took the male form of that kind,
until she became at last woman and goddess, and he a man and a god.
The limitations refine as the soul purifies, but the ring of necessity is
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.
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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
 12

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, etc., 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.

1. But Fate against Fate is only parrying and defence: there are, also, the
noble creative forces. The revelation of Thought takes man out of
 13

servitude into freedom. We rightly say of ourselves, we were born, and

afterward we were born again, and many times. We have successive
experiences so important, that the new forgets the old, and hence the
mythology of the seven or the nine heavens. The day of days, the great
day of the feast of life, is that in which the inward eye opens to the Unity
in things, to the omnipresence of law;—sees that what is must be, and
ought to be, or is the best. This beatitude dips from on high down on us,
and we see. It is not in us so much as we are in it. If the air come to our
lungs, we breathe and live; if not, we die. If the light come to our eyes, we
see; else not. And if truth come to our mind, we suddenly expand to its
dimensions, as if we grew to worlds. We are as lawgivers; we speak for
Nature; we prophesy and divine.

This insight throws us on the party and interest of the Universe, against
all and sundry; against ourselves, as much as others. A man speaking
from insight affirms of himself what is true of the mind: seeing its
immortality, he says, I am immortal; seeing its invincibility, he says, I
am strong. It is not in us, but we are in it. It is of the maker, not of what
is made. All things are touched and changed by it. This uses, and is not
used. It distances those who share it, from those who share it not. Those
who share it not are flocks and herds. It dates from itself;—not from
former men or better men,—gospel, or constitution, or college, or
custom. Where it shines, Nature is no longer intrusive, but all things
make a musical or pictorial impression. The world of men show like a
comedy without laughter:—populations, interests, government,
history;—’tis all toy figures in a toy house. It does not overvalue
particular truths. We hear eagerly every thought and word quoted from
an intellectual man. But, in his presence, our own mind is roused to
activity, and we forget very fast what he says, much more interested in
the new play of our own thought, than in any thought of his. ’Tis the
majesty into which we have suddenly mounted, the impersonality, the
scorn of egotisms, the sphere of laws, that engage us. Once we were
stepping a little this way, and a little that way; now, we are as men in a
balloon, and do not think so much of the point we have left, or the point
we would make, as of the liberty and 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
 14

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
 15

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
honnêtes gens c’est qu’ils sont des lâches." 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
 16

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 impenetrated.

But every jet of chaos which threatens to exterminate us, is convertible

by intellect into wholesome force. Fate is unpenetrated causes. The water
drowns ship and sailor, like a grain of dust. But learn to swim, trim your
bark, and the wave which drowned it, will be cloven by it, and carry it,
like its own foam, a plume and a power. The cold is inconsiderate of
persons, tingles your blood, freezes a man like a 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.
 17

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 this 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
 18

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.
 19

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 papillæ 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
 20

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
 21

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 pear–
leaf, 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
 22

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. Möller, 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
 23

his speculation, into his charity. And, as every man is hunted by his own
dæmon, 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
 24

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 dæmon 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 co–presence 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
 25

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.
 26

2. 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
 27

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
 28

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 schoolmaster, (which
one has, and one has not, as one has a black moustache and one a
blond,) then quite easily and without envy or resistance, all his
coadjutors and feeders will admit his right to absorb them. The merchant
works by book–keeper and cashier; the lawyer’s authorities are hunted
up by clerks; the geologist reports the surveys of his subalterns;
 29

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 encyclopædia, 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
 30

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 proportions. A Western
 31

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 energy, and bad; power of mind,
with physical health; the ecstasies of devotion, with the exasperations of
debauchery. The same elements are always present, only sometimes
these conspicuous, and sometimes those; what was yesterday
foreground, being 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
 32

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,
 33

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 Athenæum. 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–
 34

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
 35

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
 36

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 stop out of a chalk circle of imbecility into
fruitfulness. Many an artist lacking this, lacks all: he sees the masculine
 37

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 always intending my mind." Or if you will
have a text from politics, take this from Plutarch: "There was, in the
whole city, but one street in which Pericles was ever seen, the street
which led to the market–place and the council house. He declined all
invitations to banquets, and all gay assemblies and company. During the
whole period of his administration, he never dined at the table of a
friend." Or if we seek an example from trade,—"I hope," said a good man
to Rothschild, "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
 38

the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and
qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so
heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape. Dr. Johnson said, in one of
his flowing sentences, "Miserable beyond all names of wretchedness is
that unhappy pair, who are doomed to reduce beforehand to the
principles of abstract reason all the details of each domestic day. There
are cases where little can be said, and much must be done."

The second substitute for temperament is drill, the power of use and
routine. The hack is a better roadster than the Arab barb. In chemistry,
the galvanic stream, slow, but continuous, is equal in power to the
electric spark, and is, in our arts, a better agent. So in human action,
against the spasm of energy, we offset the continuity of drill. We spread
the same amount of force over much time, instead of condensing it into a
moment. ’Tis the same ounce of gold here in a ball, and there in a leaf. At
West Point, Col. Buford, the chief engineer, pounded with a hammer on
the trunnions of a cannon, until he broke them off. He fired a piece of
ordnance some hundred times in swift succession, until it burst. Now
which stroke broke the trunnion? Every stroke. Which blast burst the
piece? Every blast. "Diligence passe sens" Henry VIII. was wont to say,
or, great is drill. John Kemble said, that the worst provincial company of
actors would go through a play better than the best amateur company.
Basil Hall likes to show that the worst regular troops will beat the best
volunteers. Practice is nine tenths. A course of mobs is good practice for
orators. All the great speakers were bad speakers at first. Stumping it
through England for seven years, made Cobden a consummate debater.
Stumping it through New England for twice seven, trained Wendell
Phillips. The way to learn German, is, to read the same dozen pages over
and over a hundred times, till you know every word and particle in them,
and can pronounce and repeat them by heart. No genius can recite a
ballad at first reading, so well as mediocrity can at the fifteenth or
twentieth reading. 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
 39

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.
 40

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. Profitless, 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.
 41

3. 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 æons dim and mute

The reeling brain can ill compute)

Copper and iron, lead, and gold?

What oldest star the fame can save

 42

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,

 43

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, and
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
 44

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
 45

city, the freedom of the earth, travelling, machinery, the benefits of

science, music, and fine arts, the best culture, and the best company. He
is the rich man who can avail himself of all men’s faculties. He is the
richest man who knows how to draw a benefit from the labors of the
greatest number of men, of men in distant countries, and in past times.
The same correspondence that is between thirst in the stomach, and
water in the spring, exists between the whole of man and the whole of
nature. The elements offer their service to him. The sea, washing the
equator and the poles, offers its perilous aid, and the power and empire
that follow it,—day by day to his craft and audacity. "Beware of me," it
says, "but if you can hold me, I am the key to all the lands." Fire offers,
on its side, an equal power. Fire, steam, lightning, gravity, ledges of rock,
mines of iron, lead, quicksilver, tin, and gold; forests of all woods; fruits
of all climates; animals of all habits; the powers of tillage; the fabrics of
his chemic laboratory; the webs of his loom; the masculine draught of his
locomotive, the talismans of the machine–shop; all grand and subtile
things, minerals, gases, ethers, passions, war, trade, government, are his
natural playmates, and, according to the excellence of the machinery in
each human being, is his attraction for the instruments he is to employ.
The world is his 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
 46

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
 47

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, etc., 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 any where 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
 48

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 Cæsars, 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
 49

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
cyclopedias, 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
 50

permanence of wealth in certain families, those families buy and

preserve those 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.
 51

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
Massachusetts. A dollar is not value, but representative of value, and, at
last, of moral values. A dollar is rated for the corn it will buy, or to speak
strictly, not for the corn or 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
 52

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
 53

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 non–interference. 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.
 54

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 landlord and tenant. You
dismiss your laborer, saying, "Patrick, I shall send for you as soon as I
cannot do without you." Patrick goes off contented, for he knows that the
weeds will grow with the potatoes, the vines must be planted, next week,
and, however unwilling you may be, the cantelopes, 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
 55

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
 56

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
 57

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,
 58

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," etc. etc. 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
 59

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 æsthetic 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.
 60

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 spring–work 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
 61

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 stonemason who should build the well thinks he shall have to dig
forty feet: the baker doubts he shall never like to drive up to the door: the
practical neighbor cavils at the position of the barn; and the citizen
comes to know that his predecessor the farmer built the house in the
right spot for the sun and wind, the spring, and 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.
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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 ether. Yet there is commonly a confusion of
expectations on these points. Hotspur lives for the moment; praises
himself for it; and despises Furlong, that he does not. Hotspur, of course,
is poor; and Furlong a good provider. The odd circumstance is, that
Hotspur thinks it a superiority in himself, this improvidence, which
ought to be rewarded with Furlong’s lands.

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

5. Now these things are so in Nature. All things ascend, and the royal
rule of economy is, that it should ascend also, or, whatever we do must
always have a higher aim. Thus it is a maxim, that money is another kind
of blood. Pecunia alter sanguis: or, the estate of a man is only a larger
kind of body, and admits of regimen analogous to his bodily circulations.
So there is no maxim of the merchant, e.g., "Best use of money is to pay
debts;" "Every business by itself;" "Best time is present time;" "The right
investment is in tools of your trade;" or the like, which does not admit of
an extended sense. The 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
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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.
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4. 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
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apt to leave its impression on all his performances. If she creates a

policeman like Fouché, he is made up of suspicions and of plots to
circumvent them. "The air," said Fouché, "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
 66

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
order. 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
 67

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
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in pledge. And here is a pedant that cannot unfold his wrinkles, nor
conceal his wrath at interruption by the best, if their conversation do not
fit his impertinency,—here is he to afflict us with his personalities. ’Tis
incident to scholars, that each of them fancies he is pointedly odious in
his community. Draw him out of this limbo of irritability. Cleanse with
healthy blood his parchment skin. You restore to him his eyes which he
left in pledge at Mimir’s spring. If you are the victim of your doing, who
cares what you do? We can spare your opera, your gazetteer, your chemic
analysis, your history, your syllogisms. Your man of genius pays dear for
his distinction. His head runs up into a spire, and instead of a healthy
man, merry and wise, he is some mad dominie. Nature is reckless of the
individual. When she has points to carry, she carries them. To wade in
marshes and 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
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the law of nature; and men are valued precisely as they exert onward or
meliorating force. On the other hand, poltroonery is the acknowledging
an inferiority to be 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 Cæsar, 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
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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,
 71

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.
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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 amusement and
occupation which the human race in ages could contrive and
accumulate.’
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Akin to the benefit of foreign travel, the æsthetic 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 inestimable grace. Fuller says,
that "William, Earl of Nassau, won a subject from the King of Spain,
every time he put off his hat." You cannot have one 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 Staël. 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
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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 especially of American youth,—pretension. The mark of the man of
the world is absence of pretension. He does not make a speech; he takes
a low 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 himself to be surprised into thought, and the
unlocking of his learning and philosophy. How the imagination is piqued
by anecdotes of some great man passing incognito, as a king in gray
clothes,—of Napoleon affecting a plain suit at his glittering levee; of
Burns, or Scott, or Beethoven, or Wellington, or Goethe, or any container
of transcendent power, passing for nobody; of Epaminondas, "who never
says anything, but will listen eternally;" of Goethe, who preferred trifling
subjects and common expressions in intercourse with strangers, worse
rather than better clothes, and to appear a little more capricious than he
was. There are advantages in the old hat and 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."2

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."

2 Beaumont and Fletcher: The Tamer Tamed.

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’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 Pictish 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
chophouse, a barber’s shop. He has lost the lines of grandeur of the
horizon, hills and plains, and with them, sobriety and elevation. He has
come among a supple, 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 féconde,

Mirmidons,

Enfin nous commandons;

Jupiter livre le monde

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Aux mirmidons, aux mirmidons." 3

’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.

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

3 Béranger.
 77

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
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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 Cæsar,
was intellectual, and could look at every object for itself, without
affection. Though an egotist à 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,
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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
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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
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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
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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 pæan! 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.
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5. 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;
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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.
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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
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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 Athenæum 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.
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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
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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 outdoor life, and
hunting, and labor, give equal vigor to the human eye. A farmer looks out
at you as strong as the horse; his 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,
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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 Lacedæmon; ’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
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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 Cæsar, 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 "Théorie de la

démarche" 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 Roederer, and an encyclopædia of Mémoires,
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 palace–doors.

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
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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
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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."4

Manners require time, as nothing is more vulgar than haste. Friendship

should be surrounded with ceremonies and respects, and not crushed

4 Landor: Pericles and Aspasia.

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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
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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.
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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 for evermore.’ 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
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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
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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 thunder–stroke, 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
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are continually surprised with graces and felicities not only unteachable,
but undescribable.
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6. 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,

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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
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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
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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. 5
Among our Norse forefathers, King Olaf’s mode of converting Eyvind to
Christianity was to put a pan of glowing coals on his belly, which burst
asunder. "Wilt thou now, Eyvind, believe in Christ?" asks Olaf, in
excellent faith. Another argument was an adder put into the mouth of the
reluctant disciple Rand, who refused to believe.

Christianity, in the romantic ages, signified European culture,—the

grafted or meliorated tree in a crab forest. And to marry a pagan wife or
husband, was to marry Beast, and voluntarily to take a step backwards
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."6

5 Iliad, Book xxi. 1. 455.

6 Moths or worms
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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
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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’actualité." 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,
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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
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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," etc. etc., 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,"
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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 performance, when great
national movements began, when arts appeared, when heroes existed,
when poems were made, the human soul was in earnest, and had fixed
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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
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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.
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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
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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 à 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.
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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.
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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."
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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
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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
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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
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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 ledger 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
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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
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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 æons. 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
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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 coöperation, 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.
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7. 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,

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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
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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
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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
Thermopylæ had paired off with three hundred Persians: would it have
been all the same to Greece, and to history? Napoleon was called by his
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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
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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
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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.
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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 mérite," 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
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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.
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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, Æsop, 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. Æsop,
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
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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–tempered.
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
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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 lœtus, 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
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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 sea–shore, 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
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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 ôte, 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.
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8. 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,

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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.

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 mémoires 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
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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;
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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. Abbé Ménage 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
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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
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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–sightof 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.
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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 formæ" 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.
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9. 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

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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 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
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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," etc., 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
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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 unmaskers. It
was wittily, if somewhat bitterly, said by D’Alembert, "qu’un état de
vapeur était un état trés fâchieux, 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
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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
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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
Cæsar; 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
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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
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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
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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 éclat 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–
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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,
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there are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones,—they alone
with him alone.