Self-Reliance

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

Editor: Edna Henry Lee Turpin

Release date: September 4, 2005 [eBook #16643]
Most recently updated: April 29, 2022

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16643

Credits: Curtis A. Weyant, Sankar Viswanathan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON ***

ESSAYS

BY

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Merrill's English Texts

SELECTED AND EDITED, WITH INTRODUCTION
AND NOTES, BY EDNA H.L. TURPIN, AUTHOR
OF "STORIES FROM AMERICAN HISTORY,"
"CLASSIC FABLES," "FAMOUS PAINTERS," ETC.

NEW YORK

CHARLES E. MERRILL CO.

1907

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
LIFE OF EMERSON
CRITICAL OPINIONS
CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF PRINCIPAL WORKS

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

COMPENSATION

SELF RELIANCE

FRIENDSHIP

HEROISM

MANNERS

GIFTS

NATURE

SHAKESPEARE; OR, THE POET

PRUDENCE

CIRCLES

NOTES

PUBLISHERS' NOTE

Merrill's English Texts

This series of books will include in complete editions those
masterpieces of English Literature that are best adapted for the use
of schools and colleges. The editors of the several volumes will be
chosen for their special qualifications in connection with the texts
to be issued under their individual supervision, but familiarity with
the practical needs of the classroom, no less than sound scholarship,
will characterize the editing of every book in the series.

In connection with each text, a critical and historical introduction,
including a sketch of the life of the author and his relation to the
thought of his time, critical opinions of the work in question chosen
from the great body of English criticism, and, where possible, a
portrait of the author, will be given. Ample explanatory notes of such
passages in the text as call for special attention will be supplied,
but irrelevant annotation and explanations of the obvious will be
rigidly excluded.

CHARLES E. MERRILL CO.

LIFE OF EMERSON

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, May 25, 1803. He was descended
from a long line of New England ministers, men of refinement and
education. As a school-boy he was quiet and retiring, reading a great
deal, but not paying much attention to his lessons. He entered Harvard
at the early age of fourteen, but never attained a high rank there,
although he took a prize for an essay on Socrates, and was made class
poet after several others had declined. Next to his reserve and the
faultless propriety of his conduct, his contemporaries at college
seemed most impressed by the great maturity of his mind. Emerson
appears never to have been really a boy. He was always serene and
thoughtful, impressing all who knew him with that spirituality which
was his most distinguishing characteristic.

After graduating from college he taught school for a time, and then
entered the Harvard Divinity School under Dr. Channing, the great
Unitarian preacher. Although he was not strong enough to attend all
the lectures of the divinity course, the college authorities deemed
the name Emerson sufficient passport to the ministry. He was
accordingly "approbated to preach" by the Middlesex Association of
Ministers on October 10, 1826. As a preacher, Emerson was interesting,
though not particularly original. His talent seems to have been in
giving new meaning to the old truths of religion. One of his hearers
has said: "In looking back on his preaching I find he has impressed
truths to which I always assented in such a manner as to make them
appear new, like a clearer revelation." Although his sermons were
always couched in scriptural language, they were touched with the
light of that genius which avoids the conventional and commonplace. In
his other pastoral duties Emerson was not quite so successful. It is
characteristic of his deep humanity and his dislike for all fuss and
commonplace that he appeared to least advantage at a funeral. A
connoisseur in such matters, an old sexton, once remarked that on such
occasions "he did not appear at ease at all. To tell the truth, in my
opinion, that young man was not born to be a minister."

Emerson did not long remain a minister. In 1832 he preached a sermon
in which he announced certain views in regard to the communion service
which were disapproved by a large part of his congregation. He found
it impossible to continue preaching, and, with the most friendly
feelings on both sides, he parted from his congregation.

A few months later (1833) he went to Europe for a short year of
travel. While abroad, he visited Walter Savage Landor, Coleridge and
Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle. This visit to Carlyle was to both men
a most interesting experience. They parted feeling that they had much
intellectually in common. This belief fostered a sympathy which, by
the time they had discovered how different they really were, had grown
so strong a habit that they always kept up their intimacy. This year
of travel opened Emerson's eyes to many things of which he had
previously been ignorant; he had profited by detachment from the
concerns of a limited community and an isolated church.

After his return he began to find his true field of activity in the
lecture-hall, and delivered a number of addresses in Boston and its
vicinity. While thus coming before the open public on the lecture
platform, he was all the time preparing the treatise which was to
embody all the quintessential elements of his philosophical doctrine.
This was the essay _Nature_, which was published in 1836. By its
conception of external Nature as an incarnation of the Divine Mind it
struck the fundamental principle of Emerson's religious belief. The
essay had a very small circulation at first, though later it became
widely known.

In the winter of 1836 Emerson followed up his discourse on Nature by a
course of twelve lectures on the "Philosophy of History," a
considerable portion of which eventually became embodied in his
essays. The next year (1837) was the year of the delivery of the _Man
Thinking, or the American Scholar_ address before the Phi Beta Kappa
Society at Cambridge.

This society, composed of the first twenty-five men in each class
graduating from college, has annual meetings which have called forth
the best efforts of many distinguished scholars and thinkers.
Emerson's address was listened to with the most profound interest. It
declared a sort of intellectual independence for America. Henceforth
we were to be emancipated from clogging foreign influences, and a
national literature was to expand under the fostering care of the
Republic.

These two discourses, _Nature_ and _The American Scholar_, strike the
keynote of Emerson's philosophical, poetical, and moral teachings. In
fact he had, as every great teacher has, only a limited number of
principles and theories to teach. These principles of life can all be
enumerated in twenty words--self-reliance, culture, intellectual and
moral independence, the divinity of nature and man, the necessity of
labor, and high ideals.

Emerson spent the latter part of his life in lecturing and in literary
work. His son, Dr. Edward Emerson, gave an interesting account of how
these lectures were constructed. "All through his life he kept a
journal. This book, he said, was his 'Savings Bank.' The thoughts thus
received and garnered in his journals were indexed, and a great many
of them appeared in his published works. They were religiously set
down just as they came, in no order except chronological, but later
they were grouped, enlarged or pruned, illustrated, worked into a
lecture or discourse, and, after having in this capacity undergone
repeated testing and rearranging, were finally carefully sifted and
more rigidly pruned, and were printed as essays."

Besides his essays and lectures Emerson left some poetry in which is
embodied those thoughts which were to him too deep for prose
expression. Oliver Wendell Holmes in speaking of this says: "Emerson
wrote occasionally in verse from his school-days until he had reached
the age which used to be known as the grand climacteric,
sixty-three.... His poems are not and hardly can become popular; they
are not meant to be liked by the many, but to be dearly loved and
cherished by the few.... His occasional lawlessness in technical
construction, his somewhat fantastic expressions, his enigmatic
obscurities hardly detract from the pleasant surprise his verses so
often bring with them.... The poetic license which we allow in the
verse of Emerson is more than excused by the noble spirit which makes
us forget its occasional blemishes, sometimes to be pleased with them
as characteristic of the writer."

Emerson was always a striking figure in the intellectual life of
America. His discourses were above all things inspiring. Through them
many were induced to strive for a higher self-culture. His influence
can be discerned in all the literary movements of the time. He was the
central figure of the so-called transcendental school which was so
prominent fifty years ago, although he always rather held aloof from
any enthusiastic participation in the movement.

Emerson lived a quiet life in Concord, Massachusetts. "He was a
first-rate neighbor and one who always kept his fences up." He
traveled extensively on his lecturing tours, even going as far as
England. In _English Traits_ he has recorded his impressions of what
he saw of English life and manners.

Oliver Wendell Holmes has described him in this wise: "His personal
appearance was that of the typical New Englander of college-bred
ancestry. Tall, spare, slender, with sloping shoulders, slightly
stooping in his later years, with light hair and eyes, the scholar's
complexion, the prominent, somewhat arched nose which belongs to many
of the New England sub-species, thin lips, suggestive of delicacy, but
having nothing like primness, still less of the rigidity which is
often noticeable in the generation succeeding next to that of the men
in their shirt-sleeves, he would have been noticed anywhere as one
evidently a scholarly thinker astray from the alcove or the study,
which were his natural habitats. His voice was very sweet, and
penetrating without any loudness or mark of effort. His enunciation
was beautifully clear, but he often hesitated as if waiting for the
right word to present itself. His manner was very quiet, his smile was
pleasant, but he did not like explosive laughter any better than
Hawthorne did. None who met him can fail to recall that serene and
kindly presence, in which there was mingled a certain spiritual
remoteness with the most benignant human welcome to all who were
privileged to enjoy his companionship."

Emerson died April 27, 1882, after a few days' illness from pneumonia.
Dr. Garnett in his excellent biography says: "Seldom had 'the reaper
whose name is Death' gathered such illustrious harvest as between
December 1880 and April 1882. In the first month of this period George
Eliot passed away, in the ensuing February Carlyle followed; in April
Lord Beaconsfield died, deplored by his party, nor unregretted by his
country; in February of the following year Longfellow was carried to
the tomb; in April Rossetti was laid to rest by the sea, and the
pavement of Westminster Abbey was disturbed to receive the dust of
Darwin. And now Emerson lay down in death beside the painter of man
and the searcher of nature, the English-Oriental statesman, the poet
of the plain man and the poet of the artist, and the prophet whose
name is indissolubly linked with his own. All these men passed into
eternity laden with the spoils of Time, but of none of them could it
be said, as of Emerson, that the most shining intellectual glory and
the most potent intellectual force of a continent had departed along
with him."

CRITICAL OPINIONS OF EMERSON AND HIS WRITINGS.

Matthew Arnold, in an address on Emerson delivered in Boston, gave
an excellent estimate of the rank we should accord to him in the great
hierarchy of letters. Some, perhaps, will think that Arnold was
unappreciative and cold, but dispassionate readers will be inclined to
agree with his judgment of our great American.

After a review of the poetical works of Emerson the English critic
draws his conclusions as follows:

"I do not then place Emerson among the great poets. But I go farther,
and say that I do not place him among the great writers, the great men
of letters. Who are the great men of letters? They are men like
Cicero, Plato, Bacon, Pascal, Swift, Voltaire--writers with, in the
first place, a genius and instinct for style.... Brilliant and
powerful passages in a man's writings do not prove his possession of
it. Emerson has passages of noble and pathetic eloquence; he has
passages of shrewd and felicitous wit; he has crisp epigram; he has
passages of exquisitely touched observation of nature. Yet he is not a
great writer.... Carlyle formulates perfectly the defects of his
friend's poetic and literary productions when he says: 'For me it is
too ethereal, speculative, theoretic; I will have all things condense
themselves, take shape and body, if they are to have my sympathy.' ...

".... Not with the Miltons and Grays, not with the Platos and Spinozas,
not with the Swifts and Voltaires, not with the Montaignes and
Addisons, can we rank Emerson. No man could see this clearer than
Emerson himself. 'Alas, my friend,' he writes in reply to Carlyle, who
had exhorted him to creative work,--'Alas, my friend, I can do no such
gay thing as you say. I do not belong to the poets, but only to a low
department of literature,--the reporters; suburban men.' He deprecated
his friend's praise; praise 'generous to a fault' he calls it; praise
'generous to the shaming of me,--cold, fastidious, ebbing person that
I am.'"

After all this unfavorable criticism Arnold begins to praise. Quoting
passages from the Essays, he adds:

"This is tonic indeed! And let no one object that it is too general;
that more practical, positive direction is what we want.... Yes,
truly, his insight is admirable; his truth is precious. Yet the secret
of his effect is not even in these; it is in his temper. It is in the
hopeful, serene, beautiful temper wherewith these, in Emerson, are
indissolubly united; in which they work and have their being.... One
can scarcely overrate the importance of holding fast to happiness and
hope. It gives to Emerson's work an invaluable virtue. As Wordsworth's
poetry is, in my judgment, the most important done in verse, in our
language, during the present century, so Emerson's Essays are, I
think, the most important work done in prose.... But by his conviction
that in the life of the spirit is happiness, and by his hope that this
life of the spirit will come more and more to be sanely understood,
and to prevail, and to work for happiness,--by this conviction and
hope Emerson was great, and he will surely prove in the end to have
been right in them.... You cannot prize him too much, nor heed him too
diligently."

Herman Grimm, a German critic of great influence in his own country,
did much to obtain a hearing for Emerson's works in Germany. At first
the Germans could not understand the unusual English, the unaccustomed
turns of phrase which are so characteristic of Emerson's style.

"Macaulay gives them no difficulty; even Carlyle is comprehended. But
in Emerson's writings the broad turnpike is suddenly changed into a
hazardous sandy foot-path. His thoughts and his style are American. He
is not writing for Berlin, but for the people of Massachusetts.... It
is an art to rise above what we have been taught.... All great men are
seen to possess this freedom. They derive their standard from their
own natures, and their observations on life are so natural and
spontaneous that it would seem as if the most illiterate person with a
scrap of common-sense would have made the same.... We become wiser
with them, and know not how the difficult appears easy and the
involved plain.

"Emerson possesses this noble manner of communicating himself. He
inspires me with courage and confidence. He has read and seen but
conceals the labor. I meet in his works plenty of familiar facts, but
he does not employ them to figure up anew the old worn-out problems:
each stands on a new spot and serves for new combinations. From
everything he sees the direct line issuing which connects it with the
focus of life....

".... Emerson's theory is that of the 'sovereignty of the individual.'
To discover what a young man is good for, and to equip him for the
path he is to strike out in life, regardless of any other
consideration, is the great duty to which he calls attention. He makes
men self-reliant. He reveals to the eyes of the idealist the
magnificent results of practical activity, and unfolds before the
realist the grandeur of the ideal world of thought. No man is to allow
himself, through prejudice, to make a mistake in choosing the task to
which he will devote his life. Emerson's essays are, as it were,
printed sermons--all having this same text.... The wealth and harmony
of his language overpowered and entranced me anew. But even now I
cannot say wherein the secret of his influence lies. What he has
written is like life itself--the unbroken thread ever lengthened
through the addition of the small events which make up each day's
experience."

Froude in his famous "Life of Carlyle" gives an interesting description
of Emerson's visit to the Carlyles in Scotland:

"The Carlyles were sitting alone at dinner on a Sunday afternoon at
the end of August when a Dumfries carriage drove to the door, and
there stepped out of it a young American then unknown to fame, but
whose influence in his own country equals that of Carlyle in ours, and
whose name stands connected with his wherever the English language is
spoken. Emerson, the younger of the two, had just broken his Unitarian
fetters, and was looking out around him like a young eagle longing for
light. He had read Carlyle's articles and had discerned with the
instinct of genius that here was a voice speaking real and fiery
convictions, and no longer echoes and conventionalisms. He had come to
Europe to study its social and spiritual phenomena; and to the young
Emerson as to the old Goethe, the most important of them appeared to
be Carlyle.... The acquaintance then begun to their mutual pleasure
ripened into a deep friendship, which has remained unclouded in spite
of wide divergences of opinion throughout their working lives."

Carlyle wrote to his mother after Emerson had left:

"Our third happiness was the arrival of a certain young unknown friend
named Emerson, from Boston, in the United States, who turned aside so
far from his British, French, and Italian travels to see me here! He
had an introduction from Mill and a Frenchman (Baron d'Eichthal's
nephew) whom John knew at Rome. Of course, we could do no other than
welcome him; the rather as he seemed to be one of the most lovable
creatures in himself we had ever looked on. He stayed till next day
with us, and talked and heard to his heart's content, and left us all
really sad to part with him."

In 1841 Carlyle wrote to John Sterling a few words apropos of the
recent publication of Emerson's essays in England:

"I love Emerson's book, not for its detached opinions, not even for
the scheme of the general world he has framed for himself, or any
eminence of talent he has expressed that with, but simply because it
is his own book; because there is a tone of veracity, an unmistakable
air of its being _his_, and a real utterance of a human soul, not a
mere echo of such. I consider it, in that sense, highly remarkable,
rare, very rare, in these days of ours. Ach Gott! It is frightful to
live among echoes. The few that read the book, I imagine, will get
benefit of it. To America, I sometimes say that Emerson, such as he
is, seems to me like a kind of New Era."

John Morley, the acute English critic, has made an analytic study of
Emerson's style, which may reconcile the reader to some of its
exasperating peculiarities.

"One of the traits that every critic notes in Emerson's writing is
that it is so abrupt, so sudden in its transitions, so discontinuous,
so inconsecutive. Dislike of a sentence that drags made him
unconscious of the quality that French critics name _coulant_.
Everything is thrown in just as it comes, and sometimes the pell-mell
is enough to persuade us that Pope did not exaggerate when he said
that no one qualification is so likely to make a good writer as the
power of rejecting his own thoughts.... Apart from his difficult
staccato, Emerson is not free from secondary faults. He uses words
that are not only odd, but vicious in construction; he is sometimes
oblique and he is often clumsy; and there is a visible feeling after
epigrams that do not always come. When people say that Emerson's style
must be good and admirable because it fits his thought, they forget
that though it is well that a robe should fit, there is still
something to be said about its cut and fashion.... Yet, as happens to
all fine minds, there came to Emerson ways of expression deeply marked
with character. On every page there is set the strong stamp of
sincerity, and the attraction of a certain artlessness; the most
awkward sentence rings true; and there is often a pure and simple note
that touches us more than if it were the perfection of elaborated
melody. The uncouth procession of the periods discloses the travail of
the thought, and that, too, is a kind of eloquence. An honest reader
easily forgives the rude jolt or unexpected start when it shows a
thinker faithfully working his way along arduous and unworn tracks.
Even at the roughest, Emerson often interjects a delightful cadence.
As he says of Landor, his sentences are cubes which will stand firm,
place them how or where you will. He criticised Swedenborg for being
superfluously explanatory, and having an exaggerated feeling of the
ignorance of men. 'Men take truths of this nature,' said Emerson,
'very fast;' and his own style does no doubt very boldly take this
capacity for granted in us. In 'choice and pith of diction,' again, of
which Mr. Lowell speaks, he hits the mark with a felicity that is
almost his own in this generation. He is terse, concentrated, and free
from the important blunder of mistaking intellectual dawdling for
meditation. Nor in fine does his abruptness ever impede a true
urbanity. The accent is homely and the apparel plain, but his bearing
has a friendliness, a courtesy, a hospitable humanity, which goes
nearer to our hearts than either literary decoration or rhetorical
unction. That modest and lenient fellow-feeling which gave such charm
to his companionship breathes in his gravest writing, and prevents us
from finding any page of it cold or hard or dry."

E.P. Whipple, the well-known American critic, wrote soon after Emerson's
death:

"But 'sweetness and light' are precious and inspiring only so far as
they express the essential sweetness of the disposition of the
thinker, and the essential illuminating power of his intelligence.
Emerson's greatness came from his character. Sweetness and light
streamed from him because they were _in_ him. In everything he
thought, wrote, and did, we feel the presence of a personality as
vigorous and brave as it was sweet, and the particular radical thought
he at any time expressed derived its power to animate and illuminate
other minds from the might of the manhood, which was felt to be within
and behind it. To 'sweetness and light' he therefore added the prime
quality of fearless manliness.

"If the force of Emerson's character was thus inextricably blended
with the force of all his faculties of intellect and imagination, and
the refinement of all his sentiments, we have still to account for the
peculiarities of his genius, and to answer the question, why do we
instinctively apply the epithet 'Emersonian' to every characteristic
passage in his writings? We are told that he was the last in a long
line of clergymen, his ancestors, and that the modern doctrine of
heredity accounts for the impressive emphasis he laid on the moral
sentiment; but that does not solve the puzzle why he unmistakably
differed in his nature and genius from all other Emersons. An
imaginary genealogical chart of descent connecting him with Confucius
or Gautama would be more satisfactory.

"What distinguishes _the_ Emerson was his exceptional genius and
character, that something in him which separated him from all other
Emersons, as it separated him from all other eminent men of letters,
and impressed every intelligent reader with the feeling that he was
not only 'original but aboriginal.' Some traits of his mind and
character may be traced back to his ancestors, but what doctrine of
heredity can give us the genesis of his genius? Indeed, the safest
course to pursue is to quote his own words, and despairingly confess
that it is the nature of genius 'to spring, like the rainbow daughter
of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past, and refuse all
history.'"

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF EMERSON'S PRINCIPAL WORKS.

Nature 1836
Essays (First Series) 1841
Essays (Second Series) 1844
Poems 1847
Miscellanies 1849
Representative Men 1850
English Traits 1856
Conduct of Life 1860
Society and Solitude 1870
Correspondence of Thomas
Carlyle and R.W. Emerson 1883

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR.

This address was delivered at Cambridge in 1837, before the
Harvard Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, a college
fraternity composed of the first twenty-five men in each
graduating class. The society has annual meetings, which
have been the occasion for addresses from the most
distinguished scholars and thinkers of the day.

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN,

I greet you on the recommencement of our literary year. Our
anniversary is one of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of labor. We do
not meet for games of strength[1] or skill, for the recitation of
histories, tragedies, and odes, like the ancient Greeks; for
parliaments of love and poesy, like the Troubadours;[2] nor for the
advancement of science, like our co-temporaries in the British and
European capitals. Thus far, our holiday has been simply a friendly
sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy
to give to letters any more. As such it is precious as the sign of an
indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come when it
ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect
of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the
postponed expectation of the world with something better than the
exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long
apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The
millions that around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed on
the sere remains of foreign harvests.[3] Events, actions arise that
must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt that poetry
will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation
Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one
day be the pole-star[4] for a thousand years?

In the light of this hope I accept the topic which not only usage but
the nature of our association seem to prescribe to this day,--the
AMERICAN SCHOLAR. Year by year we come up hither to read one
more chapter of his biography. Let us inquire what new lights, new
events, and more days have thrown on his character, his duties, and
his hopes.

It is one of those fables which out of an unknown antiquity convey an
unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into
men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just as the hand was
divided into fingers, the better to answer its end.[5]

The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is
One Man,--present to all particular men only partially, or through one
faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole
man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is
all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and
soldier. In the _divided_ or social state these functions are parceled
out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint[6] of the joint
work, whilst each other performs his. The fable implies that the
individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own
labor to embrace all the other laborers. But, unfortunately, this
original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to
multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it
is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is
one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk and
strut about so many walking monsters,--a good finger, a neck, a
stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The planter,
who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom cheered
by any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He sees his bushel
and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead
of Man on the farm. The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth
to his work, but is ridden[7] by the routine of his craft, and the
soul is subject to dollars. The priest becomes a form; the attorney a
statute-book; the mechanic a machine; the sailor a rope of the ship.

In this distribution of functions the scholar is the delegated
intellect. In the right state he is _Man Thinking_. In the degenerate
state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker,
or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.

In this view of him, as Man Thinking, the whole theory of his office
is contained. Him Nature solicits with all her placid, all her
monitory pictures.[8] Him the past instructs. Him the future invites.
Is not indeed every man a student, and do not all things exist for the
student's behoof? And, finally, is not the true scholar the only true
master? But as the old oracle said, "All things have two handles:
Beware of the wrong one."[9] In life, too often, the scholar errs with
mankind and forfeits his privilege. Let us see him in his school, and
consider him in reference to the main influences he receives.

* * * * *

I. The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon
the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun;[10] and, after sunset,
Night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. Every
day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden.[11] The scholar
must needs stand wistful and admiring before this great spectacle. He
must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to him? There is never
a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of
this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself.[12]
Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he
never can find,--so entire, so boundless. Far too as her splendors
shine, system on system shooting like rays, upward, downward, without
center, without circumference,--in the mass and in the particle, Nature
hastens to render account of herself to the mind. Classification begins.
To the young mind everything is individual, stands by itself. By and by
it finds how to join two things and see in them one nature; then three,
then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying
instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies,
discovering roots running under ground whereby contrary and remote
things cohere and flower out from one stem. It presently learns that
since the dawn of history there has been a constant accumulation and
classifying of facts. But what is classification but the perceiving that
these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which
is also a law of the human mind? The astronomer discovers that geometry,
a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of planetary
motion. The chemist finds proportions and intelligible method throughout
matter; and science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in
the most remote parts. The ambitious soul sits down before each
refractory fact; one after another reduces all strange constitutions,
all new powers, to their class and their law, and goes on forever to
animate the last fiber of organization, the outskirts of nature, by
insight.

Thus to him, to this school-boy under the bending dome of day, is
suggested that he and it proceed from one Root; one is leaf and one is
flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. And what is that
root? Is not that the soul of his soul?--A thought too bold?--A dream
too wild? Yet when this spiritual light shall have revealed the law of
more earthly natures,--when he has learned to worship the soul, and to
see that the natural philosophy that now is, is only the first
gropings of its gigantic hand,--he shall look forward to an
ever-expanding knowledge as to a becoming creator.[13] He shall see
that nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for
part. One is seal and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his
own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind. Nature then becomes
to him the measure of his attainments. So much of nature as he is
ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess. And, in
fine, the ancient precept, "Know thyself,"[14] and the modern precept,
"Study nature," become at last one maxim.

* * * * *

II. The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar is the
mind of the Past,--in whatever form, whether of literature, of art, of
institutions, that mind is inscribed. Books are the best type of the
influence of the past, and perhaps we shall get at the truth,--learn
the amount of this influence more conveniently,--by considering their
value alone.

The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received
into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new
arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into him
life; it went out from him truth. It came to him short-lived actions;
it went out from him immortal thoughts. It came to him business; it
went from him poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is quick thought. It
can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now
inspires.[15] Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which
it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing.

Or, I might say, it depends on how far the process had gone, of
transmuting life into truth. In proportion to the completeness of the
distillation, so will the purity and imperishableness of the product
be. But none is quite perfect. As no air-pump can by any means make a
perfect vacuum,[16] so neither can any artist entirely exclude the
conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book
of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a
remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age.
Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each
generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will
not fit this.

Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which attaches to
the act of creation, the act of thought, is instantly transferred to
the record. The poet chanting was felt to be a divine man. Henceforth
the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and wise spirit.
Henceforward it is settled the book is perfect; as love of the hero
corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly the book becomes
noxious.[17] The guide is a tyrant. We sought a brother, and lo, a
governor. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, always
slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened,
having once received this book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry if
it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by
thinkers, not by Man Thinking, by men of talent, that is, who start
wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of
principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their
duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke,[18] which
Bacon,[19] have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were
only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.

Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence the
book-learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature
and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate[20]
with the world and soul. Hence the restorers of readings,[21] the
emendators,[22] the bibliomaniacs[23] of all degrees. This is bad;
this is worse than it seems.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What
is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect?
They are for nothing but to inspire.[24] I had better never see a book
than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and
made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world of
value is the active soul,--the soul, free, sovereign, active. This
every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although
in almost all men obstructed, and as yet unborn. The soul active sees
absolute truth and utters truth, or creates. In this action it is
genius; not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound
estate of every man.[25] In its essence it is progressive. The book,
the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with
some past utterance of genius. This is good, say they,--let us hold by
this. They pin me down.[26] They look backward and not forward. But
genius always looks forward. The eyes of man are set in his forehead,
not in his hindhead. Man hopes. Genius creates. To create,--to
create,--is the proof of a divine presence. Whatever talents may be,
if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not
his;[27]--cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame. There are
creative manners, there are creative actions, and creative words;
manners, actions, words, that is, indicative of no custom or
authority, but springing spontaneous from the mind's own sense of good
and fair.

On the other part, instead of being its own seer, let it receive
always from another mind its truth, though it were in torrents of
light, without periods of solitude, inquest, and self-recovery; and a
fatal disservice[28] is done. Genius is always sufficiently the enemy
of genius by over-influence.[29] The literature of every nation bear
me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakespearized now for two
hundred years.[30]

Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly
subordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments.
Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly,
the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of
their readings.[31] But when the intervals of darkness come, as come
they must,--when the soul seeth not, when the sun is hid and the stars
withdraw their shining,--we repair to the lamps which were kindled by
their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn
is.[32] We hear, that we may speak. The Arabian proverb says, "A
fig-tree, looking on a fig-tree, becometh fruitful."

It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the
best books. They impress us ever with the conviction that one nature
wrote and the same reads. We read the verses of one of the great
English poets, of Chaucer,[33] of Marvell,[34] of Dryden,[35] with the
most modern joy,--with a pleasure, I mean, which is in great part
caused by the abstraction of all _time_ from their verses. There is
some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived
in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which
lies close to my own soul, that which I also had well-nigh thought and
said. But for the evidence thence afforded to the philosophical
doctrine of the identity of all minds, we should suppose some
pre-established harmony, some foresight of souls that were to be, and
some preparation of stores for their future wants, like the fact
observed in insects, who lay up food before death for the young grub
they shall never see.

I would not be hurried by any love of system, by any exaggeration of
instincts, to underrate the Book. We all know that as the human body
can be nourished on any food, though it were boiled grass and the
broth of shoes, so the human mind can be fed by any knowledge. And
great and heroic men have existed who had almost no other information
than by the printed page. I only would say that it needs a strong head
to bear that diet. One must be an inventor to read well. As the
proverb says, "He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies must
carry out the wealth of the Indies." There is then creative reading as
well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and
invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with
manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense
of our author is as broad as the world. We then see, what is always
true, that as the seer's hour of vision is short and rare among heavy
days and months, so is its record, perchance, the least part of his
volume. The discerning will read, in his Plato[36] or Shakespeare,
only that least part,--only the authentic utterances of the
oracle;--all the rest he rejects, were it never so many times Plato's
and Shakespeare's.

Of course there is a portion of reading quite indispensable to a wise
man. History and exact science he must learn by laborious reading.
Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office,--to teach
elements. But they can only highly serve us when they aim not to
drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various
genius to their hospitable halls, and by the concentrated fires set
the hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge are natures
in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns[37] and
pecuniary foundations,[38] though of towns of gold, can never
countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit.[39] Forget this,
and our American colleges will recede in their public importance,
whilst they grow richer every year.

* * * * *

III. There goes in the world a notion that the scholar should be a
recluse, a valetudinarian,[40]--as unfit for any handiwork or public
labor as a penknife for an axe. The so-called "practical men" sneer at
speculative men, as if, because they speculate or _see_, they could do
nothing. I have heard it said that the clergy--who are always, more
universally than any other class, the scholars of their day--are
addressed as women; that the rough, spontaneous conversation of men
they do not hear, but only a mincing[41] and diluted speech. They are
often virtually disfranchised; and indeed there are advocates for
their celibacy. As far as this is true of the studious classes, it is
not just and wise. Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is
essential. Without it he is not yet man. Without it thought can never
ripen into truth. Whilst the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of
beauty, we cannot even see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, but
there can be no scholar without the heroic mind. The preamble[42] of
thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious
to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived.
Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not.

The world--this shadow of the soul, or _other me_, lies wide around.
Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me
acquainted with myself. I launch eagerly into this resounding tumult.
I grasp the hands of those next me, and take my place in the ring to
suffer and to work, taught by an instinct that so shall the dumb
abyss[43] be vocal with speech. I pierce its order; I dissipate its
fear;[44] I dispose of it within the circuit of my expanding life. So
much only of life as I know by experience, so much of the wilderness
have I vanquished and planted, or so far have I extended my being, my
dominion. I do not see how any man can afford, for the sake of his
nerves and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake. It is
pearls and rubies to his discourse. Drudgery, calamity, exasperation,
want, are instructors in eloquence and wisdom. The true scholar
grudges every opportunity of action passed by, as a loss of power.

It is the raw material out of which the intellect molds her splendid
products. A strange process too, this by which experience is converted
into thought, as a mulberry-leaf is converted into satin.[45] The
manufacture goes forward at all hours.

The actions and events of our childhood and youth are now matters of
calmest observation. They lie like fair pictures in the air. Not so
with our recent actions,--with the business which we now have in hand.
On this we are quite unable to speculate. Our affections as yet
circulate through it. We no more feel or know it than we feel the
feet, or the hand, or the brain of our body. The new deed is yet a
part of life,--remains for a time immersed in our unconscious life. In
some contemplative hour it detaches itself from the life like a ripe
fruit,[46] to become a thought of the mind. Instantly it is raised,
transfigured; the corruptible has put on incorruption.[47] Henceforth
it is an object of beauty, however base its origin and neighborhood.
Observe, too, the impossibility of antedating this act. In its grub
state it cannot fly, it cannot shine, it is a dull grub. But suddenly,
without observation, the selfsame thing unfurls beautiful wings, and
is an angel of wisdom. So is there no fact, no event, in our private
history, which shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert
form, and astonish us by soaring from our body into the empyrean.[48]
Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and dogs,
and ferules,[49] the love of little maids and berries, and many
another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already; friend
and relative, profession and party, town and country, nation and
world, must also soar and sing.[50]

Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit actions has
the richest return of wisdom. I will not shut myself out of this globe
of action, and transplant an oak into a flower-pot, there to hunger
and pine; nor trust the revenue of some single faculty, and exhaust
one vein of thought, much like those Savoyards,[51] who, getting their
livelihood by carving shepherds, shepherdesses, and smoking Dutchmen,
for all Europe, went out one day to the mountain to find stock, and
discovered that they had whittled up the last of their pine-trees.
Authors we have, in numbers, who have written out their vein, and who,
moved by a commendable prudence, sail for Greece or Palestine, follow
the trapper into the prairie, or ramble round Algiers, to replenish
their merchantable stock.

If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous of
action. Life is our dictionary.[52] Years are well spent in country
labors; in town; in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank
intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art; to the one
end of mastering in all their facts a language by which to illustrate
and embody our perceptions. I learn immediately from any speaker how
much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his
speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and
copestones for the masonry of to-day. This is the way to learn
grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and
the work-yard made.

But the final value of action, like that of books, and better than
books, is that it is a resource. That great principle of Undulation in
nature, that shows itself in the inspiring and expiring of the breath;
in desire and satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea; in day and night;
in heat and cold; and, as yet more deeply ingrained in every atom and
every fluid, is known to us under the name of Polarity,--these "fits of
easy transmission and reflection," as Newton[53] called them, are the
law of nature because they are the law of spirit.

The mind now thinks, now acts, and each fit reproduces the other. When
the artist has exhausted his materials, when the fancy no longer
paints, when thoughts are no longer apprehended and books are a
weariness,--he has always the resource _to live_. Character is higher
than intellect. Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary.
The stream retreats to its source. A great soul will be strong to
live, as well as strong to think. Does he lack organ or medium to
impart his truth? He can still fall back on this elemental force of
living them. This is a total act. Thinking is a partial act. Let the
grandeur of justice shine in his affairs. Let the beauty of affection
cheer his lowly roof. Those "far from fame," who dwell and act with
him, will feel the force of his constitution in the doings and
passages of the day better than it can be measured by any public and
designed display. Time shall teach him that the scholar loses no hour
which the man lives. Herein he unfolds the sacred germ of his
instinct, screened from influence. What is lost in seemliness is
gained in strength. Not out of those on whom systems of education have
exhausted their culture comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or
to build the new, but out of unhandselled[54] savage nature; out of
terrible Druids[55] and Berserkers[56] come at last Alfred[57] and
Shakespeare. I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be
said of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is
virtue yet in the hoe and the spade,[58] for learned as well as for
unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; always we are
invited to work; only be this limitation observed, that a man shall
not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the
popular judgments and modes of action.

* * * * *

I have now spoken of the education of the scholar by nature, by books,
and by action. It remains to say somewhat of his duties.

They are such as become Man Thinking. They may all be comprised in
self-trust. The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to
guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He plies the slow,
unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. Flamsteed[59] and
Herschel,[60] in their glazed observatories, may catalogue the stars
with the praise of all men, and, the results being splendid and
useful, honor is sure. But he, in his private observatory, cataloguing
obscure and nebulous[61] stars of the human mind, which as yet no man
has thought of as such,--watching days and months sometimes for a few
facts; correcting still his old records,--must relinquish display and
immediate fame. In the long period of his preparation he must betray
often an ignorance and shiftlessness in popular arts, incurring the
disdain of the able who shoulder him aside. Long he must stammer in
his speech; often forego the living for the dead. Worse yet, he must
accept--how often!--poverty and solitude. For the ease and pleasure of
treading the old road, accepting the fashions, the education, the
religion of society, he takes the cross of making his own, and, of
course, the self-accusation, the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty
and loss of time, which are the nettles and tangling vines in the way
of the self-relying and self-directed; and the state of virtual
hostility in which he seems to stand to society, and especially to
educated society. For all this loss and scorn, what offset? He is to
find consolation in exercising the highest functions of human nature.
He is one who raises himself from private considerations and breathes
and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the world's eye.
He is the world's heart. He is to resist the vulgar prosperity that
retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and communicating heroic
sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and the conclusions of
history. Whatsoever oracles the human heart, in all emergencies, in
all solemn hours, has uttered as its commentary on the world of
actions,--these he shall receive and impart. And whatsoever new
verdict Reason from her inviolable seat pronounces on the passing men
and events of to-day,--this he shall hear and promulgate.

These being his functions, it becomes him to feel all confidence in
himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He and he only knows
the world. The world of any moment is the merest appearance. Some
great decorum, some fetich[62] of a government, some ephemeral trade,
or war, or man, is cried up[63] by half mankind and cried down by the
other half, as if all depended on this particular up or down. The odds
are that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought which the
scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his
belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable[64]
of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom. In silence, in
steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add
observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach,
and bide his own time,--happy enough if he can satisfy himself alone
that this day he has seen something truly. Success treads on every
right step. For the instinct is sure that prompts him to tell his
brother what he thinks. He then learns that in going down into the
secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all
minds. He learns that he who has mastered any law in his private
thoughts is master to that extent of all men whose language he speaks,
and of all into whose language his own can be translated. The poet, in
utter solitude remembering his spontaneous thoughts and recording
them, is found to have recorded that which men in cities vast find
true for them also. The orator distrusts at first the fitness of his
frank confessions, his want of knowledge of the persons he addresses,
until he finds that he is the complement[65] of his hearers;--that
they drink his words because he fulfills for them their own nature;
the deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to his
wonder he finds this is the most acceptable, most public and
universally true. The people delight in it; the better part of every
man feels--This is my music; this is myself.

In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended. Free should the
scholar be,--free and brave. Free even to the definition of freedom,
"without any hindrance that does not arise out of his own
constitution." Brave; for fear is a thing which a scholar by his very
function puts behind him. Fear always springs from ignorance. It is a
shame to him if his tranquility, amid dangerous times, arise from the
presumption that like children and women his is a protected class; or
if he seek a temporary peace by the diversion of his thoughts from
politics or vexed questions, hiding his head like an ostrich in the
flowering bushes, peeping into microscopes, and turning rhymes, as a
boy whistles to keep his courage up. So is the danger a danger still;
so is the fear worse. Manlike let him turn and face it. Let him look
into its eye and search its nature, inspect its origin,--see the
whelping of this lion,--which lies no great way back; he will then
find in himself a perfect comprehension of its nature and extent; he
will have made his hands meet on the other side, and can henceforth
defy it and pass on superior. The world is his who can see through its
pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown
error you behold is there only by sufferance,--by your sufferance. See
it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.

Yes, we are the cowed,--we the trustless. It is a mischievous notion
that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long
time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so
it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To
ignorance and sin it is flint. They adapt themselves to it as they
may; but in proportion as a man has any thing in him divine, the
firmament flows before him and takes his signet[66] and form. Not he
is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind.
They are the kings of the world who give the color of their present
thought to all nature and all art, and persuade men, by the cheerful
serenity of their carrying the matter, that this thing which they do
is the apple which the ages have desired to pluck, now at last ripe,
and inviting nations to the harvest. The great man makes the great
thing. Wherever Macdonald[67] sits, there is the head of the table.
Linnæus[68] makes botany the most alluring of studies, and wins it
from the farmer and the herb-woman: Davy,[69] chemistry; and
Cuvier,[70] fossils. The day is always his who works in it with
serenity and great aims. The unstable estimates of men crowd to him
whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic
follow the moon.[71]

For this self-trust, the reason is deeper than can be fathomed,--darker
than can be enlightened. I might not carry with me the feeling of my
audience in stating my own belief. But I have already shown the ground
of my hope, in adverting to the doctrine that man is one. I believe man
has been wronged; he has wronged himself. He has almost lost the light
that can lead him back to his prerogatives. Men are become of no
account. Men in history, men in the world of to-day, are bugs, are
spawn, and are called "the mass" and "the herd." In a century, in a
millennium, one or two men;[72] that is to say, one or two
approximations to the right state of every man. All the rest behold in
the hero or the poet their own green and crude being,--ripened; yes, and
are content to be less, so _that_ may attain to its full stature. What a
testimony, full of grandeur, full of pity, is borne to the demands of
his own nature, by the poor clansman, the poor partisan, who rejoices in
the glory of his chief! The poor and the low find some amends to their
immense moral capacity, for their acquiescence in a political and social
inferiority.[73] They are content to be brushed like flies from the path
of a great person, so that justice shall be done by him to that common
nature which it is the dearest desire of all to see enlarged and
glorified. They sun themselves in the great man's light, and feel it to
be their own element. They cast the dignity of man from their downtrod
selves upon the shoulders of a hero, and will perish to add one drop of
blood to make that great heart beat, those giant sinews combat and
conquer. He lives for us, and we live in him.

Men such as they[74] are very naturally seek money or power; and power
because it is as good as money,--the "spoils," so called, "of office."
And why not? For they aspire to the highest, and this, in their
sleep-walking, they dream is highest. Wake them and they shall quit
the false good and leap to the true, and leave governments to clerks
and desks. This revolution is to be wrought by the gradual
domestication of the idea of Culture. The main enterprise of the world
for splendor, for extent, is the upbuilding of a man. Here are the
materials strewn along the ground. The private life of one man shall
be a more illustrious monarchy, more formidable to its enemy, more
sweet and serene in its influence to its friend, than any kingdom in
history. For a man, rightly viewed, comprehendeth[75] the particular
natures of all men. Each philosopher, each bard, each actor has only
done for me, as by a delegate, what one day I can do for myself. The
books which once we valued more than the apple of the eye, we have
quite exhausted. What is that but saying that we have come up with the
point of view which the universal mind took through the eyes of one
scribe; we have been that man, and have passed on. First, one, then
another, we drain all cisterns, and waxing greater by all these
supplies, we crave a better and a more abundant food. The man has
never lived that can feed us ever. The human mind cannot be enshrined
in a person who shall set a barrier on any one side to this unbounded,
unboundable empire. It is one central fire, which, flaming now out of
the lips of Etna, lightens the capes of Sicily, and now out of the
throat of Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and vineyards of Naples. It
is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which
animates all men.

* * * * *

But I have dwelt perhaps tediously upon this abstraction of the
Scholar. I ought not to delay longer to add what I have to say of
nearer reference to the time and to this country.

Historically, there is thought to be a difference in the ideas which
predominate over successive epochs, and there are data for marking the
genius of the Classic, of the Romantic, and now of the Reflective or
Philosophical age.[76] With the views I have intimated of the oneness
or the identity of the mind through all individuals, I do not much
dwell on these differences. In fact, I believe each individual passes
through all three. The boy is a Greek; the youth, romantic; the
adult, reflective. I deny not, however, that a revolution in the
leading idea may be distinctly enough traced.

Our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion.[77] Must that needs be
evil? We, it seems, are critical. We are embarrassed with second
thoughts.[78] We cannot enjoy anything for hankering to know whereof
the pleasure consists. We are lined with eyes. We see with our feet.
The time is infected with Hamlet's unhappiness,--

"Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."[79]

Is it so bad then? Sight is the last thing to be pitied. Would we be
blind? Do we fear lest we should outsee nature and God, and drink
truth dry? I look upon the discontent of the literary class as a mere
announcement of the fact that they find themselves not in the state of
mind of their fathers, and regret the coming state as untried; as a
boy dreads the water before he has learned that he can swim. If there
is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of
Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side and admit of
being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and
by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by
the rich possibilities of the new era? This time, like all times, is a
very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

I read with some joy of the auspicious signs of the coming days, as
they glimmer already through poetry and art, through philosophy and
science, through church and state.

One of these signs is the fact that the same movement[80] which
effected the elevation of what was called the lowest class in the
state assumed in literature a very marked and as benign an aspect.
Instead of the sublime and beautiful, the near, the low, the common,
was explored and poetized. That which had been negligently trodden
under foot by those who were harnessing and provisioning themselves
for long journeys into far countries, is suddenly found to be richer
than all foreign parts. The literature of the poor, the feelings of
the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household
life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a
sign--is it not?--of new vigor when the extremities are made active,
when currents of warm life run into the hands and the feet. I ask not
for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or
Arabia; what is Greek art, or Provençal minstrelsy; I embrace the
common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give
me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future
worlds. What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the
firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the
boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body;--show
me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence
of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in
these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle
bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal
law;[81] and the shop, the plow, and the ledger referred to the like
cause by which light undulates and poets sing;--and the world lies no
longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order:
there is no trifle, there is no puzzle, but one design unites and
animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.

This idea has inspired the genius of Goldsmith,[82] Burns,[83]
Cowper,[84] and, in a newer time, of Goethe,[85] Wordsworth,[86] and
Carlyle.[87] This idea they have differently followed and with various
success. In contrast with their writing, the style of Pope,[88] of
Johnson,[89] of Gibbon,[90] looks cold and pedantic. This writing is
blood-warm. Man is surprised to find that things near are not less
beautiful and wondrous than things remote. The near explains the far.
The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature. This
perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries.
Goethe, in this very thing the most modern of the moderns, has shown
us, as none ever did, the genius of the ancients.

There is one man of genius who has done much for this philosophy of
life, whose literary value has never yet been rightly estimated:--I
mean Emanuel Swedenborg.[91] The most imaginative of men, yet writing
with the precision of a mathematician, he endeavored to engraft a
purely philosophical Ethics on the popular Christianity of his time.
Such an attempt of course must have difficulty which no genius could
surmount. But he saw and showed the connexion between nature and the
affections of the soul. He pierced the emblematic or spiritual
character of the visible, audible, tangible world. Especially did his
shade-loving muse hover over and interpret the lower parts of nature;
he showed the mysterious bond that allies moral evil to the foul
material forms, and has given in epical parables a theory of insanity,
of beasts, of unclean and fearful things.

Another sign of our times, also marked by an analogous political
movement, is the new importance given to the single person. Everything
that tends to insulate the individual--to surround him with barriers
of natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world is his, and
man shall treat with man as a sovereign state with a sovereign
state--tends to true union as well as greatness. "I learned," said the
melancholy Pestalozzi,[92] "that no man in God's wide earth is either
willing or able to help any other man." Help must come from the bosom
alone. The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the
ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes
of the future. He must be an university of knowledges. If there be one
lesson more than another that should pierce his ear, it is--The world
is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and
you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers
the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all; it is for you to dare
all. Mr. President and Gentlemen, this confidence in the unsearched
might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all
preparation, to the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the
courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already
suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice
make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent,
indolent, complaisant. See already the tragic consequence. The mind of
this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is
no work for any one but the decorous and the complaisant. Young men of
the fairest promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the
mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of God, find the earth
below not in unison with these, but are hindered from action by the
disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire, and
turn drudges, or die of disgust, some of them suicides. What is the
remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hopeful
now crowding to the barriers for the career do not yet see, that if
the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there
abide, the huge world will come round to him. Patience,--patience;
with the shades of all the good and great for company; and for solace
the perspective of your own infinite life; and for work the study and
the communication of principles, the making those instincts prevalent,
the conversion of the world. Is it not the chief disgrace in the
world, not to be an unit; not to be reckoned one character; not to
yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to
be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the
party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted
geographically, as the north, or the south? Not so, brothers and
friends,--please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our own
feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.
Then shall man be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, and for
sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man shall be a
wall of defense and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of men will
for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by
the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.

COMPENSATION.[93]

The wings of Time are black and white,
Pied with morning and with night.
Mountain tall and ocean deep
Trembling balance duly keep.
In changing moon, in tidal wave,
Glows the feud of Want and Have.
Gauge of more and less through space
Electric star and pencil plays.
The lonely Earth amid the balls
That hurry through the eternal halls,
A makeweight flying to the void,
Supplemental asteroid,
Or compensatory spark,
Shoots across the neutral Dark.

Man's the elm, and Wealth the vine,
Stanch and strong the tendrils twine;
Through the frail ringlets thee deceive,
None from its stock that vine can reave.
Fear not, then, thou child infirm,
There's no god dare wrong a worm.
Laurel crowns cleave to deserts,
And power to him who power exerts;
Hast not thy share? On winged feet,
Lo! it rushes thee to meet;
And all that Nature made thy own,
Floating in air or pent in stone,
Will rive the hills and swim the sea,
And, like thy shadow, follow thee.

Ever since I was a boy, I have wished to write a discourse on
Compensation: for it seemed to me when very young, that on this
subject life was ahead of theology, and the people knew more than the
preachers taught. The documents,[94] too, from which the doctrine is
to be drawn, charmed my fancy by their endless variety, and lay always
before me, even in sleep; for they are the tools in our hands, the
bread in our basket, the transactions of the street, the farm, and the
dwelling-house, greetings, relations, debts and credits, the influence
of character, the nature and endowment of all men. It seemed to me,
also, that in it might be shown men a ray of divinity, the present
action of the soul of this world, clean from all vestige of tradition,
and so the heart of man might be bathed by an inundation of eternal
love, conversing with that which he knows was always and always must
be, because it really is now. It appeared, moreover, that if this
doctrine could be stated in terms with any resemblance to those bright
intuitions in which this truth is sometimes revealed to us, it would
be a star in many dark hours and crooked passages in our journey that
would not suffer us to lose our way.

I was lately confirmed in these desires by hearing a sermon at church.
The preacher, a man esteemed for his orthodoxy, unfolded in the
ordinary manner the doctrine of the Last Judgment. He assumed that
judgment is not executed in this world; that the wicked are
successful; that the good are miserable;[95] and then urged from
reason and from Scripture a compensation to be made to both parties in
the next life. No offense appeared to be taken by the congregation at
this doctrine. As far as I could observe, when the meeting broke up,
they separated without remark on the sermon.

Yet what was the import of this teaching? What did the preacher mean
by saying that the good are miserable in the present life? Was it that
houses and lands, offices, wine, horses, dress, luxury, are had by
unprincipled men, whilst the saints are poor and despised; and that a
compensation is to be made to these last hereafter, by giving them the
like gratifications another day,--bank stock and doubloons,[96]
venison and champagne? This must be the compensation intended; for
what else? Is it that they are to have leave to pray and praise? to
love and serve men? Why, that they can do now. The legitimate
inference the disciple would draw was: "We are to have _such_ a good
time as the sinners have now"; or, to push it to its extreme import:
"You sin now; we shall sin by and by; we would sin now, if we could;
not being successful, we expect our revenue to-morrow."

The fallacy lay in the immense concession that the bad are successful;
that justice is not done now. The blindness of the preacher consisted
in deferring to the base estimate of the market of what constitutes a
manly success, instead of confronting and convicting the world from
the truth; announcing the presence of the soul; the omnipotence of the
will: and so establishing the standard of good and ill, of success and
falsehood.

I find a similar base tone in the popular religious works of the day,
and the same doctrines assumed by the literary men when occasionally
they treat the related topics. I think that our popular theology has
gained in decorum, and not in principle, over the superstitions it has
displaced. But men are better than this theology. Their daily life
gives it the lie. Every ingenuous and aspiring soul leaves the
doctrine behind him in his own experience; and all men feel sometimes
the falsehood which they cannot demonstrate. For men are wiser than
they know. That which they hear in schools and pulpits without
afterthought, if said in conversation, would probably be questioned in
silence. If a man dogmatize in a mixed company on Providence and the
divine laws, he is answered by a silence which conveys well enough to
an observer the dissatisfaction of the hearer, but his incapacity to
make his own statement.

I shall attempt in this and the following chapter to record some facts
that indicate the path of the law of Compensation; happy beyond my
expectation, if I shall truly draw the smallest arc of this circle.

POLARITY,[97] or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature;
in darkness and light; in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow of waters;
in male and female; in the inspiration and expiration of plants and
animals; in the equation of quantity and quality in the fluids of the
animal body; in the systole and diastole[98] of the heart; in the
undulations of fluids, and of sound; in the centrifugal and centripetal
gravity; in electricity, galvanism, and chemical affinity. Superinduce
magnetism at one end of a needle; the opposite magnetism takes place at
the other end. If the south attracts, the north repels. To empty here,
you must condense there. An inevitable dualism bisects nature, so that
each thing is a half, and suggests another thing to make it whole; as,
spirit, matter; man, woman; odd, even; subjective, objective; in, out;
upper, under; motion, rest; yea, nay.

Whilst the world is thus dual, so is every one of its parts. The
entire system of things gets represented in every particle. There is
somewhat that resembles the ebb and flow of the sea, day and night,
man and woman, in a single needle of the pine, in a kernel of corn, in
each individual of every animal tribe. The reaction, so grand in the
elements, is repeated within these small boundaries. For example, in
the animal kingdom the physiologist has observed that no creatures
are favorites, but a certain compensation balances every gift and
every defect. A surplusage given to one part is paid out of a
reduction from another part of the same creature. If the head and neck
are enlarged, the trunk and extremities are cut short.

The theory of the mechanic forces is another example. What we gain in
power is lost in time; and the converse. The periodic or compensating
errors of the planets is another instance. The influences of climate
and soil in political history is another. The cold climate
invigorates. The barren soil does not breed fevers, crocodiles,
tigers, or scorpions.

The same dualism underlies the nature and condition of man. Every
excess causes a defect; every defect an excess. Every sweet hath its
sour; every evil its good. Every faculty which is a receiver of
pleasure has an equal penalty put on its abuse. It is to answer for
its moderation with its life. For every grain of wit there is a grain
of folly. For everything you have missed, you have gained something
else; and for everything you gain, you lose something. If riches
increase, they are increased[99] that use them. If the gatherer
gathers too much, nature takes out of the man what she puts into his
chest, swells the estate, but kills the owner. Nature hates monopolies
and exceptions. The waves of the sea do not more speedily seek a level
from their loftiest tossing, than the varieties of condition tend to
equalize themselves. There is always some leveling circumstance that
puts down the overbearing, the strong, the rich, the fortunate,
substantially on the same ground with all others. Is a man too strong
and fierce for society, and by temper and position a bad citizen,--a
morose ruffian, with a dash of the pirate in him;--nature sends him a
troop of pretty sons and daughters, who are getting along in the
dame's classes at the village school, and love and fear for them
smooths his grim scowl to courtesy. Thus she contrives to
intenerate[100] the granite and felspar, takes the boar out and puts
the lamb in, and keeps her balance true.

The farmer imagines power and place are fine things. But the President
has paid dear for his White House.[101] It has commonly cost him all
his peace, and the best of his many attributes. To preserve for a
short time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is
content to eat dust[102] before the real masters who stand erect
behind the throne. Or, do men desire the more substantial and
permanent grandeur of genius? Neither has this an immunity. He who by
force of will or of thought, is great, and overlooks[103] thousands,
has the charges of that eminence. With every influx of light comes new
danger. Has he light? he must bear witness to the light, and always
outrun that sympathy which gives him such keen satisfaction, by his
fidelity to new revelations of the incessant soul. He must hate father
and mother, wife and child. Has he all that the world loves and
admires and covets?--he must cast behind him their admiration, and
afflict them by faithfulness to his truth, and become a by-word and a
hissing.

This law writes the laws of cities and nations. It is in vain to build
or plot or combine against it. Things refuse to be mismanaged long.
_Res nolunt diu male administrari._[104] Though no checks to a new
evil appear, the checks exist, and will appear. If the government is
cruel, the governor's life is not safe. If you tax too high, the
revenue will yield nothing. If you make the criminal code sanguinary,
juries will not convict. If the law is too mild, private vengeance
comes in. If the government is a terrific democracy, the pressure is
resisted by an overcharge of energy in the citizen, and life glows
with a fiercer flame. The true life and satisfactions of man seem to
elude the utmost rigors or felicities of condition, and to establish
themselves with great indifferency under all varieties of
circumstances. Under all governments the influence of character
remains the same,--in Turkey and in New England about alike. Under the
primeval despots of Egypt, history honestly confesses that man must
have been as free as culture could make him.

These appearances indicate the fact that the universe is represented
in every one of its particles. Everything in nature contains all the
powers of nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff; as the
naturalist sees one type under every metamorphosis, and regards a
horse as a running man, a fish as a swimming man, a bird as a flying
man, a tree as a rooted man. Each new form repeats not only the main
character of the type, but part for part all the details, all the
aims, furtherances, hindrances, energies, and whole system of every
other. Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the
world and a correlative of every other. Each one is an entire emblem
of human life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its
course and its end. And each one must somehow accommodate the whole
man, and recite all his destiny.

The world globes itself in a drop of dew.[105] The microscope cannot
find the animalcule which is less perfect for being little.[106] Eyes,
ears, taste, smell, motion, resistance, appetite, and organs of
reproduction that take hold on eternity,--all find room to consist in
the small creature. So do we put our life into every act. The true
doctrine of omnipresence is, that God reappears with all his parts in
every moss and cobweb.[107] The value of the universe contrives to
throw itself into every point. If the good is there, so is the evil;
if the affinity, so the repulsion; if the force, so the limitation.

Thus is the universe alive. All things are moral. That soul, which
within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its
inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength. "It
is in the world, and the world was made by it." Justice is not
postponed. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts of life.
[Greek: Hoi kyboi Dios aei eupiptousi],[108]--the dice of God are
always loaded. The world looks like a multiplication table, or a
mathematical equation, which, turn it how you will, balances itself.
Take what figure you will, its exact value, nor more nor less, still
returns to you. Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every
virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty. What
we call retribution is the universal necessity by which the whole
appears wherever a part appears. If you see smoke, there must be fire.
If you see a hand or limb, you know that the trunk to which it belongs
is there behind.

Every act rewards itself, or, in other words, integrates itself, in a
twofold manner; first, in the thing, or in real nature; and secondly,
in the circumstance, or in apparent nature. Men call the circumstance
the retribution. The causal retribution is in the thing, and is seen
by the soul. The retribution in the circumstance is seen by the
understanding; it is inseparable from the thing, but is often spread
over a long time, and so does not become distinct until after many
years. The specific stripes may follow late after the offense, but
they follow because they accompany it. Crime and punishment grow out
of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the
flower of the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, means and
ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms
in the cause, the end preëxists in the means, the fruit in the seed.

Whilst thus the world will be whole, and refuses to be disparted, we
seek to act partially, to sunder, to appropriate; for example,--to
gratify the senses, we sever the pleasure of the senses from the needs
of the character. The ingenuity of man has always been dedicated to
the solution of one problem,--how to detach the sensual sweet, the
sensual strong, the sensual bright, etc., from the moral sweet, the
moral deep, the moral fair; that is, again, to contrive to cut clean
off this upper surface so thin as to leave it bottomless; to get a
_one end_, without an _other end_. The soul says, Eat; the body would
feast. The soul says, The man and woman shall be one flesh and one
soul; the body would join the flesh only. The soul says, Have dominion
over all things to the ends of virtue; the body would have the power
over things to its own ends.

The soul strives amain[109] to live and work through all things. It
would be the only fact. All things shall be added unto it,--power,
pleasure, knowledge, beauty. The particular man aims to be somebody;
to set up for himself; to truck and higgle for a private good; and, in
particulars, to ride, that he may ride; to dress, that he may be
dressed; to eat, that he may eat; and to govern, that he may be seen.
Men seek to be great; they would have offices, wealth, power, and
fame. They think that to be great is to possess one side of
nature,--the sweet, without the other side,--the bitter.

This dividing and detaching is steadily counteracted. Up to this day,
it must be owned, no projector has had the smallest success. The
parted water reunites behind our hand. Pleasure is taken out of
pleasant things, profit out of profitable things, power out of strong
things, as soon as we seek to separate them from the whole. We can no
more have things and get the sensual good, by itself, than we can get
an inside that shall have no outside, or a light without a shadow.
"Drive out nature with a fork, she comes running back."[110]

Life invests itself with inevitable conditions, which the unwise seek
to dodge, which one and another brags that he does not know; that they
do not touch him;--but the brag is on his lips, the conditions are in
his soul. If he escapes them in one part, they attack him in another
more vital part. If he has escaped them in form, and in the
appearance, it is because he has resisted his life, and fled from
himself, and the retribution is so much death. So signal is the
failure of all attempts to make this separation of the good from the
tax, that the experiment would not be tried,--since to try it is to be
mad,--but for the circumstance, that when the disease began in the
will, of rebellion and separation, the intellect is at once infected,
so that the man ceases to see God whole in each object, but is able to
see the sensual allurement of an object, and not see the sensual hurt;
he sees the mermaid's head, but not the dragon's tail; and thinks he
can cut off that which he would have, from that which he would not
have. "How secret art thou who dwellest in the highest heavens in
silence, O thou only great God, sprinkling with an unwearied
Providence certain penal blindnesses upon such as have unbridled
desires!"[111]

The human soul is true to these facts in the painting of fable, of
history, of law, of proverbs, of conversation. It finds a tongue in
literature unawares. Thus the Greeks called Jupiter,[112] Supreme
Mind; but having traditionally ascribed to him many base actions, they
involuntarily made amends to reason, by tying up the hands[113] of so
bad a god. He is made as helpless as a king of England.[114]
Prometheus[115] knows one secret which Jove must bargain for;
Minerva,[116] another. He cannot get his own thunders; Minerva keeps
the key of them.

"Of all the gods, I only know the keys
That ope the solid doors within whose vaults
His thunders sleep."

A plain confession of the in-working of the All, and of its moral aim.
The Indian mythology ends in the same ethics; and it would seem
impossible for any fable to be invented to get any currency which was
not moral. Aurora[117] forgot to ask youth for her lover, and though
Tithonus is immortal, he is old, Achilles[118] is not quite
invulnerable; the sacred waters did not wash the heel by which Thetis
held him. Siegfried,[119] in the Niebelungen, is not quite immortal,
for a leaf fell on his back whilst he was bathing in the dragon's
blood, and that spot which it covered is mortal. And so it must be.
There is a crack in everything God has made. It would seem, there is
always this vindictive circumstance stealing in at unawares, even into
the wild poesy in which the human fancy attempted to make bold
holiday, and to shake itself free of the old laws,--this back-stroke,
this kick of the gun, certifying that the law is fatal; that in nature
nothing can be given, all things are sold.

This is that ancient doctrine of Nemesis,[120] who keeps watch in the
universe, and lets no offense go unchastised. The Furies,[121] they
said, are attendants on justice, and if the sun in heaven should
transgress his path, they would punish him. The poets related that
stone walls, and iron swords, and leathern thongs had an occult
sympathy with the wrongs of their owners; that the belt which Ajax
gave Hector[122] dragged the Trojan hero over the field at the wheels
of the car of Achilles, and the sword which Hector gave Ajax was that
on whose point Ajax fell. They recorded, that when the Thasians[123]
erected a statue to Theagenes, a victor in the games, one of his
rivals went to it by night, and endeavored to throw it down by
repeated blows, until at last he moved it from its pedestal, and was
crushed to death beneath its fall.

This voice of fable has in it somewhat divine. It came from thought
above the will of the writer. That is the best part of each writer,
which has nothing private in it;[124] that which he does not know,
that which flowed out of his constitution, and not from his too
active invention; that which in the study of a single artist you might
not easily find, but in the study of many, you would abstract as the
spirit of them all. Phidias it is not, but the work of man in that
early Hellenic[125] world, that I would know. The name and
circumstance of Phidias, however convenient for history, embarrass
when we come to the highest criticism. We are to see that which man
was tending to do in a given period, and was hindered, or, if you
will, modified in doing, by the interfering volitions of Phidias, of
Dante, of Shakespeare, the organ whereby man at the moment wrought.

Still more striking is the expression of this fact in the proverbs of
all nations, which are always the literature of reason, or the
statements of an absolute truth, without qualification. Proverbs, like
the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions.
That which the droning world, chained to appearances, will not allow
the realist to say in his own words, it will suffer him to say in
proverbs without contradiction. And this law of laws which the pulpit,
the senate, and the college deny, is hourly preached in all markets
and workshops by flights of proverbs, whose teaching is as true and as
omnipresent as that of birds and flies.

All things are double, one against another.--Tit for tat;[126] an eye
for an eye; a tooth for a tooth; blood for blood; measure for measure;
love for love.--Give and it shall be given you.--- He that watereth
shall be watered himself.--What will you have? quoth God; pay for it
and take it.--Nothing venture, nothing have.--Thou shalt be paid
exactly for what thou hast done, no more, no less.--Who doth not work
shall not eat.--Harm watch, harm catch.--Curses always recoil on the
head of him who imprecates them.--If you put a chain around the neck
of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.--Bad counsel
confounds the adviser.--The Devil is an ass.

It is thus written, because it is thus in life. Our action is
overmastered and characterized above our will by the law of nature. We
aim at a petty end quite aside from the public good, but our act
arranges itself by irresistible magnetism in a line with the poles of
the world.

A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will, or against
his will, he draws his portrait to the eye of his companions by every
word. Every opinion reacts on him who utters it. It is a thread-ball
thrown at a mark, but the other end remains in the thrower's bag. Or,
rather, it is a harpoon hurled at the whale, unwinding, as it flies, a
coil of cord in the boat, and if the harpoon is not good, or not well
thrown, it will go nigh to cut the steersman in twain, or to sink the
boat.

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong. "No man had ever a point
of pride that was not injurious to him," said Burke.[127] The
exclusive in fashionable life does not see that he excludes himself
from enjoyment in the attempt to appropriate it. The exclusionist in
religion does not see that he shuts the door of heaven on himself, in
striving to shut out others. Treat men as pawns[128] and ninepins, and
you shall suffer as well as they. If you leave out their heart, you
shall lose your own. The senses would make things of all persons; of
women, of children, of the poor. The vulgar proverb, "I will get it
from his purse or get it from his skin," is sound philosophy.

All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are
speedily punished. They are punished by fear. Whilst I stand in simple
relations to my fellow-man, I have no displeasure in meeting him. We
meet as water meets water, or as two currents of air mix, with perfect
diffusion and interpenetration of nature. But as soon as there is any
departure from simplicity, and attempt at halfness, or good for me
that is not good for him, my neighbor feels the wrong; he shrinks from
me as far as I have shrunk from him; his eyes no longer seek mine;
there is war between us; there is hate in him and fear in me.

All the old abuses in society, universal and particular, all unjust
accumulations of property and power, are avenged in the same manner.
Fear is an instructor of great sagacity, and the herald of all
revolutions. One thing he teaches, that there is rottenness where he
appears. He is a carrion crow, and though you see not well what he
hovers for, there is death somewhere. Our property is timid, our laws
are timid, our cultivated classes are timid. Fear for ages has boded
and mowed and gibbered over government and property. That obscene[129]
bird is not there for nothing. He indicates great wrongs which must be
revised.

Of the like nature is that expectation of change which instantly
follows the suspension of our voluntary activity. The terror of
cloudless noon, the emerald of Polycrates,[130] the awe of prosperity,
the instinct which leads every generous soul to impose on itself tasks
of a noble asceticism and vicarious virtue, are the tremblings of the
balance of justice through the heart and mind of man.

Experienced men of the world know very well that it is best to pay
scot and lot[131] as they go along, and that a man often pays dear for
a small frugality. The borrower runs in his own debt. Has a man gained
anything who has received a hundred favors and rendered none? Has he
gained by borrowing, through indolence or cunning, his neighbor's
wares, or horses, or money? There arises on the deed the instant
acknowledgment of benefit on the one part, and of debt on the other;
that is, of superiority and inferiority. The transaction remains in
the memory of himself and his neighbor; and every new transaction
alters, according to its nature, their relation to each other. He may
soon come to see that he had better have broken his own bones than to
have ridden in his neighbor's coach, and that "the highest price he
can pay for a thing is to ask for it."

A wise man will extend this lesson to all parts of life, and know that
it is the part of prudence to face every claimant, and pay every just
demand on your time, your talents, or your heart. Always pay; for,
first or last, you must pay your entire debt. Persons and events may
stand for a time between you and justice, but it is only a
postponement. You must pay at last your own debt. If you are wise, you
will dread a prosperity which only loads you with more. Benefit is the
end of nature. But for every benefit which you receive, a tax is
levied. He is great who confers the most benefits. He is base--and
that is the one base thing in the universe--to receive favors and
render none. In the order of nature we cannot render benefits to those
from whom we receive them, or only seldom.[132] But the benefit we
receive must be rendered again, line for line, deed for deed, cent for
cent, to somebody. Beware of too much good staying in your hand. It
will fast corrupt and worm worms.[133] Pay it away quickly in some
sort.

Labor is watched over by the same pitiless laws. Cheapest, say the
prudent, is the dearest labor. What we buy in a broom, a mat, a wagon,
a knife, is some application of good sense to a common want. It is
best to pay in your land a skillful gardener, or to buy good sense
applied to gardening; in your sailor, good sense applied to
navigation; in the house, good sense applied to cooking, sewing,
serving; in your agent, good sense applied to accounts and affairs.
So do you multiply your presence, or spread yourself throughout your
estate. But because of the dual constitution of things, in labor as in
life there can be no cheating. The thief steals from himself. The
swindler swindles himself. For the real price of labor is knowledge
and virtue, whereof wealth and credit are signs. These signs, like
paper money, may be counterfeited or stolen, but that which they
represent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited or
stolen. These ends of labor cannot be answered but by real exertions
of the mind, and in obedience to pure motives. The cheat, the
defaulter, the gambler, cannot extort the knowledge of material and
moral nature which his honest care and pains yield to the operative.
The law of nature is, Do the thing, and you shall have the power: but
they who do not the thing have not the power.

Human labor, through all its forms, from the sharpening of a stake to
the construction of a city or an epic, is one immense illustration of
the perfect compensation of the universe. The absolute balance of Give
and Take, the doctrine that everything has its price,--and if that
price is not paid, not that thing but something else is obtained, and
that it is impossible to get anything without its price,--is not less
sublime in the columns of a ledger than in the budgets of states, in
the laws of light and darkness, in all the action and reaction of
nature. I cannot doubt that the high laws which each man sees
implicated in those processes with which he is conversant, the stern
ethics which sparkle on his chisel edge, which are measured out by his
plumb and foot rule, which stand as manifest in the footing of the
shop bill as in the history of a state,--do recommend to him his
trade, and though seldom named, exalt his business to his imagination.

The league between virtue and nature engages all things to assume a
hostile front to vice. The beautiful laws and substances of the world
persecute and whip the traitor. He finds that things are arranged for
truth and benefit, but there is no den in the wide world to hide a
rogue. Commit a crime,[134] and the earth is made of glass. Commit a
crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as
reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel
and mole. You cannot recall the spoken word,[135] you cannot wipe out
the foot-track, you cannot draw up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet
or clew. Some damning circumstance always transpires. The laws and
substances of nature--water, snow, wind, gravitation--become penalties
to the thief.

On the other hand, the law holds with equal sureness for all right
action. Love, and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just,
as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation. The good man has
absolute good, which like fire turns everything to its own nature, so
that you cannot do him any harm; but as the royal armies sent against
Napoleon, when he approached, cast down their colors and from enemies
became friends, so disasters of all kinds, as sickness, offense,
poverty, prove benefactors:--

"Winds blow and waters roll
Strength to the brave, and power and deity,
Yet in themselves are nothing."

The good are befriended even by weakness and defect. As no man had
ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him, so no man had
ever a defect that was not somewhere made useful to him. The stag in
the fable[136] admired his horns and blamed his feet, but when the
hunter came, his feet saved him, and afterwards, caught in the
thicket, his horns destroyed him. Every man in his lifetime needs to
thank his faults. As no man thoroughly understands a truth until he
has contended against it, so no man has a thorough acquaintance with
the hindrances or talents of men, until he has suffered from the one,
and seen the triumph of the other over his own want of the same. Has
he a defect of temper that unfits him to live in society? Thereby he
is driven to entertain himself alone, and acquire habits of self-help;
and thus, like the wounded oyster, he mends his shell with pearl.

Our strength grows out of our weakness. The indignation which arms
itself with secret forces does not awaken until we are pricked and
stung and sorely assailed. A great man is always willing to be little.
Whilst he sits on the cushion of advantages, he goes to sleep. When he
is punished, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something;
he has been put on his wits, on his manhood; he has gained facts;
learns his ignorance; is cured of the insanity of conceit; has got
moderation and real skill. The wise man throws himself on the side of
his assailants. It is more his interest than it is theirs to find his
weak point. The wound cicatrizes and falls off from him like a dead
skin, and when they would triumph, lo! he has passed on invulnerable.
Blame is safer than praise. I hate to be defended in a newspaper. As
long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain
assurance of success. But as soon as honeyed words of praise are
spoken for me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies.
In general, every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor. As
the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the
enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the
temptation we resist.

The same guards which protect us from disaster, defect, and enmity,
defend us, if we will, from selfishness and fraud. Bolts and bars are
not the best of our institutions, nor is shrewdness in trade a mark of
wisdom. Men suffer all their life long, under the foolish superstition
that they can be cheated. But it is as impossible for a man to be
cheated by anyone but himself,[137] as for a thing to be and not to be
at the same time. There is a third silent party to all our bargains.
The nature and soul of things takes on itself the guaranty of the
fulfillment of every contract, so that honest service cannot come to
loss. If you serve an ungrateful master, serve him the more. Put God
in your debt. Every stroke shall be repaid. The longer the payment is
withholden,[138] the better for you; for compound interest on compound
interest is the rate and usage of this exchequer.

The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature,
to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand. It makes no
difference whether the actors be many or one, a tyrant or a mob. A
mob[139] is a society of bodies voluntarily bereaving themselves of
reason, and traversing its work. The mob is man voluntarily descending
to the nature of the beast. Its fit hour of activity is night. Its
actions are insane like its whole constitution; it persecutes a
principle; it would whip a right; it would tar and feather justice, by
inflicting fire and outrage upon the houses and persons of those who
have these. It resembles the prank of boys, who run with fire engines
to put out the ruddy aurora streaming to the stars. The inviolate
spirit turns their spite against the wrongdoers. The martyr cannot be
dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison, a
more illustrious abode; every burned book or house enlightens the
world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the
earth from side to side. Hours of sanity and consideration are always
arriving to communities, as to individuals, when the truth is seen,
and the martyrs are justified.

Thus do all things preach the indifferency of circumstances. The man
is all. Everything has two sides, a good and an evil. Every advantage
has its tax. I learn to be content. But the doctrine of compensation
is not the doctrine of indifferency. The thoughtless say, on hearing
these representations, What boots it to do well? there is one event to
good and evil; if I gain any good, I must pay for it; if I lose any
good, I gain some other; all actions are indifferent.

There is a deeper fact in the soul than compensation, to wit, its own
nature. The soul is not a compensation, but a life. The soul _is_.
Under all this running sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and flow
with perfect balance, lies the aboriginal abyss of real Being.
Essence, or God, is not a relation, or a part, but the whole. Being is
the vast affirmative, excluding negation, self-balanced, and
swallowing up all relations, parts, and times within itself. Nature,
truth, virtue, are the influx from thence. Vice is the absence or
departure of the same. Nothing, Falsehood, may indeed stand as the
great Night or shade, on which, as a background, the living universe
paints itself forth, but no fact is begotten by it; it cannot work,
for it is not. It cannot work any good; it cannot work any harm. It is
harm inasmuch as it is worse not to be than to be.

We feel defrauded of the retribution due to evil acts, because the
criminal adheres to his vice and contumacy, and does not come to a
crisis or judgment anywhere in visible nature. There is no stunning
confutation of his nonsense before men and angels. Has he therefore
outwitted the law? Inasmuch as he carries the malignity and the lie
with him, he so far deceases from nature. In some manner there will be
a demonstration of the wrong to the understanding also; but should we
not see it, this deadly deduction makes square the eternal account.

Neither can it be said, on the other hand, that the gain of rectitude
must be bought by any loss. There is no penalty to virtue; no penalty
to wisdom; they are proper additions of being. In a virtuous action, I
properly _am_; in a virtuous act, I add to the world; I plant into
deserts conquered from Chaos and Nothing, and see the darkness
receding on the limits of the horizon. There can be no excess to love;
none to knowledge; none to beauty, when these attributes are
considered in the purest sense. The soul refuses limits, and always
affirms an Optimism,[140] never a Pessimism.

Man's life is a progress, and not a station. His instinct is trust.
Our instinct uses "more" and "less" in application to man, of the
_presence of the soul_, and not of its absence; the brave man is
greater than the coward; the true, the benevolent, the wise, is more a
man, and not less, than the fool and knave. There is no tax on the
good of virtue; for that is the incoming of God himself, or absolute
existence without any comparative. Material good has its tax, and if
it came without desert or sweat, has no root in me, and the next wind
will blow it away. But all the good of nature is the soul's, and may
be had, if paid for in nature's lawful coin, that is, by labor which
the heart and the head allow. I no longer wish to meet a good I do not
earn; for example, to find a pot of buried gold, knowing that it
brings with it new burdens. I do not wish more external
goods,--neither possessions, nor honors, nor powers, nor persons. The
gain is apparent; the tax is certain. But there is no tax on the
knowledge that the compensation exists, and that it is not desirable
to dig up treasure. Herein I rejoice with a serene eternal peace. I
contract the boundaries of possible mischief. I learn the wisdom of
St. Bernard,[141]--"Nothing can, work me damage except myself; the
harm, that I sustain I carry about with me, and never am a real
sufferer but by my own fault."

In the nature of the soul is the compensation for the inequalities of
condition. The radical tragedy of nature seems to be the distinction
of More and Less. How can Less not feel the pain; how not feel
indignation or malevolence towards More? Look at those who have less
faculty, and one feels sad, and knows not well what to make of it. He
almost shuns their eye; he fears they will upbraid God. What should
they do? It seems a great injustice. But see the facts nearly, and
these mountainous inequalities vanish. Love reduces them, as the sun
melts the iceberg in the sea. The heart and soul of all men being one,
this bitterness of _His_ and _Mine_ ceases. His is mine. I am my
brother, and my brother is me. If I feel overshadowed and outdone by
great neighbors, I can yet love; I can still receive; and he that
loveth maketh his own the grandeur he loves. Thereby I make the
discovery that my brother is my guardian, acting for me with the
friendliest designs, and the estate I so admired and envied is my own.
It is the nature of the soul to appropriate all things. Jesus[142] and
Shakespeare are fragments of the soul, and by love I conquer and
incorporate them in my own conscious domain. His[143] virtue,--is not
that mine? His wit,--if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit.

Such, also, is the natural history of calamity. The changes which
break up at short intervals the prosperity of men are advertisements
of a nature whose law is growth. Every soul is by this intrinsic
necessity quitting its whole system of things, its friends, and home,
and laws, and faith, as the shellfish crawls out of its beautiful but
stony case, because it no longer admits of its growth, and slowly
forms a new house. In proportion to the vigor of the individual, these
revolutions are frequent, until in some happier mind they are
incessant, and all worldly relations hang very loosely about him,
becoming, as it were, a transparent fluid membrane through which the
living form is seen, and not, as in most men, an indurated
heterogeneous fabric of many dates, and of no settled character, in
which the man is imprisoned. Then there can be enlargement, and the
man of to-day scarcely recognizes the man of yesterday. And such
should be the outward biography of man in time, a putting off of dead
circumstances day by day, as he renews his raiment day by day. But to
us, in our lapsed estate, resting, not advancing, resisting, not
coöperating with the divine expansion, this growth comes by shocks.

We cannot part with our friend. We cannot let our angels go. We do not
see that they only go out, that archangels may come in. We are
idolaters of the old. We do not believe in the riches of the soul, in
its proper eternity and omnipresence. We do not believe there is any
force in to-day to rival or recreate that beautiful yesterday. We
linger in the ruins of the old tent, where once we had bread and
shelter and organs, nor believe that the spirit can feed, cover, and
nerve us again. We cannot again find aught so dear, so sweet, so
graceful. But we sit and weep in vain. The voice of the Almighty
saith, "Up and onward forevermore!" We cannot stay amid the ruins.
Neither will we rely on the new; and so we walk ever with reverted
eyes, like those monsters who look backwards.

And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the
understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a
mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of
friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure
years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts. The
death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but
privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius;
for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an
epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up
a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows
the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character. It
permits or constrains the formation of new acquaintances, and the
reception of new influences that prove of the first importance to the
next years; and the man or woman who would have remained a sunny
garden flower, with no room for its roots and too much sunshine for
its head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect of the gardener,
is made the banyan[144] of the forest, yielding shade and fruit to
wide neighborhoods of men.

SELF-RELIANCE

"Ne te quæsiveris extra."[145]

"Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."[146]

* * * * *

Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat;
Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be hands and feet.[147]

I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which
were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an
admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The
sentiment they instill is of more value than any thought they may
contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for
you in your private heart is true for all men,--that is genius.[148]
Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal
sense;[149] for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,--and our
first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last
Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest
merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato,[150] and Milton[151] is, that they
set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what
they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of
light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster
of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice
his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize
our own rejected thoughts:[152] they come back to us with a certain
alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson
for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression
with good-humored inflexibility then most when[153] the whole cry of
voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with
masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the
time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from
another.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the
conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide;[154]
that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that
though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn
can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground
which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new
in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor
does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one
character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none.
This sculpture in the memory is not without preëstablished harmony.
The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of
that particular ray. We but half express ourselves,[155] and are
ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be
safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be
faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by
cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his
work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall
give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the
attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no
hope.

Trust thyself:[156] every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept
the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your
contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done
so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age,
betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated
at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all
their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind
the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a
protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides,
redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing
on Chaos[157] and the Dark.

What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text, in the face and
behavior of children, babes, and even brutes! That divided and rebel
mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed
the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these[158] have not.
Their mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we
look in their faces we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody:
all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five[159]
out of the adults who prattle and play to it. So God has armed youth
and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and
made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it
will stand by itself. Do not think the youth has no force, because he
cannot speak to you and me. Hark! in the next room his voice is
sufficiently clear and emphatic. It seems he knows how to speak to his
contemporaries. Bashful or bold, then, he will know how to make us
seniors very unnecessary.

The nonchalance[160] of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would
disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the
healthy attitude of human nature. A boy is in the parlor what the pit
is in the playhouse;[161] independent, irresponsible, looking out from
his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences
them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad,
interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never
about consequences about interests; he gives an independent, genuine
verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as
it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has
once acted or spoken with _éclat_[162] he is a committed person,
watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections
must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe[163] for this. Ah,
that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who[164] can thus avoid
all pledges, and having observed, observe again from the same
unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always
be formidable. He would utter opinions on all passing affairs, which
being