ESSAYS
        _Second Series_
        by Ralph Waldo Emerson


        THE POET


        A moody child and wildly wise
        Pursued the game with joyful eyes,
        Which chose, like meteors, their way,
        And rived the dark with private ray:
        They overleapt the horizon's edge,
        Searched with Apollo's privilege;
        Through man, and woman, and sea, and star,
        Saw the dance of nature forward far;
        Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times,
        Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes.


        Olympian bards who sung
        Divine ideas below,
        Which always find us young,
        And always keep us so.



        ESSAY I _The Poet_

        Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons
knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination
for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are
beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures,
you learn that they are selfish and sensual.  Their cultivation is
local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce
fire, all the rest remaining cold.  Their knowledge of the fine arts
is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of
color or form, which is exercised for amusement or for show.  It is a
proof of the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty, as it lies in the
minds of our amateurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of
the instant dependence of form upon soul.  There is no doctrine of
forms in our philosophy.  We were put into our bodies, as fire is put
into a pan, to be carried about; but there is no accurate adjustment
between the spirit and the organ, much less is the latter the
germination of the former.  So in regard to other forms, the
intellectual men do not believe in any essential dependence of the
material world on thought and volition.  Theologians think it a
pretty air-castle to talk of the spiritual meaning of a ship or a
cloud, of a city or a contract, but they prefer to come again to the
solid ground of historical evidence; and even the poets are contented
with a civil and conformed manner of living, and to write poems from
the fancy, at a safe distance from their own experience.  But the
highest minds of the world have never ceased to explore the double
meaning, or, shall I say, the quadruple, or the centuple, or much
more manifold meaning, of every sensuous fact: Orpheus, Empedocles,
Heraclitus, Plato, Plutarch, Dante, Swedenborg, and the masters of
sculpture, picture, and poetry.  For we are not pans and barrows, nor
even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but children of the fire,
made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted, and at two or
three removes, when we know least about it.  And this hidden truth,
that the fountains whence all this river of Time, and its creatures,
floweth, are intrinsically ideal and beautiful, draws us to the
consideration of the nature and functions of the Poet, or the man of
Beauty, to the means and materials he uses, and to the general aspect
of the art in the present time.

        The breadth of the problem is great, for the poet is
representative.  He stands among partial men for the complete man,
and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the common-wealth.  The
young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are
more himself than he is.  They receive of the soul as he also
receives, but they more.  Nature enhances her beauty, to the eye of
loving men, from their belief that the poet is beholding her shows at
the same time.  He is isolated among his contemporaries, by truth and
by his art, but with this consolation in his pursuits, that they will
draw all men sooner or later.  For all men live by truth, and stand
in need of expression.  In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in
labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret.  The man is
only half himself, the other half is his expression.

        Notwithstanding this necessity to be published, adequate
expression is rare.  I know not how it is that we need an
interpreter; but the great majority of men seem to be minors, who
have not yet come into possession of their own, or mutes, who cannot
report the conversation they have had with nature.  There is no man
who does not anticipate a supersensual utility in the sun, and stars,
earth, and water.  These stand and wait to render him a peculiar
service.  But there is some obstruction, or some excess of phlegm in
our constitution, which does not suffer them to yield the due effect.
Too feeble fall the impressions of nature on us to make us artists.
Every touch should thrill.  Every man should be so much an artist,
that he could report in conversation what had befallen him.  Yet, in
our experience, the rays or appulses have sufficient force to arrive
at the senses, but not enough to reach the quick, and compel the
reproduction of themselves in speech.  The poet is the person in whom
these powers are in balance, the man without impediment, who sees and
handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of
experience, and is representative of man, in virtue of being the
largest power to receive and to impart.


        For the Universe has three children, born at one time, which
reappear, under different names, in every system of thought, whether
they be called cause, operation, and effect; or, more poetically,
Jove, Pluto, Neptune; or, theologically, the Father, the Spirit, and
the Son; but which we will call here, the Knower, the Doer, and the
Sayer.  These stand respectively for the love of truth, for the love
of good, and for the love of beauty.  These three are equal.  Each is
that which he is essentially, so that he cannot be surmounted or
analyzed, and each of these three has the power of the others latent
in him, and his own patent.

        The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.  He is
a sovereign, and stands on the centre.  For the world is not painted,
or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made
some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe.
Therefore the poet is not any permissive potentate, but is emperor in
his own right.  Criticism is infested with a cant of materialism,
which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of
all men, and disparages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact,
that some men, namely, poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world
to the end of expression, and confounds them with those whose
province is action, but who quit it to imitate the sayers.  But
Homer's words are as costly and admirable to Homer, as Agamemnon's
victories are to Agamemnon.  The poet does not wait for the hero or
the sage, but, as they act and think primarily, so he writes
primarily what will and must be spoken, reckoning the others, though
primaries also, yet, in respect to him, secondaries and servants; as
sitters or models in the studio of a painter, or as assistants who
bring building materials to an architect.

        For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are
so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the
air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write
them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, or a verse, and
substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem.  The men
of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and
these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations.
For nature is as truly beautiful as it is good, or as it is
reasonable, and must as much appear, as it must be done, or be known.
Words and deeds are quite indifferent modes of the divine energy.
Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.

        The sign and credentials of the poet are, that he announces
that which no man foretold.  He is the true and only doctor; he knows
and tells; he is the only teller of news, for he was present and
privy to the appearance which he describes.  He is a beholder of
ideas, and an utterer of the necessary and causal.  For we do not
speak now of men of poetical talents, or of industry and skill in
metre, but of the true poet.  I took part in a conversation the other
day, concerning a recent writer of lyrics, a man of subtle mind,
whose head appeared to be a music-box of delicate tunes and rhythms,
and whose skill, and command of language, we could not sufficiently
praise.  But when the question arose, whether he was not only a
lyrist, but a poet, we were obliged to confess that he is plainly a
contemporary, not an eternal man.  He does not stand out of our low
limitations, like a Chimborazo under the line, running up from the
torrid base through all the climates of the globe, with belts of the
herbage of every latitude on its high and mottled sides; but this
genius is the landscape-garden of a modern house, adorned with
fountains and statues, with well-bred men and women standing and
sitting in the walks and terraces.  We hear, through all the varied
music, the ground-tone of conventional life.  Our poets are men of
talents who sing, and not the children of music.  The argument is
secondary, the finish of the verses is primary.

        For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a
poem, -- a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of
a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns
nature with a new thing.  The thought and the form are equal in the
order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to
the form.  The poet has a new thought: he has a whole new experience
to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be
the richer in his fortune.  For, the experience of each new age
requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its
poet.  I remember, when I was young, how much I was moved one morning
by tidings that genius had appeared in a youth who sat near me at
table.  He had left his work, and gone rambling none knew whither,
and had written hundreds of lines, but could not tell whether that
which was in him was therein told: he could tell nothing but that all
was changed, -- man, beast, heaven, earth, and sea.  How gladly we
listened! how credulous!  Society seemed to be compromised.  We sat
in the aurora of a sunrise which was to put out all the stars.
Boston seemed to be at twice the distance it had the night before, or
was much farther than that.  Rome, -- what was Rome?  Plutarch and
Shakspeare were in the yellow leaf, and Homer no more should be heard
of.  It is much to know that poetry has been written this very day,
under this very roof, by your side.  What! that wonderful spirit has
not expired! these stony moments are still sparkling and animated!  I
had fancied that the oracles were all silent, and nature had spent
her fires, and behold! all night, from every pore, these fine auroras
have been streaming.  Every one has some interest in the advent of
the poet, and no one knows how much it may concern him.  We know that
the secret of the world is profound, but who or what shall be our
interpreter, we know not.  A mountain ramble, a new style of face, a
new person, may put the key into our hands.  Of course, the value of
genius to us is in the veracity of its report.  Talent may frolic and
juggle; genius realizes and adds.  Mankind, in good earnest, have
availed so far in understanding themselves and their work, that the
foremost watchman on the peak announces his news.  It is the truest
word ever spoken, and the phrase will be the fittest, most musical,
and the unerring voice of the world for that time.

        All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a
poet is the principal event in chronology.  Man, never so often
deceived, still watches for the arrival of a brother who can hold him
steady to a truth, until he has made it his own.  With what joy I
begin to read a poem, which I confide in as an inspiration!  And now
my chains are to be broken; I shall mount above these clouds and
opaque airs in which I live, -- opaque, though they seem transparent,
-- and from the heaven of truth I shall see and comprehend my
relations.  That will reconcile me to life, and renovate nature, to
see trifles animated by a tendency, and to know what I am doing.
Life will no more be a noise; now I shall see men and women, and know
the signs by which they may be discerned from fools and satans.  This
day shall be better than my birth-day: then I became an animal: now I
am invited into the science of the real.  Such is the hope, but the
fruition is postponed.  Oftener it falls, that this winged man, who
will carry me into the heaven, whirls me into the clouds, then leaps
and frisks about with me from cloud to cloud, still affirming that he
is bound heavenward; and I, being myself a novice, am slow in
perceiving that he does not know the way into the heavens, and is
merely bent that I should admire his skill to rise, like a fowl or a
flying fish, a little way from the ground or the water; but the
all-piercing, all-feeding, and ocular air of heaven, that man shall
never inhabit.  I tumble down again soon into my old nooks, and lead
the life of exaggerations as before, and have lost my faith in the
possibility of any guide who can lead me thither where I would be.

        But leaving these victims of vanity, let us, with new hope,
observe how nature, by worthier impulses, has ensured the poet's
fidelity to his office of announcement and affirming, namely, by the
beauty of things, which becomes a new, and higher beauty, when
expressed.  Nature offers all her creatures to him as a
picture-language.  Being used as a type, a second wonderful value
appears in the object, far better than its old value, as the
carpenter's stretched cord, if you hold your ear close enough, is
musical in the breeze.  "Things more excellent than every image,"
says Jamblichus, "are expressed through images." Things admit of
being used as symbols, because nature is a symbol, in the whole, and
in every part.  Every line we can draw in the sand, has expression;
and there is no body without its spirit or genius.  All form is an
effect of character; all condition, of the quality of the life; all
harmony, of health; (and, for this reason, a perception of beauty
should be sympathetic, or proper only to the good.) The beautiful
rests on the foundations of the necessary.  The soul makes the body,
as the wise Spenser teaches: --

        "So every spirit, as it is most pure,
        And hath in it the more of heavenly light,
        So it the fairer body doth procure
        To habit in, and it more fairly dight,
        With cheerful grace and amiable sight.
        For, of the soul, the body form doth take,
        For soul is form, and doth the body make."

        Here we find ourselves, suddenly, not in a critical
speculation, but in a holy place, and should go very warily and
reverently.  We stand before the secret of the world, there where
Being passes into Appearance, and Unity into Variety.

        The Universe is the externisation of the soul.  Wherever the
life is, that bursts into appearance around it.  Our science is
sensual, and therefore superficial.  The earth, and the heavenly
bodies, physics, and chemistry, we sensually treat, as if they were
self-existent; but these are the retinue of that Being we have.  "The
mighty heaven," said Proclus, "exhibits, in its transfigurations,
clear images of the splendor of intellectual perceptions; being moved
in conjunction with the unapparent periods of intellectual natures."
Therefore, science always goes abreast with the just elevation of the
man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics; or, the state of
science is an index of our self-knowledge.  Since everything in
nature answers to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and
dark, it is that the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet
active.

        No wonder, then, if these waters be so deep, that we hover over
them with a religious regard.  The beauty of the fable proves the
importance of the sense; to the poet, and to all others; or, if you
please, every man is so far a poet as to be susceptible of these
enchantments of nature: for all men have the thoughts whereof the
universe is the celebration.  I find that the fascination resides in
the symbol.  Who loves nature?  Who does not?  Is it only poets, and
men of leisure and cultivation, who live with her?  No; but also
hunters, farmers, grooms, and butchers, though they express their
affection in their choice of life, and not in their choice of words.
The writer wonders what the coachman or the hunter values in riding,
in horses, and dogs.  It is not superficial qualities.  When you talk
with him, he holds these at as slight a rate as you.  His worship is
sympathetic; he has no definitions, but he is commanded in nature, by
the living power which he feels to be there present.  No imitation,
or playing of these things, would content him; he loves the earnest
of the northwind, of rain, of stone, and wood, and iron.  A beauty
not explicable, is dearer than a beauty which we can see to the end
of.  It is nature the symbol, nature certifying the supernatural,
body overflowed by life, which he worships, with coarse, but sincere
rites.

        The inwardness, and mystery, of this attachment, drives men of
every class to the use of emblems.  The schools of poets, and
philosophers, are not more intoxicated with their symbols, than the
populace with theirs.  In our political parties, compute the power of
badges and emblems.  See the great ball which they roll from
Baltimore to Bunker hill!  In the political processions, Lowell goes
in a loom, and Lynn in a shoe, and Salem in a ship.  Witness the
cider-barrel, the log-cabin, the hickory-stick, the palmetto, and all
the cognizances of party.  See the power of national emblems.  Some
stars, lilies, leopards, a crescent, a lion, an eagle, or other
figure, which came into credit God knows how, on an old rag of
bunting, blowing in the wind, on a fort, at the ends of the earth,
shall make the blood tingle under the rudest, or the most
conventional exterior.  The people fancy they hate poetry, and they
are all poets and mystics!

        Beyond this universality of the symbolic language, we are
apprised of the divineness of this superior use of things, whereby
the world is a temple, whose walls are covered with emblems,
pictures, and commandments of the Deity, in this, that there is no
fact in nature which does not carry the whole sense of nature; and
the distinctions which we make in events, and in affairs, of low and
high, honest and base, disappear when nature is used as a symbol.
Thought makes every thing fit for use.  The vocabulary of an
omniscient man would embrace words and images excluded from polite
conversation.  What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene,
becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connexion of thought.  The piety
of the Hebrew prophets purges their grossness.  The circumcision is
an example of the power of poetry to raise the low and offensive.
Small and mean things serve as well as great symbols.  The meaner the
type by which a law is expressed, the more pungent it is, and the
more lasting in the memories of men: just as we choose the smallest
box, or case, in which any needful utensil can be carried.  Bare
lists of words are found suggestive, to an imaginative and excited
mind; as it is related of Lord Chatham, that he was accustomed to
read in Bailey's Dictionary, when he was preparing to speak in
Parliament.  The poorest experience is rich enough for all the
purposes of expressing thought.  Why covet a knowledge of new facts?
Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us
as well as would all trades and all spectacles.  We are far from
having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use.  We can
come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity.  It does not need
that a poem should be long.  Every word was once a poem.  Every new
relation is a new word.  Also, we use defects and deformities to a
sacred purpose, so expressing our sense that the evils of the world
are such only to the evil eye.  In the old mythology, mythologists
observe, defects are ascribed to divine natures, as lameness to
Vulcan, blindness to Cupid, and the like, to signify exuberances.

        For, as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God,
that makes things ugly, the poet, who re-attaches things to nature
and the Whole, -- re-attaching even artificial things, and violations
of nature, to nature, by a deeper insight, -- disposes very easily of
the most disagreeable facts.  Readers of poetry see the
factory-village, and the railway, and fancy that the poetry of the
landscape is broken up by these; for these works of art are not yet
consecrated in their reading; but the poet sees them fall within the
great Order not less than the beehive, or the spider's geometrical
web.  Nature adopts them very fast into her vital circles, and the
gliding train of cars she loves like her own.  Besides, in a centred
mind, it signifies nothing how many mechanical inventions you
exhibit.  Though you add millions, and never so surprising, the fact
of mechanics has not gained a grain's weight.  The spiritual fact
remains unalterable, by many or by few particulars; as no mountain is
of any appreciable height to break the curve of the sphere.  A shrewd
country-boy goes to the city for the first time, and the complacent
citizen is not satisfied with his little wonder.  It is not that he
does not see all the fine houses, and know that he never saw such
before, but he disposes of them as easily as the poet finds place for
the railway.  The chief value of the new fact, is to enhance the
great and constant fact of Life, which can dwarf any and every
circumstance, and to which the belt of wampum, and the commerce of
America, are alike.

        The world being thus put under the mind for verb and noun, the
poet is he who can articulate it.  For, though life is great, and
fascinates, and absorbs, -- and though all men are intelligent of the
symbols through which it is named, -- yet they cannot originally use
them.  We are symbols, and inhabit symbols; workman, work, and tools,
words and things, birth and death, all are emblems; but we sympathize
with the symbols, and, being infatuated with the economical uses of
things, we do not know that they are thoughts.  The poet, by an
ulterior intellectual perception, gives them a power which makes
their old use forgotten, and puts eyes, and a tongue, into every dumb
and inanimate object.  He perceives the independence of the thought
on the symbol, the stability of the thought, the accidency and
fugacity of the symbol.  As the eyes of Lyncaeus were said to see
through the earth, so the poet turns the world to glass, and shows us
all things in their right series and procession.  For, through that
better perception, he stands one step nearer to things, and sees the
flowing or metamorphosis; perceives that thought is multiform; that
within the form of every creature is a force impelling it to ascend
into a higher form; and, following with his eyes the life, uses the
forms which express that life, and so his speech flows with the
flowing of nature.  All the facts of the animal economy, sex,
nutriment, gestation, birth, growth, are symbols of the passage of
the world into the soul of man, to suffer there a change, and
reappear a new and higher fact.  He uses forms according to the life,
and not according to the form.  This is true science.  The poet alone
knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and animation, for he does
not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs.  He knows why the
plain, or meadow of space, was strown with these flowers we call
suns, and moons, and stars; why the great deep is adorned with
animals, with men, and gods; for, in every word he speaks he rides on
them as the horses of thought.

        By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer, or
Language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance,
sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name
and not another's, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in
detachment or boundary.  The poets made all the words, and therefore
language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort
of tomb of the muses.  For, though the origin of most of our words is
forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained
currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first
speaker and to the hearer.  The etymologist finds the deadest word to
have been once a brilliant picture.  Language is fossil poetry.  As
the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the
shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes,
which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of
their poetic origin.  But the poet names the thing because he sees
it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other.  This expression,
or naming, is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first,
as a leaf out of a tree.  What we call nature, is a certain
self-regulated motion, or change; and nature does all things by her
own hands, and does not leave another to baptise her, but baptises
herself; and this through the metamorphosis again.  I remember that a
certain poet described it to me thus:

        Genius is the activity which repairs the decays of things,
whether wholly or partly of a material and finite kind.  Nature,
through all her kingdoms, insures herself.  Nobody cares for planting
the poor fungus: so she shakes down from the gills of one agaric
countless spores, any one of which, being preserved, transmits new
billions of spores to-morrow or next day.  The new agaric of this
hour has a chance which the old one had not.  This atom of seed is
thrown into a new place, not subject to the accidents which destroyed
its parent two rods off.  She makes a man; and having brought him to
ripe age, she will no longer run the risk of losing this wonder at a
blow, but she detaches from him a new self, that the kind may be safe
from accidents to which the individual is exposed.  So when the soul
of the poet has come to ripeness of thought, she detaches and sends
away from it its poems or songs, -- a fearless, sleepless, deathless
progeny, which is not exposed to the accidents of the weary kingdom
of time: a fearless, vivacious offspring, clad with wings (such was
the virtue of the soul out of which they came), which carry them fast
and far, and infix them irrecoverably into the hearts of men.  These
wings are the beauty of the poet's soul.  The songs, thus flying
immortal from their mortal parent, are pursued by clamorous flights
of censures, which swarm in far greater numbers, and threaten to
devour them; but these last are not winged.  At the end of a very
short leap they fall plump down, and rot, having received from the
souls out of which they came no beautiful wings.  But the melodies of
the poet ascend, and leap, and pierce into the deeps of infinite
time.

        So far the bard taught me, using his freer speech.  But nature
has a higher end, in the production of new individuals, than
security, namely, _ascension_, or, the passage of the soul into
higher forms.  I knew, in my younger days, the sculptor who made the
statue of the youth which stands in the public garden.  He was, as I
remember, unable to tell directly, what made him happy, or unhappy,
but by wonderful indirections he could tell.  He rose one day,
according to his habit, before the dawn, and saw the morning break,
grand as the eternity out of which it came, and, for many days after,
he strove to express this tranquillity, and, lo! his chisel had
fashioned out of marble the form of a beautiful youth, Phosphorus,
whose aspect is such, that, it is said, all persons who look on it
become silent.  The poet also resigns himself to his mood, and that
thought which agitated him is expressed, but _alter idem_, in a
manner totally new.  The expression is organic, or, the new type
which things themselves take when liberated.  As, in the sun, objects
paint their images on the retina of the eye, so they, sharing the
aspiration of the whole universe, tend to paint a far more delicate
copy of their essence in his mind.  Like the metamorphosis of things
into higher organic forms, is their change into melodies.  Over
everything stands its daemon, or soul, and, as the form of the thing
is reflected by the eye, so the soul of the thing is reflected by a
melody.  The sea, the mountain-ridge, Niagara, and every flower-bed,
pre-exist, or super-exist, in pre-cantations, which sail like odors
in the air, and when any man goes by with an ear sufficiently fine,
he overhears them, and endeavors to write down the notes, without
diluting or depraving them.  And herein is the legitimation of
criticism, in the mind's faith, that the poems are a corrupt version
of some text in nature, with which they ought to be made to tally.  A
rhyme in one of our sonnets should not be less pleasing than the
iterated nodes of a sea-shell, or the resembling difference of a
group of flowers.  The pairing of the birds is an idyl, not tedious
as our idyls are; a tempest is a rough ode, without falsehood or
rant: a summer, with its harvest sown, reaped, and stored, is an epic
song, subordinating how many admirably executed parts.  Why should
not the symmetry and truth that modulate these, glide into our
spirits, and we participate the invention of nature?

        This insight, which expresses itself by what is called
Imagination, is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by
study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing
the path, or circuit of things through forms, and so making them
translucid to others.  The path of things is silent.  Will they
suffer a speaker to go with them?  A spy they will not suffer; a
lover, a poet, is the transcendency of their own nature, -- him they
will suffer.  The condition of true naming, on the poet's part, is
his resigning himself to the divine _aura_ which breathes through
forms, and accompanying that.

        It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns,
that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he
is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by
abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside his privacy of
power as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which
he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and
suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then
he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder,
his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the
plants and animals.  The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then,
only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or, "with the flower of the
mind;" not with the intellect, used as an organ, but with the
intellect released from all service, and suffered to take its
direction from its celestial life; or, as the ancients were wont to
express themselves, not with intellect alone, but with the intellect
inebriated by nectar.  As the traveller who has lost his way, throws
his reins on his horse's neck, and trusts to the instinct of the
animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who
carries us through this world.  For if in any manner we can stimulate
this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature, the mind
flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the
metamorphosis is possible.

        This is the reason why bards love wine, mead, narcotics,
coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of sandal-wood and tobacco, or whatever
other species of animal exhilaration.  All men avail themselves of
such means as they can, to add this extraordinary power to their
normal powers; and to this end they prize conversation, music,
pictures, sculpture, dancing, theatres, travelling, war, mobs, fires,
gaming, politics, or love, or science, or animal intoxication, which
are several coarser or finer _quasi_-mechanical substitutes for the
true nectar, which is the ravishment of the intellect by coming
nearer to the fact.  These are auxiliaries to the centrifugal
tendency of a man, to his passage out into free space, and they help
him to escape the custody of that body in which he is pent up, and of
that jail-yard of individual relations in which he is enclosed.
Hence a great number of such as were professionally expressors of
Beauty, as painters, poets, musicians, and actors, have been more
than others wont to lead a life of pleasure and indulgence; all but
the few who received the true nectar; and, as it was a spurious mode
of attaining freedom, as it was an emancipation not into the heavens,
but into the freedom of baser places, they were punished for that
advantage they won, by a dissipation and deterioration.  But never
can any advantage be taken of nature by a trick.  The spirit of the
world, the great calm presence of the creator, comes not forth to the
sorceries of opium or of wine.  The sublime vision comes to the pure
and simple soul in a clean and chaste body.  That is not an
inspiration which we owe to narcotics, but some counterfeit
excitement and fury.  Milton says, that the lyric poet may drink wine
and live generously, but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the
gods, and their descent unto men, must drink water out of a wooden
bowl.  For poetry is not `Devil's wine,' but God's wine.  It is with
this as it is with toys.  We fill the hands and nurseries of our
children with all manner of dolls, drums, and horses, withdrawing
their eyes from the plain face and sufficing objects of nature, the
sun, and moon, the animals, the water, and stones, which should be
their toys.  So the poet's habit of living should be set on a key so
low and plain, that the common influences should delight him.  His
cheerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight; the air should
suffice for his inspiration, and he should be tipsy with water.  That
spirit which suffices quiet hearts, which seems to come forth to such
from every dry knoll of sere grass, from every pine-stump, and
half-imbedded stone, on which the dull March sun shines, comes forth
to the poor and hungry, and such as are of simple taste.  If thou
fill thy brain with Boston and New York, with fashion and
covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with wine and
French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely
waste of the pinewoods.

        If the imagination intoxicates the poet, it is not inactive in
other men.  The metamorphosis excites in the beholder an emotion of
joy.  The use of symbols has a certain power of emancipation and
exhilaration for all men.  We seem to be touched by a wand, which
makes us dance and run about happily, like children.  We are like
persons who come out of a cave or cellar into the open air.  This is
the effect on us of tropes, fables, oracles, and all poetic forms.
Poets are thus liberating gods.  Men have really got a new sense, and
found within their world, another world, or nest of worlds; for, the
metamorphosis once seen, we divine that it does not stop.  I will not
now consider how much this makes the charm of algebra and the
mathematics, which also have their tropes, but it is felt in every
definition; as, when Aristotle defines _space_ to be an immovable
vessel, in which things are contained; -- or, when Plato defines a
_line_ to be a flowing point; or, _figure_ to be a bound of solid;
and many the like.  What a joyful sense of freedom we have, when
Vitruvius announces the old opinion of artists, that no architect can
build any house well, who does not know something of anatomy.  When
Socrates, in Charmides, tells us that the soul is cured of its
maladies by certain incantations, and that these incantations are
beautiful reasons, from which temperance is generated in souls; when
Plato calls the world an animal; and Timaeus affirms that the plants
also are animals; or affirms a man to be a heavenly tree, growing
with his root, which is his head, upward; and, as George Chapman,
following him, writes, --

        "So in our tree of man, whose nervie root
        Springs in his top;"

        when Orpheus speaks of hoariness as "that white flower which
marks extreme old age;" when Proclus calls the universe the statue of
the intellect; when Chaucer, in his praise of `Gentilesse,' compares
good blood in mean condition to fire, which, though carried to the
darkest house betwixt this and the mount of Caucasus, will yet hold
its natural office, and burn as bright as if twenty thousand men did
it behold; when John saw, in the apocalypse, the ruin of the world
through evil, and the stars fall from heaven, as the figtree casteth
her untimely fruit; when Aesop reports the whole catalogue of common
daily relations through the masquerade of birds and beasts; -- we
take the cheerful hint of the immortality of our essence, and its
versatile habit and escapes, as when the gypsies say, "it is in vain
to hang them, they cannot die."

        The poets are thus liberating gods.  The ancient British bards
had for the title of their order, "Those who are free throughout the
world." They are free, and they make free.  An imaginative book
renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its
tropes, than afterward, when we arrive at the precise sense of the
author.  I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the
transcendental and extraordinary.  If a man is inflamed and carried
away by his thought, to that degree that he forgets the authors and
the public, and heeds only this one dream, which holds him like an
insanity, let me read his paper, and you may have all the arguments
and histories and criticism.  All the value which attaches to
Pythagoras, Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, Cardan, Kepler,
Swedenborg, Schelling, Oken, or any other who introduces questionable
facts into his cosmogony, as angels, devils, magic, astrology,
palmistry, mesmerism, and so on, is the certificate we have of
departure from routine, and that here is a new witness.  That also is
the best success in conversation, the magic of liberty, which puts
the world, like a ball, in our hands.  How cheap even the liberty
then seems; how mean to study, when an emotion communicates to the
intellect the power to sap and upheave nature: how great the
perspective! nations, times, systems, enter and disappear, like
threads in tapestry of large figure and many colors; dream delivers
us to dream, and, while the drunkenness lasts, we will sell our bed,
our philosophy, our religion, in our opulence.

        There is good reason why we should prize this liberation.  The
fate of the poor shepherd, who, blinded and lost in the snow-storm,
perishes in a drift within a few feet of his cottage door, is an
emblem of the state of man.  On the brink of the waters of life and
truth, we are miserably dying.  The inaccessibleness of every thought
but that we are in, is wonderful.  What if you come near to it, --
you are as remote, when you are nearest, as when you are farthest.
Every thought is also a prison; every heaven is also a prison.
Therefore we love the poet, the inventor, who in any form, whether in
an ode, or in an action, or in looks and behavior, has yielded us a
new thought.  He unlocks our chains, and admits us to a new scene.

        This emancipation is dear to all men, and the power to impart
it, as it must come from greater depth and scope of thought, is a
measure of intellect.  Therefore all books of the imagination endure,
all which ascend to that truth, that the writer sees nature beneath
him, and uses it as his exponent. soon becomes old and
false.  For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and
transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance,
not as farms and houses are, for homestead.  Mysticism consists in
the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal
one.  The morning-redness happens to be the favorite meteor to the
eyes of Jacob Behmen, and comes to stand to him for truth and faith;
and he believes should stand for the same realities to every reader.
But the first reader prefers as naturally the symbol of a mother and
child, or a gardener and his bulb, or a jeweller polishing a gem.
Either of these, or of a myriad more, are equally good to the person
to whom they are significant.  Only they must be held lightly, and be
very willingly translated into the equivalent terms which others use.
And the mystic must be steadily told, -- All that you say is just as
true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it.  Let us have
a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric, -- universal signs,
instead of these village symbols, -- and we shall both be gainers.
The history of hierarchies seems to show, that all religious error
consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and, at last,
nothing but an excess of the organ of language.

        Swedenborg, of all men in the recent ages, stands eminently for
the translator of nature into thought.  I do not know the man in
history to whom things stood so uniformly for words.  Before him the
metamorphosis continually plays.  Everything on which his eye rests,
obeys the impulses of moral nature.  The figs become grapes whilst he
eats them.  When some of his angels affirmed a truth, the laurel twig
which they held blossomed in their hands.  The noise which, at a
distance, appeared like gnashing and thumping, on coming nearer was
found to be the voice of disputants.  The men, in one of his visions,
seen in heavenly light, appeared like dragons, and seemed in
darkness: but, to each other, they appeared as men, and, when the
light from heaven shone into their cabin, they complained of the
darkness, and were compelled to shut the window that they might see.

        There was this perception in him, which makes the poet or seer,
an object of awe and terror, namely, that the same man, or society of
men, may wear one aspect to themselves and their companions, and a
different aspect to higher intelligences.  Certain priests, whom he
describes as conversing very learnedly together, appeared to the
children, who were at some distance, like dead horses: and many the
like misappearances.  And instantly the mind inquires, whether these
fishes under the bridge, yonder oxen in the pasture, those dogs in
the yard, are immutably fishes, oxen, and dogs, or only so appear to
me, and perchance to themselves appear upright men; and whether I
appear as a man to all eyes.  The Bramins and Pythagoras propounded
the same question, and if any poet has witnessed the transformation,
he doubtless found it in harmony with various experiences.  We have
all seen changes as considerable in wheat and caterpillars.  He is
the poet, and shall draw us with love and terror, who sees, through
the flowing vest, the firm nature, and can declare it.

        I look in vain for the poet whom I describe.  We do not, with
sufficient plainness, or sufficient profoundness, address ourselves
to life, nor dare we chaunt our own times and social circumstance.
If we filled the day with bravery, we should not shrink from
celebrating it.  Time and nature yield us many gifts, but not yet the
timely man, the new religion, the reconciler, whom all things await.
Dante's praise is, that he dared to write his autobiography in
colossal cipher, or into universality.  We have yet had no genius in
America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable
materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times,
the temple of Delphos, and are as swiftly
passing away.  Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our
fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boasts, and our
repudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest
men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing,
Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung.  Yet America is a poem in our
eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not
wait long for metres.  If I have not found that excellent combination
of gifts in my countrymen which I seek, neither could I aid myself to
fix the idea of the poet by reading now and then in Chalmers's
collection of five centuries of English poets.  These are wits, more
than poets, though there have been poets among them.  But when we
adhere to the ideal of the poet, we have our difficulties even with
Milton and Homer.  Milton is too literary, and Homer too literal and
historical.

        But I am not wise enough for a national criticism, and must use
the old largeness a little longer, to discharge my errand from the
muse to the poet concerning his art.

        Art is the path of the creator to his work.  The paths, or
methods, are ideal and eternal, though few men ever see them, not the
artist himself for years, or for a lifetime, unless he come into the
conditions.  The painter, the sculptor, the composer, the epic
rhapsodist, the orator, all partake one desire, namely, to express
themselves symmetrically and abundantly, not dwarfishly and
fragmentarily.  They found or put themselves in certain conditions,
as, the painter and sculptor before some impressive human figures;
the orator, into the assembly of the people; and the others, in such
scenes as each has found exciting to his intellect; and each
presently feels the new desire.  He hears a voice, he sees a
beckoning.  Then he is apprised, with wonder, what herds of daemons
hem him in.  He can no more rest; he says, with the old painter, "By
God, it is in me, and must go forth of me." He pursues a beauty, half
seen, which flies before him.  The poet pours out verses in every
solitude.  Most of the things he says are conventional, no doubt; but
by and by he says something which is original and beautiful.  That
charms him.  He would say nothing else but such things.  In our way
of talking, we say, `That is yours, this is mine;' but the poet knows
well that it is not his; that it is as strange and beautiful to him
as to you; he would fain hear the like eloquence at length.  Once
having tasted this immortal ichor, he cannot have enough of it, and,
as an admirable creative power exists in these intellections, it is
of the last importance that these things get spoken.  What a little
of all we know is said!  What drops of all the sea of our science are
baled up! and by what accident it is that these are exposed, when so
many secrets sleep in nature!  Hence the necessity of speech and
song; hence these throbs and heart-beatings in the orator, at the
door of the assembly, to the end, namely, that thought may be
ejaculated as Logos, or Word.

        Doubt not, O poet, but persist.  Say, `It is in me, and shall
out.' Stand there, baulked and dumb, stuttering and stammering,
hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until, at last, rage draw out of
thee that _dream_-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a
power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a
man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity.  Nothing
walks, or creeps, or grows, or exists, which must not in turn arise
and walk before him as exponconferred in groves and pastures, and
not in castles, or by the sword-blade, any longer.  The conditions
are hard, but equal.  Thou shalt leave the world, and know the muse
only.  Thou shalt not know any longer the times, customs, graces,
politics, or opinions of men, but shalt take all from the muse.  For
the time of towns is tolled from the world by funereal chimes, but in
nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of
animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy.  God wills also that
thou abdicate a manifold and duplex life, and that thou be content
that others speak for thee.  Others shall be thy gentlemen, and shall
represent all courtesy and worldly life for thee; others shall do the
great and resounding actions also.  Thou shalt lie close hid with
nature, and canst not be afforded to the Capitol or the Exchange.
The world is full of renunciations and apprenticeships, and this is
thine: thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a long season.  This
is the screen and sheath in which Pan has protected his well-beloved
flower, and thou shalt be known only to thine own, and they shall
console thee with tenderest love.  And thou shalt not be able to
rehearse the names of thy friends in thy verse, for an old shame
before the holy ideal.  And this is the reward: that the ideal shall
be real to thee, and the impressions of the actual world shall fall
like summer rain, copious, but not troublesome, to thy invulnerable
essence.  Thou shalt have the whole land for thy park and manor, the
sea for thy bath and navigation, without tax and without envy; the
woods and the rivers thou shalt own; and thou shalt possess that
wherein others are only tenants and boarders.  Thou true land-lord!
sea-lord! air-lord!  Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds
fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue
heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms with
transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space,
wherever is danger, and awe, and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as
rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over,
thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.



        EXPERIENCE


        The lords of life, the lords of life,---
        I saw them pass,
        In their own guise,
        Like and unlike,
        Portly and grim,
        Use and Surprise,
        Surface and Dream,
        Succession swift, and spectral Wrong,
        Temperament without a tongue,
        And the inventor of the game
        Omnipresent without name; --
        Some to see, some to be guessed,
        They marched from east to west:
        Little man, least of all,
        Among the legs of his guardians tall,
        Walked about with puzzled look: --
        Him by the hand dear nature took;
        Dearest nature, strong and kind,
        Whispered, `Darling, never mind!
        Tomorrow they will wear another face,
        The founder thou! these are thy race!'



        ESSAY II _Experience_

        Where do we find ourselves?  In a series of which we do not
know the extremes, and believe that it has none.  We wake and find
ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to
have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward
and out of sight.  But the Genius which, according to the old belief,
stands at the door by which we enter, and gives us the lethe to
drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we
cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday.  Sleep lingers all o `only holds
the world together.' I quote another man's saying; unluckily, that
other withdraws himself in the same way, and quotes me.  'Tis the
trick of nature thus to degrade today; a good deal of buzz, and
somewhere a result slipped magically in.  Every roof is agreeable to
the eye, until it is lifted; then we find tragedy and moaning women,
and hard-eyed husbands, and deluges of lethe, and the men ask,
`What's the news?' as if the old were so bad.  How many individuals
can we count in society? how many actions? how many opinions?  So
much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much
retrospect, that the pith of each man's genius contracts itself to a
very few hours.  The history of literature -- take the net result of
Tiraboschi, Warton, or Schlegel, -- is a sum of very few ideas, and
of very few original tales, -- all the rest being variation of these.
So in this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis
would find very few spontaneous actions.  It is almost all custom and
gross sense.  There are even few opinions, and these seem organic in
the speakers, and do not disturb the universal necessity.

        What opium is instilled into all disaster!  It shows formidable
as we approach it, but there is at last no rough rasping friction,
but the most slippery sliding surfaces.  We fall soft on a thought.
_Ate Dea_ is gentle,

        "Over men's heads walking aloft,
        With tender feet treading so soft."

        People grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is not half so bad
with them as they say.  There are moods in which we court suffering,
in the hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks
and edges of truth.  But it turns out to be scene-painting and
counterfeit.  The only thing grief has taught me, is to know how
shallow it is.  That, like all the rest, plays about the surface, and
never introduces me into the reality, for contact with which, we
would even pay the costly price of sons and lovers.  Was it Boscovich
who found out that bodies never come in contact?  Well, souls never
touch their objects.  An innavigable sea washes with silent waves
between us and the things we aim at and converse with.  Grief too
will make us idealists.  In the death of my son, now more than two
years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate, -- no more.  I
cannot get it nearer to me.  If tomorrow I should be informed of the
bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be
a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would
leave me as it found me, -- neither better nor worse.  So is it with
this calamity: it does not touch me: some thing which I fancied was a
part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor
enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me, and leaves no scar.
It was caducous.  I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry
me one step into real nature.  The Indian who was laid under a curse,
that the wind should not blow on him, nor water flow to him, nor fire
burn him, is a type of us all.  The dearest events are summer-rain,
and we the Para coats that shed every drop.  Nothing is left us now
but death.  We look to that with a grim satisfaction, saying, there
at least is reality that will not dodge us.

        I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which
lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be
the most unhandsome part of our condition.  Nature does not like to
be observed, and likes that we should be her fools and playmates.  We
may have the sphere for our cricket-ball, but not a berry for our
philosophy.  Direct strokes she never gave us power to makevious Page      (u) Menu                  (17%)



        Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion.
Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass
through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the
world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus.
From the mountain you see the mountain.  We animate what we can, and
we see only what we animate.  Nature and books belong to the eyes
that see them.  It depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall
see the sunset or the fine poem.  There are always sunsets, and there
is always genius; but only a few hours so serene that we can relish
nature or criticism.  The more or less depends on structure or
temperament.  Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are
strung.  Of what use is fortune or talent to a cold and defective
nature?  Who cares what sensibility or discrimination a man has at
some time shown, if he falls asleep in his chair? or if he laugh and
giggle? or if he apologize? or is affected with egotism? or thinks of
his dollar? or cannot go by food? or has gotten a child in his
boyhood?  Of what use is genius, if the organ is too convex or too
concave, and cannot find a focal distance within the actual horizon
of human life?  Of what use, if the brain is too cold or too hot, and
the man does not care enough for results, to stimulate him to
experiment, and hold him up in it? or if the web is too finely woven,
too irritable by pleasure and pain, so that life stagnates from too
much reception, without due outlet?  Of what use to make heroic vows
of amendment, if the same old law-breaker is to keep them?  What
cheer can the religious sentiment yield, when that is suspected to be
secretly dependent on the seasons of the year, and the state of the
blood?  I knew a witty physician who found theology in the biliary
duct, and used to affirm that if there was disease in the liver, the
man became a Calvinist, and if that organ was sound, he became a
Unitarian.  Very mortifying is the reluctant experience that some
unfriendly excess or imbecility neutralizes the promise of genius.
We see young men who owe us a new world, so readily and lavishly they
promise, but they never acquit the debt; they die young and dodge the
account: or if they live, they lose themselves in the crowd.

        Temperament also enters fully into the system of illusions, and
shuts us in a prison of glass which we cannot see.  There is an
optical illusion about every person we meet.  In truth, they are all
creatures of given temperament, which will appear in a given
character, whose boundaries they will never pass: but we look at
them, they seem alive, and we presume there is impulse in them.  In
the moment it seems impulse; in the year, in the lifetime, it turns
out to be a certain uniform tune which the revolving barrel of the
music-box must play.  Men resist the conclusion in the morning, but
adopt it as the evening wears on, that temper prevails over
everything of time, place, and condition, and is inconsumable in the
flames of religion.  Some modifications the moral sentiment avails to
impose, but the individual texture holds its dominion, if not to bias
the moral judgments, yet to fix the measure of activity and of
enjoyment.

        I thus express the law as it is read from the platform of
ordinary life, but must not leave it without noticing the capital
exception.  For temperament is a power which no man willingly hears
any one praise but himself.  On the platform of physics, we cannot
resist the contracting influences of so-called science.  Temperament
puts all divinity to rout.  I know the mental proclivity oft
follow.  On this platform, one lives in a sty of sensualism, and
would soon come to suicide.  But it is impossible that the creative
power should exclude itself.  Into every intelligence there is a door
which is never closed, through which the creator passes.  The
intellect, seeker of absolute truth, or the heart, lover of absolute
good, intervenes for our succor, and at one whisper of these high
powers, we awake from ineffectual struggles with this nightmare.  We
hurl it into its own hell, and cannot again contract ourselves to so
base a state.

        The secret of the illusoriness is in the necessity of a
succession of moods or objects.  Gladly we would anchor, but the
anchorage is quicksand.  This onward trick of nature is too strong
for us: _Pero si muove._ When, at night, I look at the moon and
stars, I seem stationary, and they to hurry.  Our love of the real
draws us to permanence, but health of body consists in circulation,
and sanity of mind in variety or facility of association.  We need
change of objects.  Dedication to one thought is quickly odious.  We
house with the insane, and must humor them; then conversation dies
out.  Once I took such delight in Montaigne, that I thought I should
not need any other book; before that, in Shakspeare; then in
Plutarch; then in Plotinus; at one time in Bacon; afterwards in
Goethe; even in Bettine; but now I turn the pages of either of them
languidly, whilst I still cherish their genius.  So with pictures;
each will bear an emphasis of attention once, which it cannot retain,
though we fain would continue to be pleased in that manner.  How
strongly I have felt of pictures, that when you have seen one well,
you must take your leave of it; you shall never see it again.  I have
had good lessons from pictures, which I have since seen without
emotion or remark.  A deduction must be made from the opinion, which
even the wise express of a new book or occurrence.  Their opinion
gives me tidings of their mood, and some vague guess at the new fact
but is nowise to be trusted as the lasting relation between that
intellect and that thing.  The child asks, `Mamma, why don't I like
the story as well as when you told it me yesterday?' Alas, child, it
is even so with the oldest cherubim of knowledge.  But will it answer
thy question to say, Because thou wert born to a whole, and this
story is a particular?  The reason of the pain this discovery causes
us (and we make it late in respect to works of art and intellect), is
the plaint of tragedy which murmurs from it in regard to persons, to
friendship and love.

        That immobility and absence of elasticity which we find in the
arts, we find with more pain in the artist.  There is no power of
expansion in men.  Our friends early appear to us as representatives
of certain ideas, which they never pass or exceed.  They stand on the
brink of the ocean of thought and power, but they never take the
single step that would bring them there.  A man is like a bit of
Labrador spar, which has no lustre as you turn it in your hand, until
you come to a particular angle; then it shows deep and beautiful
colors.  There is no adaptation or universal applicability in men,
but each has his special talent, and the mastery of successful men
consists in adroitly keeping themselves where and when that turn
shall be oftenest to be practised.  We do what we must, and call it
by the best names we can, and would fain have the praise of having
intended the result which ensues.  I cannot recall any form of man
who is not superfluous sometimes.  But is not this pitiful?  Life is
not worth the taking, to do tricks in.

        Of course, it needs the whole society, to give the symmetry we
seek.  The parti-colored wheel must revolve very fast to appear
white.  Something is learned too by conversing with so much folly and
defect.  In fine, whoever loses, we are always of the gaining party.
Divinity is behind our failures and follies also.  The plays of
children are nonsense, but very educative nonsense.  So it is with
the largest and solemnest things, with commerce, government, church,
marriage, and so with the history of every man's bread, and the ways
by which he is to come by it.  Like a bird which alights nowhere, but
hops perpetually from bough to bough, is the Power which abides in no
man and in no woman, but for a moment speaks from this one, and for
another moment from that one.


        But what help from these fineries or pedantries?  What help
from thought?  Life is not dialectics.  We, I think, in these times,
have had lessons enough of the futility of criticism.  Our young
people have thought and written much on labor and reform, and for all
that they have written, neither the world nor themselves have got on
a step.  Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular
activity.  If a man should consider the nicety of the passage of a
piece of bread down his throat, he would starve.  At Education-Farm,
the noblest theory of life sat on the noblest figures of young men
and maidens, quite powerless and melancholy.  It would not rake or
pitch a ton of hay; it would not rub down a horse; and the men and
maidens it left pale and hungry.  A political orator wittily compared
our party promises to western roads, which opened stately enough,
with planted trees on either side, to tempt the traveller, but soon
became narrow and narrower, and ended in a squirrel-track, and ran up
a tree.  So does culture with us; it ends in head-ache.  Unspeakably
sad and barren does life look to those, who a few months ago were
dazzled with the splendor of the promise of the times.  "There is now
no longer any right course of action, nor any self-devotion left
among the Iranis." Objections and criticism we have had our fill of.
There are objections to every course of life and action, and the
practical wisdom infers an indifferency, from the omnipresence of
objection.  The whole frame of things preaches indifferency.  Do not
craze yourself with thinking, but go about your business anywhere.
Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy.  Its chief good is
for well-mixed people who can enjoy what they find, without question.
Nature hates peeping, and our mothers speak her very sense when they
say, "Children, eat your victuals, and say no more of it." To fill
the hour, -- that is happiness; to fill the hour, and leave no
crevice for a repentance or an approval.  We live amid surfaces, and
the true art of life is to skate well on them.  Under the oldest
mouldiest conventions, a man of native force prospers just as well as
in the newest world, and that by skill of handling and treatment.  He
can take hold anywhere.  Life itself is a mixture of power and form,
and will not bear the least excess of either.  To finish the moment,
to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the
greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.  It is not the part of men,
but of fanatics, or of mathematicians, if  it is not worth caring whether for so
short a duration we were sprawling in want, or sitting high.  Since
our office is with moments, let us husband them.  Five minutes of
today are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the nelous for successful labor.  It is a
tempest of fancies, and the only ballast I know, is a respect to the
present hour.  Withoeriority, if they have
not a sympathy, and honor it in their blind capricious way with
sincere homage.

        The fine young people despise life, but in me, and in such as
with me are free from dyspepsia, and to whom a day is a sound and
solid good, it is a great excess of politeness to look scornful and
to cry for company.  I am grown by sympathy a little eager and
sentimental, but leave me alone, and I should relish every hour and
what it brought me, the pot-luck of the day, as heartily as the
oldest gossip in the bar-room.  I am thankful for small mercies.  I
compared notes with one of my friends who expects everything of the
universe, and is disappointed when anything is less than the best,
and I found that I begin at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and
am always full of thanks for moderate goods.  I accept the clangor
and jangle of contrary tendencies.  I find my account in sots and
bores also.  They give a reality to the circumjacent picture, which
such a vanishing meteorous appearance can ill spare.  In the morning
I awake, and find the old world, wife, babes, and mother, Concord and
Boston, the dear old spiritual world, and even the dear old devil not
far off.  If we will take the good we find, asking no questions, we
shall have heaping measures.  The great gifts are not got by
analysis.  Everything good is on the highway.  The middle region of
our being is the temperate zone.  We may climb into the thin and cold
realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of
sensation.  Between these extremes is the equator of life, of
thought, of spirit, of poetry, -- a narrow belt.  Moreover, in
popular experience, everything good is on the highway.  A collector
peeps into all the picture-shops of Europe, for a landscape of
Poussin, a crayon-sketch of Salvator; but the Transfiguration, the
Last Judgment, the Communion of St. Jerome, and what are as
transcendent as these, are on the walls of the Vatican, the Uffizii,
or the Louvre, where every footman may see them; to say nothing of
nature's pictures in every street, of sunsets and sunrises every day,
and the sculpture of the human body never absent.  A collector
recently bought at public auction, in London, for one hundred and
fifty-seven guineas, an autograph of Shakspeare: but for nothing a
school-boy can read Hamlet, and can detect secrets of highest
concernment yet unpublished therein.  I think I will never read any
but the commonest books, -- the Bible, Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, and
Milton.  Then we are impatient of so public a life and planet, and
run hither and thither for nooks and secrets.  The imagination
delights in the wood-craft of Indians, trappers, and bee-hunters.  We
fancy that we are strangers, and not so intimately domesticated in
the planet as the wild man, and the wild beast and bird.  But the
exclusion reaches them also; reaches the climbing, flying, gliding,
feathered and four-footed man.  Fox and woodchuck, hawk and snipe,
and bittern, when nearly seen, have no more root in the deep world
than man, and are just such superficial tenants of the globe.  Then
the new molecular philosophy shows astronomical interspaces betwixt
atom and atom, shows that the world is all outside: it has no inside.

        The mid-world is best.  Nature, as we know her, is no saint.
The lights of the church, the ascetics, Gentoos and Grahamites, she
does not distinguish by any favor.  She comes eating and drinking and
sinning.  Her darlings, the great, the strong, the beautiful, are not
are agreed what to do about it.  Thy sickness, they say, and thy puny
habit, require that thou do this or avoid that, but know that thy
life is a flitting state, a tent for a night, and do thou, sick or
well, finish that stint.  Thou art sick, but shalt not be worse, and
the universe, which holds thee dear, shall be the better.

        Human life is made up of the two elements, power and form, and
the proportion must be invariably kept, if we would have it sweet and
sound.  Each of these elements in excess makes a mischief as hurtful
as its defect.  Everything runs to excess: every good quality is
noxious, if unmixed, and, to carry the danger to the edge of ruin,
nature causes each man's peculiarity to superabound. Here, among the
farms, we adduce the scholars as examples of this treachery.  They
are nature's victims of expression.  You who see the artist, the
orator, the poet, too near, and find their life no more excellent
than that of mechanics or farmers, and themselves victims of
partiality, very hollow and haggard, and pronounce them failures, --
not heroes, but quacks, -- conclude very reasonably, that these arts
are not for man, but are disease.  Yet nature will not bear you out.
Irresistible nature made men such, and makes legions more of such,
every day.  You love the boy reading in a book, gazing at a drawing,
or a cast: yet what are these millions who read and behold, but
incipient writers and sculptors?  Add a little more of that quality
which now reads and sees, and they will seize the pen and chisel.
And if one remembers how innocently he began to be an artist, he
perceives that nature joined with his enemy.  A man is a golden
impossibility.  The line he must walk is a hair's breadth.  The wise
through excess of wisdom is made a fool.

        How easily, if fate would suffer it, we might keep forever
these beautiful limits, and adjust ourselves, once for all, to the
perfect calculation of the kingdom of known cause and effect.  In the
street and in the newspapers, life appears so plain a business, that
manly resolution and adherence to the multiplication-table through
all weathers, will insure success.  But ah! presently comes a day, or
is it only a half-hour, with its angel-whispering, -- which
discomfits the conclusions of nations and of years!  Tomorrow again,
everything looks real and angular, the habitual standards are
reinstated, common sense is as rare as genius, -- is the basis of
genius, and experience is hands and feet to every enterprise; -- and
yet, he who should do his business on this understanding, would be
quickly bankrupt.  Power keeps quite another road than the turnpikes
of choice and will, namely, the subterranean and invisible tunnels
and channels of life.  It is ridiculous that we are diplomatists, and
doctors, and considerate people: there are no dupes like these.  Life
is a series of surprises, and would not be worth taking or keeping,
if it were not.  God delights to isolate us every day, and hide from
us the past and the future.  We would look about us, but with grand
politeness he draws down before us an impenetrable screen of purest
sky, and another behind us of purest sky.  `You will not remember,'
he seems to say, `and you will not expect.' All good conversation,
manners, and action, come from a spontaneity which forgets usages,
and makes the moment great.  Nature hates calculators; her methods
are saltatory and impulsive.  Man lives by pulses; our organic
movements are such; and the chemical and ethereal agents are
undulatory and alternate; and the mind goes antagonizing on, and
never prospers but by fits.  We thrive by casualties.  Our chief
experiences have been casual.  The most attractive class of people
are those who are powerful obliquely, and not by the direct stroke:
men of genius, but not yet accredited: one gets the cheer of their
light, without paying too great a tax.  Theirs is the beauty of the
bird, or the morning light, and not of art.  In the thought of genius
there is always a surprise; and the moral sentiment is well called
"the newness," for it is never other; as new to the oldest
intelligence as to the young child, -- "the kingdom that cometh
without observation." In like manner, for practical success, there
must not be too much design.  A man will not be observed in doing
that which he can do best.  There is a certain magic about his
properest action, which stupefies your powers of observation, so that
though it is done before you, you wist not of it.  The art of life
has a pudency, and will not be exposed.  Every man is an
impossibility, until he is born; every thing impossible, until we see
a success.  The ardors of piety agree at last with the coldest
skepticism, -- that nothing is of us or our works, -- that all is of
God.  Nature will not spare us the smallest leaf of laurel.  All
writing comes by the grace of God, and all doing and having.  I would
gladly be moral, and keep due metes and bounds, which I dearly love,
and allow the most to the will of man, but I have set my heart on
honesty in this chapter, and I can see nothing at last, in success or
failure, than more or less of vital force supplied from the Eternal.
The results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable.  The years
teach much which the days never know.  The persons who compose our
company, converse, and come and go, and design and execute many
things, and somewhat comes of it all, but an unlooked for result.
The individual is always mistaken.  He designed many things, and drew
in other persons as coadjutors, quarrelled with some or all,
blundered much, and something is done; all are a little advanced, but
the individual is always mistaken.  It turns out somewhat new, and
very unlike what he promised himself.

        The ancients, struck with this irreducibleness of the elements
of human life to calculation, exalted Chance into a divinity, but
that is to stay too long at the spark, -- which glitters truly at one
point, -- but the universe is warm with the latency of the same fire.
The miracle of life which will not be expounded, but will remain a
miracle, introduces a new element.  In the growth of the embryo, Sir
Everard Home, I think, noticed that the evolution was not from one
central point, but co-active from three or more points.  Life has no
memory.  That which proceeds in succession might be remembered, but
that which is coexistent, or ejaculated from a deeper cause, as yet
far from being conscious, knows not its own tendency.  So is it with
us, now skeptical, or without unity, because immersed in forms and
effects all seeming to be of equal yet hostile value, and now
religious, whilst in the reception of spiritual law.  Bear with these
distractions, with this coetaneous growth of the parts: they will one
day be _members_, and obey one will.  On that one will, on that
secret cause, they nail our attention and hope.  Life is hereby
melted into an expectation or a religion.  Underneath the
inharmonious and trivial particulars, is a musical perfection, the
Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or seam.  Do
but observe the mode of our illumination.  When I converse with a
profound mind, or if at any time being alone I have good thoughts, I
do not at once arrive at satisfactions, as when, being thirsty, I
drink water, or go to the fire, being cold: no! but I am at first
apprised of my vicinity to a new and excellent region of life.  By
persisting to read or to think, this region gives further sign of
itself, as it were in flashes of light, in sudden discoveries of its
profound beauty and repose, as if the clouds that covered it parted
at intervals, and showed the approaching traveller the inland
mountains, with the tranquil eternal meadows spread at their base,
whereon flocks graze, and shepherds pipe and dance.  But every
insight from this realm of thought is felt as initial, and promises a
sequel.  I do not make it; I arrive there, and behold what was there
already.  I make!  O no!  I clap my hands in infantine joy and
amazement, before the first opening to me of this august
magnificence, old with the love and homage of innumerable ages, young
with the life of life, the sunbright Mecca of the desert.  And what a
future it opens!  I feel a new heart beating with the love of the new
beauty.  I am ready to die out of nature, and be born again into this
new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West.

        "Since neither now nor yesterday began
        These thoughts, which have been ever, nor yet can
        A man be found who their first entrance knew."

        If I have described life as a flux of moods, I must now add,
that there is that in us which changes not, and which ranks all
sensations and states of mind.  The consciousness in each man is a
sliding scale, which identifies him now with the First Cause, and now
with the flesh of his body; life above life, in infinite degrees.
The sentiment from which it sprung determines the dignity of any
deed, and the question ever is, not, what you have done or forborne,
but, at whose command you have done or forborne it.

        Fortune, Minerva, Muse, Holy Ghost, -- these are quaint names,
too narrow to cover this unbounded substance.  The baffled intellect
must still kneel before this cause, which refuses to be named, --
ineffable cause, which every fine genius has essayed to represent by
some emphatic symbol, as, Thales by water, Anaximenes by air,
Anaxagoras by (Nous) thought, Zoroaster by fire, Jesus and the
moderns by love: and the metaphor of each has become a national
religion.  The Chinese Mencius has not been the least successful in
his generalization.  "I fully understand language," he said, "and
nourish well my vast-flowing vigor." -- "I beg to ask what you call
vast-flowing vigor?" -- said his companion.  "The explanation,"
replied Mencius, "is difficult.  This vigor is supremely great, and
in the highest degree unbending.  Nourish it correctly, and do it no
injury, and it will fill up the vacancy between heaven and earth.
This vigor accords with and assists justice and reason, and leaves no
hunger." -- In our more correct writing, we give to this
generalization the name of Being, and thereby confess that we have
arrived as far as we can go.  Suffice it for the joy of the universe,
that we have not arrived at a wall, but at interminable oceans.  Our
life seems not present, so much as prospective; not for the affairs
on which it is wasted, but as a hint of this vast-flowing vigor.
Most of life seems to be mere advertisement of faculty: information
is given us not to sell ourselves cheap; that we are very great.  So,
in particulars, our greatness is always in a tendency or direction,
not in an action.  It is for us to believe in the rule, not in the
exception.  The noble are thus known from the ignoble.  So in
accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe
concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but _the
universal impulse to believe_, that is the material circumstance, and
is the principal fact in the history of the globe.  Shall we describe
this cause as that which works directly?  The spirit is not helpless
or needful of mediate organs.  It has plentiful powers and direct
effects.  I am explained without explaining, I am felt without
acting, and where I am not.  Therefore all just persons are satisfied
with their own praise.  They refuse to explain themselves, and are
content that new actions should do them that office.  They believe
that we communicate without speech, and above speech, and that no
right action of ours is quite unaffecting to our friends, at whatever
distance; for the influence of action is not to be measured by miles.
Why should I fret myself, because a circumstance has occurred, which
hinders my presence where I was expected?  If I am not at the
meeting, my presence where I am, should be as useful to the
commonwealth of friendship and wisdom, as would be my presence in
that place.  I exert the same quality of power in all places. Thus
journeys the mighty Ideal before us; it never was known to fall into
the rear.  No man ever came to an experience which was satiating, but
his good is tidings of a better.  Onward and onward!  In liberated
moments, we know that a new picture of life and duty is already
possible; the elements already exist in many minds around you, of a
doctrine of life which shall transcend any written record we have.
The new statement will comprise the skepticisms, as well as the
faiths of society, and out of unbeliefs a creed shall be formed.
For, skepticisms are not gratuitous or lawless, but are limitations
of the affirmative statement, and the new philosophy must take them
in, and make affirmations out-side of them, just as much as it must
include the oldest beliefs.

        It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we
have made, that we exist.  That discovery is called the Fall of Man.
Ever afterwards, we suspect our instruments.  We have learned that we
do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of
correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of
computing the amount of their errors.  Perhaps these subject-lenses
have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects.  Once we lived
in what we saw; now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which
threatens to absorb all things, engages us.  Nature, art, persons,
letters, religions, -- objects, successively tumble in, and God is
but one of its ideas.  Nature and literature are subjective
phenomena; every evil and every good thing is a shadow which we cast.
The street is full of humiliations to the proud.  As the fop
contrived to dress his bailiffs in his livery, and make them wait on
his guests at table, so the chagrins which the bad heart gives off as
bubbles, at once take form as ladies and gentlemen in the street,
shopmen or barkeepers in hotels, and threaten or insult whatever is
threatenable and insultable in us.  'Tis the same with our
idolatries.  People forget that it is the eye which makes the
horizon, and the rounding mind's eye which makes this or that man a
type or representative of humanity with the name of hero or saint.
Jesus the "providential man," is a good man on whom many people are
agreed that these optical laws shall take effect.  By love on one
part, and by forbearance to press objection on the other part, it is
for a time settled, that we will look at him in the centre of the
horizon, and ascribe to him the properties that will attach to any
man so seen.  But the longest love or aversion has a speedy term.
The great and crescive self, rooted in absolute nature, supplants all
relative existence, and ruins the kingdom of mortal friendship and
love.  Marriage (in what is called the spiritual world) is
impossible, because of the inequality between every subject and every
object.  The subject is the receiver of Godhead, and at every
comparison must feel his being enhanced by that cryptic might.
Though not in energy, yet by presence, this magazine of substance
cannot be otherwise than felt: nor can any force of intellect
attribute to the object the proper deity which sleeps or wakes
forever in every subject.  Never can love make consciousness and
ascription equal in force.  There will be the same gulf between every
me and thee, as between the original and the picture.  The universe
is the bride of the soul.  All private sympathy is partial. Two human
beings are like globes, which can touch only in a point, and, whilst
they remain in contact, all other points of each of the spheres are
inert; their turn must also come, and the longer a particular union
lasts, the more energy of appetency the parts not in union acquire.

        Life will be imaged, but cannot be divided nor doubled. Any
invasion of its unity would be chaos. The soul is not twin-born, but
the only begotten, and though revealing itself as child in time,
child in appearance, is of a fatal and universal power, admitting no
co-life. Every day, every act betrays the ill-concealed deity.  We
believe in ourselves, as we do not believe in others.  We permit all
things to ourselves, and that which we call sin in others, is
experiment for us.  It is an instance of our faith in ourselves, that
men never speak of crime as lightly as they think: or, every man
thinks a latitude safe for himself, which is nowise to be indulged to
another.  The act looks very differently on the inside, and on the
outside; in its quality, and in its consequences.  Murder in the
murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have
it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice
of trifles: it is an act quite easy to be contemplated, but in its
sequel, it turns out to be a horrible jangle and confounding of all
relations.  Especially the crimes that spring from love, seem right
and fair from the actor's point of view, but, when acted, are found
destructive of society.  No man at last believes that he can be lost,
nor that the crime in him is as black as in the felon.  Because the
intellect qualifies in our own case the moral judgments.  For there
is no crime to the intellect.  That is antinomian or hypernomian, and
judges law as well as fact.  "It is worse than a crime, it is a
blunder," said Napoleon, speaking the language of the intellect.  To
it, the world is a problem in mathematics or the science of quantity,
and it leaves out praise and blame, and all weak emotions.  All
stealing is comparative.  If you come to absolutes, pray who does not
steal?  Saints are sad, because they behold sin, (even when they
speculate,) from the point of view of the conscience, and not of the
intellect; a confusion of thought.  Sin seen from the thought, is a
diminution or _less_: seen from the conscience or will, it is pravity
or _bad_.  The intellect names it shade, absence of light, and no
essence.  The conscience must feel it as essence, essential evil.
This it is not: it has an objective existence, but no subjective.

        Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every
object fall successively into the subject itself.  The subject
exists, the subject enlarges; all things sooner or later fall into
place. As I am, so I see; use what language we will, we can never say
anything but what we are; Hermes, Cadmus, Columbus, Newton,
Buonaparte, are the mind's ministers. Instead of feeling a poverty
when we encounter a great man, let us treat the new comer like a
travelling geologist, who passes through our estate, and shows us
good slate, or limestone, or anthracite, in our brush pasture. The
partial action of each strong mind in one direction, is a telescope
for the objects on which it is pointed. But every other part of
knowledge is to be pushed to the same extravagance, ere the soul
attains her due sphericity. Do you see that kitten chasing so
prettily her own tail?  If you could look with her eyes, you might
see her surrounded with hundreds of figures performing com-plex
dramas, with tragic and comic issues, long conversations, many
characters, many ups and downs of fate, -- and meantime it is only
puss and her tail.  How long before our masquerade will end its noise
of tamborines, laughter, and shouting, and we shall find it was a
solitary performance? -- A subject and an object, -- it takes so much
to make the galvanic circuit complete, but magnitude adds nothing.
What imports it whether it is Kepler and the sphere; Columbus and
America; a reader and his book; or puss with her tail?

        It is true that all the muses and love and religion hate these
developments, and will find a way to punish the chemist, who
publishes in the parlor the secrets of the laboratory.  And we cannot
say too little of our constitutional necessity of seeing things under
private aspects, or saturated with our humors.  And yet is the God
the native of these bleak rocks.  That need makes in morals the
capital virtue of self-trust.  We must hold hard to this poverty,
however scandalous, and by more vigorous self-recoveries, after the
sallies of action, possess our axis more firmly.  The life of truth
is cold, and so far mournful; but it is not the slave of tears,
contritions, and perturbations.  It does not attempt another's work,
nor adopt another's facts.  It is a main lesson of wisdom to know
your own from another's.  I have learned that I cannot dispose of
other people's facts; but I possess such a key to my own, as
persuades me against all their denials, that they also have a key to
theirs.  A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer
among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he give so much as a
leg or a finger, they will drown him.  They wish to be saved from the
mischiefs of their vices, but not from their vices.  Charity would be
wasted on this poor waiting on the symptoms.  A wise and hardy
physician will say, _Come out of that_, as the first condition of
advice.

        In this our talking America, we are ruined by our good nature
and listening on all sides.  This compliance takes away the power of
being greatly useful.  A man should not be able to look other than
directly and forthright.  A preoccupied attention is the only answer
to the importunate frivolity of other people: an attention, and to an
aim which makes their wants frivolous.  This is a divine answer, and
leaves no appeal, and no hard thoughts.  In Flaxman's drawing of the
Eumenides of Aeschylus, Orestes supplicates Apollo, whilst the Furies
sleep on the threshold.  The face of the god expresses a shade of
regret and compassion, but calm with the conviction of the
irreconcilableness of the two spheres.  He is born into other
politics, into the eternal and beautiful.  The man at his feet asks
for his interest in turmoils of the earth, into which his nature
cannot enter.  And the Eumenides there lying express pictorially this
disparity.  The god is surcharged with his divine destiny.

        Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality,
Subjectiveness, -- these are threads on the loom of time, these are
the lords of life.  I dare not assume to give their order, but I name
them as I find them in my way.  I know better than to claim any
completeness for my picture.  I am a fragment, and this is a fragment
of me.  I can very confidently announce one or another law, which
throws itself into relief and form, but I r the great Fortune.  My reception has been
so large, that I am not annoyed by receiving this or that
superabundantly.  I say to the Genius, if he will pardon the proverb,
_In for a mill, in for a million._ When I receive a new gift, I do
not macerate my body to make the account square, for, if I should
die, I could not make the account square.  The benefit overran the
merit the first day, and has overran the merit ever since.  The merit
itself, so-called, I reckon part of the receiving.

        Also, that hankering after an overt or practical effect seems
to me an apostasy.  In good earnest, I am willing to spare this most
unnecessary deal of doing.  Life wears to me a visionary face.
Hardest, roughest action is visionary also.  It is but a choice
between soft and turbulent dreams.  People disparage knowing and the
intellectual life, and urge doing.  I am very content with knowing,
if only I could know.  That is an august entertainment, and would
suffice me a great while.  To know a little, would be worth the
expense of this world.  I hear always the law of Adrastia, "that
every soul which had acquired any truth, should be safe from harm
until another period."

        I know that the world I converse with in the city and in the
farms, is not the world I _think._ I observe that difference and
shall observe it.  One day, I shall know the value and law of this
discrepance.  But I have not found that much was gained by manipular
attempts to realize the world of thought.  Many eager persons
successively make an experiment in this way, and make themselves
ridiculous.  They acquire democratic manners, they foam at the mouth,
they hate and deny.  Worse, I observe, that, in the history of
mankind, there is never a solitary example of success, -- taking
their own tests of success.  I say this polemically, or in reply to
the inquiry, why not realize your world?  But far be from me the
despair which prejudges the law by a paltry empiricism, -- since
there never was a right endeavor, but it succeeded.  Patience and
patience, we shall win at the last.  We must be very suspicious of
the deceptions of the element of time.  It takes a good deal of time
to eat or to sleep, or to earn a hundred dollars, and a very little
time to entertain a hope and an insight which becomes the light of
our life.  We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the
household with our wives, and these things make no impression, are
forgotten next week; but in the solitude to which every man is always
returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into
new worlds he will carry with him.  Never mind the ridicule, never
mind the defeat: up again, old heart! -- it seems to say, -- there is
victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world
exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into
practical power.



        CHARACTER


        The sun set; but s the man, than anything which he said.
It has been complained of our brilliant English historian of the
French Revolution, that when he has told all his facts about
Mirabeau, they do not justify his estimate of his genius.  The
Gracchi, Agis, Cleomenes, and others of Plutarch's heroes, do not in
the record of facts equal their own fame.  Sir Philip Sidney, the
Earl of Essex, Sir Walter Raleigh, are men of great figure, and of
few deeds.  We cannot find the smallest part of the personal weight
of Washington, in the narrative of his exploits.  The authority of
the name of Schiller is too great for his books.  This inequality of
the reputation to the works or the anecdotes, is not accounted for by
saying that the reverberation is longer than the thunder-clap; but
somewhat resided in these men which begot an expectation that outran
all their performance.  The largest part of their power was latent.
This is that which we call Character, -- a reserved force which acts
directly by presence, and without means.  It is conceived of as a
certain undemonstrable force, a Familiar or Genius, by whose impulses
the man is guided, but whose counsels he cannot impart; which is
company for him, so that such men are often solitary, or if they
chance to be social, do not need society, but can entertain
themselves very well alone.  The purest literary talent appears at
one time great, at another time small, but character is of a stellar
and undiminishable greatness.  What others effect by talent or by
eloquence, this man accomplishes by some magnetism.  "Half his
strength he put not forth." His victories are by demonstration of
superiority, and not by crossing of bayonets.  He conquers, because
his arrival alters the face of affairs.  `"O Iole! how did you know
that Hercules was a god?" "Because," answered Iole, "I was content
the moment my eyes fell on him.  When I beheld Theseus, I desired
that I might see him offer battle, or at least guide his horses in
the chariot-race; but Hercules did not wait for a contest; he
conquered whether he stood, or walked, or sat, or whatever thing he
did."]' Man, ordinarily a pendant to events, only half attached, and
that awkwardly, to the world he lives in, in these examples appears
to share the life of things, and to be an expression of the same laws
which control the tides and the sun, numbers and quantities.

        But to use a more modest illustration, and nearer home, I
observe, that in our political elections, where this element, if it
appears at all, can only occur in its coarsest form, we sufficiently
understand its incomparable rate.  The people know that they need in
their representative much more than talent, namely, the power to make
his talent trusted.  They cannot come at their ends by sending to
Congress a learned, acute, and fluent speaker, if he be not one, who,
before he was appointed by the people to represent them, was
appointed by Almighty God to stand for a fact, -- invincibly
persuaded of that fact in himself, -- so that the most confident and
the most violent persons learn that here is resistance on which both
impudence and terror are wasted, namely, faith in a fact.  The men
who carry their points do not need to inquire of their constituents
what they should say, but are themselves the country which they
represent: nowhere are its emotions or opinions so instant and true
as in them; nowhere so pure from a selfish infusion.  The
constituency at home hearkens to their words, watches the color of
their cheek, and therein, as in a glass, dresses its own.  Our public
assemblies are pretty good tests of manly force.  Our frank
countrymen of the west and south have a taste for character, and like
to know whether the New Englander is a substantial man, or whether
the hand can pass through him.

        The same motive force appears in trade.  There are geniuses in
trade, as well as in war, or the state, or letters; and the reason
why this or that man is fortunate, is not to be told.  It lies in the
man: that is all anybody can tell you about it.  See him, and you
will know as easily why he succeeds, as, if you see Napoleon, you
would comprehend his fortune.  In the new objects we recognize the
old game, the habit of fronting the fact, and not dealing with it at
second hand, through the perceptions of somebody else.  Nature seems
to authorize trade, as soon as you see the natural merchant, who
appears not so much a private agent, as her factor and Minister of
Commerce.  His natural probity combines with his insight into the
fabric of society, to put him above tricks, and he communicates to
all his own faith, that contracts are of no private interpretation.
The habit of his mind is a reference to standards of natural equity
and public advantage; and he inspires respect, and the wish to deal
with him, both for the quiet spirit of honor which attends him, and
for the intellectual pastime which the spectacle of so much ability
affords.  This immensely stretched trade, which makes the capes of
the Southern Ocean his wharves, and the Atlantic Sea his familiar
port, centres in his brain only; and nobody in the universe can make
his place good.  In his parlor, I see very well that he has been at
hard work this morning, with that knitted brow, and that settled
humor, which all his desire to be courteous cannot shake off.  I see
plainly how many firm acts have been done; how many valiant _noes_
have this day been spoken, when others would have uttered ruinous
_yeas_.  I see, with the pride of art, and skill of masterly
arithmetic and power of remote combination, the consciousness of
being an agent and playfellow of the original laws of the world.  He
too believes that none can supply him, and that a man must be born to
trade, or he cannot learn it.

        This virtue draws the mind more, when it appears in action to
ends not so mixed.  It works with most energy in the smallest
companies and in private relations.  In all cases, it is an
extraordinary and incomputable agent.  The excess of physical
strength is paralyzed by it.  Higher natures overpower lower ones by
affecting them with a certain sleep.  The faculties are locked up,
and offer no resistance.  Perhaps that is the universal law.  When
the high cannot bring up the low to itself, it benumbs it, as man
charms down the resistance of the lower animals.  Men exert on each
other a similar occult power.  How often has the influence of a true
master realized all the tales of magic!  A river of command seemed to
run down from his eyes into all those who beheld him, a torrent of
strong sad light, like an Ohio or Danube, which pervaded them with
his thoughts, and colored all events with the hue of his mind.  "What
means did you employ?" was the question asked of the wife of Concini,
in regard to her treatment of Mary of Medici; and the answer was,
"Only that influence which every strong mind has over a weak one."
Cannot Caesar in irons shuffle off the irons, and transfer them to
the person of Hippo or Thraso the turnkey?  Is an iron handcuff so
immutable a bond?  Suppose a slaver on the coast of Guinea should
take on board a gang of negroes, which should contain persons of the
stamp of Toussaint L'Ouverture: or, let us fancy, under these swarthy
masks he has a gang of Washingtons in chains.  When they arrive at
Cuba, will the relative order of the ship's company be the same?  Is
there nothing but rope and iron?  Is there no love, no reverence?  Is
there never a glimpse of right in a poor slave-captain's mind; and
cannot these be supposed available to break, or elude, or in any
manner overmatch the tension of an inch or two of iron ring?

        This is a natural power, like light and heat, and all nature
cooperates with it.  The reason why we feel one man's presence, and
do not feel another's, is as simple as gravity.  Truth is the summit
of being: justice is the application of it to affairs.  All
individual natures stand in a scale, according to the purity of this
elemenhest influence to all who
are not on the same level.  Thus, men of character are the conscience
of the society to which they belong.

        The natural measure of this power is the resistance of
circumstances.  Impure men consider life as it is reflected in
opinions, events, and persons.  They cannot see the action, until it
is done.  Yet its moral element pre-existed in the actor, and its
quality as right or wrong, it was easy to predict.  Everything in
nature is bipolar, or has a positive and negative pole.  There is a
male and a female, a spirit and a fact, a north and a south.  Spirit
is the positive, the event is the negative.  Will is the north,
action the south pole.  Character may be ranked as having its natural
place in the north.  It shares the magnetic currents of the system.
The feeble souls are drawn to the south or negative pole.  They look
at the profit or hurt of the action.  They never behold a principle
until it is lodged in a person.  They do not wish to be lovely, but
to be loved.  The class of character like to hear of their faults:
the other class do not like to hear of faults; they worship events;
secure to them a fact, a connexion, a certain chain of circumstances,
and they will ask no more.  The hero sees that the event is
ancillary: it must follow _him._ A given order of events has no power
to secure to him the satisfaction which the imagination attaches to
it; the soul of goodness escapes from any set of circumstances,
whilst prosperity belongs to a certain mind, and will introduce that
power and victory which is its natural fruit, into any order of
events.  No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.
We boast our emancipation from many superstitions; but if we have
broken any idols, it is through a transfer of the idolatry.  What
have I gained, that I no longer immolate a bull to Jove, or to
Neptune, or a mouse to Hecate; that I do not tremble before the
Eumenides, or the Catholic Purgatory, or the Calvinistic
Judgment-day,--- if I quake at opinion, the public opinion, as we
call it; or at the threat of assault, or contumely, or bad neighbors,
or poverty, or mutilation, or at the rumor of revolution, or of
murder?  If I quake, what matters it what I quake at?  Our proper
vice takes form in one or another shape, according to the sex, age,
or temperament of the person, and, if we are capable of fear, will
readily find terrors.  The covetousness or the malignity which
saddens me, when I ascribe it to society, is my own.  I am always
environed by myself.  On the other part, rectitude is a perpetual
victory, celebrated not by cries of joy, but by serenity, which is
joy fixed or habitual.  It is disgraceful to fly to events for
confirmation of our truth and worth.  The capitalist does not run
every hour to the broker, to coin his advantages into current money
of the realm; he is satisfied to read in the quotations of the
market, that his stocks have risen.  The same transport which the
occurrence of the best events in the best order would occasion me, I
must learn to taste purer in the perception that my position is every
hour meliorated, and does already command those events I desire.
That exultation is only to be checked by the foresight of an order of
things so excellent, as to throw all our prosperities into the
deepest shade.

        The face which character wears to me is self-sufficingness.  I
revere the person who is riches; so that I cannot think of him as
alone, or poor, or exiled, or unhappy, or a client, but as perpetual
patron, benefactor, and beatified man.  Character is centrality, the
impossibility of (35%)



its conversation into ceremonies and escapes.  But if I go to see an
ingenious man, I shall think myself poorly entertained if he give me
nimble pieces of benevolence and etiquette; rather he shall stand
stoutly in his place, and let me apprehend, if it were only his
resistance; know that I have encountered a new and positive quality;
-- great refreshment for both of us.  It is much, that he does not
accept the conventional opinions and practices.  That nonconformity
will remain a goad and remembrancer, and every inquirer will have to
dispose of him, in the first place.  There is nothing real or useful
that is not a seat of war.  Our houses ring with laughter and
personal and critical gossip, but it helps little.  But the uncivil,
unavailable man, who is a problem and a threat to society, whom it
cannot let pass in silence, but must either worship or hate, -- and
to whom all parties feel related, both the leaders of opinion, and
the obscure and eccentric, -- he helps; he puts America and Europe in
the wrong, and destroys the skepticism which says, `man is a doll,
let us eat and drink, 'tis the best we can do,' by illuminating the
untried and unknown.  Acquiescence in the establishment, and appeal
to the public, indicate infirm faith, heads which are not clear, and
which must see a house built, before they can comprehend the plan of
it.  The wise man not only leaves out of his thought the many, but
leaves out the few.  Fountains, fountains, the self-moved, the
absorbed, the commander because he is commanded, the assured, the
primary,--- they are good; for these announce the instant presence of
supreme power.

        Our action should rest mathematically on our substance.  In
nature, there are no false valuations.  A pound of water in the
ocean-tempest has no more gravity than in a midsummer pond.  All
things work exactly according to their quality, and according to
their quantity; attempt nothing they cannot do, except man only.  He
has pretension: he wishes and attempts things beyond his force.  I
read in a book of English memoirs, "Mr. Fox (afterwards Lord Holland)
said, he must have the Treasury; he had served up to it, and would
have it." -- Xenophon and his Ten Thousand were quite equal to what
they attempted, and did it; so equal, that it was not suspected to be
a grand and inimitable exploit.  Yet there stands that fact
unrepeated, a high-water-mark in military history.  Many have
attempted it since, and not been equal to it.  It is only on reality,
that any power of action can be based.  No institution will be better
than the institutor.  I knew an amiable and accomplished person who
undertook a practical reform, yet I was never able to find in him the
enterprise of love he took in hand.  He adopted it by ear and by the
understanding from the books he had been reading.  All his action was
tentative, a piece of the city carried out into the fields, and was
the city still, and no new fact, and could not inspire enthusiasm.
Had there been something latent in the man, a terrible undemonstrated
genius agitating and embarrassing his demeanor, we had watched for
its advent.  It is not enough that the intellect should see the
evils, and their remedy.  We shall still postpone our existence, nor
take the ground to which we are entitled, whilst it is only a
thought, and not a spirit that incites us.  We have not yet served up
to it.

        These are properties of life, and another trait is the notice
of incessant growth.  Men should be intelligent and earnest.  They
must also make us feel, that they have a controlling happy future,
opening before them, which sheds a splendor on the passing hour.  The
hero is misconceived and misreported: he cannot therefore wait to
unravel any man's blunders: he is again on his road, adding new
powers and honors to his domain, and new claims on your heart, which
will bankrupt you, if you have loitered about the old things, and
have not kept your relation to him, by adding to your wealth.  New
actions are the only apologies and explanations of old ones, which
the noble can bear to offer or to receive.  If your friend has
displeased you, you shall not sit down to consider it, for he has
already lost all memory of the passage, and has doubled his power to
serve you, and, ere you can rise up again, will burden you with
blessings.

        We have no pleasure in thinking of a benevolence that is only
measured by its works.  Love is inexhaustible, and if its estate is
wasted, its granary emptied, still cheers and enriches, and the man,
though he sleep, seems to purify the air, and his house to adorn the
landscape and strengthen the laws.  People always recognize this
difference.  We know who is benevolent, by quite other means than the
amount of subscription to soup-societies.  It is only low merits that
can be enumerated.  Fear, when your friends say to you what you have
done well, and say it through; but when they stand with uncertain
timid looks of respect and half-dislike, and must suspend their
judgment for years to come, you may begin to hope.  Those who live to
the future must always appear selfish to those who live to the
present.  Therefore it was droll in the good Riemer, who has written
memoirs of Goethe, to make out a list of his donations and good
deeds, as, so many hundred thalers given to Stilling, to Hegel, to
Tischbein: a lucrative place found for Professor Voss, a post under
the Grand Duke for Herder, a pension for Meyer, two professors
recommended to foreign universities, &c. &c.  The longest list of
specifications of benefit, would look very short.  A man is a poor
creature, if he is to be measured so.  For, all these, of course, are
exceptions; and the rule and hodiernal life of a good man is
benefaction.  The true charity of Goethe is to be inferred from the
account he gave Dr. Eckermann, of the way in which he had spent his
fortune.  "Each bon-mot of mine has cost a purse of gold.  Half a
million of my own money, the fortune I inherited, my salary, and the
large income derived from my writings for fifty years back, have been
expended to instruct me in what I now know.  I have besides seen,"
&c.

        I own it is but poor chat and gossip to go to enumerate traits
of this simple and rapid power, and we are painting the lightning
with charcoal; but in these long nights and vacations, I like to
console myself so.  Nothing but itself can copy it.  A word warm from
the heart enriches me.  I surrender at discretion.  How death-cold is
literary genius before this fire of life!  These are the touches that
reanimate my heavy soul, and give it eyes to pierce the dark of
nature.  I find, where I thought myself poor, there was I most rich.
Thence comes a new intellectual exaltation, to be again rebuked by
some new exhibition of character.  Strange alternation of attraction
and repulsion!  Character repudiates intellect, yet excites it; and
character passes into thought, is published so, and then is ashamed
before new flashes of moral worth.

        Character is nature in the highest form.  It is of no use to
ape it, or to contend with it.  Somewhat is possible of resistance,
and of persistence, and of creation, to this power, which will foil
all emulation.

        This masterpiece is best where no hands but nature's have been
laid on it.  Care is taken that the greatly-destined shall slip up
into life in the shade, with no thousand-eyed Athens to watch and
blazon every new thought, every blushing emotion of young genius.
Two persons lately, -- very young children of the most high God, --
have given me occasion for thought.  When I explored the source of
their sanctity, and charm for the imagination, it seemed as if each
answered, `From my non-conformity: I never listened to your people's
law, or to what they call their gospel, and wasted my time.  I was
content with the simple rural poverty of my own: hence this
sweetness: my work never reminds you of that; -- is pure of that.'
And nature advertises me in such persons, that, in democratic
America, she will not be democratized.  How cloistered and
constitutionally sequestered from the market and from scandal!  It
was only this morning, that I sent away some wild flowers of these
wood-gods.  They are a relief from literature, -- these fresh
draughts from the sources of thought and sentiment; as we read, in an
age of polish and criticism, the first lines of written prose and
verse of a nation.  How captivating is their devotion to their
favorite books, whether Aeschylus, Dante, Shakspeare, or Scott, as
feeling that they have a stake in that book: who touches that,
touches them; -- and especially the total solitude of the critic, the
Patmos of thought from which he writes, in unconsciousness of any
eyes that shall ever read this writing.  Could they dream on still,
as angels, and not wake to comparisons, and to be flattered!  Yet
some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise, and wherever the
vein of thought reaches down into the profound, there is no danger
from vanity.  Solemn friends will warn them of the danger of the
head's being turned by the flourish of trumpets, but they can afford
to smile.  I remember the indignation of an eloquent Methodist at the
kind admonitions of a Doctor of Divinity,--- `My friend, a man can
neither be praised nor insulted.' But forgive the counsels; they are
very natural.  I remember the thought which occurred to me when some
ingenious and spiritual foreigners came to America, was, Have you
been victimized in being brought hither? -- or, prior to that, answer
me this, `Are you victimizable?'

        As I have said, nature keeps these sovereignties in her own
hands, and however pertly our sermons and disciplines would divide
some share of credit, and teach that the laws fashion the citizen,
she goes her own gait, and puts the wisest in the wrong.  She makes
very light of gospels and prophets, as one who has a great many more
to produce, and no excess of time to spare on any one.  There is a
class of men, individuals of which appear at long intervals, so
eminently endowed with insight and virtue, that they have been
unanimously saluted as _divine_, and who seem to be an accumulation
of that power we consider.  Divine persons are character born, or, to
borrow a phrase from Napoleon, they are victory organized.  They are
usually received with ill-will, because they are new, and because
they set a bound to the exaggeration that has been made of the
personality of the last divine person.  Nature never rhymes her
children, nor makes two men alike.  When we see a great man, we fancy
a resemblance to some historical person, and predict the sequel of
his character and fortune, a result which he is sure to disappoint.
None will ever solve the problem of his character according to our
prejudice, but only in his own high unprecedented way.  Character
wants room; must not be crowded on by persons, nor be judged from
glimpses got in the press of affairs or on few occasions.  It needs
perspective, as a great building.  It may not, probably does not,
form relations rapidly; and we should not require rash explanation,
either on the popular ethics, or on our own, of its action.

        I look on Sculpture as history.  I do not think the Apollo and
the Jove impossible in flesh and blood.  Every trait which the artist
recorded in stone, he had seen in life, and better than his copy.  We
have seen many counterfeits, but we are born believers in great men.
How easily we read in old books, when men were few, of the smallest
action of the patriarchs.  We require that a man should be so large
and columnar in the landscape, that it should deserve to be recorded,
that he arose, and girded up his loins, and departed to such a place.
The most credible pictures are those of majestic men who prevailed at
their entrance, and convinced the senses; as happened to the eastern
magian who was sent to test the merits of Zertusht or Zoroaster.
When the Yunani sage arrived at Balkh, the Persians tell us, Gushtasp
appointed a day on which the Mobeds of every country should assemble,
and a golden chair was placed for the Yunani sage.  Then the beloved
of Yezdam, the prophet Zertusht, advanced into the midst of the
assembly.  The Yunani sage, on seeing that chief, said, "This form
and this gait cannot lie, and nothing but truth can proceed from
them." Plato said, it was impossible not to believe in the children
of the gods, "though they should speak without probable or necessary
arguments." I should think myself very unhappy in my associates, if I
could not credit the best things in history.  "John Bradshaw," says
Milton, "appears like a consul, from whom the fasces are not to
depart with the year; so that not on the tribunal only, but
throughout his life, you would regard him as sitting in judgment upon
kings." I find it more credible, since it is anterior information,
that one man should _know heaven_, as the Chinese say, than that so
many men should know the world.  "The virtuous prince confronts the
gods, without any misgiving.  He waits a hundred ages till a sage
comes, and does not doubt.  He who confronts the gods, without any
misgiving, knows heaven; he who waits a hundred ages until a sage
comes, without doubting, knows men.  Hence the virtuous prince moves,
and for ages shows empire the way." But there is no need to seek
remote examples.  He is a dull observer whose experience has not
taught him the reality and force of magic, as well as of chemistry.
The coldest precisian cannot go abroad without encountering
inexplicable influences.  One man fastens an eye on him, and the
graves of the memory render up their dead; the secrets that make him
wretched either to keep or to betray, must be yielded; -- another,
and he cannot speak, and the bones of his body seem to lose their
cartilages; the entrance of a friend adds grace, boldness, and
eloquence to him; and there are persons, he cannot choose but
remember, who gave a transcendant expansion to his thought, and
kindled another life in his bosom.

        What is so excellent as strict relations of amity, when they
spring from this deep root?  The sufficient reply to the skeptic, who
doubts the power and the furniture of man, is in that possibility of
joyful intercourse with persons, which makes the faith and practice
of all reasonable men.  I know nothing which life has to offer so
satisfying as the profound good understanding, which can subsist,
after much exchange of good offices, between two virtuous men, each
of whom is sure of himself, and sure of his friend.  It is a
happiness which postpones all other gratifications, and makes
politics, and commerce, and churches, cheap.  For, when men shall
meet as they ought, each a benefactor, a shower of stars, clothed
with thoughts, with deeds, with accomplishments, it should be the
festival of nature which all things announce.  Of such friendship,
love in the sexes is the first symbol, as all other things are
symbols of love.  Those relations to the best men, which, at one
time, we reckoned the romances of youth, become, in the progress of
the character, the most solid enjoyment.


        If it were possible to live in right relations with men! -- if
we could abstain from asking anything of them, from asking their
praise, or help, or pity, and content us with compelling them through
the virtue of the eldest laws!  Could we not deal with a few persons,
-- with one person, -- after the unwritten statutes, and make an
experiment of their efficacy?  Could we not pay our friend the
compliment of truth, of silence, of forbearing?  Need we be so eager
to seek him?  If we are related, we shall meet.  It was a tradition
of the ancient world, that no metamorphosis could hide a god from a
god; and there is a Greek verse which runs,

        "The Gods are to each other not unknown."

        Friends also follow the laws of divine necessity; they
gravitate to each other, and cannot otherwise: --

        When each the other shall avoid,
        Shall each by each be most enjoyed.

        Their relation is not made, but allowed.  The gods must seat
themselves without seneschal in our Olympus, and as they can instal
themselves by seniority divine.  Society is spoiled, if pains are
taken, if the associates are brought a mile to meet.  And if it be
not society, it is a mischievous, low, degrading jangle, though made
up of the best.  All the greatness of each is kept back, and every
foible in painful activity, as if the Olympians should meet to
exchange snuff-boxes.

        Life goes headlong.  We chase some flying scheme, or we are
hunted by some fear or command behind us.  But if suddenly we
encounter a friend, we pause; our heat and hurry look foolish enough;
now pause, now possession, is required, and the power to swell the
moment from the resources of the heart.  The moment is all, in all
noble relations.

        A divine person is the prophecy of the mind; a friend is the
hope of the heart.  Our beatitude waits for the fulfilment of these
two in one.  The ages are opening this moral force.  All force is the
shadow or symbol of that.  Poetry is joyful and strong, as it draws
its inspiration thence.  Men write their names on the world, as they
are filled with this.  History has been mean; our nations have been
mobs; we have never seen a man: that divine form we do not yet know,
but only the dream and prophecy of such: we do not know the majestic
manners which belong to him, which appease and exalt the beholder.
We shall one day see that the most private is the most public energy,
that quality atones for quantity, and grandeur of character acts in
the dark, and succors them who never saw it.  What greatness has yet
appeared, is beginnings and encouragements to us in this direction.
The history of those gods and saints which the world has written, and
then worshipped, are documents of character.  The ages have exulted
in the manners of a youth who owed nothing to fortune, and who was
hanged at the Tyburn of his nation, who, by the pure quality of his
nature, shed an epic splendor around the facts of his death, which
has transfigured every particular into an universal symbol for the
eyes of mankind.  This great defeat is hitherto our highest fact.
But the mind requires a victory to the senses, a force of character
which will convert judge, jury, soldier, and king; which will rule
animal and mineral virtues, and blend with the courses of sap, of
rivers, of winds, of stars, and of moral agents.

        If we cannot attain at a bound to these grandeurs, at least,
let us do them homage.  In society, high advantages are set down to
the possessor, as disadvantages.  It requires the more wariness in
our private estimates.  I do not forgive in my friends the failure to
know a fine character, and to entertain it with thankful hospitality.
When, at last, that which we have always longed for, is arrived, and
shines on us with glad rays out of that far celestial land, then to
be coarse, then to be critical, and treat such a visitant with the
jabber and suspicion of the streets, argues a vulgarity that seems to
shut the doors of heaven.  This is confusion, this the right
insanity, when the soul no longer knows its own, nor where its
allegiance, its religion, are due.  Is there any religion but this,
to know, that, wherever in the wide desert of being, the holy
sentiment we cherish has opened into a flower, it blooms for me? if
none sees it, I see it; I am aware, if I alone, of the greatness of
the fact.  Whilst it blooms, I will keep sabbath or holy time, and
suspend my gloom, and my folly and jokes.  Nature is indulged by the
presence of this guest.  There are many eyes that can detect and
honor the prudent and household virtues; there are many that can
discern Genius on his starry track, though the mob is incapable; but
when that love which is all-suffering, all-abstaining, all-aspiring,
which has vowed to itself, that it will be a wretch and also a fool
in this world, sooner than soil its white hands by any compliances,
comes into our streets and houses, -- only the pure and aspiring can
know its face, and the only compliment they can pay it, is to own it.



        MANNERS

        "How near to good is what is fair!
        Which we no sooner see,
        But with the lines and outward air
        Our senses taken be.

                Again yourselves compose,
        And now put all the aptness on
        Of Figure, that Proportion
                Or Color can disclose;
        That if those silent arts were lost,
        Design and Picture, they might boast
                From you a newer ground,
        Instructed by the heightening sense
        Of dignity and reverence
                In their true motions found."
        Ben Jonson



        ESSAY IV _Manners_

        Half the world, it is said, knows not how the other half live.
Our Exploring Expedition saw the Feejee islanders getting their
dinner off human bones; and they are said to eat their own wives and
children.  The husbandry of the modern inhabitants of Gournou (west
of old Thebes) is philosophical to a fault.  To set up their
housekeeping, nothing is requisite but two or three earthern pots, a
stone to grind meal, and a mat which is the bed.  The house, namely,
a tomb, is ready without rent or taxes.  No rain can pass through the
roof, and there is no door, for there is no want of one, as there is
nothing to lose.  If the house do not please them, they walk out and
enter another, as there are several hundreds at their command.  "It
is somewhat singular," adds Belzoni, to whom we owe this account, "to
talk of happiness among people who live in sepulchres, among the
corpses and rags of an ancient nation which they know nothing of." In
the deserts of Borgoo, the rock-Tibboos still dwell in caves, like
cliff-swallows, and the language of these negroes is compared by
their neighbors to the shrieking of bats, and to the whistling of
birds.  Again, the Bornoos have no proper names; individuals are
called after their height, thickness, or other accidental quality,
and have nicknames merely.  But the salt, the dates, the ivory, and
the gold, for which these horrible regions are visited, find their
way into countries, where the purchaser and consumer can hardly be
ranked in one race with these cannibals and man-stealers; countries
where man serves himself with metals, wood, stone, glass, gum,
cotton, silk, and wool; honors himself with architecture; writes
laws, and contrives to execute his will through the hands of many
nations;